IT budgets

Overheard - IT MOOSE management

“What we’re seeing is CIOs are working very hard to reduce the cost of their operations on a per-transaction basis. They’ve done a lot of that with virtualization and data-center consolidation.” Mark McDonald, as quoted in IT After The Recession

IT demand is very strong. Companies have had to work harder than ever to make money in this environment and also to be able to drive the types of innovation that will keep customers interested in new things they’re offering. But CIOs are meeting that demand with existing IT assets rather than buying new assets.

In other words, they’re managing the IT MOOSE and they like their MOOSE lean.

Mark points out that the number of IT transactions are increasing — but not all those transactions can be directly tied to revenue.  (That reminds me. I need to log on and check my bank balance.) As the number of transactions to support $1 in revenue continue to go up, Mark predicts that CIOs will be taking a hard look at infrastructure again.

The question is…whose infrastructure will they be looking at?  Their own — or Amazon’s or EMC’s or some other cloud infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) provider?

Overheard: Wall Street, the election and your tech job

The CIO Executive Board, a division of the Corporate Executive Board, polled 50 participants in a CIO conference call last Thursday to discuss the impact of turmoil in the financial markets and economic uncertainty on Q4 spending and 2009 plans. According to the poll, 61% of CIOs are currently re-evaluating their 2009 budget plans and 59% are already re-negotiating IT vendor contracts. Almost half, 49%, are cutting spend on consultants and contractors and a majority, 59% are putting non-essential IT projects on hold. Twenty four percent (24%) are considering a hiring freeze. Pam Baker, Wall St. and Elections Piling on the Uncertainty

Interesting article by Pam Baker — it’s not suprising that 24% are considering a hiring freeze. I’m curious to know how many would have said they’re considering staff reductions.