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MANAGEMENT: Ten Trends for 2010
Recent Gauteng Business News
With the dismal financial news and poor business performance of the past year, companies around the world are all looking to 2010 to offer improved circumstances and business opportunities. According to Hubert Wentzel, Divisional Director at EOH, companies will be facing some of the same issues next year as they did this year, but that these constraints are leading to opportunities for many businesses.
“Managed services demand will increase,” he predicts. “This will apply to traditional technical managed services, desktop managed services, as well as applications management.” This, he says, will mainly be the result of an increased understanding of economies of scale and the skills shortage.
Wentzel feels that this year will see governance and compliance with King III being taken seriously. “There are some clear guidelines for the CIO now, making it easier to act in accordance with the legislation.” Similarly, Eskom’s rate hikes will lead to a more serious employment of Green IT initiatives.
He adds that the resourcing market will become stale, given the uncertainty caused by the new labour broking legislation, which, in turn, will further stimulate managed services demand. Government, too, will have to rethink its big IT spend projects in lieu of service delivery challenges and the ongoing issues at SITA.
However, Wentzel points to one positive factor that will change the face of business in South Africa. “Bandwidth prices will fall drastically as real competitive players open up the internet. We have the capacity, we only need the will,“ he says. This, as well as traffic congestion in metropolitan areas, will lead to an increase in telecommuting – by an order of magnitude, he feels. This will also be a factor in the increasing enforcement of security, identity management and segregation of duties that will happen next year.
He adds that ICT skills and capacity will remain a challenge this year, again fuelling the trend towards increased managed services. “Software as a Service uptake will also increase due to its preferential opex model, the managed services trend and more affordable bandwidth,” he concludes.
Business News Sector Tags: Management|