by Paul Kunert
19 September 2008
The meltdown in the global financial market has created a
tidal wave of uncertainty among IT buyers that were already twitchy about
ripples in the global economy, dramatically altering resellers’ and integrators
prospect lists.
The collapse of Lehman Brothers and the troubles at Merrill
Lynch, HBOS and insurance firm AIG have sent the global stock markets went into
a tail spin, taking a toll on IT budgets, according to a host of industry
stalwarts.
Customers are getting increasingly nervous said Mike Norris,
chief executive at Computacenter, “the whole world is treading with extreme
caution”.
“Clearly the credit crunch will be with us for a while yet
but how long will this extreme caution last? That is the 64 million dollar
question nobody knows the answer to,” he stated.
The credit crunch that culminated in the recent woes across
the banking sectors has spread fear and doubt throughout the entire economy and
was impacting project sign offs, said Tom Kelly, UK managing director at
Logicalis.
“There is a lack of visibility out there in terms of whether
deals will go ahead or not, many have been postponed or cancelled,” he told
Microscope,
The pipeline was less certain agreed 2e2 CEO Terry Burt,
even integrators that focused on cost saving technologies, have strong client
relationships and a good level of annuity-based revenues are not immune to the
downturn, he said.
“Anyone that has strong growth forecasts for next year are
either very well placed or are deluding themselves…it is difficult to call what
will happen next,” he said.
Stuart Fenton, EMEA president at Insight Enterprises echoed
the comments of others, “large scale enterprise projects of any substance are
being postponed and that is particularly evident on the hardware side.”
The Government sector may be relatively insulated from the
current problems said Tara Brady, CEO at Calyx but he disagreed with analyst
reports that IT remained a key priority in firms to increase productivity and
improve efficiency.
“IT is a back office function and that is always the first
thing that companies looks reduce when times get tougher,” he said.
Russell Bolan, European CEO at Dimension Data agreed 2009
would be a tough year for all in the channel, “it will be extremely competitive
and there will be an impact on margins but what is new.”
But sounding a more sanguine note he said customers will
increasingly look to outsource non-critical IT solutions and “there will be
opportunities”.
