As ad revenue plummets and competitive pressure mounts, newspapers are using new technological systems to boost workflow efficiencies, curb operational expenditure and expand service portfolios. For the beginning of 2009, highlighting immediate cost saving benefits is the most important message to take to market for technology vendors, professional services companies and systems integrators.
Technology vendors and service providers are vying to offer financial markets the lowest possible latency in the delivery of market data and trade execution information. Despite the current economic climate, the fundamental drivers of the demand for low-latency persist and may even be accentuated by the present volatility.
Why do traditional IT performance measures fail to tell managers what their real IT capability is – or how IT is serving business goals? Richard Williams and Gordon Miller of Procertis, an independent consultancy and Intellectual Property development company focussed on IT and business inter-relationships, investigate.
Misys, in partnership with HCL, is to provide Austria's Raiffeisen International with outsourced resources to support core system development. Raiffeisen International is not the first financial institution to outsource core systems development, and Datamonitor believes its decision makes sense in light of market conditions. However, it remains to be seen quite how successful the strategy will be.
The first green IT certification program for managed service providers has been launched by industry standards group MSPAlliance, offering greater incentive to exploit the largely untapped green IT market among small and mid-sized enterprises. Given the size of the commercial opportunity, service providers are unlikely to be the only companies to benefit from the growing importance of green IT.
Following much speculation on how precisely Convergys, known mostly as a services firm, would incorporate solutions provider Intervoice, the company has announced its intention to use its proprietary Dynamic Decisioning Solution engine as the crux of its integration of Intervoice's product portfolio.