Gartner and Forrester: 2009 IT Spending will Decline

U.S. jobless claims surged to a 26-1/2-year high last week, delivering yet another bad news to the economic downturn. Many experts believe that economy will get worse before it gets better.

"Market research firms Gartner and Forrester have both revised their IT spending forecasts for 2009 and now say IT spending will decline this year due to a deeper-than-expected recession. Gartner says the drop will be deeper than after the dot-com bust." according to Channel Insider.

The credit crunch has impacted IT capital purchases very hard and the only area Forrester projects as set for growth is outsourcing.

"Forrester’s forecast calls for computers and peripheral equipment sales to decline by 6.7 percent in 2009, communications equipment sales to fall by 7.7 percent, software sales to fall by 0.4 percent, IT consulting services sales to fall by 1.9 percent and IT outsourcing sales to grow by 2.1 percent in 2009"

Many technology providers have already experienced the decline in business for a while now and the forecast simply confirms the fact that businesses are not willing to spend the big capital investments (CAPEX is dead!) and is looking to cut IT budgets with the combination of moving to lower-cost alternatives, extending the lifecycle of existing products and laying off inefficient resources.

When economy is bad there is a rush to quality, a shift in spending and a higher expectation to do more with less. This is why technology providers must deliver a competitive offering to retain existing customers and to find new business opportunities utilizing the outsourcing IT model. From Pay-as-you-go hosted services to the all-inclusive per user/per month Total Outsourced Solution, Pointivity has been delivering the OPEX IT subscription model for years and we have the go-to-market strategies for our partners to deliver the same successful solution.

Do you have the right strategies to navigate through this perfect storm? Can you deliver more value than your competitors? Contact Pointivity to learn more on how we can help.

Link to Gartner Press Release.
Link to Forrester report.

High SaaS Adoption + SEC Mandates = Hosted Email Archiving

Email archiving continues to grow in market demand despite the downturn, in December the United States Securities and Exchange Commission sent an open letter to CEOs of SEC-registered firms imploring them to not ignore or cut short of their compliance responsibilities because of the economic downturn. Some of the SEC mandates for these firms includes proper email archiving and email compliance. The message is simple: do not cut corners just because things are getting tough, cut cost elsewhere but not email archiving.

Interesting enough, according to ZDnet last week, Forrester disclosed their Q4 SaaS research report which indicated an accelerated growth with SaaS adoption amongst companies looking to seek cost cutting alternatives.


Combine the two and you get a growing market demand for "Hosted Email Archiving" in a shrinking economy. There is no doubt that customers want the benefits of email archiving but this time they want it on a SaaS (pay-as-you-go) model.

Pointivity partners can now offers email archiving (Global Relay) along with enterprise communication (Microsoft Exchange), collaboration (SharePoint), and wireless email (BlackBerry, ActiveSync) as part of a complete hosted solution with private label capabilities. Our partner program is designed to enable partners to be more competitive and flexible while building a strong recurring revenue stream.