Top trends in s/w development industry

There's no doubt that the current economic situation presents difficult challenges for businesses of all kinds.  However, certain pockets and industries continue to do well and pose significant opportunities. Others are looking at IT in helping them drive efficiencies and profitability during these times. 

Tarun Gulati, general manager, business strategy, Marketing and Operations, Microsoft India believes that in 2009, technologies like Unified Communications, Virtualization and Business Intelligence will continue to advance and in fact, become even more significant in the current economic environment.

Going forward, Gulati feels, the following trends are likely to prevail in the market for the cost optimization that they deliver:

Reduced travel and communication costs:
Cutting back on plane trips and hotel stays is one of the most obvious ways for companies to save money, but that must be balanced against the value of person-to-person interaction. Today, video conferencing and new collaboration tools are making virtual meetings much more like face-to-face interaction and companies are finding that in many cases, information sharing and collaboration can be accomplished more efficiently and for much less cost when done virtually.

Going virtual:
Virtualization makes it possible to run more than one operating system on a single machine, which can help companies reduce costs by enabling them to use more of the computing power that they already own. Virtualization also presents opportunities to consolidate the number of server companies own and use.

Reduced PC energy consumption:
There are incredible power management tools in software today that help companies more effectively manage energy consumption. Companies should make sure they are taking advantage of all power management tools in today's software.

Using Business Intelligence:
Business intelligence delivers on a simple promise: to improve business performance by driving better decision making throughout your organization. BI helps you make better and quicker fact based decisions, enables all types of decision making in the organization, Operational, Tactical or Strategic, Lowers TCO, gets deployed fast and scales with your requirement and enables decision making at all levels of the organization, Personal, Team or Organization wide.

Leveraging cloud computing:
Many companies are beginning to consider the benefits of a Software as a Service model for their IT environments as a potential cost saving strategy, which provides the flexibility and options customers to help them make educated decisions. To save costs, customers will now start exploring options to see how they can manage and access software, whether it's online, on-premises or both.

CRM and ERP solutions:
CRM offers a robust suite of sales, marketing, and service capabilities, it offers businesses of all sizes a fast, flexible, and affordable solution for finding, winning, and growing profitable customer relationships. ERP helps people work quickly and efficiently and gives business the flexibility to adapt to new opportunities and growth. Ideal for small and midsized organizations, it offers a breakthrough user experience and technology innovations that can simplify access to information, improve organizational agility, streamline integration with a wide range of applications, and enhance reporting capabilities.

User productivity without compromising on growth:
Software tools are available today to help manage PCs over their life cycle within the enterprise, a common challenge for IT departments. Microsoft Windows Vista and the Microsoft Desktop Optimization Pack (MDOP) can get more out of the existing IT infrastructure, giving rich dividends in the form of time and cost savings. MDOP benefits organisations in the form of reduced IT Support and support staff requirement, reduced installation, maintenance, outage costs and downtimes, increased network and system security and enhanced user productivity and experience.