The 2010 calendar year began with the global economy trying to crawl out of a recession. Still, businesses continued to invest in solutions, to leverage the power of information technology to drive down redundancy and waste in their internal processes. This was captured in a study by Gartner of the top industry CIOs, published in their annual report titled Gartner Perspective: IT Spending 2010. In spite of the recessionary pressures, organizations continued to list improving business processes, reducing costs, better use of information, and improving workforce effectiveness as their priorities for IT spending.
The Gartner study listed the following top 10 business priorities based on 2009 findings:
Reducing enterprise costs
Improving enterprise workforce effectiveness
Attracting and retaining new customers
Increasing the use of information/analytics
Creating new products or services (innovation)
Targeting customers and markets more effectively
Managing change initiatives
Expanding current customer relationships
Expanding into new markets and geographies
The Gartner study listed the following top 10 technology priorities based on 2009 findings:
Business intelligence
Enterprise applications (ERP, CRM, and others)
Servers and storage technologies (virtualization)
Legacy application modernization
Collaboration technologies
Networking, voice, and data communications
Technical infrastructure
Security technologies
Service-oriented applications and architecture
Document management
Note
The source document for the previous two lists is: Gartner Executive Programs – CIO Agenda 2010.
These are also some of the many reasons that companies, regardless of scale, implement ERP and CRM software, which again is evident from the top 10 technology priorities of the CIOs listed above. These demands, however, happen to be articulated even more strongly by small and medium businesses. For these businesses, an ERP/CRM solution can be a sizable percentage of their overall expense outlay, so they have to be especially vigilant about their spending—they just can't afford time and cost overruns as are sometimes visible in the Enterprise market. At the same time, the deployment of rich functionality software must realize a significant and clear advantage for their business. These trends are picked up and addressed by the IT vendors, who are constantly seeking and exploring new technological ingredients to address the Small-to-Medium Enterprise market demands.