The upside of the financial crisis

We live in interesting financial times. OK, now it's your turn to make a gross understatement.

But seriously, there may be an upside to the current financial problems we’re experiencing that may actually boost spending in certain key areas of the messaging and collaboration space. Here’s my take on the potential impact for 2009:

* The problems faced by many companies on Wall Street will certainly result in increased scrutiny and oversight of any company in the financial services space over the next few years. This should lead to renewed and increased interest in archiving and related data management technologies and services that will allow organizations to get a better handle on what is happening in their organizations. I had a conversation with a key player in the space last week and they are seeing a significant uptick in business that they attribute directly to the current financial crisis.

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We live in interesting financial times. OK, now it's your turn to make a gross understatement.

But seriously, there may be an upside to the current financial problems we’re experiencing that may actually boost spending in certain key areas of the messaging and collaboration space. Here’s my take on the potential impact for 2009:

* The problems faced by many companies on Wall Street will certainly result in increased scrutiny and oversight of any company in the financial services space over the next few years. This should lead to renewed and increased interest in archiving and related data management technologies and services that will allow organizations to get a better handle on what is happening in their organizations. I had a conversation with a key player in the space last week and they are seeing a significant uptick in business that they attribute directly to the current financial crisis.

* There will likely be increased scrutiny of the costs associated with messaging, collaboration and other communication capabilities. Our research shows that the vast majority of communications-oriented decision makers cannot accurately estimate the cost of providing services to their users. I believe this will change and that many more decision makers will be taking a closer look at these costs, looking for ways to trim them. This should favor the use of hosted and managed services, particularly for smaller companies where the hosted/managed paradigm can generally provide a cost advantage.

* Our current financial problems will also result in greater interest in the use of hybrid security services, in which cloud-based services will be used in combination with on-premise infrastructure to provide improved capabilities and lower long-term costs. Because cloud-based services act as buffer for on-premise systems, they can absorb spikes in spam and malware without necessitating near-term additions to on-premise systems.

In short, the current financial crisis is decidedly not pleasant, but it does offer some bright spots for our industry.

Read more about voip & convergence in Network World's VoIP & Convergence section.