Vendors hope for compliance windfall

While IT departments struggle to make sense of recent legislation, IT vendors are preparing to ease their pain by releasing products and services specifically designed to help companies comply with new regulations or at least reduce the risk of not complying.

However, with IT spending flat and compliance often low on a company's priority list, some vendors say customers aren't lining up to buy their offerings.

The affect of these laws on IT departments "does mean an uptick in business, but we're also in a slow cycle," says Austin Hill, executive vice president and general manager of privacy software maker Zero-Knowledge Systems' enterprise division in Montreal. It's difficult for IT managers to argue the ROI benefits of purchasing compliance products, especially for new laws that have yet to pose an enforcement issue. Moreover, compliance is such a complicated beast that no one product or service can do it all. "No one is supplying compliance in a box," Hill says.

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While IT departments struggle to make sense of recent legislation, IT vendors are preparing to ease their pain by releasing products and services specifically designed to help companies comply with new regulations or at least reduce the risk of not complying.

However, with IT spending flat and compliance often low on a company's priority list, some vendors say customers aren't lining up to buy their offerings.

The affect of these laws on IT departments "does mean an uptick in business, but we're also in a slow cycle," says Austin Hill, executive vice president and general manager of privacy software maker Zero-Knowledge Systems' enterprise division in Montreal. It's difficult for IT managers to argue the ROI benefits of purchasing compliance products, especially for new laws that have yet to pose an enforcement issue. Moreover, compliance is such a complicated beast that no one product or service can do it all. "No one is supplying compliance in a box," Hill says.

Vendors that sell security, privacy, document management and storage systems are poised for an increase in sales resulting from new regulations. And consultants who can help explain and implement compliance, and the financial-reporting auditors mandated by Sarbanes-Oxley are likely to find their phones ringing off the hook, experts say.

Still, until companies realize the importance of equipping their IT departments with systems to support compliance or the economy picks up, these vendors aren't expecting the second coming of the Internet boom anytime soon.

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