Big ideas: ten tech decisions you must make now

Latin Trade, Jan, 2005 by Greg Brown

Sooner or Later--probably sooner--companies will start spending. As the world's economies shake off the cobwebs and begin to grow, companies both large and small are looking at all the decisions that have to be made to make themselves competitive, including technology purchases. Info-tech spending in the region bottomed out in 2003 at just under US$23 billion. It's forecast to rise by almost a third during the coming three years to more than $29 billion.

During the crunch of the last few years, however, most tech chiefs, if they kept their jobs, threw up their hands and simply tried to patch their way through as software platforms updated but hardware did not. It's hard to get money out of the finance side lf the boss has to decide on Layoffs and cutting, not how best to grow.

Trouble is, there's an open debate, still, on what tech spending makes sense. Even during the fat times, CEOs felt they were being sold a bill of goods, and the overlay of dot-com mania didn't help tech managers make their case. Only the most obvious value spending--e-mail, high-speed networks, and databases--could get past the bean counters.

What companies consider sacred has become so because everyone in the company touches it, uses it, and feels the value in every day tasks. But that doesn't mean it was the best spending decision, only that it was the easiest sell. Figuring out what the next purchase will be--easy or not--is the key to reviving budgets.

What tech decisions matter, really matter, to the bottom line? LATIN TRADE talked with experts in the field about what they see coming up over the next 12 months, and the message was clear: Competition--the relentless force driving innovation--has finally come to technology.

1 Some initial advice: Think, then act.

Microsoft's Alvaro Cells, server and tools business lead for Microsoft Latin America, says the trend has been until recently to spend 60% of a company's tech budget on core business hardware and software and the remainder on new tech ideas. He expects that trend to reverse, so have a clear idea of what your company needs to do next--and having enough brain power to pull it off--will be important. "If you don't have a strategy, no matter what you buy, you're going to have a problem," says Cells. "Strategy isn't only about what you do, it's about what you don't do, consciously."

2 It's the end of telecom as we know it.

Most important, experts told us, is something called voiceover-IP (VoIP), which is, simply put, talking via Internet (IP stands for Internet Protocol). Instead of hardwired, standard phone systems, companies plug their phone systems into their existing computer networks.

This isn't the tricky, garbled headset system that was sold to home computer users in the late 1990s. The technology has caught up to expectations, and now a VoIP call feels and sounds like any other phone call. Bandwidth is now so plentiful that callers can't tell this is going on. It sounds just fine. Yet breaking a voice signal into pieces creates a lot of opportunities: If you own your company's data network, for instance, calls among your employees--whether they are in China, Silo Paulo or the next door down, are free. "That's a slam dunk" says Carlos Blanco, managing director of Next Level, a technology marketing and consulting company in Miami.

Setting up phones gets easier, too. Instead of a $100 service call to move an extension, the employee can unplug a phone, walk to a conference room--or fly to the Bogota office--and plug it in. The network simply follows the number to where it is being used. "Once we configure the system, it doesn't really matter where you connect," says Kelvin Berberena, 3Com's director for the Caribbean.

3 White you're at it, let's get rid of all the wires.

Next up on the list of most-mentioned trends is wireless. Most people think of their cellular telephones when they hear the word. But the business world is about to be besieged with options. Voice will still be king, but the amount of data being pushed to powerful devices--always-on, laptop-strong business tools--will increase steadily as service and equipment prices drop.

The newest models usually combine the usefulness of a phone with the power of a handheld computer. The big change will be live access to corporate e-mail--already widely available through the popular Blackberry device--on nearly any entry-level cellphone. The difference is subtle: Key is "push" technology, which failed to spark much interest among Internet users early on but will drive the wireless revolution. Instead of logging in and downloading e-mails, which is tough sledding on a cellular phone, the e-mails just arrive, like they do on a regular office network.

Add to that Wi-Fi, a cheap standard for wireless broadband already available in places where business gets done--like hotels, airports, convention halls and office buildings--as well as broadband cellular services, and the business case becomes unavoidable. "For corporations, taking a realistic view, once it becomes available, companies will be able to negotiate attractive packages from their carriers," says Birger Thorburn, chief technology officer for the Caribbean and Latin America for software maker CSG Systems.