Business-Tech to influence tech spends in a major way

NEW DELHI, INDIA: By 2017, Forrester expects the Business Technology (BT) agenda will rise to 31% of all purchases of technology goods and services by US governments and businesses. More importantly, BT agenda technologies will consume over half of new project purchases by 2015, with overall BT spending rising by 10% or more per year, according to a new report by Andrew Bartels.

The BT agenda, which targets customer-focused and customer-supporting technologies, will capture the majority of new project spending by 2015, with overall BT spending rising by 10 per cent or more per year. The remaining information technologies will still be important, but they will grow slowly. Also, the report outlines that BT spending is primarily software and consulting services, with some hardware. The BT agenda does not feature the traditional hardware, networking, software, and services diversity of the IT agenda, because the technologies most relevant to business processes are software applications and related services. Software and the services for implementing and managing it dominate the BT agenda, with a smattering of hardware and other services.

It adds that the IT agenda generates significant expenses but not as many new challenges as the BT agenda. New investments related to the BT agenda will drive increased demands for infrastructure and operational system capacity in the out years of our forecast, but the emphasis of purchases in those periods shifts to simplification, infrastructure transformation, and cost management.