Wednesday, September 24, 2008

How Wall Street's crisis is affecting IT


I read in CIO Insight, an article about how the turmoil in Wall Street is affecting the IT. The crisis in Wall Street, with the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers and the takeover of Merrill Lynch, is troubling for the tech industry's biggest players, with companies cutting budgets for software and hardware upgrades this year.

According the article, the technology staples of Wall Street—Cisco for networks, EMC, for data storage, IBM for services, Microsoft for software—are all likely to face some loss of business. The financial sector will continue to spend, according to analysts, although the focus may not be on buying new computer equipment but investments for projects to make systems work more efficiently and software to help decision making.

The Wall Street firms are big spenders for cutting-edge technology, and an area of heavy investment is expected to be business intelligence or analytics software, which helps executives make decisions. Major corporate software providers like SAP, Oracle and Microsoft are trying to integrate those features into their business software.

"(Wall Street firms) still need to invest in the competitive tools to remain productive," said Sean O'Dowd, a senior analyst at Financial Insights.

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