DROWNING TELECOM COSTS

Reduction in telecom spending seen as top priority for 2006 among Irish IT decision makers.

In the dog-eat-dog world of managing successful businesses, executives are always on the lookout for enhancing margins. Accordingly, in Ireland, Information technology (IT) decision makers, 75% of them to be exact, have said their main aim in 2006 will be to reduce telecom spending. An iReach survey investigating chief information officer (CIO) concerns for 2006 has found that the continued convergence of IT and telecoms will also have knock-on effects in other areas such as hardware and software investment and security management.

Explains Diarmuid O'Connell, analyst at iReach, "reducing telecom spends has become a big concern. The emergence of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) as a realistic scaleable option and the continual increase in mobile services has fuelled this thinking."

With business operations demanding state of the art telecom functions in order to compete, it comes as no surprise that telecom costs need to be alleviated. Business now requires mobiles, PDAs and wireless area network (WAN) laptops and this demand can only get stronger in the coming years.

SOLUTIONS

However, solutions to cutting costs may not be that far as perceived. With Skype getting the ball rolling for free PC-to-PC calls, many players are now in the fray, including local supermarket Tesco, to make calls cheap.

Adds O'Connell, "with the rise of instant messaging and VoIP, telecom spending can be curtailed. However, what may suit large organisaions may not be ideal for smaller companies. It is important to connect business values to business needs."

SECURITY

The report also states that security will continue to be an issue in 2006, with concerns over phishing, reportedly reached an all time high in November of 2005, and anti-virus management, which is being dominated by issues such as day zero events and patch management.