TSW Day 2 Recap: Technology Spending Trends
Today is the final day of Technology Services World (TSW) Santa Clara. I’m amazed at the huge amount and high quality of the content in breakout sessions, and the positive buzz has been terrific. This post will provide a brief recap of what I was up to yesterday.
I gave my keynote address yesterday morning, providing details from my 2009 Member Technology Survey about technology budgets, adoption and spending. It is no surprise that technology spending is down, and we saw a pretty big decrease in average budget to maintain and acquire technology in the last year. But there remain some bright spots, with members having budget for spending in several areas. Overall, comparing 2008 to 2009 technology budgets, the following trends can be identified:
SSPA Member Technology Spending by Product Category
- Biggest increase is self-service. More companies are investing in knowledge and self-service tools to try to deflect more calls and cut operational expenses. This remains a strong area of investment for SSPA members.
- IP telephony migrations complete. The big loser in the survey was contact center infrastructure, which dropped from 39% of spending to 27%. I think the reason for that is we saw a lot of spending last year on infrastructure as companies made the switch to IP. The lower costs associated with implementing and maintaining IP as compared to a hardware switch means this area may continue trending down.
- Community spending up. Spending on customer communities rose from 8% to 13% last year, and with the planned spending on communities still strong, this category will likely rise slightly in 2010.
I will be publishing a detailed report of the survey findings later this month. And thanks again to everyone who took the time to complete the survey. We had a huge reponse this year, more than double the number of respondents from last year (turns out a $5 Starbucks card is a very successful carrot!).
Following my keynote I led two Innovation Tours of the Expo, with 30-40 attendees each, stopping at each of the Recognized Innovator’s booths for a brief “bs-free” demo. I also conducted interviews on our new solution stage, talking about trends and best practices with executives from LivePerson, Bomgar, Consona CRM and Citrix Online. What few time slots left were filled with member 1:1 meetings, which are really my favorite part of the event. Hearing first hand about member challenges and projects fuels a lot of my research.
This morning I am serving as a judge for the Services Innovation Awards. The finalists, representing collaborations between member companies and academia, will give a presentation about their project and we will deliberate and select a winner. It feels very “Project Runway,” minus Heidi Klum. The winners will be announced at the awards luncheon today that closes our event.
More soon. Thanks for reading!
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