Lot’s of Forrester updates today as I am working through my backlog of RSS’ … This one was standing out as it indicates that messaging / collaboration has only little impact on spending in Europe compared to other initiatives. This can perhaps be explained by the fact that a lot of organisations are (considering) consolidating these infrastructures, compared to investing in new in some other area’s …
In 2007, European enterprises will significantly increase spending on new software initiatives and projects. Top priority will be improving inter-application integration (26%), then upgrading security environments (21%) and adopting service-oriented architecture (SOA) (12%). Business intelligence software will be the top application purchase, and enterprise resource planning (ERP) will be the top major upgrade, while messaging, email, and collaboration software will lead minor upgrades. Interest in software-as-a-service (SaaS) continues to grow among enterprises, with interest in human resources (HR) applications (55%) significantly outpacing CRM (38%), which itself grew by 11 percentage points. In terms of infrastructure software, enterprises continue to invest in security software, and application life-cycle management (ALM) has the highest usage among leading-edge technologies. Software-related outsourcing remains most common among the largest enterprises, although its popularity has diminished over the last year in Europe.
