Market research and consulting firm Gartner expects companies to increasingly draw on information technology “as-a-service.” At the Gartner Symposium and the associated ITxpo in Barcelona Gartner recently forecast that spending on IT in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region would rise to over 1 billion US dollars for the coming year, representing an increase of slightly more than five percent compared with 2017. Yet hidden within these figures are the effects of the changing valuation of currencies – numerous Eurozone companies, for instance, are responding to the strengthening of the euro against the dollar by postponing investment in IT until 2018 in the hope that US dollar prices will come down. Apart from these currency impacts, the experts also detect significant shifts in IT investment patterns. “The forecast highlights that businesses are broadly reducing spending on owning IT hardware, and increasing spending on consuming IT as-a-service,” Research Vice President John-David Lovelock is quoted as saying in a press release. Gartner had recently already determined that businesses were turning to cloud models in ever greater numbers for more efficiency and agility. Users were also shifting their expenses more towards operating costs (OPEX) for service-based models: “The move to cloud services and opex spending on IT should serve to stabilize the growth in overall IT spending in EMEA in 2018 and beyond,” analyst Lovelock added. So customers connected to Retarus’ Global Delivery Network are fully aligned with the trend outlined in Gartner’s prognosis. Email, fax, SMS and EDI are the core channels for communication at companies. Not only does the interchange of information have to be technologically advanced and sophisticated, but also fulfill ever more stringent requirements for security, compliance and cost-effectiveness. Information logistics at this level requires a wealth of experience, a global infrastructure with high-availability data centers, state-of-the-art technologies and innovative cloud messaging services.
Companies increasingly opting for IT as a service
