Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Will the Credit Crunch kill the hype?

At the Netherlands Java Night 08 I moderated a discussion on Java futures and chatted with a bunch of people doing real, and large, Java projects. The overwhelming plea was "please stop the hype and the crap, lets make it work properly first". Now with the credit crunch this got me thinking about what a credit crunch could mean to IT spending.

Now apart from the obvious of more outsourcing there is the impact on technology selection, namely not as much new product being bought and a focus on the TCO more than just the development time. Now this could be a very good thing for SOA programmes out there as it helps them focus on what really matters and away from technology bells and whistles and helps them to upgrade slower and thus have more consistency and thus reduce their governance and overheads.

The other bit could be its impact on things like scripting and the various other language developments going on at the moment. These are great if there is loads of cash to spend on investigating new things but not so good if you are interested in keeping your TCO down (which is aided by consistency more than by technology) and don't want to spend loads of cash training people in something new.

Clearly the credit crunch isn't a good thing, but there could be some advantages in terms of its impact on IT spending and in particular its impact on practicallity over hype. Less of the big software purchase and random building where there is no value and more of a focus on repeatable and measurable reduction in TCO.

I can hope anyway.

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