What a year that was

Looking back at 2020 it’s clear that Tech played a more significant role in people’s lives than ever before. Fortunately for us all, Tech advances had ensured we were better prepared than ever before for somethings as disruptive as a pandemic – cloud, digital tools & collaboration tools such as Zoom helped many of us work from home. Tech enabled food and home deliveries to come right to our door. Schools shifted to deliver remote lessons. Many GPs went online to give remote diagnosis and advice. Vaccine research was accelerated through collaboration. Tech enabled so many of us to be more agile and productive. Imagine trying to do that 20 or 30 years ago before we had the internet, cloud or collaborative tech tools?!

Many big Tech Company’s made money and grew during 2020. A lucky few increased their value and revenues significantly. I imagine they are all looking forward to more of the same this year and their sales people will be pushing deals hard to satisfy their 2021 targets and revenue goals by growing existing footprints and finding new ones too.

For businesses, remote working and digital transformation will still be core drivers in 2021 as the pandemic rumbles on. Talking to Analysts reveals that they also expect an increasing focus on Automation and Artificial Intelligence (AI) to help improve Customer experiences and Employee experiences. All of this costs money.

So CIOs will need to juggle their precious budgets to satisfy on-going business challenges while also finding funds to help pay for the new Tech that will ensure their businesses drive out of the pandemic and grow again. It will be a juggling act and it’s likely that budgets won’t stretch to do everything. But one area of expense for CIOs to look at again is to re-examine existing long-term contracts with legacy giants such as Oracle, Microsoft Salesforce and SAP. There’s always some savings to be had at renewal time with these mega vendors as they always build fat in all their contracts and assume most buyers don’t know where the fat is or how to get it out. This is a great place to mine cost savings that can fund other new initiatives.

So get your negotiation hat on and challenge these vendors at contract renewal time to do better, to deliver more value and to lower their on-going costs.