TTF,
I gotta say, i think you're taking your y2k doomsday scenario a little too far. We totally agree that on the margin spending on backoffice and erp will decline as those resources are diverted to y2k testing and compliance.
However, everyone we've spoken and all of the surveys we've seen are remarkably consistent:
In a tough time, spending for IT projects that reduce costs, increase efficiency and other "nice to haves" will suffer.
However, the evidence is mounting that at least four areas will see significant increases in relative priority (and spending) in the coming years:
Customer retention and relationship management, Business intelligence, electronic commerce, and supply chain.
These segments are smaller than the erp/backoffice spending levels are today, so you can still get your y2k compliance done, reduce erp/backoffice and still increase budgets in these new areas.
We have the fodder for our beer bet, i don't know how to set it up from a stock perspective, but I think this outlines an area for a bet.
I don't want to use sebl as the instrument, but we might try a basket of stocks. I'd bet a basket of CIS/Business intelligence/e-commerce stocks WAY outperforms a comparable group of erp/backoffice stocks in the next 6 months. (I realize you'd make that bet too, and no you can't use inference, microstrategies and comshare as part of the basket.)
TD |
