If you can't innovate - we can

I attended the Regent conference in London last week. Always a high profile affair with the great and the good from the world of IT in attendance. This year we even had the pleasure of Jeremy Paxman as our compere. Great fun for the audience - but speakers got a grilling from him that wouldn't have been out of place on Newsnight.

Jon Moulton of Alchemy gave an entertaining talk about IT in a recession. He believes that companies don't innovate in a recession because they are focusing all their energy on survival. I think this is true to an extent, but take issue on this as a generalisation.

Companies innovating for themselves may see this activity as less important in a downturn. But many companies outsource much of their IT activity. If you are paying for it, you don't expect your service provider to stop innovating on your behalf.

Tens of thousands of users across many companies rely on EGS's "on demand" platform for their e-procurement and electronic invoice processing. Because our proposition is fundamentally a cost reduction one, we are seeing more pull from our customers than ever. Our development team are as busy now as they have been at any time in the last 5 years building innovative new features for our customers.

Perhaps Jon Moulton's hypothesis would be better expressed as "Companies want to innovate in a downturn but choose not to because they have to deploy their money and resources on staying alive". Sounds to me like a very good reason to look for an outsourcing partner or a managed service.

And finally......like Jon Moulton, I was intrigued by sponsors Barclays Bank's gift to delegates of an empty Barclays carrier bag. A fitting metaphor for the parlous state of the banking industry.