As for those looking to decrease their tech budget, the figures sit at 14 per cent for Australia and 21 per cent in New Zealand. Iles said the latter was a “relatively high number”, but it’s not due to a lack of demand.
“When we go through the data, it’s actually businesses that are really struggling,” he said. “It’s driven by businesses’ performance in terms of their own sales, their own revenue, their own profitability.
“It’s not symptomatic with their lack of focus on tech.”
Speed in the market
Iles also highlighted the need for partners to keep up with the accelerating speed of change in the technology market, noting that “it’s faster now than we’ve ever seen it”.
“The speed at which we need to realise that our businesses build new service offerings is faster than it’s ever been,” he said. “The customer already wants it but hasn’t actually figured out what the offering is yet.
“How long does it take you to build an offering? Most partners I talked to, it’s about nine months. By the time you figured out what’s the offering, can I deliver the right skills, what’s the vendor stack underneath it, what’s the packaging, pricing, how do I train our sales guys, how do I launch a different website? All of those things take time.”