SUMMARY TRANSCRIPT:

“It’s 50/50. We deal with the CIO or IT manager, or whatever job title you want but increasingly directors, owner managers of the business, line-of-business managers. I think it’s something like 40 or 45% of IT now is bought outside of IT. And so, if you’re providing a marketing system it’s not necessarily going to go via the IT department. But clearly, the IT department, what we’re finding is they’re adapting too. Internal IT departments themselves are becoming more like brokers. Instead of a fiefdom, they’re having to embrace the fact that if we don’t adapt, as an internal department, we’re going to find ourselves disintermediated or by-passed by the business owners or the business managers who are just going to buy stuff directly that they see. And that’s the whole consumerisation of IT, isn’t it?

The idea that it’s no longer good enough to say ‘you have to wait six months or eight months to have a limited function of feature-sets in a certain an application’, when you’ve got more features at home on your iPhone or your tablet for a much lower cost. So, you can’t pull the wool over the business users’ eyes anymore like you used to. So yeah, the business owner is becoming more educated on the line of business, they know more than they used to. They used to have to wait for the PowerPoint presentation to come along and be told what technology they needed. Now, they’re educating themselves and they know much more. Even before they make an enquiry of a potential vendor, they know much more. And they’re really just checking out who is the best potential supplier of what they already know they need, as opposed to sitting back, cap in hand and taking what’s given to them.

So yeah, there is a big change from just IT-central purchasing through to the business side too.”