If 2004 was the year advertisers and their agencies found their feet again it was the year that the technology sector also began to breath, the Internet became cool again and mobile began to look much more than a talking/text machine.

“It is becoming ever clearer as companies come out of tough times that they are focusing on productivity, efficiency and profitability,” Says Carol Bartz, CEO of Autodesk. “One way to do this is to get your products to market more quickly - especially if growth is slowing.”

Michael Critelli, CEO of Pitney Bowes, sees a similar trend “Customers today are very interested in solutions, they are demanding the ancillary services that are going to make the technology achieve the returns that have been promised. So vendors that provide a package of services and technologies will succeed.”

Although some industry leaders are still feeling cautious on expenditure. Dick Harrison of Parametric Technology says that “Today, the rate of return on an IT project has got to be well-scrubbed. We use pilot projects to verify returns before going ahead, and that is what is happening across the board. I don’t see the purse strings being opened up - I’d like to see it, but I don’t.”

Here at The Quantos Consultancy we feel that confidence and expectations are firmly but gently on the up bound and we see good opportunities for clients willing to embrace and integrate new technology to expand their businesses and build superior support and communications.

“If you look back over the last few twelve months or so we have seen growing use of search, mobile and video-enabled broadband technologies in particular.” Says The Quantos Consultancy’s Colin Hiom. “Organisations are putting more trust in their online businesses and even closing down less-profitable real-world businesses and business processes.”

“In the SME area we’re seeing a real shift. New companies are planning websites in from the start and, now that costs are more reasonable, are providing proper budgets not only for the build but also for the on-line promotion and for on-going support and maintenance.” Adds Quantos’ Robert Iles. “For the first time we now have SMEs and start-ups pushing to spend more than they need rather than less and we no longer have to convince them of the needs for promotion budgets.”

One of our smaller clients is spending several thousands of pounds a month with Google, eSpotting and Overture but by ensuring that they have proper tracking in place is easily able to justify switching the advertising budget from newspapers to search engines by demonstrating reductions in the costs of customer acquisition.

Let’s look at a few of the trends for 2005:

With growing confidence, larger budgets and subtler changes in marketing mix costs many companies will continue to migrate expenditure towards online channels and, out of necessity, will be spending more bucks on smarter, more intelligent sites that fulfil the growing expectations of its new visitors. A large part of the growth, led by smarter, faster and more fully-featured phones, is towards the mobile client where workflow integration into existing systems is also a key trend.

“As the ubiquitous mobile becomes more like a cut-down PC with pretty nifty audio-video capabilities we expect clients to extend marketing out to customers through mobile and to begin to offer more reciprocal hand-shaking through Java, FlashLite and other mobile operating system-based programming languages.” Says Quantos associate Robert Flyne.

“Removing the costs associated with paper processing is significant and permanent, and usually enough to cover the investment of the technology in a matter of months. Furthermore, the instant availability of data provides real competitive advantage, whether it is market research from the field, or the ability for salesman to check inventory and place an order whilst sitting with the customer.” Adds Robert.

Rajesh Hukku of i-flex solutions sees similar problems in the banking industry “Big banks will remain loyal to old, inefficient technology systems because a change is too costly or too daunting.”

Karen Richardson of Epiphany has a similar view in that “As we move into 2005, we will see increasing demand for solutions that drive real business value and growth, coupled with an ever-decreasing appetite to ‘rip and replace’ existing systems.”

Closer to home Quantos sees smaller, more forward-thinking businesses able to leverage new technology faster than their larger cousins, and for once the economic cycle should favour the smaller company sector.

Finally, all businesses will also be gearing themselves up to maximise the sales and new business opportunities being delivered through faster, more powerful business applications and services running on broadband enabled networks and reaching out further and faster and right to the point of a transaction through improved mobile technology.

The Quantos Consultancy, in turn, is expanding its members, clients and associate members in 2005 and opening a new studio with a continuing emphasis on the development, support and outsourcing of top-class development projects, animation, coding, programming and consultancy with a focus in 2005 on, you guessed it, mobile, video and other data and content-rich applications.

Stand by for more news and have a Happy News Year from everyone at The Quantos Consultancy.