By Núria Mas, IESE professor
Cost reductions in health care should not impede the incorporation of the latest technologies that have become essential to guaranteeing the highest quality care to patients.

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"We expect the economic environment to worsen in the coming months, and we are therefore taking significant actions to align our cost structure," said Gerald P. Quindlen, president and CEO of Logitech. These statements, published on January 6 by Cinco Días, speak to the tumultuous situation currently afflicting the global ICT market, one that is bringing about a wave of restructuring and outsourcing, such as the recent announcement by Dell to move the production of its computers to Poland, after having been the top exporter in Ireland. Another important consequence involves the acquisition of companies, such as that of BEA Systems by Oracle, EDS by HP, and Business Objects by SAP, all of which occurred in 2008.

On the heels of the restructuring of HP—which decided to cut 24,600 jobs—our newsletter for the second half of September was already calling attention to this problem. Now, in this first issue of 2009, we're focusing on the technology suppliers and operators that are opting for this course of action in an effort to prepare for the looming downturn in demand, increased competition and narrower margins. A list was compiled from the ensuing news stories published in the media, featuring cases that are noteworthy for the sheer volume involved, such as IBM, which could slash 16,000 jobs, and Microsoft, which may dispose of 15,000 employees (although at the time of publication of this issue, neither of the two moves had been made official). Nortel could dispense with some 13,000 employees, while this year the operators AT&T, France Telecom, BT and Telecom Italy will be reducing their staffs by 12,000, 14,500, 10,000 and 4,000, respectively. Sun Microsystems also expects to improve its fortunes during the crisis by letting go of 6,000 employees, as does TDK, the Japanese supplier of data storage technology, which will be laying off 8,000 employees. Motorola and Xerox will each shed 3,000 jobs; Lenovo will cut 2,500; EMC, 2,400; Sony, 16,000; Yahoo!, meanwhile, will dismiss 1,000 employees. Many others are considering layoffs as well: AMD, eBay, Sonera, Palm, Dell, Silicon Graphics, Nokia, Electronic Arts and Canon, to name a few. The list also includes firms that have rarely resorted to staff reductions in recent years, such as Adobe, which will lose 600 employees, and Logitech, which will be trimming its employee base by 15%, along with hundreds of small tech companies around the world. In Spain, among the prominent examples are the 239 jobs being cut by T-Systems and the 1,300 slashed by operator ONO. This unfortunate trend will apparently also hit Google, which is rumored to have terminated 10,000 temporary employees since last October.

Articles in La Nación (spanish), Dealer World (spanish), Cinco Días (spanish), Expansión (spanish), ITPro, La Repubblica (italian) and Linux Today

Toward the end of 2007, a tagging technology started to surface in Europe that turned cell phones with cameras into barcode readers. The Spanish newspaper La Vanguardia, for instance, introduced it in September of that year. Known as QR Code, this new technology offers such applications as identifying a manufacturer's website by simply using a cell-phone camera to view the small bar code appearing in certain announcements. This eliminates the need to type in the website URL, since the phone can access it directly to obtain further information and view the site, or recognize and automatically place a call to a given phone number. The tags are included on everything from business cards to soccer jerseys, publications and showbills. They can also be used on cell phones at the supermarket to get information about products and add the items to our shopping cart; then we just pick them up on the way out, or have them delivered to our home. Around the world there are already a number of QR Code tag-reading solutions and applications for generating these codes, which can be downloaded from the developers' websites and work with a wide variety of models and manufacturers, including such obvious players as Nokia and Apple. Nonetheless, despite their availability and potential, in Europe they are still far from matching the popularity levels currently seen in Japan. This could change, however, thanks to the support of developers like Microsoft, which has just launched its own solution, or Google, which announced its support with a view to promoting website visits in order to increase the amount of information contained on a publication in paper format.

Articles in Xatakamovil.com (spanish), Silicon Alley Insider and Engadget 

Study: La industria espera resistir la crisis con un crecimiento limitado [Industry Hoping to Weather the Crisis with Limited Growth]
Source: IDC, Everis and other sources
Date: December 2008
Abstract: The Spanish IT market grew 5.7% in 2008 compared to the previous year, reaching a new milestone of 22 billion euros in revenues. This growth was largely due to the demand for data-processing services and software, which saw considerable year-on-year gains of 7.1% and 7.9%, respectively. When factoring in the telecommunications segment, the growth was 3.2% with respect to 2007. Ciberpaís, the technology insert featured in the Spanish newspaper El País, at the end of the year published its annual report on the status of the Spanish IT market. The report is based on the opinions of various spokespeople from IT associations and yearly analyses released by the consulting firms IDC and Everis. It includes a forecast on the growth of the virtualization market "so as to make the most intelligent use of the available IT resources," as well as the so-called Green IT, "which is now included in the manuals on good corporate practices; service-oriented architectures (SOA), the integration and boom of outsourcing." As for 2009, IDC predicts slowed growth in the Spanish market (between 1-5%), pointing out that the only declines came in 1992 and 1993, as a result of the economic crisis occurring at that time. Spanish IT did not decline even in 2002, following the bursting of the Internet bubble, despite the general hit taken by the global IT market.

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Title: EuroSoftware100. Key Players & Market Trends
Source: PricewaterhouseCoopers, in collaboration with the organizations ESA, AFDEL and BASDA
Date: December 2008
Abstract: Europe's spending on software totals 56 billion euros, 30% of the world market, buying predominantly from American suppliers. This statistic comes from the EuroSoftware100 report, which also shows that eight of the top ten companies selling software to European customers—Microsoft, IBM, SAP (Germany), Oracle, Symantec, HP, EMC, CA, Sage (UK) and Adobe—are American. The study suggests that the current dominance of the American suppliers in the European market could increase in the coming years due to their acquisition policies and their control over technology sectors and other key markets. And also due to Europe's inherent weaknesses, from the disparity of legislation and practices from one domestic market to the next, to the difficulties in securing capital, and the expected cutbacks in R&D as a result of the current economic crisis, which weaken the competitiveness of its development industry. EuroSoftware100 ranks the providers that supply code to European countries, thus contributing a distinct yet complementary perspective to the 2008 Truffle report (see our newsletter from the second half of November 2008), which lists the top 100 European software vendors. Unfortunately, Spain has only a token presence in both rankings: Indra, the highest-listed Spanish company, squeaked in at 96th.

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On February 3, 2009, the city of Barcelona will be home to the third edition of the III Conference on Interactive Advertising, an annual event organized by the e-business Center PwC&IESE in collaboration with the IAB. The 3rd Meeting on Interactive Advertising—which will feature the participation of companies such as Google, Telephone and BBVA—will address the keys of communication in this new era in which people's habits in terms of reading, seeing and listening have radically changed.

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The Catalan Association of Telecommunications Engineers (ACET) and the Official Association of Telecommunications Engineers of Catalonia (COTEC) are organizing the 14th edition of La Nit de les Telecomunicacions [Telecommunications Night] under the theme of "La Nit y el juego de la innovación" ["The Night and the Game of Innovation"]. The event will be taking place on Wednesday, March 4, 2009, at "L'Auditori" in Barcelona, starting at 19:00.

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Job applicants frequently lie or cover up important information. In fact, 40% of the résumés received by companies contain inaccuracies. The result of this chicanery is that companies often end up choosing the wrong professionals, which has damaging consequences.

Interview with Veronica Artola, IESE Research Assistant 
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