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Denise Persson, executive vice president of marketing at Genesys Conferencing Inc.

... on local travel while pushing pedal to the metal on Web conferencing. Genesys Conferencing Inc. in Reston, Va., polled about 6,000 of its 50,000 North American users and discovered a new reason why traffic on its Web- and audio-conferencing system has skyrocketed 40% in the past 12 months: the price of gasoline. Peaking petrol prices have pushed people out of their cars and in front of their PCs when they need to meet, said Denise Persson, executive vice president of marketing at Genesys. "Before, Web conferencing has been seen as a lower-cost alternative to air travel, but now it's also cross-town travel," she observes. Persson says 25% of those surveyed by Genesys last month predicted that they'll further increase their use of Web conferencing in lieu of driving to local meetings. The vast majority of those virtual get-togethers will be for intracompany confabs, Persson adds.
Fred Amoroso, CEO of Macrovision Corp. in Santa Clara, Calif., agrees that the rise in energy costs is having an effect on the IT industry. But the news isn't all good, he says, pointing to a study by Morgan Stanley revealing that corporate CIOs have cut IT spending growth projections for this year from an average 4.3% increase in January to 3.3% as of August. Amoroso, who spoke at the SoftSummit 2005 conference in Santa Clara last week, notes that the study blames ballooning fuel costs for the, er, shrinking growth.
Packaged software is getting whacked ...
... by a shift inside IT to develop apps internally. That's the conclusion drawn by Ken Berryman, a consultant at McKinsey & Co. who also spoke at SoftSummit 2005. According to Berryman, New York-based McKinsey in 1998 estimated that 31% of business applications were internally developed. By 2003, that percentage had jumped to 42%, while packaged apps fell from 32% of the mix to 28%, he says. Berryman says he
expects the trend to continue because there is now "a much more standard software stack" for IT, including everything from middleware to network protocols. Plus, he says, development tools are improving.
Keep tabs on changes to open-source ...
... technologies used in your app-dev process. Marina del Rey, Calif.-based start-up Mergere Inc. makes its product debut this week with Maven 2.0, a commercial version of Maven open-source software. According to CEO Winston Damarillo, Maven checks which open-source code is used in your applications, determines whether it has changed and shows the dependencies between your programs