Tuesday, October 14, 2008

Selling Identity in an Economic Downturn

Rough week. And it's Tuesday. In the wake of the current financial crisis, I've received 3 phone calls in the past 3 days from potential customers (who were almost surely moving forward with an Identity Management deployment) to tell me that the project is in serious jeopardy. All three happen to be in the healthcare sector. One of them was given a mandate to cut $1m from his budget. Another simply stated that all new initiatives that haven't been inked yet are frozen indefinitely. The third stated that their organization's revenues were deeply impacted because of cuts in Medicare/Medicaid, and any and all projects not directly related to core business will be cut.

I've been able to position the projects to be possibly salvaged by quickly shifting drivers from compliance to ROI and cost avoidance opportunities. Thank God we're in an industry that supports multiple and varied drivers! I think that trying to sell Identity from a compliance and security angle in this environment is just a lost cause, which will probably impact the types of technologies that will be deployed. Any thoughts on other business/tech drivers that might be used? Which types of identity projects will live and which will die?

1 comment:

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Regards,
SBL - BPO Services