Conference Paper

This paper will not discuss about the source or the reason of the crisis, instead I will focus on the opportunities and the benefit for the ICT companies from the economic crisis. The ICT industry was hit in 2001 by a dot‐com bubble and one of the key‐ drivers that helped to raise the industry back were government regulations and mandates like SOX. Governments have created tight rules and regulation that increased security, risk management, reporting and on the other hand transparency. All of these areas obviously depended on sophisticated and usually expensive information systems. During these days companies, as well as the governments again are faced with the same or even bigger problems. As a result, there will be new rules, policies and regulations in almost all processes. In order to achieve this, the companies, as well as governments will need sophisticated systems for control and reporting. This is a clear opportunity for: 1) software‐developing companies ‐ to benefit through creating the new software offering the requested solutions and 2) for system integrator companies ‐ to integrate this new system with the existing one.