RAISING THE SHARE OF DOMESTIC ORDERS FROM 1/3 TO 1/2 WILL ADD STEADINESS TO ARMENIAN IT INDUSTRY

ArmInfo
2009-06-24 11:05:00

ArmInfo. Raising the share of domestic sales from something like
1/3 to ? of total IT industry sales will add steadiness to Armenian
IT industry, said Hayley Alexander, Chief of Party of USAID/CAPS
(Competitive Armenian Private Sector) project, at the 2nd Armenian
DigiTec Business forum, which was assisted by CAPS. "One third of
income generated within the local market is too low to support the
industry as a whole, because then it relies too heavily on export
sales. In these uncertain times in the international economy this is
not a great position to be in. So we’d like to see that one third of
the local market at least become a half within the next three years
or so. The DigiTech Business Forum could be a considerable boost for
this sort of activity", noted H. Alexander.

There are certain areas which could particularly benefit from employing
new IT solutions, including the tourism and pharmaceutical industries.

"Yesterday we organized the annual Tourism Competitiveness
Conference. One of the focuses during that day was emphasizing to
tourism services providers that they need to widen their web-based
promotion to reach clients worldwide, who in turn rely heavily on
the internet to plan travel. These sorts of conferences and forums
are designed specifically to develop the local market for IT services
while improving technology usage by some of Armenia’s key industries,
such as tourism and pharmaceuticals.

But there is more to IT technology than internet promotion. Industries
also may have to start looking toward IT solutions in areas like
customer relations management", he said. At the present stage, however
odd it may seem, the domestic market for suppliers to the Armenian
tourism industry – like IT solutions providers – is too small and
new to invest too much in custom made products. "There are so many
different programs out there that can be adapted, under license, to
suit the specific needs of tourism providers. But this still requires
a knowledgeable IT solutions provider to adapt the available products
and train in their best use.

Today, in the tourism industry, most travel arrangements are made
on the Internet. "So if you don’t utilize Internet based systems
to promote your products and services there’s very little chance
to enlarge your market share and attract new customers. So it’s
absolutely critical on the revenue generation side for Armenian
tour operators to be able to utilize web-based marketing solutions",
he added. On the cost saving side, CRM comes in handy for instance,
for pharmaceutical producers. "If you don’t have a sense of who buys
your products, what their customer profiles look like, you’re wasting
a huge amount of information that can help you reach your target
audience more cost effectively than mass market promotion through
say TV or radio. With proper software a pharmaceuticals producer may
explore particular groups of persons buying medicine in particular
pharmacies and create individual profiles for each client type. If
you can do that, it helps the producers to tailor a message to their
customers that will have impact. It can be much less expensive than
to maintain a huge sales force collecting all that data", he noted.

Using less costly methods, like simply distributing emails or creating
databases in Microsoft Office programs is an option for a company that
doesn’t need very sophisticated solutions. "But even making a database
usually requires assistance from somebody to help you figure out how
to set it up and what attributes it should be tracking. More likely,
rather than taking a lot of time to do that, you’d probably better
going to somebody – an IT solutions provider with an understanding of
a given software’s capability – who’s got a simple program designed
to do exactly what you want", summed up H. Alexander.