How has the ecomony impacted our client base?

The economy has had profound impact on many of our clients. We noticed the emergence of a “wait and see” policy, starting with the crash in 2008. Even though many of our clients were not immediately impacted, they still had significant concerns about the future of their business. As we moved into early 2009, our strongest clients began to make strategic moves to see them through an extended downturn. While they cut back on sizable IT initiatives they still made investments that had a Return on Investment and would put them in a good position when the economy began to grow again.


For example, a client invested in automating their manual business processes and eliminated time consuming activities such as compiling data in massive Excel spreadsheets - allowing them to efficiently match customer demand to inventory. This resulted in higher productivity and the ability to grow without increasing personnel.

Conversely, other clients essentially froze, and unfortunately they stayed frozen. Others have put off IT spending for so long that they now face major upgrades due to the age and unavailability of needed functionality in their current systems. These unrecorded liabilities are going to be a significant issue for organizations, as the slow growth out of this recession continues. If they are going to succeed they will to define an IT Strategic Plan - which identifies their most critical issues, as well as create a long term roadmap to address less vital issues. Vertical Solutions will continue to work closely with these clients to assist them with the design and implementation of a plan, so they can identify paths of opportunity as the economy rebounds.