Albay, Bicol – Businesses need to invest on innovating their business processes not only to survive the crisis, but also to come out of it as a competitive entity, an HP executive remarked during a forum with IT reporters here Friday.

Citing the need to change the economies of technology due to the recent global financial crisis, Diana dela Rosa, technology services country manager, HP Philippines , said CIOs are faced with a constant challenge to balance the act between transforming their company and remaining stable during the crisis.

“There are firms who balance cost cutting with investment,” dela Rosa said, dispelling misconceptions that a crisis is a time for immense and drastic budget cuts. “They are focused on balancing cost reductions with laying the groundwork to exit the crisis more competitive.”

Dela Rosa shared that a downturn is a time when difficult decisions have to be made, but reassured that “there’s always a recovery after every crisis,” adding that the IT sector has in fact undergone a similar scenario during the dot-com bust of 2001.

“Economic downturns can more than double the likelihood that a business significantly changes its industry ranking,” said a statement from the company’s Corporate Executive Board, which dela Rosa shared during the forum. “Those that make it into the top quartile during a downturn sustain their market premium for an average of three years.”

To ride the wave of the upturn, Dela Rosa suggested companies start investing on innovative technologies that will optimize their processes. “There is enough room for optimization without compromising the competitiveness of companies,” she clarified.

Presently, HP found that most companies are spending at least 65% of their IT budgets in operating and maintaining the enterprise, with a measly 10% left to innovate its processes. This despite executives’ willingness to implement server and storage consolidation (62%), virtualization (58%), application modernization or consolidation (49%), and automation (42%) within the next 12 months.

Dela Rosa posited a 70-30 ideal ratio between technology innovation and operations expenditure in order to gain a competitive advantage. She also noted how the company itself achieved this ideal setting, driving down IT cost from 4% of their revenue to just 2%, reducing annual electric bills and bringing down the number of used applications from 6,000 to just about 1,500 programs.

“Clearly, there is a confined drive for innovation of these processes,” Dela Rosa noted, stressing, however, the need for companies to construct a road map in order to track its progress.