Aussie vendors need to meet compliance demands

By Rodney Appleyard

Feb 3, 2005: The healthcare industry, and many other organisations in Australia are still waiting for IT vendors to provide them with the solutions they need to meet compliance requirements which could save them time and money, according to IDL.

IDL specialises in providing channel programs for the IT industry. It launched its Asia Pacific Program this week, which offers IT vendors and their channel partners a tailored regional go to market sales and training package aimed at accelerating revenue and profitability growth in compliance and business efficiency, so that profits can be made.According to IDL, vendors in Australia still need to make significant progress in terms of providing customers with compliance solutions to legislation, such as the Basel II accord, the Financial Transactions Reporting Act, the APRA Draft Standard on Business Continuity Management, CLERP 9 and The Health Records and Information Privacy Act.Neil MacArthur, the CEO of IDL, said that IT vendors in Australia need to concentrate on the business case for compliance solutions, and get away from just focusing on technology."The healthcare provides an ideal example of a need for vendors to supply staff with a compliance solution. Radiologists are probably the highest paid out of all health care workers, and they still use film to take X-ray pictures, and use them for analysis."However, this means that they have to travel from hospital to hospital, across Sydney, for example, to refer to old films that relate to different patients. Vendors could come up with a digital solution, which could be accessed through a portal on a desktop that would save radiographers from having to travel through traffic jams to get from one hospital to another."A solution could also ensure more accurate prognosis', digital images could be stored more securely with specially configured audit tracking solutions to keep the data accurate, and backed up."MacArthur says that the challenge really lies in the mid-market, since there are already many high-level solutions provided for enterprises. He said that once vendors can come up with a business case that serves compliance needs and could potentially return a profit, then IDL can help them get VARs involved to market the product and get it out to the customers who need it.He said he hoped that this year, many vendors would rise to the challenge of finding these ideas, and he advised that his company, IDL, would be best placed to turn those ideas into successful business models, following a formulaic structure that aims to return profitability to the vendor. Related Article:

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