IT Executives Reveal Their 2010 Intentions

New research from TheInfoPro announced at Interop New York 2009 outlines where Fortune 1000 (F1000) and midsize enterprises (MSEs) intend to focus their budget dollars and man-hours throughout 2010.

Based on interviews with more than 1,000 information technology decision-makers from more than 800 organizations in North American F1000 and MSE spaces, TheInfoPro’s research outlines where IT departments within these organizations stand in terms of budgets, technology roadmaps, and technology provider choices and ratings. Key infrastructure areas are covered including: storage, servers, networking, information security, virtualization and cloud computing.

A key theme prevalent in the majority of organizations interviewed is that almost all respondents will see a continued halt on new IT projects, with available dollars being geared toward optimization projects and refresh components of the existing storage, networking and server infrastructures to support growth in virtualization.

Emerging Themes for 2010

Spending
While spending is expected to increase for 2010 and budgets are projected to be more fruitful, TheInfoPro’s studies provide the following themes across all sectors of IT:

• Spending will focus on increasing existing infrastructure needs versus IT departments embarking on new projects or pilots.
• Technology purchases will focus on the optimization of existing server, networking and storage assets, requiring a six- to 12-month ROI.
• Hot new trends in technology will be prioritized if they’re easy to bring on and if they demonstrate a quick ROI.
• Upgrade investments will be made to support virtualization performance demands, especially in the area of networking.

“There’s no truth to the hype that we are going to see a quick spending rebound after the year we’ve just had, but there is still a lot to be pleased with in terms of anticipated 2010 budgets,” said Ken Male, CEO of TheInfoPro. “We had hoped in the second half of 2009 business units would demand new projects, applications, lines of business, etc., but that has not been the case. However, there is benefit from these tough times; for example, IT departments will expand services based on the consolidation and virtualization measures that have worked well for them to get through this recession.”

Storage

• After a year of consolidation, F1000 storage pros forecast a positive budget for 2010; however, new application demand remains uncertain.
• In 2009, MSE budgets fared better than F1000 budgets. In 2010, the F1000 budgets are expected to increase more.
• Deduplication, both backup and primary, solid-state disk, and 8Gbps refreshes top end users’ storage hardware priorities, while thin provisioning, archiving and e-discovery top end users’ storage management priorities.
• NAS activity continues to expand for business analytics, application optimization and virtual server adoption.

Servers and Virtualization

• Server spending turned net positive, with 30% of respondents indicating increased spending and 22% noting decreases for 2010.
• Companies will need to invest more in hardware, but not all vendors will reap the benefits of those sales; respondents point to Dell and Hewlett-Packard as first-choice vendors.
• Desktop virtualization will see an major increase in pilot programs and installations in 2010.

Networking

• Early projections indicate fewer significant networking budget cuts in 2010 as compared to 2009, with 58% of respondents expecting spending to have flat to 10% growth.
• High-ROI projects like WAN optimization continue to be deployed. To a lesser degree, unification of voice and video onto the enterprise backbone network is also moving forward when it can be accomplished without large infrastructure upgrades.
• Fifteen percent (15%) of organizations are planning future adoption of IP video conferencing solutions. The increased use of this technology is meant to offset travel expenses and improve organizational effectiveness.
• Citations for future adoption of unified messaging remain strong; an additional 29%, or nearly 75% of the current adoption rate, have unified messaging solutions in their plans for the next 12 months.

Cloud

• While nearly 60% of server organizations are not evaluating or planning to use cloud computing, the percentage of these organizations indicating interest in adopting cloud computing has nearly doubled in the past year, going from 20% to 40%.
• Thirty percent (30%) of respondents indicated they would be slow to adopt cloud computing due to immaturity of technology. Concerns over security followed closely behind, with 25% of respondents indicating this as their number one concern for adoption.
• While internal models are favored (53%), there is a substantial number of organizations looking at a hybrid of both internal and external models (34%).