Broadband ditched for virtualisation

South African businesses have changed their technology investment priorities from upgrading bandwidth, which was dominant last year, to virtualisation in 2011.

These were some of the key findings of the ITWeb-eSecure ICT Strategy Survey, which ran on ITWeb from 14 February to 28 February, attracting a total of 185 respondents.

The survey determined that while the majority of organisations (61%) last year tended to pool their resources towards upgrading bandwidth, this year 56% of businesses have switched their allegiance to virtualisation.

John Hindley, GM at eSecure, says as more and more applications in organisations require more bandwidth to run them, many businesses are led down a path that bandwidth will resolve the problem.

However, he says adding more bandwidth does not necessarily solve response time and slow responses of applications. “This is not always the case, as we can never get away from simple science that nothing travels faster than the speed of light,” says Hindley.

He says with its potential to reduce capital expenses and energy costs, virtualisation presents an attractive solution for enterprises looking to save money and generate value from their IT investments.

For this year's priorities, virtualisation was followed by application optimisation and acceleration (51%) while upgrading bandwidth, which was a 2010 darling, now sat at 44%.

It emerged that 62.03% of companies experienced an increase in their IT budget this year, with 15.19% of those companies getting a major increase.

On the other hand, 27.22% of the companies experienced no change in their IT budget with just over 11% experiencing a decrease in their budgets.

Hindley believes organisations are increasing their IT budgets in order to stay profitable. “People costs always make up a very large portion of company costs, so if technology can reduce the most costly portion of budgets then there is every reason to invest in technology that can bring quick return on investments.”

He also explains that many products that were purchased three to five years ago are also reaching the end of their life and will need to be upgraded to newer technologies.

“For example, 32-bit technology has become outdated and new feature are only available on 64-bit, so the old needs to be replaced with the new,” states Hindley.

The respondents were also asked to approximately state what percentage of their company's IT budget is spent on new solutions as opposed to maintenance.

It was discovered that most companies spend a much bigger portion of their IT budget on maintenance than they do on new solutions, with 55.69% of them spending less that 40% of their budget on new solutions.

Commenting on this, Hindley says in many cases, enterprises spent on 'new technologies' a few years back and are now maintaining those assets.

He adds that there are new versions of software that give additional features to the existing product and hence no new products being purchased.

Some 31.64% said it was very important that their company's IT staff gets regular training, giving it a four rating on a scale of one to five. About 42% said it was critically important, giving it a five rating.

However, despite the fact that the majority say it is very important that their company's IT staff gets regular training, less than a third (31.76%) say their staff goes on training at least once every three months.

According to Hindley, this is because companies always strive to ensure customer satisfaction. He points out that usually in organisations, students or trainees are committed to go on training when budget is approved, but when it is time to go on the training the students are usually at the customer site.

“There is also a tendency not to train as there is no formal payback period; so if someone goes on training, there is no way of keeping the certified professional for a long period of time. It is cheaper to get someone who is already trained than to invest in the training and experience,” he stresses.

It emerged that having an online presence and then interacting with partners and/or customers online is deemed critically important by the 51.36% of respondents.

Hindley says organisations are prioritising online presence, as it gives quick and easy reference to compare against the competition.

On which elements of security would organisations consider necessary for the optimal performance for the company, elements voted most necessary for the optimal performance of the organisation include network security (87%), and applications security (78%).

Just over a third (34.93%) of respondents say 'green' credentials of a solution is of over average importance to them, giving it a three rating on a scale of one to five. Some 47.93% of respondents feel that it is very important or critical to consider the 'green' credentials of a solution.

Just over half of the respondent (54.05%) will implement cloud technologies in 2011. The top three most popular uses for these implemented cloud technologies will be infrastructure (32%), storage (29%), and enterprise resource planning or customer relationship management apps (24%).

On the applications that organisations see giving them the biggest competitive advantage in 2011, unified communications and VOIP are seen as the applications that will give companies the biggest competitive advantage in 2011, with 56%of respondents selecting them.

This was followed by cloud computing and SaaS, with 43% of respondents selecting this option.