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EMEA CIOs eye increased spending

Admire Moyo
By Admire Moyo, ITWeb's news editor.
Johannesburg, 25 Mar 2013

Seventy-one percent of CIOs in the Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA) region are expecting increases in IT spending this year.

This is one of the biggest findings from a study commissioned by Riverbed Technology, an application performance company.

Managed by technology market research company, Vanson Bourne, 400 CIOs across the region were questioned about their spending priorities over the next 12 months and were asked to pick their top five priorities for the next year. Virtualisation and consolidation programmes came out on top. Riverbed describes virtualisation and consolidation as tremendous ways of "doing more with less", and as such, are high on IT decision-makers' agendas.

Some 50% of CIOs revealed that server virtualisation would be their biggest spending priority, followed by data centre consolidation (40%). Other priorities include storage consolidation (34%), desktop virtualisation (33%), server upgrades (33%), security and compliance (32%), as well as WAN optimisation (32%), among others.

"Investment appears to primarily focus on centralising technology in order to remain competitive," says Willem Hendrickx, senior VP EMEA at Riverbed Technology, adding that CIOs clearly understand the cost and time savings that consolidation and virtualisation can bring.

According to Riverbed, data centre and server consolidation simplifies complex infrastructures and reduces costs, thus it is not surprising that this has become a major focus for IT managers.

Among the IT spending trends for EMEA-based CIOs, the research also found that 10% of respondents plan to make aggressive investments to improve their companies' competitiveness, while 28% of companies surveyed indicated that efficiency and cuts to overall spend are key drivers for the investments they will make in the next 12 months.

However, 33% of CIOs plan to approach investment 'cautiously' in 2013, to prepare their organisations for the challenges of the next decade. Some 20% said spend will continue at the same level as the last three to five years, while only 9% of the total sample indicated that IT budgets were shrinking and that they would be spending less over the next 12 months.

Hendrickx points out that in order to fully reap the benefits of these initiatives, businesses need to realise network needs in order to completely optimise and maintain application performance, otherwise companies run the risk of negating many of the potential benefits.

"This is highlighted by the fact that as many as 38% of CIOs cited application performance over the WAN as a barrier to consolidation. As more services become virtualised and dependence on Web-delivered tools increases, companies are turning to WAN optimisation to ensure 'business as usual' in a far from usual technology environment," says Hendrickx.

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