Everyone’s putting out surveys at Interop; we’re no exception. Surveys are how we know what you need in products, how we should focus our efforts, and how to game the system when illegally betting on American Idol results, an often overlooked source of secondary revenue for mid-sized businesses in these bleak economic times.
So we’ve been surveying, and from what we learned both in Vegas and from our Symposium last month, network budgets and, consequently, network personnel, are down over the last 12 months. At the same time, network usage, unsurprisingly, went up.
Combining the results of the two surveys (totaling 170 respondents with only one mix-up between our survey and a keno bet), 69% of IT professionals indicated that their company’s WAN usage increased over the last 12 months, and 8% said it decreased.
Two notes: First, WAN usage was defined as volume of traffic, number of end users, and/or number of links. Second, our survey won $25 for nine hits out of 20 spots.
Anyway, when asked how the network management resources available to manage the increased usage have changed over the same period, 74 percent of survey respondents said their budgets have either decreased or stayed the same, and 69 percent said their personnel have either decreased or stayed the same.
Now, when you’re doing more work with less people and less availability, there’s got to be some sort of way to bridge that gap – force multipliers, if you will. That’s probably why nearly 40 percent of survey respondents indicated increased investment in network management tools, with only seven percent saying that they planned to decrease investment in network management tools.
The top network management priorities cited for this year are monitoring end-user service levels, more proactive performance management, faster troubleshooting, and data center and infrastructure consolidation. Surprisingly, despite all the industry discussion, only nine percent stated that managing a cloud computing initiative was a top priority for this year.
(There may be a bit of a bias there, as the survey was conducted at Interop and Symposium – which would, naturally, over-represent companies that are willing and able to send representatives to Las Vegas or Austin, respectively. It’s a hunch, but I personally think that cloud computing can still make a huge impact on small-to-midsize companies, and bears looking into if only because the small-to-midsize companies of this decade tend to become the midsize-to-large companies of the next.)
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