The Info Pro

18 November 2009 – Anders Lofgren, Chief Research Officer – Recently we released a new report (see press release – http://www.theinfopro.com/2009/11/tippr-7180/#more-1064 ) focusing on key budget and financial issues facing organizations in 2010. Budgets for infrastructure in 2010 appear to be recovering slightly from 2009 which has clearly been a down year. Some of this increased spending can be attributed to the significant hits that were taken in 2009. And there is also a sense of an on-going recovery, albeit slow, which has also raised optimism for the coming year. However, there are also some other factors in play here that organizations should be aware of:

• 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 demonstrate a quick ROI.
• Upgrade investments will be made to support virtualization performance demands, especially in the area of networking.

The theme is obvious – containing spending is still the order of the day. Specific to the infrastructure sectors, we see the following trends:

Storage – storage organizations we see F1000 storage pros forecasting a positive budget for 2010; however, new application demand remains uncertain. Interestingly, F1000 budgets are recovering better than MSE (medium-sized enterprises). 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.

Servers – For 2010, organizations are projecting net positive spending, with 30% of respondents indicating increased spending and 22% noting decreases. Virtualization will see continued spending with desktop virtualization also seeing a major increase in pilot programs and installations in early 2010.

Networking – early projections indicate fewer significant budget cuts in 2010 as compared to 2009, with 58% of respondents expecting spending to be 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. IP video and unified messaging are also expected to see jumps in adoption in the 12 months. Both are positioned as cost cutting measures.

Overall, we would categorize organizations as being cautiously optimistic about 2010. We will be gathering more data points in early 2010 which will give us increased visibility into how real this optimism is within these organizations.