TheInfoPro

Written by Daniel Kennedy, Research Director for Information Security

When we review our technology roadmaps, with their dark-blue in use and dark-orange not in plan bars, we often look most closely at those technologies that show a robust planning band in the middle, with the preference of course going to those technologies in the short-term implementation plans of network engineering managers. When it comes to the voice and video category in our Wave 9 Networking Study preview data, Unified Communications (UC) solutions is showing the best ongoing integration year-over-year as well as a robust planning band in the next year and a half. Twenty-five percent (25%) of respondents have UC solutions in their short-term plans, and 14% mark it as on the horizon for implementation.

This robust planning band shows 39% of respondents moving toward solutions primarily provided by Cisco and Microsoft, with Avaya a distant third in our preview data.

A sampling of narratives around project initiatives supports this projected growth:

• “We decided to move unified communications to Microsoft.”
• “We are putting a huge amount of bandwidth to cover unified communications.”
• “People comment, it’s like, they access their files much faster, being driven by the unified communications, when we go in and put in unified communications you have to put in new switches, gig switches, everyone gets a gig port, everyone notices. It’s many times better accessing their files.”
• “Unified communications may result in the need for more bandwidth at satellite offices.”
• “HP just has a better vision than Cisco does. The downside, they are late to the game with unified communications.”
• “Avaya has some cool stuff around unified communications.”

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High Profile Breaches and Mobile Devices are key spending drivers according to a report authored by Daniel Kennedy, former Wall Street Chief Information Security Officer and now Research Director for Information Security at TheInfoPro

NEW YORK, November 17, 2011 – TheInfoPro, a division of leading analyst and data company The 451 Group, recently released the findings from its bi-annual study of the Information Security market, where the source of the data is in-depth, one-on-one interviews with over 150 decision-makers in the Global 2000. Key findings include: …

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Written by Peter ffoulkes, Research Director for Servers

Originally published as a ThursdayTIP to the respondent network of TheInfoPro. Would you like to receive all of the ThursdayTIPs the minute they are released on a complimentary basis? Then join TheInfoPro’s respondent network.

By all accounts, VMware’s market position is as impregnable as Fort Knox. In TheInfoPro’s Wave 10 of its servers study, an overwhelming 91% of respondents weren’t even thinking about switching to a competitor, and only 3% were actively doing so. Spending plans for 2011 were equally robust, with 33% of respondents planning to spend more, 58% the same and only 9% planning to spend less than in 2010.

Unfortunately, every silver lining has a cloud, and in the case of virtualization it’s licensing. As a concern/pain point, licensing has grown nearly five-fold since the first half of 2010. As expressed by one respondent from a large enterprise in the industrial/manufacturing sector: “We may save the hardware costs, but there’s no flexibility in the software licensing. We’re not able to realize the actual cost savings.”

As VMware discovered recently, virtual machine licensing is a quagmire that is not as easy to navigate as it looks on the surface, resulting in its capitulation Aug. 3 and the introduction of a more realistic licensing model. The outstanding question is, how will this marketing fiasco affect server pros’ future plans, consideration of alternative suppliers and perception of VMware as a trustworthy strategic partner?

As another large-enterprise respondent in healthcare/pharmaceuticals put it, “They are trying to milk every penny they can out of us before Microsoft eats their lunch. The technology is great, but I don’t need most of it. Microsoft is catching up very quickly, and VMware knows it.”

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It is TIP’s position that the business case for Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI) has been scaled back relative to previous years.

The primary reasons are:

1. the priority to roll out Windows 7, which many feel will be the last monolithic desktop upgrade;
2. understanding the increased infrastructure costs needed to support VDI, especially storage; and
3. increases in adoption of application virtualization.

These factors will potentially mitigate the need for a significant VDI rollout as companies look to adopt a blended approach that includes application virtualization and web services.  VMware (VMW) and Citrix (CTXS) are in a two-horse race for VDI; however, it is not shaping up to be a market as pervasive as that for server virtualization. The move to application virtualization benefits Citrix and its legacy terminal services business; however, VMware and Microsoft (MSFT) are the lead vendors for companies planning to implement the technology in 2011.

• As we end 2010, 77% of respondents have less than 5% of their desktops virtualized. While the numbers improve for 2011, 55% will have less than 10% virtualized, with 28% having between 11% and 20% virtualized.
• When looking at the averages of different types of desktops installed, companies anticipate 5% of their environment to be virtualized client images in 2011.
• Spending on VDI was not meaningful in 2010, with the bulk spending less than $100,000. The plans to increase spending in 2011 are based on a low comparable.
• Application virtualization is a technology that has been moving to the mainstream for some time, and now 57% of the sample have it in use, compared to 46% that are using VDI. Our research shows that the value/risk perception for application virtualization has improved in the past year relative to VDI, with more than 75% of the sample planning to use the technology by the end of 2011.

To learn more or get our Real Time Update, contact us here for more information.

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• Larger vendors are leading in choice for infrastructure upgrades, points to potential M&A targets
• Forty percent (40%) of organizations are increasing security budgets in 2010
• Sixty percent (60%) of organizations already utilizing cloud-based infrastructure services or intending to do so in the next two years.

New York – February 23, 2010 – TheInfoPro, an independent research company for the IT industry, today released the results of its Information Security Study, which showed that 40 percent (40%) of enterprises are planning to increase their 2010 security budgets. …

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