Although green issues, Web 2.0 and m-commerce are garnering the greatest amount of column inches, its unlikely they will spearhead IT spending in the coming year. Instead, industry staples such as IT governance, Wi-Fi, security, and enterprise hardware and software will be where the real budgets are spent. According to this year’s Silicon.com’s CIO Agenda, companies are flirting with cool concepts and hot topics but when it comes to spending hard cash, it’s firmly a case of business as usual. Investment in mobile flexible working technologies will continue unabated as greater numbers of users gain access to devices, such as the iPhone and Blackberries that offer applications such as email and mobile instant messaging. Wi-Fi is set to remain one of the hottest areas, with continued investment in capacity and security. However, we are unlikely to see investment in additional line of business mobile applications such as sales force applications, but that will be on the agenda within two years.
Other software areas likely to see increased spending include enterprise resource planning (ERP) and customer relationship management (CRM). However, service oriented architecture and business intelligence projects are, in spite of the hype they have received, unlikely to be high on purchasers’ priorities.
From hardware point of view, investment in server technologies will continue unabated with rack space as well as boxes themselves accounting for significant spend. Technologies such as virtualisation will attract more investment as organisations try to drive greater efficiencies from their server and data centre investments.
The many disparate management, provisioning and reporting elements in network infrastructures pose service providers a number of challenges. Without the ability to gain a complete service overview or an automated way to switch on customers’ services, they need to turn to expensive integration and development. In addition, there is often no way to co-ordinate the delivery of customer services where discrepancies between applications occur, requiring a massive amount of human intervention and bespoke service delivery.
Imtech and NetAdmin have developed a solution that enables carriers and service providers to operate their networks far more smartly and efficiently. The solution reduces operational costs and challenges of managing services across platforms that deliver multiple business products. It does this by automating these processes at a national or global level.
However, it’s not just “yet another management platform”. Imtech and NetAdmin’s solution helps unify the access and streamline the sales-to-install process by communicating with the existing applications to provide a unified approach to configuration, provisioning, reporting, monitoring across any part of the network to any customer. The ROI model will help reduce the current costs of operation, increase productivity and shorten the product-to-market cycle.