Compliance Toolkit

The shape of tech spending in 2008

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Cath Everett ZDNet.co.uk

Published: 21 Jan 2008 12:30 GMT

...simply be more of the same. As Trifkovic pointed out: "We'll continue with existing trends and people will focus on getting more value from them via optimisation and better integration with business processes. But this makes sense, given the overall growing maturity of the market."

Nonetheless, two key, umbrella topics are likely to keep making headlines over the following year: "green" technology; and governance, compliance and risk management (GCR).

Increased interest in green IT
The interest in so-called green technologies is likely to be fuelled by growing concerns about the rising cost of power, lighting, cooling and floor space, rather than environmental concerns per se, although this won't stop vendors bombarding customers with green messaging and rebranding every widget as green.

These concerns will also lead to increasing consolidation whether in relation to servers or the number of data centres, and to the progressive adoption of virtualisation software.

Cullen explained: "You can think of it as being part of the digestion process for IT infrastructure. People are finding that the cost of keeping the lights on only goes up, unless they invest in consolidation and virtualisation, so they're trying to keep a lid on costs by focusing on these areas. The enemy of cost efficiency is low utilisation, and virtualisation is a way to fix that."

While adoption of virtualisation, even in the much-hyped x86 server world, is still limited mainly to large enterprises, this will start to change during 2008 as smaller organisations start to take more notice.

The enemy of cost efficiency is low utilisation, and virtualisation is a way to fix that

Alex Cullen, Forrester Research

"Roughly about 20 percent of companies at the top end of the market say that x86 server virtualisation is the standard thing for their live systems, and probably two or three times that [number] are evaluating it or preparing to deploy it," Atherton said. "Virtualisation is just starting to move into the mainstream but it's not part of the furniture yet, although, during 2008, it will become more the norm."

But this overarching notion of green IT will, in turn, also feed into and be fed by corporate GCR preoccupations and rising organisational concern about being viewed as a good green citizen — not least in order to retain and attract increasingly environmentally aware customers and personnel.

Push towards good governance
The general drive towards good governance and boosting efficiency will also manifest itself in other ways, however. IT managers will increasingly see the value of introducing processes and technologies to identify and manage their assets and resources more effectively. This, in turn, will result in a growing rationalisation and streamlining of both products and their associated vendors in a bid to get more value for money.

The trend is also likely to lead to increased automation of currently manual management processes and a wider and deeper adoption of systems and service-management software, in a bid to cut costs and ensure that IT staff are able to focus less on administrative tasks and more on activities that generate value for the business.

Moreover, said Neil Macehiter, a partner at analyst house Macehiter Ward-Dutton: "Business intelligence [BI] and analytics won't be headline-makers, but they will be key initiatives for many organisations. You need to know how well you're performing currently in order to work out where you need to optimise things, and BI provides that insight, especially when aligned with business-process automation to provide a feedback loop."

While, until now, most implementations of this nature have been introduced in a "patchwork style", Macehiter said 2008 will see organisations exploring how they can address their increasing need for operational information more holistically.

Another driver behind rising levels of BI adoption will be a desire to maximise sales from existing customer bases as new clients potentially become more difficult to find. Tom Kucharvy, a senior vice president at Ovum, explained: "I think there'll be a big change in adding to the level of dollars spent on this type of investment... There'll be much more of a shift to investments that have the potential to increase revenues by facilitating cross- and up-selling."

Organisations are predicted to pursue GCR in a more strategic manner. Up until now, most organisations have chosen to tackle...