A survey of information technology executives conducted by The Economist
Intelligence Unit has found that more than half of senior executives
worldwide believe their existing information technology (IT) networks are
not adequate to handle their main business goals over the next two
years.
The survey, which was commissioned by AT&T and conducted by the business
information arm of The Economist magazine, polled 237
global senior executives across a variety of industries. The report was
written by AT&T in cooperation with The Economist Intelligence Unit.
Only 6 percent of the respondents said their networks were fully up to
the task of handling all their business challenges by 2005, the survey said.
Another 58 percent said their networks, at best, could handle only some of
the challenges expected within the next two years.
When asked what top three challenges that their companies’ networks need
to meet over the next two years, the largest majority, 44 percent, cited the
move to open standards that would allow businesses to communicate with
customers, employees, suppliers and others across a variety of computing
platforms.
Another 44 percent cited the need to “to achieve efficiencies by
integrating multiple systems and applications,” and 43 percent said the need
to handle greater volumes of data traffic was among their top three issues.
Thirty four percent said their networks need to cope with more points of
access to the network globally.
The executives in the survey, 23 percent of whom described themselves as
senior functional managers, said the convergence of voice and data networks
into one managed network was a key goal within their organizations.
Other key findings in the report are that executives in the
survey said securing networks without compromising application integration
or user-friendliness is also a key concern.
And, in a sign that suggests the development of autonomic computing
systems is gaining notice with corporate networks, the executives in the
survey cited network intelligence — a network’s ability to prioritize
different types of data and identify how to re-route traffic when faults
crop up — as a key goal.
The report comes as AT&T continues to invest in upgrading its business
networking services to next-generation platforms for customers, such as
multiprotocol label switching, or MPLS
operators divert and route traffic around link failures in a network, and
Voice over IP
In a difficult spending environment among corporate IT buyers throughout
the past three years, one percentage stood out in the survey: 48 percent of
the
respondents said they plan “significant or very significant new investments
in networking over the next two years.”
But there’s also a catch, the report continued. “Burned by blue-sky
promises during the heat of the tech boom, companies are adopting a more
skeptical attitude towards the purported benefits and payback of new
solutions, especially when they already have a network in place,” which
helps explain why outsourcing IT operations, or turning to a managed
services provider, has been on the rise in the past few years.
“In the 1990s, hardware and software exploded across organizations,
creating a rat’s nest of incompatible applications. According to a recent
Forrester Research survey of large firms, the average company now spends
$6.3m a year on integration of applications, and this figure is increasing
as a percentage of IT budgets,” the report said.
Survey respondents indicated they wanted more data transmitted at higher
speeds to a greater number of access points globally. They also placed a
premium on network reliability, security and interoperability. But many
companies, the survey found, are finding that traditional networks such as
Frame Relay
scale up their networking needs as they move towards greater acceptance of
B2B commerce online.
According to the report, the ever-increasing cost and complexity of
today’s typical corporate networks compel an examination of network design
from the ground up.
Thirty percent of the respondents were from Western Europe, 26 percent
from North America and 26 percent were from the Asia Pacific region.
Other regions represented were from Eastern Europe, Latin America, the
Middle East and Africa. Of all the industry sectors represented in the
237-person survey, the top five represented were business & information
technology, software, financial services, manufacturing, and
healthcare/pharmaceuticals.
