GEC NEWS WIRESurvey reveals that IT Decision Makers Planning Investment in Virtualization and Consolidation Projects
An independent market research survey commissioned by Riverbed Technology reveals that 62% of IT decision makers in the Middle East are looking to centralize applications during 2013. This survey was conducted by Vanson Bourne, the independent specialist technology market research company. 400 CIOs in United Arab Emirates, France, Germany, Poland and United Kingdom were questioned as part of the survey.
56% of those surveyed in the Middle East indicated that security and compliance was a primary concern for investment, with 54% citing server virtualization as a priority. Additionally, 52% reported server upgrades as a priority, making these three areas the most common CIO spending priorities for 2013.
74% of CIOs in the Middle East are planning a consolidation project reported data security as the key driver for their programmes. Other reasons provided for undertaking consolidation projects included a desire for greater control of application and server upgrades (also at 74 %) and the need to reduce the cost of managing distributed servers at the branch office layer (61 %).
The study also revealed that the biggest barrier to embarking on a virtualization/consolidation project was application performance over the WAN, with 60 % of those not undertaking a project citing this reason. The costs of initial set-up as well as complexity were also reported as concerns by 50 % and 46 % respectively.
“This study shows that more CIOs than ever recognise the importance of centralizing technology and data to gain efficiencies. Although for some, barriers must be overcome before they can consider virtualizing or consolidating their applications, or removing branch office servers, the results demonstrate that most decision makers understand the cost and time savings that these projects can bring,” said Willem Hendrickx, SVP EMEA at Riverbed.
