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Sorry to talk about the economy again. On the other hand, at least I’m not talking about the VP debates.
Recently, London hosted the IP ’08 Expo, and while we were there, we conducted the same spending survey that we did at Interop NY.
Interop NY happened from Sept. 15th to 19th, so it was conducted immediately after the Lehman Brothers bankruptcy filing. We wondered if we’d get the same results regarding IT spending if we repeated the same spending survey at IP ’08, weeks later (and in a different country). Maybe the depth of the economic problems hadn’t yet sunk in when we conducted the survey.
However, we did get similar results. Forty nine percent of respondents said they will increase network management spending in 2009, while an additional 42 percent said that spending will remain flat. Only 9 percent plan to cut network management IT spending in 2009.
The results underscore the idea that network management is absolutely critical – even in times of economic problems. Changes such as adding bandwidth or deploying WAN optimization technologies are expensive undertakings, and network management technologies can help quantify the impact of these changes and evaluate whether they’re worth the investment.
Another area that most companies – 78 percent, in fact, said spending would increase: Virtualization. That makes a whole lot of sense, considering that virtualization, like WAN optimization, is one of those “do more with less” technologies. As we said back during our coverage of the poll at Interop, IT has always been about leveraging technology to do more with less money, but there’s definitely more of a pronounced emphasis on the “less money” part of that equation than the “do more” part.
Indeed, on September 30, Gartner published a report entitled “Cost Cutting in IT: So Far, No IT Recession in the U.S. and Still No Threat of One in 2008.” Essentially, while the rest of the economy might be in dire straits, the IT industry isn’t likely to fall into recession.
This doesn’t mean that times aren’t going to be tough for individual IT professionals; the industry might do well while there might be more pressure from job seekers previously in the financial industry coming into the IT job market. However, it does mean that IT pros are better positioned to weather the storm than many other fields.
If you’re interested, we have a press release about the survey we conducted at IP ’08 on the NetQoS main Web site.
