Enterprise Strategy Group X Jennifer Gahm

2012 IT Spending Intentions Survey

John McKnight — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 21:39:00 +0000

In order to assess IT spending priorities over the next 12-18 months, ESG recently surveyed 614 senior IT professionals representing midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations in North America, Western Europe, and Asia-Pacific. All respondents were personally responsible for or familiar with their organizations’ 2011 IT spending as well as their 2012 IT budget and spending plans at either an entire organization level or at a business unit/division/branch level.

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

What business imperatives are currently having the greatest impact on IT spending?
What are organizations’ general spending plans for IT products and services in 2012 and beyond?
How do spending plans vary by organization size, geographic region, industry, and other variables?
What is driving the changes between 2011 spending and 2012 planned spending?
What do organizations identify as their most important IT priorities over the next 12-18 months?
What factors will be most important in justifying IT investments to the business over the next 12-18 months?
Within specific technology segments—such as cloud computing, virtualization, storage, networking, and security—which initiatives and technologies will sustain investment over the next 12-18 months?
What is the relationship between an organization’s current and future IT spending and its overall purchasing pattern for IT products and services?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, health care, communications and media, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report 2012 IT Spending Intentions Executive Summary

Solid-state Storage Market Trends

Mark Peters — Mon, 21 Nov 2011 21:43:55 +0000

In order to assess the market trends involving the current usage and potential adoption of solid-state storage, ESG recently surveyed 223 IT decision-makers responsible for data storage at enterprise-class (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) organizations that either currently use solid-state storage or are considering using the technology. Respondents were familiar with their organization’s current storage environment as well as forward-looking strategies involving solid-state storage technologies.

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

What concerns do potential adopters, as well as those with no plans to deploy solid-state storage, have with regard to the technology? Similarly, what challenges have current users experienced?
What solid-state storage implementation types have current users deployed? If they plan to make additional purchases, will they use the same technology? What do potential adopters expect to use?
What drove initial deployments of solid-state storage? How does this vary—if at all—among potential adopters?
How extensive are current solid-state storage deployments?
What benefits have current users of solid-state storage derived from the technology? What benefits do potential adopters expect to realize?
Are current and future solid-state storage purchases being driven by the need to alleviate the performance challenges associated with any specific application(s)? Which applications?
What impact—if any—has server virtualization had on current and potential deployments of solid-state storage?
What is the relationship—if any—between automated tiered storage and solid-state storage?
How do current and potential users view the longer-term opportunity for solid-state storage?
How important is the brand of the underlying solid-state storage components, and does it impact purchase decisions?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report Solid-state Storage Market Trends Executive Summary

Application Retirement Trends

Bill Lundell — Mon, 31 Oct 2011 15:40:20 +0000

In order to assess current data management trends, as well as plans for the next 12-18 months, ESG recently surveyed 270 North American IT professionals representing large midmarket (500 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations. Respondents were familiar with their organization’s current database and legacy application environment, as well as forward-looking plans application retirement.

For the purposes of this survey, “legacy applications” were defined as applications that are no longer used to support active business processes.

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

How many legacy applications do organizations currently support?
What gives an application legacy status?
Why do organizations keep legacy applications running?
How much does it cost organizations annually to maintain legacy applications?
Do organizations have plans to decommission applications over the next 12-18 months?
What methods do organizations employ to retain decommissioned application data?
Which functional groups are involved with application decommissioning projects?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, and retail.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report Application Retirement Trends Executive Summary

e-Discovery Market Trends: A View from the Legal Department

Brian Babineau — Tue, 11 Oct 2011 17:48:53 +0000

In order to assess the state of enterprise e-discovery operations and priorities over 2011 and beyond, ESG recently surveyed 48 general counsel representing large midmarket (500 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations. All respondents were personally responsible for or familiar with their organizations’ 2010 legal services and e-discovery spending, as well as their 2011 budget and spending plans at either an organizational or a business unit/division/branch level.

Specifically, the survey asked the following questions with respect to e-discovery and legal services:

What are current trends in the volume of corporate legal or regulatory matters, and the percentage of those involving electronically stored information (ESI)?
What is the internal strategy for corporations in managing e-discovery processes among cross-functional business units? Who leads decision-making in both internal and outsourced resourcing?
What are current corporate expenses associated with e-discovery, as well as for legal services in general? Is performance being tracked, measured, or evaluated in terms of outcomes, and how?
What are corporate selection criteria for law firms and legal service providers? What are customer priorities in service delivery?
To what extent are corporate litigants performing e-discovery internally, and how? What are their greatest challenges in the process? What provisions are they making for court defensibility?
Which e-discovery technology and methods are corporate litigants using, planning to adopt, or rejecting?
What are the most important go-forward priorities within the enterprise for internal e-discovery and better overall litigation preparedness?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report e-Discovery Market Trends Executive Summary

The Impact of Big Data on Data Analytics

Bill Lundell — Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:34:38 +0000

In order to assess current data analytics and data management trends, as well as plans for the next 12-18 months, ESG recently surveyed 270 North American IT professionals representing large midmarket (500 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations. Respondents were familiar with their organization’s current database environment as well as forward-looking strategies involving data analytics and integration initiatives.

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

How important is the enhancement of data analytics capabilities relative to all of an organization’s IT priorities?
What challenges do organizations face with respect to their current data analytics technologies and processes?
How do organizations plan to deal with larger data sets during data analytics exercises?
What are organizations’ spending plans for data analytics in 2011 and beyond?
How are organizations planning to address their data analytics and data integration challenges?
What is driving the adoption or need for a MapReduce compute platform?
What challenges do organizations face with respect to their data integration needs?
How does data growth impact organizations in general?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, and retail.

Click for a PDF of the ESG Infographic: Big Data.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report The Impact of Big Data on Data Analytics Executive Summary

Remote Office/Branch Office Technology Trends

Bill Lundell — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 19:47:59 +0000

In order to determine the IT priorities and challenges currently faced by remote office/branch office (ROBO) locations, and how organizations plan to address those challenges, ESG recently surveyed 454 North American senior IT professionals representing midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations. All respondents worked at headquarters locations or other centralized corporate sites and were responsible for ROBO IT operations and/or strategy, including the delivery of IT services to these locations, authorization of expenditures, or establishment and enforcement of corporate IT policies for remote/branch offices. Respondent organizations were required to have at least two ROBO locations to qualify for the survey.

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

How many ROBO locations do organizations currently support?
What is the average number of employees that work at each ROBO location? What is the largest ROBO in terms of number of employees?
What percentage of ROBO locations has dedicated on-site IT staff? How do organizations determine which locations qualify for on-site resources?
What percentage of an organization’s total IT budget is dedicated to supporting ROBOs?
What are the top ROBO IT priorities? What are the top networking and security challenges when it comes to supporting the IT needs of remote/branch offices?
How are the majority of corporate applications and/or IT services delivered to users at ROBO locations?
What benefits do organizations derive from delivering corporate applications and/or IT services to its ROBO locations?
What challenges do organizations face in delivering corporate applications and/or IT services to its ROBO locations? What steps have they taken to address these challenges?
How many servers do organizations have deployed at a typical ROBO location? How does this vary by the average number of employees per ROBO?
How extensive is server virtualization usage at ROBO locations? What benefits has the technology yielded?
On average, approximately how much data storage capacity is deployed at the typical ROBO location? How does this vary by the server count or number of employees at the typical ROBO location?
What type of external disk storage system is the most widely used at ROBO locations? How does this vary by average ROBO storage capacity levels?
What is the primary data protection process organizations deploy at their ROBO locations?
For those organizations performing on-site backup operations at ROBOs, is disk or tape the preferred storage media? Who is typically responsible for backup operations and media management at these locations?
Do these organizations have any plans to centralize their backup processes? If yes, why?
For those organizations backing up their data to a central location, what drove them to this model and what challenges—if any—have they experienced?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report Remote Office/Branch Office Technology Trends Executive Summary

Also, be sure to listen to ESG Senior Analyst Bob Laliberte in a podcast discussion of some of the research findings.

Cloud Computing Adoption Trends

Garrett Doherty — Mon, 16 May 2011 15:48:24 +0000

In order to assess IT spending priorities over 2011 and beyond, ESG recently surveyed 611 North American and Western European senior IT professionals representing midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations. All respondents were personally responsible for or familiar with their organizations’ 2010 IT spending as well as their 2011 IT budget and spending plans at either an entire organization level or at a business unit/division/branch level. A subset of ESG’s questions in this survey focused on respondents’ usage of and plans for public cloud computing services.

Specifically, the survey asked the following questions with respect to cloud computing services:

What impact will public cloud computing services have on organizations’ traditional IT infrastructure and processes over the next five years?
Among organizations that believe public cloud computing will have little or no impact on their IT strategies, what are these customers’ leading objections or concerns?
How does cloud computing sentiment vary by organization size, IT budget, and other variables?
What are the usage trends for SaaS (software-as-a-service), and how do they vary by organization size?
What types of applications are being delivered via the SaaS model?
What percentage of organizations’ current applications is delivered via a SaaS model? How will this change over time?
Who are the primary internal advocates for the usage of SaaS?
What are the usage trends for IaaS (infrastructure-as-a-service), and how do they vary by company size and the scope of on-site IT infrastructure?
What portion of 2011 IT budgets will organizations earmark for spending on SaaS and/or IaaS services?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report Cloud Computing Adoption Trends Executive Summary

ESG Research Brief: 2011 Storage Infrastructure Spending Trends

Terri McClure — Wed, 26 Jan 2011 21:54:22 +0000

According to ESG’s 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey, 85% of midmarket and enterprise organizations will increase or maintain their spending on storage infrastructure in 2011. Spending will vary by company size, vertical industry, and organizational profile. This brief analyzes storage spending at both a general and a solution/product level and includes recommendations as to how storage vendors should segment customers and resource their marketing programs for 2011.

Storage Spending Holds the Line in 2011

ESG’s 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey once again offers good news for the health of the storage industry in the coming year. As shown in Figure 1, 50% of the midmarket (i.e., 100 to 999 employees) and enterprise (i.e., 1,000 or more employees) organizations surveyed by ESG say they will increase their storage infrastructure spending in 2011 and an additional 35% will maintain storage spending at 2010 levels. Just 15% of organizations say they expect to spend less on storage infrastructure in 2011 than they did in 2010. When ranked by the percent of organizations planning to increase spending, storage was the third most important area of IT spending growth in 2011 among ESG survey respondents, trailing only virtualization software and security technologies.[1]

Figure 1. Year-Over-Year Storage Infrastructure Spending Change, 2010 – 2011

Size matters when it comes to 2011 storage spending. As shown in Table 1, 54% of enterprise-class organizations will increase storage spending this year compared to 45% of midmarket firms. Similarly, 59% of respondent organizations with annual IT budgets of $50m or more will spend more on storage compared to just 46% of organizations with IT budgets of less than $5m.

Table 1. 2011 Storage Infrastructure Spending Change, by Company Size and 2011 IT Budget

When ESG asked survey respondents to describe their top 2011 IT priorities, “managing data growth” was the second-most selected response (out of a possible list of 24). As shown in Figure 2, organizations that view managing data growth as a top 2011 IT priority are even more likely to be increasing their storage technology spending in such areas as storage management software, new SAN systems, and tiered storage solutions.

Figure 2. 2011 Storage Infrastructure Spending Change Based on Managing Data Growth as a Top IT Priority

Storage Spending Outlook by Industry and Organizational Profile

Storage vendors will also want to know more specifically where they should focus their 2011 development, sales, and marketing resources from a vertical industry perspective. As shown in Figure 3, communications and media, retail, and health care organizations are the industries most likely to have plans to increase storage hardware spending in 2011. On the other hand, fewer than 50% of the organizations surveyed in some other industries—including manufacturing, both federal and state/local government, education, and transportation and logistics—expect to see budget increases for storage hardware this year. On a relative basis, the public sector appears that it will be particularly challenging for storage vendors in 2011 with educational institutions and both federal and state/local government agencies anticipating significant levels of reduced storage spending in 2011. Storage vendors should use this data to align their vertical efforts and focus their messaging accordingly.[2]

Figure 3. 2011 Storage Infrastructure Spending Change, by Industry

ESG also analyzed storage hardware purchasing plans by company psychographic profile and found a number of interesting trends. Most significantly, the manner in which an organization typically purchases IT products and services is a strong predictor of increased storage hardware spending. Specifically, respondents that classify their organizations as “leading-edge” consumers of IT products and services are far more likely to have plans for increased storage hardware spending in 2011 than are those with more conservative IT purchasing habits (see Table 2).

Table 2. 2011 Storage Hardware Spending Increase, by IT Purchasing Pattern

Which Storage Technologies Will Sell in 2011?

In spite of the fact that backup and recovery is a longstanding IT discipline, organizations still identify it as a top-five IT priority in 2011. Therefore, it makes sense that more than one-third (36%) of survey respondents expect to make significant investments in backup and recovery solutions over the next 12-18 months as part of their organization’s storage spending plans (see Figure 4). Based on the fact that data replication for off-site disaster recovery was the next most commonly identified area of expected storage spending, it seems clear that data protection strategies are top of mind for many organizations. Other top areas of storage investment for 2011 include new SAN storage systems, storage virtualization, improved storage management software, and data reduction technology.

Figure 4. Storage-specific Investments Over Next 12-18 Months

2011 storage investments by company size: When analyzed by company size, midmarket organizations are more likely than their enterprise counterparts to have plans in 2011 for backup and recovery solutions and replication technology for disaster recovery (see Figure 5). For their part, enterprise organizations are slightly more likely to have plans for data reduction solutions, cloud services, and advanced file storage technologies. This data suggests that midmarket firms are still somewhat more focused on basic data protection tasks while enterprises will continue to invest in more sophisticated storage and data management technologies. These differences by organization size are sufficiently significant to help drive vendors focus their product roadmaps, sales campaigns, and messaging.

Figure 5. Storage-specific Investments Over Next 12-18 Months, by Company Size

2011 storage investments by total storage capacity: Perhaps a better indicator of storage priorities from a company size perspective is based on the amount of storage capacity an organization must manage. ESG’s data reveals that respondents with at least 100 TB of storage capacity are significantly more likely than those with less than 25 TB to be considering storage technologies that simplify management including storage virtualization, data reduction solutions, advanced file storage technology, unified storage systems, and improved management software (see Figure 6). It is also worth noting that larger organizations are more likely to explore cloud storage services as a way to offload some of the burden from their own infrastructure and/or staff.

Figure 6. Storage-specific Investments Over Next 12-18 Months, by Total Storage Capacity

2011 storage investments by industry: The top five specific storage-related 2011 investment priorities by industry are displayed in Table 3. Among the key findings:

Backup and recovery is a top-five storage priority for every industry and is the top priority for all except for health care and communications and media (even in these two, it is the second highest ranked priority).
Organizations in the education, financial, manufacturing, and communications and media verticals cited cloud storage services as a top priority.
Verticals with public funding (both local and federal government, plus education) are notable in terms of citing a concern for more power-efficient storage.
While many verticals have a broad range of priorities that are “bunched” in terms of importance, it is worth noting those where one particular number one priority stands significantly (ten percentage points or more) ahead of all others. This means backup and recovery in the education, financial, manufacturing and transport/logistics markets, data replication solutions for health care, and new SANs in the communications and media vertical. Storage vendors should pay close attention to these particular priorities.
One apparent theme in this data is that users across all verticals are largely looking at solutions, tools, management, and services rather than at specific technologies. Of the five priorities across ten verticals (i.e., 50 choices) there are only six mentions of specific hardware technologies—four for new SAN storage systems and one each for NAS storage systems and flash SSDs. In other words, 88% of the user investment choices appear to be more oriented to systems and approaches than to a particular piece of equipment.

Table 3. Top 5 Areas for Storage Investments in 2011, by Industry

The Bigger Truth

The preceding data should help storage vendors identify high-probability target buyers—whether by company size, industry, IT priorities, and/or business initiatives underway. The psychographic data presented (i.e., is an organization a “leading-edge,” “average,” or “laggard” IT consumer?) can also be used to separate strong from weak prospects. Smart companies will sort through their leads and use ESG’s data as the basis for a set of qualifying questions. For example, sales and telemarketing staff could discuss the following topics with their users and prospects:

“Is your organization in IT cost containment or growth mode?” As in preceding years, growth-mode prospects should be highlighted as they are more likely to be increasing their storage hardware spending. While this outcome may seem obvious, few companies bother to ask the question.
“Would you consider your organization to be a ‘leading edge’ IT consumer?” If yes, this prospect probably has significant storage purchasing plans for 2011. Again, this may seem self-evident, but the simple act of asking the self-description of a prospect or user can help to refine a vendor’s approach.
“What is your total installed capacity?” This question not only indicates (of course) some general idea of the scale of purchasing that is probable, but—far more significantly—it can very much define the sorts of problems (and thus solutions) on which a prospect might be most focused.
“What IT initiatives/challenges are your storage purchases expected to support/address?” This question can be extended to investigate and probe around some of the broader “solutions” (from backup and recovery, to data replication, to cloud investigations, to power efficiency) that dominate the storage priorities for users. Just asking “do you need more XYZ hardware” is unlikely to get a favorable sales discussion going the vast majority of the time.

Beyond such qualification exercises, ESG’s data can also underpin the blueprints for vendors’ vertical industry sales and marketing strategies; this is because the data not only indicates which industries are buying storage systems, software, and networking products, but also the specific solutions, tools, and technologies that they plan to purchase. Table 4 takes the insights from ESG’s spending intentions research and provides an actionable guide—by industry—that can help storage providers fine tune the optimum application of their marketing budgets. It does this by providing guidance for marketing messages and plans in industry-appropriate directions which can, in turn, help to steer accurately focused investments in marketing programs and sales tactics.

Table 4. Vertical Industry Sales and Marketing Blueprint for Storage Vendors

[1] Source: ESG Research Report, 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey, January 2011.

[2] For more information on industry-specific IT spending trends, see the ESG Research Brief, 2011 Vertical Opportunity Index Score (VOIS) Rankings, January 2011.

2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey

John McKnight — Fri, 14 Jan 2011 22:08:10 +0000

In order to assess IT spending priorities over the next 12-18 months, ESG recently surveyed 611 North American and Western European senior IT professionals representing midmarket (100 to 999 employees) and enterprise-class (1,000 employees or more) organizations. All respondents were personally responsible for or familiar with their organizations’ 2010 IT spending as well as their 2011 IT budget and spending plans at either an entire organization level or at a business unit/division/branch level.

The survey was designed to answer the following questions:

What business imperatives are currently having the greatest impact on IT spending?
What are organizations’ general spending plans for IT products and services in 2011 and beyond?
How do spending plans vary by organization size, geographic region, industry, and other variables?
What is driving the changes between 2010 spending and 2011 planned spending?
What do organizations identify as their most important IT priorities over the next 12-18 months?
What factors will be most important in justifying IT investments to the business over the next 12-18 months?
Within specific technology segments—such as servers, storage, networking, security, and information management—which initiatives and technologies within those segments will sustain investment over the next 12-18 months?
What is the relationship between current and future IT spending and an organization’s overall purchasing pattern for IT products and services?

Survey participants represented a wide range of industries including manufacturing, financial services, communications and media, health care, retail, government, and business services.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report 2011 IT Spending Intentions Survey Executive Summary

North American Health Care Provider Information Market Size & Forecast

John McKnight — Wed, 12 Jan 2011 17:16:20 +0000

Driven by such factors as increasing demand for services, new clinical treatments and technologies, and a complex regulatory environment, health care providers have become one of the largest consumers of data storage technology.

It was against this backdrop that ESG wanted to better understand the make-up of these large and growing data stores: What applications or IT services—whether clinical or administrative—account for the majority of this data? How rapidly is data associated with different applications growing? How will these trends change over time?

To help answer these questions, ESG embarked on a research study that would:

Develop a comprehensive market model and forecast that quantified the volume and growth rate of health care-related digital information among North American health care providers.
Include data on current and projected information volumes and growth rates in aggregate and also by North American Industry Classification System subsector, application type, and organization size class measured by both number of employees and number of beds (hospitals only).

The data and analysis presented in this report is grounded in a body of new primary research conducted by ESG with more than 100 health care providers. This research encompassed both a quantitative research component (i.e., a web-based survey of 115 hospitals and ambulatory care providers) and a qualitative research component (i.e., 12 in-depth interviews conducted with senior IT executives at hospitals and ambulatory care providers).

Both the quantitative and qualitative research components focused primarily on obtaining as much “real-world” data as possible with respect to current health care application usage, the amount of digital information (inclusive of primary, secondary/backup, and tertiary/archive data) associated with each of those applications, the annual rate respondent organizations were experiencing data growth for those applications, and respondent organizations’ overall data management policies and procedures. ESG also used this research as a venue to better understand the specific industry and/or technology trends driving data growth across different organizations and applications. All of the data collected during this phase were instrumental in allowing ESG to accurately populate its assumptions during the development of its market size and forecast model.

For more information on the contents and findings of this report, please download the executive summary below.

ESG Research Report North American Health Care Provider Information Market Size & Forecast Executive Summary