Senior IT executives plan to boost their spending on hardware and platforms over the next two years, according to a recent nationwide survey.
The enterprise computing survey of 100 CIOs and senior IT managers conducted in April by Northstar Research Partners, on behalf of Intel Corp., found that a majority of enterprise surveyed planned to invest in new servers or operating systems over the next 18 to 24 months.
The results showed that 71 per cent of respondents plan to invest in new servers, while 36 per cent expect their spending to increase on server platforms over previous years. More than three-quarters of those surveyed said they plan to invest in new operating systems, and 44 per cent anticipate spending more on operating systems than in previous years.
However, Dave Fraser said he would have to disagree if the findings include his company’s clientele, namely large enterprises. The Toronto-based vice-president of marketing and sales operation for EDS Canada describes projected Canadian IT spending as “relatively flat.”
“When we talk to a president we see spending in terms of infrastructure and technology relatively flat except for those areas that really meet the key ROI criteria,” Fraser said. “We see more of an uptick in spending on outsourcing, that’s a nice way of to get a quick cash grab and expense cut by removing a bunch of employees or a data centre or a bunch of assets to an EDS or IBM or CGI.”
Servers built on open architecture were considered to have the most business benefit according to 87 per cent of the survey respondents.
The survey results fall in line with Intel’s thoughts on enterprise’s views about open architecture and its strong benefits to business, according to Doug Cooper, country manager for Intel Canada Corp.
“We wanted to get a read on how Canadian enterprises view the use of industry standard-building blocks in building infrastructure,” he said. “One of the things that came out of it (the survey) was a belief by Canadian enterprises that building systems with industry standard building-blocks gave them the greatest flexibility and that was a key outcome that we went into hoping we would uncover.”
Fraser does agree there will be some spending on servers and operating systems such as Windows XP.
The survey, which consisted of 30 questions, is accurate plus or minus eight per cent, 19 out of 20 times.