What IT Managers are Worrying About These Days

An IT consulting firm went around the floor of the recent InterOp show in New York, asking 100 IT professionals to rank their most urgent priorities. The resulting survey showed that they are mlost focused on supporting new technologies and innovations, followed by cost containment. Cost containment, by the way, rose from 11 percent considering this a priority a year ago to 21 percent this year.

Still popular, but not quite as popular as a year ago, is virtualization. There was almost no concern about two big items seen in the trade press and analyst reports — cloud computing and ITIL.

We do a lot of this type of work here at Unisphere Research, constantly polling members of users groups on what’s top of mind.  Interestingly, different groups yield different assortments of priorities.

Our most recent trend snapshot was among members of the International DB2 Users Group, which tend to represent large IBM shops. Among these professionals and managers, the top priority for the coming year, far and away, is managing explosive data growth, cited by 40 percent.  Meeting compliance initiatives come in second with 27 percent, followed by managing business intelligence initiatives at 21 percent.

What emerges from these surveys is a picture of IT and data managers needing to deliver more and more to their organizations on limited budgets. The push is on to get smarter and more innovative with solutions that can do far more with a lot less.