As I prepared to head out to Oracle Open World last week, I had an opportunity to listen to a CNBC interview with CIO magazine Publisher Emeritus, Gary Beach, who was opining on an IDC study that projected strong growth in IT investment over the next year. I have to admit there were a few issues for me to get through before considering the substance of his comments. The first is the old joke where the marketing manager asks the CEO “What is this?” while pointing at a 45-degree angled line. Answer: “Its an IDC forecast”. OK, cheap shot, I admit it.

Once the discussion with Beach got past the familiar gushing about a rush of IT investment by major companies following a long lull from Y2K until now, the questions became a little more pointed. Beach offered that this spending was going to be led by software to which the interviewers responded, “Does that mean that hardware will lag?” The answer was an unconvincing afterthought along the lines that hardware would also see growth. In the end, the diet of information came off as more hyperbole based on a simple survey than considered insight – but, still, it left me thinking. Based on our own Unisphere research conducted recently, allow me to offer a view on precisely what factors are driving the IT market today because we do agree with Beach that a recovery in capital investment in IT is underway.

Two things matter in IT today. The first is the resumption of massive growth in corporate data. In a study we recently completed for the Independent Oracle Users Group (IOUG), which 581 members of the IOUG responded to, we identified this fact: data is growing at nine out of ten companies responding, and 16 percent of IOUG members are seeing data growth of over 50% a year. More to the point, several years back, we reported the emergence of organizations that topped the one terabyte level with amazement. Today, 65% of the respondents to the IOUG study reported over 5 terabytes of data and 20% of the respondents reported over 100 terabytes of data. Much of that data remains online for a variety of reasons that the study documents as well. As a result, 75% of the IOUG survey respondents report that both the growth and the quantity of data is requiring more hardware resources. There is your answer to the question of where hardware investment is going.

So data is growing, what else is new? What is new is that data is growing….once again. We completed a study measuring data growth back in November of 2008 among the readers of Database Trends and Applications for GoldenGate Software, which has since been acquired by Oracle. What was data growth running at in 2008? 10% of the respondents reported a decline, and 64% reported growth between 0-24%. Just 7% reported growth in excess of 50%. Comparing the two studies in 2008 and 2010 “rough and tough” – we see that the percentage of organizations reporting data growth of over 50% has doubled over the past two years. Resumption in data growth is creating a sense of urgency both for hardware and software solutions to manage, store and access this information. That is driving market force number one.

The second driving factor shaping the market is an emerging consensus among management about the importance of “Winning on Analytics”. Everything we see demonstrates the mainstreaming of this strategic concept in business. In fact, the two single factors cited in the IOUG study that are driving data growth are, first, increased business activity and, second, data warehouse and BI applications.

I’ll leave the analysis on how this will break out among various software and hardware solutions to the analysts, editors and marketing pros. But make no mistake, from NoSQL to internal cloud to external cloud to columnar databases and everywhere else in IT, these two fundamental factors are driving us into a new age of enterprise computing and providing the kind of “native” economic stimulus we desperately need in America.

Acronyms, once primarily abbreviated expressions for Depression-era government programs, have devolved into a parallel pop language that is rapidly turning web-based communications into a modern Tower of Babel. How many times over the past year have you run a Google search on an acronym you weren’t certain you had identified correctly, if at all? Come on now, be honest. It doesn’t matter how young or old you are, chances are good that if you have even a modest intellectual curiosity, you have done it sometime over the past year. And you know what? That’s an interesting allocation of your time when you consider that the acronym is supposed to speed communications.

The use of acronyms among IT (Information Technology!) workers have become a code-language implying some kind of insider knowledge or presumed expertise by the emitter of the acronym. At their worst, acronyms have begun to work more as a refuge, or as some kind of verbal shill – increasingly conferring legitimacy on basically empty claims, views or comprehension. It’s been happening for a long time but the emergence of abbreviated messaging in social media and through texting seems to have doused the fire with gasoline. Acronyms apply a thin veneer of sophistication to our communications and usually not much more.

Having said that, we all use acronyms and many of them have become a recognizable part of the vernacular … but that still doesn’t mean we are speaking the same language. Take the acronym SMB (or its derivative SME). What’s that mean to you? If you are a marketing person, it stands for “small and medium business.” Great, what does that actually mean? Well, to some that defines small and medium businesses (or enterprises) as doing less than $1 billion in business annually. Another sees that cutoff as $500 million. Some see “medium” as running in the $100 million to $250 million range. So, we really are not talking about the same specific idea, even though we sort of “get it.” Or do we? I just received a message from a reader who thought “SMB” was an acronym for “server message blocks.” And you know what, the confusion was not amusing and looking up the “definition” was a waste of his time. I get that sentiment completely.

So, here is my humble recommendation moving forward. Return to the practice of spelling out the expression first in every document, to define the acronym. For example, we use the acronym “DBTA” all the time, but in every communication we send out we spell out our trade name “Database Trends and Applications (DBTA)” first. It’s a good rule and it takes your reader into consideration. It’s worth letting folks know what you are really speaking or writing about, if for no other reason than to make sure you actually are expressing what is on your mind. You can do it in business correspondence and email, documents, presentations, speeches and discussions, webcasts, blogs and in all types of media. You can’t really do it in text messages and social media doesn’t give you much room either. So, that’s an interesting dividing line and a point of departure for another time.

Intel Corporation signaled that it intends to take direct aim at the
heart of the data center market with the latest release of its workhorse
Xeon processor, the 5600 series.

The processor giant says a single Xeon 5600 processor-based server can
replace up to 15 single-core servers. Intel also says the new series can
improve performance by 60 percent, while reducing energy consumption by
up to 30 percent.

That’s not a bad start, considering IBM claims it can replace hundreds
of servers with its System z and System i boxes. Most of the leading
server vendors have signed up to market Xeon, including IBM itself,
which offers competing chipsets in its POWER series, as well as System z
for large-scale operations. Additional vendors read like a who’s-who in
large data center computing: Cisco, Cray, Fujitsu, HP, Oracle and SGI.
(Interesting to see Oracle, formerly an all-software company, join this
bunch – this is via its Sun acquisition, of course.)

I remember when I first met with the Intel folks back in 1998, when they
were first unveiling Xeon. Intel’s Larry Michel told me that for the
first time, Intel was targeting the $25,000-and-up server market, an
area where the chipmaker’s presence was been weak or nonexistent.

Clearly, things have changed a lot since then, and Intel running either
Linux or Windows-based systems powers quite a few fairly large
operations. Now, taking a cue from analysts and vendors discussing the
need to reign in server sprawl (a lot of caused by Intel-based servers),
Intel is looking at the green data center and server consolidation
market as an area of opportunity.

And the increased competition only makes things better for data center
managers.