Sunday, February 21, 2010

Virtualization among CIOs' top priorities in 2010

Bangalore: The ease of using technologies like virtualization, collaboration, analytics, and mobile provisioned through lightweight, modular services are gaining more importance among CIOs as companies come out of slowdown. According to a report by research firm Gartner, this is in contrast to the 1990s, when large-scale enterprise deployments were the main priorities. 



The report states that IT itself - especially the CIO - will become more focused on strategic activities, not just cost-cutting, both within IT and for the business as a whole, reports InfoWorld. These are based on the findings of a survey conducted by Gartner on 1,568 CIOs in medium to large enterprises around the globe. The survey revealed that the top 10 tech priorities this year are virtualization, cloud computing, "Web 2.0" collaborative technologies, networking and VoIP, analytics and business intelligence, mobile, data and document storage and management, services and service-oriented architecture, security technologies, and IT management.

Gartner predicts IT budgets to remain mainly flat this year, and the bulk of spending to remain on traditional and existing efforts. The lightweight, modular technologies that have risen to the top of the technology priority list won't account for a huge amount of spending - yet, notes Dave Aaron, a Research Director at Gartner Executive Programs. One reason for this trend is that these technologies are cheaper to deploy than traditional enterprise apps, costing only thousands of dollars. Another is that CIOs are still figuring out the implications of the technologies, their potential risks and benefits, and the appropriate structures and methodologies that need to be in place to effectively use them.

The top 10 business priorities for the year are business process improvement, cost reduction, increased use of analytics, improved workforce effectiveness, attracting and retaining new customers, managing change initiatives, creating new products and services, better targeting of customers, business operations consolidation, and expanding current customer relationships.

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