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Making sense of IT infrastructure spending in 2002
2002 will be a challenging year for businesses worldwide, and it seems unlikely that European businesses will escape the cold winds blowing through the world’s economy. Yet despite the economic gloom, business will continue, and the technologies which underlie business will continue to develop. For the PC user, this will mean new and emerging applications and new usage models – like increasing mobility. For the IT department this will mean the challenge of supporting those applications and users. For the financial director this will mean matching investment with clearly quantifiable short-term return.
For this reason, we believe that for Europe’s companies one of the major challenges facing the IT department is to get the right IT infrastructure in place to ensure they can successfully address five critical trends: providing true mobility to staff through full integration of wireless devices and mobile PCs; taking advantage of e-learning; implementing security policies throughout the organisation; getting customer relationship management to work; and taking full advantage of web services. All these trends have a direct and immediate impact on profitability and efficiency, and we believe that they are at the point of mainstream adoption.
All these applications place great strain on the PC on the desktop, and the adoption of the Intel® Pentium® 4 processor will continue to rocket to meet the demands of graphics-intensive web software and the increasingly multi-tasking environment. As the strain increases on the back-end of the IT infrastructure too we’ll begin to see high-end servers take on the might of mainframes, as organisations realise the cost efficiencies of back-end clustering on open industry standard servers. The cost benefit is too compelling to be ignored in today’s economic climate. For Intel, this will mean the continued fast uptake of the Intel® ItaniumTM architecture, and for the IT department this will mean greater choice and faster implementation times than on previous architectures.
Let’s look at each of the trends we have identified:
2002 will see us redefine the way we think about mobility – if you thought the growth in mobile phone usage was phenomenal wait until you see the growth driven by always-on data applications. Companies have already started transferring their critical information resources to web-based access. Applications like mySAP.com*, Oracle 9i*, as well as the classic Microsoft* Exchange and Lotus applications are increasing the proportion of corporate resources available remotely via the Internet. Secure, reliable mobile Internet access will become essential for the mobile worker, and IT departments will have to cope with the strain on their server infrastructure. Giga* estimates that 50% of European workers will be mobile by 2004. Companies will need to start preparing now.
The weakest link in most organisations’ security systems is that they insist on a ‘fortress mentality’ yet 80% of security breaches come from the inside. Implementing security at many different levels (in hardware and in software) is vital and just as important companies must develop policies for their staff to adhere to. Security must be treated as a strategic priority, and over the next year we’ll see auditors start to insist on it.
2002 will be the year that companies get CRM to fulfil its promise. The mistake many companies have made is to invest in lots of technology but to continue collecting data in vast stove- pipes of stand alone data. Next year, we’ll see companies address this by integrating CRM information to make the data work for them – after all you can’t provide a service if you don’t know your customer. For many PC users this will mean increasingly sophisticated information access, allowing much more informed and interactive customer relationships.
Web Services will bring a whole new dimension to e-business. They will transform the speed at which organisations can develop applications and will redefine good supply chain management and customer knowledge. Web Services will be like fuel injection for e-business and anyone sticking with the old ways of working will find themselves stalling in the slow-lane. The development of web services has been reaching maturity for some while, but the emergence of environments like Microsoft’s .NET will allow much more integrated web and e-business solutions and massively reduce time-to-market.
What does this mean for the PC user?
The technologies described above all increase the load on the microprocessor, often ‘transparently’ to the user. What’s more, most of these applications will be running concurrently – draining the resources of underpowered computers. The ability to fully exploit this new breed of business applications and to optimise every transaction and exchange of information both inside and outside the organisation provides a compelling competitive advantage for businesses which invest in a powerful and future-orientated PC platform.
Analysts are already aware of the problem, as Van Baker, Vice President at Gartner Group states “In corporations, (buying an Intel® Pentium® 4 processor based computers) becomes a no-brainer. The price moves are incredibly aggressive... for the kind of applications Intel is talking about it offers significantly better performance.” Gartner is recommending to corporates that the minimum configuration specification for entry level and mainstream use is an Intel Pentium 4 processor at 1.7GHz with 256MB of SDRAM, the Intel® 845 chipset and storage of 20GB EIDE. For power users, they recommend an Intel Pentium 4 processor at 2GHz, 256MB to 512MB RDRAM, the Intel® 850 chipset 20-40GB EIDE or SCSI.
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