Vendor experience is key in technology evaluation, survey finds

The finding comes from a recent survey of CIOs in Asia-Pacific and Japan, which identified an integrated IT environment as organisations’ primary competitive need.

In the current economic environment, CIOs are faced with the challenge of simplifying IT while keeping their ecosystems agile and within budget, leading to a reliance on vendor recommendations, IDC found.

“Ongoing concerns about the economic environment are causing many organisations included in the survey to evaluate their expenses and the role IT plays,” said David Marks, Asia/Pacific Consulting director for IDC.

“These CIOs said they need to overcome disparate and complex IT environments, but lack the necessary management tools to do so,” he said in a statement to the media.

“As CIOs work to simplify IT and achieve these things, they expect their IT vendors, given their vast experience in managing IT, to help them make informed choices,” he said.

“In fact, a vendor’s ability to offer and implement solutions is a key criterion for evaluation.”

The survey was sponsored by Dell and includes responses from nearly 40 IT executives from organisations in China, India, Japan and Australia.

Survey results identified business agility, expanded business requirements, regulatory compliance, assessing and quickly absorbing mergers and acquisitions, and retaining talent as key challenges amidst shrinking IT budgets.

Dell’s CIO, Steve Schuckenbrock, described the survey results as consistent with feedback from the company’s customers.

“IT complexity costs companies at least 70 per cent of their IT budgets which they spend just maintaining their current infrastructure,” he said.

“That leaves 30 per cent, or less, for IT that drives the business forward and that’s just not good enough.”

Schuckenbrock identified next-generation network servers and storage systems, virtualisation software and cloud computing as technologies that could enable more efficient use of IT resources.

Meanwhile, survey results show the adoption of virtualisation to vary across the four countries, with CIOs in China adopting virtualisation solutions more gradually than their counterparts in Japan.

“Simplified IT, including virtualisation, enables organisations to be more agile, and we are seeing more demand for this now,” IDC’s Marks said.

“The solutions the CIOs will deploy are those that enable applications or resources across countries and geographies, new product lines, new customer segments and overall increased computing capacity, without having to make significant investment.”

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