Businesses are cautious about IT investment

The current sluggish economic scenario has seen major impact on the outsourcing trend today with the emergence of newer technology such as virtualization and cloud computing. Gartner's vice president research – IT Operations, Milind Govenkar talks to Pankaj Maru of CyberMedia News and discusses technology trends and demands, the impact of budget cuts on research and development and much more. Excerpts:

There's high focus on outsourcing IT infrastructure and operations (I&O), along with the 'cloud computing'. So in such scenario, which kind of technologies in your view are on high demand today?

We see outsourcing and cloud computing as part of a multi-sourcing strategy that an enterprise has to consider. I&O organizations have to carefully consider which parts of infrastructure and operations they are going to keep in-house or outsource or indeed procure from the cloud.

Cloud computing is still relatively a new and uncharted area and most organizations are experimenting with it. Technologies such as, virtualization, service catalogues, automated provisioning, end user monitoring, service level management, workload management, data and application migration are some of the technologies that will need to be in place to manage effective service delivery.

What kind of trends do you observe in the area of IT operations and management from technology standpoint? And how much IT budget issues are impacting the enterprises' inclination towards the newer technologies and development?

At a very high level, globally we see one third of the organizations cutting their I&O budgets, one third keeping their budgets the same as last year and one third increasing their budgets. This varies by geography and industry also. In any case, most organizations have been and are through 2009 investing in technologies that help them optimize costs.

Owing to the current financial situation, do you see that the latest technologies and solutions would not be able to penetrate across industries at rapid pace and help the businesses to overcome the slowdown?

Most businesses are being cautious about any IT investment; unless there is a rapid return on investments (ROI), mainly saving costs, they are unwilling to invest. However, there are sectors such as the government and health care that are indeed seeing this as an opportunity to invest in technology and are investing more than any other industries to overcome some of the under-investment that has happened over a period of time.

Is the economic downturn and crisis going to have any impact on the development of future technologies?

Every crisis is an opportunity for innovation, to some extent. The availability of funds and cash has slowed down, but there is still money available to invest in technologies that can provide real value to organizations. Infrastructure technologies like virtualization and projects like consolidation will need new technology to manage these dynamic environments to ultimately deliver the promise of lower costs and improved service.