An improving business situation, combined with greater management acceptance of the value of IT, has resulted in increased confidence among European datacenter managers and CIOs, according to IDC’s 2004 Systems Survey. The survey interviewed 1,000 IT professionals responsible for their companies’ infrastructures in six countries in Europe to get their views on a wide range of subjects related to system strategy, purchasing, and management.
The survey shows that:
· IT directors expressed a more positive outlook for their spending in the next 12 months – up an average of two percentage points on last year’s survey.
· Smaller businesses remain more confident than other organizations.
· Of the six countries surveyed the UK, Germany, and Sweden were most positive about their investment prospects. France, Spain, and Italy were less positive.
· Greater optimism was by tempered with uncertainty over which investments would produce the greatest benefit. Purchasers were ignorant or sceptical about the alleged benefits of some newer products and form factors. Blade servers, tablet PCs, and appliance servers were subject to this scepticism.
· There were some interesting patterns of server operating system usage. Of new Linux servers purchased in 2003, 48% were used for new application deployment, compared with about 31% for both Windows and Unix.
· Server consolidation remained an important trend, with 27% of organizations, up from 20% in 2003, currently operating a consolidation strategy or having proposed a strategy.
· Customers considered price, support, and trustworthiness to be the key criteria for selecting suppliers. Technology leadership, account management, and references were less important.
‘This set of results confirms IDC‘s long-standing view that 2004 should be a year of growth for computer systems in Europe,’ said Chris Ingle, group consultant in IDC’s EMEA Systems Group.
‘The vendors that will be able to take advantage of this will be those that can convince customers that the many new technology propositions being brought to market have a place in an already complex IT infrastructure. As this survey shows, technology buyers are unconvinced by many propositions that are being promoted by vendors..’
2004-03-04
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