Survey shows tension between new tech and tight budgets

11 March 2015

Almost all IT professionals believe buying the latest technology is important to their organisation’s long-term performance but budget limitations means they cannot do so, according to a survey by IT management software provider SolarWinds.

Nikki Jennings of SolarWinds says the latest version of AppStack will help better identify, prioritise and resolve application issues.

The wide-ranging annual report by the company showed that 96 per cent of IT staff said adopting significant new technologies is at least “somewhat important” to their organisation’s long-term success; 42 per cent said it is “important” and another 20 per cent said it is “extremely important”.

The survey found that nearly 90 per cent of respondents said their organisations’ end-users were negatively affected by a performance or availability issue with business-critical technology in the past 12 months. Almost a quarter of those reported that such issues occurred six times or more.

Not surprisingly, more than 40 per cent of those questioned said more resources, such as budget, personnel and time, ranked as their number one need to feel more empowered. About a third of them (31 per cent) said they look for stronger support from their CIO when liaising with other business leaders; 29 per cent sought more or better strategic direction; 26 want better training; and another 26 per cent thought the IT department needs greater autonomy.

SolarWinds released the annual report in the same week that it launched its new Storage Resource Monitor, and released significant updates to Server and Application Monitor, Virtualisation Manager and Web Performance Monitor, including greater integration with SolarWinds’ Orion technology backbone and the new SolarWinds AppStack dashboard.

The company says its survey shows application performance and availability affect 93 percent of business end users’ abilities to do their jobs. However, the struggle to ensure this performance and availability continues, says the company.

“Applications and the supporting IT infrastructure are the centre of every business,” says Nikki Jennings, group vice president, systems management products, SolarWinds. “When those applications and systems are slow and when access is not available, productivity comes to a halt, revenue opportunities are lost – businesses suffer. As such, IT pros cannot afford to continue trying to resolve application issues within disconnected silos.”

“With these latest releases and the addition of the AppStack dashboard capability across our core systems management solutions, SolarWinds provides IT pros unparalleled top-to-bottom visibility of the application delivery chain – including storage, servers, virtualisation, cloud, the Web and more – to better identify, prioritise and resolve application issues.”