Survey Application Performance Management Aids Customer Experience
February 2, 2009
CA, Inc., an independent IT management software company, announced the results of a global survey of IT professionals on how businesses view the online customer experience and how they are managing application performance.
According to IDG Research Services’ survey, 90 percent of the respondents believe the adoption of an Application Performance Management solution will create an effective process for detecting and resolving performance issues.
Best Practices or Best Effort? IDG Research Reveals Gaps between Information Management Best Efforts and Best Practices
January 22, 2009
A recent study by IDG Research Services reveals IT professionals understand the fundamentals of managing and protecting data, but key best practices are often not in place.
How to measure virtualization ROI
January 22, 2009
Virtualization may very well be all it’s cracked up to be, but most small and midsize enterprises will never know it because they lack pre- and post-deployment ROI evaluation tools.
“SMBs don’t have adequate measurement programs in place to determine if they are achieving the maximum ROI on their virtualization programs,” says Kevin Tolly, founder of The Tolly Group, a consulting, testing, and research firm in Boca Raton, Fla. “That’s more likely to be seen in larger enterprises with more IT staff.”
Indeed, a recent study conducted for Accelerate by IDG Research Services found that fully 75 percent of SMBs say they have no post-deployment process to evaluate returns from server virtualization investments.
Unisys Research: Outsource, IT Services, and Consumer Devices Spread in Enterprises
July 23, 2008
Unisys turned to IDG Research Services and CIO in 2006 and 2007 to survey IT professionals worldwide regarding the changing technology landscape insight organizations and how those changes are affecting service and support.
Tim Lambert, vice president, Field Marketing, Worldwide Marketing Communications, Unisys, explained why he chose IDG.
“Unisys wanted a respected research and media company to survey the IT services marketplace as the foundation for a series of marketing programs. IDG Research Services and CIO were able to provide the thorough research, analysis, and reports covering North America, EMEA, APAC, and Latin America.
Since early 2006, we’ve relied on IDG to conduct several surveys and produce reports that Unisys has used to establish thought leadership in outsourcing. The survey results have formed the basis for public relations activities, events, white papers published in CIO, and sales and marketing presentations. The custom research and reports have enhanced relationships with clients and opened doors with prospects.”
Data Protection Solutions: Study Results of Data Leakage Business Survey- By: IDG Research Services
July 23, 2008
Data leakage continues to be a major concern for businesses nationwide. Undoubtedly, the traditional workplace landscape is changing in ways that make protecting data more and more challenging. With a growing number of businesses now able to offer employees remote access to their company networks and infrastructure, the need to secure mobile technologies has increased dramatically. IDG Research Services conducted a survey in January 2008 to identify sources of and/or reasons for information security breaches, and to better understand how businesses are planning to protect themselves against data leaks. Read the IDG Business Study – Data Leakage.
Toward More Flexible, Next-Generation Collaboration Solutions
July 23, 2008
A recent study by CIO Magazine and IDG Research Services found that while collaboration tools are very important, their effectiveness leaves much to be desired. The study, commissioned by Novell, surveyed 100 senior IT executives around the world on their experiences with and plans for collaboration software. A full 80 percent said secure collaboration within and beyond organizational boundaries is of critical or high importance, but fewer than half said their current solutions effectively deliver this capability. The study also highlights a need for collaboration solutions that are flexible, interoperable, and capable of leveraging existing investments.
IDG Research Survey Reveals Top Initiatives of IT Investment, and Drivers for Cost-efficient Change Management
July 23, 2008
DUBLIN, Calif. — By ensuring high service levels, IT becomes a strategic business enabler, providing employees with the support they need so that they can better serve external customers, according to FrontRange Solutions, an established global market leader in Customer Relationship Management (CRM), IT Service Management and Voice applications for the mid-market.
A recent IDG Research survey, summarized in a September 2007 CIO Magazine article and sponsored by FrontRange, says that it is equally critical that the IT group have the ability to align services with business goals. Doing so helps to increase velocity in today’s fast moving markets through speedier and more cost-efficient change management and more robust, automated workflows.
A new white paper that includes the survey’s results is available from CIO Magazine Web site.
The survey reveals that the number one IT initiative today – and the top driver of IT investments – is aligning IT and business goals. The number two initiative: Improving the efficiency of service delivery. At the same time, IT leaders view building and retaining customer loyalty as one of the top three challenges they face.
For many IT organizations, the desire to achieve this degree of partnership and alignment with the business is driving the adoption of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL[R]) best-practices framework for IT service management processes – as well as solutions that support it and other processes, governance and compliance guidelines.
Automate and Integrate
On the IDG Research survey, 47 percent of respondents considered automating workflows to be the process in greatest need of improvement. In the service management realm, applications often are not flexible enough to help a business automate customized workflows that are critical to their requirements.
But IT organizations face a potential pitfall if they don’t choose a next-generation IT service management solution that has been architected from the ground up to support best governance practices such as ITIL, ISO 2000 and COBIT, compliance requirements such as Sarbanes-Oxley, a true configuration management database (CMDB), open standards-based integration, and modern service-oriented applications.
“The architecture is something you don’t think of every day, but the architecture of a service management solution is something you live with every day,” says Kevin J. Smith, vice president of products at leading IT service management vendor FrontRange Solutions. “If you don’t have the right architecture it becomes a real barrier to making these systems successful.”
About FrontRange Solutions
FrontRange Solutions develops award-winning software and solutions used by more than 130,000 companies and over 1.7 million seats worldwide to manage a wide variety of business relationships and provide exceptional service. FrontRange product families are designed to optimize customer investment by their interoperability, specifically for small-to-medium-enterprise (SME) and distributed enterprise organizations.
Solution families are defined by three customer-centric market areas: Customer Relationship Management (CRM) including GoldMine[R]; IT Service Management including the HEAT[R], ITSM and Infrastructure Management product lines; and Voice, which integrates IP business phone systems, IP telephony and advanced contact center software solutions improving customer relations cost-effectively. This comprehensive product set provides a unique customer service and support scenario, unrivaled in the market today.
Customers representing 44 percent of the Fortune 100 and 76 percent of the FTSE 100, include Coca-Cola, Shell Oil, Prudential Securities, Electricite de France, Mack Trucks, Campbell Soup, Avaya, Bechtel Corp, Bank of America, and Turner News Network. For more information, call (800) 776-7889 or visit www.frontrange.com.
GoldMine, HEAT and other FrontRange Solutions products, brands and trademarks are property of FrontRange Solutions USA Inc. and/or its affiliates in the United States and/or other countries. Other products, brands and trademarks are property of their respective owners/companies.
CIO Survey Shows Key Drivers Behind Adoption of IP Communications
July 23, 2008
INDIANAPOLIS — A recent IDG Research Services survey of CIOs from across the U.S. shows strong and increasing adoption of IP telephony. The survey also details the business imperatives driving this adoption, including factors such as the need for greater access to advanced telephony applications, improved management of distributed operations, and reduced costs.
Core findings from the survey showed that a full 63 percent of respondents plan to deploy an IP PBX within the next 12 months, up from 50 percent who have the technology deployed in some form today.
SSDs: The Other Primary Storage Alternative
July 23, 2008
Overview This paper explores the market opportunities for Solid State Drives (SSDs) and their potential uses in the digital storage world. The technological benefits are discussed in this context, as are the opportunities where storage requirements align with SSDs. Finally, the market trends that are accelerating the adoption of SSDs in the marketplace are evaluated.
Download the whitepaper (PDF file).
Small-to-Medium Sized Businesses Most Affected by Unmanaged Printer Operations
July 23, 2008
The OKI Printing Solutions “Future of Printing Survey,” conducted by IDG Research Services Group, surveyed a total of 700 IT professionals across a range of industries. The survey obtained responses across all company sizes, including small and home offices (1-99 employees), small-to-medium businesses (100-999 employees) and enterprise (1,000+ employees).
The survey from OKI Data Americas, which markets its business printing solutions under the OKI® Printing Solutions brand, has proven that regardless of industry or company-size, printing remains critical to business productivity and performance. The survey also captured just how much business printers are utilized in the office, for work as well as for personal use. OKI Printing Solutions is a leader in showing companies how they can save substantially on their overall printing costs by incorporating the most appropriate printing technology and feature-sets based on their unique business needs.