Enterprise Communications Featured Article

What IT strategies have you adopted in your environment to streamline processes and create more efficiency? For a number of companies, the strategy included the adoption of virtualization technologies. Whether to support enterprise communications or simply streamline the data center investment, this method offered backup support and a lower cost option for the data hungry corporation.

Many got comfortable with this approach, enabling greater access while out of the office, greater support when needed and a reduction in the reliance on the corporate infrastructure. According to TheInfoPro service from 451 Research (News - Alert), however, this option is losing its hold on the market. Virtualization will continue to be the preferred strategy for companies throughout the global marketplace, yet its number of adopters will begin to decline as IT managers favor software-defined data centers.

According to the firm’s latest servers and virtualization study, the infrastructure spend is expected to plateau over the next two years. IT managers will increasingly turn to cloud platforms, management and automation tools to support virtualized data centers. At the same time, these same decision makers will spend considerably less on x86 rack servers.

Acceptance is growing for integrated infrastructure solutions and while the appeal of micro-server technology is strong, only 5 percent of respondents reported that they actually plan to deploy it in the near future.  Monies are instead being set aside for the software needed to support cloud-ready data centers, giving these organizations access to greater capacity and power in an era of big data.

For companies that want to leverage new capabilities to support enterprise communications yet lack the large budgets to support significant infrastructure deployments, these trends represent good news. Providers like Tadiran (News - Alert) are evolving in the marketplace, listening to the needs of customers, paying attention to the trends in demand and offering solutions that level the playing field. These solutions are easily installed on current hardware, eliminating the need to spend more money on equipment or infrastructure, yet greatly improving capacity and performance.

This is a significant advantage for the small business seeking to compete with its larger counterparts. Whether the robust infrastructure is in place or not, the ability to leverage data and support new innovations in business intelligence are key to dominating the market. Thanks to providers like Tadiran, the size of the company or the budget won’t matter as much as the IT manager’s ability to recognize the innovation necessary to leverage current assets and new solutions for the desired competitive advantage.