TECHTARGET IT PRIORITIES SURVEY

TECHNOLOGY PRIORITIES FOR 2015TechTarget surveyed 2,212 IT professionals across the globe to find out how they’re prioritizing IT projects at their businesses. This report features an inside look at their plans.

April 2015

SURVEY OVERVIEW

2015 IT Outlook: Growth and More

Cloud Services

DATA CENTER

Five IT Infrastructure

Projects to Tackle In 2015

NETWORKING

Network Management Tops List of IT Initiatives

MOBILITY

What’s Motivating Enterprise

Tablet Adoption?

BI AND ANALYTICS

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI on IT Priority

List

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2015 IT Outlook: Growth and More

Cloud Services

Five IT Infrastructure Projects to Tackle

In 2015

Network Management Tops List of IT

Initiatives

What’s Motivating Enterprise Tablet

Adoption?

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI

on IT Priority List

SURVEY OVERVIEW

2015 IT OUTLOOK: GROWTH AND MORE CLOUD SERVICESThe 2015 outlook for information technology includes higher budgets and an emphasis on the cloud, according to TechTarget’s annual IT Priorities Survey. BY MARK SCHLACK

IT MANAGERS WORLDWIDE expect their budgets to grow by 6.7% worldwide this year, and are using that added money to go after both established and emerging technologies. Disaster recovery, data center consolidation and business intelligence (BI) continue to receive funding. Mobility and cloud services are among the newer technologies that will get more attention this year.

At least that’s the news from TechTarget’s annual IT Pri-orities Survey of 2,212 IT professionals.

The 2015 information technology outlook suggests that IT departments are largely past the worst of times and are pushing forward (See: Which of these broad initiatives

will your company implement in 2015?)Topline budget growth increased from last year’s projec-

tion of 5.4%, finally putting a period on the lean years of the recession. In 2012, for example, IT managers projected 2013 budget growth at 2.8%.

But progress is not uniform.

Driven by the U.S. economic recovery, North American growth for 2015 is expected to be 5.7%, after last year’s 4.5% (and the prior year’s 1.4%). But Europe’s economic woes are taking their toll on IT budgets there, and respondents reported weaker growth, at 3.6%. Digging deeper, 37% of European IT managers reported flat budgets, with only 47% increasing. Worldwide, 66% were increasing with only 24% flat; in North America, 62% were increasing and 29% flat.

Continuing the pattern of recent years, Asia-Pacific con-tinues to see high growth, at 8.4%, but Africa, the Middle East and South America all exceeded that by one or two per-centage points. And in Asia-Pacific, China’s growth was only 8.3%, no better than the region as a whole.

WHERE ARE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY SHOPS INVESTING IN 2015?Among IT shops that are not cutting budgets, software is

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Home

2015 IT Outlook: Growth and More

Cloud Services

Five IT Infrastructure Projects to Tackle

In 2015

Network Management Tops List of IT

Initiatives

What’s Motivating Enterprise Tablet

Adoption?

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI

on IT Priority List

SURVEY OVERVIEW

the largest area for investment, with nearly half (48%) of all companies investing there; hardware isn’t far behind, with 45% increasing that budget segment. Among those shops spending more this year, those numbers were 55% and 52%, respectively.

In recent years, we have been probing to see the im-pact that cloud services are having. This year, we can see

that 43% of those growing their budget are growing cloud services, with only 20% increasing outside services. In budget-challenged Europe, cloud services are the single most popular area of budget increases at growth-oriented companies, representing a 48% increase compared to 39% and 43% for hardware and software, respectively. Paradoxi-cally, perhaps, in Asia-Pacific, the pattern is reversed, with

31%

40%

21%

30%

23%25%

30%34%33%

20%18%

16%18%

16%12% 11%

Datacenter

consolidation

Big data Compliance Unifiedcommunications

Socialmedia/

collaboration

Internet ofThings

Videoconferencing

Mobility

GLOBAL

NORTH AMERICA

Which of these broad initiatives will your company implement in 2015?fig. 1

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2015 IT Outlook: Growth and More

Cloud Services

Five IT Infrastructure Projects to Tackle

In 2015

Network Management Tops List of IT

Initiatives

What’s Motivating Enterprise Tablet

Adoption?

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI

on IT Priority List

SURVEY OVERVIEW

hardware and software getting more funding at 55% of shops, and cloud services at only 41%. And among those cut-ting, cloud services are being reduced the least.

As for what’s receiving funding, as the chart indicates, top projects continue the pattern of the past 10 years or so, with heavy spending on disaster recovery and busi-ness continuity; security, particularly network-related; data center transformation and consolidation, including

virtualization-related projects; and BI.Interest in mobility is strong at 34% globally, but not up

from the past two years. The most common ways people are implementing mobility are through deploying enterprise apps in mobile form, instituting mobile device manage-ment, or implementing a bring your own device program for smartphones or tablets (See: Which of these mobility

projects will your company do in 2015?)

44%47% 45% 46%

42%

32%

42%

35%32%

10% 9%

46%

Mobile enterpriseapp or app dev

platform

Deploymobile devicemanagement

BYOD forsmartphones

or tablets

Deploy mobilecontent

management

Corporate-issuedmobile device

program

Wearablecomputers/

smartphone devices

GLOBAL

NORTH AMERICA

Which of these mobility projects will your company do in 2015?fig. 2

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Home

2015 IT Outlook: Growth and More

Cloud Services

Five IT Infrastructure Projects to Tackle

In 2015

Network Management Tops List of IT

Initiatives

What’s Motivating Enterprise Tablet

Adoption?

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI

on IT Priority List

Big data has made small gains each year, going from 23% to 26%, to 30%, respectively, over the past three years. Big data analytics gets the nod at 25% of companies, while back-end processing and management are close behind at 21%.

We may be seeing the maturing of BI, as overall BI slid down the list of top projects to the 10th spot at 31%, after being at 41% last year and 46% the year before. Advanced

back-end database technologies such as in-memory or NoSQL databases are only being deployed at 15% of shops, which may reflect a shift in emphasis, at least for the time being, in paying more attention to getting the information to business users (including mobile ones) and less to build-ing a back-end engine. That may also reflect heavy use of cloud services to accomplish some of that work.

Some of this year’s trendy projects are still getting weak uptake (See: Top North American projects of 2015). Social media and collaboration projects are only getting the nod at 18% of companies (and that’s pretty even around the world). Internet of Things projects are taking off at the same num-ber of shops. Corporate performance management projects are only on the agenda at 13% of companies.

SURVEY OVERVIEW

45%

42%

39%

37%

35%

34%

33%

32%

32%

32%

31%

31%

31%

Update data center infrastructure

Network management and monitoring

Network-based security

Encryption

Backup for virtual servers

Mobility

Disaster recovery/business continuity

Migrate to Windows Server 2012

Custom application development

Data center consolidation

Mobile applications

Endpoint security

Agile development methods

0 10 20 30 40 50

Top North American projects of 2015

We may be seeing the maturing of BI, as overall BI slid down the list of top projects to the 10th spot.

fig. 3

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Home

2015 IT Outlook: Growth and More

Cloud Services

Five IT Infrastructure Projects to Tackle

In 2015

Network Management Tops List of IT

Initiatives

What’s Motivating Enterprise Tablet

Adoption?

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI

on IT Priority List

SURVEY OVERVIEW

MODEST WINDOWS UPGRADE SCHEDULESThe most migration activity in 2015 will likely be around Windows Server 2012, which will be an upgrade at 30% of companies. VMware’s vSphere 5.5 will also be an upgrade at 21% of companies.

On the desktop, IT shops are looking at three potential upgrades as many are still in the process of getting off of Windows XP. Migrations are going to be evenly split be-tween Windows 7 and 8/8.1 (19% and 20%, respectively),

with only 9% expecting to go to Windows 10 (which is actu-ally a pretty strong showing for a not-yet-released Windows version). But those numbers rise in to the mid-20s in mid-sized companies, and in large North American companies with more than 5,000 employees and less than 10,000, to 33% for Windows 7 and 8/8.1. n

MARK SCHLACK is senior vice president of editorial at TechTarget. Write to him at mschlack@techtarget.com.

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2015 IT Outlook: Growth and More

Cloud Services

Five IT Infrastructure Projects to Tackle

In 2015

Network Management Tops List of IT

Initiatives

What’s Motivating Enterprise Tablet

Adoption?

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI

on IT Priority List

DATA CENTER

FIVE IT INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECTS TO TACKLE IN 2015The right upgrades are essential to the ongoing, timely delivery of critical IT services— if the infrastructure falls behind, so does the enterprise. BY STEVE BIGELOW

IT UPGRADES AREN’T just a nicety; they’re strategic improve-ments to the technological foundation of a business.

Your IT infrastructure projects for 2015 will ultimately depend on the available budget for hardware, software and staffing. With budgets riding a favorable economic trend, many businesses are green-lighting reasonable projects.

About 47% of IT leaders report an increased hardware budget this year, according to TechTarget’s IT Priorities Survey. Of those surveyed, 48% say there’s more money for software, and 41% note added funding for cloud projects. A smaller percentage, 32%, sees an increased IT staff budget.

The survey shows 42% of enterprise IT respondents in North America are planning some kind of data center infra-structure upgrade in 2015. So what’s on the list?

1. MOVE TO WINDOWS SERVER 2012 R2Windows Server updates rank high on the to-do list for

2015: 39% of surveyed IT leaders plan to deploy Microsoft Windows Server 2012 R2 now that the OS has had time to prove itself in production.

The justifications driving this server OS upgrade proj-ect vary. Some worry about Microsoft’s ongoing support strategy, and see Windows Server 2012 R2 upgrades as a means of ensuring support over the long term. Others want a server-side platform that best supports Windows 8.1 (and eventually Windows 10) on endpoint systems.

Still more are motivated by the spate of new and im-proved features in Windows Server 2012 R2, including command-line and scripting updates in PowerShell, as well as Active Directory Administrative Center enhancements such as an AD Recycle Bin, granular password control and a PowerShell history viewer. Server Message Block has bet-ter performance, event messages, virtual machine (VM) file support and more. Windows Server 2012 R2 also caters to Remote Desktop Services with session shadowing, online

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2015 IT Outlook: Growth and More

Cloud Services

Five IT Infrastructure Projects to Tackle

In 2015

Network Management Tops List of IT

Initiatives

What’s Motivating Enterprise Tablet

Adoption?

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI

on IT Priority List

DATA CENTER

data deduplication, improved RemoteApp operation and support for DirectX 11.1.

Windows Server 2012 R2 makes additional inroads into virtualization and the cloud, touting features like shared virtual hard disks, storage quality of service capabilities and automatic VM activation. Improvements to Hyper-V Rep-lica allow VM replication as often as every 30 seconds, with more recovery points. Hyper-V Live Migration was stream-lined to enhance performance with a greater variety of protocols. Better integration with cloud platform Microsoft Azure simplifies public cloud for Windows shops.

2. LESS IS BEST: DATA CENTER CONSOLIDATIONThe push to consolidate data centers—optimizing resource use by packing more workloads onto fewer servers—is far from over: 33% of enterprise IT leaders have plans for IT infrastructure consolidation in 2015.

When IT teams tie consolidation projects into hard- ware refresh cycles, business leaders see the value of reduc-ing physical infrastructure before paying for a new fleet. Ideally, using fewer, more reliable physical systems means a smaller overall capital outlay with fewer server mainte-nance contracts and lower recurring power and cooling expenses for the data center.

Consolidation initiatives can also accompany IT archi-tecture optimization. For example, if an IT organization

restructures related workloads onto the same physical server, these VMs can exchange data without releasing to the general network. Such internal data exchanges are much faster, and alleviate network traffic and congestion.

Comprehensive management processes and tools must accompany consolidation tasks to help with VM provision-ing and resource allocation, application performance moni-toring, workload balancing, VM lifecycle management, data center infrastructure management and other tasks.

Expanding workload virtualization and mastering the art of consolidation also set an important foundation for cloud initiatives, another hot IT infrastructure project in 2015. These actions allow the business to shave hardware costs while maintaining a full suite of workloads.

3. IMPROVE VIRTUALIZED ENVIRONMENTSIT leaders appear poised to update or adopt an ever-ex-panding range of service platforms.

Updating the server-side hypervisor is popular in 2015. A new hypervisor can mean more VMs on fewer servers with better workload performance, availability, mobility and protection, aiding consolidation.

A quarter of surveyed IT leaders plan to upgrade VM-ware vSphere to version 5.5—though it might make sense to skip 5.5 and move directly to vSphere 6.0, released in Feb-ruary 2015. VMware vSphere 6.0 promises a wealth of new

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2015 IT Outlook: Growth and More

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Five IT Infrastructure Projects to Tackle

In 2015

Network Management Tops List of IT

Initiatives

What’s Motivating Enterprise Tablet

Adoption?

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI

on IT Priority List

DATA CENTER

and improved features in vMotion, Storage DRS and SRM, vSphere Replication, vSphere Data Protection and others. Scalability reaches 64 hosts per cluster, 8,000 VMs per clus-ter, 480 CPUs per host, 12 terabytes (TB) of host memory, 2,048 VMs per host, 128 virtual CPUs per VM and 4 TB of memory per VM.

Virtualization is quickly extending into the network. Network virtualization, such as VMware NSX, allows IT to treat the physical Ethernet network as a pool of transport capacity allocated to VMs along with security and network services. A significant 9% of survey respondents plan to deploy VMware’s NSX platform in 2015, eliminating long, error-prone configuration headaches traditionally associ-ated with physical network architectures.

Development, deployment and management of busi-ness applications has always been clunky and inefficient. The move to DevOps and the introduction of software containers from Docker and its ilk sparked a new look at

application development in 2014. Containers allow IT teams to build, distribute and run applications quickly and on multiple platforms—server, laptop, cloud—leading 5% of survey respondents to deploy container technology in 2015. Containerization is still in its infancy; by comparison, 32% of IT leaders report a mobile application initiative this year.

4. MOVE TO THE CLOUDCloud technology builds on a foundation of virtualization for faster and easier workload deployment and manage-ment, often by end users without direct intervention from IT. Cloud enables utility computing, where IT is the service provider to the enterprise.

Private clouds bring self-service and automation to vir-tualized and consolidated data centers; 19% of survey re-spondents plan to build a private cloud in 2015. In addition, 22% of IT leaders intend to build a hybrid cloud to support many kinds of business workloads.

A business might initially test a new application on a private cloud, but eventually deploy the app from a public cloud provider; it mitigates IT capital costs by moving some routine tasks onto the cloud and frees in-house data center capacity for mission-critical workloads.

There are still management and security concerns with cloud, such as controlling resource use, monitoring work-load performance and generating chargeback/showback

APPROACH ANY IT INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT CONFIDENTLY

  Justify expenses without IT speak

  Understand the complete data center budget

  Write the right RFP

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What’s Motivating Enterprise Tablet

Adoption?

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI

on IT Priority List

DATA CENTER

usage data. It’s no surprise that 18% of survey respondents want to deploy hybrid cloud management, and 25% of those surveyed plan to use cloud security tools in 2015.

5. WORK WITH MOBILITYThe corporate workforce is increasingly mobile, using laptops, tablets and smartphones to access business apps. Many of these endpoint devices are user-owned, pressuring businesses to support bring your own device (BYOD).

About 31% of IT leaders surveyed report mobility-related IT infrastructure projects for 2015. While 42% are plan-ning for BYOD support, another 32% of respondents will not support BYOD, instead issuing corporate-owned mobile devices.

IT staff must change architectures to accommodate a

broader base of mobile devices, while also securing sensi-tive business data.

Mobility is a multifaceted issue that requires a multi-pronged strategy for proper implementation. For example, 45% of respondents plan to deploy mobile device manage-ment; while 44% plan to use apps or application develop-ment platforms capable of supporting mobile endpoints. And 26% have planned for an identity and access manage-ment project in 2015.

Regardless of the project, support for mobility always comes down to worker comfort and productivity balanced against security. n

STEVE BIGELOW is senior technology editor in the Data Center and Virtualization Media Group at TechTarget. Email him at sbigelow@techtarget.com.

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on IT Priority List

NETWORKING

NETWORK MANAGEMENT PROJECTS TOP LIST OF 2015 IT INITIATIVESAccording to TechTarget’s 2015 IT Priorities Survey, 44% of enterprises are planning network management projects this year. BY JESSICA SCARPATI

ANDY MCINERNEY WAS on vacation, relaxing at the beach, when an alert popped up on his smartphone. It was work.

McInerney, the data network and voice manager at Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co., read the email from a colleague in his company’s Houston office. They needed help. A rogue device on the network had been shut down, but staff mem-bers requested that access be restored to it for a meeting that afternoon.

McInerney fired up Cisco’s Meraki mobile app on his phone, accessed his network management dashboard and, within minutes, reinstated connectivity for the unauthor-ized device in the Houston office’s conference room. With just a few taps on a smartphone screen, the crisis of the day was resolved. McInerney resumed his vacation without fur-ther interruption.

“I can literally manage the network from my cell—from that little form factor, which I would never really do [as a standard practice]. I’ll use an iPad or MacBook if I’m home.

But the point remains that I can be anywhere with Internet access and manage my 45 offices,” McInerney said. “They’re always reachable. My switches, my APs and my firewalls are always reachable.”

The fact that McInerney can oversee his network from anywhere reflects the extent technology has reshaped net-work management. But it also reflects the importance ad-ministrators and executives place on network monitoring and management, as demonstrated by TechTarget’s 2015 IT Priorities Survey.

The study, which polled 2,212 IT professionals world-wide, found that network monitoring and management projects tied for first place—with disaster recovery (DR) and business continuity—as the top IT initiative for 2015. A total of 44% of respondents selected those projects as ones they would pursue this year—up from 41% last year and 39% in 2013.

In Penn Mutual’s case, the insurer deployed Meraki’s

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on IT Priority List

NETWORKING

network equipment throughout its LAN, WAN and wireless LAN (WLAN) in 2013 as part of a broader effort to add more flexibility and visibility to its network. It’s a goal shared by many enterprises trying to find smarter ways to manage networks that are being thrown curveball after curveball—everything from cloud computing to bring your own device initiatives.

Management is further complicated by the blossoming of “hybrid” operating models, which could mean a hybrid cloud computing environment, a hybrid of wired and wire-less networking, a hybrid of corporate-owned and personal mobile devices, or all of the above, according to Amy De-Carlo, a principal analyst at Current Analysis. All of those things are putting pressure on network managers to imple-ment new tools and best practices that help them keep up with more diverse network requirements.

“There are so many changes happening quickly, and IT managers are looking for something better than what they had in place. Their expectations are higher because the ex-pectations on them are also higher,” DeCarlo said. “Some-times it doesn’t necessarily involve big investments, but it may involve thinking strategically about specific elements in the network, having the right tools in place and having some way to integrate them so it’s a much more manageable environment.”

The fact that network management and monitoring share first place with DR and business continuity is also

revealing, she added.“The message is that people are trying to look at how to

make their infrastructure environment much more stable, secure and reliable because they can’t afford to have it any other way,” DeCarlo said.

UNIFIED NETWORK MANAGEMENT: ARE WE THERE YET?The holy grail of network management has long been a single platform that offers control over and visibility into all network assets—wired and wireless—for any vendor’s hardware, with the same level of sophistication in features across the board. It’s a concept known as unified network management, and while vendor-specific and third-party network management platforms have made strides over the years toward achieving this, gaps remain.

For instance, wireless networking vendors’ management platforms generally aren’t as feature-rich when overseeing wired networking devices, DeCarlo said. Meanwhile, few networking equipment vendors provide an optimal level of support for multi-vendor environments in their manage-ment platforms. While third-party network management vendors do a better job there, they tend to be unable to pro-vide the same level of control that the equipment vendors can for their own gear.

“There’s some progress being made, but I think it’s still

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‘unified network management’ in quotes because it’s not re-ally there yet,” DeCarlo said.

Some recent activity from network management and monitoring vendors shows signs of that progress. Cisco announced its “cloud-managed IT” strategy earlier this year—the primary goal being to extend the Meraki portfolio from its midmarket roots into larger enterprises. The an-nouncement also included some enhancements to the core platform—including integration with the vendor’s Source-fire technology—and hinted at upcoming support for Cisco’s Intelligent WAN products on Meraki gear.

Among third-party network management and monitor-ing vendors, SolarWinds recently announced expanded WLAN monitoring capabilities, updating its Network Performance Monitor product to support heat mapping to identify and troubleshoot connectivity issues in wireless networks.

THE BIGGER PICTURE: MAKING NETWORKS BETTER, FASTER, STRONGERA separate TechTarget survey of 427 IT professionals plan-ning to buy network management and monitoring products in the next year, meanwhile, asked respondents to identify their reasons for investing in new network monitoring platforms. The top five goals for their deployments were to get better use out of existing bandwidth (64%), get help

managing an increasing number of devices (58%), improve application performance (44%), improve WAN perfor-mance (38%) and improve WLAN management (34%).

Penn Mutual’s Meraki deployment, in fact, aimed for and achieved several of these goals, said CIO Greg Driscoll. The purchase was part of a bigger strategy that included

swapping out the company’s legacy, hub-and-spoke WAN architecture built on T1 circuits for basic Internet connec-tivity or Metro Ethernet services at its branch offices. The new WAN connections, by contrast, are managed by a third-party network operations center provider.

The move reaped significant cost savings and the Meraki management platform provided Penn Mutual with unprec-edented network visibility and control, Driscoll said.

“With the private VPN [virtual private network], we had barely any line of sight into what was traversing the wire. We could see overall network utilization, but because of the service we were on, we couldn’t see exactly what was being utilized,” he said. “At this point, we can see every device—everything they’re using in real time—and you don’t even

“ I think it’s still ‘unified network management’ in quotes because it’s not really there yet.”

—AMY DECARLO, Current Analysis

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need to be anywhere near one of our buildings to do it.”The networking team can use a Google Maps-like inter-

face in the Meraki dashboard to identify potential issues, troubleshoot problems, disconnect devices and throttle bandwidth on individual devices or websites as needed. Those capabilities are especially important to a company in the financial services industry, Driscoll said.

“We need to bring an appropriate level of security to our network. It’s not just seeing what the people are doing, but also seeing what people don’t know they’re doing, such as malicious software installed on machines that might be calling home—anything of that sort we want a full line of sight on,” Driscoll said.

Additionally, Penn Mutual has taken advantage of the Meraki platform’s geo-blocking capabilities, blocking traffic that comes or is trying to go out to about a dozen blacklisted countries.

“When the [Shellshock] Bash vulnerability came out not long ago, we saw scans coming from certain countries looking for that vulnerability,” Driscoll said. “Anything go-ing directly in and out [of those countries], we knock down before it gets anywhere. And that is just something that we couldn’t have done prior.” n

JESSICA SCARPATI is the features and e-zine editor for TechTarget’s Networking Media Group. Email her at jscarpati@techtarget.com.

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WHAT’S MOTIVATING ENTERPRISE TABLET ADOPTION?In a survey of over 2,200 IT pros, respondents ranked eight driving factors behind enterprise tablet adoption. BY EDDIE LOCKHART

END USERS TODAY expect a certain level of mobility to per-form their jobs, and organizations are realizing that tablets are one of the best ways to deliver it.

The No. 1 reason organizations plan to buy tablets is to increase mobility in the field, according to TechTarget’s 2015 IT Priorities Survey. In fact, 76% of respondents listed that as the primary driver of tablet adoption. Tab-lets provide an efficient way to get work done, especially for workers who perform tasks remotely, in the field or as contractors.

For many enterprises, that means it’s time to invest in tablets as a primary device for business processes. Tablets can also provide increased control over corporate data on mobile endpoints: 30% of respondents said they would adopt tablets to add corporate control and liability.

So, why else are companies turning to tablet PCs?Security and portability aren’t IT’s only incentives, as

five other motivators received a significant portion of the

vote. More than a quarter of IT pros would use tablets to up-date organizational form factors, and 23% cited supporting line-of-business applications as a priority. End user needs also received a nod, as 22% of respondents thought tablets would satisfy workers who need lighter-weight devices.

Still, mobility management is not an easy task for a lot of organizations, especially when it comes to securing com-pany data and apps on personal devices. Enterprise tablet adoption can help there, too: More than half of respondents said they believe adding new tablets would solve their exist-ing mobile data management and security issues.

One way to protect corporate data on smartphones and tablets is to use cloud-based backups. But the survey rev-ealed that at least half of enterprises still don’t use cloud services for backup. Only 38% of respondents said they do. n

EDDIE LOCKHART is assistant site editor for TechTarget’s End-User Computing Group. Email him at elockhart@techtarget.com.

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BI AND ANALYTICS

BIG DATA PROJECTS SNEAK UP ON BASIC BI ON IT PRIORITY LISTTechTarget’s 2015 IT Priorities Survey shows that while businesses are still investing in basic business intelligence and data warehousing capabilities, big data initiatives are becoming almost as prevalent. BY ED BURNS

THE USE OF data visualization software is picking up steam at Nationwide Mutual Insurance Co. Wes Hunt, the com-pany’s chief data officer, said Nationwide also is moving to incorporate more data sources into analytics applications—for example, unstructured data from call center notes and machine data from server log files, some of the typical grist for the mill of big data projects.

“We’re looking at the big data space,” Hunt said. “We’ve been working on that, and it’s starting to grow and more use cases are becoming apparent.”

Hunt’s experience at Nationwide reflects the general state of data management and analytics in the enterprise today, according to TechTarget’s 2015 IT Priorities Survey. Basic business intelligence (BI), reporting and data ware-housing projects are still at the top of the list of planned software initiatives for this year, the survey found. But they’re being augmented—and perhaps in some cases

supplanted—by big data initiatives involving the use of ad-vanced analytics tools.

In the survey, which was conducted late last year, 31% of the 2,212 respondents worldwide said their organizations plan deployments of BI, analytics or data warehousing tools in 2015. That number was down from last year’s survey, when 41% of respondents said they were planning such initiatives. But it again was the top response in the software category, just ahead of mobile applications and data inte-gration, which tied for second at 30%.

ADVANCED DATA MANAGEMENT, ANALYTICS ON THE ADVANCEAt the same time, more advanced data processing and analytics initiatives appear to be on the upswing. Projects involving advanced database management systems, such

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as NoSQL, columnar and in-memory technology, were up slightly from last year to 15% in the 2015 survey. More im-pressively, substantial numbers of respondents also said their companies plan to spend money on big data analytics (25%) and big data processing and management (21%), nei-ther of which was broken out as a separate response in the previous year’s survey.

“Everyone has plenty of data at this point. Now it’s about using it,” said Cam Fortin, senior director of product devel-opment at Wine.com Inc., an online wine retailer based in San Francisco.

This year, Fortin and his team are focusing on improving the site’s recommendation engine. Using a platform from RichRelevance Inc., they develop algorithms for making product recommendations to customers. Currently, the recommendations are based mostly on similarities between the product a shopper is viewing and others that are avail-able on the site, but Fortin said he thinks they could be improved by incorporating specific customer data, particu-larly purchase history information.

Such mixing of data sources is the kind of big data initia-tive that many businesses say they’re planning for 2015, ac-cording to consultants.

BIG DATA: WHAT TO DO WITH IT“I think you’re really seeing a shift from businesses asking ‘what is [big data]’ to doing it at scale,” said Vince Dell’Anno, managing director of the global big data practice at Accen-ture’s analytics consulting unit. “I think that conversation is forcing companies to rethink what technologies they’ll use.”

The reason, he said, is that the BI and data warehousing space is relatively mature: Most businesses already have

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2015 IT Outlook: Growth and More

Cloud Services

Five IT Infrastructure Projects to Tackle

In 2015

Network Management Tops List of IT

Initiatives

What’s Motivating Enterprise Tablet

Adoption?

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI

on IT Priority List

BI AND ANALYTICS

those tools in place. Now many are moving on to more ad-vanced and potentially more valuable technologies, such as Hadoop, Dell’Anno added.

This new technology focus comes with a few words of caution, however. The growing interest in advanced data management and analytics tools could lead businesses into

trouble if they don’t have the right use case for them.IT vendors are heavily promoting things like in-memory

databases, NoSQL software and especially Hadoop. Jack Phillips, president and co-founder of the International Institute for Analytics, a research and consulting firm, said such technologies can help users do some exciting things. But he has seen CEOs encourage their IT teams to imple-ment new platforms and tools without really understanding their particular strengths and weaknesses.

“With the concept of big data, the expectations are so far out ahead of the reality,” Phillips said. “Increasingly, enterprises are trying on these new paradigms—NoSQL, Hadoop—to buttress the data warehouse they have. But the truth is Hadoop is by no means a replacement or a free ticket.”

BIG DATA VARIETY ADDS TO INTEGRATION NEEDSMixing various data sources for analytics uses also in-creases data integration requirements, which might help explain integration’s high ranking in this year’s IT Priori-ties Survey. The issue of data governance is another key factor in the progression from basic BI and data warehous-ing to more advanced analytics. The survey showed that the percentage of organizations planning data quality and governance initiatives this year is essentially unchanged from last year, at 20%. But good data governance becomes particularly important as organizations start implementing new tools, including self-service analytics and visualiza-tion software that opens up data to more business users for analysis.

Hunt said Nationwide has been expanding its use of data visualization tools over the last couple years and plans to continue to do so in 2015. Along the way, he and his team have had to develop strong data governance policies to en-sure that individual end users have access only to the data they need and that all analyses are based on sound informa-tion. He said it would have been risky from a data-quality

“ The expectations [about big data] are so far out ahead of the reality.”

—JACK PHILLIPS, International Institute for Analytics

Percentage of IT respondents who said they intend to implement application virtualization60

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Home

2015 IT Outlook: Growth and More

Cloud Services

Five IT Infrastructure Projects to Tackle

In 2015

Network Management Tops List of IT

Initiatives

What’s Motivating Enterprise Tablet

Adoption?

Big Data Projects Sneak Up On Basic BI

on IT Priority List

BI AND ANALYTICS

standpoint to introduce self-service BI and visualization capabilities without putting the governance policies in place first.

“Quality is a little bit like clean drinking water: When it’s not clean, you feel it, but you don’t really want to make these investments in cleaning the water that comes out of the well,” Hunt said.

Phillips thinks that as adoption of big data projects con-tinues to grow, more organizations are likely to realize how important good data quality is to the investments they’re making. Companies that “have put concepts of data gover-nance aside will eventually decide that in a big data world, governance is critical,” he said. n

ED BURNS is site editor of SearchBusinessAnalytics. Email him at eburns@techtarget.com and follow him on Twitter: @EdBurnsTT.

Technology Priorities for 2015 is a SearchCIO.com e-publication.

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