Survey: Customers Have Bigger Priorities Than Server Consolidation

Despite the buzz over demand for server consolidation, customers appear to have more important spending priorities during the next 12 months.

That's one of many findings from the VARBusiness Market Insight Report, based on a survey of more than 600 midmarket and enterprise IT decision-makers. Only 28 percent of midsize customers and 30 percent of large enterprises said server consolidation is a priority. The study, not surprisingly, found security and disaster recovery to be of far greater importance.

The only technologies customers deemed less important than server consolidation was mobility solutions, printing and imaging. Ironically, operating systems are of greater importance, an indication that customers rely on the platform to handle the task of simplification rather than reducing the amount of servers in data centers.

In addition, many organizations have already consolidated their servers during the past several years, enabled by technologies such as Web services. As a result, there's a greater emphasis on deploying solutions that will help grow the business.

That said, anecdotal evidence shows that large enterprises still view data-center consolidation a key priority, with spending focused on specific technology such as virtualization.

Arguably, virtualization is an alternative to actual server consolidation, since it enables systems to share capacity as needed.

While one might content that's splitting hairs, it's hard to dispute the growth of virtualization. EMC, for example, sees its VMware business on a $1 billion a year run rate, perhaps by next year.

Solution providers also are seeing growing interest in the technology, granted it's in the early phase of adoption.

"Virtualization is the big play today," says Lewis Johnson, president of New York-based Siwel Consulting