More than three-quarters of enterprises across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are looking to consolidate their existing IT infrastructure in the next 12 months, in a bid to increase network performance, simplify management and enhance business efficiency, a new research commissioned by Brocade revealed.
The research found that 76% of enterprises consider IT consolidation to be one of the top three IT issues they face in the coming year, followed by both virtualisation and security.
Brocade said that the 600 EMEA CIOs questioned in this study expect tomorrow’s corporate networks to fulfil a wide range of sometimes-conflicting demands.
They demand seamless mobility and increased agility (38%), and nearly half want emerging networking technologies to complement the investments they are making today.
The firm said that over half of respondents cited reduced productivity (resulting from legacy systems) as having a significant effect on business success.
Seventy three percent of organisations in the UK stated that the biggest driver for consolidation is IT simplification, while in Germany the biggest driver was increased agility.
The research revealed that 46% of organisations in the UK, are looking to reduce overall operating costs by consolidating IT systems; in France the figure drops to 30%.
According to the survey, seventy percent of the respondents are planning to consolidate their existing servers, while 56% are considering to consolidate storage and 54% are focusing on databases.
In addition, 49% stated their networks, and 47% claimed their applications, when quizzed on what they plan to consolidate.
Brocade said that its research revealed the drive to consolidate does have its barriers.
It said that a third of European respondents face resistance from within their organisation, while application diversity (49%) and platform diversity (42%) are also seen as major hurdles to overcome.
Brocade vice president of EMEA Alberto Soto said that tomorrow’s networking environment will consolidate user application traffic and storage data traffic onto a single, high-performance, highly available network that has the built-in intelligence to identify different traffic types and handle them appropriately, according to predefined rules.
"The benefits of a unified network are clear in terms of increasing performance and enabling business productivity, not to mention reducing complexity," Soto said.
