Dataquest
Publication Date: 27 October 2010 ID Number: G00208341
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User Survey Analysis: Ten Things You Need to Know If
You Sell Into the Data Center
Naveen Mishra, April Adams
Gartner's 2010 Data Center IT Issues and Priorities survey examines the underlying assumptions that are driving investment and change in the data center. What are the key infrastructure-related challenges? What is the driving force behind strategic change in the data center? And how does an enterprise's overall approach to change in the data center impact its decisions around investments and technology deployments?
Key Findings
Data growth is the biggest data center hardware infrastructure challenge being faced by large enterprises today, followed by system performance and scalability, and network congestion and connectivity.
Which technologies to invest in and which projects to implement are being driven more by business value than pure technology decisions.
Many large enterprises have started to understand the interdependencies between projects and the impact that one change can have on the rest of their data center infrastructure.
Recommendations
Vendors should plan and prepare for the sales opportunities around data center transformation. Different customers will have different pain points and attitudes toward the overall change in the data center, and technology providers should use that knowledge to create proposals.
Providers should seek out and highlight potential project interdependencies and
demonstrate the cumulative benefits that can be achieved by implementing two projects together. This would help drive account control, as well as revenue, for vendors. Providers should incorporate business continuity and availability and cost containment into their targeted customer messaging wherever possible in the entire sales cycle.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Survey Objective ... 3
Data Insights ... 3
Methodology ... 8
SURVEY OBJECTIVE
In August 2010, Gartner completed an extensive primary research study designed to drive a greater understanding of what's happening in the data centers of large enterprises worldwide and the trends that will drive change in those data centers in the future. To that end, we explored the infrastructure-related challenges they are experiencing, what is driving strategic change in their data centers, the project and investment plans that large enterprises are putting in place through 2011 to address these challenges, and how their philosophical approach to longer-term change in the data center might have impacted their responses. This extensive survey included over 1,000 respondents from eight countries and concluded in August 2010.
DATA INSIGHTS
1. The No. 1 data center hardware infrastructure challenge facing large enterprises today is data growth — Our large-enterprise respondents reported that data growth is
the biggest challenge relative to data center hardware infrastructure today. Forty-seven percent of respondents worldwide placed it in their top three challenges, and it came in first in almost every segment we evaluated as well. The challenge of data growth was followed by system performance and scalability (37%) and network congestion and connectivity (36%). Cost of power, cooling and space emerged as the close fourth rank (33%) followed by data center management issues (30%) in fifth place.
Advice for providers — Technology and service providers that are selling into the data center would benefit from understanding the challenges faced by their customers so that they can use them when creating and proposing the end-user solutions. Traditionally, vendors have focused on one element of the IT stack when approaching customers. With the recent changes in data center technologies, vendors are better-positioned to deliver data center solutions encompassing multiple technology silos. Providers that take user pain points into consideration can either align their messaging to suit customer needs or, better yet, provide solutions that are more comprehensive, covering various aspects of the data center, such as server, storage, networking and/or management. While doing so, vendors should also clearly lay out the migration plan from the legacy to the new environment. 2. Business metrics are driving strategic change in the data center — While business
continuity and availability ranked as the top driver for strategic change in the data center, with 50% of respondents worldwide ranking it among their top three, cost containment initiatives — already well-entrenched after a period of economic decline — placed second with 37% and will likely continue to be a driving force. The need to maintain or improve user service levels and satisfaction emerged as the close third priority with 36% of the responses.
Advice for providers — Since large enterprises continue to be very mindful of their cost of operations (including power, cooling and space), technology providers should still try to tie their technology advancements to cost containment — at least as the supplementary advantage if not the primary one. IT organizations are also increasingly being measured against business metrics rather than just the delivery of technology, further increasing IT management's awareness of cost issues. Therefore, positioning technologies as being tightly linked to cost advantages while also delivering supplementary benefits is probably a wise move. For example, data archiving or application retirement can be positioned as helping to contain costs, in addition to possibly improving SLAs. There would be customer situations where cost may not be the primary driver, but it will be a part of the overall value proposition.
3. Large enterprises are evenly split on whether they approach change in the data center with a definitive strategic plan and integrated project road map or by addressing each project separately to meet current needs — Fifty percent of
respondents worldwide said that they had a definitive strategic plan that included an integrated project road map, while 49% said they address each project separately to meet current needs rather than as part of an integrated plan. While we didn't delve deeper into the specifics or maturity of their strategic plans, it is encouraging to note that many have such plans. This suggests that large enterprises are perhaps becoming more proactive in their approach to data center infrastructure and aligns to what we hear in client inquiry — that IT organizations are increasingly focusing on business metrics as the driver for data center decisions.
Advice for providers — There's an evolution happening in the data center. Enterprises are striving to maintain appropriate levels of business continuity, contain costs, and maintain or even improve user service levels and satisfaction, while at the same time, facing some daunting infrastructure challenges. They're getting pinched from both sides, and something has to give. So whether an IT organization is enthusiastic about changing its approach in the data center or needs to be dragged kicking and screaming to try new ideas, a change is coming just the same. Understanding where your customer is on the data center
transformation continuum — essentially, how the customer approaches change in the data center — will accomplish two things. In the short term, it will cue you in on the best way to approach the prospect. You'll be more effective if you meet your customers where they are and then gradually move them along the path to the next-generation data center. Longer term, if you're successful in demonstrating an understanding of the customer's situation and providing a view into solutions that step beyond the individual project or technology they're currently concerned with, you may position yourself as a trusted advisor in the account — solidifying your partnership and enabling future sales. So engage with your customers. Explore what each customer means when they say they have a "strategic approach." And that will allow you to work together to best position IT to facilitate the organization's overall business goals.
4. Significant capacity changes are coming in large enterprises' data center space —
Of our respondents, 79% said they plan to make some kind of change to their data center space by the end of 2011. That is a huge number. Over half (51%) expect to expand capacity at their existing data center sites, while 32% expect to use co-location and 28% plan to use outsourcing to grow their data center space. A full 30% expect to build one or more new data centers by year-end 2011, while 21% expect to close down one or more of their existing data centers in that time period.
Advice for providers — Extensive demographic changes in the data centers portend big opportunities for vendors selling into those data centers. This further gets interesting given the significant evolution in the data center technologies; every vendor is trying to broaden its product portfolio and eyeing adjacent markets. Capacity expansion also suggests that data center design and facility services are going to witness increased customer adoption, and vendors with such capabilities would be better-positioned to forge strategic relationships with customers. Whether you simply provide hardware or services to fulfill the expansion needs, or you offer alternative solutions — such as data center containers to speed up delivery of a new data center, technologies that will save customers money, time or headaches as they update and expand their data center capacities, or services to assist in the migration or management of data from legacy equipment to something new — there is certainly solid sales potential here. Build off the foundational knowledge outlined in the previous three take-aways and understand the prospect's challenges, drivers and philosophy toward change before recommending a solution.
5. Server virtualization leads large enterprises' 2011 technology investment plans, but other technologies are not far behind — Not surprisingly, server virtualization was the most frequently reported server technology that large enterprises plan to invest in by year-end 2011 (67% of respondents). The rest of the top five may or may not surprise you. Application consolidation came in second with 56%, followed by a tie for third between blade servers and unified communications, both with 51%. Storage tiering rounded out the top five with 46%.
Advice for providers — Gartner client interactions suggest that investment in virtualization and application modernization/consolidation is going to be a strong theme for data center consolidation activities. As server virtualization penetration increases, so do vendor
opportunities around product, management and services. Emerging markets are expected to see significant uptake in adoption given the smaller virtualization footprint relative to mature markets. As server virtualization begins to become more mainstream, vendors with a portfolio play — or those that are able to partner effectively — should consider extending their offerings perhaps to include network or storage virtualization. Desktop virtualization, though currently not a high investment priority for large enterprises, offers another potential complementary opportunity down the line. Vendors should adopt a consultative selling approach, in which they create a complete road map of virtualization solution deployment from start to end, which will drive vendor credibility and loyalty in the long term. Beyond virtualization, telecom and IT vendors should also prepare for the ongoing investment in unified communications, as this will drive significant product and service revenue for various players in the value chain.
6. Fabric-based computing has a distance to go before it sees widespread adoption
— When we asked respondents about their investment plans for 11 specific
technologies, 28% said they had never invested in fabric-based computing and didn't plan to in 2011, putting it in last place. A few respondents (9%) said they had invested in fabric-based computing before but didn't plan to invest any more in 2011, and 23% said they did plan to invest in it by year-end 2011. Nevertheless, the technology seems to suffer from a lack of awareness and/or understanding. Twenty-two percent of
respondents said they weren't sure whether they would invest or not, while another 19% either had never heard of the term of didn't know what it means.
Advice for providers — Vendors going to market with a fabric-based computing solution should target smaller market opportunities, because there are expected to be relatively few early adopters in the next 12 months. The Gartner Hype Cycle also suggests that it would take two to five years for fabric-based technology to become mainstream. Investing marketing dollars in customer awareness campaigns that include case studies to publicize early success stories should be aggressively carried out to remove barriers. Gartner also believes that fabric will be leveraged for private cloud infrastructure and services in the near future. Vendors can help early adopters by creating the migration plan and governance model from the legacy environment to their next-generation infrastructure.
7. Server virtualization, while popular and beneficial, also has significant impacts on the data center infrastructure that can drive future opportunities for providers — While server virtualization provides significant benefits for organizations that deploy it, it is not without its challenges. One is the domino effect it can have on other aspects of the data center infrastructure. The large enterprises we surveyed reported that the biggest impact they expected server virtualization to have on their data center was that they would have to invest in management tools to operate it efficiently (50%). This suggests that as customers mature with their server virtualization deployments, they begin to struggle with management of the virtual infrastructure. Their need to manage and control the virtual infrastructure opens a potentially lucrative opportunity for providers.
Additionally, 49% of respondents expected to have to purchase additional storage capacity as a result of their server virtualization deployment. These findings highlight the importance of a successful server virtualization project factoring in the impact that server virtualization will have on other IT components, such as networking or storage. These findings are in line with Gartner's view on virtualization, suggesting that this technology drives multiple changes across the complete IT stack as well as management.
Vendors should include that aspect in their discussion with customers as well and consider making it part of their proposal. This is a good example of why understanding your
customer's philosophical approach to change in the data center and working with the customer to bring it along to something more strategic is so beneficial. A provider that has already laid the groundwork with a customer and explained how some projects are, by their very nature, interdependent, will have less trouble persuading server virtualization prospects to include a storage purchase or infrastructure management tools as part of the sale. Other areas that respondents thought would be impacted included investment in power
management solutions (31%) and security products (31%). Gartner client interactions also suggest that the entire security paradigm changes for the organization once it takes virtualization to the majority of its workloads.
Advice for providers — Technology providers should continue positioning server
virtualization as a cost containment technology coupled with additional long-term benefits of improved agility and cloud readiness. However, as the organization matures with this technology, vendors should act as a trusted advisor by highlighting all the possible areas of impact, such as management tools, security and storage, and explaining the
interdependencies between the projects. Vendors should also try to expand their portfolios, which should include management tools, etc. If there are gaps, vendors should engage with other vendors as their partners and help their customers.
8. Large enterprises seem not to be prioritizing projects based on technology silo —
When we asked respondents to assign a priority to a series of server, storage and networking projects, only three out of 30 rated x86 server virtualization disaster recovery projects and securing stored data as a "high priority" (see Note 1). None of the project types was rated as "very high priority," but several were in the broader "high priority" range. However, when we approached the topic a different way, and asked respondents what projects they planned to invest in to address specific data center infrastructure challenges (like data growth) or enable their key change drivers (like business continuity and availability), some of the projects that had a lower priority on the
server/storage/networking project question suddenly ranked higher. For example, deploying a server load-balancing appliance had a mean priority rating of 4.5 out of 7 when we asked about it in the context of a networking project, yet in the context of projects to address the challenge of business continuity and availability, 62% said they planned to implement server load balancing by year-end 2011. Similarly, data reduction techniques received a 4.6 mean priority rating when we asked about it in the context of storage project priorities, yet over half of our respondents (53%) said they planned to implement it by year-end 2011 when we asked what technology projects they were implementing to enable cost containment, and 49% intend to invest in it to address the No. 1 data center hardware infrastructure challenge of data growth.
Advice for providers — Providers should first lead with client success stories, which can illustrate how their solutions will address the challenges that customers are facing and help them drive strategic change. Such an approach is better than presenting factoids about the technology alone. This has been standard advice for years, yet we still see frequent examples of marketing that takes the speeds and feeds approach. At a minimum, today's enterprises are looking for solutions that can address their broader IT needs, though many
are beginning to move beyond that and looking for solutions that will improve their business metrics. Develop messaging and train your sales channel to address the real needs that customers have to improve business agility and align with overall business goals when supplying stakeholders with the optimal IT infrastructure.
9. The most popular way for organizations to address the data growth challenge is data archiving and retirement — Virtually everyone we surveyed considered data growth a challenge that needed to be addressed in some manner (less than 1% of respondents said it was not an issue for their organization). So we asked respondents what technology projects they would be investing in by year-end 2011 to address that particular challenge. Data archiving and retirement emerged as the No. 1 response, with 62% of respondents favoring it. Data security from internal, external or hacker risk followed in second place with 54%, and storage consolidation ranked third with 53%. Storage management tools and data reduction techniques rounded out the top five projects that organizations plan to invest in with 52% and 49%, respectively.
Advice for providers — With cost containment remaining highly important to large enterprises, providers need to help customers not only address the data growth challenge, but do so cost-effectively. One challenge with the projects that respondents plan to deploy in this case is that with the exception of some data deduplication solutions, they generally don't fall into one of the standard budgetary categories that most IT organizations use. Therefore they vie for funding from a more generalized bucket and often get deferred. To increase the chances that your proposal will be funded, link your product messaging to cost containment and improved SLAs, and provide convincing case studies and other tools that will help IT managers convince management of the project's value.
10. Large enterprises around the world are investing in technology projects to address the cost of power, cooling and space at a strong rate, despite the fact that its reported importance as a specific challenge varies by country — The challenge associated with the cost of power, cooling and space ranked fourth in importance from the global perspective, and every country reported a strong rate of technology investment plans to address the challenge, despite the fact that its rank position varied widely among the individual countries. In Brazil, only 14% of respondents considered it among their top three challenges, while the rate was 47% in the U.K. Nevertheless, plans to invest in projects to address it are still in place for 2011 and will likely increase as various countries put mandatory regulatory frameworks in place for companies, particularly in many emerging markets. Variables like energy cost and production capability also contribute to the varying degree of response. Our survey suggested that over two-thirds of large enterprises are investing in server or storage virtualization as a way to tackle this problem, while another 53% are investing in server load balancing and 44% are investing in power measurement and management tools. These investments make sense given that:
Virtualization helps enterprises optimize both their capital expenditure and their operating expenditure as fewer physical servers need to be purchased and there is an associated decline in staff time expenditure to manage the hardware and facilities costs for power and cooling.
Server load balancing helps to enhance the server performance and utilization level and hence, optimize the physical server requirement.
Power and space are increasingly becoming scarce resources across the globe, causing data center managers to seek energy management tools that provide them greater visibility into the ongoing energy consumption across the data centers.
11. Advice for providers — Providers should consider including a sustainability or green IT theme when building the plan for their next-generation data center transformation product offerings and marketing. This theme should move beyond virtualization and focus on energy management, facility management, etc. Vendors with limited in-house expertise or intellectual property in these emerging areas may want to consider
partnership opportunities, because this is expected to be a strong revenue stream in the long term, though it may not significantly add to the revenue stream in the short term. METHODOLOGY
In June, July and August 2010, Gartner conducted a Data Center IT Issues and Priorities survey to gain a greater understanding of what's happening in data centers and the trends that will drive change in the data center. The survey explored the major challenges that large enterprises are facing in their data centers and with data center transformation; the kinds of changes they are making in their data centers and why; what business issues they are trying to address with data center transformation; why they are spending their money on the projects and technologies they are; and how they prioritize data center projects and spending.
A total of 1,004 screened respondents participated in this study; at least 100 survey respondents were from each of the eight countries: Australia (N = 100); Brazil (N = 100); China (N = 150); Germany (N = 108); India (N = 148); Russia (N = 107); the United States (N = 167); and the United Kingdom (N = 124). Data for this survey was gathered via a combination of phone-based and Web-based interviews and included companies with 1,000 or more employees in the
respondents' country (except in Australia, where the screening criteria were broadened to include companies with 1,000 or more employees worldwide and 500 or more employees within
Australia). All industries were included except vendors (IT service providers and software publishers).
To qualify to participate in the survey, respondents had to be personally knowledgeable about their data center projects and data center strategies, and familiar with the company's overall data center demographics. Their organization also had to have at least one data center in the country where the respondent resided and could not be outsourcing 100% of their data center operations. The survey was developed collaboratively by a team of Gartner analysts who follow the IT market and was reviewed, tested and administered by Gartner's Research Data Analytics (RDA) team. The data presented throughout the report is representative of the respondent base, rather than worldwide enterprises as a whole.
RECOMMENDED READING
"User Survey Analysis: Key Trends Shaping the Future of Data Center Infrastructure Through 2011"
"Cloud Computing Transformation" (forthcoming)
"User Survey Analysis: Data Center Transformation of Server Projects" (forthcoming)
"Marketing Essentials: Six Ways to Increase x86 Server Market Opportunity With Virtualization" "Hints and Tips on Using Gartner Numbers When Reviewing IT Spending Plans"
Evidence
The main source for this data was a new primary research study completed by Gartner in August 2010 with representatives from 1,004 large enterprises from eight countries. That information was
supplemented by knowledge gleaned from previous Gartner research studies, client inquiry and the collective experience of our Data Center IT Issues and Priorities Survey analyst team. It was also vetted through Gartner's usual rigorous peer review process.
Note 1
Definition of High Priority
High priority is defined as having a mean rating between 5 and 7 on a scale of 1 to 7, where 1 = not a priority at all and 7 = very high priority.
This document is published in the following Market Insights: Computing Hardware Worldwide
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