Griet Bruyninckx’s post ‘What CIOs should be thinking about: challenges and solutions‘ nicely highlights the interests and concerns we are seeing and hearing from enterprise network users and managers this year.
It can’t be coincidence that our annual enterprise engagements have started briskly, with significant numbers of companies wanting to know if they are getting the best out of their network services – in-house or managed. Cost is always important of course, but what’s interesting is how many more companies see the capabilities of the network as equally significant: how adaptable, flexible and responsive is it.
For enterprises growing their networks and ICT to support their growing businesses, BT Connect IQ eValuator is exactly the kind of tool they need. They don’t have to be afraid to go to the telco as a possible service provider in relative ignorance about their own usage and management requirements; they can immediately test out their applications usage and see what effect that is having on their business network.
In our report on the Intelligent Network we focused on four major themes:
- Applications are cascading through the enterprise in every form from financial management software with business analytics, workflow management programs and business software test and development, to ecommerce services that are directly collecting revenues and billing customers;
- CIOs also have to deal with a proliferation of devices inc smartphones, tablets and other personal assistants – as well as the interconnection of machines (vehicles, vending machines, process plant and power stations, health monitors and pacemakers, video games consoles);
- Cloud is ultimately an outsourcing decision. It’s dawning on us all that the most robust cloud technology model – cloud computing (server virtualization, remotely hosted, dynamic capacity management, with SLA controls) has attributes that actually can be applied in communications applications and network management;
- Finally the CIO is now thinking about employees and their behaviour in new ways, about operations management, and about relationships with other senior managers.
The bottom line for the CIO is that they must have good visibility of the network – a big window into the whole picture of what is happening. They must have reliable measurement. And they must be able to work with the network, safely to get the best out of it.
David Molony, Principal Analyst, Ovum
As it happens, the service provider has some tools in the IN locker that can help. They include the user portal, with increasing features and functions and availability, and with professional services support as well as technical helpdesk; the network performance management and applications acceleration tools that we now see are being tuned for the vertical supply chain requirement. And proven managed security services across the network and around the individual end user.
Security is consistently the number one issue for our survey CIOs in almost every ICT choice, certainly when data governance is counted with network integrity.
To find out more about intelligent networks and the future of the CIO click here.
