Survey: Data Center Budgets Will Stay Pretty Much the Same in 2009

Of course, you only care if it's YOUR budget.

AFCOM survey indicates that nearly two-thirds of managers of large data centers will maintain or increase their budgets in 2009, despite the deepening recession. The remaining one-third will lose about 15 percent of their budgets, with much of the reduction involving travel and training expenses.

A noted data center industry association reported Dec. 23 in a survey of IT managers that nearly two-thirds will see their IT budgets stay the same or even increase in 2009, and that the remaining one-third will lose only about 15 percent of their budgets.

eWeek article

Economic meltdown to change telecom landscape, report says

The tech industry that includes the telecom and the enterprise networking sectors has gone through some hard times in the last 20 years, but the author of a new economic forecast for the technology industry says he's never seen anything like this.

The title says it all. In Surviving a Tech Market Nuclear Winter: A Planners Handbook to Tech Success in Today's Challenging Financial Times, industry analyst and consultant Tom Nolle, president of CIMI Corporation, says "it's hard to see how we could have a worse juxtaposition of planning activity and economic events." But Nolle also believes that if companies take the right actions in a bad market, they can come out of this economic crunch stronger than when they went into it.

Search Telecom article

Google: Raise Your Data Center Temperature

The following article speaks of a growing trend of raising temperature set points in large scale data centers. Lifeline Data Centers believes this is a viable option assuming that hot air removal is well-managed.

The biggest players in the data center industry are raising the thermostats in their data centers, with some saving hundreds of thousands of dollars in energy costs in the process.

The latest company to focus attention on temperature in the data center is Google. “The guidance we give to data center operators is to raise the thermostat,” said Erik Teetzel, an Energy Program Manager at Google. “Many data centers operate at 70 degrees or below. We’d recommend looking at going to 80 degrees.”

Data Center Knowledge article

Debating IT's True Value

Interesting article on valuing internal IT against the wide availability of outsourced IT services. Should in-house staff worry?

The rise of IT services offers a unique opportunity for IT shops to measure their true value. But not everyone agrees.

One of the few bright spots in these tough times has been the market for IT services. Amidst all the gloomy headlines—the talent shortage, the economic and financial crises, layoffs and lowered forecasts from the tech industry, rising unemployment in the broader economy—IT services employment has gone up.

CIO Insight Article

Outsourcing deals being re-evaluated in weak economy

IT outsourcing remains steady at most large companies, but the weak dollar and service issues are causing some CIOs to reconsider their decisions. And that's not all -- loss of flexibility and control can also be factors.

In a tough economic environment, flexibility definitely becomes more important. Executing change orders, modifying manufacturing orders or altering marketing pitches delivered during telephone contacts are all more difficult when the work is outsourced. "You don't have the luxury of saying, 'Come on team, let's go!'" explained David Rutchik, managing partner at Pace Harmon, a Washington, D.C., consultancy that specializes in outsourcing issues.

SearchCIO article

IT Management Slideshow: Top CIO Priorities for 2009

As expected, cost-cutting goals have expanded, but it’s not the whole ballgame in 2009. Here’s what more than 220 IT executives listed as their top priorities in business, management and technology priorities.

CIO Insight article

A CIO Perspective on Change Management

The discipline of change management is as old as computers themselves. Yet the advent of the personal computer and its bottom-up acceptance and growth in the enterprise put many disciplines like change management on the back burner. Many of us have paid the price for this lack of discipline. This article talks about the business side of change management.

The BTM Institute interviews Robert Keefe, CIO of Mueller Water Products and member of the Society for Information Management (SIM) to get some perspective on effectively handling technology-related change management and organizational change management.

Managing change often ranks among the top 10 concerns of the 3,600 senior technology professionals who belong to the Society for Information Management (SIM). Robert Keefe, the president of SIM International, says that although change management ranked seventh in SIM's 2007 survey, the percentage difference between each ranking was very close.

Baseline article