Tuesday, October 20, 2009

Gartner sees global IT spending growth in 2010

Has the recession bottom yet? With consumers hesitant to buy and enterprise slashing IT budgets, how will companies position themselves in 2010? Accordingly to the last report from Gartner, “global IT spending is on track to mark its worst year ever, but global tech spending will climb 3.3% to $3.3 trillion in 2010.

2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth. For more than 50% of CIOs the IT budget will be 0% or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner.

While this is not exactly the kind of news we like to hear, the research firm also offers 3 budgeting advice:

  1. A Shift from Capital Expenditure to Operational Expenditure in the IT Budget — Concepts such as cloud services will accelerate this shift. IT costs become scalable and elastic. CIOs need to model the economic impact of IT on the overall financial performance of an organization.

  2. Impact of the Increased Age of IT Hardware — With delayed purchases of servers, PCs and printers likely to continue into 2010, organizations must start to assess the impact of increased equipment failure rates, and if current financial write-off periods are still appropriate. Approximately 1 million servers have had their replacement delayed by a year. That is 3% of the global installed base. In 2010, it will be at least 2 million.

    If replacement cycles do not change, almost 10% of the server installed base will be beyond scheduled replacement be 2011,” Mr. Sondergaard said. “That will impact enterprise risk. CFOs need to understand this dynamic, and it’s the responsibility of the CIO to convey this in a way the CFO understands.

  3. IT Must Learn to Build Compelling Business Cases — 2010 marks the year in which IT needs to demonstrate true line of sight to business objectives for every investment decision. IT leaders can no longer look at IT as a percentage of revenue. CIOs must benchmark IT according to business impact.

Sounds familiar? We're no research firm but we're glad we're heading towards the right direction. Here is why:

Number 1
.Everything that Pointivity offers requires no up-front capital, just pay-as-you-go making it operational expense in nature. From our Hosted Application to total IT outsource with iTOS, our pricing model allows the contract to fluctuate monthly without costly changes or renegotiation.

Number 2. All of our hosted solutions includes upgrades and updates so our customers never have to worry about patches, new versions or licensing renewal fees. Everything is included when we deliver your IT solution. We take the risk out of building and managing your own IT so you can focus on your core business. Let our experts handle keeping up with IT.

Number 3. We’ve been delivering custom IT solution to our customer via iTOS for years, just checkout some of the case studies to see how our customers have benefited.

The bottom line: iTOS is a business strategy because we do business with your bottom line in mind.

Friday, October 2, 2009

Should You Be Concern About SaaS Security?

At Pointivity we offer many IT services to our clients and one in particular is gaining popularity - our SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) solution. The IT industry is currently moving quickly to adopt SaaS to help customers control costs and take advantage of a shift towards the increasing availability of data and applications away from a traditional office setting. As the SaaS trend continues, there is also the growing concern over the security of SaaS delivery model versus on-premise solutions.

According to a recently article published on MessagingWire by Michael Osterman of Osterman Research, there are some misconception that the SaaS delivery model is less secure.

He points out the specific fears that decision makers have with regard to hosted/SaaS solution and went on to provide two key takeaways from his research findings:

  • Education should be priority to help decision makers understand how their on-premise infrastructure and data transmission stacks up against SaaS solutions.

  • Realize internal security procedures may be giving them a false sense of security. In many organizations, any employee can gain access to a server room or a backup tape quite easily, leaving the organization vulnerable to serious data loss.
For Pointivity we’re able to offer better security because we have access to more resources than most organizations do with their on-premise implementations. All our hosted/SaaS solutions are housed at a state-of-the-art SAS 70 (Statement on Auditing Standards No.70) Type II compliance data center, reflecting a consistent, reliable and secure operating environment to support customers worldwide. In addition, our 24x7 help desk is staffed by certified engineers that can provide both remote and onsite technical support for desktops, servers, network, routers, firewalls and other IT infrastructure.

Unlike traditional hosting providers, we bring process-specific and industry focused experience that help our clients integrate and manage their applications. Hosted in the cloud or onsite, we can assess and quantify the costs of your current technology platform then provide a complete ROI analysis using our infrastructure.

Osterman goes on to suggest that "on average, SaaS providers offer better security than most of their prospective customers because they have a) the resources to do so and b) they have much more to lose if they don’t."

We couldn’t agree more, supporting our client’s infrastructure is what we do, it’s our business and our core focus.

Do you have questions about SaaS? Are you interested to learn more about how Pointivity can transition your business into the hosted model? Contact us.