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Technology managers worry most about a shortage of skilled workers and a lack of money to buy equipment to keep their companies communications networks from failing, according to a new survey.
Their nightmares are filled with human error, security breaches, server failure, power outages, natural disasters and staffing problems — all leading to downtime and the erosion of their companies bottom lines. Those were some results of the telephone survey of 152 information technology managers done by Fleishman-Hillard Research on behalf of NetBotz.
NetBotz announced the survey results at last weeks NetWorld+ Interop show in Las Vegas, where speakers peppered the audience with remedies for those IT nightmares.
Intel CEO Craig Barrett said a single network based on Internet Protocol architecture is inevitable. The sooner open standards are adopted to serve that network, the sooner everything, from handheld-devices to PCs, can communicate, and the faster innovations will come, he said. And IT professionals wont have to juggle equipment headaches for three different networks to serve their data, voice and wireless devices.
“Were in a recession, but innovation never goes into recession,” Barrett said.
Compaq Computer and Intel are working together on hardware to meet IT professionals demand for low power consumption and increased density. Called QuickBlade, it uses Intels ultra-low-voltage processors to build smaller, more powerful servers for the edge of the network that can perform such duties as media streaming, load balancing, caching and providing firewall protection.
The power of hundreds of todays non-QuickBlade servers will take up the space of just 40, said Michael D. Capellas, CEO of Compaq. This is one of several ongoing projects involving low-powered servers.
Scott Kriens, CEO of Juniper Networks, said companies can no longer afford the capital costs of running separate networks for voice, wireless and data. “If youre operating separate networks, youre getting much less return on your expenditures. The beauty of the IP network is you can leverage its power,” he said. All transactions can be on a unified network. And then “it will be impossible not to use it — everyone will have to, by complete necessity.”