Midsized Canadian Companies Forecast IT Budget Doom and Gloom

A survey sponsored by ioFABRIC Inc. revealed dark times for IT budgets in midsized companies, including reduced or stagnant spending, salaries, and services.

More than 70% of respondents said their annual IT budget has stayed the same or even decreased over the past three years, and fewer than 15% expect to see any increase in the next three years. More than half said that their lack of budget to accomplish desired upgrades is a major challenge.

The belt-tightening these companies are doing extends to spending less in nearly every category: reduced hardware spending (71%), reduced software spending (42%), cutting back on outsourcing and professional services (42%), and reduced human resources spending including salaries and training (29%).

“Based on this data, concerns about controlling capital expenses and operating expenses cannot be underestimated, and the market needs to send a message of delivering business value and optimizing costs,” said Steven Lamb, co-founder and CEO, ioFABRIC. “While it’s tempting to see this as troubling news for vendors, it’s also an opportunity for companies like ours to educate and help customers better understand how to get the most out of existing systems, how to support their workloads efficiently, and how to drive more value out of existing storage systems and scale in the future with less cost.”

While the survey revealed other general issues with managing storage, some of these challenges are also related to budget constraints.

78% of respondents reported reducing downtime is very important to them, and 64% said improving performance levels for critical applications is very important.

“Downtime and performance problems are frequently the result of aging infrastructures, and also the inability to adapt to infrastructure and application workload changes,” said Rayan Zachariassen, co-founder and CTO, ioFABRIC.

Not surprisingly, only 35% of respondents said “yes” when asked whether there is enough time in the day for them to effectively manage their storage systems.

“Eliminating manual chores like provisioning and migration, complexity, or constraints on future growth are easy problems to solve – if there is an adequate budget,” said Lamb. “Without the budget, companies need to look for solutions that let them do more with theirr existing infrastructure. This is a key focus at ioFABRIC. We created Vicinity in direct response to the market need for extending hardware life to meet budget constraints. What this survey tells us is doing more with less, or doing more with the same amount of resources for years on end, is the new reality for a broad segment of users.”

ioFABRIC Vicinity transforms storage infrastructure, using existing systems and media to reach new levels of service. Vicinity will discover more life in existing storage while scaling performance and capacity. With a single pane of glass, Vicinity unifies diverse vendors storage while automatically responding to changing workloads and resource uses. Vicnity’s QoS-driven storage automation can be deployed as distributed storage or hyperconverged. ioFABRIC channel partners sell Vicinity as a licensed software and support solution or by white-labeling it with additional hardware and/or software.