WW Remote Branch Spending Will Reach $24.2 Billion by 2011

The remote branch market is evolving into one of the key IT battlegrounds, a new study from IDC shows. According to this special market analysis report published by IDC’s Enterprise Infrastructure group, worldwide remote branch spending will increase at a 6% compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from $19.4 billion in 2007 to $24.2 billion in 2011.

"Inherent in the nature of the remote branch is the desire of the business to be closest to its end customer, whether it is a retail operation that needs multiple points of sale or a hospital that wants to deliver timely patient care," said Lucinda Borovick, research vice president, Datacenter Networks. "Because the remote branch is the location within an organization that is closest to the end customer, it is the point where the IT organization must be able to deliver the services that meet the fluid needs of the business. The remote branch is globally dispersed and provides an opportunity for IT to bring business value to the organization. We believe the number of remote branches will grow over the forecast period."

According to Laura DuBois, research director for Storage Software, "While we tend to see the number of data centers consolidating, the number of remote branches continues to expand. A growth in the number of remote and branch locations brings about a corresponding balancing act required of IT to both reduce and contain costs at the branch while driving growth in the business."

Other key factors influencing IT infrastructure spending associated with branch deployments presented in this study include:

• A requirement of providing real time business analytics to remote locations in order to contribute to revenue growth.
• A mandate to secure corporate data either for regulatory purposes or simply to stay out of the headlines is driving centralization of all IT assets (servers, storage, desktops) into the datacenter.
• Motivations to – where feasible – centralize, consolidate, and standardize IT infrastructure to achieve economies of scale, cost reductions, improved service levels, and controlled administration and management.
• Solutions to address business needs for higher levels of data protection and recovery, application or site specific bandwidth and performance, availability and uptime, infrastructure management, and accessibility and information security and compliance.

The remote branch of the future does not have one standard template but it will have certain standard components. IDC believes that organizations are moving towards a model for the remote branch that is more consolidated, more consistent, and with IT having more of a voice in the equipment being deployed.

IDC’s special study, Remote Branch of the Future (Doc #212655), is an examination of changing business requirements in remote branch locations and the resulting technology requirements and infrastructure changes out in remote branch locations. The report provides an overview of the most challenging technology issues facing the remote branch today and lays out the requirements and relevant technologies for the remote branch of the future.