After modest investment in corporate networks during 2012, this year’s research shows organisations are prioritising far higher levels of investment, with budgets increasing for 52% of organisations.
Application performance issues are becoming increasingly frequent. More than half (54%) the organisations surveyed found that application performance problems such as slowness or non-responsiveness are becoming more frequent, a 10% rise on 2012.
Performance problems are hitting business critical applications hardest: responses reveal that application performance problems affect organisations’ most important IT systems, with business applications (including CRM and ERP systems) ranked as the most frequently impacted, closely followed by business critical video applications, Unified Communications, and collaboration systems.
Thierry Grenot, executive VP at Ipanema Technologies, noted: "What’s particularly concerning about this years’ study is that increased networking budgets are not translating into a reduction of application performance problems.
"Not only do we see application performance problems increasing, but those problems are affecting critical applications like ERP systems and increasingly, sophisticated Unified Communications products. This type of problem has a significant impact on productivity and can jeopardise a wide range of strategic IT programmes such as moving to the cloud.
"If organisations are investing in business productivity systems they should be addressing any performance challenges head on. Companies need the ability to pro-actively monitor and to allocate network resources to the applications that really need them in order to control this situation effectively."
Bandwidth requirements are growing rapidly for corporations: 84% of respondents reported that their company’s bandwidth requirements are growing by at least 10% per annum, and for 40% of companies this growth exceeds 20% per annum. Bandwidth growth is higher than last year, when only 67% of companies experienced bandwidth growth over 10% per annum.
Justin Fielder, CTO at Easynet, said: "What’s clear from this year’s KillerApps research is that traditional approaches to network management are no longer enough. We see companies throwing more money at the network and increasing bandwidth capacity, yet in just one year 10% more organisations are telling us that application performance problems are becoming more frequent.
"It’s time for our industry to realise that the rise of cloud computing and evermore sophisticated applications mean many organisations are heading for ‘application anarchy’, where IT departments lose control of how systems use the network and as a result, the performance of those individual applications."
Measurement of application performance remains fragmented, with network managers still reliant on outdated, network-level metrics such as jitter, delay and packet loss. Today, a new approach is required that combines a host of complex metrics to deliver a single, application-centric score to describe how each application performs.
‘Killer Apps 2013’ was conducted by independent research firm Vanson Bourne and includes responses from 650 CIOs and IT decision makers drawn from the USA and six key markets in Europe – the UK, Germany, France, Spain, Italy, and the Benelux region.
