Silva I’m in the process of reviewing data from the IT Plans and Priorities panel survey which I’ve mentioned before on the blog. In fact, the last post on the survey  was an invite I passed along to our readership and I hope that, as I churn through the data from the survey, I’ll be reviewing some of your inputs.

One of the early findings that I’ll be writing and publishing formal research on is the fact that, while some areas such as devices (computing clients and mobile devices) may see longer refresh cycles in light of the economy, and certainly when faced with actual budget cuts in 2009, areas such as networking are likely to remain relatively static with some small increases in spending. I attribute the latter to the continued build-out of services such as Wi-Fi networking. Formerly a convenience or "nice to have" element of the network, Wi-Fi is increasingly critical to connect mobile devices and mobile users to applications that house ever more critical, role-specific data.

Vendors in this space, for their part, have been doing quite a bit of marketing around the criticality of the WLAN; perhaps my earlier post bemoaning the state of Wi-Fi marketing was a bit premature.

Since that time, we’ve seen quite a bit of activity, including:

  • HP and Colubris teams hit the road with a solid story just 45 days out from their merger.
  • Meru begin marketing a fundamental level of control on the WLAN, required for it to replace wired.
  • Proxim announcing today they’ve received orders for over 1k 802.11n APs

So, it’s clear that the marketing is alive and well in WLAN and, in light of our recently collected data, we’re likely to see some fruit borne from these initiatives. In some cases, this seems to already be the case, at least with some vendors. I see this as good news that IT Operations is also reaping the benefits of IT transitioning to BT, as evidenced by spending continuing to take place, even on newer networking technologies.

By Chris Silva

Check out Chris’ research