IDC’s Top Ten items for the CIO Shopping Cart

By Nathan Statz

March 20, 2008: Analyst firm, IDC has released their Forecast for Management survey which has predicted the top ten items for CIO’s shopping carts this year.

While the budgets are a little more extensive than shoppers bustling down the isles at your local supermarket, the trusty shopping list is just as important to a CIO when making decisions about where the millions will go. IDC’s study focused on the current and future use of major application and management disciplines and their supporting technologies in Australia through to 2009.

The top 10 technologies or management disciplines to be in use by ANZ CIOs by 2009:

1. Services Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web services – forecast to change in use in 2007 to the start of 2009 by 141%
2. Radio Frequency ID Tags – 122%
3. Voice and/or Voice over IP – 97%
4. IT Services Quality Certification – 86%
5. Virtualisation (eg, VMWare, etc) – 75%
6. Storage over IP and/or iSCSI – 72%
7. Sales force automation tools & marketing management – 66%
8. ITIL (Information Technology Library) – 65%
9. Document Management – 63%
10. Online Exchanges/Marketplaces/Portals – 63%

Melissa martin, senior market analyst at IDC reports that half of responding CIOs have SOA in their 2008 budgets, “this is interesting as many IT industry participants first saw SOA as another standards and application development paradigm wave that would just fade away,” she said.

“Virtualisation is another of the top technologies that CIOs will be investing in this year. This is no surprise as CIOs are now on the journey to enable their environments to be as flexible and ‘future proofed' as possible. SOA and Virtualisation technologies are enablers that can support these objectives," added Martin.

The survey has been conducted annual in Australia since the mid 1980’s and focuses on CIO expenditure, resourcing and challenges with IT.

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