"Nearly nine out of ten senior IT and business executives say that data, voice and network services can be leveraged to drive innovation, facilitating remote access to critical applications and speeding up customer service.
They can generate immediate cost savings by eliminating the cost of maintaining separate voice lines."
Today's IT and Business Leaders on Market Trends
Infrastructures
for InnovationA difficult economy is impacting IT investments, but advanced communications infrastructures bring opportunities for innovation and cost savings.
IT leaders understand the need to drive business value by lever-aging voice, data and network infrastructures. They know that advanced communica-tions services are the backbone of effective customer experiences, providing business-es with quick, efficient and cost-effective ways to reach out and respond to clients and Voice and network prospects. In that and many other respects, these services contribute to exactly what the business wants in these challenging economic times-lower operating costs, higher revenue, and effective and rapid delivery of new offerings to the market. services can be Faced with declining funds to invest in these services in a down economy, CIOs must provide their C-level peers with compelling arguments to build new "infrastruc- leveraged to drive tures for innovation." Companies that are still investing see enabling convergence, increasing scalability, and expanding application and information access as efforts that innovation.are both vital to opening new frontiers for the business and doing away with the un-necessary costs of legacy environments.
Where Opportunity Lies Fortunately, both business and IT executives acknowledge that more sophisticated infrastructures bring opportunities for innovation, cost savings and productivity improvements. In a recent survey conducted by IDG Research Services and Fortune Custom Publishing, nearly nine out of ten senior IT and business executives say that data, voice and network services can be leveraged to drive innovation, and they cite facilitating remote access to critical applications and speeding up customer service among the top advances these services enable. Both sets of respondents believe that About CIO2CEO: companies that continue to invest in data, voice and network services during slow eco- This peer-based thought leader-nomic times will gain important benefits, such as improved efficiencies and reduced ship program analyzes quantitative costs, and better collaboration. and/or qualitative research from But in the midst of a downturn, nuts-and-bolts considerations often trump hoped- actual CIOs and CEOs. The result-for advantages, especially when ROI may not be immediate or its overall impact is as ing insight is then disseminated via yet unclear to business executives. A majority of IT and business executives report that IDG Enterprise and Fortune Inc.'s economic conditions have slowed or delayed their organization's investments in data, various multimedia assets. To learn voice and network services compared to 12 months ago. Nearly one-third of CIOs say more about the CIO2CEO program, the slowdown has been significant. With IT budgets shrinking, it's not surprising that please contact Charles Lee at available resources tend to get directed to the most pressing needs. clee@idgenterprise.com.
1 CIO2CEO Today's IT and Business Leaders on Market Trends"There may be some other things that are screaming tivity; new IP voice technology to provide uninterrupted that they are going to break if they aren't fixed," confirms service even during a crisis; integrated remote offices; Lynn Willenbring, CIO of the city of Minneapolis. In and cost savings as a result of leveraging the existing data the city's case, for example, some applications are in network and the new voice infrastructure investments. desperate need of an upgrade just to keep operating. Its Indeed, converged voice and data networks provide basic infrastructure, on the other hand, is in pretty good some of the most obvious and immediate TCO proof shape, and Willenbring can postpone investments for points for communications upgrades. They can generate additional functionality as long as it can sustain current cost savings from day one by eliminating the expenses and near-future needs. The city is fortunate in that it is associated with maintaining separate voice lines and realizing benefits from previous efforts it has under- internal calling among branch offices. "We have brought taken. That includes being the anchor tenant of a Wi-Fi in VoIP, and that has reduced costs between offices," says network for city staff usage that will lower costs by elimi- an IT support manager at one firm that runs its ... [download for more]
