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Based on interviews of more than 300 IT decision-makers in seven countries, Forrester sees the increasing fragmentation of organizations. The problem is threefold:
1) Companies are becoming increasingly distributed. We found that companies must support a large number of branch locations, outsourcing relationships, and employees that are simply no longer in the traditional headquarter location.
2) Users are becoming increasingly mobile. On top of more remote locations, users are also becoming more mobile — relying on broadband wireless technologies to stay connected and productive.
3) Applications are becoming increasingly complex. IT must support all of these locations and users with a very broad mix of applications. In fact, a large organization can support hundreds if not thousands of unique apps. But to make matters worse, new application types like software-as-a-service (SaaS) force IT to recalibrate support mechanisms.
The result of all this is poor performance and users will no longer tolerate it. Today’s mobile worker expects access to any application, and when something goes wrong, the help desk gets the call. However, we already know that companies are successfully overcoming this hurdle by deploying WAN optimization solutions that are specifically tuned for a mobile environment. Mobile WAN optimization provides the acceleration needed to ensure consistent performance, room for new applications, and the ability to ensure end user productivity at all times.
Research Methodology
In September 2007, Forrester Consulting conducted an online survey of 302 IT decision-makers and influencers in North America, Japan, China, France, The United Kingdom, Germany, and India. Respondents represented a broad range of industries and included the following breakdown:
- Thirty-seven percent of respondents were the seniormost decision-makers in the company; 26% were application developers; 24% were network operations and architecture professionals; 8% were enterprise architecture professionals; and 6% were storage director or architecture professionals. (Please note that the sum of percentages in this paper may not equal 100 due to rounding.)
- Fifty-one percent of the respondents were from companies headquartered in the United States; 8% were headquartered in India; 8% were headquartered in United Kingdom; 8% were headquartered in Germany; 8% were headquartered in France; 8% were headquartered in China; and 8% were headquartered in Japan.
- Thirteen percent of respondents had 500 to less than 1,000 employees; 30% had 1,000 to less than 5,000 employees; 28% had 5,000 to less than 20,000 employees; and 29% had 20,000 employees or more.
- Nineteen percent of respondents were from companies with revenues of $50 million to less than $200 million; 25% with revenues of $200 million to less than $750 million; 24% with revenues of $750 million to less than $5 billion; 25% with revenues of greater than $5 billion; and 7% did not know their company’s revenue.
apart. On one end you have virtualization and consolidation efforts that are centralizing applications and data into fewer locations; on the other, you have users that are becoming increasingly distributed across work sites. A lot of energy has been spent studying, analyzing, and addressing the server centralization aspect. We’ve seen an entire industry that has grown up around IT consolidation using advanced virtualization and management tools. But how many companies are addressing the fact that people — not technology — are becoming increasingly decentralized?1 We think this is where the majority of friction will occur moving forward. Specifically, Forrester found that:
- Branch offices are found in all industries and company sizes. Eighty-one percent of organizations responded that they have branch offices, with more than 30% of companies indicating they support more than 100 branch offices.
- Branches will proliferate as companies further decentralize. And it will get worse: 40% of respondents noted that their organizations would likely be more decentralized three years from now. Less than 20% of organizations cited a trend of centralization at their organizations, likely due in large part to the increase in the prevalence of technologies to empower the mobile worker (see Figure 1).
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