NW500 survey: Important advances

By - John Dix, Network World, 06/20/05

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Bolstering security , striving to comply with regulations and updating data center infrastructure are the activities that will preoccupy IT shops for the next 12 months, according to the annual Network World 500 survey.

These were the same concerns that topped the survey last year, indicating either little progress, the enormity of the task or, more likely, a combination thereof. It will take years to realize the promise of new data center technologies, and while we might expect companies to get better at compliance, no one will ever completely solve the security problem.

The survey of 500 Network World readers, however, provided ample evidence that strides are being made with a range of technologies, from wireless LANs to VoIP. And it shows progress on core enabling technologies that will underpin the network IT environments of tomorrow: Web services/service-oriented architectures (SOA ) and grid computing.

Eight out of 10 organizations say they have deployed some Web services , up significantly from last year when six out of 10 reported deployment. Companies that have deployed Web services say they have, on average, adapted 41% of their application infrastructure for the technology.

The primary reasons buyers are adopting Web services is to create applications that can be accessed by partners/customers (mentioned by 77% of the respondents), to lower costs (75%), and to facilitate application integration and development (70%).

Early success with specific Web services is driving the growing interest in more encompassing SOAs, where all applications can call on services offered by other programs across the organization. While more than 50% of the respondents say they are unsure if they will or have no plans to use SOA, 23% say they already employ some SOA principles. Another 24% say they will embrace SOA within two years.

The perfect complement to flexible SOA software architectures, of course, is grid computing, which promises to increase hardware utilization rates by making it possible to distribute workloads across networked systems in reaction to demand.

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