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Planning your Next IT Purchase

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PCQ Bureau
New Update

It's good to have lots of technologies and solutions available, but it also

increases the difficulty in choosing the right one for your business. Today's IT

infrastructure is more complex than ever, which makes it essential to make a

very careful IT purchase. It doesn't mean just paying for cost of the IT setup

but the cost of services, maintenance, licenses, etc. It's very important that

your IT purchase process goes beyond product buying. With endless solutions

available in the market, CIOs face the dilemma of what to buy and what not to,

as a single wrong IT purchase can result in huge losses or a flop project.

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We surveyed key CIOs from across the country to understand their buying

habits. Where they actually plan to invest in near future and what are their

expectation levels from the current setup in their enterprise? We provide you

with the know how of having a strong IT purchase strategy in place and a

well-defined process to back it up.

Trends in IT purchase



One of the key findings of survey is the fact that enterprises are spending

more and more every year. When asked about the trends in their IT budgets, most

of them said these increased over the years. When asked where they are planning

to invest in the coming year, DR and BCP topped the list. Good to know that

enterprises are finally taking DR and BCP seriously. Other most wanted

technologies for the next year turned out to be Unified Communication, SAN,

Information Security, and Server Consolidation. When asked about how frequently

they purchase products, 40% of them said as and when required and incidentally

the same number of CIOs, ie, 40% said every quarter.

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Gap between your current IT setup and your

expectations

Green IT revolution also seems to be gaining momentem, 56% of the respondents

said that they are extremely serious about implementing Green IT in their

enterprise while only 40% of them said that they were somewhat serious. Every

company has a limited budget and they need to spend it carefully. Let's take a

look at steps you can go ahead with to ensure you spend your IT budget

effectively.

How frequently do you purchase equipment

for your IT setup?
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CIO vs CEO: Satisfaction level with current

IT setup

Look before you leap



Before planning your IT purchase strategy, you need to find how well is your
current IT setup performing? How happy are the users with your current IT setup.

In our survey when we asked key IT decision makers about how often they conduct

user assessment surveys, only 50% of them said once in a year. As ultimately

it's the users who are running the business, user's feedback should be taken

more often, at least once in six months. For defining a good important strategy,

it's important to know that how have your recent IT setups delivered, their

impact on the business, what are the challenges that have come across after

deployment and how they are being resolved? Other than the user's feedback, this

valuable information can come from your own IT team, managers, partners, and

customers.

Next you will also need to calculate the costs of IT setups implemented in

the past year. This will give you fair idea of variation between how much you

planned to spend last year and how much you actually spent. And in case you have

spent more than you actually had planned, and the setup is still not up to your

expectations, you will have to drill deeper to find out what exactly have caused

the gap.

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Once you have gathered all this information (which is quite time consuming)

you need to analyze the trends faced in IT problems and issues faced during the

past year. This can be easily done by analyzing data of calls logged by your IT

helpdesk. Here determine the unique incidents which resulted in major problems.

How much of a loss did these cause and how widespread was it? Other things to

look at are how many users did it impact, how long it took to rectify the

problem completely, what was the overall impact on the business and what should

be done to prevent such attacks in future? Once you have identified the key

issues that had an impact on your organization and reasons behind them, you will

have a fair idea of what should be in your priority list of next IT purchase.

Where CIOs plan to invest in the near

future?
Everytime a new technology is introduced in

the



market, do you purchase it immediately or wait?
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Set your priorities



Once you've outlined the major incidents and their impact on your business,

next thing you need to do is figure out their solutions. Again this can be done

in various ways: by taking an IT consultation, asking your managers and IT team

for suggestions. Once you have got the list of the solutions recommended, you

can also perform a feasibility study.

Now you have a starting point on identifying what to purchase. At this stage,

you can start filtering them out, based on the impact they'll have on your

business. At the end, you'll have a filtered-out list of items you need to

purchase. You could collate them in different categories and define a time

period by when you'll need them. There might be things that need to be purchased

immediately, while others could wait, perhaps for the next



purchase cycle. Once you have a filtered and well-categorized list, you can
start defining the specs for each item onit.

Choosing the right vendor



After identifying what exactly you want to buy, and who all are going to be

the key decision makers for it, the job is half done. Next step is to identify

the vendors offering the product you are looking for. This shouldn't be hard to

do, you can find this information online, in various magzines etc. Once the list

is ready, check out the products available on the vendor's Website. After going

through few specs, you will have a fair idea of what's available in the market

and which of them exactly suit your needs.

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Next you invite the quotes from various vendors and process of negotiating

for the best deal begins. When choosing the vendor, it's advisable to go for the

vendor which can deliver multiple items on your purchase list, as this makes

your IT infrastructure more standardized. In our past surveys we have seen there

has been always a gap between a CIO's expectation and what is finally delivered

by the vendor. To avoid such situations you should test some of the equipments

before placing the final and must have stringent SLAs with the vendor.

How often do you conduct user assesment and

satisfaction survey?

Of expectations and dreams



When we asked how much is the gap between the current setup and their

expectations from it, a major chunk, about 48%, said that there is only a small

gap. In our survey another surprise came out when according to the CIOs their

CEOs were more satisfied about the current IT setup in their enterprise than the

CIOs themselves. About 64% of the CIOs said that their CEO is very satisfied

with the current IT setup, while same figure for CIOs themselves was 44%. When

we asked CIOs whether there is a mismatch between you and your CEO's

expectations, only few of them admitted that there is a difference.

When we asked CIOs the dream question that where they would like to invest,

if they were provided with unlimited IT budget and it was their call of where to

invest, Virtualization topped this list and others in the top list were Unified

Communication, BI, SOA, DR ,and BCP. When we asked CIOs about their personal

likes and dislikes, incidentally Virtualization again topped the list of

personal likes. Other technologies CIOs seem to love where .Net, DR and BCP, BI,

RFID, IP telephony, and Green data center. While coming to dislikes some of them

didn't like even a single technology, while others seem to have different

choices but at the end of it, there was no single technology that we can call

most hated one.

Anil Chopra and Swapnil Arora

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