Theeconomic downturn appears to be inescapable worldwide. Earlier today,the European Union announced that the 15 countries that use the euroare officially in a recession. On this side of the pond, both WallStreet and Bay Street have been on a rollercoaster ride over the lastfew months.
In the technology realm this week, we’ve seen companies like Sun Microsystems and Nortel cut jobs.
Andif you listen to the analysts, IT departments might also be feeling theheat in the coming months. IDC recently cut its IT spending forecastfor 2009, predicting just a one per cent growth rate in the U.S. fornext year. The report also indicated that worldwide spending on IThardware, software and services would only grow 2.6 percentyear-over-year in 2009.
Withall this said, many IT professional that we’ve talked to haven’tnecessarily been feeling this pinch yet. Especially in areas such as ITsecurity, budgets have remained fairly steady for a lot of IT shops.
Is IT safe or are we just being lulled into a false sense of security?
IBMsays the answer to that question is really not important and itsexecutives are advising that IT managers make it a habit to optimizetheir IT infrastructure and start cutting costs wherever they can. ForMoonish Badaloo, a product manager with IBM’s global technical servicesteam, this starts with server consolidation.
Speakingat a ComputerWorld Canada event, Badaloo outlined the benefits toserver optimization through virtualization technologies. One of which,comes from Richmond Hill, Ont.-base CiRBA.
GerrySmith, president and CEO at the Canadian company, said his data centreanalysis software brings together configuration information, businessattributes and utilization data of servers, representing them as athree-dimensional cube and finding opportunities to optimize their usethrough virtualization or consolidation.
Wetalked with both Badaloo and Smith and got their perspective on theeconomic downturn and how IT managers can sell server optimization totheir c-level bosses.
Read more about this story at IT World Canada: IBM responds to economic woes with virtualization
