blog

Disaster recovery and business continuity solutions should be easy to sell. Everybody needs them, and some businesses are required by regulatory bodies to meet specific and demanding standards. They also represent a place where IT solution providers and manufacturers can distinguish themselves because DR/BC is not only a cost, but one that will show a benefit only rarely. So, a company that can shorten backup and recovery times, consume less storage space and lessen demand on datacenter staff is likely to find a willing audience.

But, there are factors that can frustrate the DR/BC sales effort. There’s plenty of competition, making it harder for our voice to be heard and causing sales fatigue to set in among CIOs and other IT decision-makers. Further, the technologies that can have the greatest impact can disrupt IT — and end-user — operations, a situation that many IT departments seek to minimize. So, what’s intuitively an easy sell can become rather complex.

Here are five ways to tip the odds in your favor:

Read the rest of this entry »

The penetration of virtualization technologies is still low, but that only means it has room to grow. By 2014, according to a new report from Citrix, virtualization will dominate IT enterprise savings — and thus the agendas of CIOs. Citrix surveyed more than 700 CIOs from around the world and found that virtualization has led to IT cost savings of 16 percent, and they expect it to hit 27 percent in 2014.

While 31percent of CIOs estimate that 5 percent of their IT budgets or less are dedicated to virtualization technologies, 26 percent of them expect virtualization to account for a quarter of their IT budgets in 2014. The UK is leading the adoption of virtualization, with 27 percent of CIOs rolling out desktop virtualization over the next year and 41 percent planning to extend their use of server virtualization. In the United States, server virtualization adoption is currently only 17 percent.

Read the rest of this entry »