Last time, we discussed which IT initiatives we believed would experience the biggest budget increases in 2009. We based that on our surveys of two separate audiences - one primarily made up of U.S. IT execs and the other of European IT execs. The infrastructure initiative that is likely to experience the greatest increase in funding is virtualization, followed by wireless LAN/WANs and WAN optimization. The driver for growth in WLAN/WAN is mobility and the driver for WAN optimization is cost avoidance.

A significant percentage of employees at most companies are highly mobile and this is caused by the requirement for employees to be close to the company’s key partners and customers. This requirement will not lessen in challenging economic times but will likely increase to help companies reach their revenue goals.

As mentioned, one of the drivers of WAN optimization is cost avoidance. The idea being that in many instances it is more cost effective to implement WAN optimization than it is to continually increase WAN capacity. Since bad economic times put pressure on IT organizations to be cost effective, we expect that cost avoidance will indeed drive many organizations to implement WAN optimization in 2009. Another driver is application performance. As we mentioned in the last newsletter, CIOs place a very high priority on applications. As such, many IT organizations will implement WAN optimization in order to ensure acceptable application performance and hence support the goals of their CIO.

We also asked the survey respondents to indicate which management disciplines would experience the greatest budget increase in 2009. Again, the responses of the two audiences was remarkably consistent. The three areas that would experience the greatest growth were security, network performance management and application performance management.

Security has clearly been a top of mind issue for most IT organization for the last several years. We don’t anticipate that changing in 2009. If nothing else, the conventional wisdom is that in difficult economic times, there is an increase in hacking. As such, IT organizations would be wise to increase their focus on security in 2009.

We have written numerous newsletters on network and application performance. We see these areas as being key to the success of any IT organization because of the importance that CIOs place on applications. For more discussion on this topic, we suggest that you attend Network World’s IT Roadmap conference in Washington, DC on Dec. 16. Jim will moderate a panel on the topic and joining him on the panel are four of the leading vendors.

Steve Taylor is president of Distributed Networking Associates and publisher/editor-in-chief of Webtorials. Jim Metzler is vice president of Ashton, Metzler & Associates.