* IT management trends to watch for in 2009
The IT spending forecast continues to creep downward, but many industry watchers continue to argue that despite the stall in spending, IT management initiatives will flourish in 2009.
Slideshow: 2009 IT budgets and spending: a snapshot
One research firm, Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), laid out what it considers the top IT management trends to watch for 2009. EMA lists 12 areas it believes will find greater attention in 2009, but here I will explore a few that could gain popularity due to their multi-purpose appeal.
To start, the firm, always an advocate of processes around managing configurations, expects to see configuration management databases (CMDB) evolve into federated systems that will encompass application discovery, provide better metrics and “closely link to related architectures like process automation.” One area that CMDBs could help enterprise IT with is instituting chargeback capabilities. By correlating CMDB data with information from asset, procurement and financial systems, IT managers might be able to better pinpoint the costs they expend delivering services to the business.
“The CMDB will prove itself to be a very valuable resource in a chargeback scenario,” says Glenn O’Donnell, senior analyst at Forrester Research.
Another area EMA tags as hot in 2009 is virtualization — which many say managing virtual servers will continue to challenge IT managers. EMA Research Director Andi Mann says, “Virtualization has people sharing servers and moving workloads around frequently. It is a lot more difficult for IT to allocate those costs on paper, never mind determine accurate numbers for cost recovery or capacity planning.”
And EMA identifies automation technologies as key to maintaining service levels during a down economy.
“IT organizations are under intense pressure to reduce expenses while continuing to improve the strategic value of IT by providing flexible, dynamic and efficient IT services that drive business success,” EMA analysts wrote in a press release. “EMA believes that organizations with increasingly turn to automation as a means of doing more with less — especially in the data center and storage arena.”
