* Continuing our look at IT pros' pressing challenges
Last time, we discussed our recent survey of 342 IT professionals in which they were asked to evaluate 22 IT related topics using two criteria – the importance of each topic to their organization and how much of a challenge it presented to their organization. In that issue, we discussed the security aspects and today, we will talk about one of the key application performance issues: the ability to unify, integrate, and/or enable the change of the disparate applications and activities that comprise a complex business process such as supply chain management.
Of all of the application performance issues noted on the survey, respondents indicated that the above issue was one of the most important and the most challenging to accomplish.
To get more context on this issue, we spoke to the CIO of a midsized bank. He explained that his company had a number of internally developed applications in addition to applications that it had acquired from a variety of software vendors. He said that his organization had done the integration between several of the internally developed applications and the third-party ones. The problem, he explained, was not the work involved in the initial integration; his concern was that every time one of his vendors issued a new software release, his organization had to spend an inordinate amount of time testing to see if the revisions still worked with the internally-developed applications.
Most IT organizations do not think of the WAN as playing much of a role when it comes to integrating disparate applications. However, that is exactly how Cisco is positioning Application-Oriented Networking (AON) strategy. While it is fair to say that AON is still a work in progress, it does provide some insight into how IT organizations may be able to use the WAN to provide value in new areas.
As we mentioned in the last newsletter, if you would like to participate in similar surveys and gain access to respondents-only information like this, check out the current surveys here and here.
