Your Challenges

In June 2012 we undertook our sixth annual Customer Satisfaction Survey and polled over 1500 of our customers to find out what you thought of us and better understand what your priorities were for the year ahead.

The following reveals the Top Five priorities as identified by our customers.

Interesting Conclusions

The Top 5 priorities remain largely unchanged on 2011.  Business Continuity/DR continues to be the most pressing concern, demonstrating the complexities of this challenge particularly considering some of the transformations which are occurring in the data centre.  The emergence of Desktop hardware/software refresh as such a priority may build on Windows 7 migration as a top five priority in 2011’s survey and is perhaps an indicator that many organisations have sweated desktop assets for long enough and are now considering a move to Windows 8 rather than 7.  This may also account for the rise in priority seen for Desktop Virtualisation/VDI (as a change in software or OS is a common trigger event for hardware and software refresh) and Consumerisation of IT/BYOD which would naturally feature if end-point assets are being considered for replacement.

Outside of the top five priorities there is other noteworthy movement.  Network upgrade jumped from number ten to number seven.  This is likely to coincide with upgrades in wireless connectivity, desire for 10g connections to the desk and overall prevalence of mobile devices.  Likewise, big rises in Systems management/monitoring give indication of the importance of this task especially as virtual infrastructure is almost mainstream in medium to large enterprise which is creating new challenges for IT administrators.

Finally it appears that growing swathes of our customers are considering Off-premise Data Centre as a priority for 2012. Whilst still well outside of the top five it will be interesting to monitor what happens over the next 12-24 months with this priority considering market hype surrounding cloud and because co-location of existing IT assets will be a natural first step for many on this journey.  We certainly believe this will be the beginnings of an exciting upward trend.