Last year Curvature commissioned a study with Forrester Consulting to look at the IT maintenance landscape to analyze IT purchaser behavior and the overall marketplace. What Forrester found was that the number one concern of IT departments was to keep costs down. No surprise there. However, despite this constant pressure, the majority of IT organizations were essentially throwing away working equipment because their vendors were telling them to do so.
85% of the companies that Forrester consulted said that they would have kept their networking equipment longer but saw no alternative, since their OEM would no longer support it. In their report, “Challenging the Status Quo on Maintenance Contracts and Refresh Cycles to Lower Costs,” Forrester recommends businesses not only keep working existing infrastructure and avoid premature and unnecessary upgrades, but should also not pay for software updates that don’t exist or are free.
This has led to a fundamental shift in IT spending. Decision makers, and those responsible for P&L, are beginning to demand more control over their network. As OEM constraints become tighter, companies are seeking more alternatives than the traditional options they’ve been given. In Malcom Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point, he refers to these types of people as “Early Adopters.” People who recognize a trend before it becomes mainstream. It’s not just start-up companies beginning to adopt these principles anymore either. Large financial organizations, manufacturers, and health care companies have all begun to look at and purchase independent alternatives, often with huge dividend results.
For access to the study and its results, click HERE. For a downloadable infographic highlighting these topics, click HERE.
