Short-term planning saves money

Analyst Gartner advises firms to stop wasting money on unnecessary upgrades that may not be needed in as little as three years' time

IT managers continue to waste money on unnecessary network upgrades, and should not look beyond three years when assessing future needs, says analyst Gartner, which believes that most companies are failing to align their systems to business processes.

Speaking at today’s NetEvents conference in Geneva, Gartner vice president Ian Keene also criticised IT departments for blindly following vendor upgrade strategies to protect themselves and because they happen to have money to spend.

“They follow vendor orientated architecture too much, but it is important to remember that vendors just want to make money and sell all the bells and whistles,” Keene said. “They should buy only what they need for the short term because the business need is going to change anyway, and they should not fix what is not broken – people should not, but they do.”

Mark Hilton, regional head of product marketing for network vendor HP ProCurve, defended his company’s under-fire “adaptive networking” strategy. He pointed out that ProCurve is bringing new technologies to the core and distribution layer, including power over Ethernet and less complex network management features, at affordable prices where it makes sense for the customer base.

“Five to seven years is the length of time you need to think about a network investment strategy and we try and push customers towards building out something for the long term,” he argued.

However, Eurolan researcher Keith Humphreys argued that, “A spending plan of between one and three years sends an implicit message that the network will change, as cloud computing, software as a service (Saas), thin clients and virtualisation suggest they will. But I am not convinced that adaptive network will not cause more problems than it solves because we don’t know what the future holds.”

Keene went on to lambaste wasteful firms that needlessly spend millions upgrading 10Mbit/s desktop connections to Gigabit Ethernet and private branch exchanges (PBXs) to IP telephony.

“Why put in an IP PBX and a nice, shiny IP phone on the desktop, with expensive proprietary software and zillions of features that nobody will ever use, then send people on training courses to work out how to use it? They should invest the same amount of money in unified communications and really cheap handsets or PC softphones to do the same job,” Keene said.