At PepsiCo, the IT budget will remain flat in the coming year. But lead network engineer Bryan Cleal says downward price pressure on Internet and carrier services will free up new funds even without a budget increase. Even so, he's being directed to piggyback new services, such as IP telephony, on existing equipment, to wring more value out of systems the soft-drink maker already owns.
"There has been a lot of pressure to extend life and extract additional functionality out of systems," according to Cleal.
Those who hold the purse strings are emphasizing prudence over pizzazz. Server hardware topped the list of technologies that will get the most funding this year, followed by security, network infrastructure and business applications. Coolness is clearly a handicap: At the bottom of the priority list were convergence (IP telephony, videoconferencing and the like) and mobile and wireless systems. Yet it's notable that when we asked which technology project had the largest impact in the past year, mobile and wireless ranked third, with 5 percent, and VoIP ranked ninth, at 3 percent. The top vote-getters were business applications (10 percent) and Windows (8 percent).
Audio- and videoconferencing are getting the most attention from those who are devoting resources to convergence, though nearly a quarter of respondents said they will tackle VoIP and unified messaging in the next 12 months.
A popular project is server consolidation. Washington Penn Plastic, a Washington, Pa.-based manufacturer of thermoplastics and resins, brought in a consultant to assess the company's server network resources and identify where it was spending too much on software licensing. "Servers were springing up like rabbits," says applications architect Rob Swider. "It was getting out of hand." For example, the manufacturer pays for six Microsoft SQL Server licenses because different departments have deployed their own copies. Swider is looking at one large server to host all of them to lower the fees and make sure upgrades and patches are easy to implement. (Microsoft insisted that Washington Penn use a Microsoft "gold" partner in its area, Allin Consulting, to assess the savings opportunities. It doesn't take a cynic to see why that's a potential conflict of interest.)
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