SolarWinds Survey Reveals IT and New Technology Adoption are at the Heart of Business Success, Highlights Need to Better Empower IT to Deliver Impact

AUSTIN, Texas – March 10, 2015 – SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI), a leading provider of powerful and affordable IT performance management software, today released the results of its IT Trends Report 2015: Business at the Speed of IT, which demonstrates the significance of IT and IT’s ability to successfully adopt and implement new technology that drives business success. It also highlights the need to empower IT to overcome the challenge of delivering on the promise of these technologies and potential business impact in today’s increasingly hybrid environments. While 93 percent of IT professionals surveyed said adopting significant new technologies is important, many cited barriers to successful adoption that have resulted in achieving mixed results, such as budget (77 percent) and shortage of personnel (49 percent)—two key areas they also identified as top needs to feel more empowered.

“These findings highlight the vital role that IT and technology now play for today’s businesses. Businesses can only progress and perform as quickly as IT enables them to—it’s business at the speed of IT,” said Suaad Sait, executive vice president, products and markets, SolarWinds. “Empowering IT—especially to successfully adopt and implement new technologies quickly—should be a top priority for every organization. This will become more important as we move further into the hybrid cloud era. The cloud offers tremendous opportunity to streamline business and reduce costs, yet, as the study finds, three out of five organizations have migrated less than 25 percent of their infrastructure and one in ten have not migrated anything. IT must be given the resources they need to make this transition. Otherwise their businesses may suffer.”

Key Findings

IT and IT’s ability to successfully adopt significant new technologies is critical to long-term business success. The new measures of IT performance are not just availability, reliability and uptime—but also business productivity, growth and profitability. However, barriers and challenges, including, for some, business leadership, continue to stall adoption and therefore business impact.

– Nearly all—93 percent—of IT professionals who responded to the survey indicated that adopting significant new technologies is at least somewhat important to their organization’s long-term success; of those, 48 percent said it is important and another 20 percent said it is extremely important

– Budget limitations ranked as the top barrier to adopting those significant new technologies, followed by inability to convince decision makers of the need and/or benefit and a shortage of IT personnel to implement and/or manage the technology, respectively

– While 66 percent of survey-takers indicated they view their organizations’ CIO as an enabler in adopting significant new technologies, nearly one-quarter said their CIO is either a barrier or uninvolved

Without empowering IT to effectively overcome these barriers, organizations struggle to achieve expected results from technology adoption within anticipated timeframes, and to ensure overall business-critical technology performance.

– More than half of IT professionals surveyed said it took longer than anticipated—23 percent said much longer—for the last significant new technology their organization adopted to start impacting business and/or end-user efficiency

– Only half of the survey-takers said their organizations’ last adoption of a significant new technology achieved expected return on investment within the projected timeframe; while one-third said it took longer than expected—11 percent of those said it took much longer

– Nearly 90 percent of respondents said their organizations’ end-users were negatively affected by a performance or availability issue with business-critical technology in the past 12 months; nearly a quarter of those reported that such issues occurred six times or more

To better empower IT to overcome these barriers and drive the success of their businesses through technology adoption, organizations must first provide IT with more resources, better training and development and greater autonomy.

– Nearly 50 percent of survey-takers said more resources, such as budget, personnel and time, ranked as their number one need to feel more empowered

– More or better training and development (32 percent), greater IT department autonomy (29 percent), stronger CIO support when liaising with other business leaders (26 percent) and more or better strategic counsel and guidance from the CIO (24 percent) rounded out the list of IT’s top five needs ranked number one by IT professionals surveyed

The annual SolarWinds IT Trends Report consists of survey-based research that explores significant trends, developments and movements related to and directly affecting IT and IT professionals. The findings of this year’s report are based on a survey fielded in December 2014, which yielded responses from 231 IT practitioners, managers and directors in the U.S. and Canada from public and private sector small, mid-size and enterprise companies.

Additional Resources

IT Trends Report 2015: Business at the Speed of IT

IT Trends Report 2014: The New IT

About SolarWinds

SolarWinds (NYSE: SWI) provides powerful and affordable IT management software to customers worldwide from Fortune 500® enterprises to small businesses. In all of our market areas, our approach is consistent. We focus exclusively on IT Pros and strive to eliminate the complexity that they have been forced to accept from traditional enterprise software vendors. SolarWinds delivers on this commitment with unexpected simplicity through products that are easy to find, buy, use and maintain while providing the power to address any IT management problem on any scale. Our solutions are rooted in our deep connection to our user base, which interacts in our thwack online community to solve problems, share technology and best practices, and directly participate in our product development process. Learn more today at http: http://www.solarwinds.com.