e-Commerce leads enterprise project plans, according to new Evans Data report
Santa Cruz, CA — December 1, 2003 — In what may be a sign that the long downturn for technology is coming to an end, e-commerce projects lead plans for next year in enterprise development project planning, according to the new "Enterprise Development Management Issues" survey from Evans Data Corp., an IT industry market intelligence provider.
The survey reported that B2B e-commerce increase 40 percent in the last six months for planned projects and a move from eleventh place to the first-place ranking. Business-to-consumer (B2C) projects also showed strong gains with developers planning 20 percent more B2C projects for next year than they were six months ago.
"We're seeing a resurgence in e-commerce deployments, but this isn't a revival of the so-called 'dot-com' frenzy by any means," commented Joe McKendrick, Evans' enterprise analyst. "Rather, many companies are extending relevant portions of their applications and data to supply-chain partners."
He went on to say that with growing adoption of Web services and other standards, such connectivity is now possible with little additional investment. "In fact, we're finding that developers are getting more comfortable with Web services, and therefore directing more efforts beyond their firewalls, to B2B interaction," he said.
Some of the other findings from the November 2003 survey of 400 IT and development managers in companies with more than 1,000 employees were:
* Sixteen percent of enterprise companies plan to use grid computing instead of a clustering environment, and another 24 percent are considering the technology. Evans said grid computing is a relative new concept in which computing power, storage and applications are stored across systems, either within an organization, or across a network of organizations. Underused capacity in one system is picked up by another system on the network.
* Outsourcing has decreased by more than 20 percent in the last year with 56 percent of enterprises outsourcing some of their development, down from 71 percent a year ago. Only 7 percent of companies are outsourcing a majority of their projects, down from 12 percent a year ago. The most cited reason for outsourcing was to tap special expertise not available in-house.
* Computer viruses/worms led the most common types of security breaches on enterprise data followed by internal human errors and internal software or system errors. One in 10 respondents reported no security breaches at all in the last year.
