This spring's focus groups were held across the United States in five cities -- Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. There were a total of 33 participants who were IT executives from major companies.

Focus on Network and Wireless

One of the issues we delved into was networking. We started by asking about bandwidth needs and whether they were expected to increase over the next few months. 75% of respondents said that they would have a requirement to increase their current bandwidth. Many commented that the need to increase is never ending. One even went so far as to say that, “bandwidth is the limiting factor of our business”.

Video conferencing was cited by about a third of the respondents as the big bandwidth eater and one they would be investing heavily in over the next six months; the primary motivation being to cut down on the expense and annoyance of travel.

We wanted to find out about any barriers to this constant need to buy more, more, more, so we asked about budget issues, lack of support, etc. Everyone seemed to be in agreement that finding the budget for bandwidth was not a problem as it was deemed a necessary expense and one that everyone in the company benefits from. The biggest barrier, instead, was on the supplier end with many companies frustrated with their inability to find local facilities to support their needs. This was a particular problem for locations outside major cities.

When it comes to wireless though, the situation was not so cut and dry. About 50% of respondents’ companies were making use of PDAs, but precious few were really using these for anything more then a way for employees to check e-mail. This couldn’t be more evident then when we asked about support for 3G and received back a unanimous “What’s that?”

The most often cited barrier to broader use of wireless devices was the security issue, and secondly was the availability of worthwhile applications. Use of wireless was definitely seen as “hot” but when questioned about it being ready for real business apps, it’s still a “not”.