EMEA Companies’ Transformational IT Projects ‘Produce Meagre ROI’

Businesses across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are failing to realise full return on investment (ROI) from transformational IT projects – including the cloud, big data, mobility and social – championed and sanctioned at board-level, a report claims.

Produced by Riverbed Technology, the report, entitled ‘The Transformers’, is based on a survey of more than 1,000 IT decision makers at companies in multiple vertical sectors and across 10 regions in EMEA – UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy, Switzerland, Benelux, Russia, Middle East, and South Africa.

The survey findings suggest that only one in four companies in EMEA meet the definition of a ‘Transformer’, defined as a company that describes its use of IT infrastructure to drive ‘innovation excellence’. Riverbed suggests that the success of Transformer companies is supported by a number of metrics. For example:

• Seventy per cent of Transformers expect ROI on all or most new technology investments within two to three years compared to 57% of non?Transformers.
• Sixty-one per cent of new IT applications or services introduced in the last 12 months are described as a complete success for Transformers compared to 52% for non?Transformers.
• Twenty-nine per cent of Transformers see more than three-quarters of projects as a success compared to 16% of non?Transformers.
• Transformers are more likely to have reviewed various aspects of their network or application infrastructure. Seventy-seven per cent of Transformers have already completed or are currently implementing a datacentre consolidation or optimisation project versus 49% of non-Transformers.

The survey also found that investment in new enterprise applications and technologies has dramatically increased across EMEA in the last two years. Eighty-two per cent of IT decision makers say the proportion of their overall spend dedicated to new business-critical applications has increased.

On average, 25% of IT budgets are now devoted to deploying new technologies or innovations, in particular cloud computing (59%), social media (45%) and mobile application development (44%).

“The speed of change in enterprise technologies over the last five years has been astonishing,” said Willem Hendrickx, senior vice president (SVP) sales EMEA at Riverbed. “Social media, big data, mobility, and cloud computing have disrupted existing business models.

“Business leaders see these new technologies as a significant opportunity to innovate, improve efficiency, and provide differentiated customer experiences in highly competitive marketplaces. The challenge, however, is to ensure that repeated adoption of the ‘next big thing’ delivers maximum benefit and optimal value to the business. That is the question this study set out to answer.”

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