InformationWeek: The Business Value of Technology

While only 10% of respondents to our InformationWeek 2012 State of IT Staffing Survey involved with hiring or managing IT personnel anticipate increasing WAN staff over the next 12 months, 37% of those identifying it as one of the top two areas of staffing increase expect to bump up personnel by more than 10%. Read on for trends in compensation, hiring criteria, skill sets and training for an important but challenging specialty.

Expertise, automation and silo busting are all required, say early adopters.

We asked 87 respondents with private clouds in place about their experiences and quizzed 123 more who are just starting initiatives about their expectations. We also asked 204 respondents who aren’t aiming for a private cloud about their concerns. 32% say their applications are a major hurdle—and even more say they just don’t have the budget for new initiatives. Are they right to hold back?

While staff and managers are satisfied with their jobs overall, more than 50% of staff and management got raises of less than 5% or had their pay frozen, and about a quarter saw benefit cuts.

Cisco still leads, but rivals are making some inroads.

Cisco leads on the LAN, with an overall score of 77% based on product reliability, product performance and other key criteria, but HP, Dell and others are finding ways to compete. Find out how 444 IT pros who use and evaluate LAN equipment compare vendors.

We surveyed nearly 500 business technology pros and found that, for companies looking to maximize expensive bandwidth, WAN optimization works—and in many cases, works well. But there’s still plenty of room for improvement.

Network and data center staff and management demonstrate a high level of satisfaction, despite earning less than their IT peers in other disciplines.

Next-Gen WAN -- Switch to IPv6 -- Mike Fratto -- Opinion

Full The New Data Center Network RFI responses from Alcatel-Lucent, Arista, Brocade, Extreme,  Enterasys, Force10, HP and Juniper