This finding was part of the IT Priorities Survey that TechRepublic and ZDNet will conduct every year as a means of tracking IT health. Indeed, with 2012 as the survey’s first year, the budget benchmark is pretty healthy.

• More than twice as many organizations increased IT budgets in 2011 as reduced them.
• IT budgets have gone up for 38.7 percent of organizations, stayed flat for 44.6 percent, and were reduced at just 16.7 percent of responding companies.
• More than 20 percent of respondents increased their IT budgets this year by more than 10 percent.

Two-thirds (66.2 percent) of businesses with greater than 500 employees are lowering IT infrastructure costs, while only 44.4 percent of businesses with 49 or fewer employees have reduced their IT infrastructure costs.

“Cloud computing gives companies of all sizes the opportunity to quickly scale their IT operations, and minimize the fixed costs traditionally associated with major implementation efforts,” writes Dallon Christensen in CFOworld. “However, moving to the cloud does present a unique set of challenges for organizations of all sizes.

“With many IT departments now reporting to the CFO, cost often becomes the key consideration during cloud implementations,” he writes. “When looking for the right cloud technologies, CFOs must focus on long-term productivity and value to their companies. Cloud computing is more than a passing fad, and companies must make sure they are focused on more than the next quarter’s financial results when making their decisions on the future of their IT operations.”

“Located in the beautiful Northwest — one of the greenest locales in North America — cloud, managed services and colocation provider EasyStreet Online Services, Inc., understands the need to make its data center operations as “green” as possible. Using wind power and flywheel energy storage, EasyStreet has a long-standing green commitment and seized the opportunity to be a beacon of how to build energy-efficient data centers.”

Read more…

Rich Bader (CEO) and Dean Oswald (VP of Sales) decided to take a 1-on-1 outside this morning. “Just Between Us,” I think it was a lovely idea.

EasyStreet and Chrysalis | BTS invite you to attend an informative three-part webinar series that will help you unlock SharePoint’s full potential.

Webinar 1: Getting Started with SharePoint
Tuesday, May 8, 10:00 a.m. PST
Learn more…   Register

‘Webinar 2: SharePoint Advanced Capabilities
Tuesday, May 22, 10:00 a.m. PST
Learn more…   Register

Webinar 3: SharePoint Deployment Options
Tuesday, June 5, 10:00 a.m. PST
Learn more…   Register

With a blend of business, technical, strategic and end-user perspectives, the Information in Motion webinar series is designed to help you unlock SharePoint’s best uses for your organization. This series is perfect for both business and technical decision-makers, experienced or new to SharePoint.

“It’s no surprise that private clouds are gaining currency,” stated a Cisco report regarding the IDG survey. “They hold the promise of meeting critical needs of enterprises today, from both an IT and a business perspective.” (At EasyStreet, we’re seeing this trend as well.)

The IDG survey showed that 46 percent of responding IT decision-makers said they are already putting part of their computing resources into a private cloud. Another 25 percent planned to do so within the coming year, and the remainder said they’d be using a private cloud within three years.

“Asked to name the top benefits of a successfully implemented private cloud, survey respondents pointed to increased IT efficiencies, lower total cost of ownership for IT infrastructure, the ability to use resources as needed and the ability to scale up or down to accommodate business needs,” the report stated.

“In the coming years, Forrester predicts that mobile apps and cloud services will merge to form what the company calls the ‘App Internet,’ where specialized apps will use the storage and processing power of PCs, smartphones and tablets and the scale and flexibility of the cloud to allow applications to communicate with other apps and devices,” writes Forrester analyst Brian Hopkins.

“The App Internet, if it plays out, would mark the end of the website as we know it and the dawn of the mobile app era,” he continues. “It’s also certain to change how developers and enterprises create apps and manage the devices that run them. This type of interaction requires a new architecture, and it’s not one that most companies currently support.”

Despite the findings of their own survey, Forrester analysts now figure the usage percentage actually could have been as high as double what the IT folks estimated.

“It often comes as a big shock to the infrastructure and operations people within IT to find they grossly underestimated the cloud services in use at their organizations,” explains Galen Schreck, Forrester’s principal analyst. “They have no idea what the application owners and developers are up to.”

We won’t know who the “winners” are until the event on April 25. Applications were received from over 30 businesses, representing leading practices and creative solutions in environmental, economic and social sustainability. Mayor Adams will unveil this year’s winners at the event.

 Click here for more information and tickets to the event.

This year, EasyStreet teamed up with Freewire Broadband for their annual March Mayhem Bracket contest. A total of three Apple iPad 3s and an Amazon Kindle Fire were awarded as prizes. Shown in the photo above are Freewire President, Jeff Burchett and Brenda Gibson of Multnomah County University. Brenda won the iPad 3 in our random drawing from the bottom 20 brackets.