Futurewatch: Enterprise

Although partnerships offer ease-of-integration within an enterprise, exclusive partnerships could potentially have too much influence to drive the industry rather than be driven by the industry.

Investment
CFOs will create optimistic budgets for 2008 and will develop at least one backup budgetary plan or contingency strategy in the event of a sudden cutback.

This is where a critical distinction needs to be made regarding investment into enterprise streaming solutions. Managers who make projections based on isolating the technology as a separate budgetary drain are making not only a technological blunder but a budgetary one as well. It must be understood that the streaming media component of any content delivery strategy be realized as an integrated functional layer in the network, as a component of the total IT investment that will extend the usefulness of what systems already exist.

Comprehension of this fact will be useful in constructing and committing to a plan. In my experience, business case development creates three possible budgetary scenarios:

1. If an initiative is introduced to decision makers and deemed too costly, resubmit a secondary budget that comprises a less robust series of releases (or phases).

2. If a recession or sudden cutback hits in mid-deployment, pull out the low-ball budget and maintain course. This is critical if enterprise technology is going to keep the momentum once a project has been initiated. If you do not have a contingency plan built into a strategic deployment—and this happens all too often—the loss looks better on the financials than a continued investment in something that is not yet proven.

3. Deliver ROI based on real-cost savings with streaming media as a shared technology. The trick in the enterprise is to leverage existing infrastructure, such as web proxy, caching, or more pertinent systems that use similar technologies (for example, applications that can all run on a single Linux server or that can share and leverage streaming media infrastructure components).

However, the reality is that enterprise investment has not changed its course. That course is based on conservative investment with calculated so-called refresh projects. At first glance it appears that there is progress being made—in reality, what exists is a "wait and see" attitude disguised as progress. I have personally been privy to deep-pocket purchases being made only to watch the effort go abandoned for another layer of investment based on trend.

In short, partnerships are channel funnels in the enterprise space because they drive the technologies that gain entry and capture the attention of a decision maker somewhere in an organization. It is up to the decision makers across lines of business in the enterprise space to talk to each other and to share budget information in order to make relevant business decisions.

Ironically, in the enterprise the No. 1 complaint I have heard over the years is that communication is too difficult, no one knows who is doing what or where they’re doing it. That is why you wind up with multiple, random efforts that fizzle out for streaming media and other similar initiatives.