The study, commissioned by value-add distributor of best-of-breed open-system convergent solutions provider Zycko, discovered that 73% of financial services respondents are concerned about IT not delivering results for business. The same percentage also stated that they lost sleep over the poor performance of their IT systems.
In addition, 71% of respondents claimed that maintaining network performance for end users is their primary networking headache.
David Galton-Fenzi, group sales director at Zycko, said: “The IT director within a financial services company is faced with many challenges - compliance, managing and securing growing data volumes and ensuring it is always accessible for employees.
“Bottlenecks or Internet downtime is not an option because this could result in lost business opportunities, annoyed customers, increased client churn, financial loss and in some cases financial penalties. As such, the pressure to deliver new technologies, including VoIP or video conferencing services is intense.”
According to the research, 40% of financial services IT directors questioned admitted that being locked into proprietary systems with expensive licensing upgrades is their heaviest grievance.
Data management, such as securing increasing data volumes, also continues to plague financial services IT managers, with 39% admitting that it is a major headache.
Half of all respondents also admitted that they are not happy with their current supplier and 59% stated that they believe open standards networking will deliver significant cost savings, for example through improved choice and flexibility.
“IT managers have traditionally relied on tried and tested brand names for their networking requirements, but 2007 will see a revolution in purchasing,” added Galton-Fenzi. “The market is growing and there are already high quality open standards networking systems available to deliver the best performance available. Moving to open systems can help alleviate network headaches, save money and improve overall business performance.”