Growth in Virtualization, Security and Collaboration

To salute more than 15 years of its Cisco Certified Internetwork Expert (CCIE) certification and to gain insight into what digital infrastructures will look like over the next five years, Cisco today announced the results of the most comprehensive end-customer survey ever conducted of the international CCIE community.

Commissioned as part of Cisco’s overall 25th anniversary celebration, the research was conducted by Illuminas, a strategic research firm, to explore the unique perspective of some of the most knowledgeable and well respected information technology professionals in the networking industry. A total of 970 CCIE holders from 79 countries participated; their employers range from Fortune 500 enterprises to small and midsize organizations representing a wide variety of industries.

Survey Highlights:

Rapid Adoption of Virtualization

• More than two-thirds of the CCIE holders surveyed said virtualization will be the top networking investment over the next five years.
• Organizations are increasingly adopting virtualization as an energy, space and cost savings measure.
• CCIE holders expect energy efficiency in the data center to be the top green networking initiative impacting networks over the next five years.

Increasing Security Requirements for Increasingly Sophisticated Networks

• CCIE holders believe it is critical that networking professionals stay ahead of the increasing number of internal and external security breaches that jeopardize today’s networks. Over the next three to five years, security and risk management will be the networking skills in greatest demand, according to 64 percent of the survey participants. One out of three expects network and information security breaches to remain a top concern of CIOs over the next five years.
• As organizations embrace collaboration technologies across business and geographic boundaries, network security will continue to be a critical component of IT strategy.

Collaboration via Unified Communications and Video

• Unified communications will lead to increased collaboration in the workforce. 47 percent of the CIE holders said. Thirty percent of the respondents expect that accommodating the needs of a highly collaborative, global workforce will be a top CIO concern over the next five years as companies strive for creating competitive advantage.
• Collaboration and Web conferencing solutions will play a key role as enterprises prepare to address the complexities of this highly mobile, highly collaborative global business environment.
• Fifty-two percent of the respondents believe that real-time video solutions, such as Cisco TelePresence, will be one of the top green initiatives affecting networks and network engineers.

At OpenView Venture Partners, we have deep experience investing in expansion stage virtualization, security and collaboration companies. We believe these sectors will continue to flourish given the emergence of cloud computing infrastructure and services and we will continue to embrace these trends in delivering superior returns for our investors.