In a bid to increase network performance, simplify management and enhance business efficiency, more than three-quarters of enterprises across Europe, the Middle East and Africa (EMEA) are looking to consolidate their existing IT infrastructure in the next 12 months, according to new research commissioned by Brocade. The research found that 76 percent of enterprises consider IT consolidation to be one of the top three IT issues they face in the coming year, followed by both virtualization and security.

The 600 EMEA CIOs questioned in this study expect tomorrow’s corporate networks to fulfill a wide range of sometimes-conflicting demands. They want unprecedented scalability but reduced management complexity (61 percent). They demand seamless mobility and increased agility (38 percent), and nearly half want emerging networking technologies to complement the investments they are making today, instead of forcing them to refresh the entire environment in a wholesale “rip-and-replace” exercise, while reducing the total cost of ownership.

“Tomorrow’s networking environment will consolidate user application traffic and storage data traffic onto a single, high-performance, highly available network that has the built-in intelligence to identify different traffic types and handle them appropriately, according to predefined rules. The benefits of a unified network are clear in terms of increasing performance and enabling business productivity, not to mention reducing complexity,” stated Alberto Soto, Brocade vice president, EMEA.

Network performance is now a critical business driver, with over half of respondents citing reduced productivity (resulting from legacy systems) as having a significant effect on business success. As testament to this, 40 percent of IT departments are now spending between 10 to 30 percent of their time reacting to network downtime instead of investing in business development.

However, according to the research, the drive to consolidate does have its barriers. A third of European respondents face resistance from within their organization while application diversity (49 percent) and platform diversity (42 percent) are also seen as major hurdles to overcome.