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Over the next several posts I'll be exploring the impact the financial crisis is having on all of us - vendors, customers, individuals and leaders. I hope we'll get some good discussion going - and be able to openly explore how we all can manage through this. After all, challenges breed opportunities. The financial market troubles have changed perceptions, strategies and expectations 180 degrees in a span of hours.  Many say what was once considered prudent course of business is now perceived to be reckless, as enterprises, households and individuals 'batten down the hatches.' Let's face it, we're all unsure of the best moves to make at this point. While we can't ignore the fact that the overall economy has caught a case of the flu, let’s separate that from what's happening within the IT sector.  Commerce, the buying and selling of stuff, is not going to stop.  Competitive actions aren’t going on hiatus. The fact is that IT spending will continue to be driven by the strategic objectives like globalization, aligning IT with business goals, and increasingly by infrastructure initiatives to increase agility, reduce complexity and maximize ROI. And although overall IT spending is expected to slow, as we look forward in time, data center spending and the energy it consumes will account for an increasingly larger percentage of the overall IT market. The bottom line is, things don't just stop. IT organizations, under sudden budget pressures, will change how they acquire new technology. They have shifted from experimenting with new ways to solve emerging challenges to, now, implementing proven solutions that demonstrably address discrete business issues. And they want these proven solutions from vendors that deliver what they promise and are committed to making their customers successful. That doesn’t mean companies will opt for the ‘safe buy.’ Safe buys aren’t always the best solutions. So while scrutiny on IT investments just increased significantly, this actually opens tremendous opportunities for management to re-evaluate their investments and solve today’s problems with the best solutions. The need for proven disaster recovery, high availability, easy-to-use management tools that support heterogeneous environments has never been higher.  Now is the best time to develop a plan and implement a strategy to achieve a reliable dynamic data center. Because when the economy begins to roar back, you’ll be ready.