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We can’t ignore the fact that the overall economy has caught a bad case of the flu, but the fact is that the demands on IT have not changed as a result of the economy.  It’s easy to get distracted in times like these – but we’ve all got to focus…harder than ever before. Data centers across the globe are in the midst of the most significant transformation since the shift from mainframe to client/server computing.   Yes, spending may curtail but a great deal of investing will continue.  It has to in order to support business goals.  Forward-thinking businesses aren’t going to “turtle” and wait it out; they’re going to look for opportunities in the mire. Every organization wants to be “in position” for when the economy rebounds.  For some companies that will mean having higher availability, reliable disaster recovery, SaaS applications and a lower cost model.  CIOs are focusing on negotiating lower rates from suppliers, standardizing their hardware to reduce complexity and support requirements, locking in longer term services agreements with favorable terms, and outsourcing their applications and parts of their edge infrastructure.  While cost reduction may be the focal point, realistically, companies won’t have much flexibility to make drastic cuts without impacting their business operations.  So in reality, the focus is on IT and business process efficiency, TCO, ROI, and data center reliability. This should accelerate the shift to SaaS application adoption and to SOA architectures that employ “pay as you go” models. A number of companies are actively looking to move their edge and non-mission critical applications to cloud service providers or hosting companies where they are charged by the transaction or amount of computing resources used.   Shifting the responsibility to a third party gets companies out of the “IT competency’” business without losing any of the benefits of technology innovation.  Naturally, companies will think twice about replacing old hardware and many companies have resorted to a homogeneous or “single vendor” strategy.  The belief is that buying from the biggest vendor in any category is safer in times like this, even if the solution is only “good enough.”  I think we’d agreed that the impending industry consolidation adds complexity to the data center and to budget pressures, but CIOs should look at their longer term strategy and understand how the “best solutions” fit into their models, architecture and business needs.  What many are finding is that the key lies in next generation data center tools that effectively manage highly shared and automated computing environments. So, while human (and business) instinct might tell us to turtle and wait out the contraction, in reality, the opportunities for getting it right for when things turn around again have never been more obvious.