According to a survey by IDG Research Services, 80 percent of senior-level IT leaders (director-level or higher) place a high or critical priority on Infrastructure Performance Management (IPM) and 79 percent have established a cross-domain team dedicated to managing the performance of their IT infrastructure.

According to the survey, senior-level IT leaders indicated that investments in IPM solutions are being driven by the transition to virtualization and/or the cloud (63 percent), a desire to reduce costs (61 percent) and the need to reduce infrastructure slowdowns (59 percent).

In addition, 53 percent of respondents said that a growing mobile workforce and data center consolidation projects are driving their investments in IPM solutions.

According to respondents, there are real business advantages to investing in IPM solutions, including increased visibility into infrastructure performance, improved customer service, improved business agility and more informed decision making.

The survey revealed that investments in IPM solutions have paid off:

- 66 percent of respondents have seen or expect to see improved system efficiencies.

- 61 percent of organizations saw or expect to see reduced downtime or slow time.

- 56 percent of respondents saw or expect to see improved infrastructure response times.

- 66 percent of respondents plan to increase the level of investment in IPM solutions in 2014.

As the importance of having an end-to-end view of the IT infrastructure grows, nearly four out of five responding organizations (79 percent of respondents) have established IPM teams dedicated to managing the performance of their IT infrastructure.

Thirty percent of organizations have teams that include individuals from across IT and line of business (LOB) functions while 31 percent of teams have added new hires to complement the expertise from individuals in IT and LOB functions. Eighteen percent of the teams were established by hiring individuals with specific IPM skills.

IPM teams are breaking down historical silos within organizations by promoting collaboration between various segments of IT including, the networking, server, storage, database and development teams.

In addition, these teams are creating stronger relationships with the lines of business as many teams include representation from the application “owners” themselves.

Organizations with an established IPM team are significantly more likely to see improvements in the performance of their infrastructure. The survey reveals that companies with IPM teams in place are able to identify infrastructure problems almost 2x more quickly, remediate infrastructure problems 3x faster, proactively mitigate risks 3x more efficiently and experience a more than 8x improvement in business agility than organizations without teams.

In addition, those respondents who have an established IPM team are significantly more likely to place a critical priority on IPM than those who do not have a team in place (54 percent vs. 13 percent).

About the survey: The survey was completed by 152 IT director-level or higher employees across various industries, including financial services, manufacturing, and healthcare, at organizations with employees in the 5,000-50,000 range. Questions focused on the factors driving adoption of IPM solutions, which is defined as those that enable an enterprise to holistically monitor, report, trend and diagnose IT infrastructure performance.