It has an irresistible allure in December–that inevitable
look back at the year that was. And the world of IT is no different. We’ve run
several polls this year and we thought you might find it interesting to see how
your career, and your company’s infrastructure, stacks up to others in your
line of work. Here’s what we found out.

The IT state of mind

Let’s talk about you for a minute. We had a great deal of
talk on the site this year about job satisfaction. Some of the discussions
regarding career garnered responses in the hundreds. (For example, TechRepublic
member posted a comment about his dissatisfaction with the field of IT
in this discussion and it unleashed a torrent of similar feelings from
other TechRepublic members.) We asked in one poll if you consider yourself an
IT generalist or an IT specialist. Figure A shows how the answers shake out.

Figure A

Then we asked the big one–how satisfied are you with your
career? As you can see in Figure B, the majority of respondents were either
satisfied or very satisfied. But the number of respondents not satisfied is
nothing to shake a stick at.

Figure B

The state of your company

Several polls asked questions about the state of your
company’s IT infrastructure. We asked how much data you have on your file
servers. Although most of the respondents said that they have under 250 GB,
nearly 20% said they had over 1 TB.

We wanted to know how many companies have deployed VoIP, one
of the most widely hyped technologies in IT. The results indicated a near tie
between those who had deployed and those who plan to, with 19% saying they had
no plans for a VoIP deployment. (If you do plan to deploy, you might find VoIP FAQ
helpful.)

When it comes to which Web browsers companies support, most
support IE only. Coming in second, however, are those who support both Firefox
and IE, as you can see In Figure C. (Here’s a discussion in which some
TechRepublic folks
discuss their browser preferences.)

Figure C

When we asked what type of intranet collaboration platform
you use in your company, the results showed a near tie between SharePoint
at 30% and Wiki
at 28%. As you can see in Figure D, a good portion of companies don’t use an
intranet collaboration platform at all.

Figure D

One topic sure to spark a lot of activity on the
TechRepublic site every time it’s mentioned is Linux. (For an example, take a
look at this discussion in which one member asks the Linux crowd
to defend itself as a better OS than Windows.) We asked our members how
many Linux servers they have in their organizations. You can see how it broke
down in Figure E.

Figure E

Your thoughts on vendors

Which hardware vendor has the best customer service?
According to our poll results, it’s Dell, followed closely by HP. If our
results (Figure F) are any indication, Sun and Gateway have some PR work to do.

Figure F

When we asked which company has had the best impact on the
use of IT, the unsurprising leader was Microsoft at 50% with Cisco Systems at a distant second.

And last, just to see how many budding IT Nostradamuses we
have out there, we asked you when you thought Microsoft would officially
release Vista. Most of you tended to go with Microsoft’s promise of late 2006,
but otherwise the choices were pretty evenly spread out among Q3 2006, Q1 2007,
and Q2 2007, as you can see in Figure G.

Figure G