Most important, these companies represent the tip of an iceberg. Top-level findings of the Uptime @ Crunch Time survey, sponsored by the BPM Forum and BlueArc Corporation, a leading provider of high performance unified network storage, underscore that fast storage networking has become critical to a vast majority of big businesses. Surges in computing performance peaks and other requirements outpace their ability to keep up, the survey shows, but companies now know this and worry about it. Similarly, the survey also notes that most businesses today recognize that improvements in storage performance will lead to dramatic revenue growth.

The Uptime @ Crunch Time -- Valuing the Need for Data Speed at Critical Business Inflections study included an online survey capturing responses from more than 125 IT professionals along with in-depth executive dialogs with select IT management completed in the first quarter of 2008. The survey represents a deep dive into the issues, drivers, challenges, imperatives and best practices in maintaining system uptime in the midst of exploding demand for increased data performance and storage.