Depending on your company and size, studies indicate that up to 70 percent of your IT budget is earmarked for maintenance and support, making it a large target for budget cuts.

However, a recent Tecala Group study found that IT maintenance was the highest budget priority for four out of five organizations in 2012, while a third of companies allocated 80 percent of their budgets toward maintenance-related activities. One in four organizations spent 70 percent of their budget on maintenance compared to 30 percent on innovation, and only seven percent of respondents prioritized innovation over maintenance in their IT budgets.

"The results confirm that when it comes to IT, many organizations were simply treading water in 2012," said Tecala Group sales and marketing director, Pieter DeGunst, in a statement. "Their IT strategies and budgets were focused on maintaining current capabilities rather than building for future needs. If allowed to continue for too long, there is a danger that this will only exacerbate the disconnect between between business and IT objectives.”

Within the data center, one in five organizations expect to virtualize more than 90 percent of their production servers by the end of 2013. The most compelling drivers for server virtualization and physical-to-virtual conversion are business continuity and disaster recovery, operational flexibility and agility, high availability and server clustering and sever consolidation.

XS International is an IT services company that specializes in cross-platform OEM and alternative IT maintenance, data center consolidation, data center relocation, IT asset disposition and IT hardware and software sales.

Third-party maintenance companies offer cost-effective maintenance and support agreements that save as much as 40 percent in ongoing maintenance costs while keeping service levels agreements (SLAs) the same – if not improving them. XSi offers alternative IT maintenance solutions for Cisco, Enterasys, SGI, Juniper, HP, Dell, Brocade, IBM, EMC, F5 Networks (News - Alert), Sun, Oracle and Hitachi. To learn more about how you can reap the benefits of third-party IT maintenance and still keep maintenance as your top priority in your IT budget, click here.