Thanks for your interest in this survey! We've gotten enough responses and the survey is now closed.

Two or three times per year, Ars runs surveys in order to help us better understand what kinds of stories you all want to read about. ITDMs—that is, "IT decision makers," the folks in IT who participate in discussions on what technologies companies should invest in—are a particular area of focus for us, because you make up such a large percentage of the Ars audience and because on your shoulders rest a tremendous amount of influence and responsibility.

And it's that time of year again! We've got another survey fresh out of the oven, and if you're an ITDM, we'd love your input.

Services, services everywhere...

This time around, I'd like to pick your collective brain on how your company is approaching (or not approaching) transitioning various IT services from old-school centralized datacenter hosting to new-fangled X-as-a-service offerings. Given the breadth of hosted platforms and the rapid infiltration of the hybrid cloud concept into mainstream businesses, the "X" in "X-as-a-service" can at this point stand for almost anything—and I'd like to know your opinions on whether you think your company is striking the right balance between clinging to the datacenter and embracing the quickly growing (for better or worse) standard of anything-as-a-service.

There are a few other items on the survey this time beyond asking about things-as-a-service; I've also included a few questions to gauge what you think about your companies' approaches toward edge computing and storage management.

Storage in particular is a topic near and dear to my own heart—I used to spend all day up to my elbows in EMC ProSphere (née EMC Control Center) arguing with a stable of Symmetrix DMX and VMAX arrays, and fortunately things have evolved considerably in the last few years—you crazy kids today have sophisticated management tools that would have blown the gray hairs right out of my angry sysadmin beard, and we want to know if you think storage management and planning is easy or still as annoyingly complex and quirky as it was ten years ago.

We who are about to survey salute you

One final note: I'm specifically looking for answers from ITDMs—and that could mean anything from a junior sysadmin whose boss occasionally asks for advice on vendors to an enterprise architect writing RFPs. An ITDM could be a senior developer choosing the toolchain components for the company's production work, or an IT purchasing specialist negotiating support and service contracts. You might even be the C-suite who has signature authority over the whole mess. If you're an ITDM of any stripe and you'd be willing to sit through a reasonably short 20-question survey, please click here to get started.

The survey is now closed—thanks so much for the responses!