|
 Faisal Paul, Head, ESS Marketing and Growth Initiatives, HP India, opines that a majority of customers want technology that allows them to scale up or down to meet changing needs, and expect to move from Capex to Opex
The year gone by saw companies being affected by the global recession. There was an urgent need to better leverage IT, and find immediate and near-term ways to cut operating costs. CIOs had to focus on cost and competitiveness, and plan for the recovery.
Things turned a lot better in the second quarter of 2009, and Indian industry showed the utmost resilience in fighting the downturn.
Despite budget constraints, demands for technology grew. CIOs looked at ways to spend smarter by prioritizing new technology investments based on business value, adopting flexible options to keep critical projects running, and aligning costs to actual use.
The new-normal
If we look at the past, economic cycles were more predictable and matched technology planning cycles. Organizations either planned for growth or a downturn. But those old rules no longer apply. The new-normal is a future that will be difficult to predict. To be successful, organizations need to be agile, planning for growth and preparing for a downturn at the same time.
As we go into 2010, three technology trends will shape the marketplace in the next decade.
Line of sight. Organizations will increasingly depend on technology to provide a line of sight to see what’s coming around the next corner. They will look to increase competitiveness and mitigate risk through business data management, information governance and business analytics.
Elastic infrastructure. Companies will look for technology infrastructure that is elastic, allowing them to scale up or down when needed. Historically, infrastructure was always built with the idea of scaling up. Going forward, this approach to it will change.
Everything as a service. Customers will look at leveraging IT as a service, whether through an in-house, outsourced, hosted, private or public cloud.
In a recent survey HP conducted among IT decision-makers in the country, 79 percent said that technology will be key to help spot market-based patterns. About 85 percent said that they needed technology which allowed them to scale up or down to meet changing needs. While 85 percent said they wanted to move from a focus on Capex to Opex.
Converged infrastructure
For two decades, organizations have been adding datacenter equipment to keep pace with business growth, creating costly technology silos that consume up to 70 percent of the IT budget. Today, across India, many datacenters are built with a one-size-fits-all mindset. This often means expense from the upfront construction of the datacenter as well as from the ongoing operations. One of the most defining trends that we will see through the next year is the convergence of infrastructure. IDC, in its top 10 predictions for 2010, forecasts that a converged fabric and evolving datacenter will be the centerpiece of this transformation. It believes that the datacenter of the next decade will almost entirely be built on a converged architecture.
A converged infrastructure integrates existing silos of compute, storage, network and facility resources with unified management to deliver a virtualized, highly-automated technology environment. With pools of shared services which can be leveraged on the fly, businesses increase the flexibility of their environments.
Solving the issue of IT sprawl is expected to create a $35 billion market opportunity by 2012 for converged infrastructure solutions.
BI to enable line of sight
Conventionally, business intelligence (BI) has always been analytical, based on analysis of historical information and for the use of decision makers at the apex of the organization. However, with a growing market, immense competition and shortened time-to-market in India, organizations are looking for real-time information to make rapid decisions at every level.
The service-centric ecosystem
As we go into the next decade, various delivery models will emerge, ultimately leading to everything as a service. Traditional models of IT will continue to exist in the enterprise space, and will in many ways be complementary to the new models. The cloud will be a delivery mechanism and the means through which everything will be delivered as a service wherever, however and whenever you need it.
| Takeaways for 2010 | - In a HP survey, 85 percent customers want technology that allows to scale up or down to meet changing needs
- 85 percent want to move from Capex to Opex.
- Organizations will depend on technology to provide a line of sight to see what’s coming round the corner
- Customers will look at leveraging IT as a service
- The cloud will be a mechanism through which everything will be delivered as a service
- Channel partners will have to assimilate specialty skills
|
Burden of legacy
Without discussing why IT is focused more on the processes of the organization rather than the actual outcome in the form of a service, let’s just say that there’s a lot of legacy stuff in IT that tends to drag us down the process path: legacy technology, legacy datacenters, legacy standards, and a legacy belief that process control will result in better IT deliverables and therefore better business outcomes.
To deliver a cloud-based service, one needs a complete ecosystem (that’s built on the principles of service centricity) from infrastructure which can be agile and scale up and down based on business needs, through management that can automate provisions or change services on the fly, to security which provides trust, and finally to a delivery mechanism that enables service providers to offer companies services on an outsourced basis and priced like utilities.
For the channel community this means significant opportunities since they, along with ISVs, will play a critical role in enabling the ecosystem. As we go into 2010, we will see more channel partners assimilate specialty skills in areas such as virtualization, datacenters and converged infrastructure. |