We hear and read a lot about lowering costs, IT budget management, but also operational growth and efficiency. So how do organizations plan and prepare their businesses to be competitive for the future in the face of such challenges?
Two trends emerged from a Gartner survey of 2300 CIO's:
1. Budgets were flat for 2012 and trending flat for the short-term
2. CEOs depend more and more on CIO's that have a deep understanding of IT cost drivers and the relationship between optimized IT infrastructure and innovation.
CEO's see new technology as a way to lower costs and increase competitiveness. They realize now that information technology is the new basis of competition and that they require a current technology platform to be able to compete. Therefore IT cost management doesn't mean cost reduction, but rather smarter spend.
Where to start on this journey – Virtualization and Cloud should be top of mind
The first place to start on this road to competiveness is by improving data center efficiency to yield tangible benefits to the organization. The days of virtualization being used only as a tactical tool to drive consolidation and higher system utilization are quickly ending.
Virtualization 3.0
IDC states that we are now transitioning to the third era of virtualization deployment (3.0) that is taking on cloud-like attributes for highly virtualized and automatically managed internal deployments.
A good read about tackling an advanced virtualization approach is found in the IDC white paper: