Bangkok--13 Dec--Aziam Burson-Marsteller
By Dr. Beng Teck Liang
Managing Director and General Manager of HP Enterprise Business
Hewlett-Packard (Thailand) Ltd.
1. What were key challenges and opportunities in the IT industry in 2010?
Data Center Convergence:
Many organizations have been adding data center equipment to keep pace with business growth, in turn creating costly technology silos that consume up to 70 percent of the IT budget. Solving the issue of IT sprawl is expected to create a $35 billion global market opportunity by 2012 for converged infrastructure solutions.
In 2010, HP accelerated the adoption of technologies that created a converged infrastructure — solutions that unify computing, storage and network assets, allowing customers to make the most efficient use of technology resources that drive business innovation.
This approach is helping businesses accelerate the delivery of application environments in a predictable, repeatable way, making the most efficient use of IT, facility and staff resources to drive business innovation. Organizations can deliver any application, anywhere, anytime; flex resources on demand in an optimized way; unleash productivity of administrators, systems and facilities; provide predictable continuity of service; and accelerate time-to-business value from IT investment.
Application Modernization:
Throughout 2010, more and more CIOs recognized the need to upgrade inefficient systems to reduce costs and increase innovation. In today’s self-service world, a company’s business applications must be able to support changes quickly, while keeping pace with competitors and ensuring continuous operations without disruptions.
However, many organizations have been working within rigid technology environments that are costly to maintain and expensive to update.
Many companies hence have turned to application modernization, which can be implemented quickly to help organizations shift the focus from the costly maintenance of legacy systems to investment in innovation.
Cloud Computing:
CIOs in businesses and government organizations have also faced increasing pressure to deliver innovative technology-enabled services to meet ever-changing demands. One delivery model enterprises have increasingly turned to is cloud computing, which provides newfound levels of agility, collaboration and speed.
To get the most out of cloud computing, organizations need to understand where and how their portfolio of technology services can benefit from cloud sourcing. They must weigh cloud against traditional delivery models and select the best method to achieve their goals within budget.
2. What top trends will shape the IT industry in Asia Pacific in 2011?
With the adoption of mobile and cloud computing, everything is becoming connected and immediate. As a result, customers and citizens expect responses in seconds and “instants”, instead of weeks and days.
Recent research[1] conducted on behalf of HP reveals the role of IT in Asia Pacific is shifting from chiefly being the administrator of the enterprise, to becoming one and the same with the enterprise:
— 80 percent of senior business and government executives believe that to better serve customers and citizens they must rapidly adapt the enterprise to meet changes in consumer expectations.
— 73 percent believe that technology is the key to business and government innovation.
— 76 percent indicated that in order to be successful, technology needs to be embedded in the business or government service.
Instant-On Enterprise:
The Instant-On Enterprise delivers differentiated competitive advantage, serving customers, employees, partners and citizens with whatever they want and need, instantly. To facilitate customers on their Instant-On journey, HP’s Hybrid Delivery helps them develop a strategy for their services, through analyzing an enterprise’s overall workload to determine the best fit for hybrid environments or by providing a structured understanding of the activities required in the shift to a hybrid delivery model.
As companies move towards an Instant-On Enterprise, HP sees the following enterprise technology trends gaining traction in the upcoming year:
Application Transformation:
The Instant-On Enterprise runs on applications that are always available and can easily adapt to new opportunities. Never before has the need for application flexibility been so pervasive and powerful, with applications being at the heart of delivering innovation for businesses and governments. Yet, today’s offerings are negatively impacting organizations’ ability to deliver new services that drive advantage.
— Unresponsive and rigid legacy systems drain the technology budget with their inability to meet quickly changing business demands. Recent research conducted on behalf of HP reveals that almost half of the organizations surveyed in Asia Pacific have applications more than eight years old. Within that group more than 15 percent have applications more than 16 years old. More than half of the respondents agree that the costs, resources and time required to update and maintain legacy applications negatively impacts their ability to quickly deliver new services.
— The applications portfolio also has increased in size, leading to the current challenge of application “sprawl” or “bloat.” The average Fortune 100 company has 35 million lines of code, a number that is growing at 10 percent per year.
— This aging and ”bloated” applications portfolio, coupled with the challenges set by new delivery models such as mobile and cloud computing, will require appropriate application transformation strategies to be executed. Almost 60 percent of survey respondents indicated this was a key priority project for 2011.
HP believes in transforming applications and processes designed for another era, and in helping enterprises gain control over aging applications and inflexible processes that challenge innovation and agility by governing their responsiveness and pace of change.
Converged Infrastructure:
The Instant-On Enterprise is built on technology that can rapidly and reliably scale up and down to meet changing needs. It neither over- nor under-provisions technology, but instead instantly meets enterprise demands.
For many enterprises, rigid infrastructure along with both physical and virtual sprawl has inhibited enterprise agility. As a result, ongoing IT operations and maintenance consumes more than 70 percent of IT resources, leaving only 30 percent dedicated to innovation.
The HP Converged Infrastructure, an architectural blueprint for the data center of the future, is designed to close this gap between what the enterprise requires and what IT can deliver. It enables clients to eliminate technology silos, while integrating servers, storage and networking into shared pools of interoperable resources, and reducing power consumption and cooling requirements. A common management platform manages and provisions these pools of resources.
Enterprise Security:
In an Instant-On Enterprise, chief information officers (CIOs) and chief technology officers (CTOs) know that enterprise security is a necessity to protect assets without constricting the flow of information between enterprises and governments and their customers or citizens.
Organizations and governments are embracing new and increasingly open ways of connecting with customers and citizens, through mobile applications, social networking, and cloud services, and with this security is becoming more challenging. A recent independent report by Forrester Research, Inc. shows that consumerization is the new technology trend of most concern to security executives. When asked, nearly half (46 percent) of enterprises cited concerns about smartphones, and 38 percent were concerned about Web 2.0 technologies.
To be an Instant-On Enterprise, IT must develop integrated security approaches that protect business assets while making them available to authorized users. However, research conducted on behalf of HP indicated that in the past year one in two senior business, government and technology executives in Asia Pacific have experienced impediments to innovation, technology agility or customer service due to security constraints.
HP Enterprise Security solutions will thus help businesses and governments protect data, defend resources and manage risk, while driving innovation.
Information Optimization:
Businesses and government agencies are facing a number of challenges associated with rapidly expanding data. Growing legal and compliance requirements are being placed on IT, while budgets to manage that are often flat or declining. At the same time, business and government leaders are also demanding timely delivery of better information to aid real-time decision making.
According to new HP research, only 18 percent of senior business and technology executives in Asia Pacific said IT provided them with the information they need all of the time. This problem will only get worse:
— In 2005, mankind created 150 exabytes of digital data. In 2010, it will create eight times more.
— 88 percent of senior technology and business executives believe that storage assets will grow at least 20 percent over the next two years. More than half of the 88 percent believe that storage assets will grow over 30 percent.
— Reactive legal discovery costs approximately $1.8 million per terabyte of data.
To overcome these challenges, organizations can implement HP Information Optimization solutions to turn their information environment into one where information is managed for efficiency and compliance, while being leveraged for competitive business advantage. With HP Information Optimization solutions, information is first controlled, and then turned into insight.
(1) [1] “HP Research: The Instant-On Enterprise,” Coleman Parkes Research Ltd., October 2010.