Dr Steve Hodgkinson, Research Director, IT, Asia Pacific

Ovum publishes Australian CIO Survey: ICT Challenges, Investment Priorities, and Sourcing Approaches

Our survey of 63 Australian CIOs across a range of sectors reveals a slightly surprising picture of the reality of ICT management compared to the media hype.

While alternative sourcing approaches such as shared services, outsourcing, and cloud services are much discussed at conferences and in the media, the reality for this group of CIOs is that ICT management is still about managing the people, processes, and technologies of the in-house ICT department. It is therefore not surprising that a shortage of people and skills was regarded as one of the major challenges.

However, outsourcing and cloud services are projected to account for one-third of ICT activities overall in the next 1–2 years. Change is definitely coming, while perhaps more slowly than expected, and momentum for cloud services in …

Brian Riggs, Principal Analyst, Enterprise Telecoms

At Enterprise Connect in March 2013 Avaya introduced a set of platforms on which its partners – which include operators, systems integrators, and resellers – can build to offer fully hosted communications services. The move is a marked departure for the company, whose revenues are derived mainly from selling communications software and solutions that enterprises deploy on-premise.

Avaya also has a services business that sells managed and hosted communications services to a highly restricted set of business customers. Last month’s announcement, however, represented something new for the company.

In addition to selling its communications solutions and services to businesses, Avaya will now sell them to service providers, which will use them as the basis for the cloud-based unified communications (UC), video conferencing, and contact center services that they sell to enterprises.

This is a good move on the part of Avaya, which has lagged behind …

Aryaka, a company which offers wide area network optimisation in the cloud, has collated together several pieces of research emphasising the importance of cloud in a modern enterprise.

Pooling together studies from the likes of CIO Insight, Forrester and IDC, Aryaka has examined cloud strategies at different points of the enterprise, predominantly assessing the UK market.

Among the statistics cited in the infographic include an interesting summation of the top cloudy growth areas. According to the 1300 people surveyed, IaaS (infrastructure as a service) is predicted as the key growth area in cloud computing by 41% of respondents, followed by management and security (27%) and PaaS (platform as a service (26.6%).

This arguably goes against current wisdom that PaaS is the quickest growing (albeit still smallest) cloud market, SaaS (software as a service) – which trailed behind on 17.4% – will still increase healthily whilst IaaS will flatten out.

Last …

At the beginning of 2013, we sent out invites to our IT infrastructure monitoring community with regards to their adoption or consideration of Converged Infrastructure. As it turns out, not only is Convergence a hot topic right now; 1/3 of our respondents are already running Converged Infrastructure in their environments.

We sent our survey to over 100,000 people to truly dig in to the actual adoption rates around Converged Infrastructure, the number of real-world deployments being considered in 2013, how well current deployments are actually working, and candid insights from the innovative companies already harnessing the power that comes from convergence. You can download a copy of the full report here.

Highlights from the survey include:

The Converged Infrastructure adoption curve is quite steep at this time

• 30% of respondents are already living with Converged Infrastructure.
• Half of respondents (51%) are actively considering or planning to adopt Converged …

All enterprises, regardless of what they produce or the services they deliver, are really information businesses.

The accuracy, speed and precision of IT systems means the difference between winning or losing customers, keeping supply chains profitable, and solidly translating new concepts into revenue-producing products and services.  The world’s best-run services businesses have customer-driven IT as part of their DNA; it is very much who these companies are internally.

In the recently published Gartner report CEO and Senior Executive Survey 2013: 21 Top Companies Admired for Competitive IT  completed between October and December, 2012, which was part of the 2013 CEO and Senior Business Executive Survey, C-level respondents were asked to name the companies they most admired in terms of their ability to apply IT-related business capabilities for competitive advantage.   

Respondents were also asked to limit their responses only to their own and related industries.

391 respondents participated in the …

The term Big Data is going to become a key part of the forward-looking business technology debate among informed, proactive and ICT savvy executives. But what’s really driving the growing demand for meaningful solutions?

While most companies are collecting, storing and analysing data, they continue to struggle with both the business and IT challenges of Big Data — more data is not necessarily better.

Enormous amounts of data are being generated daily by smartphones, sensors, video cameras, smart meters, and other connected devices, adding to the huge store of information from traditional sources.

This «data avalanche» represents a potential gold mine of insights, but a new study commissioned by Cisco reveals that IT professionals and businesses are challenged to extract strategic value from their data.

The Cisco Connected World Technology Report (CCWTR) surveyed IT professionals across 18 countries to examine the IT readiness, challenges, technology gaps, and strategic value of …

Communications provider CommScope has released a report, entitled the 2013 Global Enterprise Survey, to assess which aspects of IT were changing the paradigm for organisations around the world – and found that cloud computing and enterprise mobility were the biggest tickets on the list.

The research, which is taken every three years and gathered over 1100 responses from 63 countries in five continents, found the top five disruptive IT forces as enterprise mobility, cloud services, 40Gb and 100Gb Ethernet, infrastructure intelligence and green power.

Of course, many of these overlap, with cloud and mobility often going hand-in-hand for corporate IT policy. Respondents also stated that server virtualisation and cloud were the key components of a green, energy-saving strategy.

44% of respondents said that cloud services were a game-changer, with the same number citing enterprise mobility as a key trend. The research found other contextual statistics:

• Just under three quarters (74%) of …

Roy Illsley, Principal Analyst, Ovum Software

IBM recently made three significant announcements about its vision for how cloud computing will be adopted by enterprise customers.

First, IBM believes that open standards are needed to drive increased customer demand for workload portability in a hybrid cloud environment. Second, IBM has segmented the adoption of cloud computing as two different strategies serving two different reasons to adopt cloud computing, namely a cloud-enabled approach and a cloud-centric approach. A third element that IBM introduced to the cloud debate was role-converged infrastructure solutions, and how these will enable both of the cloud adoption strategies.

Ovum considers that the concept of an open standard-based approach to cloud computing represents one such way a technology can gain wider adoption, but cautions that it will need wide cross-vendor support to make an impact on the market.

IBM backs OpenStack as the way to wider cloud adoption

At …

By Luca Smuraglia, General Manager, Enterprise Business, Easynet

I’m a numbers man. I like to look at all the data available and make a decision based on fact, not just instinct. And I’m not alone: whether at work or at home, we all like to arm ourselves with information before we make a decision.

It’s empowering and reassuring. E-Consultancy’s recent Multichannel Retail Survey found that 90% of consumers research online before buying in-store. We amass vast quantities of data as businesses and as consumers, and we’re constantly hearing about explosions of information, tsunamis of data. According to Ofcom’s International Communications Market Report, the average UK mobile connection consumed over 424MB of data – higher even than Japan (392MB) in second place and the United States (319MB).  

Information as an asset to a business is more important than ever, but the term ‘big data’ is misleading …

The cloud movement is about much more than the service offerings. It’s a core ingredient of a larger commercial transformation movement – where savvy leaders are using business technology to advance their operations and accelerate their key processes.

According to the latest market study by International Data Corporation (IDC), worldwide spending on hosted private cloud (HPC) services will be more than $24 billion in 2016. IDC says that they define HPC as an operational model for deploying computing infrastructure services of many types via the cloud.

IDC forecasts that HPC spending will experience a compound annual growth rate of more than 50 percent during the 2012-2016 period, as companies look to managed cloud services in its various forms as a means to transform the ‘how’ of what they provide to their customers.

Evolution of Public and Private Cloud Models

IDC believes that hosted private cloud offerings will become the backbone …