It has become increasingly difficult for companies to cold-shoulder buzzwords in enterprise computing. ‘Cloud computing’, ‘virtualization’ and ‘standardization’ are crowding into the vocabulary of senior executives, be they in an organization’s treasury, data manage- ment, human resources or logistics department.
The ultimate goal is to apply those technologies that serve the corporate bottom line, because this is an age where – as one executive puts it – the ability to leverage cost-cutting technologies defines the most competitive companies.
More and more enterprises are keen on taking advantage of new technologies that allow them to capture opportunities in a business environment where the outlook for growth has improved, according to Natalie Wan. This has led to more consultancy-led and business transformation projects proliferating around the region, in particular for cloud-related initiatives, which is the reason why the senior research manager of IDC’s Asia-Pacific services research group expects the IT services market in the Asia-Pacific ex Japan to continue to do well after the strong recovery in 2010. She forecasts a 9.4% year-on-year growth for the market in 2011.
A fair number of larger corporates around the region are oozing cash, like chocolate from Willy Wonka’s factory, making them prime candidates for investments in enhanced IT capabilities and platforms. Yet, the heightened level of corporate board scrutiny and worries about the possibility of a sudden turn for the worse in the economic environment necessitate a degree of prudence in spending the cash which leads the corporates to explore the options provided by technology outsourcing which, in turn, has translated into a strong growth momentum for various types of IT services in the region.
Andrew Sampson says the cloud computing buzz has certainly caught on among corporates and financial institutions in the region in a bid to cut IT costs and respond to the more dynamic business environment. Under a cloud computing environment, the general manager for Hitachi Data System for Hong Kong and Macau explains, applications and services are not tethered to specific hardware components and processing is handled across a distributed, globally accessible network of resources, which are dispensed on demand, as a service.
As IT budgets continue to be stretched, cloud computing is enabling CIOs to do more with virtualization, standardization and other fundamental features of cloud computing that lower the cost of IT, simplify IT service management and accelerate service delivery. In doing so, CIOs can leverage available infrastructure more effectively to support the business goals of their company. By lessening the drag on data centre resources, cloud computing is enabling IT to hone in on real value creation, namely innovation.
Sending them up to the clouds
According to Sampson, the goal of a technology provider such as HDS is helping enterprises to better manage the storage of critical data in a way that will make it easier for them to take advantage of the cloud computing environment. When asked about the rationale of taking a bevy of journalists and clients on a helicopter ride to offer them a dramatic view of the towering Hong Kong cityscape, Sampson offers: “We are trying to send them to the clouds.”
His group launched an enterprise data storage platform in October 2010 that was a vast improvement from the one launched back in 2007. “We are in a world of data and information and the volume of data that enterprises have to cope with has been growing rapidly. Hospitals, for instance, create magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) scans and X-rays, most of them in three dimensions (3D), which patients may want to keep for a long time. Corporates too need to find ways to keep such records for a long time. In the financial services industry, banks are not allowed to delete data and may be required to keep records of their transactions for years.”
The whole social networking phenomenon has led to more data being created and stored. This has prompted companies such as Hitachi to respond with new products that can handle growth in data storage requirements and make the process more cost-effective, Sampson notes.
In Hong Kong, the group counts among its multinational customers distribution companies and manufacturers in almost any imaginable industry, including banks with large regional data centres in Hong Kong. Such large companies have to continually increase their storage capacity. Local Hong Kong companies too make up a major client segment and while their requirements are of a smaller magnitude, they still have to deal with a lot of the complexity. Smaller companies spend more time dealing with performance issues.
Sampson admits that technology glitches can cause a great many problems. “If a company’s e-mail system is not working, employees become frustrated. In quite a number of companies, once the e-mail system fails, everybody stops working to chat and idle away their time, wandering about the office. Not only does productivity come down but the company faces legal issues as well when customers are not served.” This explains, he points out, why Hitachi aims to provide every corporate with a high-performance platform where data are amply protected and secured.
Sampson says the new platform enables corporates to enhance performance by as much 30% to 40% and results in a 30% to 40% reduction in both power and floor space requirements. “There are plenty of corporate customers who spend more on power to run their date centres than they do on actual service or storage. Not only do they pay for electricity to power the hardware, they need air-conditioners to cool the computers too. More often than not, they end up paying more for power than for storage and service.”
The new storage platform introduced in the region in October is the industry’s first 3D scaling platform, according to Sampson, allowing organizations to become more efficient operationally and cost-wise in virtualized data centres.
Dynamic data centres
Hitachi virtual storage platform (VSP) helps transform data centres “into dynamic information centres where access to blocks, files and content is seamless and resides in a fluid and virtualized environment”, as Sampson puts it.
He argues that the data migration capabilities of the platform greatly reduce outage windows. The 3D scaling – scaling up in performance, scaling out in capacity and scaling deep with external storage connectivity – delivers extreme performance and capacity for robust disaster recovery and high availability systems.
Sampson believes there is no doubt that today’s data centres are reaching an inflection point, evolving into something that is more agile, more scalable and more efficient, with storage vendors delivering on the critical requirements. “Enterprises are looking to transform their data centres into an infrastructure that meets the demanding needs of today’s virtualized environment.”
Wan of IDC holds that the growth in demand for IT services in the region will be largely driven by outsourcing and project-oriented services, as well as an uptake of cloud services. The explosion in outsourcing of a large proportion of corporates’ technology needs has been motivated by a search for alternatives to traditional outsourcing models, triggered by the availability of IT-as-a-service and pay-as-you-go models.
This has resulted in increasing interest in hosted application management as a transition to a public cloud, along with data centre consolidation and virtualization projects, according to Wan. Server, storage and desktop virtualization, along with transition to next-generation data centres, have continued to fuel the growth of network consulting and integration services.
Business analytic solutions are growing fast as more enterprises are demanding predictive capabilities to capitalize on the value of information and enhance competitiveness and time-to-market. IDC analysts say the transformation of IT infrastructure, modernizing applications, as well as streamlining of business processes, are driving enterprises to increase their investments in IT.
This is why initiatives remain to reduce pressure from demand for capital expenditure. IDC believes such initiatives will continue to fuel innovation in outsourcing services over the next 12 months, as governance and IT service management take centre stage in the value proposition for outsourcing services.
This was published in the December 2010 issue of The Asset
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