The document discusses opportunities for IT organizations to optimize their datacenter services over the next five years. As businesses look to grow and innovate following the economic downturn, IT will need to balance efficiency gains with flexibility to enable new initiatives. Datacenters of the future will require automation and standardized infrastructure that can adapt to changing workload demands. Many IT organizations currently lack the in-house expertise to implement private clouds and achieve this level of optimization, and may require external assistance to successfully transform their datacenters.
1. WHITE P APER
The Value of Smarter Datacenter Services
Sponsored by: IBM
Michelle Bailey Rob Brothers
Katherine Broderick
May 2011
IDC OPINION
www.idc.com
The next five years in IT will likely be some of the most exciting and demanding
for datacenter managers and the office of the CIO. In this post-recession period,
organizations will be setting in place strategies that will expand their core business
while mining for new market opportunities. For many, this business transformation will
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include new product development, mergers and acquisitions, geographic expansion,
cross-selling opportunities, and partnerships. Technology will be a critical enabler for
these new initiatives, and a diverse and efficient datacenter strategy will be essential.
While the emphasis has been on consolidation and cost reduction during the
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economic downturn, as IT organizations look to the future, success will be built on
streamlining processes, reducing complexity, and improving time to market. IT
organizations will be responsible for real IT transformation in the coming years and
not simply the cost reduction of the past. They will have to strike a balance between
integrating new applications and multiple infrastructure delivery models and
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continuing to support their already substantial IT portfolio.
The future datacenter will be a highly automated set of standardized infrastructure
where applications and data will be deployed and provisioned on systems and in sites
based on workload demand. New cloud-based technologies and methodologies will
expand the options for IT organizations to source hosting or outsourcing providers for
software, platforms, infrastructure, and datacenters at varying price points and
locations. The backdrop to all of these choices is the physical backbone of the
datacenter, otherwise known as facilities. Power and cooling will need to be flexible
enough to keep up with automated, virtualized, dynamic IT while keeping in mind
capacity limitations, efficiency, and budgets.
With these new demands being placed on IT and facilities, it is not surprising that in a
recent IDC survey of over 250 IT managers, more than one in five found that
their IT staff is not skilled enough to implement a private cloud. In another IDC survey
of over 400 IT decision makers, lack of in-house IT expertise is listed as a top
challenge to virtualization by over 22% of respondents. These two data points
indicate that for many IT organizations, the journey toward adding incremental value
to the business will require external help. In addition, the large number of forthcoming
sourcing options and technology decisions will challenge IT organizations to balance
their need to maintain control without inhibiting innovation. As time to market
becomes a differentiator in the economic recovery, speed of deployment must be
balanced against security, availability, and service levels across the IT organization.