The rise of mobile and cloud has empowered more front office workers to take control over their own IT destiny. This study answers the question “is IT equipped to handle the implications of this shift?”

1. THE VIRTUAL SPACE RACE
How IT with The Right Stuff creates a competitive advantage
A STUDY BROUGHT TO YOU IN PARTNERSHIP BY

2. The rise of mobile and cloud has empowered more front office workers to take control
over their own IT destiny. This study answers the question “is IT equipped to handle the
implications of this shift?”
Demand for an agile, efficient IT infrastructure is at an all-time high, yet most organizations
lack the capacity to quickly deploy and manage applications on and off premises in response
to the needs of front office employees and customers.
Leveraging new technology to compete in the marketplace is a virtual space race, one in which
organizations with the right IT infrastructure have the competitive advantage to respond quicker
and plant their flag first in the market.
Methodology: Softchoice, one of the largest technology solutions and services providers in North America, partnered with VMware,
the industry-leading virtualization software company, to gauge enterprise IT departments’ responsiveness to the increasingly complex
technology demands of front office employees. They surveyed 250 IT managers and 750 line-of-business (sales, marketing, operations,
finance, etc.) managers across the U.S. to examine their expectations around IT department performance and IT infrastructure agility.
Introduction

3. From the Earth to the Moon
The gap between front office expectations and the
back office’s ability to deliver has never been so wide.

4. What is IT Thinking?
We asked IT managers to rank tasks based on what they
ideally would like to do and what they really do.
Ideal
1. Security
2. Maintenance
3. Strategy
4. Help Desk
Real
1. Maintenance
2. Security
3. Help Desk
4. Strategy
Ideally, IT Managers want to
spend more time on security
and strategic priorities, and less
time on maintenance.
In reality, they spend most of
their time on maintenance and
the least on strategy.
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5. IT Managers
65% think their colleagues view them as a
help desk and not a strategic partner
55% think their colleagues view them as a
gatekeeper versus an enabler
70% spend less than 25% of their week
on strategic projects
28% think they should spend 25-50%
of their time on strategic projects
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6. 80% see IT as a cost center versus a revenue generator
73% think app deployments should take less than a month,
while 25% expect it to take 1-5 days
57% think their organization should invest more in IT, and 3 out of
4 of them are willing to spend more of their own budget to do it
31% don’t involve IT when purchasing new software for their
department. Half of them said it’s because they have their own
technology budget
Front Office Managers
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7. Not Ready for Launch
Most IT departments lack the right
infrastructure to take their
organizations to the next level.

8. Most organizations lack the IT infrastructure
needed to compete with the best-in-class.
61% virtualize less than half of their
IT environments
46% automate ¼ or less of the processes
associated with application rollouts
46% have no hybrid cloud capabilities
25% don’t have centralized management
of their IT environment
64% don’t have chargeback capabilities
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9. Despite front office expectations for
instant gratification, IT often takes months
to deploy a new application.
30% take 1-6 months
28% take over 6 months
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10. What you need to create a more agile,
efficient IT infrastructure:
Standardize and centralize infrastructure
that supports software-defined solutions
Virtualize your compute, network and
storage
Automate the apps in your data center
with scripts and policies
Connect your cloud infrastructure and
manage as one system
The Right Stuff

11. Gaining A Competitive Advantage
“One small step for IT, one giant leap for IT’s relevance.”

12. 4x more likely to deploy a new app within 5 days
2x more likely to move processing workloads across
servers the same day
3x more likely to accommodate front office requests
the same week
Compared to those that don’t, IT managers that have
the right* infrastructure are…
*Infrastructure that meets front office
employee needs from responsiveness and
capacity to connectivity and remote access.
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13. 5x more likely to be very or extremely satisfied
with new software rollouts
5x more likely to believe IT spends plenty of
time on strategicprojects that support their
departments’ needs
Compared to those that don’t, front office managers
that have the right infrastructure are…
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14. Managers that don’t have
the right infrastructure…
…are far more likely to think their organization
needs to increase its technology spend.
IT managers: 83%
Front office managers: 71%
However, at least half of those with
the right infrastructure still think
their workplace needs to spend
more on technology.
IT managers: 62%
Front office managers: 50%

15. Conclusions
Organizations with agile, efficient IT infrastructure can implement new processes
faster, respond quicker to employee and customer needs, and focus more on growth
and innovation.
Front office managers and executives are also far more likely to consider their IT
colleagues as strategically relevant to their overall success if they can support their growing
need to quickly implement, and seamlessly access, new work apps from anywhere.
Having the right IT infrastructure that is software-defined, centrally managed, highly
virtualized and highly automated is the key to winning the virtual space race.

16. Contact Us
www.softchoice.com/vmwarewww.softchoice.com