Abu Dhabi – MENA Herald: EMC Corporation today announced their fourth annual CIO Connect Summit, being held at the Yas Viceroy, Abu Dhabi, on 25th – 26th May. In addition to interactive presentations and workshops during the two-day event, EMC will shed light on the State of IT Transformation report, an analysis of more than 660 EMC and VMware customers worldwide and share insights on the direction of IT transformation investments in the region.
The State of IT Transformation report is based on a qualified evaluation of companies who attended IT Transformation workshops conducted by EMC and VMware and are in the midst of IT transformation initiatives. EMC and VMware aided the companies to determine the gaps, progress and objectives in their long term and short term IT transformation journeys.
Transforming Operations
The report indicated that organizations are seeking to be cost-efficient, hence can save as much as 24% in operations by transforming IT. Regardless of industry, most organizations reported wanting to improve their IT service strategy to run IT like a customer-focused business.
While 90% of organizations indicated the importance of having a documented IT transformation strategy and roadmap with executive and line of business support, 55% admitted to having nothing documented.
80% indicated they want to standardize services in a business-focused catalog with a self-service portal and increase automation to improve IT service delivery including:
- Resource Provisioning – Delivery of continuous service to meet customer demands and prevent financial setbacks depends upon streamlining all business processes by provisioning the infrastructure timely. 77% of participants expressed the desire to provision infrastructure resources in less than a day, or dynamically as needed.
- Financial Management – 87% said they rely on a yearly allocation-based recovery, or a project-by-project recovery of IT costs.
- Metering – 88% of organizations said they want to get to a state where they use automation to track the resources each business unit is consuming.
Applications – Accelerating App Development
Mobile services have revolutionized customer engagement, becoming a medium to broaden the reach of every company. This necessitates the need to provide customers quick access to services through mobile. According to the report, participants said they want to automate the application framework to help their organizations develop software and mobile applications faster. Yet more than 80% of participants reported lacking a scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework and 68% said their organizations take 6–12 months or more to complete a new application development lifecycle.
In addition, most organizations indicated they want to have hybrid cloud architecture for their production applications within the next 18-24 months.
Key Highlights by Industry
- Healthcare – Firms in the healthcare industry are the least mature in their IT transformation and scored themselves the lowest in more areas while prioritizing gaps in more areas than any other industry.
- Retail – They also report having a majority of their applications built on a scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework.
- Telecommunications – participants in this sector lead in network virtualization with the average firm reporting they’ve achieved 40% in network virtualization; the top 20% of companies in this sector have achieved nearly 80% network virtualization.
- Financial Services – participants scored above average in most areas of their IT transformation initiatives with nearly 40% having a fully supported, documented IT transformation strategy and roadmap.
- Government – top 20% reported having over 20% of production apps in a hybrid cloud and nearly 100% of compute and applications virtualized.
Habib Mahakian, Vice President, Gulf & Pakistan, EMC said: ”Business needs should adapt to changing consumer demands, which are evolving at a rapid pace. This underlines the need for CIOs to strategically envisage adding more value to consumer engagements and drive competitive differentiation by attaining unprecedented organizational efficiencies. As business needs continue to change and the role of the modern day CIO evolves, it is time to undertake IT transformation in order to enable business scalability". The State of IT Transformation report indicates that organizations across industries can benefit from transforming their IT service strategy by adopting software-defined technologies. We look forward to helping our customers adopt and embrace an IT transformation strategy, thus driving business and extracting a higher enterprise value”.
Methodology
This research was undertaken by EMC and VMware to assess the current state of IT infrastructure employed by their 660 global customers and identify the gaps impeding achievement of business goals. The organizations analyzed in this report attended IT Transformation workshops conducted globally by EMC and VMware from 2014 to mid-2015. EMC and VMware measured every organization’s infrastructural capabilities against their industry peers and helped them to determine their business goals and prioritize the next steps to achieve those goals.