Top factors to future proof your business, Crawford Del Prete IDC

The cost of managing computing platforms is growing rapidly within a span of ten years. Operational costs are doubling every eight years, data volumes are doubling every 18 months, computing costs are dropping by half every two years, and the number of applications are doubling every four years. From 1995 to 2015 the cost of server management and administration has gone up by a factor of 8X, power and cooling by a factor of 3X, and ratio of operational costs to capital costs ie Opex/Capex by a factor of 3.9X. This is where the cloud becomes incredibly efficient, according to Crawford Del Prete, Executive Vice President Worldwide Products and Chief Research Officer, IDC.

Increasing productivity and reducing costs are the topmost priorities for enterprises but are diametrically opposed and hence that is the challenge. A significant business change that is happening over the last 75 years is the reducing life span of a typical business. By superposing the technology platform life cycles over the business cycles, it is evident that the life span of successful and stable businesses have been reducing, as they are disrupted by newer and better technology enabled businesses. The lifespan of businesses have been reducing from 61 years in the 1960’s when the First Platform of technology was dominant, down to 18 years in the current decade with the Third Platform of technology. That means the ways to use technology to transform these companies and to keep these companies relevant and healthy has got to improve, says Del Prete.

For the enterprise, security and cloud computing were the top IT initiatives for 2015. Other easy wins for IT across the year include virtualisation and server consolidation, process automation, and other initiatives with business. But IT is still trying to figure out its role within the business, and in a thriving businesses this is changing rapidly.

In a software defined world, compute, networking, and storage functions are no longer vertically stacked. They can be run by converged systems that are tuned to support these different functions and this is where IT is getting significant cost savings and improvement. The software defined enterprise is great to talk about but in practice it is very difficult because all the technologies are not yet in place. As per IDC’s CIO survey, there is good market awareness, but very little adoption. IT wants to move to this platform to get more efficient.

A good cross positioning of resources and platforms is IDC’s four quadrant positioning that includes dedicated and shared resources and on premise and off premise. The current distribution appears as private cloud 23%, public cloud 12%, traditional IT 43%, hosted IT 22%. The expected change in this distribution appears as, private cloud 0% no change, public cloud +50% change, traditional IT -25% change, hosted IT +25% change. In essence traditional IT, while still very dominant is under pressure and will be disrupted in favour of public cloud and hosted IT, while private cloud remains stable.

Other organisational challenges include getting a balance between technology, people and processes and how to get IT to be part of the conversation from the beginning. Application developer interest, developer investment, and developer traction, will be a key differentiator for application platforms in the future. #43

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