EMC Corporation 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 which assesses 660 EMC and VMware customers worldwide and shares insights on the direction of IT transformation investments in the region.
The State of IT Transformation report is based on the evaluation of companies who attended IT Transformation workshops conducted by EMC and VMware from 2014 to mid-2015 and are in the midst of IT transformation initiatives. EMC and VMware measured every organisation’s infrastructural capabilities against their industry peers and helped them to determine their business goals in the short and long run and prioritise the next steps to achieve those goals.
Transforming Operations
The report indicated that organisations are seeking to be cost-efficient, hence can save as much as 24% in operations by transforming IT. Regardless of industry, most organisations reported wanting to improve their IT service strategy to run IT like a customer-focused business.
While 90% of organisations 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.
Similarly, 80% indicated they want to standardise services in a business-focused catalogue with a self-service portal and increased automation to improve IT service delivery including:
- Resource Provisioning – More than three-fourth (77%) of participants expressed the desire to provision infrastructure resources in less than a day, or dynamically as needed.
- Financial Management – Most organisations (87%) said they rely on a yearly allocation-based recovery, or a project-by-project recovery of IT costs.
- Metering – Majority (88%) of organisations said they want to get to a state where they use automation to track the resources each business unit is consuming.
Accelerating application development
According to the report, participants said they want to automate the application framework to help their organisations develop software and mobile applications faster. Yet more than 80% of participants reported lacking a scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework and 68% said their organisations take 6–12 months or more to complete a new application development lifecycle.
In addition, most organisations 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 prioritising 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 virtualisation with the average firm reporting they’ve achieved 40% in network virtualisation; the top 20% of companies in this sector have achieved nearly 80% network virtualisation.
- 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 virtualised.
“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 organisational 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 organisations 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,” states Habib Mahakian, Vice President, Gulf & Pakistan, EMC.
