With IT widely recognised as an important enabler of business growth, there has been an increased focus among customers to transform their datacentres to better support changing business needs. According to results from IDC Australia 's Asia/Pacific "Continuum" End User Survey 2008 conducted in Asia/Pacific, the top three challenges that businesses face today are successfully expanding into new business opportunities, controlling cost of businesses, and improving customer satisfaction by providing better experiences.
Avneesh Saxena, Group Vice President, Asia/Pacific Systems, Storage and Software Research, said "A transformation is the need of the day; and we are not talking about replacing any one IT product, but rather rejuvenating the entire datacentre that drives IT within an organisation." As time, money and effort go into building a new datacentre, it is important for end users to be clear about how to plan, build and manage their datacentres efficiently. Hence, the theme of IDC's InfraVision conference this year is Datacentre Transformation: Making the Best Choices, with an agenda geared towards addressing these concerns. IDC classifies datacentres today into three primary categories based on the type of business it serves. "Web 2.0 datacentres are leading the transformation by setting new standards in datacentre design and architecture", added Avneesh. "These companies are fairly new and hence starting from scratch in the kind of IT that will support their business model. Hosted/managed and traditional datacentres are the ones that need to transform, in order to stay competitive and meet the new business objectives."
Most end-users realise the need to transform their datacentres but are at a loss on where to start and who they should partner with. There is also confusion around the ideal type of datacentre that will serve their needs in the future.
Some frequent questions they come across are:
- When do we know if it is time for our datacentre to be replaced/refreshed?
- What kind of power and cooling infrastructure should we build?
- Which new forms of server and storage architectures should we install?
- What type of infrastructure software solutions will help us become more efficient and reduce unplanned downtime?
- How can we become more nimble and adaptive without giving up the ease-of-use which our business is used to?
Additionally, the theme of Green IT: The Economy of Ecology will also be addressed during the conference. IDC's Australian InfraVision Conference 2008 on 12th November at the Four Seasons Hotel in Sydney will address these issues.
IDC Australia's "Continuum" is an annual IDC end-user survey that is conducted across 14 key markets in the Asia/Pacific (including Japan) region, since year 2000. The study provides data in the area of IT spending, IT setup, IT planning environment, across a broad range of technology areas. "Continuum" harnessed 3500 feedback from CIOs, IT Directors, and/or IT Managers who are responsible for the IT decision-making process within end-user organisations.
The aim of IDC's Asia/Pacific End-User Research and Statistics (ERS) Group is to design and collect research in a cost-effective, efficient and accurate manner with professional survey sampling, questionnaire design, and management experience. IDC aims to deliver a comprehensive end-user research solution to help corporate/commercial, public and consumers sectors, as well as help suppliers/channel partners with their business and market strategies. Their research encompasses technology hardware, software, IT services, emerging technologies, peripherals and vertical businesses (manufacturing industries, government sectors, health industries, retail industries and financial sectors).