Spring is the time of year for conferences of leaders in the IT industry and after Lenovo, EMC and others, IBM held its annual event IBM EDGE from May 11th to 15th.
I attended the Executive track of the IBM Edge conference and here are the 3 key points that I took away, they are the essence of the IT departments of today and tomorrow.
Transforming IT from the inside
With digital transformation, business leaders need to change their perception of IT. Today, it is no longer profitable to simply see IT as the department that manages equipment and keeps the lights on and allows other services to produce. It is a sub-optimal use of IT department personnel and corporate IT budgets.
It is estimated that 70% of the overall IT budget is devoted to the maintenance of infrastructure, leaving little room for initiatives to aid the entire company in adapting to the demands of the digital era.
The adoption of cloud computing and automated IT infrastructures paves the way for the integration of IT into the corporate growth strategy by reducing both the TCO (Total Cost of Ownership) of infrastructure and the time spent managing it. As well, more and more medium-sized companies are moving towards managed services to free up their IT resources from non-value adding tasks.
Anticipate the rise in the volume of data in IT infrastructures
There is an explosion of storage requirements, given the fact that the volume of data being produced is growing exponentially, even in medium-sized enterprises.
IBM is refocusing on its core business, that is to say, servers and storage. However, this does not imply turning back, quite the contrary.
The digital transformation is accompanied by a push towards automated data centers, and in particular for the storage part with Software Defined Storage. IBM is continuing and even accelerating in that direction and will continue to invest heavily over the next 5 years.
For business executives and IT, it is essential to take into account the reality of the preoccupation of data and the rapid and relentless growth of unstructured data to prepare to take advantage of them.
The delays that companies tolerate regarding their IT infrastructure will limit opportunities for rapid evolution.
Speed and agility at the heart of tomorrow's infrastructures
The requirements of speed and agility in IT infrastructures responds to a critical business need: adapt to the constantly evolving business requirements in a rapidly changing economy. Many recent examples demonstrate, often vividly, that it is more than ever essential for any business to be agile and flexible and it is in this perspective that cloud services stands out for triggering these benefits.
Many companies are developing competitive advantages through agility of their infrastructure. This is the case for Visa, Walmart and Vodafone who presented the gains that their company obtained at the conference. Nowadays, the idea is not just to have an agile infrastructure to stand out, but to stand out through new processes and new marketing initiatives, all of which are possible thanks to an agile and flexible infrastructure.
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Crédit phot : IBM