Organisations also use this time to reflect on what went right and what needs improvement. Therefore as we shake off the holiday fog and kick off a new year full of potential, I decided to collaborate with our key partners and internal experts to discuss what IT strategies they think Canadian enterprises should focus on in 2016. Basically I asked them to answer the following question:
And so here are their personal opinions. Thank you for providing your valuable input!
“My wish for 2016 is that IT executives and executives in general are mindful (and most importantly, act accordingly) of the essential role played by IT today. And that this applies not only to the health of their companies, but to ensure their viability.
The technological advancements of recent years aim to simplify, automate and optimise environments, allowing teams to focus on real business issues, helping to make the company more agile, maintain and gain market share and be innovative in their industries. Too few companies are moving in this direction and it’s time to simplify and take advantage of the advancements in SDDC, in order to be in a position to deliver what the company really needs, well beyond simple SLAs.
Nowadays, business competition comes from everywhere, you have to be able to adapt to the current reality and one way of doing this is to take advantage of your staff as a lever. However to do this, you must have the time and not be constantly trying to manage crises or react to the last infrastructure glitch.”
-Nicolas Brodeur, Systems Architect, Present
“I think storage optimisation is a "low hanging fruit" for most of our customers. In fact, with the explosive growth of data and business intelligence projects linked to analytics, the associated costs to manage data infrastructure are increasing. In 2016, every company should make sure to perform a comprehensive analysis of all of their storage environments to identify how much cost savings they could generate by taking advantage of advanced features now available with a storage strategy defined by software (Software Defined Storage).”
-Martin Dubeau - Executive Director, IBM Systems Quebec
“Increasingly, companies are redefining their service offerings to a software-based approach. The goal now is to offer added value services such as mobility or highly personalised services through analytics (+ LaPresse, Ajusto, Waze, etc.).
In this context, IT is becoming increasingly critical for companies’ main mission. For these companies, a transformation of IT is necessary in order to be able to support new initiatives and offer the expected level of agility.
To do this, companies are turning to an ITaaS service model to facilitate this transition (self-service portal, automation of activities, SLA, etc.).
This pushes businesses to opt for converged infrastructures (integrated combination of servers, network, storage and hypervisor components). In a converged infrastructure, each component becomes a commodity as such and the important element becomes the software layer to integrate each of these components. This approach exponentially accelerates transforming traditional IT environments to an ITaaS oriented service mode.
At EMC, we believe that 2016 is an important year of transition for companies and that VCE converged infrastructure technologies as well as ITaaS solutions such as EHC (EMC Hybrid Cloud) will facilitate this transition.”
-Martin Bazinet, P.Eng.- Manager, Systems Engineer, EMC
“The digital transformation of enterprises is no longer a simple question of competitiveness and market positioning. It is now a matter of survival.
Therefore the following two IT priorities, that Present helps implement within enterprises, seem unavoidable in 2016:
-Claude Gagné, Solutions Architect, Present
“Data is the source of life and sustainability of any business of the 21st century. The network infrastructure where this enormous amount of raw data resides must be secure, scalable and efficient. Nothing new on that side.
However, we now need to add the terms agile, flexible and open to our vocabulary. When the time comes to invest (and I do not say "spend") in a new networking infrastructure, the various stakeholders of IT departments need to be aware and mindful of the services offered to their customers (internal and/or external), otherwise a gap will be created between what the IT department can provide and ease of access to data in the cloud.
Software Defined Networking or SDN reduces this gap and builds infrastructures based on new concepts, new open standard protocols and open applications that are built by companies for companies.
In this New Year 2016, the Quebec Brocade team wishes you liberation from the status quo.”
-Pierre Lemay, Senior Technical Consultant, Brocade Communications Systems, Inc.
“There is a new era of IT upon us. To use a slogan from my company Nutanix, there are ways of making “invisible infrastructure” which enable clients to focus more on supporting the business versus managing technology. With 2015 in the books and 2016 now well underway, here are the 3 core areas that everyone should consider as part of their technology initiatives.
-Christopher Kuppek, Territory Account Manager, Nutanix
“The gap between IT and LOB executives is an important situation to manage as it can delay the achievement of corporate objectives in many companies. With the growing role of technology in enterprises, a once ‘back office’ function is now a key to growing and thriving the business. My wish for 2016 is that CIOs and other c-suite leaders resolve to find common ground and ways to collaborate more efficiently in order to transform their enterprises through this digital age.”
-Louis de Grandpré, General Manager, Present
On behalf of Present, I wish you much success in both your personal and professional goals for 2016! Sign up to our blog to receive weekly insight into strategies and tactics to use IT as a lever to grow the business and help navigate the 3rd platform of digital transformation we have entered.
Photo credit : © marinini - Fotolia.com