Nearly two thirds of Irish businesses (65%) believe that they will need to create new roles such as cloud architects to transform their IT infrastructure, while half believe that Big Data will generate a need for data scientists.
These are some of the key findings of an EMC survey of 169 Irish businesses in the lead up to its forum event in Dublin. Other findings were that 81% of businesses are planning to transform their IT environments over the next 12 months, with 63% citing data storage and management as their top IT priority.
The business priorities of those surveyed were revealed as 47% for increasing revenue, followed by enhancing customer experience and engagement at 43% and improving governance and compliance at 40%.
The other IT priorities after data concerns were the maintenance of existing technologies (software and hardware) at 58%, further technology (systems, applications and data) integration/process management at 57%, data backup and recovery at 50%, optimisation of reliability, scalability and performance at 46% and cloud computing at just 38%.
"These findings show that businesses are no longer simply undertaking IT transformation to cut costs but rather using it to actively drive growth," said Jason Ward, country manager Ireland, EMC. "By aligning the IT transformation agenda across cloud, Big Data and IT security with the business development model, companies can implement a fully integrated strategy that accelerates growth."
Eric Herzog, senior vice president, Product Management and Product Marketing, EMC emphasised in his key note at the forum that it was the company’s mission to "lead customers and partners on their journey to hybrid cloud computing".
Describing EMC’s own journey to the private cloud, Herzog outlined the most recent step, a major move to cloud-based SAP ERP system. A "big bang" approach was adopted, after prototyping and piloting, the system was deployed and used immediately, without a parallel phase.
Herzog said that the company’s experience in this kind of transformation, based on its use of hybrid cloud, gave it the experience and the expertise to be able to advise customers on finding their own way to hybrid cloud usage and its inherent benefits.
He outlined a three paths to the cloud based around best of breed solutions, proven infrastructure or fully converged solutions. This, said Herzog, gives organisations a range of approaches to suit their respective wants and needs.
With respect to the choice of public or private cloud, Herzog was adamant. "The answer is not either," he said, "it’s both," referring to hybrid cloud. Herzog said that with the use of private cloud there were additional benefits of "flexibility in storage and compute resources" in public cloud.
"The key to cloud computing is as much automation as possible," argued Herzog, a theme that was picked up by Ian Fitzgerald, senior manager, private cloud division, EMC Global.
Referring to internal provisioning processes before its own transformation toward IT as a Service (ITaaS), he said "we counted around 20 hand-offs in even the simplest provisioning operations-that screams automation".
Automation, argued Fitzgerald, allows self-provisioning and that is both enabling and adds efficiencies.
However, there are issues and Fitzgerald said that charge-back to the business was less than straightforward. "Financial transparency has been a hell of a journey over the last few years. The last 10% is or so is very complex."
Fitzgerald said that with the capability that cloud infrastructure delivers, IT needs to be more entrepreneurial in its approach. "IT becomes a broker and a builder," he said. Irrespective of where a service used by the business originates, he argued, "IT must remain in control as a broker."
There was also a major emphasis at the forum on Big Data and analytics and the potential to transform business models.
The survey found that businesses are increasingly aware that cloud computing and Big Data analytics, which EMC predicts will be the most disruptive IT trends this decade, will lead to the emergence of new roles in IT departments.
Almost half of businesses surveyed said that Big Data analytics will create the new winners and losers in their industry over the next five years, with 69% of companies in the telecoms sector agreeing.
Three out of five businesses said they had either deployed Big Data analytics tools or plan to consider new analytics tools in the next 12 months.
"As Irish companies become more aware of cloud and Big Data analytics, they will need to embrace new roles such as data scientists and cloud architects to drive the IT transformation agenda and generate better insights into their markets, customers and products. This survey shows that for many businesses in Ireland the journey to IT and business transformation is already well under way," said Ward.
For more on the EMC Forum, see the November issue of ComputerScope.
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