Predictions 2014

These types of solutions will provide business resilience and continuity to any company without the need for capital investment and will especially appeal to small to mid-size organisations. They tick all the boxes when considering cost, risk and productivity criteria in making ICT decisions for your organisation. As cloud adoption accelerates, managed services encompassing cloud solutions and traditional onsite services will accelerate. More companies will outsource more of their ICT services to external providers and manage through service level agreements.

The dynamic nature of the industry at the present time makes it very difficult to highlight a single issue as “highest impact”.

Cloud will have very little impact in terms of how larger enterprises manage their data and applications. Hybrid cloud combines the best of both worlds where cloud solutions are used in conjunction with the established on-premise model to offer a solution that is better than the sum of its parts. We will see far higher penetration with solid state drives (SSD) in 2014 leading to completely new applications that are not feasible with spinning disk drives. This is largely driven by the huge cost reduction in this area. SSDs are still more expensive than hard disk drives (HDD) but the factor has dropped from 50 fold a few years ago to somewhere between five and 10 today.

Open source is increasingly important and providers are offering solutions comparable to the major players in some areas. You only have to look at the success of MapReduce, Hadoop, KVM, NoSQL or the penetration of open source technologies in high performance analytics.

If I had to identify one issue for large enterprise above all others, that will impact the industry in 2014 I will go for “Software Defined Data Centre”. The traditional model for storage and network technologies is to embed the functionality in the array, switch or router. We are seeing waves of solutions that are decoupling these features from hardware and abstracting them into an overarching software management layer. It is now entirely feasible to provide the functionality of a router using software running on a commodity platform.

What can be done for Irish businesses to either minimise the impact or take full advantage of the opportunity?

PFH has proven pedigree in delivering ICT solutions and is recognised by industry analysts as the largest indigenous service provider in the country. We have achieved this position through supporting thousands of organisations through repeated technology cycles. Cloud has been a part of our portfolio for over six years now. We have the economies of scale and learnings to support any organisation design full cloud or hybrid (cloud and on premise) environments and indeed manage and support these solutions over their operational life. Our client’s are now taking the opportunity to test some of their applications and infrastructure requirements by placing them in a test bed hosted by PFH in our cloud platform. This goes a long way in helping client’s become comfortable with the concept, the performance and the process of using cloud based services. Our Professional Services team will conduct a suitability analysis on a client’s ICT environment and business requirements and then recommend the way forward and how or if cloud based solutions have a role to play.

The solution will enable organisations to be more productive and more efficient… and it keeps pace as the organisation grows! If you need more capacity just ask because our solutions are scalable, and match the demands of your business cycles, allowing you to ramp up — or down as necessary.

The cloud computing train is leaving the station: cloud computing has become the norm for both enterprise and small business market. While it’s not too late for business who haven’t done so, I would say to seriously consider cloud adoption in 2014. We know there are still a small number relying on older software such as Windows XP and Office 2003, but these will no longer be supported versions by April, so upgrading is now imperative. Businesses who don’t adopt newer and faster cloud base solutions such as Office 365 and CRM online will find that they not only open their information up to serious security issues, but they will lag behind those business who use cloud applications to deliver greater reach and agility on a more national and international scale thus enabling significant competitive advantage.

IaaS is moving lightning fast. Even if business leverage the cloud purely for infrastructure they will see significant financial savings. Windows Azure plays a huge part in opportunities for our customers and our partners. The Microsoft partner community need to be educating itself and the market to support the customer base further by explaining the value proposition of leveraging the cloud. For example cloud significantly alters the economics of disaster recovery, making it possible for organisations to use Windows Azure to establish a second site for recovery. This can be done at a fraction of the cost of building and maintaining a secondary data centre.

While we have dipped our toe in the water of devices, 2014 is going to see an incredible acceleration of all form factors for business. This is going to be a huge growth area for OEMs and will deliver positive benefits such as mobility for customers.

The opportunity in 2014 for the partner channel and their customers is for the partner to become cloud aggregators! By wrapping up together, aggregating cloud services, Windows Azure and access to devices and delivering a structured managed service for their customers is going to greatly increase success not only for our Microsoft partners, but for Irish businesses.

Fujitsu Ireland: Kenneth Keogh, director of Business Development

Virtualisation and private cloud have the potential to remove many of the constraints associated with traditional IT at as little as 30% of the cost of traditional hardware and provide secure desktop access enabling employees to work remotely. It also has the potential to reduce energy consumption by up to 80% — saving money and reducing a company’s carbon footprint.

At the moment, the IT departments in many companies are spending a significant amount of time and money on the design, purchase, configuration, integration, optimisation, and expansion of their IT infrastructures which are required for delivering server and desktop virtualisation to the business. This needn’t be the case and the move certainly shouldn’t be a big challenge or a drain on company resources.

With clear management and consolidation benefits, virtualisation and cloud are a commonplace IT reality; the benefits can be seen immediately, and new services are available within minutes.

Fujitsu’s vShape is an optimal solution for businesses that are looking to start their journey towards virtualisation and private cloud. vShape supports the consolidation of IT, which means you need less hardware and can use what you have more efficiently, reducing operational costs and efforts.

vShape offers improved availability, flexibility, security and efficiency and is an extremely affordable solution. With scalable architectures tailored to application requirements, the purchase cost, deployment time and provisioning time are all lowered. vShape offers a stress-free solution straight out-of-the-box, significantly reducing the cost of design and time to deployment so companies can spend less time on IT and focus instead on their core business.

When investing with a long-term view, analyst’s estimates that for large enterprises (LEs) data grows at 60% a year, and up to 180% for SMEs. Fujitsu vShape solves this problem by providing converged implementations based on highly scalable and modular reference architectures. These satisfy future capacity requirements without limiting performance or functionality.

When implementing virtual or cloud environments storage performance is key, as are data availability and security. vShape provides solutions for various workloads, and is based on servers and storage systems with highest performance, as well as first-class high availability and security features.

Advice for CTOs: scalability is key. Organisations need to maintain a flexible approach to meet growing data capacity demands and application requirements, while maintaining a managed growth process that minimises costs and down time associated with traditional IT hardware upgrades. While everything cloud has become a byword for storage efficiency and capacity building and the latest must have, it is often the tailored management solution that delivers the value, so I would advise CTOs to research their options carefully and speak to IT solutions providers to find a solution that fulfils current needs and can grow with their business over time.