Five digital transformation trends to tap in 2016

For seasoned and new IT leaders, the new year is a good excuse to pause and take stock of agenda to digitally disrupt their organizations.

We are in the midst of a tectonic shift in enterprise technology,like how cloud has an ever-growing impact on businesses provision infrastructure and software. Similarly, social media has too impacted the enterprises in getting bigger, forming partnerships, splitting, selling, goodwill etc. It is time for tech seasoned and new IT leaders to tap the tech trends well enough to plan new year’s strategies accordingly, as the new year is a good excuse to pause and take stock of agenda to digitally disrupt their organizations.

EC’s Rashi Varshney spoke to a few tech leaders to find out the uptrends of 2016. Read on…

Storage with local access

The enterprises are increasingly becoming more global with a distributed workforce. Also, the volume of unstructured data is growing rapidly and doubling every two years, hence increasing the need for managing data efficiently while also garnering value from it.

Amit Mehta, Country Manager, Isilon Storage Division at EMC India & SAARC, said that enterprises today are managing more data and in more locations than ever before.

“The rapid growth of unstructured data in the data center core and at the enterprise edge is challenging organizations to both manage data growth and find new ways to tap highly distributed data stores for business intelligence and value. The traditional IT pace and approach is limiting success and will make old ways of operating IT irrelevant,” he added.

Mehta suggests that to move at the speed of global business models, CIOs and IT professionals must anticipate business needs; simplify and lean out redundant process; embrace the latest technologies; and automate and digitize as much as possible.

“Not only will this transform how IT organizations are run in the coming year and improve the total customer experience internally, but it will have a long lasting positive impact for our companies. Solutions like data lake, simple solution that offers end to end consistency, the storage needed for local access in a product that is easy to both license and deploy, will evolve the IT landscape to make enterprises operate efficiently, cost-effectively,” Mehta said.

Real time data analytics

Talking about the technology trend, Subash Nambiar, Vice President, Oracle India said that whether in India or globally, the organization wants to leverage the additional channels which was not accessible earlier.

He also pointed out that earlier the customers were satisfied with T minor zone or T minus 2 kind of reporting but that is not anymore helping. The trend is changing, the CFO wants real time data. That means using the current database, how do we get real time.

Scale-up Scale-down

Even though, CIOs are looking forward to manage data efficiently, it looks like that they are keen for flexibility as one of the key functionality. Elaborating on the same, Nambiar said that, however, the enterprises does not want any sudden kind of changes, they want predictable performance. They want scale up, scale down model. “For instance, some banks say that quarter end or year end, their usage of infrastructure is really high, so they come and say we have utilized 90% of our server which is quite dangerous because it can crack. How do we use this? Take example of cloud where there is a scale up scale down model, during those times you can use the infrastructure at a peak level and scale down when your usage is not that much. So, one is the predictable performance, second is scale up scale down model based on the business need, these are the two main things,” he explained.

Omni-channel environment

Today, with the faster evolution of technology and ever-increasing adoption of devices, the demand for omni channel functionality is rising in a big way. According to Chary Mudumby, Executive Vice President of HTC Global Services, the CIOs are trying to identify the innovation opportunities in existing applications and platforms and embracing the new-age technologies on cloud as the quickest ways for digital transformation. He added that, “the CIOs in India are looking for set of technologies offering unified customer experience in an omni-channel environment across the product lines will cause the most disruptive and game changing digital transformation in 2016.”

Vertical Expansion

The data center has been a cost center for an enterprise for a long time now. Escalating real estate cost coupled with concerns over increased power usage and rising demands from the CXOs for newer services from existing infrastructure is compelling many CIOs to look at newer options namely: vertical expansion of data centers and the right power distribution units (PDU).

Sanjay Motwani, Regional Director, India, SEA, Taiwan & Hong Kong, Raritan International says that taking 3phase power to the rack is the best way to be able to achieve higher compute densities / rack.

“Hence deployment of 3phase PDU’s at the rack level – which then provide single phase power to the IT equipment – is the most cost efficient way of doing this. Most importantly maximum utilisation of space or rather getting the highest power per square foot becomes inevitable if the rapidly increasing big data storage needs have to be accommodated. The best way forward for sustained growth and data centre efficiency is vertical expansion given the different constraints of space, time ,etc.” Motwani said.

He concluded that sooner or later data centres will have to adopt this technique to remain competitive in the market.

digital transformation
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