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By Joe O'Halloran
An increasingly mobile workforce, new requirements for access to
services and environmental concerns will be among the key factors
impacting enterprise outsourcing decisions in 2008, according to
predictions made by Joe Hogan, vice president, Strategic Outsourcing
Programs, Unisys.
Computerization of information technology will continue to have profound
implications for enterprises’ IT services strategies and the outsourced
utility model of IT infrastructure management will become more of a
necessity. This means that the modernization of legacy applications will
accelerate as pressures for both flexibility and cost containment
increase and that environmentally conscious data centers based on
“green” technology will proliferate across all industries;
“Cost savings, formerly the key factor in outsourcing decisions, will
now be a given and not the sole driver, or in many cases even a primary
one,” Hogan says. “A profound transformation in how people work and do
business is driving a new set of service requirements and imperatives.
Accommodating these new user demands will be the main challenge for
outsourcing providers in the coming year and beyond.”
Hogan says that companies that have previously hosted their own data
centers, with management of those facilities provided by their
outsourcing provider’s personnel, will come to rely more and more on
off-site data centers owned and operated by their services provider.
“It makes economic sense for enterprises to take advantage of their
outsourcing partners’ increasing investments in lower cost service
delivery, standardized systems serving multiple customers, and ‘green’
IT,” said Hogan. “This new paradigm can help forward-looking enterprises
decrease their capital expenditures and reinvest the difference to drive
innovation in their business.”
To avoid the adverse impact of unchecked data centre power usage, Hogan
says, companies will push substantial investments in “green” IT in 2008.
They will also demand that their outsourcing providers do the same – not
only to conserve energy, but also to appease increasingly concerned
shareholders and dramatically impact their bottom line.
According to Hogan, outsourced data centers will increasingly feature
more efficient storage and better power facilities, servers using
multi-core processors and use of virtualization. The last two steps can
reduce the number of systems requiring separate power supplies while
making operations more efficient by dividing tasks among and within
multiple processors in each server computer.
Posted: 15:00 03 Jan 2008 |
