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Apps deployment tops CIO priorities in 2005

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CIOL Bureau
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BANGALORE: An insightful perspective on the future IT landscape came from Bobby Cameron, V-P and Principal, The CIO Group, Forrester Research. At the CIOL C-Change Forum on Saturday, he outlined the top priority areas for CIOs that emerged from findings in North America and Europe.

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Application deployments topped the lists of 2005 priorities, followed by upgrading disaster recovery capabilities and support changes in corporate governance. Upgrading the security environment, consolidating IT infrastructure and replacing legacy systems came in next.

Emerging technologies, he said, came in two categories: organic IT to stabilize IT infrastructure and X Internet to enable new business models. “CIOs are stabilizing commodity technologies — Foundation or commodity technologies like accounting, HR, real estate and content management amongst others, delivers robustness and efficiencies. Strategic software delivers competitive advantage,” he said.

A key problem that emerged was fragmented infrastructure — monolithic code software, single purpose servers, isolated disk storage and fragmented network. The key technologies to achieve organic IT would then be RAIL (Redundant Array of Internet Links), storage virtualisation, blade servers, grid computing and open source.

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For delivering business value with the X Internet, the technologies required would be RFID, Biometrics, sensors, Wi-Fi and Presence Awareness — real time interactions on a VOIP network among willing participants who are connected via their choice of device or application.

“Emerging technologies like RFID, Biometrics and sensors amongst others are gaining traction and average emerging technology spending will increase 3 per cent from 2004 to 2006. But leading CIOs focus on the business and not on emerging technologies!” Cameron said. CIOs have less time for technology since most of North American and European CIOs spend most of their time interacting with company CXOs and business executives, a survey found.

“Stability in core technologies and IT processes opens the door for successful new business models. The CIOs are focusing on emerging technologies for stabilizing infrastructure and enabling new business models but a focus on process and visibility dominates his attention. Portfolio management underpins most IT best practices and a middle office app strategy is critical to supporting new cross-unit business models,” concluded Cameron.

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