Enterprise technology trends for 2013: Oracle

BANGALORE, INDIA: The year 2012 witnessed a remarkable change in enterprise technology market with the implementation of disruptive technologies like smart analytics, big data, social computing, mobility and cloud computing. With the beginning of the year 2013, we see successful IT organizations implementing more-efficient technologies and processes, and investing the resulting savings back into their companies to develop innovative business services that drive top-and bottom-line growth.

In today's environment, IT products and solutions need to be extremely flexible and adaptable; hence innovation and integration will continue to be the key drivers for IT investments in 2013. We are at a tipping point, where organizations are looking at effective solutions to reduce capital costs, time utilized for deployment and drive higher performance.

The overly complex infrastructure has driven up operational expenses and forced data centers to become cost centers. According to industry estimates, datacenter costs (which comprise 25 per cent of the total IT budget) are growing at 20 per cent per year. On the other hand, most servers in these data centres are severely underutilized, not optimized enough for energy efficiency and take up a lot of physical space (space utilization is typically around 30 per cent). At a broader level, this coupled with other concerns over globalization, evolving skills and green initiatives - are compelling companies to review their data centre strategy.

These organizations understand that eliminating complexity not only lowers operating costs but can also drive better productivity. The overriding trend we expect in the coming year is simplification of IT. The age of IT environments getting progressively more complex is finally drawing to an end.

By refreshing older server and storage hardware with the latest generation of faster, more efficient systems, they are delivering performance improvements, productivity gains, and cost savings that give them a quantifiable return on investment and a real competitive advantage within their industry.

The year 2013 will see an increase in the adoption of pre-integrated converged infrastructure solutions or engineered systems that exemplify ‘simplified IT' - in that they are easy to implement and require minimal intervention and management at the customers' end. Engineered systems are going to be a game changer in the world of enterprise IT as they reduce the cost and complexity of IT infrastructure. These systems combine network, storage, compute and software in one pre-optimised stack. With these pre-integrated and pre-engineered systems, organizations simplify and reduce the costs associated with purchasing, deploying, and supporting IT environments.

In addition to reducing costs, a focus on sustainability will be the buzzwords in 2013 for organizations looking to make new infrastructure investments. Several global technology analyst firms expect the sustainable data center market to witness accelerated growth in 2013 as the market becomes more focused on cost-savings, and provides more efficient internal IT delivery methods. According to the analysts, these methods will include virtualization and the use of converged infrastructure solutions.

Organizations are progressively realizing that their datacenters still have dedicated silos, where each application runs on its own middleware, database, servers and storage.  Each silo is sized for peak load and therefore there is a significant amount of excess capacity built in. Each silo is also different, leading to complexity and high costs to manage.  Today, organizations are moving from these silos to a grid or virtual environment with shared services, dynamic provisioning and standardized configurations or appliances.

Majority of the companies are engaged in some form of consolidation, though they may be doing this in only a portion of their datacenter.  This trend will trickle down to midsize customers as well, as their needs are same as large enterprises.

However, for midsize customers, time is critical and therefore, there will be increasing demand to invest in easy-to-implement product bundles. These bundles will help mid-sized companies easily upgrade, consolidate and virtualize their existing IT infrastructure, at a very affordable cost and thus enabling them to build a strong foundation for cloud adoption.

We believe that the combined effect of these trends will help boost productivity and also equip the enterprises to combat the new-world technology challenges to gain a competitive edge. The above mentioned trends will see tremendous traction and matching investments in 2013 and will change the face of enterprise IT like never before.

The author is CTO and director, Systems Solution Consulting, Oracle India.