Top five IT trends for 2009

BANGALORE, INDIA: As we look forward to 2009, IT executives are facing one of the most challenging environments we have seen in decades. The economic climate in most parts of the world looks bleaker than it has in decades, forcing companies across all industry sectors to reduce IT budgets below 2008 levels.

All this is happening just as user expectations of IT services are reaching an all-time high, driven by a new generation of workers (and customers) who grew up with the instant, rich, personalized, on-demand world of the web as their model of what computing should be like.

To make things worse, the complexity of providing even the most basic IT services is going through the roof. The sheer volume of application types, user devices and locations IT is now expected to support has passed the breaking point for most companies.

In this article, Citrix identifies the top five technology trends that can help IT executives to address these challenges in 2009.

Virtualisation

Just at the point in time when cost pressures are at their highest, while scrutiny and pressure to run as efficiently as possible are at their worst, we find that there is still massive over provisioning in hugely expensive datacenters. According to analyst firm Gartner, approximately 80% to 90% of the capacity of the x86 server market is unused at any one time.1

Promising to unlock much of this underutilized capacity without having to invest in new hardware, many organizations are increasingly turning to virtualization as the answer to optimize their applications, business services and physical infrastructure. Virtualization will not only be hot in 2009, it will be one of the only areas of IT spending growth in what will otherwise be a down year. In fact, during the September to October 2008 period when the financial meltdown began, there was a considerable increase in the search incidence for “virtualization” on Gartner’s website2, bringing this technology to the forefront as imperative for business survival.

While successful CIOs will no doubt accelerate spending on virtualization from the datacenter to the desktop in 2008, we believe that 2009 will be the year in which many companies will start getting much more serious about applying virtualization in new ways that will massively change the economics of computing, and that is where the cloud comes in.

Cloud Computing

While it may be early days for cloud computing in the enterprise, the economics of the cloud are so compelling that they are impossible to ignore. This is especially in a year like 2009 where budget pressures cry out for IT to do things differently.

To adopt a cloud like mentality, we actually encourage IT leaders to look outside of the IT industry for inspiration. Take an example like Direct TV or any of the other popular broadcast media delivery services around the world. Their model is radically different from the way most IT organizations operate today. Yet, it is exactly where we need to go as an industry – which is to adopt a system that virtualizes servers, applications and desktops, centralizing them in the datacenter and “broadcasting” them to end users over any network as an on-demand service.

If CIOs have not yet begun experimenting with the cloud, 2009 is absolutely the year to begin. The future of IT will include a broad mix of internal and external clouds – much sooner than you may think. CIOs who jump in early and understand how to best apply the realities of cloud computing in their environment will be the winners. The economics and flexibility are simply too powerful to ignore.

Cloud computing allows organizations to centralize control and simplify management and delivery of applications, reducing overall costs and resource utilization while still providing a consistently high experience of securely accessible applications and data from any location for end users. These resources that are freed up can then be better deployed to support the organization’s core businesses.

Even for small and medium-sized businesses (SMBs), cloud computing is also an attractive option as many have limited in-house IT infrastructure and expertise in place. Adopting cloud computing and software-as-a-service will enable such smaller companies to gain access to sophisticated technologies without having to invest large sums of money to build new infrastructure.

Consolidation and Centralisation - Harnessing the power of one

Consolidation and centralization allow CIOs to embrace the “Power of One” as virtualization and cloud computing enable IT organizations to maintain just one copy of each software, application, workload, allocate one password for each user and create only one instance of data.

A good example is desktop virtualization technology as it enables the centralization of users’ desktops by creating virtual desktops in the data centre, making them easier to secure and back up. This technology also eradicates the hassle of updating and maintaining multiple copies of each software application on numerous machines, allowing the IT organization to roll out new applications and desktops much more quickly as IT executives are not required to rebuild the infrastructure each and every time to take into account new assumptions for security, connections and users’ devices. New users can also be easily added onto the networks in minutes, rather than days or weeks. This means that you build it once and leverage it infinitely.

When this happens, IT wins because the cost of managing resources from a central delivery center is much lower and employees actually become far more motivated when they are working on devices that they prefer at anytime and anywhere that they are most productive, and in most cases, this means that they will actually work a lot more.  So, “virtualizing your workforce” may well be one of the most groundbreaking business enabling IT initiatives you can do for your organization.

Consumerisation of IT

Twenty years ago, few CIOs paid attention to consumer IT products. This trend has definitely been reversed because consumerization of enterprise computing is real, and it is happening now. Increasingly, more users, especially Generation-Y employees, are bringing personal technology into the workplace and expecting to use it as part of their jobs.

According to Gartner, consumerization of enterprise IT will be the single, biggest trend affecting corporate IT over the next decade. By 2010, end-user preferences will decide as much as half of all software, hardware and service acquisitions made by IT.3

All too often today, when IT delivers services, they are delivering what IT wants, what they think you need (generally just about the same as everyone else) at times when it is convenient to them (usually only on your first day). However, the model of the future for IT is going to look a lot more like the consumer world – a world of “self service” where users decide what they need and when they need it.

It has, therefore, become extremely important for CIOs heading 2009 to pay close attention to what is happening on the consumer front and model their best practices for their IT organizations to act more like consumer-product companies. Rather than allocating more of their limited budget to prevent the introduction of user technologies, it will be more viable, in the long run, for IT organizations to manage user choices through expanding them in a collaborative fashion.

BYOC (Bring Your Own Computer)

As more enterprises embrace the concept of cloud computing alongside the growing consumerization of IT, IT organizations should get out of the business of owning and managing end-point assets and relinquish this responsibility to end-users.

Traditionally, employees are issued a standard corporate laptop upon joining a company. However, as we progress further into the digital age, users, especially those from the younger generation, get more excited and are happier when working on a device that they love and are more familiar with. Happier users make more productive employees, as they tend to work more and take better care of the devices that they own.

On the other hand, by eliminating the need for IT organizations to manage end-point assets, CIOs can also better deploy their resources to develop other value-added projects. 

A good example of leveraging on technology to address this emerging trend is  BYOC program that Citrix Systems has implemented internally.

This program provides Citrix’s employees an opportunity to use a personal laptop of their choice at work and at home. When employees come onboard this program, they are given monetary allowances of up to US$2,100 to purchase their personal laptops or PCs and an accompanying three-year maintenance contract. Leveraging on solutions for application virtualization, desktop virtualization and secure access which is Citrix XenApp XenDesktop and Access Gateway respectively, IT can deliver applications, virtual desktops and information through the cloud to the user’s end point devices in a secure manner. 

Not only does this initiative make Citrix a great place to work at, especially for Generation-Y employees, it has also helped the company increase efficiency while reducing its IT costs by about 20 percent.

Moving forward, as talent retention and cost-cutting pressures continue to mount, CIOs must embrace change, initiative such as the BYOC program is a novel idea which will certainly create a win-win situation for both IT organizations and end-users.

The author is area vice president at Citrix India Subcontinent