DCN February 2017 | Page 62

final thought

MOVING WITH THE TIMES

Shaun Lynn , CEO of Agilitas , gives his views on the changing data centre environment .

Data centres continue to become ever more prominent in the UK as our ‘ always-on ’ digital world continues to demand access to applications and its associated data . Cloud adoption has fostered the growth of Software-asa-Service ( SaaS ) tools and platforms , the data of which requires significant storage capacity and processing power to operate .

Within businesses , the cloud has encouraged a somewhat ‘ out of sight , out of mind ’ mentality , in which buyers see migrating as a means to free up physical space and hand over the reins for supporting elements of their infrastructure . Although valid , the perception has meant that some outside of the industry are unaware of their continued reliance on data centres or the changing data centre environment .
The challenge for the IT industry is simply how to move with a changing environment . As we look to the future , staying ahead of the curve and dealing with disruption will be key to success . These are the main areas in which I ’ m expecting to see significant changes :
Data centres heading outside Data centres are seeing centralisation nationally . The continued growth of cloud technology has meant that large tech firms , resellers and service providers are all continuing to build . In recent months , Microsoft , IBM and Amazon have all announced or opened new data centres in the UK . The trend is further supported by our own commissioned research that highlights where the IT reselling channel is heading as we approach 2020 . Leaders expect over half of their data centre support contracts to be located away from customer premises by 2020 .
The growth in demand for data centres and hardware is therefore likely to increase as cloud dependency rises , and it should be viewed as a positive trend .
Multi-vendor solutions A trend we ’ ve noticed in our role managing IT spares inventory is a reduction in the number of customers concerned with brand names . In the past , the name on the box has acted as one of the primary selling points for hardware . This has changed though , as system performance and reliability have become the main focus of both IT and data centre solutions and technology , and these factors are now more comparable amongst manufacturers .
Interestingly , our research has revealed IT resellers expect to be selling 35 per cent more multi-vendor solutions , into business and data centre customers by 2020 . And just 20 per cent believe single solution driven operations are set to be a business priority by 2020 .
Access to parts With performance becoming one of , if not the highest priority across IT , innovative support strategies and access to parts is likely to
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