Network Communications News (NCN) May 2016 | Page 6

I NDUST RY NEW S
CIOs look to infrastructure
and skills amid fears about
IT readiness for the future
New research revealed by EMC has exposed
a concern among CIOs that their current
IT infrastructure and the skills of their IT
professionals may not be enough to meet long
term needs as technology becomes embedded
across the business.
The findings indicate that three quarters of
CIOs believe that five years from now they will
need to be able to launch new products, services
and applications in half the time it takes them
today. Forty-one per cent say that extracting
value from ever greater volumes of data is the
top IT challenge facing the business, with 37 per
cent expecting this to still be the top challenge
in 2019. Ranked second in 2016 is the need to
accommodate business unpredictability and the
associated demands for rapid scaling. By 2019
this is expected to be replaced by the challenge
– and opportunity – of enabling real time
business operations.
However, the study reveals that many CIOs
are concerned that their company will struggle
to overcome these challenges and harness these
opportunities. Two thirds (69 per cent) worry
that business growth will reveal weaknesses in
traditional IT operations and infrastructure and
could lead to IT inhibiting rather than enabling
innovation in the organisation if they do not have
the right infrastructure or tools.
This point is not lost on CIOs and their
business colleagues and many are taking active
steps to address the situation. For example,
73 per cent of the leaders surveyed in the UK
feel that implementing a more advanced and
agile IT infrastructure would reduce risk and
complexity and provide a solid platform for
future growth. Further, nearly half are already
training IT professionals in skills including
converged infrastructure, cloud computing and
business skills.
Nigel Moulton, EMEA CTO at VCE,
the Converged Platforms Division of EMC,
commented, ‘The research casts new light on
current attitudes towards IT within businesses of
all sizes. To reclaim full control, CIOs and their
IT teams need to stop spending so much time
building and managing different infrastructure
components. Instead they need to transform IT
into an efficient business focused engine that can
scale rapidly in response to changing business
needs. This demands a modern data centre. One
way of achieving is by implementing a robust,
software defined, converged infrastructure.
Convergence can power more agile development
and increased speed to market, addressing
directly some of the top IT challenges identified.’

IT departments still too focused on
cost saving, finds new research
Almost half of European IT leaders say the IT department’s core function is to reduce costs,
according to latest research from Claranet.
With IT budgets going up in recent years, IT departments’ fixation on cost reduction
might be expected to be lower on the agenda than enabling revenue generation for the wider
business or innovating to support growth strategies. However, recent research from Claranet
shows IT departments across Europe are still fixated on containing costs at the expense of
working on new value-add activities.
Independent research, which was conducted by Vanson Bourne on behalf of Claranet and
surveyed 900 European IT leaders, has found that cost reduction is significantly more likely to
be a focus for IT departments in 2016 than it was a year ago. In spite of budget increases, 46
per cent of respondents highlighted cost reduction as a core function today, compared with
just over a third (34 per cent) in 2015.
This focus on costs is likely to come to the detriment of other value-add activities; just
29 per cent of IT leaders view enabling revenue generation for the wider business as a core
function, and only a quarter (25 per cent) believe they should be engaged in increasing
customer loyalty.
Commenting on the findings, Michel Robert, Claranet’s UK managing director, said,
‘European IT budgets are growing, which woul