Digital transformation will dominate enterprise IT strategies in 2017, says Hubert Yoshida, chief technology officer of Hitachi Data Systems and Russell Skingsley, chief technology officer of Hitachi Data Systems Asia Pacific.
Enterprises in Asia Pacific believe they are further ahead in their digital transformation journeys than their global counterparts, according to the findings of an upcoming Forbes Insights research survey, sponsored by HDS.
Five trends for the technology market in 2017
#1: Productivity Gains Will Be More About People, Process and Business Outcomes
Despite the explosion of new technology over the past 10 years, productivity has declined compared to the previous 10 years according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development. This is because new processes have not kept up with new technologies.
In the hospitality business, Airbnb had access to the same technology as traditional hotels, but it has created a new business model and grew its market valuation to $30 billion in less than 10 years. Agile infrastructure, cloud, and the benefits of DevOps will gain attention as a way to speed up the development and deployment of applications and services with less defects and wasted effort.
#2: Accelerating Transition to Cloud
Cloud-first strategies are the foundation for staying relevant in a fast-paced world, according toEd Anderson, research vice president at Gartner. The Asian market has been quick to embrace this approach, with Asia leading the world in this year’s Cloud Readiness Index by Asia Cloud Computing Association.
IT managers across Asia Pacific will focus on developing skills in cloud monitoring, cloud workload performance and security management, and cloud capacity management. Instead of buying infrastructure from different vendors and knitting them together with management software, IT will want access to the converged systems to deliver infrastructure-as-a-service.
#3: Bimodal IT
Bimodal IT refers to two modes of IT:
Mode 1: Traditional — emphasizes safety, accuracy and availability.
Mode 2: Nonlinear — emphasizes agility and speed.
IT must be able to manage both modes and implement systems that can bridge between them. Converged infrastructure solutions can modernize mode 1 systems and bridge to mode 2 ones via orchestration and cloud ready interfaces.
While the need to operate bi-modally may be seen as a necessary evil, organizations will not tolerate data being stranded in mode 1 islands at the cost of valuable business insight. Tools like Pentaho Enterprise Data Integration, that can bring together the data warehouse of mode 1, with the unstructured data of mode 2 to provide users with a clear view of all their data, will gain significant traction.
#4: A Centralized Data Hub
Recent IDC research revealed that 53 percent of organizations in the region consider big data and analytics important and have adopted or plan to adopt it in the near future. Companies are finding new ways to correlate and merge data from different sources to gain more insight, while repurposing old data for different uses.
To ensure the governance and accessibility of this data, IT needs to create a centralized data hub for better management, use and protection of their data. This centralized hub will need to be an object store that can scale beyond the limitations of traditional storage systems, ingest data from different sources, and provide search across public and private clouds as well as mobile devices.
#5: Growing Awareness of IoT in the Data Center
The networking of things will affect every aspect of our lives, and while this may not become a major trend for APAC next year, according to Yoshida the decisions we make in IT in 2017 should be made with an eye to IoT.