Virtual growth
Virtualisation was a major theme in 2008 and will continue to be in 2009. In fact, adoption may even accelerate as organisations seek ways to make better use of scarce IT resources. The space has also benefited from increased competitiion, with VMware, Novell, Citrix and (belatedly) Microsoft and more all targeting aspects of virtualisation.
A recent VMware-sponsored survey of 535 organisations across Australia and New Zealand, revealed that 75% of businesses have adopted or are currently implementing a virtualisation, up 16% from 2007.
Drivers include disaster recovery and demand for application availability.
Fifty-eight percent of those polled stated that most or some of their new production servers are provisioned as virtual machines, including those running mission-critical production applications, up by 21% over last year.
The top five benefits of virtualisation, according to the respondents, include: improved/enabled disaster recovery; reduction in the time to deploy or redeploy servers; reduced ongoing infrastructure costs; lower administration and management costs, and; simplified management of server and desktop infrastructure.
Communications 2.0
Unified Communications could be considered a centre of excellence in New Zealand, with at least two local providers, IPFX and Zeacom, exporting their software globally. Add the multinational providers, such as Cisco, Siemens, Avaya, open source and (belatedly) Microsoft and the market is vibrant.
Unified communications has come into its own with arrival of voice over IP allowing the development of sophisticated customisable communications applications. the result: a convergence of conferencing, email, mobile, voicemail and other applications offering the key UC feature of presence, the ability to know whether someone is taking calls and the ability to route calls to where they can be taken.
One recent study, from Market Tools on behalf of Siemens, found a third of end users expressing strong interest in UC. The study found over half the companies surveyed installing UC applications.
The drivers? Increased productivity and agility.
Online everywhere
Mobile data is finally here and 2009 will be a big year for mobile in New Zealand, with Telecom (belatedly) getting on the right technology platform.
Internationally Vodafone Group recently cut its revenue outlook, but despite a weaker economy, the mobile giant still sees growth opportunities in mobile data.
Analyst firm Ovum reports both AT&T (51%) and Verizon (43%) have experienced very strong growth in wireless data revenues over the past year.
With more carriers subsidising smartphones such as the iPhone and the BlackBerry Storm, Ovum projects that mobile data revenues will see continued strong growth throughout 2009.
Data explosion
It’s kinda boring, but pervasive computing can only lead to higher volumes of data - and that means more demand for storage in all markets and more demand for document management and archiving in business and government. But then, we say that every year.