Regardless of geography or industry, organisations worldwide are finding new ways to improve their IT service strategy to run IT like a customer-focused business.
Findings from a joint EMC and VMware study - State of IT Transformation - show that customers across the globe are in the midst of IT transformation initiatives to help advance the digital business agendas of their organisations.
While 90 percent of organisations indicated the importance of having a documented IT transformation strategy and roadmap with executive and line of business support, more than half (55 percent) admitted to having nothing documented.
As such, 80 percent indicated they want to standardise services in a business-focused catalog with a self-service portal and to increase automation to improve IT service delivery, including resource planning, financial management and metering.
“Our analysis of hundreds of EMC and VMware customers was more validating than surprising in that nearly every organisation that participated shared with honesty, very common gaps and target goals to deliver IT services more efficiently as the best way to help enable their organisations better compete as full-fledged digital businesses,” says Kevin Roche, President, Global Services, EMC Corporation.
“Both EMC and VMware have been part of many successful IT transformations with our customers, particularly those that enthusiastically adopt hybrid cloud strategies.
“These customers are not only experiencing significant cost savings, they are also making the most progress toward their digital business objectives.”
Cloud
Participants indicated they want their IT organisations to be cost-competitive with external service providers and are seeking cost efficiencies by virtualising, standardising, and developing hybrid cloud architectures.
Most organisations indicated they want to have a hybrid cloud architecture for their production applications within the next 18-24 months, with 90 percent reporting they are in the evaluation or proof-of-concept stage.
In terms of virtualisation, nearly every participating organisation reported wanting to reach between 80-100 percent in compute, storage, and application virtualisation.
“The State of IT Transformation report shows that organisations in a variety of global, vertical industries can benefit from the implementation of a robust IT service strategy, powered by software-defined technologies,” says Loretta Brown, Vice President of Federation, VMware.
“Together, with EMC, our mutual customers can achieve IT transformation by easily extending their private cloud workloads to and from the public cloud, while managing, securing and connecting all of their applications across all clouds and all devices.”
Applications
Participants said they want to automate platform delivery to help their organisations develop software faster.
Yet more than 80 percent of participants reported lacking a scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework and 68 percent said their organisations take 6–12 months or more to complete a new application development lifecycle. Most indicated the desire to get this down to a few weeks.
Industries
Healthcare - firms identified the most opportunities for improvements in their IT transformations. Healthcare participants scored themselves the lowest in more areas while prioritising gaps in more areas than any other industry.
Retail - the top performer in desktop virtualisation with the top 20th percentile reporting well above 60 percent of desktops virtualised. They also report having a majority of their applications built on a scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework.
Telecommunications - participants in this sector lead in network virtualisation with the average firm reporting they’ve achieved 40 percent in network virtualisation; the top 20 percent of companies in this sector have achieved nearly 80 percent network virtualisation.
Financial Services - participants scored above average in most areas of their IT transformation initiatives with nearly 40 percent having a fully supported, documented IT transformation strategy and roadmap.
Government - top 20 percent reported having over 20 percent of production apps in a hybrid cloud and nearly 100 percent of compute and applications virtualised.