Key IT infrastructure trends CIOs need to consider in 2015

BANGALORE, INDIA: 2014 has been a momentous year for VMware, particularly in India. "We are witnessing a pretty significant business transformation, where businesses are digitizing and their products and go-to-market strategies are changing. For IT, it’s a question of how do all of the things they do to support their businesses change to keep up with and help drive the transformation," says Arun Parameswaran, MD, VMware India.

He also rounds up key predictions themed around VMware's three missions that will be useful to bear in mind as CIOs continue to define what the North Star is for their organization’s IT infrastructure, said he.

Software-Defined Data Center (SDDC)
Software-defined networking, storage, data centers and security will start to mature. After all, according to an IDC whitepaper commissioned by VMware in October 2014 entitled, “Empowering Organizations in a Software Defined World”, businesses in India have already avoided $1.5 billion in CAPEX and will be able to avoid a further US$4 billion by 2020.

Simply being able to virtualize some servers has a limited value, but when combined with a highly automated infrastructure, IT departments can deliver a degree of IT agility that the business has been demanding.

To deal with the rapidly changing demands of digital business and scale systems up — or down — rapidly, computing has to move away from static to dynamic models. According to IDC, integrated infrastructure and platforms will grow 26 percent and reach $1.47 billion in 2015.

Hybrid Cloud
Across APJ, according to the VMware APJ Cloud Index 2013, around two-thirds of IT decision-makers have told us they intend to invest most heavily in private and hybrid clouds. We know hybrid interest in the region will continue to be strong.
In a similar vein, IDC analysts predict that the hybrid cloud will be the choice data center infrastructure in 2015. By end of 2015, 20-25 percent of enterprises will be in a hybrid cloud environment with SDDC and/or integrated infrastructure.

End-User Computing
In 2015, Forrester expects to see a significant number of businesses across Asia Pacific embrace hybrid tablet/laptop devices as a start of their enterprise mobility journey. After all, enterprise IT’s transition to the mobile-centric delivery model is powered by the software-defined generation who continue to enter the workplace every year. Our end-user study, VMware MeConomy 2014, reveals that 28 percent of college students say they would not consider joining a company that restricts them from using own devices at work.

A growing proportion of forward-thinking businesses in Asia Pacific will begin to examine their employee's mobile moments and those who succeed will think customer mobility, not enterprise mobility.