You’d have to be living in a remote cave for several years now not to realize mobile phones are changing the world. You can begin comprehending the impact of these ubiquitous mobile devices by reading a recent survey from global market-research firm Synovate, involving 8,000 cell phone owners across 11 world markets.
“Three quarters of the survey respondents — including 82 percent of Americans — never leave home without their phones, and 36 people of people across the world (42 percent of Americans) go as far as to say they ‘cannot live without’ their cell phone,” the report states.
Overall, 23 percent of respondents own more than two mobile phones. Americans are among the most likely to own at least two at 33 percent, along with the French at 34 percent. Brits and Americans were the most likely to own a smartphone at 21 percent and 20 percent, respectively.
“This sheer volume, coupled with enormous marketing potential that is just starting to be realized, means that marketers need to understand as much as possible about how people use their phones, how they feel about them and what they want more of,” says Steve Garton, the firm’s head of global media.
To learn more about the Synovate survey and its findings, click here.
As I understand it, dynamic infrastructures actively react to the environment around them by interpreting data from sensors. In this InfoWorld article, analyst Charles King, editor and principal of Pund-It, calls this new model “chaotically distributed computing,” and warns of the need for IT to support and manage all of those new data sources.
Check out the article, here. It contains some interesting projections about the value of dynamic infrastructures and the possible IT fallout. “But,” says King, “That is what IT is all about: recognizing the difficulties and overcoming them.”
Yes, it’s been a bad year for IT budgets – the worst ever, in fact – but we should return to the lavish spending levels of 2008 … in 2012.
That’s the prediction of Peter Sondergaard, senior VP of research with Gartner, who says: “Global enterprise spending on IT is going to decline 6.8 percent this year. And the IT industry – measured in dollar terms – will actually not recover until 2012, to the 2008 revenue levels.”
In dollars and cents, that’s $2.3 trillion spent this year, compared to $2.5 trillion last year, which will be the level we reach again three years from now.
“Spending has actually declined in all markets,” he says, citing hardware, software, telecommunications and IT services. “Compared with previous negative economic cycles, the impact has been felt all across every single vertical industry.”
Recovery will be driven by IT spending primarily in health care, utilities and government. Sondergaard notes that IT budget planning for 2010 is being done “on the background, therefore, of the worst year ever, in the IT industry.”
“2010 is about balancing cost, risk, and growth,” he says, but expects that about half of all enterprise IT budgets will reflect zero growth or even less funding than for this year.
“By 2012 the accelerated spending on IT will begin to drive a culturally different approach to technology that will start to impact product features, service structures and the overall IT industry,” Sondergaard predicts. “Silicon Valley is no longer in the driver’s seat.”
To see Sondergaard’s brief speech on this, click here.
Whether you’re looking overseas or in the Portland metro area for outsourcing your data center, the fundamental factors governing the decision are much the same. In a recent paper primarily discussing overseas data center outsourcing, Gartner consultants listed some key recommendations we feel apply locally as well:
1. Drive data center sourcing decisions with business requirements.
2. Outsourcing cost decisions should be driven not only by cost savings, but also by the provided quality and value.
3. Every sourcing strategy has limitations and risks.
4. Establish the key contract clauses required in a sourcing agreement to allow for flexibility and to support the data center needs of the future.
5. Focus on the sourcing governance challenge – organization, skills and processes – and retained activities.
“IT operations and support organizations are often viewed as an overhead that provides a commodity function that can be easily and safely outsourced,” the report states, then adds: “Good business decisions are based on understanding services and costs, the impact of change, and the risk associated with IT services that do not meet business requirements.”
Good advice that tracks with our experience. Customers who consider EasyStreet as an IT partner ultimately get the most benefit from our services.
Wondering where your IT budget is going? Recent tabulations of data center costs show the rising costs of operating one could even threaten corporate profitability in some companies.
A recent report from global management consultants McKinsey & Company says data center capacity currently is growing 10 percent annually as businesses process and store more data. And the resulting cost of this growth is higher yet.
“With this spike in capacity comes a corresponding escalation in data center IT costs,” states the McKinsey report. “Today’s data centers account for approximately 25 percent of the total corporate IT budget, when you take into account facilities, servers, storage and the labor to manage them. This share will grow as the number of servers, the amount of power consumed, and the unit cost of power all increase.”
For example, overall IT spending is climbing at a rate of six percent a year, but data center facility costs alone are jumping 20 percent annually.
“The portion of the IT budget consumed by infrastructure and facilities is significantly reshaping the economics of many businesses,” the report states. “In information-intensive businesses like investment banks, telecoms and business information, data center costs are diverting capital from new product development, making some products and segments uneconomical and materially affecting margins. Without radical changes in operations, many companies with large data centers face reduced profitability.”
You can guess EasyStreet’s take on this: Considering the well-known inefficiencies in most corporate data centers, these rising costs sound like a good argument for outsourcing as a more manageable IT cost structure for more companies.
