An increasingly mobile workforce, new
requirements for access to services and environmental concerns will
be among the key factors impacting enterprise outsourcing decisions
in 2008, according to predictions made by Joe Hogan, vice
president, Strategic Outsourcing Programs, Unisys.
Consumerisation of information technology
will continue to have profound implications for enterprises’ IT
services strategies and the outsourced utility model of IT
infrastructure management will become more of a necessity. This
means that the modernisation of legacy applications will accelerate
as pressures for both flexibility and cost containment increase and
that environmentally conscious data centres based on “green”
technology will proliferate across all industries;
“Cost savings, formerly the key factor in
outsourcing decisions, will now be a given and not the sole driver,
or in many cases even a primary one,” Hogan says. “A profound
transformation in how people work and do business is driving a new
set of service requirements and imperatives. Accommodating these
new user demands will be the main challenge for outsourcing
providers in the coming year and beyond.”
Hogan says that companies that have
previously hosted their own data centres, with management of those
facilities provided by their outsourcing provider’s personnel, will
come to rely more and more on off-site data centres owned and
operated by their services provider.
“It makes economic sense for enterprises to take advantage of
their outsourcing partners’ increasing investments in lower cost
service delivery, standardized systems serving multiple customers,
and ‘green’ IT,” said Hogan. “This new paradigm can help
forward-looking enterprises decrease their capital expenditures and
reinvest the difference to drive innovation in their business.”
To avoid the adverse impact of unchecked
data centre power usage, Hogan says, companies will push
substantial investments in “green” IT in 2008. They will also
demand that their outsourcing providers do the same – not only to
conserve energy, but also to appease increasingly concerned
shareholders and dramatically impact their bottom line.
According to Hogan, outsourced data centres
will increasingly feature more efficient storage and better power
facilities, servers using multi-core processors and use of
virtualization. The last two steps can reduce the number of systems
requiring separate power supplies while making operations more
efficient by dividing tasks among and within multiple processors in
each server computer.