Today's CIO agenda looks vastly different to how it looked two years ago due to the current economic climate, with CIOs aggressively cutting costs and IT managers not able to afford making bad decisions.
Speaking at the VISIT 2009 conference, in Munich, Germany, Fujitsu CTO Dr Joseph Reger stated that reduced IT spend means the CIO's focus has shifted from capital/operational expenditure, to cash flow management, as well as from non- to discretionary spend.
“IT is in management mode,” said Reger, adding that the cost of IT infrastructure matters greatly to organisations under the current circumstances.
Regarding the cost of infrastructure, Reger stated that organisations need to determine how to leverage their investment, how to keep the infrastructure running and how to accelerate transitions.
He pointed out that old-style infrastructure models have become expensive, underutilised, ran up high energy costs, are difficult to reconfigure and are not suitable new business models. Most importantly, said Reger, old-style infrastructure models are not dynamic.
On the other hand, new-style IT infrastructure models are dynamic and allow organisations to transform assets into dynamic resource pools and automate the management of all infrastructure elements.
“This is the current wisdom, but is there a way to go one step further?” Reger asked, before adding that there is, as long as an organisation can find its pain points.
The answer, he said, lies in adopting a managed portfolio of the IT infrastructure, which includes infrastructure as a service, managed infrastructure, infrastructure solutions, and infrastructure products and services.
This approach, Reger explained, is globally sustainable and competitive in the market. But the components of a single global IT portfolio do not operate independently, but work best when working together.
Reger pointed out that the new dynamic infrastructure products released this week by Fujitsu, which has repositioned itself as a dynamic infrastructure provider, illustrate this point. The company's zero client product works with its workplace-as-a-service concept, while the server-as-a-service plugs into cloud infrastructure.
“This is how to be competitive. You have to put together the design capabilities with the service infrastructure,” he said, adding that CIOs have to raise their game.
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