The IDC IT Managers Forum: Smart IT Buyer event brings together business and technology experts to present best practices on how to become a smart IT buyer in a crisis situation.
The Johannesburg event, held on 25 November, at the Sandton Convention Centre, formed part of the IDC's road-show programme, and was the first to be introduced by Andries Lombaard, the IDC's country manager for SA.
The main presentation, delivered by Hannes Fourie, senior research analyst, Systems and Infrastructure Solutions, at IDC SA, was titled “The New Normality for Technology Buyers”. Fourie addressed the state of IT markets, IT decision-maker spending patterns and macro trends in technology.
His presentation assessed the impact the economic recovery is having on ICT expectations and budgets, and revealed that IT spending on hardware, packaged software and services is forecast to show double-digit growth in 2011.
Research by the IDC suggests that worldwide IT spending will be about 6% for 2012 and will remain at this level through 2013 and 2014.This figure is expected to be higher in SA, initially at about 7% for 2012, in order to address the inherent pent-up demand prevalent in the local market, especially in the areas of enterprise resource planning, business intelligence (BI) and virtualisation. The overall market value in 2012 is estimated to be about $14 billion, split between hardware (48%), services (37%) and packaged software (15%).
IT spending budgets this year are expected to be generally higher than in 2010, with only 22% of survey respondents indicating lower budget numbers in 2011 than in 2010. In addition, the top three expenditure items for 2011 were increased availability and/or performance of IT systems; better communication with customers; and alignment of applications to business metrics.
Operational efficiency was seen as the top strategic initiative for the next 12 months, with virtualisation; BI and analytics; and unified communications and/or video conferencing the top three investment areas for this year.
The three macro technology trends identified by Fourie were cost 'removal', business efficiency and device proliferation. Cost reduction will be enabled by data centre consolidation, virtualisation and the use of cloud and/or outsourcing, he said; business efficiency involved real-time metrics, collaboration and unified communications, social media and business analytics; while the device proliferation trend considered the impact of flexibility, business continuity, competence, security and experience regarding mobility.
Fourie noted the growing virtualisation management gap created between the number of physical servers and the number of logical servers. He also made a number of interesting observations. Among these were that information is expected to grow by a factor of 44 from 2010 to 2020; storage capacity is expected to grow by a factor of 30 over a similar period; while staffing will grow at a factor of 1.4. The number of smartphones will overtake those of laptops by 2014; social media will become an integral part of business strategy; and data creation will become, and already is, part of daily life.
Presentations were also given by Gautam Chakrabarty, deputy GM, Business Solutions Division at Sharp, who spoke on managing enterprise output in a changing economy; Allan Stewart, senior enterprise sales at Mimecast, who discussed cloud computing; and Jaco du Plooy, technical manager at Eaton, who presented on server virtualisation. Lindiwe Msila, deputy director of IT in the Gauteng Office of the Premier, considered how technology can improve service delivery in the province.
In conclusion, the IDC advised that IT decision-makers anticipate, as far as possible, which applications are critical and which are discretionary. It encouraged them to use tools and processes to maximise visibility across infrastructure, and to develop win-win policies, stressing a 'no' attitude does not work, especially in the social media arena. It noted that BI and analytics are crucial for success, and encouraged decision-makers to consider desktop or client virtualisation and remote application portals for secure computing environments on a wide variety of devices. Finally, it suggested that decision-makers leverage, build and buy plans to take advantage of cloud.
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