In a survey conducted by Tecala and released by ZDNet regarding the IT priorities of 136 IT managers and CIOs in Australia, the results revealed that almost 2/3 of businesses plan to increase their cloud computing spending for the next 12 months. Half of the respondents believed that cloud computing and virtualization will be top priorities for the next year and that 25% of them had expressed willingness to prioritize datacenter virtualization. According to the survey, 20% of the respondents plan to shift to private clouds.
The survey also showed that about 66% of the respondents have partly shifted their IT operations to the clouds and that about 25% of these companies’ computing requirements are already in the clouds. 78% of the respondents believe that they can totally move their operations to the clouds without the need to maintain on-premise physical servers while 48% of them want to employ hybrid cloud computing.
The survey also revealed that companies are open to the idea of datacenter virtualization in order to enhance server efficiency and limit maintenance costs and hardware purchases. Also, 10% of the respondents plan to implement virtualization next year. The Tecala study was conducted in Melbourne and Sydney during the EMC Forums.
In another development, Gartner expects tech spending to reach $3.7 Trillion in 2013. Big data, social networking, cloud computing and mobile technologies will continue to influence IT budgets. Even departments outside of IT are going to spend more on technologies. Sales and marketing departments are expected to spend on cloud-based CRM and social networking while individuals will spend on Dropbox accounts. The trend on tech spending is new and will depend on the needs of each department.
The $3.7 trillion budget shows an increase of 3.8% from the 2012 expectation and Gartner is also expecting that tech spending will breach the $4 trillion by 2015. The Chief Information Officers will still play a major role in tech budgeting. According to Mary Mesaglio, VP for Research at Gartner, the Chief Information Officers must spend money on digital interface between the customer and the business. Back office automation shouldn’t be a top priority.
According to an InformationWeek article, Gartner’s revelation is anchored on the expected increase in IT employment and the forecasted inability to meet the expected surge in big data. According to Gartner analysts, there will be 4.4 million global IT jobs created by 2015 specifically for big data support. What’s more interesting is that for every IT job created to support big data, at least 3 more jobs will be created outside of IT. But, even if there’ll be an increase in jobs opening, analysts aren’t sure if there’ll be enough employees for it. Thus, the Chief Information Officer must be able to hire as well as train his employees for the big data surge.
