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The Future is in the Clouds, CIOs Told

DUBAI - If 2009 was the year that Chief Information Officers (CIOs) spent ducking under the devastating effects of the financial downturn, in 2010 they would do well to heed some expert advice and stick their heads 
into the clouds.

In a world where ‘cautious optimism’ defines the future of IT spending across both the developed and the emerging markets, cloud computing might well be answer to every CIO’s quest to not only trim operational costs, but bring about a serious alignment of their organizations’ business and IT objectives.

Philippe De Marcillae, Executive President IDC, during his speech in the IDC CIO Summit at the Burj Al Arabon Sunday.—KT photo by Rahul Gajjar

Cloud computing is a new-wave IT architecture under which business tap their data and applications over the Internet or intranets instead of from local servers. This will be among a host of other prominent issues, including virtualisation, outsourcing, business analytics, disaster recovery, and security, that will be discussed at the two-day IDC Middle East CIO Summit 2010 to held at the Madinat Jumeriah on January 24-25.

Running under the theme ‘From Pressure to Performance’, the third installment of the conference will attract almost 130 of the region’s most influential ICT end users as they gather to hear the views of industry leaders who will seek to drive home the importance of understanding the dynamics of the new digital landscape that will help spearhead global recovery this year
 and beyond.

Speaking at a press conference to introduce the summit and their partners, IDC’s Executive Vice President for International Business Units, Phillipe de Marillac, said that markets in Middle East and Africa (MEA) will represent approximately 17 per cent of the net new global IT spend in the next two years. That is certainly sounds like good news, considering that there was a 5 per cent decline in IT spending in the MEA region (with the UAE slipping as much as 14.7 per cent in 2009), but Marillac cautions against expecting the economy to gallop the way it did in the 
pre-recession years.

“Despite emerging markets emerging from recession virtually unscathed, they will concentrate on maintaining liquidity, rebuilding customer pipelines and spending smartly.” And this makes the job of the CIO just a little more complicated. “The CIO has to do a great balancing act which is centered around the need to optimize, drive business expansion and ensure compliance with increasingly complex regulatory requirements,” says Jyoti Lalchandani, IDC ME, Africa and Turkey’s Vice President and Regional Managing Director. “In that context their questions are no longer about how much worse it would get, but what does the shape of recovery look like. So they are looking to increase the efficiency of their existing IT structure, improving logistics and distribution and manage the exponential growth of stored information among other things.” As far as the Middle East is concerned, the public sector along with healthcare, education and banking will be the sectors that will dictate ICT spend this year, he said.

The key to managing enterprise efficiency will also depend on the CIO’s ability to subscribe to new IT services without having to stretch his budget. “Cloud computing will help him manage his hardware costs, besides he doesn’t have to worry about investing or maintaining compliance either. As far as the question about security are concerned there is no guarantee that it would be safe in the data centres where they are right now,” says Omar Dajani, Director of Systems Engineering, Symantec.

“In the past everyone was talking about process speeds. Last year it was about improving performance and energy efficiency. We reckon from now onwards it will be about having technology that is faster and smarter that gives the CIO and his organization a hold on security and remote manageability, which ultimately helps bring the ownership costs down,” concurs Khaldoun Aboul-Saoud, Regional marketing and development manager, Intel.

anshuman@khaleejtimes.com