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3rd Platform IT as a service to grow in importance


INTERNATIONAL DATA CORPORATION (IDC) predicts that by 2016, 65% of global competitive strategies will require real- time 3rd Platform IT as a Service (ITaaS). The ability of CIOs and IT organizations to grasp how business wants services that serve actual business needs, not traditional IT components, is significantly altering the ways in which service management is defined as successful. A new report, IDC PlanScape: Accelerating IT’s Progress to Business Maturity offers clear guidance about the business justification for creating a more mature, business-oriented service management strategy.


3rd Platform technologies are fundamentally altering how IT organizations function, how business is conducted, and how enterprises compete. This demands restructuring IT to deliver ITaaS 3rd Platform services that are focused on realizing the enterprises’ competitive strategies. The ability of IT to immediately achieve a maturing business focus within its strategic planning and


execution process is now an imperative. In this IDC PlanScape study, IDC explores a planning framework that enables CIOs and IT organizations to prepare for and respond to these transformative 3rd Platform imperatives. Moreover, the document details the key stakeholders and their roles and responsibilities in creating a more mature, business-driven IT organization to deliver service innovation to customers.


Additional key findings from this PlanScape include the following: Without question, maturing the IT business dimension requires the active participation of top IT management. Equally imperative is to ensure all stakeholders and beneficiaries of IT within the enterprise are kept abreast of the business dimension maturity process and actively solicited for feedback whenever possible.


Service innovation demands a multifaceted approach that seeks to ensure that all five maturity dimensions are simultaneously


addressed, continually focusing on the least mature process or the bottleneck that is holding up all other maturity dimensions. Rather than tackle IT business-facing objectives through massive project implementations, IDC recommends companies take a “theory of constraints” approach, frequently used within IT as a Service to quickly identify, analyze, and resolve a prioritized impediment (constraint) to IT-business alignment, thereby empowering subsequent energy and action for a second and third IT-business alignment constraint.


IT organizations that achieve long-term success will be characterized by a service- centric culture that tracks effectiveness through an “outside in” or customer-focused perspective, rigorous IT competitive analysis, and business-oriented service metrics.


Flash already a key part of EMEA storage market


FLASH STORAGE is one of the disruptive technologies that are changing the game in the European storage market. Even though it is a relatively new technology and many vendors have only entered the European market in the past 12–18 months, customer adoption is already soaring, according to a forthcoming special study from International Data Corporation (IDC).


Despite this being a relatively new storage market segment, the external flash storage market in EMEA is expected to reach a total value of $2.9 billion in 2014, showing year-on-year growth of 32%. The total capacity shipped with flash-powered arrays is expected to hit 3.53 exabytes in 2014. Flash-powered arrays can be divided into two groups. Hybrid flash arrays (HFAs) are the main category in the market, given their ability to reach an almost comparable performance with an all-flash system, but with considerably lower $/GB. All-flash array (AFA) systems, although posting impressive 302% year-on- year growth in user value in 2014, remain a single-point solution in the datacenter, with broader adoption hindered by the still high $/ GB price gap compared with spinning media.


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Western Europe accounted for roughly 75% of total EMEA flash market value in 2014, with adoption spreading from the U.K. to Germany, France, the Nordics, and Benelux, traditionally first adopters of new technologies, with southern European countries following closely.


Central and Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and Africa (CEMA) follows suit with Western Europe in terms of HFA penetration in EMEA with the highest adoption seen in Russia, South Africa, Israel, and the Gulf countries. AFA demand is still very nascent in the emerging markets, with significant growth potential mostly from the Middle East subregion.


“European organizations have quickly adopted flash storage systems for their performance-sensitive workloads,” said Silvia Cosso, Western European storage analyst at IDC. “Now that all the major vendors have flash-powered arrays in their portfolio, and startups continue to push AFA into the market, competitive differentiation will come from data management capabilities and price. Future penetration of flash in the datacenter is dependent on how quickly the $/GB value will continue to decline.”


The flash storage systems market is a fast-growing segment of the EMEA storage systems market. IDC forecasts that total flash-optimized market value will grow at 15% CAGR from 2013 through 2018. The AFA market alone is expected to show an impressive 58% CAGR during the same forecast period, and will account for about 15% of EMEA’s total flash market by 2018.


Growth is mainly fuelled by a drop in flash $/GB value, which is expected to fall by more than 70% from 2014 to 2018, as well as mainstream acceptance of flash systems for a broader range of workloads.


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