An IBM managed services roundtable revealed two thirds of CIOs saying they will turn to partners to steer resources to more business-aligned objectives. Justin Gatlin, director, offering management and development of IBM Asia Pacific’s global technology services division said that these CIOs would even go so far as to selectively hand over day-to-day management of selected infrastructure portions to partners. This is the result of large organisations moving more focus away from IT optimisation towards customer service instead.
It has necessitated them partnering with a vendor to manage the basic IT layer of their organisation while they pay more attention to their customers.
CIOs also have to manage new trends and issues like mobility, a more porous security network, a high-performance workplace, complexity, risk and more. All these sees Gartner’s 2012 forecast of 20-percent of companies not owning any IT, turning out to be very possible.
Gatlin touts that all service delivery by IBM to their customers, “… is based on the same platform so ability to move across different delivery methods without disruption, is very high.”
Wang Jack Jong, general manager of global technology services for IBM Malaysia gave an overview of the Malaysian market, “Most organisations in Malaysia are in the strategic outsourcing phase; they have implemented virtualisation, enabled self-help –they now just need IBM to handle some parts. It’s more about the day-to-day operations (that need to be managed).”
He also admitted that public cloud take up in Malaysia was low. That said, a more enhanced version of their public cloud service, Smart Cloud Enterprise+ is due to be launched in the region. More information about it can be found at http://thoughtsoncloud.com/index.php/2011/12/introducing-ibm-smartcloud-enterprise-part-1-of-2/
