The industry reflects, looks ahead

By Staff, ZDNet Asia
Friday, March 14, 2008 06:39 PM

Andrew Dobbins, regional vice president, Verizon Business Asia-Pacific

Andrew Dobbins,
Verizon Business
In China and India especially, firms began to see that they could use their information and telecommunications infrastructures as a key business differentiator. This is clear: in our region firms treasure the concept of efficiency, and robust and effective IT and communications infrastructures allows them to make these savings.

Q. What do you remember as the biggest industry news for 2007, and why?
Dobbins: Basically the strength of the market, despite some predictions in 2006 that we would be in for a rough ride. In China and India especially, firms began to see that they could use their information and telecommunications infrastructures as a key business differentiator. This is clear: in our region firms treasure the concept of efficiency, and robust and effective IT and communications infrastructures allows them to make these savings.

In 2007, we also saw enterprises extend their reach to their fullest potential by implementing the appropriate IT and communications products and services, and become more flexible and adaptable entities. Key has also been the availability of reliable, available, secure and far-reaching and very high-bandwidth networks that support companies' business aims.

Gartner issued a report warning IT heads to prepare a recession budget. What is your view?
CIOs, IT directors and heads of IT should always have a contingency plan to avoid any disruption to the smooth running of operations, so this warning should not really mean any dramatic change for most large businesses. It's hard to predict exactly what impact issues such as the U.S. credit crunch or the price of oil will have on the Asian economy, or regional IT spend. However, all companies in the region, and particularly those operating globally, should always be ready to react quickly to changing market conditions.

What is certain is that most global companies are now looking extremely closely at getting the best value from their IT investments, streamlining operations, realizing cost efficiencies, and most importantly, ensuring that technology truly supports business objectives. The ongoing uptake of managed services for business critical IT and communications is one result of this trend. It shouldn't be forgotten that you can strike managed service deals that flex according to your businesses' needs, whether that is expansion or contraction

Name three hot technologies to watch in 2008.
First, unified communications and collaboration will likely be a hugely significant technology during 2008. All of the required elements to make it work--applications, networks and system integration--will be enterprise-class and global.

Fundamentally, the way firms will derive competitive advantage will be by extending their reach to their fullest potential and becoming more flexible and adaptable entities sharing knowledge, reacting faster and having a more effective supply chain than their competitors. For global enterprises, maximizing the potential of infrastructure and resources across geographical and time boundaries to achieve the twin goals of productivity and profitability will be the number one critical management objective in 2008 and unified communications and collaboration systems will support these aims.

Unified communications is all about making real-time communications manageable and accessible, across multiple devices within the extended enterprise, seamlessly and intuitively integrating business communications solutions with operational goals, with the objective of enabling employees to collaborate easily and naturally. According to a study by research firm Frost & Sullivan, collaboration is a key driver of the overall performance of companies around the world. The research showed that its impact is twice as significant as a company's aggressiveness in pursuing new market opportunities according to the firm's strategic orientation and five times as significant as the external market environment that firms work in.

Second, software as a service (SaaS). As firms look to make crucial decisions regarding their bottom lines and expenditure, one of the most useful weapons in their armory is the ability to stop making unnecessary investment in under-utilized technologies. Over the last year or so one of the most interesting trends in IT as a whole in recent times has been the advent of software as a service, where business critical applications are delivered on a hosted, as-you-need basis.

There's many a successful IT organization that uses hosting solutions for business-critical applications areas such as sales (e.g. Salesforce.com), CRM and enterprise resource systems such as Siebel and SAP. Hosting gives companies the opportunity to take advantage of business enhancing outsourcing deals, thus saving companies large sums of money that would have been spent on capital equipment, but can now be spent on addressing key business and technology challenges.

In 2008 we should see this concept extended to communications as a service (CaaS) where the voice, messaging and conferencing facilities are delivered on a hosted basis

Third, WAN (wide area network) optimization. Companies today are often faced with poor performing applications caused by multiple factors, including rogue applications on a network, bandwidth for non-business use, replication and data backups, that can lead to long transaction times, lowered productivity or an inability of workers to access applications. To address this issue, WAN optimization management solutions will continue to pick up momentum in 2008 through enterprise IT organizations with distributed or global environments, or both, that require standard performance of corporate applications across all company sites.

Organizations will increasingly realize that network optimization solutions--application acceleration, data flow and packet compression, monitoring functions, network security, and quality of service (QoS) capabilities--provide viability and ROI value in various parts of their WAN networks.

We'll also see increased take up of managed WAN optimization services that focus on the performance of customer applications starting with the network layer--and using metrics such as throughput, quality of service (QoS) and application volume. This is different from traditional measures of performance, which primarily center on customer premises equipment (CPE) uptime. Managed WAN acceleration services provide visibility into applications on the customer's network, enhance performance of mission-critical applications, and fine-tune the network to maintain performance.

Name up to three security trends that IT heads should look out for in 2008.
The success of today's extended global enterprise is built on the premise of enabling more workers in more places to 'work smarter' with more technology. Business critical data is stored and processed in increased and more diverse geographical locations, and has to be available not only to employees (both office-based, and remote), but also partners, suppliers or customers, around the world, and around the clock.

We believe that IT heads should now be focusing on securing this global information flow--not only across the network, but also outside the network and into a host of applications, remote databases, and wireless and mobile devices. This approach demands a fundamental reappraisal of "traditional" approaches to security, which focused on securing the business perimeter. Security today should span the entire IT stack, including the network, data, applications and users. And security decisions should be based on an effective assessment of risk, not simply on threats and vulnerabilities.

What does this mean in practice? Firstly, security controls should span the extended enterprise and be executed at the places where they are most effective and cost-efficient. This enables effective identity management to secure trust around users, with security technology encompassing the breadth of all those places where 'trusted users' can access data. The other tangible benefit of this is increased visibility and traceability of information that allows firms to track data usage over time across this wider reach.

Security decisions also need to focus on achieving measurable gains for the systems and services that have been implemented. Of course, measuring 'security performance' can present its own unique challenges, but by adopting this type of working culture, businesses are in a strong position to respond to compliance requirements. The approach gives companies data in a format they can use in a process-centric manner; firms therefore get maximum leverage from the knowledge that they generate and have a mechanism by which this knowledge can be leveraged in future projects. The key is to make sure that firms are able to conduct risk management in the most cost efficient way and from the most effective place.

Security should also be delivered as an ongoing process, addressing all parts of the security life cycle, providing visibility and control, with the aim of constant service improvement--and thus reduced risk. And finally, no one-size fits all; security solutions simply have to align with the business requirements and working practices of the customer.

Most importantly, the ideal security solution works around a customer-focused business model. It aims to meet customers' IT security goals such as information protection, business continuity and compliance through solutions that offer threat and vulnerability management, identity and access management, security and compliance measurement. These are delivered through managed security services, professional services and specific products, deployed where most effective and cost-efficient, completely according to customer requirements, and based around an intelligent, network-centric infrastructure.

Social networking sites...
...This time last year, nobody could have predicted the explosion in use of social networking sites such as Faceboook and MySpace. One other thing that hasn't been realized is just how such an explosion in use places more demands on networks. As businesses increasingly look to use such technologies in the enterprise arena, the demand for capacity can only be set to increase.

In our view, the impact of social networking for business is really tied to the move to a more collaborative working environment. In that sense, it's about much more than just "the business Facebook" but rather how to use any flavor of IP-enabled tools or applications to deliver productivity and direct bottom-line costs savings when deployed across the business and business partnerships.

In addition to building the collaborative enterprise, and the increased networking demands linked to this, the other big challenge with social networking sites will be security--and generating awareness among users the importance of developing good practices when interacting with unknown people on these sites. Relationships are all about building trust between two people, and in the real world this happens when we meet face to face. On the Internet, this often doesn't occur and users should beware of the potential dangers when signing up to and participating in these sites.

This brings together the importance of considering security in the extended enterprise, with the move to building a collaborative working environment. One consideration here is the growing importance of presence and identity management. It will be interesting to see to what extent social networking becomes integrated into the fabric of business life over the coming 12 months.

The biggest mistake I see CIOs make is...
...Not preparing for the future properly. By assuming that the status quo today will continue to support the business tomorrow, CIOs risk losing their competitive edge. Nobody can say for sure what the future brings but it would be a huge error for CIOs not to prepare for business contraction. All good CIOs and IT Heads should have put in place a business continuity strategy; likewise they will be mistaken if they do not have plans in place for how they can use IT to make the business more flexible and quicker to react to change.

The biggest challenge facing IT departments is...
...Coping with downward financial pressures, which is doing more for the business with less resources. Businesses will want to get more and more from their IT and won't likely be giving IT departments huge sums of money to be able to do it. Finding appropriately skilled IT and security professionals is contributing to the demand for more flexible and selective outsourcing and managed service arrangements. Such things could be the perfect solution to satisfy the demands on the IT department.


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