Goodbye 2008, onward 2009

Yaj Malik, area vice president for ASEAN, Citrix Systems

	Yaj Malik, Citrix Systems
	IT should be a business enabler and not an inhibitor to corporate streamlining and growth.

Q: What was the biggest thing that affected the industry last year?
Almost every firm in every industry has had to deal with the fallout of the financial crisis and economic downturn plaguing the global markets. Spending predictors are showing that many CIOs are cutting big-ticket investments and low value projects, which means less cash for bells and whistles IT projects.

What they are doing, however, is continuing to fund existing projects with tangible ROI--projects that are going to deliver sustainable business values for their businesses.

What is the biggest misconception about virtualization and why?
Many decision makers deem virtualization as a quick stopgap measure to rapidly reduce costs of server management and optimize their infrastructure spend. The area in which virtualization really moves beyond where it is in the marketplace today is when it starts getting applied to strategic business problems. Nobody deploys virtualization technology because it is the latest trend or for the short-term cost savings.

Goldman Sachs sees total cost of ownership (TCO) reductions will be a key driver for the acceleration in server virtualization deployments as CIOs are forced to cut capital spending and reign in management, administrative, power/cooling costs. Today, businesses are applying virtualization because they have very strategic business problems that are core to the fundamentals of running the business.

We will see these decisions manifested in strategies related to building an internal "cloud" environment to take advantage of delivering simplified computing to their staff.

What technology trend do you think will transform IT this year?

2009 will see the increased trend towards the consolidation of IT assets that will eventually allow CIOs to embrace virtualization and cloud computing to enable their IT organizations to maintain just one copy of each software, application, workload, allocate one password for each user and create only one instance of data. Not only does this eradicate the hassle of updating and maintaining multiple copies of each software application on numerous machines, it enables the IT organization to roll out new applications and desktops much more quickly as IT department is not required to rebuild the infrastructure each and every time to take into account new assumptions for security, connections and users’ devices.

New users can also be easily added onto the networks in minutes, rather than days or weeks. Built on a solid base of virtualized servers, applications and desktops, this end-to-end virtual environment is fast becoming a reality for many organizations.

No discussion on application delivery can be complete without addressing the plethora of end user devices available for the mobile and knowledge worker. With the consumerization of enterprise IT, this will be the single, biggest trend affecting corporate IT over the next decade. According to Gartner, by 2010 end-user preferences will decide as much as half of all software, hardware and service acquisitions made by IT as more users are bringing personal technology into the workplace and expecting to use it as part of their jobs.

It has, therefore, become extremely important for CIOs heading 2009 to pay close attention to what is happening on the consumer front and model their best practices for their IT organizations to act more like consumer-product companies. Right now, we’re looking at ways to deliver applications and desktops for end users in a natural and organic way to use in a rich environment with a broader range of mobile devices.

The biggest challenge facing IT departments is...

...the sheer complexity of the distributed computing model. Maintaining, managing and optimizing an organization’s IT assets has been the bane of every IT administrator and CIO, however, simplifying this has been a challenge for many companies. The existing infrastructure has proven on many counts to be inflexible in dealing with the challenges of a modern, dynamic business environment.

The inability of these resources to handle the agility required with new mergers or of rapidly offshoring certain functions has led to many corporate failures and succumbing to competitive threats. IT should ideally be a business enabler and not an inhibitor to corporate streamlining and growth.