What should a CIO be paying attention to in this time of services innovation?

According to an IDC analyst, there are at least four trends to watch. These include a scaling of services; data center transformation; big data provisioning and a consolidation in vendors.

IDC’s Chris Morris outlined these trends at the CIO Summit in Australia this week. Morris is IDC’s principal analyst in the Asia-Pacific region for cloud services and technologies.

Outsourcing 3.0: This is all about services. In particular, this is about integrating services for mobile devices, applications and information analytics.

The CIO’s view about outsourcing is changing. We talk about this internally quite a bit.  “Services,” for example is a double entendre. It has multiple meanings but carries the same context. IBM is a services provider, offering manpower for technology integrations. But it also can mean that the service provider builds their own data centers to offer  a suite of services. Tata and CSC are both building data centers to offer this new form of services.

For Morris it means that the cloud will be just another tool in the tool kit. It is not just a place to move your infrastructure. It has to be a place where services are continually made better.  That means service management plays a critical role. This is a huge battleground for the likes of HP and IBM.

Data Center Transformation: CIOs are feeling the stress of virtualization. The goal is to have more than 100 VMs on each server by 2012. That’s putting stress on the netwok and storage infrastructures which look increasingly outdated. The CIO needs to consider the impact of this stress and the need for upgrades to the architecture.

Big Data Provisioning: We hear about big data all the time but what impact will it really have? Morris says it will come down to how big data is provisioned. It’s the public cloud services that are buying up the disk storage. They have instant, on-demand access to storage. Those providers will have the best prices and the most sophisticated capabilities for managing modern applications.

Supplier Consolidation: The big data provisioning issue will lead to vendor consolidation.

According to CIO Australia:

“By 2015 public Cloud will probably be more important than virtual private Cloud because those security and reliability levels will have come up and there will be 80 per cent of new applications developed for public Cloud,” Morris said.

Change in Job Requirements: More services means more technology requirements. The greatest demand will be for people with technical skills. He says there will be a mix in the IT organization of 80% technicians and 20% managers.

Services Angle

We’re fast-moving to a services world. The CIO in many ways has to consider what it means to engage in a market that is less about solutions and more about outsourcing to services providers.