IT Areas of Focus for 2009

February/March 2009 Sun Inner Circle India Making sense of data GlassFish or Tomcat? This month's letter from Sun CIO Bob Worrall Member Resources Get the content you want: » Update your profile. Not a member? » Join now. Print-friendly page Contact Sun

Dear Inner Circle readers,

A warm welcome into the new year!

Given the challenges of the ongoing economic crisis, businesses are re-examining the IT assets they currently have and looking for ways to more fully take advantage of those capabilities. High performance, reliability, and scalability will always be key, but we will also continue to see developers and start-ups building on open source offerings. Open source software is available without barriers and offers access to source code, and we will see development teams in companies large and small bring in open source solutions to meet business requirements at minimal cost. A recent IDC study shows worldwide revenue for open source software will balloon to $5.8 billion in 2011 from $1.8 billion in 2006.

In 2009, organizations may consider putting datacenter refreshes and expansions on hold. However, there are tremendous opportunities to cut costs in the long run by making minor investments in virtualization over the next year. Both server and storage virtualization market is growing at a tremendous rate. Today, the emerging trend is x86 server virtualization, which most companies are focusing on now. According to IDC, with the adoption of virtualization technology, utilization rates for x86 systems have jumped from less than 10 percent to a far healthier 30 to 50 percent. Analysts also report that virtualization will rise dramatically through 2010.

Eco responsibility and ability to scale are also important priorities in 2009. Demand for scale and efficiency are ever increasing. The conversations around energy efficiency and eco responsibility are growing exponentially, in addition to increasing demand for network infrastructures. Organizations will move more towards adopting an open storage strategy will accelerate business and market response times while saving up to 90 percent versus closed, proprietary storage.

2009 will also witness a surge in the demand of comprehensive identity and access management solutions that can provide self-service to end users in a secure environment while addressing all aspects of user administration, authentication and access control. Technologies that require lower capital investments such as thin-client computing and SaaS will also offer opportunities to enterprises to be more cost efficient. The government spending on IT hardware, services and software is expected to continue irrespective of how the market scenario pans out. According to market analysts, this sector is large enough to even offset some of the losses from the corporate side.

2009 will see further adoption of personal and social networking technologies in the workplace. IDC says increased use of mobile technologies and Web 2.0 tools will "erode the distinctions" between work and personal environments. The government spending on IT hardware, services and software is expected to continue. In an economic downturn those companies that invest, develop and capitalize on technologies that save money while improving the efficiency and effectiveness of business have an opportunity to grab significant market and mind share with new and existing customers.

Running a business and overseeing IT is a tough task in the best of times. But in today's environment — with consumer and business spending shrinking, budgets declining, the stock market sinking, and the pressure to adopt new tools and technologies growing — many organizations are finding themselves stretched to the limit.

As 2009 unfolds, it is clear that enterprises with a forward-thinking approach and a solid grasp of technology trends will have a distinct competitive advantage.

With that note, I would like to thank you all for your support in the last year and hope the new year brings with it new hopes, joys and successes.

Anil Valluri
Managing Director & President
Sun Microsystems India