ENTERPRISE MANAGEMENT ASSOCIATES®
Analyst Corner
January 2009 EMA Analyst’s Corner:
12 Hot IT Management Trends to Watch For 2009
With the beginning of the new year, you’re probably wondering what trends to watch for in 2009. To help address this need, EMA has announced its take on the IT management trends and technologies that will have the greatest impact on enterprise computing during the coming year.
Overall, EMA expects a strong focus on:
- IT management initiatives that deliver measurable cost savings in a tight economy
- Continued deployment of technologies that enable IT to be managed as a business
- New management challenges introduced by the growth of emerging technologies.
Furthermore, the following are 12 hot IT management trends that the EMA roster of analysts has identified for 2009:
CMDBs will mature into integrated systems with a heightened focus on federation, resulting in faster time-to-value – look for maturing “CMDB System” deployments that encompass application discovery, provide better metrics and closely link to related architectures like process automation. These federated CMDB Systems will consist of components targeted at unique constituencies (e.g. network managers, asset managers), increasing IT flexibility and speeding the realization of benefits from a core CMDB investment.
Widespread proliferation of virtualization will continue to present formidable management challenges – following exuberant and largely under-managed virtualization deployments, EMA predicts that comprehensive management of virtual systems will be the most important success factor for virtual environments in 2009.
Increased adoption of technologies that facilitate management of IT as a business – IT organizations are moving beyond technology management and expanding into the business of IT, including strategy, marketing, staffing, suppliers, service portfolio and investment. EMA expects an increase in application of service catalog, service portfolio, business service management (BSM) and other technologies that help companies manage the business of IT to deliver greater value at lower cost.
Role of the service desk to transform and gain importance – the pressure to run IT as a business will further move the help desk front-and-center as a key customer-facing discipline. EMA expects traditional help desks to evolve into modern service desks that will shoulder broader responsibilities and become part of companies' larger IT Service Management (ITSM) strategies.
Forecast for cloud computing calls for rough weather – perhaps the most hyped technology of 2008, cloud computing will undoubtedly continue its reach into the enterprise during the coming year. However, EMA predicts that savvy IT professionals will demand credible answers to growing concerns around reliability, security and compliance before adopting cloud computing as a viable approach for mission-critical applications.
Green IT investments will be fueled by cost savings vs. environmental altruism – although some won’t admit it publicly, “Green IT” is not purely about environmental sustainability and corporate altruism. More so, employing Green practices and technologies will be driven by ROI and reductions in IT power consumption in both the data center and on the desktop. With spiking energy costs and a tight economy, EMA predicts that Green IT will be all about dollars in 2009.
IT governance initiatives will help enterprises weather the economic storm – IT is rightly seen by many as a potential savior for organizations trying to weather the economic storm. Along those lines, EMA predicts that organizations will increasingly turn to IT governance initiatives, such as project and portfolio management (PPM), resource management and financial control to create an edge in these tough economic times.
Significantly increased threats, new approaches to IT management and economic pressures will keep IT security in the forefront – an explosion in threats, organized cybercrime, unresolved questions about the security of virtualization and cloud computing and the global economic crisis will keep IT security front and center in 2009. EMA predicts that these factors will put new pressure on business executives to recognize IT risk management as a central aspect of IT governance, with new emphasis placed on improving the effectiveness of complementary IT management and security operations.
Solid state disk to emerge as new first tier of storage in the data center – with breakthroughs in nano-technology, Solid State Disk (SSD) solutions promise to deliver greater capacity at much less cost. In 2009, EMA predicts that SSD will emerge as the new first tier of storage in the data center.
Economic pressures to drive strategic (but quantifiable) investments in automation – with the economy facing challenges of historic proportion, IT organizations are under intense pressure to reduce expenses while continuing to improve the strategic value of IT by providing flexible, dynamic and efficient IT services that drive business success. EMA believes that organizations will increasingly turn to automation as a means of doing more with less – especially in the data center and storage arena .
Video growth will push unified communications management to the forefront – with several major industry players pushing video for operational cost savings with green upside, accelerating growth in video traffic will expose service delivery infrastructure issues that had only started to appear with prior deployments of VoIP, ICT and mobility. EMA expects that IT operations and planning professionals – especially those focused on the network – will need to re-tune and optimize their environments to handle this demand in 2009.
Changing organizational roles will escalate demand for new management technologies – as IT silos become more integrated along a service management model, the need for new technologies to support cross-domain collaboration and more cohesive views of infrastructure-to-service interdependencies will become paramount. The politics of collaboration will reach well beyond finger pointing to higher levels of automated diagnostics, process automation and shared access to information that will in turn reduce IT operational costs.
To find out how EMA can help you get pointed in the right direction this year with these IT management topics, please contact sales@enterprisemanagement.com or call 1.303.543.9500.
