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IDC Tackles Complexities Surrounding Data Center Transformation At Its Asia/Pacific InfraVision Conference

Source: IDC中国  Date: 2008-11-18

Beijing, November 18, 2008--With IT widely recognized as an important enabler of business growth, there has been an increased focus among Asia/Pacific customers to transform their datacenters to better support the rapidly changing business needs. According to results from IDC’s Asia/Pacific “Continuum” End User Survey 2008 conducted in Asia/Pacific, the top three challenges that businesses face today are successfully expanding into new business opportunities, controlling cost of businesses, and improving customer satisfaction by providing better experiences.

Avneesh Saxena, Group Vice President, Asia/Pacific Systems, Storage and Software, said "A transformation is the need of the day; and we are not talking about replacing any one IT product, but rather rejuvenating the entire data center that drives IT within an organization." As significant amounts of time, money and effort go into building a new data center, it is important for end users to be clear about how to plan, build and manage their data centers efficiently. Hence, the theme of IDC's Asia/Pacific InfraVision road show this year is Data Center Transformation: Making the Best Choices, with an agenda geared towards addressing these concerns.

IDC classifies data centers today into three primary categories based on the type of business it serves. "Web 2.0 data centers are leading the transformation by setting new standards in data center design and architecture", added Avneesh. "These companies are fairly new and hence starting from scratch in the kind of IT that will support their business model. Hosted/managed and traditional data centers are the ones that need to transform, in order to stay competitive and meet the new business objectives."

Most end-users realize the need to transform their data centers but are at a loss on where to start and who they should partner with. There is also confusion around the ideal type of datacenter that will serve their needs in the future. Some frequent questions they come across are:

• When do we know if it is time for our data center to be replaced/refreshed?
  
• What kind of power and cooling infrastructure should we build?
  
• Which new forms of server and storage architectures should we install?
  
• What type of infrastructure software solutions will help us become more efficient and reduce unplanned downtime?
  
• How can we become more nimble and adaptive without giving up the ease-of-use which our business is used to?

IDC’s Asia/Pacific InfraVision Conference 2008 strives to address these issues in its upcoming Beijing event on November 20, 2008. Event details can be found here.

Notes to Editor
If you would like to arrange for an interview with IDC's analysts or any of the InfraVision conference speakers, please contact Karen Zhang at +86-10-83917628 or kzhang@idc.com.

About IDC’s "Continuum" End-User Survey
"Continuum" is an annual IDC end-user survey that is conducted across 14 key markets in the Asia/Pacific (including Japan) region since year 2000. This powerful study provides IT benchmarks in the area of IT spending, IT setup, IT planning environment, across a broad range of technology areas. The study harnessed 3500 feedback from CIOs, IT Directors, and/or IT Managers who are responsible for the IT decision-making process within end-user organizations.