New Dell Global Study Shows Business and IT Decision Makers are Aligned on Key IT Trends

APJ – July 29, 2016 – Dell today announced the results of a new Dell State of IT Trends 2016 global study, which finds business decision makers’ (BDMs) and IT decision makers’ (ITDMs) understanding of current IT trends are much closer than they are generally perceived to be.

In the past, business and IT leaders had different levels of understanding of IT trends and technologies. However over time, business and IT leaders’ perceptions of technology have evolved and more closely aligned as new technologies have entered the market and become increasingly critical drivers of an organization’s success.

The Dell State of IT Trends 2016 global study reveals a greater sophistication and alignment in understanding of IT trends between the two groups. The results indicate that IT and business leadership are better collaborating and having in-depth conversations about not only how technology works but how it can propel the business forward.

“There is a lingering misperception that business leaders are disconnected during strategic IT discussions, but times have changed,” said Matt Baker,executive director, Enterprise Strategy, Dell. ”This study reveals that there is an increasingly common understanding between business and IT decision makers on the key IT trends and the growth opportunities that IT can deliver.”

“Organizations across Asia Pacific are being exposed to the digital tsunami and a common understanding between business and IT decision makers is imperative as they embark on a transformation journey, said Amit Midha, President, Asia Pacific and Japan at Dell and Chairman, Global Emerging Markets. “This alignment would drive the adoption success of digital technologies such as Cloud that create a differentiation for organizations in the market to better engage with their customers.”

In today’s data-driven economy, companies need IT that is agile, efficient, scalable and capable of responding to business applications in real time. According to the Dell State of IT Trends 2016 survey, increasing business productivity is the main IT consideration for both ITDMs (81 percent) and BDMs (77 percent), followed by growing the business (71 percent and 69 percent, respectively).

Global decision makers, in companies of all sizes and in both developed and developing markets, are most closely aligned on the following IT trends:

In terms of technology spending for 2016, cloud is the main priority among both ITDMs (67 percent) and BDMs (59 percent). This is followed closely by data storage upgrades or purchase (54 percent and 48 percent, respectively).

Ice cream flavoring manufacturer Star Kay White must quickly adapt its operations to meet the changing requirements of its global food manufacturer clients. The company replaced its traditional infrastructure that used disparate IT with a centralized, virtualized and redundant solution based on Dell storage, networking, firewalls, services and desktops.

“To meet our clients’ requirements, we must continually fine-tune our operations, which requires the close collaboration of our business and IT leaders to support how we want to evolve our business,” said Mikko Peltoniemi, director of IT at Star Kay White. “Even after doubling sales in the past eight years, we are still just as nimble as we were when we were a smaller organization, and we can respond to customers’ just-in-time requests.” 

The study results confirm that Dell’s customer-driven, compute-centric and software-defined data center vision is what business and IT leaders need most to meet their business objectives.

The Dell-sponsored research was performed by PSB, which conducted 1,200 online interviews between April 15 and May 4, 2016, in the U.S., U.K., Germany, Japan, Brazil, India and China. The respondents consist of 700 ITDMs and 500 BDMs.