Asia Pacific Businesses Focused on Achieving Digital Maturity in 2017 According to Hitachi Data Systems

Asia Pacific Businesses Focused on Achieving
Digital Maturity in 2017 According to Hitachi Data Systems 

All areas of the enterprise expected to feel
the benefit as region takes the lead on digital transformation

Singapore — November
29, 2016 — Hitachi Data
Systems (HDS), a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi, Ltd. (TSE:6501), today
released its key Business and Technology Trends for Asia Pacific in 2017.
According to Hubert Yoshida, chief technology officer of Hitachi Data Systems
and Russell Skingsley, chief technology officer of Hitachi Data Systems Asia
Pacific, digital transformation will continue to dominate enterprise IT
strategies in 2017, as trends in a number of areas emerge.

“With digital
transformation rising up the agenda of CIOs across the world in 2016, we expect
to see an increasing number of organizations striving to reach digital maturity
in 2017,” comments Skingsley. According to the findings of an upcoming Forbes
Insights research survey, sponsored by HDS, enterprises in APAC generally
believe they are further ahead in their digital transformation journeys than
their global counterparts. A belief that is likely to be validated in 2017.

In line with the
Forbes survey, which will be officially published end of November, Yoshida and
Skingsley have identified five trends for the technology market in 2017.

 #1:
Productivity Gains Will Be More About People, Process and Business Outcomes

Despite the explosion
of new technology over the past 10 years, productivity has declined compared to
the previous 10 years according to the Organization for Economic Co-operation
and Development. According to Yoshida, this is because new processes have not
kept up with new technologies.

In the hospitality
business, Airbnb has had access to the same technology as traditional hotels,
but it has created a new business model that has enabled it to grow to a market
valuation of $30B USD in less than 10 years. Digital transformation is about
transforming the business through people and process, as well as through
innovative use of technology. As a result, agile infrastructure, cloud, and the
benefits of DevOps will gain greater attention as a way to speed up the
development and deployment of applications and services with less defects and
wasted effort. 

“The biggest benefit
of agile infrastructure and cloud delivery models is the empowerment of those
with the most business insight and most innovative ideas to drive their own
technology projects. It’s really about putting the power of innovation into the
hands of those with the best ideas”, added Skingsley

#2: Accelerating
Transition to Cloud

Cloud-first strategies
are the foundation for staying relevant in a fast-paced world, according to Ed Anderson, research
vice president at Gartner. The Asian market has been quick to embrace this approach, with
Asia leading the world in this year’s Cloud Readiness
Index by Asia Cloud Computing
Association.

“It is clear that the
predominant cloud model for the foreseeable future will be hybrid, as most
understand the agility benefits of cloud but are not willing to move entirely
to public cloud at this point.  We expect this to continue throughout
2017,” comments Skingsley. 

As a result, IT
managers across APAC will be focused on developing skills in cloud monitoring,
cloud workload performance and security management, and cloud capacity
management. Instead of buying infrastructure from different vendors and
knitting them together with management software, IT will want access to the
converged systems required to deliver infrastructure-as-a-service. These will
enable enterprises to drive out even more cost and streamline infrastructure
operations even further by combining converged solutions, like Hitachi’s United
Compute Platform, with cloud management portals, like VMware vRealize, to
deliver a pre-engineered approach for public, private, and hybrid cloud via a
single management interface. 

#3: Bimodal IT

Bimodal IT refers to
two modes of IT:

·  ·         Mode 1: Traditional — emphasizes safety, accuracy and
availability.

·  ·         Mode 2: Nonlinear — emphasizes agility and speed.

In the same way that
hybrid cloud will continue to be the predominant model for years to come, so
too will bimodal IT continue to be necessary.  While many may wish for the
ability to simply do away with legacy application stacks and start afresh, the
reality of the need for business continuity built on well understood and
supported mission-critical systems continues. IT must be able to manage both
modes and implement systems that can bridge between them. Converged
infrastructure solutions can modernize mode 1 systems and bridge to mode 2 ones
via orchestration and cloud ready interfaces. 

Skingsley adds, “From
a storage perspective it is important that data from both IT modes can be
leveraged, so organizations will look more to systems that can bridge the gap
between the two.  This means the ability to present cloud protocols, the
capability to be instantiated on-premise or in public clouds and to facilitate
data mobility between these environments.”

While the need to
operate bi-modally may be seen as a necessary evil, organizations will not
tolerate data being stranded in mode 1 islands at the cost of valuable business
insight. Tools like Pentaho Enterprise Data Integration, that can bring
together the data warehouse of mode 1, with the unstructured data of mode 2 to
provide users with a clear view of all their data, will gain significant
traction.

#4: A Centralized Data
Hub

Data is becoming
increasingly valuable. Recent IDC research revealed that 53% of organizations in the region consider
big data and analytics important and have adopted or plan to adopt it in the
near future. Companies are finding new ways to correlate and merge data from
different sources to gain more insight, while repurposing old data for
different uses. 

“It is a clear lesson
learnt from the highly disruptive internet-based businesses that the ability to
wield data effectively is extremely valuable.  Many of these businesses
are fundamentally data, a simple interface and insightful business logic. 
Traditional enterprises realize now that they have not used their valuable data
as effectively as they might have,” says Skingsley. 

To ensure the governance
and accessibility of this data, IT needs to create a centralized data hub for
better management, use and protection of their data. This centralized hub will
need to be an object store that can scale beyond the limitations of traditional
storage systems, ingest data from different sources, and provide search across
public and private clouds as well as mobile devices. 

Skingsley calls this
the “repository of everything an organization knows” and believes that
organizations can no longer abide by archiving or backup systems that leave
this potentially important data stranded.

#5: Growing Awareness
of IoT in the Data Center

The networking of
things will affect every aspect of our lives, and while this may not become a
major trend for APAC next year, according to Yoshida the decisions we make in
IT in 2017 should be made with an eye to IoT. 

“The integration of IT
and OT with analytics is the first step. Today, IoT requires data scientists
and researchers with deep domain expertise and most projects are in the
proof-of-concept stage. In 2017 we will be at the stage where we have the
recipe for IoT projects, like train-as-a-service or industry 4.0. Hitachi Data
Systems, along with other divisions in Hitachi and outside partners, is
developing an IoT core platform, Lumada, to develop these recipes and deliver
baked IoT solutions that are open, adaptable, verified and secure,” comments
Yoshida.  

Russell Skingsley
adds, “Next year’s trends are being driven by a clear enterprise demand to
deliver on all the promises of digital transformation, with APAC set to lead
the way. Regardless of industry, IT is seeing a fundamental shift as
enterprises embrace the new revenue streams, efficiencies and possibilities
provided by digitization.”

For further insights
into the APAC technology market, sign up to the upcoming Webcast here on December 14, 2016.