Unleashing IT to achieve business success

• The study also indicated that the major drivers for application modernisation are the need to
• integrate with new platforms and processes (38%);
• respond to business requirements (38%);
• reduce ongoing maintenance costs (37%); and
• improve service levels (36%) Although only 9% of the respondents said they had a hybrid cloud environment, this will rise to 24% by 2020, as 69% of respondents said migrating and building new apps on standardised cloud platforms will yield substantial savings; 61% said automation will enable them to reduce IT staff by 20% during the next three years; and 59% said that the public cloud is the best choice for 25% of their workloads.

At bmobile’s Technology Conference and Expo hosted in Trinidad earlier this year, Dr Ronald Walcott, TSTT’s Chief Executive Officer, said in his opening remarks that, “Data is a big part of what is happening now. Infrastructure and solutions as services, the internet of things, 5G, robotics, artificial intelligence and the like, all are here today and a big part of how we go forward.” Dr Walcott indicated that the convergence of business and ICT development is fundamental to the way business is evolving and organisations have to become a part of it, if they are to move into the new technological era.

SDDC as a service model VMware, a global leader in cloud infrastructure and digital workspace technology, is one of the technology partners that TSTT works with to deliver advanced enterprise communications solutions to its customers. Waldir Montoya, a VMware Network and Cloud Architect, also spoke at bmobile’s Technology Conference and Expo and delved deeper into the topic of the deployment of software as a service and how this is driving rapid and fundamental changes in businesses and their operating models.

Referencing a quote by Charles Darwin which said “it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent that survives.

It is the one that is most adaptable to change,” Montoya noted that to support today’s rapid changes and achieve business success, companies should consider modernising their data centres by transforming them to a cloud management platform, or a software defined data centre (SDDC), which are agile, flexible, highly automated and scalable.

Forrester.com defines SDDC as, “An abstracte cost-savings through automation, reduced labor costs, improved security, and simplified IT management. In addition, a company using a cloud management platform will innovate better and react to market changes more quickly, since SDDC’s deliver IT infrastructure and application services with the speed and agility required.

DaaS as a service model Montoya also discussed the new mobile era where employees now work from where they want, when they want and on any mobile device and IT needs to support all their devices and applications, whether they are Apple, Android or Windows, while still ensuring security and control. A company can achieve this through the use of a desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) model, which is delivering desktops and applications using a cloud.

DaaS can be beneficial to organisations facing the need to support mobile workers, remote workers and call center staff including contract workers, or rapidly scale the number of desktops based on seasonal workers. It extends the benefits of virtualization and simplifies things for the IT department. It is flexible, less expensive to manage and maintain, easier to deploy and delivers high performing work spaces with integrated security and control, to any user, on any device, no matter where they are.

In this fast-paced, mobile and digital era, companies can achieve superior performance and stay ahead of the competition by cost-effectively transforming their organizations into digital enterprises through the use of SDDC and DaaS models, for a fully automated, zero-downtime infrastructure that works with any device, any application, and any hardware, now and in the future.