Wipro and Outsourcing Center unveil survey report on data center economics

BANGALORE, INDIA: Wipro Technologies, along with Outsourcing Center, an Alsbridge company, announced the findings of a survey conducted on data center optimization, at the Gartner Data Center Conference being held in Las Vegas. As the amount of data proliferates across all industries, organizations of all types are challenged with optimizing their data center operations. Since data is at the very heart of most businesses, it benefits organizations to develop a strategy to deal with their data centers.

Outsourcing Center and Wipro conducted a survey that included 75 CIOs and Heads of IT from Fortune 1000 companies across US, Europe and APAC that aimed to determine the current state of organizations’ data centers as well as explore the attitudes and challenges towards data center optimization. The participants represented a range of industries including retail, financial services, transportation/logistics, manufacturing, healthcare and telecommunications.

The key findings of the survey are:

Datacenter strategies (IT infrastructure, applications, network and facility) clearly impact businesses
Wipro and Outsourcing Center survey participants seem to agree that a data center strategy impacts their organization’s business. While more than half of participants (53.1 percent) said that they believe a data center strategy impacts their business, only a scant 15.6 percent of participants said that such a strategy has no impact on their organization.

Most organizations operate from multiple data centers but owned fewer than half of their data centers
According to the Wipro and Outsourcing Center survey, a majority of organizations currently operate from more than just one or two data centers. More than two in five participants (41.9 percent) said they operate from three, four or five data centers. More than 10 percent of participants (12.9 percent) said they operate from more than 20 data centers. More than half of survey participants (56.2 percent) said that they owned fewer than half of their data centers.

Most organizations do not know the detailed cost breakdown of each data center
A whopping 71.9 percent – nearly three-fourths – of all survey participants reported that they do not know the detailed cost breakdown of each data center. And most organizations only know a portion of their data center costs– not the whole cost picture.

Fewer than half of organizations have adopted alternative models for data center management
The participants in the Wipro and Outsourcing Center survey were about evenly split on their adoption of alternative models for data center management, although slightly fewer (46.9 percent) said they have not yet adopted these models to manage their data centers.

Lack of measurable return-on-investment is holding organizations back from moving to alternate data center management models
A majority of participants in the Wipro and Outsourcing Center survey cited lack of measurable ROI as a challenge they face in moving to alternative data management models. However, since organizations don’t know their costs, they can’t really gauge how, or whether or not, the alternative models are benefitting them in terms of cost.
The cost of such an initiative and lack of necessary budget was identified by 22.6 percent of participants.

The survey also points out new approaches to the data center can provide organizations of all types with myriad benefits. By standardizing, consolidating, virtualizing and automating processes, organizations can transform their data centers to be lean and energy efficient. Transforming the data center can enable growth, minimize risk, increase speed and agility, and lead to dramatic cost reductions.