The ultimate change agent

By Stephanie Carullo

Today’s enterprise operates in a highly competitive landscape shaped by new market pressures, business demands and IT challenges. The economic downturn, capital constraints, increased regulation, energy shortfalls and globalisation are shaping a new business environment. At the same time, companies are trying to cope with the increasing volume of data, devices, and technology in a new reality of constant change.

Again and again, CIOs are asked to do more with less. Can you roll out new applications in days instead of months - and without deploying new physical servers or storage capacity? CIOs must compromise to increase speed and support more dynamic business process changes. Their goal: create an agile and efficient data centre that is capable of transforming the business to meet these challenges.

How do you empower your organisation to embrace these shifts? Look to the data centre as the critical change agent. A unified architecture can support choice and flexibility in both technologies and partners, which in turn will help ensure investment protection. From that foundation, you can deploy IT services faster to accelerate revenue, improve profitability across the organisation, and promote new business models as often as the market demands. The ultimate goal is an open yet controlled environment that transforms the data centre from a cost centre into a competitive tool.

There are four requirements for success: technology innovation, systems excellence, a solutions-oriented approach and business value.

The most important element of a data centre transformation is the underlying technology that is in place across the end-to-end infrastructure. Only standards-based innovation and choice in platforms allow businesses to deliver new capabilities and enter new markets quickly. From switching and storage to computing and operating system and application networking components, you need to consolidate networks within a unified fabric, with policy-based management and provisioning across the layers.

A systems-based approach for consolidation and virtualisation dramatically reduces costs, simplifying management and infrastructure in the data centre. With open APIs and standards, you can improve scaling and application delivery. The result is an agile and efficient data centre that can respond immediately to changing business needs.

Whether you want to build a private cloud or automate data centre operations, a holistic approach is crucial to success. Joint solutions such as the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) coalition's Vblock Infrastructure Packages enable new consumption models for customers to buy the data centre services and capacity they need to grow.

The combination of technology innovation, systems excellence, and solution differentiation leads to greater business value for the enterprise in the form of more choice and flexibility, a unified architecture, and improved investment protection.

UK-based financial service provider Winterflood Securities offers insight into the data centre transformation process. Following the introduction of the 2007 Markets in Financial Instruments Directive (MiFID) in Europe, the company experienced a drastic increase in trading volumes, from three to four million messages a day to 250 million, with surges of up to 30,000 messages per second. Winterflood Securities needed to respond to this dramatic growth in data and adapt quickly to new market opportunities.

The company decided to review its entire data centre strategy and chose a next-generation data centre platform specifically built to accelerate the virtualisation process: Cisco Data Center Business Advantage. Uniting computing, networking, storage access, and virtualisation resources in a single energy-efficient system will help Winterflood Securities reduce IT infrastructure costs and complexity, extend capital assets, and act more quickly on new business opportunities.

With the data centre as the critical change agent, CIOs can enable growth, increase performance and profitability, and transform the business. The convergence of business value with IT innovation is the foundation that enables customers to achieve business advantage in the data centre.

Biography

Stephanie Carullo is worldwide vice president for data centre and virtualisation sales at Cisco, Inc. She leads cross-functional global teams responsible for Cisco's go-to-market strategy for data centre architecture.