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Experts everywhere are commenting on the “unprecedented” demands and pressures facing business, government and society today. Ben Bernake, Chairman of the Federal Reserve, says the present “scale and pace” of globalization is “unprecedented.” The consulting firm Accenture states in a recent report on High Performance Business: “In an environment of unprecedented complexity, traditional explanations and prescriptions are no longer adequate. Leaders in business are brushing off the dust and asking themselves: what does it take to achieve and sustain high performance.”
It’s Business Velocity on a New Scale. And it’s impacting and driving business and government organizations everywhere.
All these new pressures and requirements add up to an environment in which business velocity – the capacity to move operations and new forms of information at an accelerated and highly efficient pace – is a must-have. Not only do organizations need to respond, and react quickly to rapidly changing demands, they need to do so on a grand scale, with more and more information required at the ready to move the process along.
Information technology, of course, is a major factor behind the accelerating pace of change. Indeed, harnessing its capabilities is essential to being on the right side of Business Velocity on a New Scale. To reference Accenture’s research on High Performance Business once more, enterprise technologies “have the potential to provide organizations with distinctive capabilities,” enabling companies “to differentiate from competitors and outperform industry peers.” For example, traditional business processes are being replaced with Web based solutions offering greater customer choice and improved sales and servicing capabilities. The result is improved customer satisfaction, reduced costs and the ability to launch new products faster and with much greater impact.
At the same time, companies in all markets are grappling with processes that have grown increasingly data-intensive and complex. Increasing file sizes, the unpredictable elasticity and rapid growth of user bases, and the global proliferation of remote offices requiring 24x7 real-time access to expanding volumes of data are all factors in this transformation. Indeed, the nature and structure of business information itself is morphing – from traditional structured transactional data to today’s preponderance of unstructured digital content. From an estimated 15 billion emails a day that are sent and received, to a new generation of desktop applications, such as Microsoft PowerPoint, that now incorporate audio, video and images, to a forecasted 1 billion video views per day that will occur on YouTube by the end of the year – there is ample evidence of an explosion of data that is not formally structured or formatted. IDC predicts that the information added annually to the digital universe will increase to 988 exabytes by 2010, a compound annual growth rate of 57%. And some analysts estimate that up to 80% of all information in an organization is already unstructured. That constitutes nearly 6 million new libraries the size of the Library of Congress of unstructured data in two years!
THE IMPACT ON IT INFRASTRUCTURES
Business Velocity on a New Scale is creating the need for entirely new levels of performance, flexibility, and scalability in today’s IT infrastructures. Driven by new market and business requirements, IT systems and processes need to access unprecedented and dynamic scalability, easily and quickly, while still maintaining control and flexibility to adapt to rapidly changing requirements. From Web 2.0 applications for collaboration and social networking, to oil and gas exploration, visual effects rendering, credit card processing and a wide range of enterprise activities -- demand for storage flexibility and performance is exploding. IT and storage demands fluctuate with new applications and users, requiring the ability to continually manage performance and capacity.
Compliance mandates and regulations around information archiving and retrieval have also increased the need to access, retrieve and protect data. According to IDC, the archiving portion of the storage software segment grew 18.5 percent year over year in 2007. “First was the need for compliance, e-discovery and litigation support. Second was the growing need to retain information for extended periods of time and to be able to use the information in order to improve business. It’s no longer just data; it’s being viewed as information that might give an organization an edge in its competitive environment,” stated Noemi Greyzdorf, research manager with IDC.
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