Wikibon has released the results of its first IT Transformation survey conducted in May and June of this year with the assistance of SiliconAngle’s ServicesAngle. The study was comprised of 261 business technology professionals from a random sample of Wikibon community members in a broad spectrum of professional roles, organizational sizes and geographic locations. The study revealed several interesting findings.

Growing Data, Growing Opportunities

Respondents cited data growth, budget constraints and data protection/disaster recovery/business continuity as the most significant IT challenges they face in 2012. IT responsiveness and mobility closely trailed these concerns. These results add to the long list of information that confirms big data and its many implications are more than just hype. In fact, four, possibly all five of the top five concerns, are related to data growth.

Increased use of mobile devices is often one of the contributors to growing data volumes and diversity. As data sizes spiral, managing it can quickly become substantially more complex. IT departments must identify and apply new solutions as data sizes outgrow traditional strategies. This strains both staff and budgets, reducing the resources available to respond to business requests and pursue other initiatives.

In terms storing all the data being created, Wikibon researchers aptly point out that advances like de-duplication are helping businesses deal with expanding data sizes more efficiently. However, these solutions are not a big data silver bullet and its unlikely that any tool will meet those lofty expectations. The size of the challenge certainly is discouraging vendors from trying. Big data was certainly a hot topic at recent technology conferences.

Big was a frequent topic at IBM’sfirst storage conference, IBM Edge. IBM announced several enhancements to its Smart Computing product family designed to improve support for big data processing. IBM isn’t the only vendor attempting grab its share of the big data storage market. Big data also took a starring role at both the 2011 and 2012 EMC World conference. EMC’s CTO Enterprise Information Management and Analytics, Bill Schmarzo, sat down with the Cube to discuss his views on the state of big data at this year’s conference.

Schmarzo described his experiences with technology leaders dealing with increasing data sizes. According to Schmarzo, many IT leaders are so afraid of making a mistake, they are paralyzed and doing nothing. This is exact opposite of what they should be doing; the market is moving fast and mistakes will occur. This cycle is essential for optimal solutions to big data challenges to emerge. Trial and error is also important for IT organizations to become more adept at identifying opportunities to extract business value from big data. According to Wikibon, this capability will be important for growing IT budgets along with data. Analysts also recommends that IT should partner with someone in the business organization that has the authority and means to support big data initiatives.

Transforming IT

Wikibon asked participants about their organization’s plans for transformation initiatives. Over 85 percent of the companies in the survey had a transformation initiative underway, and infrastructure (30.2 percent) and service catalog implementation (27.0 percent) were the top areas of focus. A substantial percentage of respondents, 33.7 percent, planned to use hybrid clouds and 23.0 percent were building private clouds. Wikibon’s 2011 survey of cloud strategy found only 9.0 percent of companies were considering hybrid cloud adoption. This enormous growth is attracting vendors like Amazon, VMware and Dell to enter the hybrid market.

Analysts at Wikibon suggest that this growing adoption of cloud computing is the driver for the somewhat surprising high level of interest in infrastructure transformation. It is likely that cloud computing has also a contributed to the attention service catalogs are receiving. The cloud’s ability to flexibly scale to meet demand is an important component for offering IT-as-a-service, a delivery model many organizations are striving to achieve.

The transition to a service-based model is highly desirable, but IT organizations are struggling with the transition. Only 15.1 percent of organizations were using detailed chargebacks, which are an indicator that an organization has achieved complete visibility of the services it provides and users consume. Almost 25 percent of respondents felt cultural issues were the biggest barrier to shifting from a project-focused model.

Looking at Services

Respondents listed Microsoft, EMC, HP, IBM and Oracle as their top service providers. Almost half of respondents, 41.9 percent, said their company only uses an external firm when it’s absolutely necessary. Cloud strategy and deployment, big data strategy, security and application development were the main areas where companies considered using an external firm to complete work.

Wikibon analysts suggest that it is important for almost every company to have some type of cloud strategy or risk falling behind their competitors. They also advise that eventually cloud adoption in the enterprise will need to evolve to a new model that brokers cloud usage instead of developing every aspect from scratch.

The pace of technology change and increasingly sophisticated expectations of users continue to present challenges to IT organizations. It seems most organizations are moving forward to meet these challenges and exploring strategic options to do so, instead of point solutions. This approach will place these organizations in a better position to adapt to the future changes that will invariably occur more quickly.