Who is Moving Enterprise IT's Cheese?

17 Dec 2012
by Chirajeet Sengupta

Executive Summary

Enterprise IT has been the primary procurer of IT infrastructure and related services, as well as the central repository and guardian of IT assets, policies, security, and business continuity mandates. This is a result of decades of fine-tuning of the IT procurement process addressing the need to centralize this key operation that cuts across an enterprise’s business units, verticals, and operations.

With a view to the above, purchasing assets and services used to be a time consuming, and bureaucratic exercise. This was partially due to technological limitations and partially due to the due diligence required. However, businesses today feel the need to improve the go-to-market time of their IT-enabled products and services. The legacy IT policies, put in place to control decentralized purchases, as well as the resulting asset proliferation are straining to provide quicker response times.

As a result, business IT users are starting to open up to new paradigms of IT, led by technology breakthroughs and next-generation pricing models.

The new market is a collection of barely related services that share the same buying center – the business IT user – and the same driving factor – ease of access. Suddenly, business IT users found out they could swipe a credit card, lease out a server from the cloud, and quickly set up the development environment, all outside the support environment of the enterprise IT.

This new norm gives rise to inquisitions from several quarters. While the answers are not easy to get, enterprise IT wants to know how this trend stands to impact their future role, business users want to understand how they can benefit, and service providers and vendors on both sides want to find out what is driving this new market and why.

A look at the IT workloads running among businesses may give us an idea of the sheer size of business that could potentially be taken out of enterprise IT’s purview and purchased by business IT users, with relative ease and at much lower cost points. However, the business will need to be prepared with additional conditions in order to succeed.

This viewpoint discusses:

  • The new market and its promoters, and the factors driving its growth and popularity
  • How the new market can dramatically shrink the traditional infrastructure market
  • Conditions that business IT users must meet before they can take full advantage of the new services
  • Implications for key stakeholders in the infrastructure marketplace

 

 

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