INFORMATION technology (IT) would enable a company to cut cost and increase its bottom line even during a financial crisis.
This was one of the points highlighted during the 2008 Asia Pacific summit for chief information officers (CIOs), sponsored by Hitachi Data Systems (HDS) at the Shangri-La’s Mactan Island Resort and Spa last week.
While research firm Gartner predicted a slowdown in global growth in 2009, HDS observed that demand for IT support—to manage expanding corporate data and improve business processes in order to increase companies’
competitiveness—continues to grow.
“The turmoil in the global economy calls for greater business agility. IT (information technology) must be approached in its
totality and not just on individual investment (basis) as the parameters of success are against revenue trends and ratios,” said Randy DeMont, HDS vice-president and general manager for worldwide sales, services and support.
Rather than increasing IT infrastructure capacity to cope with the growing amount of corporate data, HDS vice-president and chief technology officer Hubert Yoshida recommended the application of services-oriented storage solutions (SOSS), which provides a platform that can be reconfigured and optimized to accommodate business requirements.
Yoshida and DeMont were among those who attended the three-day CIO summit, which served as a venue for discussion of issues concerning digital data storage, the impact of the global financial crisis on IT spending and current business needs.
HDS offers SOSS that enables heterogeneous storage that can be provisioned according to business needs and managed through a virtualization software.
Cautious
Mark Kay, HDS senior vice president and general manager for Asia Pacific, noted that various industries in Asia are adopting SOSS in their businesses, even when they have become cautious about spending on IT amid the present financial crisis.
According to HDS, a customer can reduce IT costs and manage IT-related complexities under the SOSS framework,
specifically through storage consolidation.
The SOSS already provides data protection and enables virtualization, network-attached and tiered storage, regulatory compliance, and archiving, among others.
Since Hitachi established itself in the Philippines last year, solutions and products director for HDS-APAC region Vivekanand Venugopal said the company has been eyeing potential market in the country’s IT, telecommunications and banking sectors.
Other possible clients for HDS in Asia include the government, academe and the medical sector.
HDS, with headquarters in the US, is a wholly owned subsidiary of Hitachi Ltd. It provides storage infrastructure solutions, storage management software and storage consulting services. (NRC)
