Progress – Slow Going

Focal Points:

• According to Uptime Institute's recently released 2012 Data Center Industry Survey, more than half of the enterprise respondents stated energy savings were important but few have financial incentives in place to drive change. Only 20 percent of the organizations' IT departments pay the data center power bill; corporate real estate or facilities is the primary payee. In Asia it is worse: only 10 percent of IT departments pay for power. When it comes to an interest in pursuing a green certification for current or future data centers, slightly less than 50 percent were interested. 29 percent of organizations do not measure power usage effectiveness (PUE); for environments with 500 servers or less, nearly half do not measure PUE. Of those that do, more precise measurement methods are being employed this year over last. The average global, self-reported PUE from the survey was between 1.8 and 1.89. Nine percent of the respondents reported a PUE of 2.5 or greater while 10 percent claimed a PUE of 1.39 or less. Precision cooling strategies are improving but there remains a long way to go. Almost one-third of respondents monitor temperatures at the room level while only 16 percent check it at the most relevant location: the server inlet. Only one-third of respondents cited their firms have adopted tools to identify underutilized servers and devices.
• A survey of 279 non-IT federal executives by MeriTalk, an online community and resource for government IT, finds more than half of the respondents said their top priorities include streamlining business processes. Nearly 40 percent of the executives cited cutting waste as their most important mission, and 32 percent said increasing accountability placed first on their to-do list. Moreover, less than half of the executives think of IT as an opportunity versus a cost while 56 percent stated IT helps support their daily operations. Even worse, less than 25 percent of the executives feel IT lends them a hand in providing analytics to support business decisions, saving money and increasing efficiency, or improving constituent processes or services. On the other hand, 95 percent of federal executives agree their agency could see substantial savings with IT modernization.
• IQNavigator, a contingent workforce software and managed service provider, released its second quarter 2012 temporary worker rate change index for the U.S. Overall, the national rate trend for 2012 has been slowly rising and now sits five percentage points above the January 2008 baseline. However, the detail breakdown shows no growth in the professional-management job sector but movement from negative to 1.2 percent positive in the technical-IT sector. Since the rate of increase over the past six months remains less than the inflation rate over the same period, the company feels it is unclear whether or not the trend implies upwards pressure on labor rates. The firm also points out that the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics (BOL) underscores the importance of temporary labor as new hires increasingly are being made through temporary employment agencies. In fact, although temporary agency employees constitute less than two percent of the total U.S. non-farm labor force, 15 percent of all new jobs created in the U.S. in 2012 have been through temp agency placements.

RFG POV: Company executives may vocalize their support for sustainability but most have not established financial incentives designed to drive a transformation of their data centers to be best of breed "green IT" shops. Executives still fail to recognize that being green is not just good for the environment but it mobilizes the company to optimize resources and pursue best practices. Businesses continue to waste up to 40 percent of their IT budgets because they fail to connect the dots. Furthermore, the MeriTalk federal study reveals how far behind the private sector the U.S. federal government is. While businesses are utilizing IT as a differentiator to attain their goals, drive revenues and cut costs, the government perceives IT only as a cost center. Federal executives should modify their business processes, align and link their development projects to their operations, and fund their operations holistically. This will eliminate the sub-optimization and propel the transformation of U.S. government IT more rapidly. With the global and U.S. economies remaining weak over the mid- to long-term, the use of contingent workforce will expand. Enterprises do not like to make long-term investments in personnel when the business and regulatory climate is not friendly to growth. Hence, contingent workforce – domestic or overseas – will pick up the slack. IT executives should utilize a balanced approach with a broad range of workforce strategies to achieve agility and flexibility while ensuring business continuity, corporate knowledge, and management and technical control are properly addressed. 

Gray Clouds on the Horizon

Lead Analyst: Cal Braunstein

Focal Points:

• According to a new Gartner Inc. report, global IT spending percentage growth for 2012 is projected to be 3.0 percent, down from 2011 spending growth of 7.9 percent. The brightest spot in the analysis was that the telecom equipment category will grow by 10.8 percent – however that is down from 17.5 percent in the previous year. All the other categories – computer hardware, enterprise software, IT services, and telecom services – are growing slowly between 1.4 percent (telecom services) and 4.3 percent (enterprise software). The drop in spending is attributed to the global economic stresses – the eurozone crisis, weaker U.S. recovery, a slowdown in China, etc. For 2013 Gartner is projecting higher spending on hardware and software in the data center and on the desktop, better growth on telecom hardware (but down from 2012), and slightly higher spending on telecom services. In support of these projections is the latest Challenger, Gray report that shows during the first half of the year, 51,529 planned job cuts were announced across the tech sector. This represents a 260 percent increase over the 14,308 layoffs planned during the first half of 2011. Job cuts are so steep this year that the figure is 39 percent higher than all the job cuts recorded in the tech sector last year. Three tech companies are responsible for most of the job losses – Hewlett-Packard Co. (HP) announced it was slicing headcount by 30,000 and Nokia Corp. and Sony Corp. are each reducing staffing by 10,000. While the outplacement firm expected more cuts to be made over the course of the next six months, it does see bright spots in sectors of the business.
• According to Uptime Institute's recently released 2012 Data Center Industry Survey, cloud deployments have significantly increased globally over the past year. 25 percent of this year's respondents claimed they were adopting public clouds while another 30 percent said they were considering it. Additionally, 49 percent were moving to private clouds while another 37 percent were considering it. In 2011 only 16 percent of respondents stated they had deployed public clouds whereas 35 percent claimed they had deployed private clouds. 32 percent of large organizations use the public cloud, whereas 19 percent of small organizations and 10 percent of "traditional enterprises" employ public clouds. When it comes to private clouds, 65 percent of large organizations have claimed to have deployed private cloud but only 39 percent of small and mid-sized organizations were doing so. Public cloud adoption rates are 52 percent in Asia, 28 percent in Europe, and 22 percent in North America. Private cloud adoption rates are 42 percent in Asia, 52 percent in Europe, and 50 percent in the U.S. Cost savings and scalability were the top two reasons given for moving to the cloud while security was the major inhibitor for not adopting cloud computing (27 and 23 percent respectively), followed distantly by compliance and regulatory issues (64 and 27 percent respectively).
• Oracle announced the results of its big data study, in which 333 C-level executives from U.S. and Canadian enterprises were surveyed. The study examined the pain points that companies face regarding managing the deluge of data that organizations must deal with and how well they are using that information to drive profit and growth. 94 percent of respondents claimed growth with the biggest data growth areas in the areas of customer information (48 percent), operations (34 percent) and sales and marketing (33 percent).  29 percent of executives give their organization a "D" or "F" in preparedness to manage the data influx, while 93 percent of respondents believe their organization is losing revenue opportunities. The projected revenue loss for companies with revenues in excess of $1 billion is estimated to be approximately 13 percent of annual revenue from not fully leveraging the information. Most respondents are frustrated with their organizations' data gathering and distribution systems and almost all are looking to invest in improving information optimization. The communications industry is the most satisfied with its ability to deal with data – 20 percent gave their firms an "A." Executives in public sector, healthcare and utilities industries stated they were the least prepared to handle the data volumes and velocities. 41 percent of public sector executives, 40 percent of healthcare executives, and 39 percent of utilities executives rating themselves with either a "D" or "F" preparedness rating.