I am borrowing heavily from my ESG colleague Steve O’Donnell for this blog.  If you don’t know him you should, Steve is the managing director of our EMEA practice and writes the very popular blog The Hot Aisle.  Before joining ESG Steve was an SVP of IT Operations at a very big company – his capital budget alone was in the billions; he knows what keeps CIOs up at night.  He has a presentation he gives about what concerns CIOs and what their priorities are based on both what stage the company is in and how mature the IT organization is.  I want to share some of his insight with you today because it’s a theme you’ll be hearing a lot from ESG this year.

The top three issues facing CIOs today are avoiding or reducing risk to existing business activities, reducing cycle time to deliver innovation, and reducing cost.  Vendors often focus on only one vector when positioning and selling their products, and this is often a weak spot in vendor strategy.  It is important to keep all three vectors in mind – because missing on one  can cost a vendor a sale and  missing on two creates a big hole the competition can exploit.  Think about it – cost savings is really attractive in this macroeconomic environment – but how many of you as vendors walk in with incredible TCO and ROI models and think your cost proposition is a sure winner – only to lose the deal?  CIOs won’t put money-saving efforts in place if there is a chance of introducing risk into the equation and even the most compelling cost-savings solutions are undone if they increase cycle times.  Understanding how you can help the business by reducing cycle time, without introducing risk, is a compelling value proposition.

On the storage front where I focus, managing data growth is an ongoing challenge for IT. It is also the “low hanging fruit” with which CIOs can make an impact on all three vectors.  Keeping up with data growth has become an ever more costly effort as it has been historically limited by traditionally inefficient and complex processes to manage scale-up architectures.  These stove-pipes make it difficult to respond to changing business conditions and create risk by the sheer complexity created when trying to manage an environment with petabyes of storage.

IT needs to change the storage model – it is starting to collapse under the complexity and complexity’s byproduct, waste.   IT’s ability to respond to business needs must occur in real time, which in turn is driving IT to look at deploying newer technologies (like cloud services and scale-out architectures) that can provide a platform for business agility, consolidation, ease-of use, and availability.  In the next few blogs I’ll be looking at the “golden triangle” (okay – we’re working on naming it and making it prettier – but I didn’t want to wait for the branding to be finished to discuss this!) in relation to scale-out architectures and the interest in cloud services.

UPDATE: Steve O’Donnell expands on his thoughts about the golden triangle in his latest blog – give it a read:  http://www.enterprisestrategygroup.com/2010/01/what-influences-it-buying-decisions/

Related posts:

1. Tintri – What if We Build VM Storage from Scratch?

Tags: CIO, Cloud Storage, scale-out