Having made all the operational cost cuts possible in recent years regarding information infrastructure, businesses in Central and Eastern Europe, as well as in Greece, are now changing direction and moving towards a complete transformation of their infrastructure in order to become more efficient and contribute to revenue generation.
This is one of the key findings of a study conducted by IDC on behalf of Oracle, one of the world's largest IT companies, presented at Oracle Day 2014 in Athens yesterday. IDC conducted 200 interviews with chief information officers (CIOs) and chief executive officers (CEOs) from 180 large companies in Central and Eastern Europe, including Greece. The study aimed to analyze current IT strategies and the methods that CIOs use to address the need to optimize their IT infrastructure while supporting the organization's overall strategic needs.
The economic crisis that hit the region resulted in companies moving towards cost reduction and it is characteristic that in Greece it is estimated that the reduction in spending on information infrastructure by large domestic companies reached 40%. Now, the situation is improving, but the existing estimate speaks of an increase in investments for information systems of only 1%-2%. What the IDC research shows is that CIOs are now moving towards the comprehensive transformation of their information infrastructures. This transformation aims to keep up with the constantly changing needs of the respective organizations.
The survey found that optimizing business processes, reducing costs and improving quality are among the top strategic priorities in the region for the coming year. It also found that CIOs are eager to transform their environments into new IT infrastructures that can better manage the challenges of the modern era. This can be done by widely adopting the latest advances in IT – such as cloud, mobility, big data and modern database that are able to cope with the expected explosion in data volume.
The research also showed that CIOs in Central and Eastern Europe can better support the strategic goals of their organizations by taking a more decisive role in developing new services for end users.
It is noteworthy that the widespread adoption of social media and smart connected devices is putting pressure on CIOs to transform to a new IT infrastructure that can better respond to the volume, frequency and variety of data they manage.
Furthermore, approximately 38% of companies in the region are investing in business intelligence and business intelligence analytics solutions to more easily identify opportunities to improve their operations and processes.
It is also important that approximately 30% of CIOs state that investments in mobility are a significant priority for their spending.
Cloud
The cloud is already considered a key factor in competitiveness for businesses, facilitating rapid application development and deployment. Companies participating in the survey are moving towards the cloud: approximately 32% of companies are already using a private or hybrid cloud environment, while 16% are using public cloud infrastructure and/or applications.
Cloud adoption is a proven way for CIOs to achieve new strategies. IDC findings show that mission-critical applications—such as financial management systems, HCM, SCM, CRM, and document management solutions—and infrastructure solutions—such as database engines, platforms, or storage systems—can often be provisioned and up and running much faster when they are cloud-based.
Source: imerisia.gr
