Emerging Enterprise Forum

Creating the adaptive enterprise

With the ever-present need to integrate IT and business, organisations are looking at concepts such as adaptive enterprise management. by Venkatesh Ganesh

The concept of an adaptive enterprise is about the integration of people, processes and technology that aims to run IT as a business and automate the dynamic link between business and IT. Most vendors and service providers are of the opinion that adaptive enterprise infrastructure management is the next big wave, and that it is only way for enterprises to stay competitive.

The Need To Adapt

Durgadutt Nedungadi Director HP

In order to evolve into an adaptive enterprise, CIOs need to control their environment by using management software to manage discrete or clustered resources. They then need to optimise their environments to increase utilisation, performance, and availability.

Says Durgadutt Nedungadi, HP’s Director of Business Development and Solutions for Blade Systems, Asia Pacific and Japan, “In our experience, only 20 percent of the organisations have matured to this level of infrastructure and environment.”

The final step towards automating processes is to link business needs using software that drives adaptive and virtual infrastructure.

What It Takes

Companies need to look at the following areas to help evolve into an adaptive enterprise:

Alignment of IT with the business: The IT infrastructure supports real time business objectives efficiently, superseding the industry’s current tech-centric focus.

Efficiency: Gives an authorised user easy access to role-relevant services and information.

Responsiveness: The IT infrastructure adapts automatically to technical malfunctions through superior analytics for diagnostics.

Manufacturing and telecom have witnessed increased activity in infrastructure management. Healthcare and education are moving in this direction. Enterprises are also considering remote infrastructure management services. These are a good example of adaptive enterprise infrastructure management services.

The Service Provider Mindset

K Bhaskar DGM, Technical Sify

K Bhaskar, DGM, Technical, Sify says, “Enterprises in India are steadily migrating the responsibility of IT infrastructure management to service providers, who, in turn might have adaptive monitoring or management systems deployed.”

The trend is also catching on in the enterprise segment. Customers increasingly ask their service providers to provide them with adaptive systems. According to Sify, enterprises are looking at a 100 percent secure infrastructure. At the same time, infrastructure has to be scalable both horizontally and vertically. They are also looking at managing the infrastructure with ease along with reduced TCO, at the same time keeping space utilisation and power consumption levels to the minimum.

Increased demand has helped IT teams realise that infrastructure management requires more than just network management tools. Standard practices such as the ITSM model are being increasing adopted by Indian enterprises to streamline infrastructure management. ITSM is the alignment of IT with business objectives to assure certain levels of performance and availability of business-critical IT services. It also acts as a key link in moving from a traditional infrastructure set-up to an adaptive one. The model basically consists of service support and delivery.

The use of the ITSM model in the right manner ensures provision and management of effective IT services. It enables CIOs to set appropriate expectations across the enterprise about the type and quality of IT services that users receive while ensuring alignment between IT and business.

Controlling Costs

Adaptive management breaks the cycle of endless maintenance costs, so CIOs can once again invest in innovation. Management services like ITSM can help customers create a lean, responsive IT operation, while management software provides the key to linking business processes and applications down into the raw hardware. For any CIO expected to do more, investing in management services is the way to get on the fast track to control costs and turn it into a more adaptive enterprise.

The Benefits Of Going Adaptive

Explains Nedungadi, “The combination of people and resources comprises 80 percent of most IT budgets. It is our belief that we will be able to help customers bring it down to 55 percent, thus freeing precious resources to work on new IT initiatives, making IT strategic to the business.” The most negative scenario is that the dollars required for ongoing maintenance of an existing infrastructure will prevent investment in new, more strategic areas, and that’s where an adaptive enterprise infrastructure can help.

Nedungadi says that adaptive management is the most powerful means of bringing down costs and creating opportunities to invest in activities that will grow the business and enable it to be more successful. “Adaptive management creates a tight automated linkage between the status of computing infrastructure and the ability to allocate computing resources,” he says.

In order to evolve into an adaptive enterprise, CIOs need to look at their enterprise’s processes, applications and infrastructure to find new ways to simplify, standardise, modularise, and integrate. “Having an adaptive enterprise model helps organisations reduce and manage costs, and react quickly to changing business needs. It also helps optimise and streamline existing infrastructure,” says Nedungadi.