Oracle Next Generation Data Centre Report as Tom Pegrume Vice president, Oracle Hardware Sales, Middle East and Africa visits Nigeria
Tom Pegrume Vice president, Oracle Hardware Sales, Middle East and Africa, will be in Nigeria on February 27th to interact and answer relevant questions as to the future of data with Oracle solutions.
Following an Oracle report released recently and made available to us by SY&T Communications Limited ,entitled Next Generation Data Centre Index Cycle II reveals that many businesses seem to have been caught off guard by the boom in ‘Big Data’. The findings also suggest data has become an issue for boardroom consideration, while sustainability is back on the agenda.
The report follows Cycle 1 (C1) of the Next Generation Data Centre Index, announced in May 2011. This established that many businesses are lagging behind in their use of innovative technology in data centres, making them less able to meet industry demands and respond to change quickly. Many were also found to be lagging in terms of managing spiraling energy costs.
The new research – Cycle 2 (C2) – shows there has been improvement in the general performance of many organisations, as measured in three key areas: achieving data centre flexibility, sustainability and supportability. Taken as an overall average across these three sub-indices, businesses scored 5.58 on a scale of 0 to 10 (where 10 would be the most sophisticated data centre strategy possible,assessed by analyst house Quocirca1), compared to 5.22 in the first report.
Key Index numbers include:
– The proportion of respondents with in-house-only data centres is down from 60% (C1) to 44% (C2).
– Those using some external data centres has risen from 40% (C1) to 56%.
– Many more businesses now see a need within two years to build new data facilities,up from 27% in C1 to 38% in C2.
– Sustainability is back – fewer respondents report not having a sustainability plan in place in C2 (6.39% against 13.19%), while the number of data centre managers seeing a copy of the energy bill has risen from 43.16% to 52.19% in C2.
“We are seeing similar trends to EMEA across Africa,” said Tom Pegrume, vice president Hardware Sales, Middle East and Africa. He said: “There is a visible acceleration in Consolidation, Virtualisation and Systems Management. We are seeing increasing alignment between IT and business with many companies taking advantage of the radically improved price performance on new technology to develop innovative products and services that were not possible two or three years ago.”
Luigi Freguia, senior vice president, Systems, Oracle EMEA said: “Wrestling with Big Data is going to be the single biggest IT challenge businesses face over the next two years. By the end of that period they will either have got it right or they will be very seriously adrift of their own business and the threats and opportunities posed by Big Data.”
“Encouragingly,this research suggests businesses realise they have a need to catch up on data within their organisation,” he continued. “Many are looking at a combination of short-term need and longer term planning. They are looking to outsourced solutions in the short-term while planning long-term to build something in-house.
“The unique challenge of Big Data represents the coming together of many IT trends –the growth in connected applications, devices, systems and individuals in both the consumer and business world creating vast amounts of structured and unstructured data through everything they do. Mining and understanding that data holds the key to business success and that process must begin in the data centre. The findings of this report suggest businesses are becoming aware of this and are rapidly trying to get on top of their short and long-term data needs.”
