CIOs Need New Tools to Boost Business Performance: Gartner

The cloud took a prominent role in a recent Gartner survey of the world’s top IT executives, and it’s imperative business leaders seek solutions, including hybrid cloud services from companies such as Rackspace, to cope with essentially flat IT budgets and increase IT’s potential in 2013.

In a worldwide survey of 2,000 CIOs, a Gartner report found that the executives’ top IT priorities for 2013 include cloud computing and it varieties: software as a service, infrastructure as a service, and platform as a service.

The Gartner Executive Programs report, called “Hunting and Harvesting in a Digital World: The 2013 CIO Agenda,” represents a comprehensive examination of business priorities and CIO strategies, according to Gartner.

Over the last 18 months, digital technologies — including mobile, analytics, big data, social and cloud — reached a tipping point with business executives. Analysts said there is no choice but to increase technology’s potential in the enterprise, meaning evolving IT’s strategies, priorities and plans beyond tending to the usual concerns as CIOs expect their 2013 IT budgets to be essentially flat for the fifth straight year.

“Digital technologies provide a platform to achieve results, but only if CIOs adopt new roles and behaviors to find digital value,” said Mark McDonald, group vice president and Gartner Fellow. “CIOs require a new agenda that incorporates hunting for new digital innovations and opportunities, and harvesting value from products, services and operations.

“In a world of change, it is concerning that around half of CIOs surveyed do not see IT’s enterprise role changing over the next three years,” McDonald said. “IT needs new tools if it hopes to hunt for technology-intensive innovation and harvest raised business performance from transformed IT infrastructure, operations and applications. Without change, CIOs and IT consign themselves to tending a garden of legacy assets and responsibilities.”

CIOs see mobile, big data and cloud among the trends upending business over the next 10 years. When asked which digital technologies would be most disruptive, 70 percent of CIOs cited mobile, followed by big data/analytics at 55 percent, social media at 54 percent and public cloud at 51 percent. The disruptiveness of each of these technologies is real, but CIOs see their greatest disruptive power coming in combination, rather than in isolation.

One way to take control of these disruptive forces is to implement a sound cloud strategy that enables enterprises to realize the power of hybrid cloud hosting.

Rackspace’s RackConnect is a unique solution designed for customers who require the flexibility and elasticity of the cloud, as well as the enhanced security and performance characteristics of traditional hosting. RackConnect enables customers to realize the power of hybrid hosting.

Businesses trust their mission-critical applications on highly available and high-performing traditional hosted infrastructure, using products such as high-speed SAN storage, single-tenant virtualization and high-capacity load balancers. RackConnect can enhance this infrastructure with rapidly elastic cloud compute and storage resources, allowing an expansion of capacity at a moment’s notice, reacting to unexpected spikes in demand or to seasonal business trends.

Patrick Burke is a writer and editor based in the greater New York area and occasionally blogs for Rackspace Hosting.