Advising on the commercial impact of technology and
    market changes in telecoms, software and IT services

IT infrastructure is on the cusp of a revolution. Over the last five years, large enterprises and increasingly mid-sized businesses have been literally racing to consolidate their IT environments as a means of reducing costs and harnessing disparate silos. They now see even greater opportunities for reducing costs, improving flexibility and gaining availability and performance advantages by deploying technologies including virtualization, clustering and blades. But just as customers have begun to understand the benefits of, and have begun to deploy these "maturing" technologies across their companies, vendors are introducing new capabilities that customers must increasingly master-technologies such as multi-core processors, high-speed communication protocols and dynamic provisioning tools. But while new technologies are tough enough to master, customers are now faced with fundamental changes to established IT architectures (as with the emergence of shared services and the convergence of scale-up and scale-out models) and governance and processes models (as under ITIL). This module identifies the capabilities that will be required in next-generation systems and the strategies that will be most effective in bringing them to, and establishing them in the market.

Key Research Topics

• Emerging technology adoption patterns (based on the newest results of our regular IT infrastructure surveys) and what this means for server and storage vendor positioning
• The role of dynamic provisioning technologies as the real value-added enhancement to virtualized resources
• The growing convergence of scale-up and scale-out systems and what this portends for the role of different vendors
• The future of blades as appliances and as a new platform for scale-up computing
• How the emergence of flexible financing and deployment options will change the insourcing/outsourcing balance.

Ovum Summit's Unique Perspective

This module is built on a two-pronged approach that combines insight gained from discussions with leading vendor strategists and innovative start-ups with survey and interview information garnered from leading-edge, but necessarily pragmatic IT executives. This combination will help subscribers better understand:

• Which server and storage technology trends will have the greatest market impact and when
• How to effectively package new server and storage technologies as dynamic computing solutions
• How the changing roles of insourcing and outsourcing will alter the ways in which IT hardware is sold, acquired, paid for and used
• Which type of technology and financing packages will prove most persuasive to different classes of customers.

Server and Storage System Strategies is for systems and storage vendors that intend to establish their hardware offerings as leading "standards" in emerging dynamic computing environments.