December 20, 2010

Cisco announced today the final installment of the Cisco Connected World Report, an international study about the behavioral trends of workers in accessing information anywhere, with any device, and the ability of information technology (IT) professionals to address their needs. The latest results focus on data centre, virtualization, and cloud computing trends, and evolving IT roles, in the context of increasingly mobile and distributed workforces.

The study found that global IT professionals are creating new job
opportunities by increasing collaboration among teams in the data
centre, and adopting new technologies such as virtualization and cloud
computing, but they are also struggling to maintain security and data
governance as employees demand more offsite access to networks and
information.

For example, across the 13 countries in the global study, 52% of the IT
professionals stated they use or plan to use cloud computing, while much
higher cloud adoption rates are predicted in Brazil (70%), China (69%)
and India (76%). Across the world, respondents rated the following as
their top data centre priorities for the next three years: improve
agility and speed in deploying business applications (33%), better
manage resource capacity to align demand and capacity (31%), increase
data centre resilience (19%), and reduce power and cooling costs (17%).

Today’s announcement adds to the initial survey results released in
October, which revealed that workers want flexible access to corporate
information from any mobile device, anywhere, anytime, and to the
results released in November, which revealed disconnects in worker
expectations around information access, IT policies and employee
awareness of policies. The latest survey results examine how IT managers
are evolving their data centres and taking advantage of new
technologies, while working to accommodate trends in the workplace like
social media, device proliferation, video and an increasingly mobile
workforce. The latest results will be presented today during a live
Internet TV broadcast from 8 to 9 a.m. PST at www.ustream.tv/ciscotv.

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Cloud computing trends
Cloud use today: Across the study’s 13 countries, only an average of 18%
of respondents are using cloud computing today, while an additional 34%
plan to use the cloud. Top cloud users today: Brazil (27%), Germany
(27%), India (26%), U.S. (23%) and Mexico (22%) top the list of
countries that are already taking advantage of cloud computing,
exceeding the average (18%) across all countries.

Future cloud use: A large majority (88%) of IT respondents predict that
they will be storing some percentage of their company’s data and
applications in private or public clouds within the next three years.

Private clouds: One in three IT professionals said more than half of
their company’s data and applications will be in private clouds within
the next three years. Private cloud adoption was predicted to be higher
in Mexico (71%), Brazil (53%) and the States (46%).

Timing for public clouds: Of those respondents that will use public
clouds, one of every three (34%) plan to deploy within one year, and 44%
predicted their companies would use public clouds within the next two
years; 21% are expected to do so within two to three years.

Virtualization trends
Server virtualization is not yet widespread in production and
non-production environments. Only 29% of the respondents worldwide have
more than half of their production servers virtualized, and only 28%
have more than half of non-production servers virtualized.

Top reasons to deploy virtualization: IT professionals cited an increase
in IT agility (30%) as the top reason, followed by the ability to
optimize resources to reduce costs (24%) and by faster application
provisioning (18%).

Virtualization inhibitors: The greatest hurdles to virtualization
included security (20%), stability concerns (18%), difficulty in
building operational processes for a virtualized environment (16%) and
management (16%).

Virtualization on the rise: The picture changes over the next three
years. Almost half of the IT respondents (46%) expect that 50% to 100%
of their production environment servers will be virtualized.

IT professionals see big savings from virtualization: Two of five (40%)
respondents expect a data centre cost reduction of between 25% and 49%,
and another 30% expect up to 24% in cost savings.

Data centre trends, concerns, priorities
Top data centre concerns: IT managers rated their top data centre
concerns as security, performance, reliability, and budget for
maintenance and management.

Top technologies and trends: One out of three IT managers cited mobile
access to information as the trend that would most affect the data
centre, especially in China (47%), Brazil (40%) and Germany (39%). Rated
nearly as high were virtualization (32%), unified data centre fabric
(29%), desktop virtualization (27%) and cloud computing (17%).

Business trends that will most impact their data centres: IT managers
were asked to select all those business trends that would most impact
their data centre over the next three years. Two out of five (40%)
stated that increases in applications and data will be the top business
trend for the next three years, followed closely by security and risk
management (39%) and cost reduction (34%). Also high on the list were
support for a distributed mobile or remote workforce, and a greater use
of video and collaboration technologies.

Role of the network: About seven of every 10 IT respondents (69%)
predict an increasing role for the network due to its central position
in the data centre and its ability to unite and manage resources.

Top data centre priorities: Worldwide, the top data centre priorities
for the next three years were to improve agility and speed in deploying
business applications (33%), better manage resource capacity to align
demand and capacity (31%), increase data centre resilience (19%), and
reduce power and cooling costs (17%).

Primary data centre strategy: More than one in four IT respondents (28%)
named a unified data centre fabric to unite storage and local area
network data traffic as the top technology strategy in their data
centres, with 23% naming data centre virtualization, followed by cloud
computing (18%), unified computing (17%) and desktop virtualization
(13%).

Unified computing: Although unified computing is a very new technology,
about one of five (19%) IT professionals had already tested or deployed
it, while another 41% plan to test or deploy a unified computing
solution in the next 12 months.

Average number of data centres: IT managers indicate that the server
capacity of their company is housed at an average of 14 data centres.

Data centre career opportunities: new job roles and team collaboration
Top career benefits: The trend toward unified data centre infrastructure
has fostered greater collaboration among formerly separated IT teams
and given rise to new training programs, new certifications and new job
roles and titles.

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IT career opportunities: About 50% of IT professionals predicted the
development of new IT career opportunities over the next three years as a
result of cross-training and collaboration among formerly separate
teams. More than a quarter (27%) cited greater efficiency as the reason
for collaboration among IT teams, and 25% rated the deployment of new
technologies as necessitating closer IT team integration.

Career growth: Countries that predicted the greatest development of new
IT careers due to cross-training and collaboration were India (59%),
China (56%), Spain (53%) and Mexico (53%).

Job opportunities: Across all countries, 43% expect new IT job
opportunities opening up due to the latest training and certification
programs for data centre managers. This was the case especially in China
(64%) and the States (52%).

Overall, 41% see new career opportunities opening up, with job
descriptions and titles such as data centre architect and data centre
manager; leading this trend are China (75%) and India (51%).

“The data centre is evolving to meet employee expectations for accessing
networks, applications and information anywhere at any time with any
device,” said Lew Tucker, Cisco’s chief technology officer, cloud
computing. “The third installment of the Cisco Connected World Report
demonstrates that IT professionals worldwide are embracing new
technologies such as virtualization, cloud computing, desktop
virtualization, and unified data centre infrastructure to meet employee
expectations while helping their companies meet their businesses goals.”

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