Business Transaction Management Blog

What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas and this blog

December 15, 2010 at 6:43 pm Linh C. Ho Leave a comment

By Linh C. Ho

Last week I put on my blue suede shoes and spent the week in viva Las Vegas! I was attending Gartner’s 29^th annual data center and IT operations conference—of course. To no one’s surprise, the main theme of the conference was around cloud computing and virtualization. Over 2000 IT professionals marched up and down the Caesars Palace between sessions, analyst one-on-ones, and perhaps a round of black jack by the dancing dolls

Without a doubt, trends to watch were on the horizon – some of the top trends I picked up from one of the keynotes are:

• Virtualization is just starting: it is not a one-time project, it’s a process! the number of virtualized PCs will grow from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011.
• Big data – big elephant or was it gorilla in the room? Storage continues to grow at an average of 50% to 60% CAGR in most enterprises.
• Energy efficiency and monitoring: data centers can consume 40 to 100 times more energy than offices they support! Big need to measure and report on consumption!
• Unified communication and collaboration: incorporate mobile devices into the enterprise!
• Staff retention and retraining: how do you keep staff from leaving? The US department of labor estimates that today’s labor force will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38!
• Social networks: don’t band Facebook, Youtube or Twitter from your staff! Did you know more video was uploaded to youtube in the last 2 months than ABC, CBS, NBC had been airing new content since 1948?? (OpTier uploaded 4 in the last month!) check em’ out!
• Cloud computing: it reduces operating expenses, improves agility –yes great hype but focus on results!

While the name of the game was to count how many times the word ‘cloud’ gets mentioned in a session, I was keeping an ear out for ‘OpTier’.  The topics of interest were application performance management, end-user experience, ITILv3, CMDB/CMS, business service management, virtualization and (drum roll) cloud.

Few additional things I’ve picked up from the sessions:

• User defined transaction flow or Business Transaction Management (BTM) is the most popular inquiry in application management area in 2010. (DING! For OpTier!)
• Warning of small niche deep-dive vendors in Java/.NET claiming to do BTM! –they don’t!
• Application Performance Management (APM) continues to be a hot area:
• 2009 APM inquiries: 650
• 2010 APM inquiries to date: 700+
• 2009 APM market size: $1.5B
• 2010 APM market size ~$2B (with 10% annual growth going forward – only virtualization management is growing faster)
• End-user Experience management continues to be a hot priority (DING! For OpTier!)
• A lot more emphasis on ITIL and process improvement from Gartner this year. I believe they even hired a new analyst to cover ITIL. This must be a reflection of the US adoption. While Gartner shows that over 30% are 3-5 years into ITIL, the majority of the audience is at maturity level 2 or 3. This means that enterprises are becoming more process-centric and proactive rather than reactive.
• Investment in managing cloud is mostly in private cloud only, very little <5% investment in managing public cloud.

All and all, I have found the conference very informative and worthwhile! I have been going to this conference for many years, this was by far the biggest datacenter show I’ve seen. Viva Las Vegas!

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