With the correct IT strategies in place, businesses will grow, said Gerhard van der Merwe, EMC country manager, at the annual EMC Forum 2008, held at Monte Casino, Fourways.
"Information is the lifeblood of your business and the management of this is critical to your business."
EMC's business partners were selected to showcase and present their technologies, business solutions, storage, information protection and virtualisation, to bring together customers as well as potential customers and highlight growing IT trends and innovative solutions.
Grant Morgan, CTO of Dimension Data, highlighted the importance of reducing the cost of storage infrastructure: "Businesses should make use of lower cost disk drives to reduce the cost of storage connectivity. Businesses need to maintain agility, availability and control and make use of efficient storage capacity for an environment that's changing quickly. Business management infrastructure needs to change around its virtualisation architecture."
IT must be aligned to 21st century business, said Ren'e Bosman, data centre business development manager on emerging markets at Cisco. "The number one priority used to be cutting costs, but its now about improving IT responsiveness to business."
Tying together virtualisation and collaboration architecturally is a big opportunity, he said. This improves collaboration between technology and productivity. Businesses are moving away from a typical silo approach to a standardised business environment for data.
"Some of the changes that we are seeing in the industry are that hypervisors are becoming predominant and networks and servers are coming closer together more than ever. New applications are becoming more network centric. In addition, IT is moving from hardware to software provisioning," Bosman said.
"Application network services is rapidly growing in Africa, but the biggest challenge that still remains is bandwidth availability."
Gary Bailey, head of Game Plan 2010 and ex-soccer player for Manchester United, said IT has an important role to play in the FIFA World Cup. "We are expecting a minimum of 400 000 people to come to the country in the four weeks of the World Cup. Businesses need to put plans in place to get the best out of this event."
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