Virtualisation to provide solutions

By Nafisa Akabor, ITWeb junior journalist

Johannesburg, 01 Jul 2009

The current economic condition has put the crunch on IT spend, forcing companies to do more with less.

This is according to Johannes Kanis, service line architect at Microsoft, who will speak at ITWeb's second annual Virtualisation of the Enterprise conference. The event takes place at The Forum in Bryanston on 21 and 22 July.

“IT is expected to deliver the same value and service quality but with less budget and investment. It therefore makes sense to simplify the complexity of one's IT environment in order to drive down the overall cost of ownership,” says Kanis.

Other challenges the industry faces is creating and presenting value to business-based spend against the IT budget, responding faster to dynamic and ever-changing business needs, and driving environmental sustainability through green IT, according to Kanis.

"The trick lies in balancing the IT challenges with the business strategy, ensuring that IT becomes a 'strategic asset' to the business and not just another cost centre," he states.

As far as optimising infrastructure is concerned, Kanis says there are various maturity models and frameworks in the industry that Microsoft has had success with, one of them being the 'Infrastructure Optimisation Model' which can be found on www.microsoft.com/io.

Also speaking at the conference is head of data centre business development at Cisco Systems, Rene Bosman. He will discuss Cisco's new market inflection, how customers benefit from reduced TCO, and the unified computing system and network.

Bosman says Cisco is creating a new market inflection by building an architectural model for the data centre, something that hasn't been done before. “In entering this market, we believe we are best positioned by bringing a new approach to how data centres, specifically compute platforms, are designed and operated.”

He adds that Cisco is well positioned because it has no legacy to protect. “We have developed industry-standard convergence technologies for unified access to compute platforms and believe the network is the natural aggregation point.”