Tooling up with technology

According to the International Association of Outsourcing Professionals (IAOP), in 2010, enterprises are increasingly likely to deploy advanced management practices, tools and technologies, to provide improved value and operational flexibility and performance¹. These technologies include:

Cloud computing and virtualisation: Steve Prentice, Vice President, Gartner, predicts 2010 is likely to be a turning point for cloud computing, and by the end of 2010-2011, nearly 20% businesses are likely to move away completely from physical IT infrastructure; with the trend towards end-to-end virtualisation likely to be initiated by medium and small businesses followed by larger enterprises².
Current Analysis agrees that in 2010, cloud services like Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) are likely to emerge as key on-demand offering, primarily driven by significant cost reduction considerations, security and reliability issues and flexible deployments. IT service providers are also likely to be involved in a competitive battleground in the virtual data centre space involving IaaS³.
BT provides an extensive range of cloud computing services in collaboration with other top tier ITSPs like Microsoft and Cisco. BT provides the Microsoft BPOS service, a suite of ‘on-demand’ services that includes a fully integrated range of applications, including voice to the desktop, video conferencing, instant messaging and presence that delivers on the promise of improving productivity while reducing costs⁸. Further, in collaboration with Cisco, in December 2009, BT launched a global cloud based IPT solution from BT's Onevoice UCC portfolio⁹.

Telepresence: Optimise business processes, enhance cross enterprise communications, as well as maintain environmental sustainability with telepresence. According to Current Analysis, telepresence is likely to gain traction in 2010, because of its lower initial costs of deployment and by the growth of unified communication services that focus on better integration and flexible architectures³.
BT provides Cisco TelePresence technology, which uses ultra-high-quality immersive video and audio for instant communication between remote locations, with the personal touch of a face-to-face conversation. As the technology of Telepresence gains traction in 2010, BT has the capability to support extensive telepresence services, largely through its global network reach, as well as strong position in LAN, WAN and IP telephony elements critical to delivering a high-quality business solution¹⁰.

Advanced analytics: Deploying advanced analytical and business intelligence tools and models to maximize business process and decision effectiveness, will be key in 2010. Advanced analytics is also likely to be leveraged for providing simulation, prediction, optimization and other analytics, not simply information, to empower even more decision flexibility at the time and place of every business process action⁴.

Client Computing: Virtualisation is bringing new ways of packaging client computing applications and capabilities. As a result, going ahead, the choice of a particular PC hardware platform, and eventually the operating system platform, is likely to become less critical. Analysts indicate enterprises are expected to proactively build a five to eight year strategic client computing roadmap outlining an approach to device standards, ownership and support; operating system and application selection, deployment and update; and management and security plans to manage diversity⁴.

Open source software: Optimise operational expenses with CRM applications, database management and virtualisation software. During 2010, IT service providers are also expected to position open source as a solution and customise it to the needs of specific verticals. As well as build partner ecosystems and expand through partners' sales support and services⁵.
BT entered the open source arena by acquiring Osmosoft in May 2007 and branded the company as its open source innovation arm. The creator of Osmosoft, Jeremy Ruston is now the head of open source innovation at BT¹¹. Additionally, BT provides Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) across the entire organisation, and is actively engaged in numerous FOSS communities, projects, initiatives and events.

Social computing: According to an IDC survey in January 2010, the intersection of Web 2.0, enterprise 2.0 and collaboration is likely to fundamentally alter how businesses interact with customers, partners, suppliers and employees. Out of the 4,710 respondents surveyed by IDC, 15% reported using a consumer social tool instead of corporate-sponsored social tools for business purposes due to ease of use, familiarity from personal use and low cost.
IDC predicts software companies will increase their social software offerings significantly in 2010 as customer demand steadily increases. IDC also anticipates that ‘socialytic’ applications are likely to emerge that link social/collaboration software, and analytics to business logic/workflow and data⁶.

Business Process Management (BPM): According to Gartner, as more enterprises embrace BPM to further improve business performance, BPM will increase beyond its initial focus on structured processes into more challenging, cross-boundary processes. Analysts indicate that by 2014, nearly 40% of business managers and knowledge workers in Global 2000 enterprises are likely to use comprehensive business process models to support their daily work, up from 6% in 2009⁷.

Find out more
To start benefitting from any of these technologies, simply call your BT Account Manager today.

Source:
1. International Association of Outsourcing Professionals website

2. Computerweekly

3. Current Analysis

4. Gartner

5. Computerworld/ IDG News Service

6. Information Management Online

7. Gartner

8. BTGS website

9. Cisco website

10. BTGS website

11. Osmosoft website