MANILA, March 5, 2015 – VMware Inc, the global leader in virtualization and cloud infrastructure, today unveiled its solution portfolio that empowers businesses with the latest in cloud management, software-defined and end-user computing solutions. The announcements are in line with VMware’s latest survey findings that showcase Philippines businesses at the leading edge of technology adoption in ASEAN with over 79 percent respondents expecting to be at least 30 percent virtualized in two years. The findings further highlight businesses in the highly virtualized category to more than double from existing 17 to 44 percent by 2017.
623 business and IT managers and decision makers participated in the VMware Philippines Business Survey conducted from January to February 2015.
The positive virtualization trends in Philippines would mean long-term business savings as the IDC Datacenter Economies Index estimated that businesses in the Asia Pacific region would be able to avoid almost US$1B (US$92,413M) in costs between 2014 – 2020 as a result of virtualization of compute, storage and networking hardware, and leveraging a software-defined approach to managing IT. The savings, according to the same study, would come from four key areas of hardware (US$40,038M), real estate/maintenance (US$1,965M), administration (US$35,856M) and power and cooling (US$14,554M), just from 2014 – 2020.
“As one of the most social and mobile markets in the region , the Philippines’ on-demand and hyper-connected workforce is changing the marketplace to one that is increasingly fluid and instant. It has become imperative for businesses in the Philippines to look to technology and effectively leverage the cloud to stay competitive,” said Emmanuel Portugal, country manager, VMware Philippines. “VMware is committed to enabling businesses in the Philippines to be more agile, competitive and flexible in today’s dynamic mobile-cloud era with solutions that are fluid, instant and secure.”
Key findings from VMware Philippines Business Survey (2015):
IT security, disaster recovery and enterprise cost reduction outlined as key business priorities for 2015
• Philippines businesses define their top three IT priorities for 2015 as providing IT security and data protection (34 percent), disaster recovery and business continuity (31 percent) and reduction of enterprise costs (23 percent)
The strong focus on turning to software-defined data centers could be attributed to the added technology advantages of virtualization. In the quest for productivity amongst businesses, organizations in Philippines that can rapidly provision new services in a secure and highly available environment, while scaling dynamically as the business grows in a cost-effective manner, will in turn be able to succeed in this new era.
Businesses expect software-defined data centers to improve operational efficiency and optimize resource utilization
• Improve operational efficiency (35 percent) and optimize resource utilization (30 percent) were identified as the key drivers for adopting software-defined data centers
There is a paradigm shift in the IT expectations of enterprises from being just a productivity and efficiency driver to a catalyst in achieving business outcomes. With measures to continuously drive economic growth and challenges, including lesser resources such as land and manpower, businesses in Philippines need to consider adopting technologies such as virtualization and software-defined data centers for operational efficiency and better resource utilization. This storage efficiency factor from virtualization has allowed less physical storage capacity to be purchased. From this reduction in physical storage required, more savings in hardware spending, and reduction in costs from power and cooling, data center space and storage administration can also be realized.
Costs, business culture and lack of information as top barriers to adoption
• Costs (45 percent), business culture (25 percent) followed by lack of information (22 percent) were identified as the top barriers to adoption of Software-Defined Data Centers
Beyond costs, another significant challenge to organizations looking to adopt newer technologies is culture. This issue is apparent when examining the results of the IDC Asia/Pacific Transformative Infrastructure Index, which showed strong “interest” around a myriad of new technologies, and lesser focus on the execution of a business-aligned strategic IT projects. While many would argue that this issue stems from insufficient funds, this ‘lack of funds’ can also be attributed to “attitude”. If there is greater alignment of the IT projects to measurable business outcomes, then the ability of organizations to find the necessary funds to deliver on some of these capabilities will increase.
Supporting businesses in their mission to improve efficiency and costs in today’s liquid world, VMware also recently announced the industry’s first unified hybrid cloud platform including the latest edition of its flagship virtualization platform, VMware vSphere® 6. Its ‘One Cloud, Any Application’ approach and suite of solutions bring to market a unified platform that unites on-premise and public clouds with open management, enabling rapid development, automatic deployment and secure consumption of any application, anywhere.
Other recent launches also include expansions into its end-user computing portfolio of solutions and new wave of cloud management offerings and capabilities for the hybrid cloud including the VMware Horizon® FLEX™, VMware vRealize™ Suite 6, VMware vRealize Code Stream™ and VMware vRealize Air™ Compliance.
