9. Solid state disk to emerge as new first tier of storage in the data center. With breakthroughs in nanotechnology, solid state disk (SSD) solutions promise to deliver greater capacity at much less cost. In 2009, EMA predicts that SSD will emerge as the new first tier of storage in the data center.
10. Economic pressures to drive strategic (but quantifiable) investments in automation. With the economy facing challenges of historic proportion, IT organizations are under intense pressure to reduce expenses while continuing to improve the strategic value of IT by providing flexible, dynamic and efficient IT services that drive business success. EMA believes that organizations will increasingly turn to automation as a means of doing more with less especially in the data center and storage arena.
11. Video growth will push unified communications management to the forefront. Accelerating growth in video traffic will expose service delivery infrastructure issues that had only started to appear with prior deployments of VoIP, ICT and mobility. EMA expects that IT operations and planning professionals (especially those focused on the network) will need to re-tune and optimize their environments to handle this demand in 2009.
12. Changing organizational roles will escalate demand for new management technologies. As IT silos become more integrated along a service management model, the need for new technologies to support cross-domain collaboration and more cohesive views of infrastructure-to-service interdependencies will become paramount. The politics of collaboration will reach well beyond finger pointing to higher levels of automated diagnostics, process automation and shared access to information. This will in turn reduce IT operational costs.
“The role of IT management continues to rise in value and importance within the enterprise as organizations turn to technology as a means of driving business success and competitive advantage,” concluded Twing.