Several solutions have been put forward as a way forward to control cost. What’s your take on Virtualization, Cloud & Outsourcing as potential solutions?

Wee Wah: IT outsourcing is not new and has been around for a long time. Under traditional IT outsourcing an enterprise hires an outside service provider to provide one or more business-IT functions that were previously provided internally by the enterprise. With the maturing of technologies of virtualization, virtualization-ready hardware and management software, IT services provisioning are taking shape fast in companies deploying private, public and hybrid clouds. According to CIO.com, “Cloud services are a boon for many IT departments willing to forego customization: They help IT organizations chip away at hefty capital expenditures from back-end infrastructure to customer-facing software and everything in between. Consequently, the cloud is turning the traditional IT services industry on its head.” In fact, Gartner predicts that by 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own virtually no IT assets.

 I think this new cloud-enabled IT Outsourcing can be broadly translate into two new IT outsourcing broad offerings: managed services and on-demand services. By outsourcing non-strategy IT Services, organizations could concentrate on core-businesses that will help improve its cost-savings measures and eventually create greater business value for its stakeholders in the long term. On-demand services, on the other hand, provides ad-hoc computing power on a per-use basis case and you pay only for the services you use during the “rental” period. This will definitely help in cost predictions as well as in controlling running costs.


* This article is an extract from the media interview I've done with Divya Sangam, Online Communications Manager. For full interview's content, refer to IQPC Worldwide www.iqpc.com.sg