VMware and EMC today released a joint State of IT Transformation report, an analysis of more than 660 their customers worldwide that are in the midst of IT transformation initiatives to help advance the digital business agendas of their organizations.

More accurate than a survey of polled research subjects, it presents a qualified analysis of companies who participated in EMC IT Transformation and VMware Accelerate workshops and self-identified gaps, progress and target goals in their short- and long-term IT transformation initiatives.

Transforming Operations

Loretta Brown, Vice President, Federation, VMware “The State of IT Transformation report shows that organizations in a variety of global, vertical industries can benefit from the implementation of a robust IT service strategy, powered by software-defined technologies. Together, with EMC, our mutual customers can achieve IT transformation by easily extending their private cloud workloads to and from the public cloud, while managing, securing and connecting all of their applications across all clouds and all devices.”

Regardless of geography or industry, most organizations reported wanting to improve their IT service strategy to run IT like a customer-focused business.

While 90% of organizations indicated the importance of having a documented IT transformation strategy and roadmap with executive and line of business support, more than half (55%) admitted to having nothing documented.

80% indicated they want to standardize services in a business-focused catalog with a self-service portal and to increase automation to improve IT service delivery including:

• Resource Provisioning – 77% of participants expressed the desire to provision infrastructure resources in less than a day, or dynamically as needed; over half reported taking between one to four weeks to do so
• Financial Management – 87% said they rely on a yearly allocation-based recovery, or a project-by-project recovery of IT costs; only 5% said they are able to bill the business for services consumed at an advertised price
• Metering – 88% of organizations said they want to get to a state where they use automation to track the resources each business unit is consuming; 70% indicated they have gaps in their ability to track IT resource consumption across the business

Cloud Infrastructure – Defining a Strategic Platform

Participants indicated they want their IT organizations to be cost-competitive with external service providers and are seeking cost efficiencies by virtualizing, standardizing, and developing hybrid cloud architectures. Most organizations indicated they want to have a hybrid cloud architecture for their production applications within the next 18-24 months, with 90% reporting they are in the evaluation or proof-of-concept stage.

In terms of virtualization, nearly every participating organization reported wanting to reach between 80-100% in compute, storage, and application virtualization.

Applications – Empowering and Accelerating App Development

Participants said they want to automate platform delivery to help their organizations develop software faster. Yet more than 80% of participants reported lacking a scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework and 68% said their organizations take 6–12 months or more to complete a new application development lifecycle. Most indicated the desire to get this down to a few weeks.

Highlights By Industry

• Healthcare – firms identified the most opportunities for improvements in their IT transformations. Healthcare participants scored themselves the lowest in more areas while prioritizing gaps in more areas than any other industry.
• Retail – the top performer in desktop virtualization with the top 20th percentile reporting well above 60% of desktops virtualized. They also report having a majority of their applications built on a scalable, infrastructure-independent application framework.
• Telecommunications – participants in this sector lead in network virtualization with the average firm reporting they’ve achieved 40% in network virtualization; the top 20% of companies in this sector have achieved nearly 80% network virtualization.
• Financial Services – participants scored above average in most areas of their IT transformation initiatives with nearly 40% having a fully supported, documented IT transformation strategy and roadmap.
• Government – top 20% reported having over 20% of production apps in a hybrid cloud and nearly 100% of compute and applications virtualized.

The complete EMC-VMware State of IT Transformation analysis report, along with summary content and Infographics can be viewed at emc.com 

Kevin Roche, President, Global Services, EMC Corporation “Our analysis of hundreds of EMC and VMware customers was more validating than surprising in that nearly every organization that participated shared with honesty, very common gaps and target goals to deliver IT services more efficiently as the best way to help enable their organizations better compete as full-fledged digital businesses. Both EMC and VMware have been part of many successful IT transformations with our customers, particularly those that enthusiastically adopt hybrid cloud strategies. These customers are not only experiencing significant cost savings, they are also making the most progress toward their digital business objectives.”