FeaturesOutsourcingStrategy

In the first CIO Exchange event hosted by Enterprise Innovation and VMware held in November in Malaysia, VMware's General Manager of SE Asia Ed Lenta shared the findings from the Global Business Agility Survey released in February 2011.

He pointed out that the 600 global respondents in the survey say that IT agility is a direct and key contributor to business agility, which in turn has contributed to corporate performance. The study goes on to note that corporate performance can be defined as revenue growth, cost reduction, and risk management.

"More than 80% of respondents associate business agility with revenue growth, cost reduction, and risk management; while 66% state business agility is a priority today," said Lenta.

The study by VMware and research firm AbsolutData, showed that IT agility is strongly linked to agile companies. Companies that are extremely agile report a more agile IT function; and those that are not agile report a weak IT function in terms of agility.

Lenta noted too that business leaders were linking cloud directly to business outcomes.

"Sixty-three percent of business leaders agree that cloud can have a significant impact in making their business more agile and responsive."

Companies with enterprise-wide cloud deployments are three times more likely to achieve business agility that is "much better than competition", said Lenta.

   

During the discussion, Sunway Group CIO Cheah Kok Hoong revealed that as part of ongoing cloud considerations, his business is considering implementing virtual desktop infrastructure in one of its business units.

Sunway Group's core businesses consist of an integrated properties division which is a consolidation of its property development, hospitality, retail, leisure and commercial properties in Malaysia as well as overseas. Other business divisions include construction, trading & manufacturing, quarry, building materials, healthcare, education and information technology.

"We have not taken a big step with cloud initiatives yet but have invested in VMware for the last five years."

A virtual desktop solution will help to optimize resources and save costs, Cheah noted.

According to Cheah, in other parts of its business, storage and server virtualization technologies have already been integrated into its IT backend.

Like Cheah, virtualization is not new for Cagamas VP Head of IT Tommy Tan. His team first proposed it five years ago.

Cagamas Berhad, the National Mortgage Corporation, was established to promote the broader spread of house ownership and growth of the secondary mortgage market in Malaysia. It issues debt securities to finance the purchase of housing loans from financial institutions and non-financial institutions.

"Unfortunately there weren't many success stories [for virtualiation] then and senior management decided to put it on hold," he said.

His IT department, which makes up 10% of the whole organization, persisted in educating the senior management and in September 2011, the virtualization project was approved by the board.

He noted that investments in the cloud are still being considered and with software such as Microsoft being updated every few years, the company is considering Microsoft 365 -- the cloud-based Office platform.