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It's crunch time for many IT departments today. Businesses are demanding a new way of computing as cloud service providers offer the prospect of purchasing IT on a pay-as-you-go model; the ability to scale up and down as you need; and provisioning of services within minutes.

For traditional internal IT departments it's alarming to be compared and benchmarked against offerings like that, as in most cases the internal IT department would fall well short of these same metrics.

The issue is that businesses today demand that IT adapt so it can meet business demands exactly when they need to and in an optimal way so that resources are efficiently utilized. When asked if IT budgets were going up in 2012, the majority of gathered CIOs replied in the positive, with one or two replying that budgets were expected to be flat.

IT leaders from Ho Chi Minh City joined the recent CIO Exchange roundtable discussion hosted by Enterprise Innovation and VMware.

At HSBC, Head of Change Nguyen Hung noted that while some companies have higher IT budgets, often the call from business is: "Do more with the same or maybe now it's more for less," he said. "Budgets overall may well be going up but it's clear that business expects IT to deliver much more than we have been asked to deliver before."

At Prudential, the budget for IT is likely to go up by five percent for next year but that must be matched against the business outlook to accurately gauge the significance of that budget.

"In my case I feel that even with five percent more it will be very tough for IT next year as business is projecting much higher growth overall, so finding ways for IT to keep pace with this growth is the biggest challenge for us right now," said Dao Huu Phuc VP, head of Technology, Prudential Vietnam Finance Company.

The message is that IT departments must become more dynamic and elastic in meeting business needs. According to Ed Lenta, general manager for VMware in ASEAN, this requires a new way for doing computing, a new model for provisioning and consuming IT infrastructure.

He added that cloud computing is likely to be the most fundamental way of changing the IT model so that IT can become more agile and have a direct impact on corporate performance.

He also pointed to Gartner and IDC who have both noted that the most effective and likely predominant model for businesses to maximize the cloud potential is to adopt a hybrid model of building private cloud capabilities and leveraging public cloud where applicable.

"But the first step to getting there has to be virtualization, and it must be on x86 architecture," said Lenta. "You look today at the data centers of Amazon aws.amazon.com or Google and you will not find mid-range servers or mainframes. It's not a question of whether you can virtualize these hardware platforms but is it the smart thing to do? Because price performance wise, x86 beats any other platform by a distance."