Quality IT adoption needed to meet 2013 challenges

MANILA, Philippines -- In line with the explosive demand for analytics to improve business performance, companies and organizations in the Philippines are urged to improve their IT adoption to meet the challenges through 2013.

According to IT company EMC Corp., the Philippines with its upgraded economic standing has opened opportunities for increased technology adoption this year.

"The Philippines is enjoying a lot of optimism with its improved economy but this resulted also to an environment peppered with a lot of challenges," said Ronnie Latinazo, country manager of EMC Philippines.

The Philippine economy hit 6.6 percent in 2012, surpassing the official 5- to 6-percent target. It became Asia's second best performing economy last year, next only to China. This year, the target has been raised to 6 to 7 percent.

"Technology is now at the forefront, at the mainstream offering savings and speed of deployment," Latinazo said, noting the Top 3 trends that currently drive today's IT spending are Big Data problems (23 percent), Cloud Computing (18 percent), and Security (14 percent).

Among the other IT trends are Windows upgrade cycles, desktop virtualization, storage virtualization, offshoring labor/labor optimization, server virtualization, and green computing or saving on power.

Latinazo added mobility and social networking are major disruptive but opportunistic technology trends.

The executive said the digital universe is growing by 7,600 petabytes a day and every IT department in any organization faces two fundamental challenges of lowering operating costs and increasing business revenue.

He said about two-thirds of IT budgets are spent on maintaining existing systems with only one-third of the budget left to invest in new applications to increase business revenue.

"Advances in new workload will drive continued innovation in storage and storage arrays and Big Data will help customers increase revenue, while mobile and cloud will be the key enablers," Latinazo said. 

For EMC's part, Latinazo said the company will continue to develop their portfolio of IT solutions throughout 2013.

EMC will also continue to invest in their go-to-market strategies to expand their reach and provide customers with the broadest choice in accessing IT with either product or via a service provider.