Hu Yoshida, Hitachi Data Systems’ Chief Technology Officer visits Australia

In February 2011, Hu Yoshida, Chief Technology Officer at Hitachi Data Systems, visited Australia as part of his annual tour of the Asia Pacific region. Hu is always keen to hear about the issues and trends that are being shared by Hitachi customers and partners across the globe, and it also provides him with the opportunity to share his industry insights with the wider Hitachi network.

While juggling Hu’s busy itinerary of meetings in Australia and New Zealand, Howorth secured several interviews for Hu with local technology press, where he could share his thoughts and insights on the key storage trends in 2011.

Howorth kicked off Hu’s visit with a broadcast interview on Sky Business News’ Technology Behind Business programme, which airs on Friday, Saturday and Sunday.

In the interview, Hu shared his thoughts on how the transformation of the data centre will be an important trend in 2011, as well as data centre efficiency. A shortened version of the interview also appeared on the Tech Report programme, which airs on Sky Business News on Monday.

Hu was also interviewed by Computerworld, iTWire (1, 2, 3) and SearchStorage, with five quality articles subsequently appearing.

What’s hot in 2010?

It is getting to that time of year when the industry analysts get out the crystal ball and start to highlight some key trends and forecast for 2010. First cab off the rank is Gartner, and this is their top 10 strategic technologies for 2010:

1. Cloud Computing
2. Advanced Analytics
3. Client Computing
4. IT for Green
5. Reshaping the Data Center
6. Social Computing
7. Security – Activity Monitoring
8. Flash Memory
9. Virtualization for Availability
10. Mobile Applications

The list is considerably different from Gartner’s forecasts for 2009 — Green IT, which was named as the number one priority in 2008, and dropped down to number 10 in 2009, is now back at number four. Virtualisation was number one in 2009, now at number nine. We assume Advanced Analytics is another name for Business Intelligence, which sees it climb from number nine last year to number two. Other technologies dropping in priority include enterprise mash-ups, servers beyond blades, specialised systems and unified communications, which all fall out of the top 10 list.

Gartner goes on to say that CIOs will be challenged to balance cost, risk and growth in 2010. The demand on IT organisations will be greater transparency and accountability. Gartner predicts few IT leaders will receive budget increases in 2010, which may mean more of the “mend and make do” approach.

It is agreed that 2009 will go down as the worst ever year for the IT industry, but 2010 will see spending increase with 3.3% growth. Gartner’s Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner and global head of Research, said: “2010 is about balancing the focus on cost, risk, and growth. For more than 50 percent of CIOs the IT budget will be 0 percent or less in growth terms. It will only slowly improve in 2011. While the IT industry will return to growth in 2010, the market will not recover to 2008 revenue levels before 2012.”

Sondergaard adds that business intelligence, virtualisation and social media will continue to dominate IT leaders’ agendas in 2010.

How much of this holds true, only time will tell. We’ll update on what the other analysts say for 2010 as soon as the details are published.