A new study has revealed that there is an increasingly common understanding between business and IT decision makers on the key IT trends and the growth opportunities that IT can offer.

The new Dell State of IT Trends 2016 global study stated that there is a greater sophistication and alignment in understanding of IT trends between both the groups.

PSB carried out the survey by conducting 1,200 online interviews in the US, UK, Germany, Japan, Brazil, India and China.

Of the total respondents, 700 were IT decision makers’ (ITDMs) and 500 were business decision makers’ (BDMs).

According to the survey, increasing business productivity is the main IT consideration for 81% of ITDMs and 77% of BDMs.

62% of ITDMs and 51% of BDMs agree that cloud computing is the most important technology trend for their companies.

88% of ITDMs and 80% of BDMs said their organisation is considering implementing a software-defined data centre (SDDC), is in the process of transitioning, or has already completed the transition to one.

According to the survey, by 2:1 margins, both ITDMs and BDMs say they will use more open data centre technologies in the future.

Compute-centric is the best approach to gain a scalable and open data centre for 86% of ITDMs and 85% of BDMs.

More than eight in 10 of those surveyed agree that integrating hyper converged solutions is the first step in achieving a software-defined data centre.

Approximately nine in 10 global decision makers agree that open technology best supports data centre trends toward application and data portability and broad data center-wide process management, compared to vendor hardware or solutions.

The ability to address issues rapidly is the top global concern for all respondents with respect to managing the data centre management.

The results suggest that IT and business leadership are better collaborating and having in-depth conversations on how technology works and drives the business forward.