Many large companies in France have initiated steps to virtualise their IT environments as they see that cloud computing will help meet their business needs and increase agility in highly competitive markets, according to research from VMware, Accenture and EMC.
The survey, carried out by IDC France, explored largest French companies’ with about 2,000 employees and from all industries, basing its study on two major axes, virtualisation and service industrialisation/automation level.
The research focused on the maturity of those companies regarding the industrialisation of IT services to users and revealed how virtualisation and cloud computing are included as part of their infrastructure modernisation model.
The survey indicated that French companies are embracing desktop virtualisation, where one out of four companies already virtualised some of their client desktops and 17% of the companies plan to virtualise their desktops within 18 months.
French companies understand that virtualisation delivers more than cost savings alone, where 18 months ago, 80% of companies believed cost savings to be the most important benefit, compared to 55% of companies.
Although cloud is a new technology, nearly 72% think that cloud computing fits their needs and about 90% of companies have started to virtualise their server environments, while 50% have a strong industrialised approach to IT services whereby IT services are automatically rebilled.
Most companies between 67 and 71% depending on their size are looking to keep IT resources pooled within their France-based premises and less than 15% of them would consider a public cloud environment.
Further, many large companies, mainly those with more than 5,000 employees are now developing an IT service industrialisation approach through the implementation of private clouds.
The study reveals pooling must remain restricted to IT management’s field of technological expertise, since less than 15% of companies were ready to consider implementing a public cloud environment.
It also covered most of the strategic issues CIOs have to deal with on short and mid-term bases to define their IT strategies and investments, and suggests them to change the way they operate to transform their traditional infrastructures into private cloud data centres and deliver IT as a Service to both internal and external customers.
