SIFMA: Pre-Show Thoughts

  by Richard Muirhead | 09 Jun 2008 | Permalink | IT Management

As I gear up to attend and blog from this year’s SIFMA Technology Management Conference , I thought I’d take a moment between trips to the shops to find something comfortable to wear in this 100 degree heat to blog about some of the trends and top-of-mind issues I expect to hear discussed at the conference.

IT continues to seek to catch up with the professionalism and industrialization of its brethren company functions and hence data center technologies and best practices such as ITIL are hitting the SIFMA agenda in a noticeable way this year. Not surprising in this economic climate – we’ve seen an increase in demand for software, services and processes that help consolidate and optimize existing resources and squeeze every bit of value from them. Companies strive to attain a high level of efficiency and it makes sense to achieve this through a focus on IT metrics and IT governance. In fact, we’re seeing customers in the financial services sector actually accelerating initiatives like data center optimization in response to the credit crunch.

I also imagine virtualization will be a hot topic this year, as there’s been a marked uptake in these initiatives. Server virtualization has succeeded to a point where companies now need to find ways to rein it in from a lifecycle and change control perspective. Now virtualization allows us to benefit from a 10 x increase in the speed with which a server is deployed and efficient use of the hardware estate within which it resides, and we need to find new ways to manage these configurations and the performance of these virtual environments.

The dirty little secret is that in many cases companies are facing the issue of VM management when they don’t even have transparency into their physical infrastructure. Though few would admit it, most don’t have an accurate or up-to-date server count in their data centers, let alone understand what’s running where or connected to what how. Until financial services firms have an accurate picture of their IT infrastructures it will be too expensive to find opportunities for cost savings – and too risky to implement them.

I’m looking forward to discussing these and other issues with exhibitors and attendees at the conference, and will be posting here about interesting ideas and trends I encounter during the week.