Phl companies seen to improve IT savvy in 2013

MANILA, Philippines -- As the economic outlook in the Philippines continues to stay positive and companies are pressured to improve business performance, more local firms are expected to transform their IT infrastructure in 2013, according to IT storage and hardware solutions company EMC.

Ronnie Latinazo, country manager of EMC Philippines, said they expect more IT changes and even transformation of local companies as businesses aim for more productivity and higher levels of efficiencies.

Latinazo shared  that EMC sees businesses to embrace transformative and disruptive technologies to improve their capability to support rising big data trends from social platforms and within the business environment.

"The Philippines had seen that technology plays a vehicle in a development of a country," Latinazo said, noting there was even a perception shift that saw the IT department move from being a cost center to a value center.

Some of EMC's continuing momentum expectations are in the areas of IT Transformation, Big Data, and Trusted IT.

Under IT transformation, EMC reported 2013 will pave the way for a more mature IT environment where transforming applications, infrastructure and backup capabilities are critical for businesses moving in an era of mobility and business intelligence.

For Big Data, 2013 will be an even more promising year of such technology and data scientists, as businesses look to leverage analytics to uncover greater business insights and derive value for that competitive edge.

"By 2016, Asia Pacific will generate the most cloud traffic at 1.5 zettabytes annually," Latinazo shared.

Yet for the Trusted IT, organizations are predicted to increase their need to develop systems and solutions that mitigate new forms of security risks as well as to be able to observe regulatory compliance for data protection.

Latinazo explained the rise in the big data phenomenon led businesses to rethink the power of big data analytics. Businesses are using big data analytics to gain business insights and empower decisions.

In the public space, pre-empting the spread of diseases and gaining insights into voter preferences during elections are fast becoming a reality and EMC claims they are at the forefront of this trend.

In line with the explosive demand for analytics, Gartner and IDC report that there will be a shortage of data scientists to manage the data, quoting a demand of one million big data jobs in the Global 1,000 companies by 2015, but only one-third of those will be filled.

Also research firm Nucleus claims that public and private sector organizations that leverage technology to examine large and complex data sets will see a return on investment of 241 percent. Businesses will need to look into its big data talent pool early on to meet the challenges of the coming year.