Published on the 14/08/2013 | Written by Newsdesk

Enterprise IT managers need to rethink their approach to infrastructure and information management according to the chief technology officer of EMC, John Roese. In Australia for a major user conference, Roese said that the traditional practice of scaling enterprise infrastructure to meet employee needs was no longer valid and organisations needed to scale infrastructure to meet combined employee and customer needs, linking on-premise and cloud systems.

This will require CIOs to establish infrastructure pools and then develop the capability to “abstract the infrastructure via software,” harnessing a software platform to simplify the management and provisioning of infrastructure. CIOs who really want to lift IT’s value proposition should also develop unified analytics engines able to source data from multiple systems, join the dots between the data and serve the insights back to the business in a form that adds value.

“This is a huge opportunity for IT to increase their value proposition to the enterprise,” said Roese. “When they do it…it increases the relevance of IT in a way that I have never seen before.”

EMC’s VIPR tool slated for launch later this year will allow organisations to develop a software abstraction of infrastructure storage. Meanwhile it has established the Pivotal business unit focused on business analytics.

Roese said that EMC has been working with a Europe-based telecommunications company to bring together data from multiple systems in order to tackle customer churn problems. He said it was now possible for the carrier to send a text to a user within 100 milliseconds of a call dropping out and offer a free click-to-reconnect service which would improve customer satisfaction and help reduce the risk of churn. “We couldn’t do that five years ago. If I reduce churn in telcos by 2-3% it can have an impact worth hundreds of millions of dollars,” he said.

Bringing data insights together isn’t just benefitting the big boys.

Australian print and packaging business Guru Labels has announced that it will deploy the Sage ERP X3 software to integrate data from its manufacturing, inventory, purchasing, finance, CRM and sales systems in order to improve decision making and streamline the business, Guru Labels expects savings of around $100,000 a year as a result.