Indian organizations are forerunners of IT maturity in APJM: Study

IT Transformation can result in bottom-line benefits that drive business differentiation, innovation and growth, according to ESG IT Transformation Maturity Curve India Report commissioned by Dell EMC and Intel Corporation.

Today’s business landscape in India is rife with disruption, much of it driven by organizations using technology in new or innovative ways. In order to survive and thrive in today’s digital world, businesses are implementing new technologies, processes and skill sets to best address changing customer needs. A fundamental first step to this change is transforming IT, to help organizations bring products to market faster, remain competitive and drive innovation. According to the study:

• 90% of Indian respondents agree that failing to embrace IT Transformation will hurt their company’s competitiveness
• Respondents from Transformed organizations in India were 1.35 times more likely to have exceeded their revenue targets (97%) in the past year compared with Legacy/Emerging Indian organizations, as compared to only 45% of respondents at Transformed companies in the rest of Asia
• Transformed organizations in India are 11x more likely to believe they are in a very strong competitive business position compared to lower scoring organizations

The ESG 2018 IT Transformation Maturity Study

The ESG 2018 IT Transformation Maturity Study follows the seminal study commissioned by Dell EMC, the ESG 2017 IT Transformation Maturity Study, and was designed to provide insight into the state of IT Transformation, the business benefits fully transformed companies experience, and the role critical technologies have in an IT Transformation. ESG employed a research-based, data-driven maturity model to identify different stages of IT Transformation progress and determine the degree to which global organizations have achieved those different stages, based on their responses to questions about their organizations’ adoption of modernized data center technologies, automated IT processes and transformed organizational dynamics.

This year’s 400 participating organizations from India were segmented into the same IT Transformation maturity stages:

• Stage 1– Legacy (2%): Falls short on many – if not all – of the dimensions of IT Transformation in the ESG study
• Stage 2 – Emerging (21%): Showing progress in IT Transformation but having minimal deployment of modern data center technologies
• Stage 3 – Evolving (61%): Showing commitment to IT Transformation and having a moderate deployment of modern data center technologies and IT delivery methods
• Stage 4 – Transformed (17%): Furthest along in IT Transformation initiatives

This year’s findings show organizations are progressing in IT maturity and generally believe transformation is a strategic imperative.

• 72% of Indian respondents whose organizations have achieved Transformed status also report having mature Digital Transformation projects underway versus only 3% of the Indian Legacy/Emerging companies surveyed
• IT groups at Transformed companies in India are 6.5 times more likely to be involved in business-strategy development compared with their counterparts at Legacy/Emerging companies (46% versus 7%). Moreover, in the rest of the region Transformed organizations were only 5 times as likely to enjoy this level of involvement compared to lower scoring organizations

IT Transformation maturity can accelerate innovation, drive growth, increase IT efficiency and reduce cost. More specifically:

• Two-fifths (41%) of respondents at Transformed companies cited cost reduction as a key IT success criterion
• Nearly universally, 89% of Indian respondents said their companies are under pressure to deliver products and services faster, which requires having an agile approach to IT
• Transformed organizations in India were 10 times more likely than Legacy/Emerging organizations to report the majority of their applications are deployed ahead of schedule

Maturity Characteristics Compared with the Rest of Asia

For Indian organizations, IT Transformation correlates with improved IT and business outcomes.

In terms of modern datacenter technology usage, Indian organizations appear to lead their counterparts across the rest of Asia: 

• They are more apt to use Flash, 84% of surveyed Indian companies use All-Flash and/or hybrid arrays compared with 73% for the rest of Asia
• 82% of Indian organizations surveyed use scale-out storage versus 65% for the rest of Asia
• They are much more likely to be committed to software-defined datacenter technologies, e.g., software-defined networking and storage—72% of Indian respondents indicated such a commitment compared with 53% across the rest of Asia
• They were more likely to report using both converged and hyper-converged infrastructure in their environments—46% versus the 19% reported by organizations in other Asian countries
• Indian organizations are more virtualized than other Asian organizations—49% of Indian production servers are VMs versus 45% in the rest of Asia

In addition to modern datacenter technologies, Indian organizations are, in general, exceeding the rest of Asia in terms of automation and process evolution:

• India’s organizations were more likely to report extensive (29% versus 7%) self-service infrastructure provisioning capabilities to end-users compared with the rest of Asia
• India-based organizations are more likely to have highly automated server environments including provisioning (35% versus 15%), updating (39% vs. 16%), and troubleshooting (34% versus 13%) processes.  

Lastly, ESG asked respondents to qualitatively describe how extensively their organizations have adopted formal DevOps principles and practices. Indian organizations appear to be ahead of the rest of Asia, with 26% reporting extensive adoption compared to 10%.

Running