We recently welcomed Bob Ridout, former DuPont CIO, to our board of directors. We sat down with him to canvas his thoughts on the industry, future trends and RF Code’s position in the industry.
What are your thoughts on subscription pricing for solutions in the data center?
It’s a great way to pay for IT and new technologies. One of the most significant drivers behind cloud adoption has been the ability to deliver services using OpEx payment models. As a CIO, this overcomes the hurdles that are traditionally associated with securing new capital investment. Subscription pricing gives companies the flexibility to ramp-up usage as and when the business requires.
What do you think the future trends and management focuses will be in the data center?
In the enterprise more projects and applications will migrate to the cloud, which will create an increasing demand for reliable cloud providers. Organizations will likely retain their critical solutions on-premise, however even those may become more of a hybrid solution. These are what I call the ‘secret sauce’ of the business and the data centers responsible for these on-premise services, though much smaller, are even more critical to the business. Ultimately these micro and edge facilities require greater operational continuity to ensure applications are always available.
You’ve worked in IT for a long time; how has the data center and its role changed?
I remember the manual audits of the data center, they were labor intensive and wouldn’t be suitable for the always moving environment of today’s data centers. Facilities are getting larger and more complex as the cloud continues to grow - they now require intelligent monitoring of assets and the environment in real-time.
There is still budgetary pressure on data center operators. The hyper-scale data centers of Amazon and other players in the market are now big business, though they simply didn’t exist ten years ago. It’s even more important for these facilities to be as efficient and reliable as possible.
In your role as a CXO advisor what are executives looking for from their IT investments?
Enterprises are always searching for flexible solutions that are easy to implement. CIOs also want innovative solutions that help improve productivity and efficiency. IT is becoming more and more strategic to every business. What is critical is that the technology has to work, so the focus is now on operational continuity. With the data center, auditing and monitoring is important as is reducing power and the associated cost savings.
Read more about Bob’s career here. You can find out more about CenterScape Cloud and our new subscription pricing here.
