ManageEngine surveys democratisation of IT and ability to influence business decisions in enterprises

ManageEngine, the enterprise IT management division of Zoho Corporation, announced results from its IT at work: 2022 and beyond study. This newly released data, involving IT decision makers and business decision makers, examines the democratisation of IT and the ability of IT teams to influence business decisions in large and enterprise-sized organisations in the UAE.

According to the study, there is increased collaboration between IT and other teams within organisations, which may have contributed to non-IT employees possessing more knowledge about IT now than they did before 2020. IT structures within organisations are being increasingly decentralised, and non-IT departments now enjoy autonomy when it comes to technology decisions.

However, any concerns over the role of IT teams being diminished are dispelled as the study found that they are pivotal in building tomorrow’s enterprises. Around 76% of ITDMs expect IT to play a greater role in setting the organisation’s overall strategy in the next 5 years. This is 11% higher than the global average.

Ganesan, President, ManageEngine.

is more responsible for business innovation than ever before.

Key findings from the study

l The vast majority, 90% of respondents report that collaboration between IT teams and other departments has increased during the past two years.

l More than four-fifths, 84% of respondents agree that non-IT employees in their organisation are more knowledgeable about IT now than they were before 2020.

l Around 44% of organisations have already decentralised their IT structure, with another 49% currently attempting to do so.

The success of the IT team in playing its role has a significant bearing on the organisation’s success, with over 91% of all respondents pointing to a direct correlation between both. Furthermore, IT professionals are increasingly expected to be innovators, with more than nine in ten, 91% respondents agreeing that IT l Nearly all, 98% BDMs say their department has autonomy when it comes to making technology decisions. This autonomy relates to not only purchasing software, 64%, and devices, 47%, but also to hiring tech talent, 62% . l Around 91% of all respondents say AI and ML technologies will play a significant role in strengthening their organisation’s IT security framework. e-finance, Egypt’s national developer of digital payment infrastructures, announced its collaboration with IBM to grow its digital payment services and enable clients to securely make payments across hybrid cloud environments. Through this collaboration, e-finance is leveraging the latest IBM Power servers, to upgrade its current infrastructure as a service and streamline business processes to optimise performance.

Turtlefin, India’s Insurtech platform, announced a partnership with The Continental Group, one of the leading insurance intermediaries and financial services solutions providers in the UAE. Turtlefin will provide its leading SaaS platform modules, enabling The Continental Group’s distribution teams to access relevant information and seamlessly customise proposals for their clients.

Through this strategic partnership, Turtlefin will onboard new insurers on their cutting-edge platform to provide seamless access to the users of The Continental Group. This will lead to increased insurer participation bringing in more choices to clients to make the right decision on their insurance needs. The solution will bring significant operational efficiencies through the automation of proposal journeys, management reporting and dashboards, which will be accessible from a single source rather than multiple dependencies.

(Left To right) Laxmikant Pawar, Senior Director, Turtlefin, Akshay Sardana, Director & Vice President, The Continental Brokers, Ashok Sardana, Founder & Managing Director, The Continental Brokers, Amreesh Kher, Chief Partnership Distribution Officer, Turtlefin and Anselm Mendes, Executive Director, Sales & IT, The Continental Brokers.

Turtlefin develops distinctive, tailored technological solutions that provide real value for institutional clients and allows their sales teams to offer insurance as a solution in an educated and effective way. TurtleFin’s solutions will enable financial experts at The Continental Group to enhance their distribution capabilities with applications like Digital Prospecting, Learning and Skilling on the Go and paperless transactions.

Currently, many of the e-finance offerings are running on IBM Power10 servers, including electronic payment systems, government POS management systems, the card management and electronic payment system for “Khales” and more.

Designed to help clients operate in a secured, frictionless hybrid cloud experience across their IT infrastructure, the IBM Power E1080 servers will allow e-finance to deliver end-toend encryption, scale business-critical applications, and accommodate high-performance transactional workloads through its flexible and secured infrastructure offering.

With a renewed focus by clients on improving sustainability, IBM Power10 E1080 servers deliver 33% lower energy consumption for the same workload when compared to the earlier Power E980 generation, and 52% lower energy consumption when comparing the previous generation of Power E880C servers, thus maximising reliability in a sustainable way.

As part of the collaboration, IBM will also provide e-finance with IBM FlashSystems and IBM Software-Defined Storage, SDS, introducing streamlined administration and operational complexity across on-premises, hybrid cloud, virtualised and containerised environments. By providing advanced compression features that will allow data to be stored on significantly less desks than traditional modules, e-finance will be able to host its customer’s data and workloads more efficiently, reducing its datacentres and floor space footprints by up to 40% and its energy consumption by 50%.

Amazon Web Services, announced launch of a new AWS Local Zones location in Muscat, Oman. AWS Local Zones are a type of infrastructure deployment that places AWS compute, storage, database, and other services near large population, industry, and information technology, IT centres—enabling customers to deploy applications that require single-digit millisecond latency to end users or on-premises datacentres.

Customers can run workloads with low latency requirements on AWS Local Zones while seamlessly connecting to the rest of their workloads running in AWS Regions. AWS now has 25 AWS Local Zones around the world, with announced plans to launch 27 more AWS Local Zones globally.

For applications that require single-digit millisecond latency or have to remain within a geographic boundary for regulatory reasons, the location of cloud infrastructure matters. Most customer workloads run in an AWS Region, a geographic location where AWS clusters datacentres to serve customers. However, when a Region is not close enough to meet low latency or data residency requirements, customers need AWS infrastructure closer to their data source or end users.

Organisations have traditionally maintained these location-sensitive workloads on premises or in managed datacentres that require customers to procure, operate, and maintain their own IT infrastructure, and use different sets of APIs and tools for their on-premises and AWS environments.

The launch of a new AWS Local Zones location in Muscat gives customers the ability to easily deploy applications located close to end users in the metro area. Having AWS Local Zones close to large population centres in metro areas enables customers to achieve the low latency required for use cases like online gaming, live streaming, and augmented and virtual reality. They can also offer customers operating in regulated sectors like health care, financial services, and public sector the option to keep data within a geographic boundary.