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February - 2011 - issue > CEO Spotlight
Open Source, Cloud and Virtualization Imperative for Organizational Efficiency
Pramod Sharma
Wednesday, February 2, 2011
IT budgets are constrained and enterprise CIOs must “do more with less” while managing a larger, more complex mix of business and technology challenges. As a result, we will continue to see innovative technology solutions – cloud, virtualization, open source and dense computing – that allow organizations to become more efficient and green while reducing IT spending.

We’ve heard a lot of buzz around cloud in the last few years, but I think this year we will begin to see more adoption as organizations start moving more mission-critical applications to the cloud. Additionally, more and more organizations will virtualize in order to reduce their IT footprint, achieve real, tangible cost savings and operational improvement.

I believe the open source movement will continue, especially since Federal CIO Vivek Kundra and leading government agencies have embraced open source.

Finally, dense computing will find its way into more enterprises as the needs to carry processing power into the field, reduce the total cost per processing unit, CapEx and O&M and adopt green solutions become more important.

I believe we will see a significant increase in M&A activity in the government services sector as the economy continues to pick up and mid-tier companies struggle to compete with the large systems integrators. Additionally, we will see an increase in the number federal contracts awarded to small businesses since a lot of federal agencies have not been meeting their small business quotas.

While there are significant opportunities for entrepreneurs in the federal IT services market, our industry is undergoing changes that pose a challenge for emerging companies. First, there are widespread government budget cuts – the Department of Defense is cutting $100 billion per year. Additionally, the government in-sourcing initiative continues to eliminate IT solutions and functions that the private sector has historically offered in support of agencies. Finally, large businesses are starting to pursue and bid on smaller deals that were traditionally only competed on amongst small businesses.

The author is the President & CEO of Criterion Systems
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