Application data migration leaders highlight key market developments for the Telecoms industry: New research outlines how business risk and zero downtime are critical for today’s Communication Service Providers
London, UK, April 20, 2010 – Business Engagement is the critical factor in successful application data migration programs according to a new survey conducted by TM Forum and Celona, it was announced today.
As enterprise data volumes continue to grow exponentially and applications become increasingly complex and business process dependent, data migration is evolving into the key driver in realising the benefits of Next Generation Telecoms B/OSS environments. Compounding this, regulatory policy is becoming harder to navigate, and organizations are now faced with an operational and compliance minefield.
Taken from data gathered from 50 participants, the research concludes that;
Business Engagement and an understanding of how to mitigate business risk facilitate data migration program success, as CSPs move towards Next Generation Telecoms models and application environments. 74% of respondents cited this as one of the top 3 factors for success. Following Business Engagement, “Choice of Strategy”, “Data Quality”, and “Migration Method” were cited as the next most important factors.
Significant data migration programs are becoming a regular event across enterprises, with billions being spent as companies allocate increasingly significant proportions of their IT budgets on these initiatives. Of the 50 companies surveyed, 50 percent stated that they are now performing ‘six or more’ major migrations each year.
50 percent of service providers will spend more than 15 percent of their IT program budgets on data migration projects, equating to billions of pounds per year across the industry.
“Quite simply, we have a data migration minefield developing,” said Tony Sceales, CTO at Celona and TM Forum Executive committee member. “Data is being created by companies at an exponential rate, more tightly tied to business processes than ever before; there is more money being spent on increasingly frequent data migration projects to support application consolidation and transformation; migrations themselves are becoming increasingly complex; and business disruption must be avoided during migration programs.
“Business engagement is cited as the critical success factor, but data migration success is undermined by organizations relying on technology not built for purpose. Astonishingly, over 70 percent of organizations do not use a specialist application data migration software platform. The answer lies in progressive migration capability, which delivers business agility by offering a range of data migration strategies to support business needs, zero downtime and manages the transitional risk to new applications / strategic environments. Traditional data migration approaches such as custom scripting are in many cases an unsuitable and expensive option in today’s enterprise application world.”
Keith Willletts, CEO and Chairman of the TM Forum added, ”The data that service providers have in their systems is invaluable. With the business and IT transformation projects that are happening in organizations all over the world today, protecting the information, customers, services, networks, throughout this process is in essence protecting the family jewels. This study has helped the TM Forum and our membership get a better grasp on the issues related to data migration and how business critical it is to the global service provider community.”
