I received a copy of Dov Seidman’s book: Why How We Do Anything Means Everything for Christmas. It’s a truly motivational read and a reminder of why it’s important to focus on doing the right things. As Seidman writes: “In the 21^st century, principled behavior is the surest path to success and significance in business and life.”

Identifying those ‘right things’, however, can be a difficult first step – especially when there’s a lot of background noise. All too often we fall foul of peer pressure, media hype or sales pitches and end up making the wrong choices.

In business and IT, we rely on inspirational leaders to help us avoid these pitfalls and set us on the path to innovation and continuous improvement.

For many organizations, DCIM will be a key step on this path in 2015 as they strive to balance data center resources with business demand. According to industry analysts, the DCIM market will grow 30 percent in 2015.

On the right track

But what will be the right things for adopting and evolving DCIM in the months ahead? There are five key trends to consider when planning your DCIM strategy for 2015:

1. The fundamentals will not change: Organizations will still be looking at DCIM as a way to optimize availability, efficiency, capacity and sustainability in the data center and to help control operational and capital expenditure. As the use of hosted and cloud environments grow in 2015, organizations will be turning up the pressure on external providers to deliver the same levels of optimization and financial savings.

2. From monitoring to managing: DCIM will no longer been seen as just an operational tool but a strategic enabler. As well as capturing operational metrics to improve current performance, organizations will begin embracing analytics to help avert potential problems and plan for the future. The ability to run ‘what if’ scenarios and create 3D visualization models will be particularly key in 2015 as organizations start to think more about the long-term business value of DCIM.

3. Smarter capacity management: As data centers get ever denser, capacity management needs to be unified across all resources to prevent outages and performance issues. In 2015, organizations will move towards Converged Capacity Management, with DCIM providing critical insight into key operational elements, such as power consumption, rack utilization and cooling distribution as it relates to storage, compute and the data center network. As the Internet of Things continues to gather pace in 2015, intelligent capacity management will be essential. As Gartner vice president and distinguished analyst Joe Skorupa said: “The enormous number of devices, coupled with the sheer volume, velocity and structure of IoT data, creates challenges, particularly in the areas of security, data, storage management, servers and the data center network, as real-time business processes are at stake. Data center managers will need to deploy more forward-looking capacity management in these areas to be able to proactively meet the business priorities associated with IoT.”

4. The need for speed: Agility will remain top of the agenda in 2015 as organizations compete for their place in the application economy. While DevOps is key to accelerating the front-end of application development, DCIM is key to safeguarding back-end. For example, by alerting IT and facilities teams to potential data center hotspots, DCIM can prevent outages on development and production environments. Organizations will increasingly leverage DCIM’s automation capabilities in 2015, shifting development and production workloads between infrastructure resources to maintain a consistent user experience.

5. Linking up the business: Organizations will continue on their journey towards linking data center resources to business services to deliver better outcomes. In 2015, DCIM will play an important role in connecting the IT and business dots, with 3-D maps providing unrivalled visibility into the data center at every level. For example, this will help organizations understand at the application level how much cooling and power is required, enabling them to make provisioning decisions in the context of their business.

Look around at your DCIM peers and you will find a group of leaders. They are moving their organizations to be more data driven, more aligned across IT and facilities, and ultimately more successful.

DCIM is not about cutting back; it’s about moving forward. Although DCIM will continue to help organizations make financial savings in 2015, it will also help them increase agility, optimize the customer experience and drive growth. Recognizing potential is a key characteristic of a great leader; being able to harness that potential is even more important.

The post DCIM: What’s in store for 2015 appeared first on Highlight.