IDC recently surveyed over 250 IT managers and found that many reported their IT staff is not skilled enough to implement a private cloud. In another IDC survey, lack of in-house IT expertise is listed as a top challenge to virtualization by over 22% of respondents. These two data points indicate that for many IT organizations, the journey toward adding incremental value to the business will require external help

Review the IDC information below to find out how using an IT service provider can help you solve your data center challenges.

Start with IDC's Multimedia White Paper on Smarter Data Center Services -- it features IDC senior analyst Katherine Broderick as she presents the white paper highlights and key findings. You can view summaries of each chapter of the white paper on-line.

For more in-depth analysis and information, read the IDC whitepaper "The Value of Smarter Datacenter Services". IDC examines approaches for data center rationalization, consolidation and virtualization; and for cloud computing. These strategies can help organizations glean more value from their data centers now, while laying the foundation for future technological innovation. The paper also explores the value that IBM data center services brings to organizations that lack the in-house expertise needed to design, build and maintain smarter data centers.

Next, listen to the on-demand Web seminar (link resides outside of ibm.com) featuring Katherine Broderick, IDC senior analyst, Steve Sams, IBM vice president of Site and Facilities Services and Nancy Galietti, vice president of Information Technology at the National Football League (NFL) as they discuss data center issues and how clients like the NFL are tackling these head-on with analytics-based services.

In the Web seminar, you'll learn the following:

• Proven and cost-effective ways to design and manage data center infrastructures to provide greater flexibility to respond to change
• How you can realize 80% faster virtualization implementation for complex Wintel workloads
• New ways to save 15-30% on total costs on new data center build
• How you can reduce storage architects time by 50% while saving up to 20% Tier 1 storage.

These new approaches leverage analytics-based services to provide insight into your infrastructure to help your teams unleash greater business value. They help you implement a smarter data center.

Please contact us if there are any questions on smarter data centers and how you can get started on your journey.