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Our eleventh awards night went off with a bang, as ever, with over 30 trophies presented over the course of the proceedings.

Nonetheless we've endeavoured to squeeze in as much useful content as we can around the winners listings, including a bumper crop of interview pieces featuring Actifio, Zycko and Wipro. We also focus on the recurrent theme of outsourcing in a fascinating article from Q Associates' Andrew Griffiths. Specifically, he argues, outsourcing IT strategic management is no longer the sole province of the large enterprise: "There was a time when outsourcing was synonymous with hidden cost or perceived lack of control, but the market has unquestionably moved on. Costs are no longer hidden, on the contrary they have become transparent and measurable. We pay £X for our IT, it needs to deliver £Y, you can't run and you can't hide."

Griffiths' solution is to offer what Q Associates are calling a 'Virtual CIO service' - the benefits of an in-house CIO who fully appreciates the internal business drivers as well as the external IT issues, at a fraction of the cost. Is this a model that could take off for small-to-medium sized businesses in an environment of cost control and tightened purse-strings?

Elsewhere we return to another topic that keeps coming back around; the use of SSDs in the enterprise. John Scaramuzzo of SanDisk suggests that cloud and hyperscale environments are the perfect place for flash technologies to prosper. Businesses that operate in these environments are particularly reliant on efficiency and performance in their data centres. When the bottom line depends on dynamic information provided in real time, a split-second delay can be very costly. As more and more business functions move into virtualised environments or cloud-delivery platforms, any bottleneck in storage becomes a mission-critical concern.

As Scaramuzzo says: "The market is exploding with massive quantities of structured and unstructured data, which must be collected, sorted and stored safely. Trying to process all this data in real time, so it adds value to the organisation, is like drinking from a fire hose... Getting a handle on it all requires efficient storage systems - and that means solid state storage technology."

David Tyler
david.tyler@btc.co.uk