Business Service Management Hub

The Hub Commentary_

Hooray!  Great post by Mary on the management and service level management requirements for the cloud.

Michele

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IDC is forecasting that the total cloud systems management software market will total $2.5 billion by 2015. This market will encompass virtualization management, automated provisioning, self serve provisioning portals, dynamic consumption based metering and capacity analysis, service catalogs, end-to-end real time performance monitoring and related management software tools deployed into public and private cloud environments.  (Read Full Article…)

I can already hear you asking and scratching your heads, “Michele, what do those 3 things have in common – cmon, get real”.  Yes, I’m a long term IT nerd and tremendous football fan that remembers everything.  Heck, I fessed up to crashing a data center for 7 hours in an earlier post.  My motto:  go large or stay home or as we say in the south: ” if you can’t run with the big dawgs, stay off the porch”!

Back in 1999 Victoria’s Secret ran their first ever Super Bowl ad, $2.7M for 30 seconds.  Early days of online retail, wind back the clock and clear the cobwebs, yes, these were the early days of Amazon and the revolution to online sales and web hosting.  Then the unthinkable happened, 1M website visitors in an hour, was IT ready for this traffic?  Heck no!  Did IT and Marketing prepare and communicate this impending event, likely not.  Headlines:  CNNMoney 2/1/1999 “Victoria’s ‘Net Secret is Out” .  So can I fault them in these early adopter days, nah, I applaud them as market innovators.  However, they brought the data center to its knees.  Marketing created interest that the data center could not fulfill upon in an effort to generate Valentines sales with both men and women in an audience estimated at 100M so ~3 cent spend per customer and generated millions in orders.  Not a bad return.

Now roll the clock forward.  It was almost 10 years before Vickies (as I call them) purchased another Super Bowl ad in 2008 – USA Today 2/1/2008 “Victoria’s Secret back to Fiirt with Super Bowl”. No outage headlines this time, but this is a prime example of Business Service Management practices and IT understanding and operating with the business objectives in mind.

The moral of the story is IT and the business must link up in order to support major bursts in spend, marketing,  Super Bowl ads and traffic on the infrastructure to reap the biggest return on the investment.  This year’s ads are $3M for a 30 second slot.  Who’s “going to the cloud”?  Who leveraged the cloud for the additional one time capacity – now that is a story I’d love to read about linking Business Service Management and Cloud strategies.

Who’s going to make IT headlines after this year’s Super Bowl or will it be 2012 for the Cloud Bowl headlines?  How cool would it be to make headlines because you leveraged the Cloud for additional capacity to reap the greatest reward of a marketing spend at the Super Bowl? Business Service Management in Action!

As much as it hurts me to tell you this on so many levels, Texas Stadium is IT ready, Check out this video.

What I do find fascinating about this is that Texas is experiencing an unusual cold snap and they are experiencing power outages.  However, the news says the power outages will not impact Texas Statium, no guarantees to all the Texas TV watchers, but the event is supposed to be impact free. 100M viewers will determine that on Sunday!

P.S. – In case you  are wondering – I’m a serious Colts Fan, but this year the color of the helmet in the feature picture is no accident – Green Bay all the Way!

The Hub Commentary_

The author points out great security points in making the leap to the cloud and part of those warts not mentioned is the management of those VMs in the cloud from an end-to-end business service management perspective to manage against the risk he points to.  How risky is it to have that VM in the cloud?  How secure should you make the data and management of the VM?  What business services are at risk?

It is the end-to-end service view that needs to also be considered up front when architecting your plans for cloud deployment and that should be based upon the service value and risk of the overall service.  Mapping those services, understanding cost, risk and value will aid in making these decisions, architecting the VMs and putting the proper monitoring, management and measurement of the VMs and services in total.

Check out my Feature Post on classifying services.

Michele

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Over the past few years, we have seen a gradual transition from traditional computer center with dedicated resources to virtual machines and cloud computing.  During this time, people have realized some of the value of virtualization in termsof savings and resource optimization.  Unfortunately, there are still a number of warts in the virtualization that have followed the migration to the cloud.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

This article inspired me to write a full blown feature on the subject of vendor management, service level measurement/management/communication and basic business service management practices.  The net of it, IT you own it – no shifting blame to others and no government intervention to set up terms and conditions.  This is outsourcing, plain and simple – manage your provider.

Read the feature commentary in this post.  I do predict there will be a very large outage in 2011, it will be a brand name company, there will be hype based headlines and buried deep in the article disguised in hype will be the root cause – poor contractual terms and conditions, poor vendor management and complete lack of service level measurement keeping perception in check with reality!

Michele

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Back in December, after Amazon summarily pulled the plug on WikiLeaks using its servers for alleged violations of terms and conditions, the CTO of Fujitsu Technology Solutions wrote that the action constituted a serious threat to the business of cloud computing…. (Read Full Article…)

Face it, we all blame our siblings for everything that goes wrong, in my case my baby brother – who towers over me.

Today I’m writing an article instead of just sharing the news having spent a little time consulting and reviewing major sourcing contracts for customers and being trained in the Ross Perot bootcamp of outsourcing early in my career.  What I always find amazing is how much trust a subscriber puts in the provider during the contract negotiation.  On one hand there is trust (I call it naivety) and the provider was successful in creating a relationship, playing on emotion and expertise in the market.  On the other hand it is a recipe for disaster,  a lose – win situation for you the subscriber.  Know your rights.

Cloud computing is still just outsourcing, however, agile and dynamic technology enables a more dynamic purchasing option than in an early adopter phase.  What differentiates the providers at this time is their maturity to manage the services and service level agreements and the flexibility of their services.  When the market matures, we will reach a state of similar services, standard agreements and get down to price based decisions.  Price based decisions currently reflect the “buying” of a customer base and immature operating processes.  Buyer beware in these situations of early adopter buying and low cost options – shame on you the buyer.

Here’s my usual SLA and sourcing advice.  Outsource the commodity, the services that are absolutely the same regardless of industry, stop being unique, special and different and accept the standard and low cost option.  Go back to my Service Value chart.  Remember you still own the services and you can’t blame your sibling.  To that point, you own the service level – availability, performance, response, contract termination, etc.  Just remember the more stringent you are with the terms the greater the risk to the provider and the higher the cost.  Evaluate their standard terms and fill in the gaps, but fill them in appropriately based upon the value of the service.  Do not tell the provider “how” to deliver the service or how to manage the infrastructure, you are outsourcing for a reason.

My prediction for this year is that a major customer will engage with a major provider and there will be a major outage this year and there will be front page headlines creating noise how the cloud fails.  I will point back to front page Wallstreet Journal news of just about 10 years ago.  IBM, Seibel and SAP fail and Hershey misses Halloween – their largest candy selling season.  Pages and pages of an article playing to the hype of the big names and the market and failure.

I remember exactly where I was when I read the paper, waiting on my relentlessly late co-worker in the lobby of a San Francisco hotel.  Net of the story, change management and testing issue and Hershey found we are not loyal to chocolate.  We will go to another drugstore for a brand of toothpaste, but when we want chocolate we will take what is on the shelf.  Moral of the story was Hershey missed Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, Valentines and most of Easter to sort out their order to distribution challenges for what they thought was “14 days, we can fix anything in 14 days”.

I predict the same hype will occur here and it will boil down to a mismanaged, lack of defined and monitored SLA’s.  Just because you subscribe to a service does not alleviate you from the responsibility of the service and contract.

Monitoring, management and measuring cannot be an afterthought – how are you monitoring your service provider(s)?

The article that riled me up for this post is the following:

Cloud Computing (still) Needs a Bill of Rights – ZDNet

Back in December, after Amazon summarily pulled the plug on WikiLeaks using its servers for alleged violations of terms and conditions, the CTO of Fujitsu Technology Solutions wrote that the action constituted a serious threat to the business of cloud computing:  (Read Full Article….)

The Hub Commentary_

This week there has been significant buzz around this acquisition and I’ve held off posting and referring to any of the articles.  Lydia of Gartner sums it up well with her blog of yesterday.  One in debt without a sales team and the other in need of data center footprints and a sales force in need of a ticket to the CIO.

Infrastructure and the management of it has no doubt become the commodity in IT.  The acceleration to the cloud and subscription or back to the old days of timeshare on the IBM computers is here.  Now the trick is architecting your services, managing them and the service provider, while balancing costs and value.  This new model has much to offer and is the future, but has many pitfalls that can be a cost drain.

I expect before year end we will hear about how the model fails and what you will find in the middle of what will be a very lengthy article will be a lack of proper vendor and service management.  Renting the infrastructure does not alleviate the instrumentation responsibility to make the workloads intelligent and service enabled back to your management platform or the integration across providers and platforms to manage the end-to-end service.  Then there is that pesky relationship with the vendor.

How are you architecting your workloads of the future?

Michele

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A couple of days ago, Verizon bid to acquire Terremark, for a total equity value of $1.4 billion. My colleague Ted Chamberlin and I are issuing a First Take on the event to Gartner clients; if you’re looking for advice and the official Gartner position, you’ll want to read that. This blog post is just some personal musings on the reasons for the acquisition.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

As the writer mentions, a lot of ink has covered cloud computing – I might suggest a lot of that ink has been about the commoditization of IT.  As I posted yesterday with the 2×2 grid of service classification, most of what falls into the Cost quadrant are services that could be considered commodity. Applying business service management practices and taking a top down view as my friend Siki suggests in the article, is the first step in identifying services, where they should run and how they should be managed for that end-to-end view as she also mentions.

The for Cost services are not unique and different from one organization to the next and those resources can be redeployed for applying technology to growth opportunities for the business.  As we have posted many times on The Hub on this topic, management has to be baked into workloads making them not only secure, but also intelligent to feed the proper monitoring information back into your management tools.

How are you taking advantage of the cloud today?

Michele

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So much digital ink, on InfoWorld and elsewhere, has been spilled analyzing cloud computing — what it is, whether it’s anything new, whether it will change IT as we know it. But a recent conversation has me thinking that cloud computing’s greatest contribution may be in the way it applies the principles of mass production to IT.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Business Service Management practices need to be baked into the workloads as they are configured and deployed just as you would instrument applications and hardware as it is deployed into production environments.  The difference in this situation is that the workloads are a bit more dynamic and potentially paid for with a subscription on outside infrastructure.  Management to decommission workloads is as important as deploying additional resources during peak periods to monitor costs appropriately.

Management practices are often the last applied when moving or changing services into production.  However, in order to be properly instrumented for monitoring and management, the management must be planned and implemented during the planning and configuring stage in order to properly test and move to production.

How intelligent are your workloads?

Michele

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The Hub Commentary_

I cannot escape the cloud discussion today and must say that I agree with Don and his article this week in contrast to the other I just posted today.  Business Service Management practices, Service Level measuring and management of the service regardless of where it runs is the responsibility of the service provider – IT.

Having a view of the overall service, who’s doing what and how each component is performing is the value of the integrated end-to-end view of services IT delivers to the business.  Take advantage and evaluate the most cost efficient and best use of your resources when evaluating where it should be deployed, however, do not forget you must still instrument it to be managed and measured.

Service levels are a key component when engaging with the service providers.  You want to define your expectations for service availability, performance and responsiveness to an incident, but you need to map your requirements to the value delivered by the service.  Exercising your right to define very stringent service levels only increases the price, balance your real requirements with your service level requirements.

Are you measuring your service provider and cloud services?

Michele

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(Read Full Article…)

This is not the first article about Business Service Management and cloud computing, and it will certainly not be the last. The one thing I’ve learned about the cloud, both private and public, is that this is new technology, and it is constantly changing. Companies setting up private clouds are adopting different technologies to make their lives easier, while public cloud providers are updating their products and APIs on a regular basis to improve and accelerate the transition. This leads to an exciting, dynamic environment that causes more challenges when implementing a BSM solution…or does it?

How exactly should BSM work with the cloud? Once cloud resources are incorporated into a company’s IT infrastructure, there needs to be a way to tie these virtual/cloud resources into the company’s business service views. Then the health of the business services will reflect all of the IT resources. And voila, problem solved. Now, I have been told I sometimes over simplify things, but when it comes to BSM, I don’t think people should look at “the cloud” as some complex, unknown entity. The cloud should simply provide another data source to be incorporated into a business service view.

BSM is only as powerful as its underlying integrations. How can one look at the availability of a service or the root cause of a service breach unless these metrics are driven by ALL of the underlying IT resources that make up this service? The resources in the cloud should not be treated as different, special data sources. Cloud resources need to be integrated with all of the existing underlying technology that drives the business service. Given how fast cloud computing technology is growing and changing, this will force BSM products to continue to create and enhance their underlying integrations. Of course, this is nothing new for BSM vendors, or any software vendors who integrate to third party software.

The cloud will continue to bring change to BSM, and BSM products will need to grow and evolve along with the cloud technology. But since BSM is based on underlying integrations, BSM is ready to go “to the cloud”.

The Hub Commentary___

Great read of an inspirational CIO taking advantage of agile technology.  What is missing is how does he manage and measure the workloads in the cloud?  How does he instrument them or does he to make them intelligent to proactively monitor, manage and measure back to the business on the cost and value.

What I find intriguing with many of these articles on the those being successful with the cloud is that only half the story is told, sure they took advantage of the agile technology, but what about the operational side of it too?

I’m all for the adoption and deployment of agile technologies as I am in the long term future for that technology with the operational management that makes it cost effective and valuable in the end.  Another article I posted yesterday indicates the all too common reality of downtime and how it costs on average $100,000/hour of downtime and this has been my experience in working with customers and prospects on Business Service Management projects that proactively monitor, manage and measure services versus technology avoiding downtime.

Real power of the cloud can be short sided if not managed and measured.  How do you measure your cloud?

Michele

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Leave it to Rob Carter, the CIO of FedEx, to clarify what’s really powerful about cloud computing. Carter, the company’s CIO since 2000 and an InformationWeek advisory board member for almost as long, has a knack for discussing technology in a way that cuts to the business payoff, but without leaning on buzzwords that whitewash the complexity involved.  (Read Full Article…)

Business Service Management can provide a single pane of glass across any environment:  public/private cloud, virtual and physical – How important will this be as we move to the cloud?

I heard a great quote a couple of months ago: “Every company in the IT industry with revenue of less than $100m is currently changing their strategy to focus on the cloud.” If you combine that assertion with the fact that every company in the IT industry with revenues over $1 billion is modifying their strategy to make it “cloud-enabled” or “cloud-ready”, it becomes difficult to support the naysayers who are claiming that the cloud is just a fad. It’s here to stay whether or not you want to accept it.

So the question for this audience becomes “What does that mean for Business Service Management?” From my experience with a very large service provider who is aggressively moving into the public/private cloud space for their internal operations as well as their external customers, Business Service Management becomes a necessity instead of a nice to have. Adoption of the cloud exacerbates the technical challenges that spawned the BSM industry in the first place: namely IT heterogeneity, physically/geographically dispersed data centers and the need for IT organizations to provide higher levels of service at lower costs. At the most simple level, the ability to co-locate two virtual machines on one physical server cuts costs in half. However, this cost savings brings along complexities in terms of resource sharing, how the virtual machines got provisioned to the box, how they are being independently and jointly monitored and how they will be managed moving forward. Additionally, cloud adoption may very well increase the number of systems management tools that an IT organization needs to deploy, manage and monitor.

The ability to provide IT operations and management a single pane of glass view into all of these complexities, focused on the most critical business services, becomes necessary to ensure that the costs of these complexities do not overcome the costs savings enjoyed through virtualization.

How are you measuring your services in the cloud?

Kevin

The Hub Commentary_

Interesting we swing to virtual stall over management tools and the year ahead holds data centers being designed with integration, systems management, hardware, end-to-end views in the planning and implementing.  Good summation of trends in the market and keys to success.

Michele

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What will be the big trends in data center design and operations in 2011? We surveyed some of the leading thinkers in the field, and got their thoughts about the trends that will make news this year. Their predictions cover a lot of ground. But a key theme was the emergence of a holistic approach to the data center, that integrates the many technologies, departments and processes that historically have created challenges for the industry.   (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

It’s that time of year for Gartner’s updated CIO Agenda and survey.  2011 promises to be a year of change for the brave that reach out and embrace it.  On my personal blog I used the phrase, Technology without Imagination is Commodity – Technology with Imagination has Endless Possibilities!

I find change exciting, budgets are loosening, new technologies and approaches to business are available – now what are you going to do with it?

Michele

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Its time to reimagine IT as business and technical changes require CIOs to answer new questions rather than just find new answers to old questions. That is what Dave Aron and myself found as we completed a worldwide CIO survey from September to December 2010. The survey includes responses from 2,014 CIOs representing more than $160 billion in corporate and public-sector IT spending across 50 countries and 38 industries.  (Read Full Article…)

Earlier this year I suggested a prediction regarding the waning discussion of ITIL and this week I expanded upon that prediction in a post, “ITIL will be the end of ITIL”. The same day I posted my discussion, I received my brochure for the HDI Conference where Malcolm Fry is set to speak on “What’s up with ITIL?”.  The description starts with questions regarding the dying of ITIL, what’s going on, etc.  Defense – first indication that a wave is starting to swell in the market.

I received many great questions and discussion, which still says ITIL is alive and well in the ranks of IT organizations, trainers, consultants, certifying organizations, etc.  I do want to mention again, I do not see the practices and advice dying, going away or becoming replaced, just that the outward facing conversations will and need to stop being about ITIL and need to start being about the business service, value and performance.  ITIL is merely advice on how to manage your internal operations efficiently.

The catalyst in the market is the cloud and the explosive growth of service providers.  They need to have good operational processes in place or they are one outage away from being out of business.  However, the difference is they are not talking about ITIL, they are talking about the benefits to the business and the simplicity of running and subscribing to services in The Cloud.

The business leader has an internal organization  talking about justifying a CMDB project and a cloud provider talking about monthly subscriptions to online purchasing systems at a monthly or usage fee and here is a rate card, use it like a credit card.  Did I just see that leader walk away from the project justification discussion table and walk off into the sunset all googly eyed with the cloud service provider?

Last night I pulled another article from CIO regarding the innovation expectations the business has for its IT organization.  Embrace the development of innovating services and automate the commodity, routine, mundane that merely powers the lights – free yourself to drive growth.

I had a discussion with a very large and mature cloud service provider organization this morning on just the topic of providing the value add transparency on top of their services – the dashboard view that will communicate service performance to their customers.  The providers know that the business wants transparency and the providers want to insure that there isn’t a perception challenge regarding service delivery and the ones that will be most successful are baking it into there infrastructure and services from the beginning.  IT, are you or are you still talking about ITIL?

I’ve digressed, but the example is clear.  Those that sell technology services for a living know how to speak to your business leaders and how to bake proper service monitoring, management, measuring and communication into their services.  Steal a play from their playbook – implement and deliver the communication of service performance and service value into your services and sell your services, not the process of building services.

Are you communicating Service Value by selling the car or are you still selling the parts and directions as to how to build the car?

Michele

he Hub Commentary_

Ok, I know you are asking, Michele what does this have to do with BSM?  It’s one of those fun articles I just couldn’t pass on as an old COBOL programmer.  The previous news has been about driving innovation into the data center and focus on company growth, even COBOL is going to the Cloud!  I love it!

COBOL – To The Cloud!  A new marketing slogan born!

Michele

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IDG News Service — Micro Focus has updated its developer platform for the Cobol programming language, adding the ability to run Cobol applications on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

The theme of driving growth, innovation and value based upon the customer experience continues.  2011 will be a year of innovation and next year’s Fortune 500 list will see organizations swap places for the lead of their industry.  Very refreshing to see focus on technology again for innovation over back office automation.

My post of yesterday regarding ITIL generated many questions both in the Twitter and on The Hub regarding what replaces it and why did I post such blasphemy.  This article again solidifies the opinion.  The focus is the customer you sell goods and services to, not the end user in your company, technology for growth and innovation will be king in 2011.  Those focused on justifying ITIL projects will be left behind.

Again, I’m not against process for efficiency and there is a balancing act as this author states at the end of the article.  For far too long IT has been inwardly focused and thus turning up the heat of frustration by the business to drive to focus on services that your business offers to the market and driving growth.

I find this curious as technologist or maybe I’ve been on the software development side for far too long.  I thought most of us liked to work on new, cool, gee whiz things rather than just keeping the lights on.

Are you just keeping the lights on or driving innovation?

Michele

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Most of the CIOs I speak with are looking at the year ahead as an opportunity to drive innovation within their organizations, usually by automating back office activities. That’s a good place to start.  (Read Full Article…)

Service Value is the Next Generation!

Time for ITIL.  Year-end is always a good time to watch the predictions fly and I too had to add 4 to my friend Richard Whitehead’s post with his top 10.  In my post I made a prediction that this would be the year that ITIL begins to wane as a topic of conversation for a couple of reasons.  Last week reinforced one of those beliefs with a CIO article I commented on, “ITIL versus the Cloud:  Pick One”.  Even this week, I still cannot wrap my head around this article and this is where my reasons for ITIL waning is deeply rooted.

First, I will mention I have been ITIL Foundation certified 2 times (version 2 and version 3) and was around in the service desk world during the days of all the little books for version 1.  Yes, I started working when I was 12.  Seriously, ITIL is prescriptive, not a remedy.  It is guidance about processes, not a mandated set of principles by which to govern an IT organization to the point of suffocation.  I have done my fair share of consulting and once folks get past the hurdle that it is merely advice, adapt it to what makes sense in their environment without suffocating, then the sessions are more successful.  However, I find that ITIL is one of those topics I would rather not discuss in mixed company, much like politics or religion, as it brings out very passionate debates and you need to know the party lines to consult.

Why do I believe it is really waning, it’s an inward facing operational process that is expected, it is a consulting and training industry.  Business doesn’t want to hear about how you do your job, just that you do it, do it well and do it efficiently.  It’s like this, as consumers we take our cars to the shop for routine maintenance and fixes when things break and what we are most interested in is how much will it cost and when will it be done.  We don’t really care what processes and procedures the mechanic follows or how many certifications he/she has to perform the job, we just care he/she can do the job, do it well and cost efficiently.  So why is it as IT professionals we go to work everyday and speak jibberish to our business colleagues?

I would find it a safe bet that your business would love to hear you come in and tell them exactly how implementing an updated service, a new technology, or automating a process will reduce XYZ cost, will drive XYZ additional revenue and this is how we will monitor Service Performance mitigating risk of service impacting events.  Just as this article implies, ITIL is very silo focused still.  Sure version 3 speaks of a service lifecycle, lifecycle not so much on the service performance and value to the business.

Here is a picture to help explain, click on it to enlarge it.  ITIL is going through a process maturity as well.  Here are the stages:

• version 1 – Processes Identified as individual processes
• version 2 – Processes Integrated
• version 3 – Process Lifecycle
• version 4 – still to come and already too late

I’ll end with this, I’m not against ITIL if it is taken as a prescription, training, examples.  However, when it becomes the way we speak to our business and customers and our sole focus, I find it like new technology for the sake of technology.  When I read articles about How to Justify an ITIL Project to the Business, I know the service providers are knocking on your door to take over your data center because they speak in terms of creating efficiencies, saving money and driving revenue.

We have lost all focus when we start speaking in terms of a new technology not fitting ITIL and choose one.  In that situation, I’d leverage new technology and work to service enable it to manage it, control it and communicate the value it is delivering to the organization over ITIL as it is, again, merely training, prescription and examples

The only thing I can guarantee is change and technology evolution are sure things.  As technology professionals, we must be seeking automation, technology and methods by which we can start communicating to our business in their terms.  Communicating Service Performance, Growth and driving Value into our businesses is the focus of those that lead their industries with technology.

I believe the explosion of cloud computing and the service provider market will be the catalyst described by Nicholas Carr’s article, “IT Doesn’t Matter”.

I know this controversial, give me your thoughts!

Michele

The Hub Commentary_

Here we go IT – another chance to redeem ourselves and service enable our infrastructure and take advantage of new technology.  The business has cracked the door to invest in technology that will transform the business and new systems management tools to communicate service performance and value realizing that new technology will take new approaches, all I can say is – Wake Up and Smell the Coffee and take advantage of the opportunity to drive your business forward!

Our businesses get it, learn to speak business language rather than ITIL language and use technology to grow your business to the next level.  We’ll talk ITIL in another post, but communicate service value because the service providers are and will eat your data center for lunch given the opportunity.  This is the catalyst that will make or break your data center, reach out and take it back!

Michele

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Intel (INTC) and SAP results and various forecasts issued this week suggest that while 2010 was a recovery year for just about all sectors of IT, enterprise software and accompanying services will be the main drivers for technology revenue growth over the next few years.  (Read Full Article…)

The Hub Commentary_

Another great post by my friend Dennis.

Michele

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A lot comes to mind with a title like this one.  So, let’s start by wiping away areas like politics and finances (except as they relate to IT), births, deaths, marriages and celebrities.  In fact, there’s still a very long list of possibilities by just focusing on IT and everything that goes into managing and optimizing services – let alone all of the trends around cloud.   (Read Full Article…)