Tag Archive | "Gartner"

IT Transformation – Who Does Gartner Show Winning in the $3.6T IT Business? – Qmunity

Tags: Availability, Best Practices, BSM, Business Alignment, Business Service Management, CIO, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Cost Reduction, Forrester, Gartner, Innovation, IT Management, Service Value, Transformation


IT Transformation is and has been a hot topic for >20 years. Wow!  I was speaking to one of my analyst friends at Forrester not too long ago and we were chatting about how much waste exists in annual IT spend just “Keeping the Lights On” and how these metrics haven’t changed in >20 years. The answer has been simple, no competition, no catalyst for change.

This week I was reading an article from the NY Times Technology section, “Information Technology Spending to Hit $3.6 Trillion in 2012”, supported by information from Gartner and it pointed to this pent up demand for transformation within IT organizations. Much of the increase in spending is going to Cloud Service Providers and Consultancies even with economic challenges in Europe and China. There is an increase in Public Cloud spending by 20% representing considerable computing power and more efficient IT Systems due to complex systems, cloud computing and analytics. My reaction as I read the article was Wow again. Ironically, this comes on the heals of articles from the previous 2 weeks regarding the outage of the cloud and Amazon’s Ashburn, VA data center.

My first comment is no one outsources services because it is cheaper. Services are outsourced to create change that cannot be achieved from within. So let’s break this down into the great change that is underfoot and IT Transformation based upon cost, value and innovation.

Read full story here …….

Convergence is in the Air or Clouds – Qmunity

Tags: Availability, Best Practices, BSM, Business Alignment, Business Service Management, CIO, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Cost Reduction, Forrester, Gartner, IT Investment, IT Management, IT Management Tools, Outsourcing, Service Level, Service Providers, Service Value, Spending, Transformation, Trends


I have posted a couple of new posts on NetIQ’s Qmunity and wanted to share here as well.  IT is under great Transformation to get to Service Brokers who can manage Service Governance.  This is the convergences of Development, Operations and Security functions within IT.  In the first post I discuss the convergence and the second post is on the topic of Service Governance and new research from Forrester.

Enjoy!

 

 

Overhauling Service Management – Developing, Operating and Securing

Previously I posted, “Why Service Management” discussing the melding of IT and the business for common objectives in managing, measuring and communicating service performance.  The recent Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM) also provoked the status quo of IT Operations andCameron Haight began to challenge and discuss a new term, DevOps, where development and operations are more closely aligned.  The post event Trip Report provides a glimpse into the many thought provoking challenges and discussions of the week.  continue reading…

 

 Communicating Service Performance – Beware of the Competition

We’ve discussed service management and the transformation that IT is undergoing with the catalysts being the cloud, service providers, SaaS, social media, collaboration, mobility, BYOD, etc.  The root catalyst is choice and options in the market and the competition speaks in terms of service value and service performance. I posted a question in LinkedIn regarding how much of your services are in the cloud today and expected to be next year?  Join the discussion.  The first answer was as I expected, a law firm that isn’t in the cloud and isn’t going there because of security concerns.  I responded as I bet they use services that are internet based, research likely, and thus they are in the cloud.  Just like a recent customer discussed having hundreds of apps in the cloud that now need to be reconciled, rationalized and managed for cost.  How did they get this point?  Easy, credit card subscriptions – cheap and easy to do business with.  continue reading….

 

Gartner Infrastructure & Operations Mgmt Summit – Road Trip Wrap-up

Tags: Analytics, Availability, BSM, Business Alignment, Business Service Management, CIO, Cloud, Gartner, Innovation, IT Investment, IT Management, Mobile, Monitoring, Performance, Service Level, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation, Trends


I’m back from a couple of weeks of travel and most notably, the annual  Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM) the first week of June.  There were more than just a handful of aha moments, much churn in what has been a mature market and many great conversations on the solution showcase floor and hallways.  Let’s start with the opening keynotes on the first day:

10 Emerging Trends that will Impact Infrastructure and Operations – David Cappuccio

The trends are in last week’s InfoWorld article, “10 for 2012: Gartner’s Top Emerging Infrastructure Trends” and are as follow:

    • Consumerization of the Tablet
    • The Infinite Data Center
    • Resource Management
    • Mobility
    • Hybrid Clouds
    • Fabric Data Centers
    • IT Complexity
    • Big Data – Big Problems
    • The End of Service Desks
    • Virtual and Software-Defined Networks

David opens with the statistic of >75% of IT budgets are spent just keeping the lights on, operating, not driving the company forward.  IT didn’t see the (or didn’t want to see) the tablet coming to the workplace.  Just 5 years ago 1G of storage cost $7995, today it is 25 cents – that was yesterday! and I was 2 years away from my first cell phone, still had a pager!  We have LOTS of data to secure, not hardware or devices to manage, the focus must shift from the device to the information and data.  The Cloud will replace storage from the PC / Workstation to be accessible from any device, anywhere.

Even this old timer, slow adopter (me) is synching 3 devices via the cloud to share data across devices without the help of my company and I share that data with outside parties as appropriate due to the size limitations imposed by IT.  We all find a work-around!  At a minimum we each have 4 devices, yes, I have 2 phones, an iPad and a laptop, 5 if you count the Kindle I stopped using – have to keep Microsoft and Apple, Google and Blackberry all in check.  😉  I still live with the “Blue Screen of Death”, but have been seen checking the weight of that boat anchor of a Mac Book Pro.  🙂

The expectation is that no matter what we are using, it “just works”.  IT lost control of the environment a long time ago, now is the time to embrace the next generation and the self service culture.  Companies are now considering a stipen to aid in funding a device of the users choice lowering support and break-fix costs.  My bet is it happens within the year.

Another interesting statistic was for every 25% of functionality added to the current infrastructure, there is an increase of 100% in complexity.  The cloud is here, the business is subscribing with or without IT as I’ve posted previously out of frustration to deliver innovation over just operating.  We in IT are in catch up mode and need to move quickly.  With that said, we all need to be wary of the hype and focus on the value delivered and concentrate on the right delivery model for the value.

Of all the trends, the one indicating the end of service desks surprised me most from this conservative crowd and having spent the early part of my career in this market.  The more I have pondered this trend over the past week the more I agree and see it.  I have often posted and consulted that IT needs to stop turning support into a custom adventure and at 10% of an IT Operational budget, it is well suited for SaaS and/or outsourced.  Customers expect service now (no pun intended 🙂 and IT is diminishing it’s own value in the loss of productivity, especially with the next generation of workers.  IT needs to become proactive, embrace new technology and begin focusing on the right deployment options and securing the data / information, rather than device support and lock down.  This shift has occurred very quickly and the war already lost by IT.

Applications 2020:  The Impact on Infrastructure and Operations of Current and Emerging Trends in Applications – Valentin Sribar

To my surprise, an old friend presented this session, Val, and was quite an interesting topic and approach from an Operations outsider in front of 800+ Infrastructure and Operations leaders.  The first half of the session focused on the next generation worker and their expectations of technology.  I had to think about my baby nephew during this session (now 17) who grew up with a whole different view of technology and it’s capabilities.  Who, by the way, is the only person I’ll “text” with as it is his only means of communication and a communication method I dislike.  I think of one of the first applications I provided for him, a Crayola painting application.  My father and I watched a 3 year old at the time drag and drop the primary colors into his paint tray and paint a picture.  I with, my back to him, asked, “create and use purple, my favorite color”.  Sure enough he does it without question to my father’s exclaim, “how did he know he could do that?”, (dragging and dropping red on blue) I said, “because he didn’t know he couldn’t”.

This generation expects devices to just work, expects them to work together and expects to easily share data and applications across platforms and devices and communicate instantly in 140 characters or less.  My nephew doesn’t understand that if he texts me while I’m driving, what’s the delay.  Connectivity is instantaneous and global.  I travel globally, my nephew hears the action of a car race on the phone, turns on the tv to see it live, we text and IM across the globe as if I’m in his house daily and part of his daily life.  When he was born and I lived 10 hours away, I wanted to be sure we had a tight relationship.  Little did I know that in 6 short years the world would change and in a couple more years, distance would no longer be a challenge.  This is the next generation worker, not hindered by device, time or distance.

Development for the mobile world should be the default and workstation minority as an afterthought.  The user experience from these devices will be like jewelry, a microphone, speakers, cameras, gamification of applications, scoring and choice of applications, etc. etc. etc.  These workers expect an AppStore, not IT, to choose, download and just use in an instant – it just needs to work.  Apps and options are not one size fits all.

STOP what you are doing today and turn it upside down.  Reduce costs at the bottom to add value at the top and get away from one size fits all and join the value add discussion.  This is where Val provided several insightful slides and a paper (G00147079 – Application Leaders:  Stop Eating Profits and Capital with the Unnecessary Operational Expenses).

 

Both of these sessions set the tone for the remainder of the sessions and 3 days of the Summit that I’ll save for additional posts.  What this all points to is Change is inevitable, with Change comes Complexity and with Complexity and the need for speed comes Risk.  We all need to embrace the Change, learn to manage Complexity and mitigate/control Risk to take advantage of new technology and deploy innovation into our organizations.  As someone in the Service Management or Business Service Management market for quite some time, this was music to my ears.  The Cloud is the disruption creating the urgency for change, as well as the next generation.  Ignore the hype, focus on the value and choose the right deployment and technology options that will drive your business into the future.

The one thing that did strike me odd in most of the sessions was the use of the term “User”.  The reason this struck me odd was that the focus should be on the customer, less on the internal users, and driving the business.  Working to drive the business is about the organization in support of the customer.

As I entered the workforce, a southerner was transplanted in Boston and a year and a half later relocated to Texas with a New York co-worker and friend .  At that time our confusion was a result of different words and concepts like Round-abouts, The Green Monster, The Garden and BBQ of which I had no idea what the first 2 were, the third I thought was a botanical garden and the fourth was of course stringy pork with a vinegar based sauce and coleslaw sandwich versus steak on a bun.  We had dumb terminals and PC’s were off in the distance.  Change has come lightening fast.

I walked away from the Summit knowing it is about the service, driving revenue, embracing technology, ignore the hype and concentrate on the value, securing an unknown perimeter and creating freedom of the imagination.  Technology with Imagination – Endless Possibilities.

Thoughts?  Were you at the Summit?  What struck you the most?

Michele

Road Trip – Gartner Infrastructure & Operations Mgmt Summit

Tags: Availability, Best Practices, BSM, Business Alignment, Business Service Management, Change, CIO, Cloud, Cloud Computing, Gartner, IT Management, ITSM, Mobile, Monitoring, Service Level, Service Providers, Service Value, Social Media, Spending, Transformation, Trends, VDI, Virtualization


I traveled the globe from October to February meeting with customers and our sales teams discussing NetIQ’s IT Operations Management (ITOM) value and solutions, then I traded in wings for a bit.  Now it’s time for one of my favorite battery re-charging conferences of the year, the Gartner Infrastructure and Operations Management Summit (IOM).  I enjoy the Summit to see old friends in the vendor community as well as many old analyst friends, but this year there is a lot of buzz around the Summit and ITOM has become the talk of the town again.  Here are few quotes and phrases from the opening pages of the Summit Agenda:

  • “Delivering Accelerated Business Value:  Cloud, Mobility and More”
  • Hot Topics:
    • Enterprise mobility
    • Private/Public cloud computing
    • Moving beyond server virtualization
    • Cost optimzation
    • Data center space, power and cooling
    • ITIL and process improvement
    • Improving IT service quality
    • Business value
  • “The reign of the PC is over.  A new era is emerging, one that will require enterprises to fundamentally rethink how they deliver services to users.”

There are many sessions on the power of these emerging technologies, how we will manage them, how we will deliver value to the business and how technology is no longer just operating the business – technology is powering the business.  At least that’s what our businesses are expecting in the coming couple of years and how the competition with the service providers is stacking up and pushing the IT Wake Up call.

I’m jazzed to start my day tomorrow with 3 back to back keynotes with a couple of old friends:

  • 10 Emerging Trends that will Impact Infrastructure and Operations – David Cappuccio
  • Applications 2020:  The Impact on Infrastructure and Operations of Current and Emerging Trends in Applications – Valentin Sribar
  • The IT Operations Scenario – Ronni Colville & Deb Curtis

 

Then we move into lunch, come see us at the NetIQ solution showcase to chat about the sessions with my old friends and how we see their insights coming to life in our every day worlds.  I’ve been posting on the need for IT to better align in how it speaks of technology in the business as services and driving top line revenue rather than just bottom line with cost savings for a while now.  In the last bullet above from the opening pages of the agenda, the one thing that did strike me odd is “deliver services to users”.  I would restate that as it is how we will “deliver services to our customers”  to drive revenue.  Yes, driving efficiency into the organization is part of the IT balancing act, but the first focus has shifted to the customer and value.

Then I’ll finish the afternoon with:

  • Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2012:  Will You Be Able to Manage Them? (Before They Manage You?) – Cameron Haight
  • Compuware, VMware and Dell will provide simultaneous session with a App Performance, Cloud Mgmt and a CIO Panel, repsectively – How will I choose?
  • 2 More Choices to Make:
    • VDI and other Virtualization Strategies to Securely Support and Manage a Dynamic Workforce – Neil MacDonald & Philip Redman
    • Leveraging Mobility, Content and Communication in you Business Processes – Bern Elliot
  • 2 More Final Choices to Make:
    • Lessons Learned from Early Adopters of Social IT Management – Jeffrey M. Brooks & George Spafford
    • Networking and Mobility Trends for the Next Decade – Tim Zimmerman

Then we are back to wrap up at the NetIQ solution showcase with a head spinning with many new viewpoints and ideas.  I look forward to speaking with many of the attendees to gain their insights into the sessions, stop on by and join the conversation, follow us in real-time on Twitter and send your comments to these posts.

As you can see from my agenda for just the first day, many new trends to wrap our management arms around to provide flexibility with balance of controls.  Change is coming fast and furious and managing it with controlled risk will be the key to the successful in the coming year.   I have some choices to make tomorrow regarding the sessions I can attend, but look forward to hearing about the risks and value of new technologies applied to our business challenges.  You even see a little Social Media has creeped into IT Management.  Wonder what that’s all about?  🙂

I’ll send a few early comments on Twitter tomorrow during my adventures.  Follow:  @BSMHub this week and catch the real-time insights, at least my perspective, of the conference.  I’ll post my take aways each evening.  Drop me your comments, I’d love to hear what’s happening out there in the real-world.

Michele

The Cloud Is Not Just a Technology Play – ITBusinessEdge

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Gartner, IDC, IT Management, ITBusinessEdge, Service Providers, Service Value, Transformation, Trends


The Hub Commentary_

Nice article summing up considerations that must be evaluated when assessing a cloud deployment option.  IDC predicts that by 2013, 52% of IT budgets will be dedicated to “OUTSOURCED IT” – ASP, Public Cloud, and Enterprise/Hosted Private Cloud.  There is also a shift in where the budget and where spending decisions are being made – in the business.

As a former analyst in the sourcing space going back to the first ASP/ISP/MSP, du jour of the late 90’s / early 2000, the speed of this shift and the shift in decision making serves as an indicator in businesses to create change to drive the business.  The requirement to move from technology operator to service manager or broker has been there for almost 20 years.  Now there is competition to force the change.

Rarely is outsourcing cheaper, but it does create change that cannot be achieved easily from within.  Cloud deployment for the sake of it still isn’t the right blanket direction.  Looking at deployment options, commodity services, speed to market to drive competitive advantage whether inside or out are all factors to evaluate and consider.

If one lesson can be learned from these historical ebbs and flows between insourced and outsourced services, it should be that of service enablement in order to make the transition to service manager/broker at the time of deployment rather than an afterthought.  An effective service manager/broker will rely heavily on the federation or integration of data in order to manage the services delivered as mentioned by Gartner in the slides attached to the article.

How will you service enable  your infrastructure to deliver service value that powers your business, regardless of technology platform?

Michele

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It’s human nature to want the newest and best of everything, even if the ramifications are still unknown. Enterprises fall into this trap as well, considering they are built and run by humans. It’s kind of the digital version of shoot first and ask questions later.  (Read Full Article…)

Its Time to Start Talking about the ‘Middle Office’ – Gartner

Tags: Business Service Management, Gartner, IT Management


The Hub Commentary

Interesting insights about the ability to monitor and measure business processes that fall outside of the traditional front and back office structures.   Have you considered that many decisions  being made in the “middle office” may effect your ability to effectively manage business services?

Randy

Not every activity fits neatly into either front or back office processes.  There are in just about every organization as set of middle office activities that go un-noticed but may be prove to be more important than either end of the organization.  Too often we have thought of activities in the mid-office as either being the domain of management or knowledge work that cannot be readily monitored, measured or supported as past attempts have produced behaviors that were counter productive to the goal.   Read more…

When the customer has end-to-end visibility, and you don’t – Gartner

Tags: Business Service Management, Gartner, IT Management, IT Management Tools


The Hub Commentary

Do your customers have more visibility into your end-to-end management processes than you do?  You’re probably not alone…

Randy

In dealing with a service provider, I found that I have more visibility into the process they are providing than they do. That’s pretty sad. Part of me wonders if they’ll call me up and say, “David… what do you see from your view? Tell us, because we can’t see the whole thing.”  Read full article

The iPad 2 is Coming, So Are You a Technology Climber or a Proven Early Adopter? – Gartner Blogs

Tags: Business Service Management, Gartner, IT Management, Service Value


The Hub Commentary_

Adopter or climber?  Hmmmm I have to laugh, sometimes I am, rarely though and I’ve spent my career in the technology field.  I finally got myself an iPod a few years ago with accumulated airline points, I only traded up to a smart phone (Android) last year only because it had an up to date GPS, which so far has not proven itself better than my old standby Garmin, which I also got with airline points and is the size of a baseball.  I did purchase the first gen Kindle to read my newspaper while traveling and I no longer had to deal with the paperboy trashing my flowers in the spring.

As I’ve written several times today already, but what exactly will be the tipping point in the enterprise to embrace the tablets?  IT would be wise to be applying thought to inventive ways to communicate and interact with their customers with these mobile devices first.

Are you an adopter or climber and how will your enterprise use tablets?

Michele

___________________

I grew up in transition neighborhoods outside of Cleveland Ohio and Hartford Connecticut.  By transition I mean it was a neighborhood where people moved in after the family got a promotion, generally into the lower ranks of middle management and then as they worked their way up the corporate ladder they moved out as senior management either to trade up their house or town.   (Read Full Article…)

Should IT Play for Food – Gartner Blogs

Tags: Business Service Management, Gartner, Transformation


The Hub Commentary_

Absolutely!  This is the crux of the problem with IT today and why it is “IT and Business” rather than I sell insurance.  I jumped the fence many years ago for this very reason and I developed and delivered an executive information system that reported on revenues, so I couldn’t have been closer to the business if I tried, but still felt a million miles away.  I started out life working for an outsourcer before going internal IT and thus I likely had a tainted view.

When you develop, deliver and support technology based upon the market and your customer needs, constantly evaluating what the competition is doing and learning more about your customer’s business than your customer has, it brings a whole different perspective.

One day at a conference I spoke on the topic.  An audience member came to speak to me afterwards and said his IT had no relevance to his company.  I knew nothing more than the name of his company and that it was a candy manufacturer, so manufacturing.  I asked only 3 questions and had him understanding business value in under 5 minutes.  First, does IT have any hand in the automation of the manufacturing line (the heart of the business), not really an IT function.  Ok, next question, I suspect you have an ERP system, why Yes we do, xyz system.  Ok, I suspect sales, distribution and customer service play an important role.  He was now standing up straighter.  Well, uh yes.

In the fall of 1999 Hershey took a gamble on a new CRM and ERP system just before Halloween and learned the market will go to a different drug store to buy a brand of tooth paste, but when we want chocolate, we buy what is on the shelf and found themselves on the front page of the Wallstreet Journal.  Long story short, they missed the biggest selling season, Halloween, then Christmas, Valentines and most of Easter before the systems were up, running and integrated as designed.  Now he was standing tall.  Maybe IT is important and has impact on sales, revenue and growth.

Sometimes we get too close to our business to see the trees for the forest.  So while some bash the vendors, we work for food and we have to understand your business when you don’t and help you see it in order to see a business case for automation that can help you drive growth, so we aren’t all bad.  🙂  I cannot count the number of times I have helped an IT team build a business case as a former analyst, where if they understood their own business it would be easy.

This year it is an imperative to make this shift with the service provider explosion.  I challenge you to work for food!

Do you work for food or just operate?

Michele

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Wednesday’s post discussed the difference between people playing for food or playing for fun. The analogy applies to the difference between pro-athletes who play for food and college athletes and others who play more for fun. The idea expressed in that post was that food and fun are part of the IT/Business context.  (Read Full Article…)

Playing for Food is Different than Playing for Fun – Gartner

Tags: Business Alignment, Business Service Management, Gartner, IT Management, Service Value


The Hub Commentary_

Mark McDonald of Gartner has hit the nail on the head – Playing for fun or Playing for Food?  IT being insulated from the business and the external customer means they play for fun, no consequences for their actions. Business service management practices and understanding service value and being the power of the business would bring the risk / reward closer to home to most IT organizations.

I once was on the IT side of the fence many moons ago.  I was working on a project that used a new tool we had purchased and I had the pre-sales technician stop by one day to look over my work and offer some tips and tricks.  As I sat and listened to him that morning what became clear to me was I was on the wrong side of the fence.  I love technology, I love working with people and I love solving the puzzle and bringing the project to life.

My favorite project while in IT was one where I revamped an old system and how billing occurred driving an additional 90K+ / month into the company.  That day I knew I did something with technology that drove value and revenue for the business.  As IT professionals, we lose sight of this by being insulated and thus focus inward and on the wrong things.

I jumped the fence and went to the dark side of the vendor community where we play for fun and for food!

Does you IT play for Fun or for Food?

Michele

___________________

People ask about the differences between ‘the business’ and ‘IT’ and what people can do to eliminate them. It is a great question and unfortunately a persistent one. Usually when you have an issue that people recognize and work to resolve but cannot, there are deeper issues involved. I think that this is a big part of the situation here.  (Read Full Article…)

Verizon Buys Terremark – Gartner Blogs

Tags: Business Service Management, Cloud, Gartner, IaaS, Service Providers


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

___________________

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…)

What does it mean to Reimagine IT? – Gartner Blogs

Tags: Business Service Management, Gartner, Growth, IT Investment, IT Management, Trends


The Hub Commentary_

The time has come to re-think IT, the assets, sourcing options and management with the focus on growth, sure cost cutting is still in the balance of things too.  Opportunities to re-think the routine, automation, leverage lower cost tools for the commodity and apply the shift in that spending toward growth.

One side effect to increased spending is the spending only on new technology without reimagining the whole picture of managing and operating on the day-to-day as well.  In another article posted today from the Cloud Computing Journal, downtime costs $100,000/hour.  Reimagining IT is the whole operational picture – this is exciting for those who embrace it and make the most of it both from new services and operations.

Michele

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Last week Gartner announced the results of Gartner’s 2011 CIO Survey and Agenda under the theme of reimagining IT. The idea behind this theme is that CIOs and IT leaders have an opportunity to use new business priorities and technologies to create value in new ways.  (Read Full Article…)

Reimagine IT: The 2011 CIO Agenda – Gartner Blogs

Tags: Business Alignment, Business Service Management, Cloud, Gartner, IT Management, Spending, Trends


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…)

Gartner’s Magic Quadrant Disses Amazon Cloud – NetworkWorld

Tags: Amazon EC2, Availability, Business Service Management, Cloud, Gartner, IT Management, NetworkWorld, Performance, Service Providers


The Hub Commentary_

“Visionaries have an innovative and disruptive approach to the market, but their services are new to the market and are unproven,” Gartner  Yes, this does describe Amazon and EC2, but does that mean it is 2 steps behind the Leaders?  Not often are there times to truly innovate and redefine a market.  Amazon and EC2 are redefining an industry regardless of internal enterprise IT or the consumer market.  Their customers are a mixture now over the traditional IaaS (Infrastructure-as-a-Service) IT service providers.

To the innovator go the initial spoils, revenue in the market.  Will or can they sustain that leadership will play out over time.  Given where we are in the life cycle of this disruptive technology (mostly development and test) in Enterprise IT shops, EC2 brings just the agility required for businesses to drive agile development of new products and services and move to market faster than ever before mimicking the consumer market.

In order to take these early development projects to production, yes, more formalized monitoring and management will no doubt need to be baked in.  Now the question becomes, who bakes that in and supplies that information?  Isn’t that agent part of the workload that is packaged and shipped out to the cloud to run on the subscribed to infrastructure?  I call this service enabling your workload and injecting intelligence into it for purposes of monitoring, securing and communicating the performance of the workload the subscribers responsibility.  Right?  The provider is responsible for the infrastructure your workload runs on, not what’s going on in the workload, that remains the responsibility of the subscriber.

I applaud Amazon and say keep challenging the status quo.  IT and the traditional proven providers need to think a little out of the box to meet the demands of market dynamics in market time! What do you think?

Michele

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Gartner’s Magic Quadrant report has placed Amazon’s cloud computing service in one of its lower tiers, saying that for all of Amazon’s commercial success it is “visionary” but “unproven.”  (Read Full Article…)