Most forward-looking CEOs have already made their move to prepare for the future that they foresee – where business technology is a key deciding factor for them to attain ongoing commercial prosperity. This new digital-propelled environment will profoundly change business processes, along with the need for accelerated tech-savvy human capital development across all industries.

Those leaders that catch the next wave of Internet-driven market development will reap the rewards of the expanding Global Networked Economy. They’ll achieve a quantum boost in performance. And they’ll reach their lofty goals by harnessing the unique competitive advantages of cloud computing services, mobile enterprise applications and other targeted business technology investments.

Welcome to the Internet of Everything

Worldwide IT spending is forecast to surpass $3.9 trillion in 2015 – that’s a 3.9 percent increase from 2014. Business technology spending will be driven by Digital Business practitioners, according to Gartner, Inc. This change of influence is having a dramatic impact on the legacy IT profession.

Gartner defines Digital Business as new commercial designs that blend the virtual world and the physical worlds — changing how processes and industries work through the Internet of Things phenomenon.

“This year enterprises will spend over $40 billion designing, implementing and operating the Internet of Things,” said Peter Sondergaard, senior vice president at Gartner. “Every piece of equipment, anything of value, will have embedded sensors. This means leading asset-intensive enterprises will have over half a million IP addressable objects in 2020.”

Line of Business Leaders Take the Driver’s Seat

Gartner believes that demand, procurement and control has already moved away from traditional IT organizations — toward Digital Business units and closer to the ultimate end-customer of business technology applications. Clearly, there’s been a significant shift in IT spending power. Gartner estimates that half of all major vendor salespeople are actively selling direct to business units, not IT departments.

“Thirty-eight percent of total IT spending is outside of IT already, with a disproportionate amount in digital. By 2017, it will be over 50 percent,” Mr. Sondergaard said. “Digital startups sit inside your own organization, in your marketing department, in HR, in logistics and in sales. Your business units are acting as technology startups.”

Speaking at the Gartner Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando this week, Sondergaard used the example of smart machines to highlight the disruption caused in Digital Business. Smart machines are an emerging super class of technologies that perform a wide variety of work, of both the physical and the intellectual kind.

Smart machines will automate decision making. Therefore, they will not only affect jobs based on physical labor, but they will also impact jobs based on more complex knowledge worker tasks.

The impact will be profound. By 2018, digital businesses will require 50 percent fewer business process workers. However, by 2018 Digital Business will drive a 500 percent boost in digital commerce related jobs.

Sondergaard explained to the CIOs in the symposium audience, “The new digital startups in your business units are thirsting for data analysts, software developers and cloud computing vendor management staff, and they are often hiring them faster than IT.”

He insists that CIOs must move with a sense of urgency, to avoid further disruption. Companies must build talent for the digital organization of 2020 now. Not just the digital technology organization, but the whole enterprise. In essence, savvy multifaceted digital-native talent is the key to Digital Business leadership and sustainable competitive supremacy.

Focus on Vision-First Digital Business Leadership

As the technologies and trends that power digitalization move to center stage, traditional IT leaders are being presented with a unique opportunity to become forward-thinking Digital Business leaders, according to the latest global survey of CIOs by Gartner.

The latest survey uncovered that CIOs are fully aware that they will need to change in order to succeed in Digital Business — with 75 percent of respondents acknowledging that they’ll need to adapt their leadership style within the next three years.

According to the survey findings, 89 percent of CIOs agree that in addition to the considerable opportunities afforded by digitalization, the digital world engenders new, vastly different and higher levels of risk. Moreover, 69 percent said that the discipline of risk management is not keeping up.

The average IT budget will grow by just one percent from 2014 to 2015. CIOs estimate that 79 percent of IT spending will be “inside” the IT budget (up slightly from last year), but much digital innovation can and will be funded outside of the planned IT spending.

Seventy-three percent of surveyed CIOs say that they have changed their leadership style over the last three years, and 75 percent say they must change it over the next three years — to essentially flip their leadership style from control-first to more of a vision-first orientation.

“During the second IT era of industrialization, people leadership was honed to emphasize precision, discipline and tight control,” said Graham Waller, vice president and executive partner for Gartner Executive Programs. “Therefore, through both nature and nurture, CIOs have evolved into control-style pragmatic leaders. Given the characteristics of the new digital era, this bias is dangerous. CIOs must invert their style to be more vision-led and inspirational.”

The worldwide Gartner survey included responses from 2,810 CIOs, representing more than $397 billion in IT investment and operating budgets, within 84 countries.

read more

Consider that the Age of the Cloud has precipitated a new agent concept which is lightweight, deploys quickly, and goes in virtually undetected with zero configuration. These agents are built with a survival mode in mind including a self-healing option for hands-free maintenance. At the time when we were looking for a monitoring solution (2006-2007) APM as we know it today had yet to be defined. There was no Gartner MQ, real-user-monitoring (RUM) was too high level, “agent monitoring” brought concerns of overhead and complexity, instrumenting the application meant to ARM it (i.e. Application Response Measurement), and transaction tagging was a pipe dream.
There was no Gartner MQ, real-user-monitoring (RUM) was too high level, “agent monitoring” brought concerns of overhead and complexity, instrumenting the application meant to ARM it (i.e. Application Response Measurement), and transaction tagging was a pipe dream. This created a fierce debate on the risks and rewards of agent vs. agentless monitoring…

read more

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

The cost and functional benefits of migrating services to the cloud have been well documented, but as more solutions are introduced to the market, choosing the right one is presenting many businesses with a real challenge. The industry is becoming increasingly crowded, so we have simplified the research process and singled out five key things organisations may not know about the cloud to help them make the most informed decision.  

Beware of hidden costs

Many businesses have discovered that there can potentially be a number of hidden costs to cloud computing that may lead to an overall increase in expenditure. When a company signs up for a cloud computing service, the most common contracts are for a set cost per user per month, for a fixed duration. Ideally, any so-called ‘hidden costs’ that might be expected from a service should be included in this rate. The key is that providers still offer a known fixed price for any bespoke or customisation work as this is the main area where many of the cost ‘surprises’ tend to creep in. It’s not about the usage costs – the hidden costs come in with any integration or development which may be required, in fact, any kind of customisation of the solution.

The middle ground

It is not just public versus private. The median option is a hosted hybrid model that offers the best of both public and private cloud networks: vendor-owned infrastructure is deployed on the company’s local network, as all data is kept on the premises. This offers the required security, while the logic and routing is in the public cloud and at a public cloud price model.

Going up and down with the cloud

One of the greatest recognised benefits of the cloud is the flexibility it provides, particularly for those companies with peaks and troughs in demand. Cloud services let companies quickly scale capacity up and down to match their specific business requirements. This is ideal for those customer facing industries, particularly those operating in the financial and retail sectors, which are subject to boom times and quiet times in their normal business cycles. Similarly, companies can match capacity to demands as business units grow and contract over time which would help to align IT spending with actual needs.

The ultimate innovation tool

Companies are now starting to realise the cloud’s potential as an innovation tool and alongside adoption rates, this looks set to rise significantly in the next few years. Going forward, businesses can advance strategies for cloud-oriented innovations and use cloud-enabled business models to promote a sustainable competitive advantage.

In terms of technology, one important step is for companies to create an architecture that can accommodate innovation, and the cloud is becoming the preferred location for these initiatives because of its flexible nature. An ideal architectural model for innovating with the cloud is a strategic enterprise architecture, or SEA. An SEA will provide a blueprint of the business architecture and   technology architecture mapped to it, and will lay out all business processes end to end, incorporating customers and external partners.

The data centre – location matters

Regardless of application, one of the most critical aspects of cloud is where the data actually resides and what happens in the event of a data centre failure or disaster. Customers around the world are subject to many different laws and regulations; legal requirements in one country may be inconsistent with those elsewhere. There are providers who operate their cloud services under common operational guidelines across multiple jurisdictions, with common security and privacy requirements in mind. This should alleviate any concerns a business has surrounding its security, privacy and compliance needs.

Physical security

The data centre should also have tight physical security. The best cloud data centres will have SAS70, type II-certification, so they are under surveillance through intense 24/7 monitoring, as well as being access controlled.

Picture credit: iStockPhoto

Danish beer brand Carlsberg is rolling out Microsoft Office 365 for greater enterprise collaboration, according to details of a customer case study from Redmond.

Carlsberg is rolling out this technology initiative under the banner of ‘GloCal’, which “aims for global efficiency while staying true to its local roots,” and chose Microsoft Office 365 as the optimal solution.

Employees use a full range of Microsoft products: Exchange Online for email; Lync as a messaging tool; SharePoint for collaboration; and Yammer for social networking.

“One way we are helping our employees work better together is by deploying Office 365,” said Etienne Dock, vice president of IT architecture and sourcing at Carlsberg.

“No matter what device or distance, the cloud is breaking down traditional barriers so we’re better able to focus on brewing the best beer in the world.”

From six markets in 2000, Carlsberg is now the fourth largest brewer of beer in the world with over 500 different brands to manage. The firm has also launched the Carlsberg Supply Chain (CSC) which utilises cloud technologies, such as Office 365, to streamline the business.

As a result, any opportunity to cut corners and improve the bottom line is a welcome one for Dock.

“Breweries are capital intensive, so we don’t want to build too many,” Dock said. “CSC gets huge business value from using Office 365 as a global collaboration tool to interact with our global markets and exchange the information we need to fine-tune the balance between these variables to optimise our operations and save money.”

This isn’t the only tech initiative Carlsberg has rolled out in recent weeks. The firm rolled out beer mats containing an NFC tag and a QR code at pubs across Denmark earlier this month, as well as installing Bluetooth beacons to drive traffic on its Crowdit venue discovery app.

A report released last week by Skyhigh Networks found that many enterprises weren’t using the full umbrella of Microsoft cloud apps. While Office 365 and SharePoint were popular, Yammer, Lync and OneDrive didn’t get as much traction.

Go ahead. Name a cloud environment that doesn’t include load balancing as the key enabler of elastic scalability. I’ve got coffee… so it’s good, take your time…

Exactly. Load balancing – whether implemented as traditional high availability pairs or clustering – provides the means by which applications (and infrastructure, in many cases) scale horizontally. It is load balancing that is at the heart of elastic scalability models, and that provides a means to ensure availability and even improve performance of applications.

But simple load balancing alone isn’t enough. Too many environments and architectures are wont to toss a simple, network-based solution at the problem and call it a day. But rudimentary load balancing techniques that rely solely on a set of metrics are doomed to fail eventually. That’s because a simple number like “connection count” does not provide enough context to make an intelligent load balancing decision. An application instance may currently have only 100 connections while another has 500, but if the capacity of the former is only 200 while the capacity of the other is 5000, a decision based on “least connections” is not the right one.

read more

In her General Session at 15th Cloud Expo, Anne Plese, Senior Consultant, Cloud Product Marketing, at Verizon Enterprise, will focus on finding the right mix of renting vs. buying Oracle capacity to scale to meet business demands, and offer validated Oracle database TCO models for Oracle development and testing environments.
Anne Plese is a marketing and technology enthusiast/realist with over 19+ years in high tech. At Verizon Enterprise, she focuses on driving growth for the Verizon Cloud platform globally. Previous to Verizon, Anne spent over 10 years with Cisco. There she was focused on growing Cisco’s global data center and cloud revenue, and boosting market awareness and affinity for Cisco data center solutions within the Enterprise and Commercial market segments.

read more

This is the third in a series of cloud predictions for 2015, starting with When the Walls Come Down, which predicted that workload migration (into the cloud) costs would drop by more than 50% in 2015; then continuing with The Cloud Startup Ecosystem Explosion, which predicted the impact that cloud market share gains in 2015 […]

read more

The major cloud platforms defy a simple, side-by-side analysis. Each of the major IaaS public-cloud platforms offers their own unique strengths and functionality. Options for on-site private cloud are diverse as well, and must be designed and deployed while taking existing legacy architecture and infrastructure into account. Then the reality is that most enterprises are embarking on a hybrid cloud strategy and programs.
In this Power Panel at 15th Cloud Expo, moderated by Ashar Baig, Research Director, Cloud, at Gigaom Research, panelists will discuss how enterprises should develop their processes for choosing the cloud option that truly fits what they need.

read more

StackIQ offers a comprehensive software suite that automates the deployment, provisioning, and management of Big Infrastructure. With StackIQ’s software, you can spin up fully configured big data clusters, quickly and consistently — from bare-metal up to the applications layer — and manage them efficiently. Our software’s modular architecture allows customers to integrate nearly any application with the StackIQ software stack.

read more