Customers are quickly reinventing how they choose to learn about new products, keep current on existing ones, and stay loyal to those brands they most value. 

The best-run companies are all over this, orchestrating their IT strategies to be as responsive as possible.

The luxury of long technology evaluation cycles, introspective analysis of systems, and long deployment timeframes are giving way to rapid deployments and systems designed for accuracy and speed.

CIOs need to be just as strong at strategic planning and execution as they are at technology.  Many are quickly prioritising analytics, cloud and mobile strategies to stay in step with their rapidly changing customer bases. 

This is especially true for those companies with less than $1 billion in sales, as analytics, cloud computing and mobility can be combined to compete very effectively against their much bigger rivals.

What’s driving CIOs – A look at technology priorities

Gartner’s …

Moving to a model that utilizes the cloud is a huge proposition. You can throw some applications out there without looking back – if they have no ties to the corporate datacenter and light security requirements, for example – but most applications require quite a bit of work to make them both mobile and stable. Just connections to the database raise all sorts of questions, and most enterprise level applications require connections to DC databases.
But these are all problems people are talking about. There are ways to resolve them, ugly though some may be. The problems that will get you are the ones no one is talking about. So of course, I’m happy to dive into the conversation with some things that would be keeping me awake were I still running a datacenter with a lot of interconnections and getting beat up with demands for cloudy applications.

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Business Process Management solutions enable business people to quickly and easily capture their business goals as models that can be instantly turned into intelligent, automated processes. No or minimal software development, and no wait for IT resources.
The Business Process Management solution is a complete set of tools for creating, executing, and optimizing business processes. This enables unparalleled collaboration between business and IT managers. As a result, business processes are automated and optimized to improve efficiency and agility while costs are lowered.

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Virtualization and cloud computing have forever changed how organizations achieve control and visibility over both core IT elements and IT services. Now it’s time to move away from solutions that are not ready to handle the dynamic high rate of change and service delivery in the Cloud. Traditional IT configuration and compliance tools cannot monitor changes that cause compliance violations in realtime.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, George Gerchow, Director of VMware’s Center for Policy & Compliance, will show you how to capture hundreds of significant changes in Cloud Infrastructure that alter our compliance posture without having to collect data or force manual assessments. To help customers address the fundamental challenge of getting the right information to the right people over an infrastructure that they can trust, VMware has adopted a two-prong approach to ensuring control and visibility for cloud environments. For areas that are fundamental to the deployment of secure, reliable applications in virtual and cloud environments, VMware offers solutions that are purpose built and embedded in the infrastructure. VMware has also raised the bar by providing a new set of Cloud Mission Critical Controls to help customers prioritize configurations as they migrate mission critical applications to Cloud environments. In addition, VMware is enabling a security ecosystem of industry leading security partners to provide a new generation of security and compliance solutions specifically designed for cloud infrastructure.

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Now that could computing has become a mainstream option for secure storage, the few who still publicly question its security are having a harder time finding an audience.

Corporate accountants and executives love any idea that saves money, and their aversion to risk dwindles each time another big company jumps on the cloud bandwagon.

And there are plenty of IT managers who are happy to pass on the responsibility of maintaining servers for data backups if the executive team is open to a different solution.

The big drawback to cloud computing, at least in my opinion, is that you can only outsource responsibility to a certain level before the risk becomes intolerable.

And the question that very few corporate leaders are asking is: what happens when a failure occurs?

In this modern era where companies spend endless resources on consultants and lawyers to pinpoint blame, a case of “cloud collapse …

Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) represents a complete preintegrated platform offering for the development and operation of general purpose business applications. A fully preintegrated and standardized platform – offered in a multitenant mode as a managed service – means much less manual effort than installing and configuring middleware components in on-premise servers.
Enterprise architecture patterns and framework changed heavily during the last decade, the software / platform / framework upgrades eat up the major chunk of it budgets and leaving relatively smaller portion for business innovation.
However, due to the support for Java EE full implementation and open standards along with extended support for common relational databases, Redhat Open Shift provides a better option for porting existing Java EE applications to Cloud.

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I remember thinking as a 22-year-old just out of college that I would be able to make wise business decisions because I’d read Plato’s Republic. Even studied it in a Classics class, no less. Such is the hubris of youth, or at least of mine.

I’m drawing an analogy here with my question in yesterday’s piece about how to go about creating a specialized cloud-computing college degree.

A quick review of some CS departments in the US finds requirements that include many semesters of programming, a few of software engineering (including working with frameworks), and some new-fangled, specialized courses for developing mobile apps. An intro to cloud computing can be found as a special topic here and there.

Would it be beneficial to education, IT, and humanity if a more-or-less standardized cloud-computing regimen were to emerge? And if it did, would it create a new generation of IT employees who thought they were now able to drive an enterprise-wide cloud strategy because they’d taken a course in RESTful services?

Actually, CS students should probably be required to read Plato’s Republic to get a grasp on some of the ethical dilemmas they’ll face with the use of the technology they design and deploy. Sun co-founder Bill Joy would routinely cite The Greeks when talking about how he approached his work.

What does it take to become proficient with cloud? Does it truly require a lot of experience – seeing what can and does go wrong, understanding past approaches that caused past problems – in addition to getting up to speed on the different programs and environments one will encounter with cloud? How much can be taught at the undergrad level? What courses should be included, even if the newly minted grad cannot quite yet be deemed a cloud guru?

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