TM Forum Management World in Nice and CA World in Las Vegas collided last week.
But what happens in Vegas (or Nice) doesn’t stay there any more, as presentations, demos and keynotes are available on the Web…and even YouTube.
Let me be candid right up front: I work at CA Technologies, and serve on the TM Forum’s Executive Committee. So I have interests in what happened in both places.
The discussions in the Desert Babylon and the Mediterranean Haven were remarkably parallel. Both events focused heavily on the current transition in IT – oversimplified as the Cloud “paradigm shift.”
Here are some of the key insights and observations that swirled around the Mandalay Bay and the Acropolis:
The new IT department will manage a dynamic supply chain of internal and external resources -- some cloud-based -- to deliver services to the business, and its internal and external customers and clients. IT leaders will not manage hardware elements in a datacenter but will manage a sophisticated IT supply chain to deliver business-critical services.
Instead of focusing internally, IT organizations can start looking outside the walls of the data center for resources and services. And can start leveraging new business models as well as new technologies.
IT will focus on the business services, not on the technologies, processes, infrastructures and tools.
IT’s primary role will no longer be cost reduction. Rather it will be rapid, reliable, flexible, agile development and deployment of new services to internal and external customers, following the “try it, fix it or fail quickly” methods pioneered by Google and others. IT’s success will be judged on service-delivery and creation – not just on expense reduction.
Cost savings enabled by IT will be redirected at innovation – new products, new services for new communities of interest, new markets.
The "new data center" is based on the Internet and the Cloud together as a unit.
Just like we have witnessed a progression from mainframes, to client-server, to Internet…we now see another, to Cloud. And they don’t replace each other – they are additive. Prior “generations” evolve parallel to the “new paradigms.”
The Cloud isn’t just technology. It’s about using existing, new and emerging technologies in new ways to enable IT to develop and deliver services in new, more efficient, more cost-effective ways.
The Cloud enables unprecedented IT flexibility. It allows big enterprises to act with the agility of small companies. The Cloud enables IT organizations to take full advantage of mainframe, distributed assets, physical environment and virtual environments as well as services and solutions accessed from the Cloud.
The discussion of business model changes is perhaps most interesting – and controversial. The context runs as follows: IT has had an internal monopoly, broken occasionally by rebellions such as departmental computing, PC and smart-device proliferation. The Cloud bodes well to permanently break that monopoly by enabling flexible and easy access to powerful resources needed by the business. IT organizations can either embrace those changes, or fight rearguard actions against them. [A separate comment on these business model issues is in the works.]
These are fundamental issues that the industry at large – customers in all verticals, markets and geos, service providers, suppliers – is wrestling with. How we respond will determine how well we harness the new powers available to deliver both business and social benefit.
TM Forum Management World overviews and keynotes are at: http://tmforum.telecomtv.com/
Directly on point at CA World, CA Technologies EVP Ajei Gopal described how the Cloud will transform the future of IT: http://www.ca.com/us/press/release.aspx?cid=235911
Other CA World announcements, including about the new Cloud Commons, are at: http://www.ca.com/us/content/campaign.aspx?cid=231278
Posted
05-26-2010 4:48 AM
by
Bill Ahlstrom