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One of the exciting aspects of my role is guiding key clients through their journey of defining a cloud strategy and implementing it. In effect over the last 12 months I had the opportunity, to have multiple client executive discussions almost every week and also to see through change projects, reinventing IT departments and creating new offerings with service providers.
In effect, it is one of the benefits of my role, to consult organizations interested in developing new cloud business models and also organizations that are interested in consuming such offerings. This also drives interesting discussions with both sides – what is of interest in the market and also what new offerings are in the pipeline, where is the industry going.
The typical performance indicators are focusing on reducing time to market for delivering end-to-end capabilities (business product, software changes, hardware, etc.), changing capital to operational expenses, productivity gains within operations, availability concerns, and of course cost reduction, with ultimately reducing the platform expansion cost in both capex and opex.
This is not only about a procurement exercise, but it is about building an open-standard end-to-end computing platform for an enterprise, which requires significant planning and a larger change agenda. This often starts with an application, technology, and operation assessment.
There will have to be a structured and in-depth design to consider high availability and all key performance indicators and understanding technologies in use and how they operate into significant detail. Virtual and physical alignment, type of technologies to standardize without impacting business applications, test cycles, proving feasibility of new models, etc. are all part of a careful orchestrated exercise.