Cisco taps Microsoft's Cloud OS for new datacenter portfolio

Cisco and Microsoft have teamed up on a series of new datacenter ventures designed to simplify cloud deployments.

Based on Microsoft's Cloud OS, the suite of solutions rely on the combination of Cisco's Unified Data Center architecture with Microsoft's Fast Track architecture for private clouds.
The tech giants tout that the merger of these architectures should streamline the management of combined Cisco and Microsoft data center environments while improving agility to provision resources.
Microsoft customers, in particular, will also gain access to Cisco's Unified Computing System of servers, which combine networking, virtualization, and storage access into a single architecture.
One example is the Cisco PowerTool for Microsoft's PowerShell utility, which is touted to enable IT departments to provision, configure, and monitor physical and virtual infrastructures and Windows Server and application software at every level.
Cisco and Microsoft will also be jointly delivering new go-to-market initiatives to channel partners who resell both Cisco datacenter and Microsoft Cloud OS products.

 ZDNet

Cloud computing, mobile ushering in "major shift" for enterprise security practices

Gartner recently held forth on what it expects to be the top security trends for 2013, citing the rise of cloud computing, social media and employees bringing their own devices to work as among the forces likely to produce radical changes in how enterprises manage IT security. The market research firm also says the "major shift" expected in IT security in 2013 will shake up established IT security vendors as newer players in cloud and mobile challenge them. 


Earl Perkins, Gartner research vice president, said during a webinar with clients that the forces cited above, as well as an "information explosion" in the enterprise, are putting enormous pressure on enterprise IT professionals and vendors by "making some of the existing IT infrastructures obsolete." He added: "Will the major providers of security technology be the same ones in three to five years? The answer is probably not."

Perkins said Gartner analysts believe the vendors, service providers and value-added resellers of today are starting to feel the volatility of market changes wrought by the rise of cloud-computing services and new practices such as enterprises adopting smartphones and other mobile devices, and allowing employees to use their own at work. A large IT security firm such as Symantec, although certainly "aware and making changes" due to the growing importance of cloud and mobile, said Perkins, is nonetheless under pressure from many smaller companies that are "nimble" in introducing new technologies.

Mobile and BYOD "challenge the fundamental principles by which we deliver applications," to users and protect user data, said Perkins. It means "consumer identities" will need to be tied to "corporate identities" in terms of authentication, authorization and other identity access and management functions. There will be pressure to "manage diversity" in this, he added. And when it comes to access to cloud-based services, the goal will be to find ways for introducing cloud-based access and authentication so users will "enjoy" these services "adequately and securely" in what may be a hybrid-cloud environment with the enterprise network. 

Ricoh CIO explains why he let 9,000 employees go BYOD.

Don't Blink

De actuele kwestie rond de Patriot Act is nauwelijks grondig onderzocht.

De overgang naar cloud computing levert de nodige vragen op. Een van de terugkerende vragen is of deze overgang consequenties heeft voor de toegang tot gegevens door buitenlandse overheden. Daarbij wordt typisch verwezen naar de Amerikaanse overheid en de zogenaamde Patriot Act, die het mogelijk zou maken dat gegevens van Nederlandse gebruikers van cloud diensten worden opgevraagd vanuit de VS.  

Joris van Hoboken, onderzoeker van het IViR: “De actuele kwestie rond de Patriot Act is nauwelijks grondig onderzocht. Hierdoor zijn in het maatschappelijke debat over cloud computing flink wat onjuistheden geslopen. Het maakt bijvoorbeeld in beginsel niet uit of cloudgegevens in de VS of ergens anders in de wereld zijn opgeslagen. Als een Nederlandse cloudaanbieder structureel zaken doet in de VS, dan geeft de VS wet- en regelgeving al de mogelijkheid voor VS autoriteiten om gegevens op te vragen vanuit Nederland. Voor afnemers van clouddiensten zullen zulke relaties in de praktijk moeilijk te achterhalen zijn en door overnames in de sector kan de situatie opeens veranderen.”  Bekijk het gehele rapport van het IViR hier.

Workday IPO Reflects Investor Confidence in Cloud Computing for Business - The CIO Report - WSJ

Brendan McDermid/Reuters

Workday, a company that offers online human resources software, saw its stock soar in early trading Friday after its initial public offering, as shares opened up 72% from the initial public offering price of $28 per share. The stock’s performance is a vote of confidence for a business model investors have been slow to embrace, but that era of good feelings will persist only to the extent that CIOs demonstrate the same level of confidence going forward.

While companies are turning increasingly to cloud vendors for a number of applications, human resources start to get a little close to what are considered mission critical systems CIOs have been loath to move off premise. In this sense, Workday is a big test for both CIOs and the cloud software industry as a whole.

Workday is benefitting from large corporate customers that need speed and flexibility as well as savings that result from not buying and managing the servers and other physical infrastructure needed to run the software.

Flextronics was one of Workday’s first and largest customers. In 2007, when Flextronics CIO David Smoley began considering Workday’s application, however, he was in a pickle.
The company had just acquired electronics manufacturer Solectron, which outsourced its HR systems to Convergys and he needed to streamline the 40 or so other human resources systems the company used globally to support its approximately 200,000 employees. 

Smoley realized he could save tens of millions of dollars, and buy himself some budgetary wiggle room, just by rationalizing all those systems.   Flextronics has razor-thin operating margins of about 3% and Smoley typically pays for new IT projects through savings he is able to generate with them. Frustrated by the high maintenance fees the company paid large software vendors like SAP, and impressed by the pay-as-you-go business model and product road map presented by Workday co-founders Dave Duffield and Aneel Bhusri – both former PeopleSoft executives — he got the blessing of Flextronics CEO Mike McNamara to take a risk on the startup. The company standardized on Workday globally and, along with other shifts, saved $100 million in three years. 

The timing worked because of the Solectron acquisition. And while human resource systems are important, they’re not as mission critical to Flextronics as, say, the company’s manufacturing systems. For Smoley and Flextronics, moving to Workday was a risk, but a calculated one.
Rachael King  WSJ

Microsoft's leadership in cloud collaboration

Forrester noted: "Office 365 eases enterprises into the cloud by allowing IT leaders to pick which collaboration workloads move into the cloud and which remain on-premises." In this evaluation, Microsoft had the top scores in sub-categories for breadth of offering, and availability and resiliency, and was tied with other vendors for the top scores in sub-categories for language localization, IT administration, customization, pricing structure, service delivery mechanisms, integration, corporate customers, and partner ecosystem.

Forrester Research, Inc., has named Microsoft as a leader in the cloud collaboration market in its August 2012 report entitled "The Forrester Wave^TM: Cloud Strategies of Online Collaboration Software Vendors, Q3 2012." 
 

Among eight vendors, Microsoft's Office 365, which includes SharePoint Online, earned the highest score for "Current Offering." Recent Microsoft acquisition Yammer landed the top score for "Strategy." Microsoft's leadership in cloud collaboration is one of the reasons why Office 365 is on track to be one of the fastest growing offers in Microsoft history.  With Microsoft products and services, customers can get the best productivity experience in the cloud and on-premises, and always on their terms.  

80,000 Employees VINCI Moves 1to Office 365 - Why Microsoft - Site Home - TechNet Blogs

Another major win for Microsoft this week. VINCI, the world’s leading facilities management and construction group, recently replaced Google Apps for Business and two other collaborative working solutions with Microsoft Office 365.

The company, which has 183,000 employees in 2,500 subsidiaries spread across 100 countries, wanted to create a social network that encouraged employee collaboration and nurtured the development of its corporate culture and working methods. The company chose Office 365 for three reasons:

• Maturity – VINCI wanted a complete and unified solution founded on Microsoft's 30 years of expertise and capable of meeting the company’s specific business requirements. Executives particularly appreciated the unified communications tools with Lync.
  
• Innovation and roadmap – VINCI liked the Microsoft outlook for future innovation in the realm of business social networks, concluding that it would open up new prospects for collaboration.
  
• Flexibility – The company sought the flexibility of a hybrid solution that could be deployed in the cloud or on-premises so that it could serve its numerous subsidiaries with varied technological requirements. It also wanted its employees to be able to work both online and offline.
  

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Cloud veilig met revolutionaire micro-virtualisatie | Webwereld

Leuk artikel over micro-virtualisatie van Henk-Jan Buis.

De bedenkers van Xen komen met een revolutionaire methode om cloudservers veiliger te maken. Door middel van micro-virtualisatie krijgen hackers geen kans om mee te liften op cloudresources.

Het Amerikaanse bedrijf Bromium neemt een groot obstakel voor clouduitrol weg en belooft de cloud veilig te maken tegen hackers door middel van verregaande virtualisatie. Malware en andere bedreigingen worden opgevangen in micro-virtuele machines (micro-VM's). Een van de grote voordelen van deze 'micro-virtualisatie' is volgens de makers dat bedrijven vast kunnen houden aan de pc of laptop en voor virtuele desktops niet hoeven over te stappen naar hardwareclients die volledig op de cloud draaien. Cloud veilig met revolutionaire micro-virtualisatie

IBM The power of cloud

Wie de cloud opvat als 'een kosten-kunstje' onderschat haar. Bedrijven wenden zich in toenemende mate tot de cloud om hun bedrijfsmodellen te vernieuwen, zegt IBM.

Nu gebruikt 16 procent van bedrijven cloudtechnologie strategisch; in 2015 zet naar verwachting 35 procent de cloud in voor het veranderen van z'n bedrijfsvoering. Dat meldt IBM in zijn eerder deze maand vrijgegeven rapport 'The Power of Cloud: Driving business model innovation', waarvoor het technologiebedrijf met hulp van de Economist Intelligence Unit meer dan 500 technologie- en business-verantwoordelijken bevroeg.

IBM The power of cloud

10 Key Findings Cloud, adoptieversnelling in Europa verwacht

Uit wereldwijd uitgevoerd onderzoek doorTata Consultancy Services blijkt dat bedrijven cloud computing als een belangrijk technologiestrategie hebben opgepakt. Het stadium van pilots heeft men in Latijns-Amerika en Azie achter zich gelaten. Cloudapplicaties vormen al een substantieel onderdeel van grote zakelijke IT-infrastructuren meent TCS.  Aan het internationale onderzoek deden ruim 600 senior managers en corporate IT-managers van grote bedrijven mee. Persbericht. Het volledige onderzoek is te downloaden.

10 Key Findings

The final stream of research was capturing the experiences of TCS cloud experts – professionals who are working with companies on a daily basis about cloud computing issues. From our analysis of the data from all three research streams, TCS uncovered 10 findings that explain how large companies around the world are using cloud applications, to what benefit, with what concerns, and with what future plans:

Finding No. 1: Despite the hype, cloud applications do not rule the large corporation, although their usage is expected to increase significantly. Cloud applications are still in the minority of all applications in companies (19% of the average large U.S. company’s applications, 12% in Europe, 28% in Asia-Pacific, and 39% in Latin American companies). But they expect the ratio of cloud to on-premises applications to increase greatly by 2014.  The case of Australia’s largest bank, Commonwealth Bank of Australia, illustrates why many companies have gained a voracious appetite for cloud applications. (Read more)

Finding No. 2: The biggest driver of cloud applications is not to cut IT costs.  IT cost reduction is an important factor, but not the most important. Rather, standardizing software applications and business processes across a company (in the U.S. and Asia-Pacific) and ramping systems up or down faster (in Europe and Latin America) are the most highly rated drivers for shifting on-premises applications to the cloud. And the factors driving companies to launch entirely new applications in the cloud are quite different – to institute new business processes and launch new technology-dependent products and services. The case of assessment testing company CTB/McGraw-Hill shows why cloud computing will become a key tool for delivering pioneering IT-enabled offerings. (Read more)

Finding No. 3: The early returns on cloud applications are impressive. Companies using cloud applications are increasing the number of standard applications and business processes, reducing cycle times to ramp up IT resources, cutting IT costs, and launching a greater number of new products and processes. The story of a major telco shows the ambitions of the some of the most aggressive cloud adopters. (Read more)

Finding No. 4: Customer-facing business functions are garnering the largest share of the cloud application budget.  Marketing, sales and service are capturing at least 40% of that budget in all four regions. The experiences of Dell’s enterprise sector online marketing function shows how one large company is trying to get closer to customers through cloud marketing applications.  And a new private cloud at Web media company AOL Inc. explains how a technology-dependent company can make its technology more responsive and cost-effective. (Read more)

Finding No. 5: Many companies are reluctant to put applications with sensitive data in the cloud. In the U.S. and Europe, the applications least frequently shifted from on-premises computers to the cloud were those that compiled data on employees (e.g., payroll), legal issues (legal management systems), product (pricing and product testing), and certain customer information (e.g., customer loyalty and e-commerce transactions). Still, some companies had shifted applications with customer data to the cloud, especially in customer service, and many planned to shift a number of customer-related applications to the cloud by 2014. (Read more)

Finding No. 6: The heaviest users of cloud applications are the companies that manufacture the technology hardware that enables cloud computing (computers/electronics/telecom equipment), while healthcare services providers are the lightest users (in terms of average number cloud apps per business function).  (Read more)

Finding No. 7: The most aggressive adopters of cloud applications are companies in Asia-Pacific and Latin America. They report having much higher percentages of cloud apps to total apps – and bigger results from cloud apps than their peers in the U.S. and Europe. We show how a large consumer products company uses the cloud to respond rapidly and effectively to consumer issues around the world. (Read more)

Finding No. 8: Despite a significant shift to cloud applications, most companies (especially in Europe) remain conservative about which applications they put in public clouds. Less than 20% of U.S. and European companies would consider or seriously consider putting their most critical applications in public clouds. But 66% of U.S. and 48% of European companies would consider putting core applications in private clouds. (Read more)

Finding No. 9: The keys to adopting and benefiting from cloud applications are overcoming fear of security risks and skepticism about ROI. (Read more)

Finding No. 10: Companies evaluate cloud vendors most on their security and reliability/uptime capabilities – and far less on their price. This was the case in all four regions. In fact, price typically finished at the bottom of a list of nine factors in making the cloud application purchasing decision. (Read more).

Microsoft Office Live Small Business customers: The clock is ticking | ZDNet

Microsoft Office Live Small Business customers: The clock is ticking | ZDNet

Microsoft officials said back in October 2010 that the company planned to phase out its Office Live Small Business (OLSB) Web-site hosting and design offering.

The date when that is set to happen — April 30, 2012 — is quickly approaching. Existing OLSB users need to make some decisions and take action in order to avoid losing their Web sites and content.

Application Performance in Complex and Hybrid Environments

Only a decade ago, IT organizations mostly managed transactions between application servers and the end user’s desktop and most of this work was done inside the corporate firewall. Modern companies field applications to users both within and outside the firewall – applications which may be hosted on virtualized servers, or even in the cloud, rather than on a traditional monolithic server, and which may be deployed to a wide variety of systems and devices. In such a complex environment, application performance has become more difficult to monitor and manage. 

Recent research in End-User Monitoring and Management (August 2010) reveals that 75% of companies perform some kind of systems or application monitoring, while only 24% monitor applications outside the firewall. As the complexity of IT environments increases, and user expectations continue to rise, companies are feeling more pressured than ever before to understand how their applications are performing, and to improve that performance.
 
Source: AberdeenGroup

The People’s Choice, Office 365

 Office 365 encompasses all the capabilities that we currently use with Microsoft Business Productivity Online Standard Suite and takes them to the next level by making it even easier to work from anywhere. We are looking forward to using it… Because Office 365 has the same look and feel as other Office products, which everyone is familiar with, our employees will be very comfortable using it. It really eliminates the learning curve and the amount of training needed.”  TechNet Blogs

Zakelijke apps zitten in de lift

Zakelijke apps zitten in de lift

Het bedrijfsleven ziet steeds meer in het gebruik van apps, zo blijkt uit onderzoek van Symantec. De afdeling IT-beheer moet daarvoor wel alle zeilen bijzetten, door continu een afweging te maken tussen het nut en de mogelijke bedreigingen van een app.

Symantec heeft de resultaten van het onderzoek vervat in de zogeheten State of Mobility Survey 2012 [PDF]. Dat onderzoek laat ook een toename te zien in het gebruik van mobiele applicaties binnen Nederlandse organisaties. Van de bedrijven geeft 73 procent aan dat zij op zijn minst aan het nadenken zijn over het gebruik van op maat gemaakte mobiele applicaties.

Een derde geeft aan op dit moment mobiele applicaties aan het implementeren te zijn of deze al geïmplementeerd te hebben. Maar een even grote groep laat weten het gebruik van apps nog 'een uitdaging' te vinden.

Bron: Automatisering Gids

OpenText Places New Business Processes on Azure

It's only a little over a month since OpenText launched its business process management strategy and already we’re starting to see some moves from the Business Process Solutions group. This week’s announcement sees OpenText adding a list of process and case management solutions to the Azure platform. The relationship between OpenText and Microsoft has been well documented before, and OpenText already placed its records management and archiving solutions on Azure more than three years ago. But this is taking that relationship to a new level and, apart from the fact that users will now have the possibility of deploying these solutions on-premise, in the cloud, or as a hybrid combination of both, the functionality that is now being offered has been considerably extended.

Symantec Lands LiveOffice

Symantec Corp. announced the acquisition of LiveOffice for US$ 115 million on January 16th. LiveOffice, Symantec’s hosted archiving OEM partner for Enterprise Vault.cloud, will add a cloud-based messaging protection solution to Symantec's information security and management solutions arsenal.

6 Stocks to Gain From Tech Battle Starting in 2012

IDC said the list of leaders includes International Business Machines(IBM_), Microsoft(MSFT_) and Oracle(ORCL_). But they will be challenged by Amazon(AMZN_), Google(GOOG_), Salesforce.com(CRM_) and VMware(VMW_) in cloud computing and software services.

Big firms will look for an edge by buying smaller firms with complementary technology. "Look for Microsoft to buy a content/media cloud, like Netflix(NFLX_), to provide a marketplace for its apps and content," IDC said in a research note.

Other prime targets for acquisition, IDC said, are cloud applications/software-as-service companies, such as privately held Workday, an on-demand financial-management and human-capital-management software vendor; NetSuite(N_), which delivers enterprise software over the Internet; and Taleo(TLEO_), a human-resources software company that provides an on-demand, Internet-based software product.

Fidelity identifies the stocks it thinks will benefit from these trends, but the detail in Chai's report is such that we picked several that we thought matched his generic profile and most of them are also named by IDC as potential big winners. 

The six stocks that are among those that are already among the leaders in the IT industry expected to benefit most from IT's changes:

"Cloud computing -- using networks rather than local computers to manage data and run software -- represents an architectural shift," said Chai, who works in Fidelity's Hong Kong offices.

The beneficiaries of cloud computing's growth "will include platform providers, whose value-added will likely be in the management software to run large-scale virtualized systems," Chai said. "And given their complexity, competition from new players will be limited and early providers are likely to capture the majority of market share."

Providers of Internet infrastructure, applications, and security also will benefit from the trend toward aggregated off-site centralized computing, as will software firms capable of providing software as a service.

That service eliminates the need to buy proprietary IT infrastructure, as users can access it when they need it over the Internet and only pay for what they use.

Big data refers to new types of large data sets, everything from correspondence to confidential customer information, have emerged because of advances in technology, including mobile computing.

Driving these changes is the growth of mobile computing. Data transfer from that sector alone is expected to grow at a cumulative annualized rate of 92% between 2010 and 2015, according to Fidelity's research.

IDC said in its outlook for next year that 2012 will be a battleground for those offering cloud services "as the strategic focus shifts from building infrastructure to the creation of application platforms and ecosystems." 

TheStreet

6 punten, vergelijk Google Docs met Microsoft Office Word App

Kijk en ervaar zelf het verschil.  Vergelijk de resultaten Google Docs en Office Word Web App.  Volgens mij gaan  er bij Google Docs een aantal dingen mis, met name zijn er file integriteits problemen.

Don´t Blink

How Cloud Computing is Changing Many Job Descriptions

Just as cloud computing is a game-changer for many companies, it is also changing the nature of jobs – not only within the information technology department, but in other parts of the enterprise as well.

Photo Credit VitruviusMedia

 For senior-level executives, especially chief information officers, the changes reflect the more strategic role IT plays in the direction of businesses. For the business, it introduces more reliable and predictable supporting technology.

“For a long period of time, IT was in that Wild West mode,” Greg Shields, partner and principal technologist with Concentrated Technology, recently told Jason Helmick of Interface Technical Training. “We were making up the rules as we go.” But companies and their IT leaders recognize that the best and most cost-effective solutions are those that may have been built and tested elsewhere. “You don’t grow your own food. You don’t raise your own cows anymore for meat. You go to the grocery store because somebody’s figured out that I can create this experience that is the grocery store, and I can do it at a lower cost, both in time and in dollar cost.”
The ability to identify and leverage resources –whether they come from the cloud or the company’s own data center — is becoming a key part of IT leaders’ responsibilities. The ability to introduce and develop valuable cloud computing engagements or infrastructure may even be the ticket to the corner office, as recently discussed in a study from CA Technologies.


A majority of 685 CIOs surveyed, 54%, believe that cloud computing has enabled them to spend more time on business strategy and innovation. Approximately 71% who have adopted cloud computing see their position as a viable path to pursue other management roles, compared to only 44% of non-cloud adopting CIOs.




Part of the challenge, however, will still be being able to bring in the skills that will make it all work. As Chuck Hollis, VP of global marketing CTO for EMC Corporation, put it in his blog post late last year: “If you’re an IT leader, you’ve got an interesting challenge on your hands. You most likely don’t have the right portfolio of end-state roles, skills and processes. And you are probably lacking the people with skills who can lead the change from present state to future state.”
As a result of the shift to cloud, there is growing demand for professionals and managers that are more focused on business development than they are in application development. There will be greater opportunities for enterprise architects, and some offshoots will include cloud architects, cloud capacity planners, cloud service managers and business solutions consultants. Jobs being created may not always bear the term “cloud” in their titles, but cloud will form the core of their job descriptions.

Consider enterprise or business architects, for starters. This emerging discipline will help bridge the gap between IT and the business at a time when it could be extremely costly to have such a gap. “Business executive involvement will be especially helpful when outsourcing IT processes, such as cloud computing,” says Steve Nunn, COO of The Open Group and CEO of the Association of Enterprise Architects. Adding to Nunn’s thoughts, Kevin Daley of IBM and vice-chair of The Open Group Business Forum, says the enterprise architect will play a key role in bringing cloud into the business. “Cloud will help increase the speed of development and change. The business architect will be called upon to ensure the strategic relevancy of transformation in a repeatable fashion as cycle times and rollouts happen faster.”
EMC’s Hollis also pointed out that in many cases, managers and professionals working with cloud will be the “infrastructure enablers” – they will be charged with creating “the cloud-like environment that can support the next-gen processes and workflows that will be needed in this new environment. Implied in this work is re-orienting traditional and specific technology-oriented disciplines (e.g. storage, server, etc.) to the newworkflows and processes coming from the other side of the equation.”

Software engineers appear to be in a good spot as a result of the growth of cloud. Consider the fact that earlier in 2011, CareerCast determined software engineers to be the best job to have in today’s economy, thanks in no small part to the rise of cloud computing: “A proliferation of companies making applications for smartphones and tablets, along with the push to develop ‘cloud’ software hosted entirely online, has made the job market for software engineers broader and more diverse.”
A perusal through recent job openings provides a glimpse of the new emerging class of professionals and managers who will make IT happen in the years ahead. Here are just a few job titles and descriptions culled from recent help-wanted sites — note how much engagement there is with the business:

• Cloud Specialist: This professional will “provide expertise, design, engineering, troubleshooting of the cloud environment, collaborate with project managers and engineers to ensure cloud computing best practices are followed and applied.”
• Cloud Computing Architect: “Serves a critical role to drive the architect/design and implementation for [our] cloud-based solutions. Drive the architecture/design and implementation to migrate [our product] to a cloud-based PaaS and SaaS product. Interact effectively with CTO, product manager, and engineering managers to drive an optimized solution under known constraints. Mentor the team to adopt development and QA processes or best practices for cloud computing. Provide innovative idea or direction to [our] product.’
• Systems Engineer – Cloud Computing: “This individual will be a member of the system engineering team and will support an initiative to transition [federal agency] services to a cloud computing environment. The job will include developing the agency’s cloud computing strategy, cloud suitability assessment, and 3-5 year cloud computing plan for an environment that is comprised of programs that are safety critical (high RMA, security, and performance levels) and as well as administrative and support. Strong oral and written communication skills are necessary and individual who is self-motivated and eager to research and identify solutions critical to the public.”
• Lead Software Developer – Cloud Computing Focused: “This position is a great opportunity for someone who is motivated by building high business value applications and working with smaller teams to directly influence company growth. [We need] you to put your emerging cloud technologies skills to use designing and developing the next generation of software. Lead technological foray into cloud based platforms such as SalesForce.com, Azure, Google, & Amazon.”
• Cloud Architect – Infrastructure: “This is a technical role where you will be working with key clients and prospects helping them architect proper cloud solutions. Prime responsibilities include designing and architecting innovative and practical cloud based solution for clients; defining and recommending the cloud adoption roadmap for clients; interacting at the client’s CIO/CTO levels and their architecture teams.”
• Cloud Alliance Manager: “Focuses on the overall, ongoing management of [our] cloud computing service provider partnerships. This is done through the development and implementation of successful marketing programs unique to the specific cloud category, business units and
  selling venues, supported by the development of competitive strategies relative to vendors, pricing, assortment and solutions.”
• Virtualization & Cloud Computing Subject Matter Expert: “Will support cloud computing strategy and roadmap development from a mission and technical perspective including identification of potential obstacles and solutions regarding the use of cloud computing in a client environment.”

 Forbes

Cloud is Now according to KPMG Report

©RonaldScherpenisse

The vast majority of senior executives globally say their organizations have already moved at least some business activities to the Cloud and expect 2012 investment to skyrocket, with some companies planning to spend more than a fifth of their IT budget on Cloud next year, according to a report by KPMG International.

“Clearly, these findings proclaim, ‘the Cloud is now,’” said Bryan Cruickshank, KPMG head of Global IT Advisory, Management Consulting. “Clearly Cloud is transcending IT and widely impacting business operations, as a full third of survey respondents said it would fundamentally change their business, which is significant considering many organizations are still developing their Cloud strategies.”

In a KPMG global survey of organizations that will use the Cloud, as well as companies that will provide Cloud services, economic factors were cited by 76 percent of both groups as an important driver for Cloud adoption. However, a number of other considerations were equally or more important: 80 percent said the switch to Cloud was driven by efforts to improve processes, offering more agility across the enterprise; 79 percent of users and 76 percent of providers said they saw it as having technical benefits, in some cases improvements that they otherwise could not gain from their own data centers; and, 76 percent said the use of Cloud would have strategic benefits, possibly including transforming their business models to gain a competitive advantage.

Most user respondents to the KPMG survey (81 percent) said they were either evaluating Cloud, planned a Cloud implementation, or had already adopted a Cloud strategy and timeline for their organization, with almost one-quarter of them saying their organization already runs all core IT services on the Cloud (10 percent) or is in transition to do so (13 percent). Fewer than one in 10 executives say their company has no immediate plans to enter the Cloud environment.

“Cloud adoption is quickly shifting from a competitive advantage to an operational necessity, enabling innovation that can create new business models and opportunities,” said Steve Hasty, head of Global IT Advisory, Risk Consulting. “As this rapid adoption curve continues to gain momentum amid a struggling global economy, it is important for corporate leadership, directors and boards to be informed and engaged in strategic discussions about Cloud’s impact on their long-term growth opportunities and competitiveness.”

Hasty pointed out that the role of the corporate Cloud leader remained contentious. IT executives see migration to the Cloud as their initiative, while operations executives believe the CEO should lead the change. “Enter the Chief Integration Officer, as the traditional CIO’s role expands to break down potential silos and integrate internal and external business needs, systems and partners,” said Hasty. Continued
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