Blade Watch

Business Week

I would have liked to attend the MIT Sloan CIO Symposium  on Wednesday. I couldn’t make it to Boston but I followed the conference via blogs and the Twitter stream of CIO reporter Kim Nash. Panelists discussed the evolving role of the CIO in light of cloud computing. Some suggested that the job of CIOs would be radically different when enterprise technology moves to the cloud and that CIOs might even need new titles.

I think these discussions are premature at best. While software as a service and cloud computing are making their way into portions of the enterprise, most CIOs are taking baby steps. It will take years before CIOs at Fortune 500 companies need to worry about new job titles. Surveys show that cloud computing and software as a service aren’t currently high priorities for CIOs.

A 2009 survey on IT spending by Goldman Sachs ranked cloud services #33 on the list of spending priorities among CIOs, with about 50 percent saying that it was a low priority. Software as a service ranked even lower at #36, with more than 60 percent categorizing it as a low priority. Check out the chart here.

An interesting post talking about cloud computing. There’s been a lot of buzz and talk about cloud computing, people saying it’s a concern of big business, others saying it’s rubbish, both are right and wrong at the same time. In many respects the CIO is often so busy doing the day to day work, resourcing, dealing with issues, keeping different stakeholders happy, that moving onto a new platform for business might not be at the top of their concerns as much as headcount, budgets or data center space?

The fundamental justification for CIO will come from specific needs or services which are needed but might be better funded and provided by an external provider, they might not necessarily be key or core to the business. So we might see a derivative of cloud in the respect of an external internal cloud. By that I mean, I want capacity for my analytics application, I need 1500 blades running windows, I don’t want to buy them or provide the data center space, the vendor provides everything and I pay per cpu, per blade or whatever model we can make that meets my cost or investment criteria (no capex etc). I wonder also if we might see this more in the disaster recovery area? Where I might buy a data center with virtualization infrastructure put in place – but again in the enterprise, it’s going to be more likely customer specific in terms of specification and data, until we deal with issues relating to data ownership, concepts about billing and context – the what if scenarios regarding billing, upgrades, changes to configuration and requirements.

Related posts:

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