Bladewatch.com

Network World

One-third of 1,200 organizations (33%) plan to convert their application environments away from a traditional, client-server model to one based on virtualization and cloud computing over the next two years, according to a study commissioned by Microsoft and released today. The study sought to broadly determine global IT spending priorities.

The most interesting part of this (technologies aside) is how we manage the change within the enterprise, how we change and updated our processes, our billing and management, don’t get me wrong, we’ll still need server, storage and networks people, but do the roles not change from you do Windows and nothing else, to you do Windows on thin client technology, so you need to know VMware, Hyper-V, Windows, thin client technology etc, and how does this affect career progression, salaries and everything else? In a cloud/virtualization platform isn’t service delivery ever more important as everything is dependent on everything else, the days of answering the phone and saying “the server pings and it works for me…” are gone, we want service delivery based technical people. Does this not mean I want someone that knows enough of specific platforms/applications rather than specialist in everything?

Are businesses ready for this kind of environment and how do we transform our organization in terms of costs structures, budget and delivery? How do I strategically protect my business value? Is information, design, the application if you like not becoming your core business rather than the business function? If we take the car market, could I dare say the statement I don’t care who builds the car, providing it meets Volvo design, parts and standards? Could we ever see the era where you buy a design and have it built locally rather than ship a car around the world? What does that say for the car manufacturer? For the investment bank? Does an investment bank become a trade desk and a team of developers? This becomes ever more relevant if your subsidiaries, competitors or partners are white labeling your applications, your infrastructure for their business – who’s core business is that? Where is the value to shareholders/stakeholders/partners? What stops Bill from Oxford creating a massive trading house by running a series of applications white labeled from an investment house – how do we value Bill’s company and revenues? Is it not a brand rather than a business?

If I use VMware as a platform for my infrastructure, how many years away are we from Exchange, from Lotus Notes or my inhouse applications being written for Xen, for VMware containers rather than Windows 2003? Is VMware becoming the operating system, and everything becoming integrated to the application?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.