Blade Watch

http://www.computerweekly.com/Articles/2009/12/04/239596/Will-the-IT-department-die-if-it-does-not-build-private-clouds.htm

IT departments face the challenge of making technology available to business users through the web while retaining control of security and data.

The future could see a user request a service and the public cloud delivering the most appropriate application automatically according to the price and security demanded by the user.

To this end, businesses are building private clouds as a stepping stone to public clouds, according to Gartner. The analyst firm says companies will spend more on developing private clouds than they will on services from cloud suppliers.

I am always interested by these articles. What I think we are seeing going forward is the change from IT doing the nuts and bolts elements of the infrastructure more towards a vendor relationship and service delivery stance. Interestingly the viewpoint is divided, some CIOs see that who provides the technology, who does the different pieces of the infrastructure puzzle is irrelevant. At the same time, there are those that argue that an IT person employed by the organization will be more committed, better informed and able to deliver IT services to meet the business specific requirements, they have the site knowledge, the experience with the enterprise platforms, how to get things done. It can go either way, the enterprise is going to react differently to the SME, to the medium sized business, is there a benefit to an SME buying a device to prevent email SPAM, secure their email infrastructure, when they can simply buy in an email service from a cloud or a service provider. For IT and for the business to move forward we need two things the business to place an internal value upon elements of the infrastructure – what is core to the business, what is not, what we are prepared to buy in, and what might be bought in but could be easily done internally at marginal cost. I could have someone else build our servers before they are delivered, but if I had the right set of tools and infrastructure, we can do this just as easily and avoid the per server operating system load cost (it might go either way).

IT has an opportunity right now. We either in effect say, right this is the way we do business in technology terms for the business, take a risk and innovate, improve process, delivery and that way compete against external suppliers, or change towards an enabler to change. You want to buy in your high performance blade capacity, great, here are the things you need to think about and what we can do to help. The days of box selling are over, but that does not mean the days for IT are. Users want effective delivery, they might not care who delivers it, but they do care that it works, that it is on time, that outages are managed and the perception that we care, that we mean business so to speak. With that in mind, we need a sense of branding, of ownership, computer says no, that is not how we do things are all phrases that need to change from the norm to the exception. That does not mean we loose quality or control of the infrastructure, it means a change of mind set from IT doing things because that is how it has always been, to actually managing the needs of the business, with what is possible right now, possible with a bit of investment, or possible with our next generation infrastructure upon which we should be building our business – capacity anyone, not a problem, it is over there, fill your boots.

It is so easy to sit outside and say it is crazy the way things work, that IT is in effect rubbish, put any vendor/service provider or business under the same terms and conditions, operating politics and organizational divides and I wonder whether you might face equal levels of service and delivery. Without business backing and I mean real business backing, your IT delivers what it is you ask, if you do not explain what it is you want, establish processes both in terms of helpdesk workflows, investment and freedom, then you will get out exactly what you put in. That back office refuse to buy new servers, means middle office can say the same thing, IT can hide costs for a while, maintain stability for the short term, but ultimately if you are not innovating, your treading water, technically and operationally, your IT and your business is doomed to mediocrity, and at the mercy of the lowest operating cost – Mike from accounts wont buy a new PC, he has a Pentium 300, that means all drivers, all packages, all firmware and software has to be validated, tested against Mike and his PC, but Mike only ever pays his fixed support cost, annualized and averaged out from the budget that is IT.

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