The Role of IT in 2011: Just Saying No is Not an Option

I’ve been working on my 2011 cloud integration predictions and came across this fantastic interview on the Salesforce blog between John Taschek and Gartner’s Daryl Plummer. The provocative post is called, “IT: Become Relevant or Die.” Here’s the interview…be sure to have pen and paper ready for note taking (yes, I’m old school).

 

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Cloud and SaaS will Have the Greatest Impact on IT

Just as many retailers have already rolled out the Christmas cheer, it seems that industry prediction season has started early this year. Check out this summary of Forrester’s 15 Technologies to Watch Out For. According to the report:

“Cloud and SaaS will also have the greatest impact on IT  as executives determine where to invest resources, adopt new application support practices for SaaS, and re-evaluate capacity issues and architecture standards.”

And according to Forrester analyst Gene Leganza, enterprises should “think outside the box, and enable employees to do so, by evaluating the key technology trends driving empowered technologies”. He went on to share more details of the report on his blog. Here’s an interesting table summarizing his research:

I predict we have not seen the last of Cloud/SaaS-centric predictions…and I tend to agree!

Integration as a Cloud Bridge

I heard this line from a CIO today:

“The cloud has been a destination for us. Integration is now the key to connecting our clouds to the rest of the enterprise.”

So if cloud is your destination, better start investing in the right short, medium, and long-term bridge…

7 Criteria for Evaluating Cloud Solutions

I had a conversation today with an IT director at a very large company who listed these 7 criteria as essential when evaluating a cloud-based application, platform or infrastructure:

1. Security Compliance
2. Cost
3. Ownership of Data (Privacy)
4. Performance
5. Integration
6. Extra Capacity (Scalability)
7. Disaster Recovery

I thought it was a pretty good list. Not too different from the Forrester research on SaaS concerns.

Do you agree with the list? How would you prioritize it? What’s missing?

Ten Things a CEO Should Know About Cloud Computing

Deloitte put out a press release today called, “10 Things a CEO Should know About Cloud Computing.” While I’m not so sure a CEO needs to know all of this (a CIO definitely does), I thought #8 was particularly strong:

Integration with the cloud

According to Forrester, integration is one of the top concerns people have about cloud computing. Therefore it is going to be one of the main drivers of user adoption of the cloud. Integration cost and duration, integrating software as a service (SaaS) and traditional applications and managing and monitoring interfaces are key challenges around integration.

To respond to the integration challenges underlying most implementations, cloud vendors are now proposing SaaS integration solutions that offer an easy way to integrate systems compared to traditional approaches.

SaaS FUD: Security and Integration Top the List (Again)

Security and integration concerns top the list (again) of software as service fear, uncertainty and doubt, according to a recent Forrester survey:

This CIO.com article provides a good overview of the research report, with lots of quotes from analyst Liz Herbert. Here’s a good one:

“Some tools make it possible for non-IT roles to manage ongoing integration points (within reason), which appeals to business populations that are attracted to SaaS to gain independence from IT. However, sourcing and IT professionals should typically get involved to make sure that the integrations are cost-effective and avoid duplicating integration work being done elsewhere in the organization.”

Agreed.

The article also links to a thought-provoking article by Brian Sommer called, “9 Questions every SaaS vendor needs to be able to answer.” It’s a great summary of what’s on the minds of large enterprise CIOs when it comes to SaaS.

Cloud Computing: The Dreaded “I” Word

“The biggest worries of all are centered on what one CIO friend calls “The dreaded ‘I’ word: Integration.”"

CIO.com put cloud integration in the spotlight this week. Maryfran Johnson introduces the topic in this overview:  Cloud Integration Triggers Familiar Headaches, which sets up a detailed article by Kim Nash called, “Cloud Computing:  What CIOs Need to Know About Integration.  The article features interviews with Judith Hurwitz (who calls integration “the most important issues in the cloud”), the CTO of Finra, and the CIOs of Santander Consumer USA, Shorenstein Properties, PDS Tech, Shaklee Corporation, Bay and Bay Transportation, Legg Mason, and others.

Here’s the link to the full article. And in a different, but very much related story, you might also want to check out this CIO.com article: The Politics of Cloud Apps: Beware IT Staff Unrest.

Bottom line seems to be that there may be a U in Cloud, but whatever you do, don’t forget the “Dreaded I”…

Press Panel at All About the Cloud SIIA Conference

I attended the press panel at this week’s All About the Cloud SIIA Conference in San Francisco.  While there was some general negativity towards cloud computing hype, there was consensus on the inevitability of the market shift to the model.

Kara Swisher from the Wall Street Journal was particularly outspoken (and entertaining). I would definitely attend any panel that includes her as a participant in the future! You can check out the #AATC tag to find some of the musings. I jotted a few quotes down as well. To paraphrase from the panelists..

“CIOs are notoriously obstructive to anything that’s innovative.”

“Cloud will be led by CEOs.”

“It’s not that I’m optimistic about the cloud, it’s that it’s inevitable.”

“The cloud is like penicillin. This is what you’re going to be using now. “

“Who buys CDs, other than some old dude in my neighborhood?”

“It’s like a horse and buggy clinging to dirt roads.”

Agree? Disagree?

Drowning in Data: The Cloud Opportunity and Threat

These two headlines caught my attention today:

• New OAUG Survey Reveals Enterprises Drowning In Their Own Application Data
• IT Spending On Cloud Ratcheting Up

Whether you believe that Applications Don’t Matter or not, will the clouds accelerate or slow down the data flood? As one CIO on today’s SaaScon Cloud Integration Panel put it:   “Data isn’t born and doesn’t die on premise!” My sense is that we’re poised for the perfect storm… (sorry, the cloud cliches are just too easy!)

Check out these stats from the Oracle Applications User Group survey:

• 42 percent require one to five full-time employees to maintain a “legacy application”
• One in seven requires even more headcount, and 14 percent devote a tenth of their annual IT budget to maintaining such applications
• 75 percent make up to five copies of live production data for non-production purposes

And based on the Sandhill.com survey, M.R. Rangaswami projects that:

“Large enterprises with 10,000 to 15,000 applications are considering moving 2,000-3,000 applications to the cloud over the next three years or obtaining them there as software as a service.”

The data problem is getting worse and the shift to SaaS, PaaS, and Infrastructure as a Service is happening more quickly than most people thought. This probably explains why integration was mentioned in every CIO and vendor session I attended today at SaaScon.  Cloud computing may be the solution to many of the application issues cited above, but if cloud integration isn’t prioritized and managed from the outset, you’re just heading towards a much bigger data fragmentation problem and you won’t be coming up for air anytime soon…

Phase Two Cloud Integration

Interesting article in InformationWeek today called Practical Analysis:  How to Lead in Cloud Adoption. It’s a summary of a recent panel that featured Informatica’s CIO Tony Young and James Barrese, who’s the VP of Architecture, Platforms and Systems at eBay. Sounds like it was a wide-ranging discussion about all things cloud. This paragraph is particularly relevant to the topic of cloud data integration:

“For both panelists, there were other concerns for maturity. One that I found particularly interesting is the way many SaaS vendors sell their products–convincing line of business owners of their product’s value by demonstrating whizbang user interfaces and cool features, while essentially daring the IT department to stop the sale with their esoteric concerns like data integration capabilities, user management, and data security models (you know the little stuff). The threat of this sort of adoption alone should make IT execs very amenable to discussions about adopting SaaS applications. Better to help vet them upfront than to try to unseat them after the fact.”

I wrote about a phenomenon I call “phase two cloud integration“ in this post:  The Dangers of Delaying Cloud Integration. Possible reasons for delaying integration in the initial phases of a SaaS application roll out include:

1. SaaS application sales reps want to check the integration box and avoid slowing the deal down with potentially complex integration discussions
2. Prospects are told that data migration, synchronization and replication are easy thanks to a few free tools, Excel spreadsheets, and a Web Services API
3. LOB either doesn’t have technical resources or simply don’t want to have to get IT involved as they’ll slow things down

With all of the talk about the importance of data integration in the era of cloud computing, I think we’re going to see the role of integration (and even IT) change and evolve. Stay tuned…