Mike_Lingo_Book_-_Final_Copy

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HEY! YOU!GET ONTOMYCLOUD

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HEY! YOU! GET ONTO MY CLOUD

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HEY! YOU!GET ONTOMYCLOUDMIKE LINGOWITH JON OBERMEYER

A S T A D I A P R E S S

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TO ALL THOSE WHO TAUGHT ME THAT I CAN DO ANYTHING AND EvERYTHING I SET MY MIND TO:

Jeanne Kibler, John Doe and Exene, Mike Watt

and D. Boon, Jeanette Guthrie, my mom and

dad Helene and Jack Lingo, Michael Marendo,

and last but not least my wife Rebecca, who

bears a big challenge in raising three awe-

some children named Meejung, Minna and

Noah while I traverse the globe servicing

clients every day of the week. I’m humbled by

your dedication and perserverance.

Thanks also to John Miller and Jon Obermeyer

for their patience with me. Thank you for

making this possible!

First editionCopyright ©2010 by Mike Lingo

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Astadia Press. Astadia is a registered trademark.

www.astadia.com

Book design by John Miller

Printed in the United States of America

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LINGOCONTENTS

Foreword The Car Commercial 1

Drivers1 A Warning to IT 52 TCO: Total Cost of Onerous 83 Blame the Consumer 11 4 Time to Rent Again 155 Doing More with More 176 Save the Song and Dance for the Talent Show 207 A Push for Power Consumption 22

Cloud Rants 1 Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Cloud 272 The Failure of Outsourcing 303 Placing Business First 334 The Core Challenge of the Cloud 35

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Three Stories 1 Tasked 372 Cured: A New Way of Looking at the End User 403 Put My Chart in the Cloud , Stat 42

Transformation 1 The Empire Strikes Back, or Unleashing IT as an Innovation Center 452 The Empire as We Know It 473 Innovation as a Distraction 504 Strip Distraction Away 525 Opportunity for Disruption, or a New Generation of CEO 546 The Cloud Story is a Human Story 567 Shifting the Spend 578 Engagement 599 The CIO They Love 62

People 1 The Disappearance of the Slash 652 Process People Prevail 673 Scale Back to Scale Up 684 Tapping into Talent 70

Process 1 Own the Room 732 The Cloud’s Security Advantage 763 Scalability is a Pipe Problem 774 Whip Through the Turns 79

Tools1 Vendors with Ripped Abs 812 Beware the Entrenched Vendor 843 Don’t Buy the Cloud from a Database Vendor 86

CIO1 The Cloud Opportunist 892 IT Spend 923 Creating Value and Vision for your CEO 934 Inside the Cloud Transformed Enterprise 94

Liberation1 Retooling for the 21st Century 972 The Tools of Tomorrowland 993 Verne Global, a Green Story 1014 Enterprise Software Consolidation 1035 Where my Mouth is 1056 I’m No Oracle 107

CONTENTSCONTENTS

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The ON-PReMISe BuSINeSS (SaleS, SeRvIce,

HEY! YOU!GET ONTOMYCLOUD

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For this opening chapter, picture me in jeans and

a dark gray t-shirt rather than my standard white

button-down oxford shirt. And I’m standing in front

of gleaming, super-charged hemi muscle car that’s

parked at an angle, the fake suburban street behind

me made to look like it just rained...

People ask me, Mike, why the Cloud? Why now? And

I tell them it’s about having the horsepower they’ve

always wanted, with fewer trips to the gas pump

and very little wallop to your wallet.

Foreword

The Car Commercial

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Cut to someone obviously not me, an experienced driver

on a closed circuit, taking the car through its paces...

I tell them the Cloud has a higher safety rating than

standard computing, and you get that safety and

security without compromising at all on what you can

wring out of this baby on the curves in your contact

center, or on slick surfaces like you find on the execu-

tive floors.

Cut to forest canopy layer and lush green tones, tropical

birds abound...

I tell them the Cloud is about helping the environ-

ment, about reducing or even eliminating your

carbon footprint.

Cut to me, in the showroom, filled with happy people,

sunlight dappling, balloons and cake and streamers...

I tell them it’s time to act because Cloud deals have

never been better. I tell them that you don’t even have

to own anything, you just rent, and if you don’t like

the model you’ve chosen, you bring it back and they

give you another one to try out. Like a test drive, but

all the time.

Cut to me standing in front of a cargo ship unloading

thousands of cars onto the lot at a secure port...

And this is not just some special offer because you’re

the head honcho; this is available to everybody. You

want fifty for your fleet by this morning? Fine. You

want five thousand for your global sales force, deliv-

ery around lunchtime? You got it!

There’s never been a better time to get behind the

wheel.

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1 A Warning to ITYou have sole possession of the secret password and

you enjoy the prestige and the protection of having

specialized knowledge. You have gained the trust of

rulers, and you work in relative quiet behind thick

stone walls in a subterranean environment, bolstered

and funded from coffers that are not of your winning.

Without realizing it, though, you’re mired in a maze.

You’re bogged down with the burdens that may or

may not have been of your own making. The very

Drivers

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things that gave you the illusion of security have you

shackled.

Your workers have apprenticed in the centuries-old

tradition, in the rituals and folklore of proven practice.

Their productivity is based on hierarchies, on heritage

and the guilds of governance.

The “friends” that have arrived to help you from the

outside won’t leave when you no longer need them.

They have too much at stake, and they have bolted

themselves into your walls and they inhabit all your tun-

nels and even in your air ducts. They eat from your food

stores and deplete your resources, and toast you from

flagons of exotic ornament. These same friends have

erected monuments and monoliths to their legacy, and

created fortresses within your fortress.

When you ask for change, your adjuvant friends are only

able to show you borrowed and stale plans, smuggled in

from the outside from great distance away and at great

expense. As has been custom, they have provided the

mortar for your bricks. They are intractable.

Some of it’s just the gear, the weighted-down armor and

plating, the fortress-scale armaments and weaponry

of siege-mode and defense. There is nothing light and

nimble to be found. For something to be moved, it must

be taken apart piece by piece, dug out at the footings,

lifted and then rolled on logs across the terrain.

Great changes are at hand. Kingdoms are uniting

around common currency, language and custom.

All around you the borders are in flux, and the territory

beyond the walls is subject at any time to a change in

rulers. These rulers travel in caravans, depend on light

infantry, and when they break camp, they leave you

behind, shackled in the labyrinth within the fortress of

your own making.

You have been able to build most everything you need,

but now you’re cut off from the rest of the business, and

even if you wanted to move closer, you can’t.

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2 TCO: Total Cost of OnerousThrow out the old metrics. They don’t mean any-

thing in the era of Cloud computing.

Bring down the walls between you and the business,

rid your house of entrenched vendors, and take imme-

diate advantage of the transformation that is at hand

— and the liberation that will follow over the next five

years as these changes roll out to their full potential.

You will most likely have to start from scratch because

the Cloud is so transformational to business process

that any type of half-step will only drag along an

expense and execution model that is fundamentally

flawed.

Modern business applications can’t be concerned

about the network, the data store, and the workflow

challenges inherent in on-premise application devel-

opment environments. Users want application fea-

tures available online, with a simple, intuitive inter-

face. They will pay per month for it, but they won’t pay

millions for software. Those days are gone.

I don’t say this as someone who has something to sell.

I say this because every day I hear the stories of trans-

You’ve never had the time to really work on the things that matter, the things that the business needs to you to do.

formation, and I see what can be achieved, things I

never thought possible.

I’m basing this book on my personal experience as a

Chief Technology Officer, with the historical perspec-

tive from my days as a programmer/analyst in early

1990s Silicon Valley, coming out of the housing bust,

learning my trade in conference rooms and hallways.

Here, if you didn’t understand both business and

process, technology was useless. I lived ASP hey-

days of the late 1990s, through the dot.com and its

bubble, where amazingly poor business strategies

were masked as innovation. I lived this firsthand in the

Silicon Valley and I experienced it from classic brick

and mortar companies, software startups, Fortune 100

networking, and telephony companies.

I want to look at where we are as we close down 2010,

and where I think we’re going to be in just a few years

from now. That will be as radical shift as we have seen

so far, perhaps even more so.

And here’s why: As a CIO, you’ve never had the time to

really work on the things that matter, the things that

the business needs to you to do. You’ve been bogged

down with onerous stuff all around you and you’ve

never had the freedom to operate the way the busi-

ness needs you to. You simply can’t realize the potential

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of addressing business process in a fundamental way,

when budgets, personal bandwidth, and technological

capacity limit you on all sides.

There’s going to be a very long list of things that are

suddenly “off your mind” as you make the switch to

the Cloud. This is no longer about scan card access

to a locked server room, or hiding all the resource

requirements to keep the infrastructure going in your

CapEx budgets every year.

And it’s not as complicated as your outside helpers

make it out to be. You won’t need a cadre of 20 people

to help you understand how you can transform your

shop. All you really need is an agile internal team and

a couple of strong support and architecture resources.

This is no longer about entrenched vendors mak-

ing this process as complex as possible in order to

maintain their legacy applications and tools, and their

heritage of sales. This is about blowing up the fun-

damentals of how you service internal and external

customers as an IT services provider.

This is also about freeing your potential from limita-

tions, from solutions based on the narrow availability

of servers, disk, and the people needed to run them in

your shop. And from the burdens that limit you — and

the business.

3 Blame the ConsumerPull. Tug. Yank. Feeling that?

On one level, this has nothing to do with what we in

the enterprise IT realm have created. The consumer

experience on the web is behind the gravitational pull

of emerging business applications and Cloud solu-

tions. Consumers have come to expect free or very

low-cost applications, delivered over multiple mobile

devices on a high-bandwidth utility that’s as robust

and available as what previous generations expected

from their phone lines and television sets. Yet what

once took decades to fund and build, is now counted

in years, if not months.

The dot.com era unleashed a lot, including free apps

and ubiquitous access. Fortunately, what didn’t last

from that frontier era were the many overvalued

companies and amazingly poor business strategies,

either previously unheard of or incapable of being

understood. The acceleration of the internet and

the venture spending behind the ecosystem left

us with the beginnings of today’s landscape.

If you were there in the midst of the dot.com blaze like

I was, you may not have gotten rich. But one genu-

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inely progressive thing that came from it was how the

consumer web experience rivaled and then outpaced

desktop applications to the point of rendering con-

sumer desktop software completely obsolete.

That’s amazing when you think about it.

We literally do anything you can think of online now –

from our financials and banking, to consumer buying

to vacation planning , and then there are loads of

ways we share our experiences via blogs, and tweets

and Facebook and scads of utilities to tell all our

friends, coworkers, and loved ones where we are and

what we’re doing at any given time from any elec-

tronic device.

TIMe SPeNT ONlINe (per week)

2004 2010 FORRESTER

6 hours

13 hours

Users want application features trickled to them over time, available online, and with a simple, intuitive interface.

Oscar Berg, a Senior Consultant for Acando, has an

interesting thought on the growth of this behavior:

“The main lesson that I learned from the dot.com era

was that people were not ready for the kind of online

lifestyle that we had in mind when building platforms.

We built platforms and features for people like our-

selves — pioneers who were obsessed and enamored

with the new technologies — and not for the aver-

age person. But, today, the situation is very different.

Most people are very comfortable with using the web

for both private and professional purposes, and they

willingly expose things about themselves that they

wouldn’t have dared to think about exposing ten

years earlier.”

Now this has extended to the business paradigm,

where users want application features trickled to

them over time, available online, and with a simple,

intuitive interface. And they are happy to pay per

month for it. But gone are the days when anyone will

pay millions of dollars for software.

Everything’s been compressed and commoditized:

software price points, configuration services dollars,

customizing and deployment solutions, and support.

We all have the dot.com era (the older, bolder but less

pragmatic brother of the Cloud), to thank for that.

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Modern business applications can’t be concerned

about the network, the data store, and the workflow

challenges inherent in the last generation’s on-

premise application development environments.

What is required is a solid set of workflow tools that

are Cloud-configured, and Cloud-deployable with a

solid application development and debugging

platform, with solid monitoring tools surrounding

those applications.

Only with this type of infrastructure (virtualized or

Cloud-deployed) can solution architects and technical

architects design and deploy solutions that will satisfy

this new consumer-derived user experience.

4 Time to Rent AgainThere was a time when the CIO was like the Robert

Duvall character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in the film Apoca-

lypse Now, on the beach in full battle dress, calling in

air strikes with all the helicopters buzzing overhead.

But instead of a war zone, the setting was a huge data

center with hundreds of people tending to the gear,

and the CIO proclaiming, “I love the smell of servers in

the morning.”

But nobody has the budget for that anymore. From

the CEO’s perspective, the company spent millions of

dollars and really didn’t get what it paid for and pissed

off a lot of users along the way. There’s no compelling

reason now for us to build and own the applications

or the infrastructure.

You will find that Cloud vendors have created a

network and data security approach that blows away

what you and your internal IT teams can afford to

build. For instance, in the last five years, salesforce.

com on its own has probably spent over a billion

dollars on scalability, security and infrastructure.

There’s a reason that Microsoft, Google and others are

building huge utility-style, grid computing facilities that

The ON-PReMISe BuSINeSS (SaleS, SeRvIce,

There was a time when the CIO was like the Robert Duvall character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in the film Apocalypse Now, on the beach in full battle dress...“I love the smell of servers in the morning.”

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cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s not because

they can’t figure out where to spend their money.

They know there is a wave coming: back-to-the-future

hosting, application, functionality and infrastructure.

And if they don’t have investment in the capacity,

customers are going to go with a different provider.

They are building all these facilities because the mar-

ket is there.

As companies focused on our own core businesses,

we really can’t afford to do anything else. It’s like the

housing market. The bottom has fallen out and we

can’t afford to own what we need. We need to start

renting again.

GOOGle INFRaSTRucTuRe INveSTMeNTS

DATA CENTER KNOWLEDGE

$131million

$186million

$221million

$239million

$476million

2Q ‘09 3Q ‘09 4Q ‘09 1Q ’10 2Q ‘10

5 Doing More with MoreThere’s a lot of noise out there. Terms like “restruc-

turing” and “downturn” and “return to profitability”

ultimately fail to express the magnitude of what is

occurring economically. Whatever someone might say

in a press release or an annual report doesn’t capture

it, because the shock waves are still coming.

It’s turned everything we knew on its head. For

instance, do we really know what we’re talking about

when we say that a business issue is “mission critical?”

In your organization, can anyone honestly tell me

what is mission critical, and what is not mission criti-

cal? And if we can make that distinction, do we really

have the tools to make sure that whatever is mission

critical is a success and that we can benchmark that

success for all the mission critical projects that follow?

If you could catalog them in your organization, I bet

the number of mission critical apps running on some

Microsoft Office application would stun you. And it’s

been that way for 15 years!

This new economic landscape means you’ll have

to clear the decks of most of the strategic planning

you’ve done You’ll likely need to deliver a substantial

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reduction of expense and headcount, scuttle projects

that may have seemed high priority, and think about

reshuffling the deck on your resource partners. There

may be acquisitions and divestitures in combinations

you would have never conceived before, and many of

the targets you prepared for are no longer viable in

the new environment. You’re going to have to do

all this while providing even more support for the

business.

While you may have become accomplished creating

a whole series of contingency plans, this new era of

economic upheaval demands that you become com-

fortable when more things than ever are unforeseen.

But the good news: the Cloud gives you the tools to

address unintended consequences and inadvertent

events much quicker and at lower cost.

This is really not about doing more with less, you’re

actually doing more with more. The new mindset is

to approach each new challenge as a lesson. It’s about

learning how to work with fewer barriers to getting

things done, having more tail-wind, and knowing how

to manage the process. You’re going to spend way

less energy from now on routine maintenance, yet

keeping up with the business will demand more of

your process skills than ever.

Look, the big bad wolf, the well-publicized plummet of the global economy, has already blown down the shack without you, scattering all the straw and sticks and bricks. But this mess is everything that made your job impossible.

Get ready to inherit a tsunami of powerful services

that will blast right through your standard defense,

your sandbags of scalability-security-governance.

You’ve tried to build these yourself, but in the Cloud

you find that others have already completed it — and

they didn’t have to borrow half of an FTE from some-

one’s team to get it done.

Look, the big bad wolf, the well-publicized plummet

of the global economy, has already blown down the

shack without you, scattering all the straw and sticks

and bricks. But this mess is everything that made your

job impossible. Those problems are gone now, but

now you have some new ones.

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6 Save the Song and Dance for the Talent ShowIn the cloud world, your place at the table is re-

quired more than ever. Now you don’t have to spend

any time on the song and dance because your CEO

and your board are sold, they know what you can do.

Now they just want to know how fast you can bring

up your team and how far you can take this.

The contribution of IT is changing because it’s

being validated every day by the undisputed force

of business investment, the flow of venture capital,

internal infrastructure development dollars, novel

product offerings and service business models,

and the pace of strategic acquisitions within the

computing ecosystem.

A stricter regulatory environment will not only

demand more agile IT shops, but will also create

opportunities for those companies that can incor-

porate new regulations across the enterprise. Those

companies —Cloud companies —have an advan-

tage, since the new regs aren’t being queued into

separate legacy silos, with sluggish traditional proj-

ect timelines and priority metrics. They’ll be

able to stay on pace in pursuit of prospective markets

and revenue growth.

Core competency means more than just shedding

non-essentials. Carving away all those layers calls

for IT leadership that understands the interconnect-

edness and the consequences of removal, the

implications at each step and iteration, and which

outsourcing may be required. This is up to you,

because I’m guessing your incumbent vendors

haven’t been thinking ahead on your behalf. Why

would they, when their own profitability is tied to

your previous, un-agile operating mode?

And this goes beyond the vetting and the shedding.

Flat or stagnant growth at the macro level means

that many will be lulled into thinking that only large

solutions will produce large revenue growth. But it’s a

new game: opportunities can be leveraged, because

the cost and time cycles to test and launch have

fallen so dramatically. Proverbial low hanging fruit

will be more obvious to spot sooner, and your new

set of process tools will help you inform the business

if it contains the seeds for future expansion.

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7 A Push for Power ConsumptionOK. Forget the downturn and the subsequent

restructuring and cost-slashing and reactive resur-

gence of a more restrictive regulatory environment.

From my vantage point, there is an even larger force

out there, outside the walls of your IT shop and far

beyond the scope of your company, dwarfing any-

one’s GDP. This one has the potential to become the

most dominant driver of all.

It’s the energy story. There’s not enough of it, first off,

at least deriving from sustainable sources. The oppor-

tunities for IT just in accounting for your company’s

energy consumption is going to fuel a new service

sector: energy accounting. Think of the implications

for anyone doing business in multiple locations, let

alone multiple continents, each with its own meter-

ing and mix of energy sources. Then think how

each business unit is going to answer for its energy

allocation, with an entirely new category on the

management scorecard.

Now let’s talk about the supply side, the energy pro-

viders. As the large energy companies intersect with

information technology applications and require-

ments, energy consumption will be a Cloud catalyst

at several levels:

n Mobile Devices

n Data Centers

n Smart Grid

Green Tech Media is a New York-based integrated

media firm that covers power generation and distri-

bution over the grid, analyzing trends for how power

is consumed by individuals and the larger enterprise.

“Information technology on the whole consumes

about 2% of all energy. So it’s not really a significant

sector as, say, manufacturing,“ observes Green Tech

Media CEO Rick Thompson. ”Yet with Cloud comput-

ing growing at 5%, there are tremendous oppor-

tunities where energy and information technology

intersect.

“Green enterprise not only encompasses helping

the financial institutions and mega-retailers manage

their large power demand, but more granular tech-

nologies like advanced LED lighting and the build

out of automation networks for lighting,” Thomp-

son adds. “Green IT goes beyond analyzing power

consumption to novel products and services where

From my vantage point, there is an even larger force out there, outside the walls of your IT shop and far beyond the scope of your com-pany, dwarfing anyone’s GDP. This one has the potential to become the most dominant driver of all.

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computing creates more efficient and accountable

transmission and distribution of power over the grid.”

This has far-reaching implications for the Cloud, as

new players such as well-capitalized utilities will cross

these borders and barriers naturally and quickly. You

can be assured that someone is always looking at

power consumption and engineering more power

efficiency and cost savings, from the chip set to

the router card, to the network and ultimately the

largest consumer of power within an enterprise, the

data center.

Think beyond hosted applications and servers. Is it

possible that the on-premise data center is ultimately

a relic for most companies? Will it be too much to

manage from the standpoint of power consumption

and carbon footprint? Are you better off with some

or all of your enterprise computing in a hosted and

green environment, such as a geo-thermal fueled

data center in Iceland?

Thompson of Green Tech offers a savvy scorecard for

monitoring this trend. “We left telecom infrastructure

and entered Green Tech. We began watching where

the entrepreneurs were placing their attention and

the venture capitalists were directing their funding.

And because of smart grid, you’re starting to see the

traditional networking shops bring on board senior

people from the energy companies, and not just

putting out a press release around green tech initia-

tives. We’re talking radical scenarios here as it plays

out. The energy market dwarfs the IT market, and the

global markets are massive. We’ve devoted our entire

company to this, and it merits serious attention for

everyone who has a stake in where information tech-

nology is headed.”

“Beyond generating reliable sources of power, this is

completely an IT game, with giant energy concerns

crossing swords with technology as they usher in

new energy services to consumers.”

“It’s fairly simple,” Thompson concludes.” Everything

beyond transmission is low bandwidth, without

super high speed, and it’s all going to need a back-

end to an enterprise network. Within the energy

companies there’s not as much information technology

expertise as you’d think, and most of the applica-

tions are in separate silos for weather management,

field and outage management. There’s so much

more technology being thrown at them than they

can handle, and that will create large opportunities.

The VC’s see it and the entrepreneurs see it, and the

larger companies are already investing in the talent

to help them get there.”

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1 Thirteen Ways of Looking at the Cloud1. The Cloud is not about product offerings.

2. The Cloud is not a change agent, paradigm shift

or transformative event.

3. Blogs, tweets and rants are downbursts from the

Cloud, but they are not the Cloud.

Cloud Rants

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4. The Cloud has very little to do with technology, let

alone information technology.

5. The Cloud is not a source of new business models

or service offerings.

6. The Cloud is not a Cloud computing conference at

the Moscone Center in San Francisco.

7. The Cloud is not disruptive, in the way that some-

one might disrupt a conversation or a meeting in

progress. The Cloud is disruptive in the way that you

wake up one morning in your own bed, and a really,

really quiet tornado has picked up your house and set

it down 50 miles away in an open field.

8. If you could measure the economic impact of the

Cloud as seismic activity, it would not show up at all

on any local Richter scale — until it’s too late.

9. You can learn as much about the Cloud in Reykjavik

as you can in Redwood City (headquarters of Oracle).

10. Your server at lunch might know more about the

Cloud than anyone who manages the servers in your

data center.

The Cloud is disruptive in the way that you wake up one morning in your own bed, and a really, really quiet tornado has picked up your house and set it down 50 miles away in an open field.

11. The Cloud will not pull us out of the recession.

12. Johannes Gutenberg might have invented the

Cloud, but he got all caught up with his success with

movable type.

13. The Cloud just happened.

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2 The Failure of OutsourcingThe IT industry has talked for decades (my entire

working career!) about business process tools, and

techniques and systems which can enable “business

process re engineering.” But just look at the word

“re engineer” and you know all you need to know.

Do you think some original “engineering” discipline

was applied to most of the business processes you

support — those same ones that cause you the most

pain or provide the least benefit?

Once you are unencumbered of the tasks that are

time sinks — because you move those tasks onto

Cloud providers or into managed environments such

as a private Cloud — then you have the potential to

address business process in a fundamental way that

budgets, personal bandwidth, and technological

capacity simply couldn’t provide.

I lived through the ASP heydays of the late ‘90s, and

was always amazed when vendors like Corio would

hand me their PeopleSoft application that was,

literally, single-tenant and supremely customized for

my business needs — in a way that wasn’t trivial.

And I also watched that approach fail, and saw folks

move to “hosting” applications to a co-lo facility,

which had the benefit of being less service-based

from the provider, and just getting the “gear” off your

premise. You still managed nearly every service associ-

ated with making sure the gear was compliant with

your infrastructure standards and processes.

And then there’s outsourcing. Outsourcing your busi-

ness processes to outsourcing firms wasn’t the silver

bullet that many thought it was. The idea was to find

cheaper options for expensive infrastructure and

people, but the result was the specialization of

resources, which turned into increased costs and limited

holistic perspectives from new people entering the

job market. The result: complete confusion and chaos

from CFOs, CEOs and COOs on what they actually got

from their IT investment .

So on the other side of being re-engineered, co-located

and outsourced, we discover something profound:

1. Costs need to be cut.

2. Resources need to be evaluated, and change man-

agement plans adopted.

Once you are unencumbered of the tasks that are time sinks because you move those tasks onto Cloud providers... then you have the potential to address business process in a fundamental way.

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3. CIOs need to respond to their Boards and CEOs with

plans for innovation and not plans for operating like

the cost center of the 1990s.

There is no reason today, this month, this quarter,

I shouldn’t be able to deliver – with a team of eight to

ten — the same amount as traditional service ven-

dors, using their dated methods and staffs of 30-40

people. Being unshackled from that approach is the

most liberating thing that businesses can hope for

with their IT and applications spend.

3 Placing Business FirstTen years from now, we will all laugh about how

hard it was to design, build and deploy applications.

All the self-imposed shackles and inventions will seem

antiquated.

Happily, the Cloud presents a totally different method

of working: It’s about real change in how we procure,

develop, and release applications. It’s a laser focus

on what’s required from a business perspective. And

companies are going to spend billions over the forth-

coming years to convert their enterprises into the

Cloud Transformed Enterprise or CTE.

So CEOs need to understand what this means for the

role of IT. Today, any CEO you survey will give you the

pat answer that IT is currently important to the busi-

ness and that it will grow in importance in the future.

They’ll even take it to the tactical level: the demands

are increasing to keep the business competitive. IT’s

expanded role includes workforce mobility, cost analysis,

more data to create meaningful metrics around decision

making, and storage and retrieval and e-commerce on

multiple application and electronic device platforms.

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Business has taken a back seat to technology for 30 years. This liberation of business potential within the Cloud is scaring the pants off IT and CIOs and ISVs to the point of it being openly condemned, ridiculed or ruled as a fad.

But do you ever see a CEO asked about the degree of

expectation that IT will actually meet those demands?

You won’t, because the priorities and the base of

power have been inverted for decades.

Business has taken a back seat to technology for 30

years. This liberation of business potential within the

Cloud is scaring the pants off IT and CIOs and ISVs to

the point of it being openly condemned, ridiculed

or ruled a fad. That’s all the info you should need to

understand how liberating this technology truly is.

But the Cloud isn’t magic. Technology deployment

options won’t cure poor requirements, bad design

or poor test cases. What the Cloud does, though, is

provide a framework for putting the business first.

And when business process is king, that’s when you

have success.

4 The Core Challenge of the CloudDon’t get me wrong. This is not going to be easy

for everyone. Working in a Cloud environment will

be challenging for many individuals and for entire

companies.

People will have to work harder and communicate

better, because you are no longer waiting for this

magic gift — for someone to go off and develop

something in a dark corner and bring it back to you,

and you hope it’s the fix. The Cloud dials up the

importance of sitting shoulder to shoulder, working

together and communicating daily, working through

the challenges of each project.

That certainly shouldn’t sound like a challenge, but in

any software project, communication — not technol-

ogy — is the point of failure. The Cloud environment

creates a chance to focus on that communication over

the technology.

This will create a lot of risk in companies that have

learned to be horrible communicators, especially the

communication between IT and the business, and be-

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tween IT and the external vendors. It no longer works

to stick a vendor in between IT and your business,

then let them take the blame for your organizational

dysfunction and inability to communicate internally.

Companies will still struggle until they find commu-

nicators who understand process with their systems

developers, IT administrators, even the owners and

management team. Those are the people that you

want. Those are the skills that are important to make

sure the investment works.

If you didn’t communicate well before, your dysfunc-

tion only gets exacerbated with the Cloud. You no

longer have an environment where one group goes

off to procure the server farm, while another group

talks to users for months and writes a bunch of words

down that people agree with or don’t disagree with.

It’s a different cycle.

Think about it like a doctor’s office. In the old IT para-

digm, you were sitting there in the waiting room for

a long time, hoping somebody was going to call your

name and that they could tell you what was wrong

with you. It’s different now. There’s not even a waiting

room. The doctor comes to you whenever you need

attention, and it’s all about open dialogue and treat-

ment options.

Think about it like a doctor’s office. In the old IT para-digm, you were sitting there in the waiting room for a long time, hoping somebody was going to call your name and then tell you what was wrong with you. Now there’s not even a waiting room.

1 TaskedSo here’s how it will happen: You’re a senior net-

work architect at a large global company and your

CTO doesn’t really appear to know anything about

the Cloud. He arrives at your desk and starts the

same old song and dance, the same one he gives

every time he’s been asked to research something

novel. He confides that it’s probably a total waste of

time, and he’s really looking high and low for ways

to dispel it.

Three Stories

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So your CTO has been tasked, and now you have been

tasked: Deliver a Cloud strategy for the company. You

have three months to get it done.

It’s a blank slate. You have to figure out everything,

including the infrastructure challenges. After all, the

way everybody thinks around your shop is: keep up

with the gear, and the applications, and governance.

You know you’re in the sweet spot of virtualization of

your servers, applications and services at 50-65 per-

cent, but you still cannot control how and when those

services or environments are being setup, scaled and

managed by your app dev teams. Further, you can’t

get the SAN team to install new disks sooner than six

weeks, which hamstrings your app dev teams, and

your infrastructure group. The list goes on. How do

you gain some control to manage the environment in

a simpler, and smarter fashion?

As you dig into the Cloud, it resonates right away. This

may be a way to get out of the vicious cycles of capital

budgets, cost creep, and slow cycle times on projects.

Then you then notice the word “Cloud” thrown around

in meetings with your on-premise vendors. It’s tak-

ing a life of its own, popping up more and more as a

topic at user conferences — those events you used to

It takes six months to mount new storage on-premise, and now it looks as if you can do that in minutes!

attend, but don’t anymore because you’re burdened

with getting your projects across the finish line (180

days late is now a good metric. Receiving accolades for

six month lag time just doesn’t seem right.)

Your company’s competitive advantage needs to be

flawless delivery and reliability, which will be based

on hardcore infrastructure. Job one will be replacing

the servers and managing the virtualization clusters,

finding a way to keep up governance. Your IT head-

count is 500 plus, and half the people within the unit

don’t know the other half.

So how is your life going to be better in this new

model? How will this help with resources constraints,

with the bottlenecks you can see coming every time?

It all sounds like a world of ideas, but what you really

want to know about are the technical underpinnings.

Start with this: It takes six months to mount new stor-

age on-premise, and now it looks as if you can do that

in minutes! But there’s a lot of virtualization involved,

so how does that work in the Cloud? And what about

my applications teams, where do they fit in?

You’re a busy guy and now you’re about to become a

poster child for the Cloud. You’re going to need some

guidance. You need tools. You need a roadmap.

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2 Cured: A New Way of Looking at the End UserSometimes the issues of technology and adoption

have serious consequences. Here’s one: It involves a

major research hospital and thousands of patients

over a multi-year period. This is a case where Cloud

process and Cloud tools could have a direct impact on

saving lives.

This project is off to a good start: The CIO is enlight-

ened. He knows how to leverage assets, the teams are

experienced with the Cloud, and the project is based

in a part of the country where a lot new IT products

and services are conceived, created and marketed.

Now they are looking at new and different administra-

tive applications no one knows or understands. They

need to drive 6-12 projects at a time. And these are

big projects, in data collection and analysis in support

of research, and treatment of a major disease state.

We’re talking next-gen research and treatment, draw-

ing from multi-center medical populations, but the

data and the processes are literally from the 1950’s

and 1960’s. They’ll gather critical data sets from

100,000 patients over the next five years, collecting

and centralizing it, then getting it quickly to research-

ers and treatment practitioners.

Now add the patient privacy issues and all the chal-

lenges of managing IT in a healthcare environment

within the rigors of clinical research. How do you keep

patient data secure in a multi-center environment?

How do you capture, transfer and store data that will

be the basis for scientific hypothesis, clinical treat-

ment, and potential disease cures?

This is not about outsourcing, off-shoring or all the

nifty flow charts we put in our white papers and

presentations.

A Cloud services company has donated the licenses,

service time, millions of dollars in tailwind, and

technology that will adopted by the IT leadership

supporting the patient study. But will that make a

difference? Are the legacy process issues going to

swamp the potential for success?

This is a title bout. It’s a high-profile project, and a lot

of people are placing their hopes on it. Can the Cloud

deliver when lives — not just cost containment and

project cycle time — are at stake?

This is a case where Cloud process and Cloud tools could have a direct impact on saving lives.

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3 Put My Chart in the Cloud, StatSo, here’s a third story. It’s not about thinking about

what the cloud might do for you operationally in your

own IT shop, or in helping a research hospital find

potential breakthroughs in medical treatment. This is

about something that is already working, right there

in the emergency room at your local hospital.

Think about this for starters. The emergency depart-

ment is the single largest access point to most

hospitals in the United States. A 2007 study published

by the National Center for Health Statistics noted

116.8 million emergency room visits in the United

States, about four out of every ten Americans, and

that 18% of emergency patients were seen within 15

minutes of arrival and 12.5 percent of all visits to the

emergency department resulted in hospital admission.

A well-managed emergency department is critical

to the success of any hospital, and hospitals wisely

are turning to emergency staffing partners such as

Lafayette, Louisiana-based Schumacher Group. Doug

Menefee has been CIO for Schumacher Group since

2005, and has upgraded or replaced every enterprise

Approaching the Cloud as a way to guarantee the integrity and reliability of healthcare data twenty-four, seven, also brought Mene-fee directly into consideration of related benefits of flexibility, scalability and cost savings.

system he inherited to support the hospitals in Schu-

macher Group’s service portfolio.

Menefee approached the challenges from the stand-

point of business continuity. “We staff emergency

departments at more than 150 hospitals, and we

would be crippling ourselves and our clients if our

data center goes down during a hurricane, or even an

unexpected storm that nobody predicts,” explains Me-

nefee. “You just can’t compromise the information a

doctor has at his or her disposal for treating a patient,

nor for that matter the entire team that supports the

M.D. You don’t want to be that patient, either, suf-

fering even more and awaiting the right treatment

because of some catastrophic event that happened to

a computer center far away.”

Approaching the Cloud as a way to guarantee the

integrity and reliability of healthcare data 24/7, also

brought Menefee directly into consideration of re-

lated benefits of flexibility, scalability and cost savings.

“Being able to manage our services over the Internet,

meant we could start right away with 50 percent of

our data-center process hosted in the Cloud, and re-

cently adding the human resources piece has brought

that percentage up to 70 percent.

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“When I don’t have to focus on the infrastructure

piece, I’m not in a maintenance role, and I’m able

to allocate funds to innovation, to rolling out new

business solutions and meeting the needs of the

business,“ says Menefee.

Next time you’re in the ER and they ask you for your

insurance card, you might want to ask them if their

patient data is hosted in the Cloud before they roll

you down the hall.

1 The Empire Strikes Back, or Unleashing IT as an Innovation CenterIf you don’t innovate, what is the cost to the

business? Not just the financial cost, the

opportunity cost? Who can put a price tag on

what it means to merely keep the servers running,

or at best, replace one enterprise application

with an application that is fundamentally no

Transformation

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different than what you’re replacing? If you don’t have

the time or resources to take the extra step required

for innovation, how can you be expected to move the

dial forward?

Yet companies and organizations today are under

tremendous pressure to cut costs, increase revenue

opportunities and be more in tune with their custom-

ers. The only way to accomplish all three of those

goals is by undertaking initiatives that are so pro-

found, so fundamentally different, that they turn the

IT function inside out.

That’s a scary transformation for the traditional CIO,

especially for one who has decades of experience

in the everything-we-need-is-in-house IT model.

However, we’re now at a point where that story of

innovation can be told. New models and best

practices are emerging, and the application of those

models and best practices creates an innovation

platform from which IT can regain mind share within

the business.

CIOs haven’t had the time or resources to pursue impact-ful projects that could support the sales, service or mobile applications that increase productivity and profitability.

2 The Empire as We Know ItTraditionally, the IT department has been an empire

unto itself, with empire-scale assets, budgets without

boundaries, and a decidedly internal focus. Saddled

with supporting massive infrastructure, CIO’s haven’t

had the time or resources to pursue impactful projects

that could support the sales, service or mobile appli-

cations that increase productivity and profitability.

Rarely has IT been viewed by the business as a source

of lasting innovation. Until now.

Beyond the scalability and security issues of moving

to the Cloud, innovation-driven CIO’s are searching

for a new management paradigm that reflects an era

where IT assets are now commodities and the funda-

mental role for the empire is one of alignment with

business process and business strategy.

n Once I accept a Cloud solution as the primary

architecture of my stack, how do I repurpose those

under-utilized members of my team who know the

business and are capable of innovation?

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n How do I identify the skills and qualities of those

who are best suited to help?

n What is possible now that I am no longer spend-

ing 80 percent of my budget and most of my time

making sure the application servers, network load

balancers and databases are up and running?

n What are examples of this fundamental transforma-

tion from CIO’s who have already blazed the trail,

and lived to tell about it?

Not every CIO is ready or willing to tackle this trans-

formation issue head-on or all at once. For that more

traditional CIO considering slow adoption and an

incremental strategy, the questions might be framed a

bit differently:

n How do I build the case for modernization and a

more measured approach to Cloud computing that

doesn’t threaten the existing infrastructure?

n If I adopt Cloud solutions incrementally, how does

this affect the management of existing IT projects?

n What are some best practices for structuring internal

IT teams to ensure that our core infrastructure is

maintained?

What is possible now that I am no longer spend-ing 80 percent of my budget and most of my time making sure the application servers, network load balancers and the databases are up and running?

n What are ways to utilize and preserve our IT assets in

the Cloud, in the face of increasingly complex and

numerous security threats?

Regardless of your approach, IT has an even more

important role with the business in a Cloud environ-

ment. CIO’s now have at their disposal more power

to increase productivity and profitability across the

enterprise, more effectively integrated with the

business than ever.

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3 Innovation as a DistractionMost will admit that technology innovation has

been over-used as a way of selling projects. In the

classic example, the CIO sells a project to senior

management based on a promised ROI, budget and

timeline, and invariably the project fails to clear

those hurdles.

You’re lucky if you get a 25 percent return on invest-

ment for an IT project. If you come in on-budget with

a project, you’re lucky. If you’re on time, you’re lucky,

but you’re rarely going to get where you promised

you’d get to.

Then management has had no other alternative than

to take the hit, or clean house and fire the CIO, which

has a cost associated with it and provides no guar-

antee of future success. There’s an overall structural

problem that prohibits even the most innovation-

minded CIO’s from having a shot at a breakthrough.

As a CIO, you’re so focused on managing all the other

stuff that you don’t have the time to think about in-

novation or how you can meaningfully support the

business. Innovation is a distraction.

You’re not able to give your company or organization

the ability to connect meaningfully with the people

who buy your product or service.

ON-PReMISe vS. The clOuD

ON-PReMISe clOuD

INFRASTRUCTURE-FOCUS INNOVATION-FOCUS

LARGE PROJECTS RAPID PROTOTYPING

BLIND SHOTS BEST PRACTICE ADOPTION

LOW SUCCESS EXPECTATION INCREMENTAL SUCCESS

INTERNAL-FOCUS CUSTOMER-FOCUS

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4 Strip Distraction AwayThe cloud gives you the ability to strip some of that

distraction away. You can build a project successfully,

from the ground up. You have the time and focus to

build slowly, to create the momentum.

The Cloud lends itself to innovative thinking on the

part of the CIO and the ability to incorporate best

practice expertise, because of those things you don’t

have to do anymore.

Some companies can’t unburden themselves from

what they’ve always done. They’re so focused on

building and maintaining on-premise infrastructure

and the staff to support it, that projects become three

times as expensive as projected, are horribly delayed,

and don’t even accomplish what they set out to do.

I know of instances where a company takes 18

months to complete a project, and in that time they

could have easily had that project delivered two or

three times, and at half the cost, but they can’t see

it because they are so mired in the depths of how

they’ve always operated.

This has huge implications for the CIO because there

are new technology initiatives that should be assessed

around governance and compliance, green technol-

ogy, social media tools and mobile productivity ap-

plications, but the mindset has always been focused

on those large monolithic, multi-year infrastructure

projects that CIO’s like to tackle to further entrench

their value to the organization.

The business benefit is that the distraction of innova-

tion is removed and IT leaders can contribute time

spent on keeping the lights on toward new technolo-

gies which further innovation within the business

model.

When a company moves that infrastructure to the

Cloud, it gets to deploy capital in new ways and at a

speed never before experienced.

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5 Opportunity for Disruption, or a New Generation of CEO The competitive advantage of the Cloud is not just

for the large corporation. It’s incredibly enabling for

emerging companies to now afford the broad scope

of computing applications and scalability

heretofore reserved for the giants.

That’s going to be very disruptive, because the CIO’s

of those emerging, more nimble companies have

more than likely worked on the web their entire

career, and for them operating in the Cloud is natural.

These younger CIO’s may not have the gray hair and

the credibility yet, but they understand transparency

and the culture of risk taking, and with these new

affordable tools at hand, they have a much better shot

at leading the charge for innovation.

They understand what it’s like to accomplish some-

thing amazing in 30 days, not 30 months. They’re less

concerned with formality and covering their mistakes,

as they are about figuring out quickly if what they

think might work actually works. It either works or it

doesn’t, and they can move on very quickly to revise

or scrap the project, without really spending a whole

lot of capital.

And most importantly, everything they’re doing is in

alignment with the business units, not separate and

sequestered from the business.

The challenge for some of these younger and more

innovative CIO’s is they may be managing teams of

individuals who are used to a culture of creating and

defending large budgets and projects.

They may be leading people whose career revolved

around having everything in-house, the traditional

brick-and-mortar enterprise. They’re going to be

threatened by any hint of migrating to the Cloud,

because they don’t know where they’ll fit in.

Younger CIO’s may not have the gray hair and the credibility yet, but they understand transparency and the culture of risk taking...

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6 The Cloud Story Is a Human Storycloud transformation is ultimately a resourcing story

with a decidedly human element. I may not need

three email administrators anymore. I may need one.

How do I repurpose those individuals I no longer need

to maintain the infrastructure? Maybe it is possible to

turn traditional introverts who like to work with new

gear and gadgets, into outwardly-focused weapons of

innovation?

A prized team member for the CIO will be that indi-

vidual who understands business process mapping

and business process templates, who knows the busi-

ness better than the business people. This might be

someone who used to “gate” innovation, but with the

Cloud, all that falls away.

7 Shifting the SpendTo generalize, at least half of your IT budget (and as

much as 80%) is spent on support and infrastructure,

keeping the lights on. The rest was spent on new gear

and new projects. The expectation from everyone

involved was not really high for any return on invest-

ment, because any innovation was a distraction not a

priority.

Adopting a Cloud solution gives the CIO the

opportunity to invert completely that traditional

budget formula, so that the IT spend is now on rapid

project development instead of maintenance. This

fundamentally shifts the balance of where you put

your attention.

Once you accept the Cloud as the fundamental archi-

tecture of your stack, the wind is truly at your back.

Innovation is now a different story.

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ON-PReMISe

New Projects

60%

Infrastructure

35%

New Gear

5%

clOuD

IT BUDGET COMPARISON

Infrastructure

80%

New Gear

10%

New Projects

10%

8 EngagementWhen you think about the traditional power base of

IT, it has historically been a vertical model. The intrac-

table IT organization has thrived as an entrenched

and deeply-rooted entity, but not really connected in

any meaningful way to the business, or the customers

that give the business its reason for existence.

The majority of the IT power structure is in the sup-

port and infrastructure people, the network, database

and help desk people. And over these functions, you

have a thin IT strategy layer trying to shield you from

the business.

This thin layer claims to be in alignment with the busi-

ness, but is never in real alignment. The problem is

that team members that come in at this support level

in an organization were never top-tier consultants.

They aren’t process people who understand how the

business works.

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With a Cloud solution, this thin strategy layer in IT gets

really transformed into something very different, and

business process becomes even more important. For

every component of the business, there’s a horizontal

alignment where IT becomes the business process

partner and a driver of innovation:

The ON-PReMISe BuSINeSS

Strategy layer

Support layerNetworks Databases Help Desk

The clOuD BuSINeSS

The Business IT Delivery

Business Strategy Strategy Support Innovation

Sales Business Process Support – Sales Innovation

Service Business Process Support – Service Innovation

R&D Business Process Support – R&D Innovation

This is now a horizontal story instead of a vertical

story, because the focus of IT is on business process

support and implementation, not infrastructure sup-

port. It’s shoulder-to-shoulder.

There’s an element of delivery and innovation that

didn’t exist before, and there’s more connectivity than

you have in the older, vertical model. The power base

in this aligned, horizontal model is fundamentally

different. In the vertical IT model, even if you could

afford a process and strategy emphasis, it didn’t really

ever get you what you thought.

Yet, when you remove infrastructure building and

support as the primary area of focus, the people who

are more process-oriented and strategy-oriented

become the most important people in your IT shop

for you as CIO.

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9 The CIO They LoveWhat you’re really trying to do as a business-savvy

CIO is blur the line between IT and the business.

True breakthroughs in technology involve an iterative

delivery process, which depends more on conversa-

tion and communication ideas, and less on conserva-

tion and the protection of physical and personnel

assets. Innovation occurs within a culture of risk, and

the embracing of small failures in pursuit of larger

successes.

A CIO must also become a good caretaker of the

brand. Given the inside-out transformation of the IT

role, there’s going to be a level of quality and brand-

ing that you’ve never had to worry about before.

Projects are going to land on the CIO’s desk that have

more to do with brand and culture, and will require

greater transparency to the organization.

There will always be a technology underpinning, but

for the most part it’s about those primary business

drivers: revenue growth, brand value and profitability.

The era of the propeller head is over.

Data centers and network architecture have moved to

a realm of commodities, where the prices continue to

drop and someone else is responsible for R&D. In the

Cloud, most of these things are no longer your decisions.

This is going to ask a lot of the CIO who has grown

up in a brick-and-mortar IT environment, the internet

arrived at mid-life or mid-career; to some extent this

involves a wholesale conversion. The seasoned CIO

may be asked to move beyond almost everything

they’ve learned, and embrace a new way of working.

And beyond your own conversion, you’ll have to go

transform your team and optimize them for speed-to-

market delivery. Instead of protecting your powerbase

of people, you’ll need to open up and share them.

When “the empire strikes back,” you will unleash both

innovation and value in those critical areas such as

service, sales and R&D, ultimately reinforcing the core

importance of IT to the business.

Think about it. You’ve often known the answer, but

rarely do you get credit for knowing it. You’re no

longer the guardian of the key card, behind a locked

door with all this equipment. Now, you’re part of the

business.

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1 The Disappearance of the SlashI remember when I was getting into the technology

space in the early 1990s. I was a programmer/

analyst. I think that slash in the job title might be

telling, because this role has all but disappeared,

removed in the name of specialization. What this job

title meant was that not only did I have to maintain

the technical skills of developing kickass code as a

developer, I had to have the panache of a business

People

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analyst who could sit in understand the business, its

challenges, and specify opportunities and strategies

for deploying business models successfully.

Programmer/analysts have been a dying breed for

years, but we need them now more than ever. Univer-

sities, corporate training programs, and private train-

ing companies need to dig back into the 1980s and

1990s and dust off the training content for this role,

update it and get it back in front of their teams.

There is no better way to leverage the new, modern

Cloud-enabled deployment capabilities than with a

strong solution architect who has really good techni-

cal chops as well. Those resources are in such rare air,

and we better find a way to retrain, recruit and deploy

those resources if we want to leverage everything

we’ve got to offer.

There are some in your organization who can be

trained, mentored and deployed in this role, and if

you want to successfully leverage all that the Cloud

has to offer you need to focus on this task more than

any other.

It will be more critical than vendor selection, procure-

ment negotiations, or application developer skill sets.

I promise.

These process people are going to be logical thinkers, good commu-nicators, with passion and energy for problem solving. They know the business well, and exude initiative.

2 Process People PrevailWho are these new weapons you have at your

disposal? How do you tell your team apart? Which are

the ones with larger potential to align with the new

structure?

It probably has less to do with skill sets, specific work

experience or any type of technical certification,

and much more to do with personal qualities. These

process people are going to be logical thinkers, good

communicators, with passion and energy for prob-

lem solving. They know the business well, and exude

initiative.

They are less interested in tape back-up, and more

focused on taking apart a process and examining the

gaps in the delivery and value chain.

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3 Scale Back to Scale Upadmit it. Outsourcing your business processes to the

outsourcing firms wasn’t the silver bullet that you

thought it was, and it won’t be from now on. But that’s

not going to stop the big outsourcing firms knock-

ing on your door, cloaked in the Cloud, to “help” you

transform your enterprise.

As a case in point, I often see big consulting firms –

from the previous Big Five firms – throw 30 to 40

bodies at Cloud projects because they cannot under-

stand how to give their customers what they need in

a new model. They only understand onsite resources

billing. Nice work if you can get it.

These incumbent providers are locked into a dif-

ferent business model, and the concept of running

enterprise computing at scale on shared infrastruc-

ture, troughed and secure, accessible and governed,

remains to them something very exotic. To them,

security means the self-preservation security of lock-

ing you down to their legacy models.

You want to help your business units. Automation

targets are everywhere, not just in supporting the

sales force, but in your contact center, and accounting

and billing as well. Your internal customers and their

customers —the end users — now expect a differ-

ent experience. You’re going to be much better off

on your own service delivery if you can cover more

ground with the smaller and more mobile teams.

The Cloud helps you rethink lean as a luxury. You don’t

need a cadre of 20 people to help you understand

how you can transform your shop. I am continually

amazed seeing large firms do with 12 people what

I’ve seen accomplished with an internal team and a

couple strong support and architecture resources.

That’s the model. Don’t let them convince you it’s so

scary complicated that you can’t help figure out your

lean roadmap and strategy.

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4 Tapping into Talentlook at the mess we’ve made. We’ve added an awful

lot of expense to IT solutions over the last 20 years.

As we attempted to cut cost, we’ve only made things

more expensive. Some of it has been absolutely

required and supported an ROI story that drove busi-

ness success.

But this has also created innumerable giveaways for

the technology and outsourced solutions to find the

cheaper options for expensive infrastructure and

people. Mix in the specialization of resources which

has lent itself to increased cost and limited holistic

perspectives. A real quagmire, one that might have

detracted new people from entering the IT job market

since the message was: the people (also known as the

overhead) were the problem.

One welcome thing the Cloud has brought is

employee retention and skill-set building. You’re not

going to see this prevalent anywhere at your next

Cloud convention, it’s not going to be out there as a

demo on the expo floor or in the keynote address.

But you do see a lot more accomplished with smaller

teams of solution architects — the business drivers

with a couple technical resources — than you have

seen with a team of 20 in the past. That gives employ-

ees a strong sense of worth. This is the fundamental

difference: how much you can do with so few.

I go back to my best days in the Silicon Valley, when

failure didn’t really cost that much because there

weren’t huge assets devoted to your project. There

weren’t stakeholders and shareholders to worry

about; you were answering to the intrinsic value you

were creating in the marketplace.

People love to work for that kind of company and I

suspect that if you can build that kind of environment,

where innovation and inventiveness trumps moni-

toring the infrastructure, you’ll stand a good chance

of retaining the talent you have, and stand a better

chance of attracting some new minds. And best of all,

it will be the kind of place where you want to show up

every day.

One welcome thing the Cloud has brought is employee retention and skill set building.

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1 Own the RoomOnce you embrace the Cloud, here’s what you’re

going to lose: No more scan card access to a locked

server room. No more hiding all the resource

requirements to keep the infrastructure going in

your Cap Ex budgets. No more limiting the poten-

tial of the solution based on the narrow availability

triangle of servers, disk and the people needed to

run them.

Process

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Now pure, unbridled solution design and process

creativity will drive successful applications,

business models, partner ecosystems and customer

interactions.

Process creativity is your ability to stand at a white-

board, listen to confusing, complex, but important

stuff from the business, put it into context and formal-

ize it so you can enable it with tools and technology.

If you can do this, you have a chance to own the room

again, armed with experience and cache. How well

you can do this will drive how successful you’re go-

ing to be. If you don’t have process creativity in your

arsenal and the members of your IT team don’t either,

then failure is inevitable.

But you will be successful if you can sit in room with

the business people, and understand their processes.

Why? Because you also are the technologists that

know how to implement, develop and deliver their

solutions. So, as programmer analysts, we know the

business challenges and the code.

Unfortunately, what’s happened over the last 20 years

is that we have taken those skill sets inherent in the

programmer analyst — those five or six core compe-

tencies — and made them individual specialties.

We need the business-savvy, technology-oriented programmer analyst more than ever.

Now it takes four or five people to do the kinds of

things we did holistically.

We need the business-savvy, technology-oriented

programmer analyst more than ever. Interestingly, you

don’t have to be as technologically proficient: All the

things around infrastructure, scalability and security

have been pushed out a level. While there’s risk in

that, I’d rather have that challenge put onto a vendor,

because I can hold that vendor accountable. I can

beat him up if I need to. And I can get the vendor to

do more than my staff has the capability to do.

So it’s easier to attack complex projects now. Of

course, this is not holding back your competitors, so

you need to jump on the opportunity. Put a lever to

the talent and take back the advantage.

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2 The Cloud’s Security AdvantageWhile security issues may appear to be one of the

most formidable challenges to Cloud adoption, what

a CIO should really fear is what internal users and

development partners are capable of doing with

their data.

Almost all security challenges are data breach issues

created by their own employees leaving a laptop on

a plane or having it stolen with an easily hackable

password.

When the data isn’t on your computer it’s much

harder to find. Manage the devices, the people, and

what they are doing and most of your exposure is

limited.

And then the vendors: Every industry has its

accepted levels of governance and you have to make

sure every cloud infrastructure vendor complies with

your security standards.

3 Scalability Is a Pipe ProblemThere’s currently a lot of caution around network

scalability and failover. Ultimately, we’re going to buy

some utility computing services, and we need to vet

that our vendors can handle load. After all, there is

immaturity in this space. But realistically, for 90%

applications we will deploy, the real key is to ensure

that our pipes to the internet are redundant, scalable

and have failover options. That way, when someone

cuts some fiber down the street (which seems to hap-

pen to every business about every 5 years) you can

still get to the internet and run your Cloud solutions.

It’s a total turnaround from five to ten years ago, when

the Internet was a “nice to have” and the internal LAN,

at high expense, was redundant, fault-tolerant, and

managed by loads of people, tools, and vendors.

Now we’re flipping it up, and saying that the local LAN

is about a wireless access point, maybe a printer, and

some VPN if required. The internet connectivity is the

part that needs to be redundant, robust and always-

on at any business location. That’s a different network

The Cloud provides a level of security by obscurity. When the data isn’t on your computer it’s much harder to find.

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engineering problem, and is the most important part

of scalability.

Now you should still put your vendors through their

paces, because that’s due diligence. But ultimately

you have to worry about your pipe more than you

have to worry about whether a Cloud vendor can

truly scale.

4 Whip Through the TurnsIn cloud environments, you’ll see failure differently.

In fact, you won’t need to think about failure at all.

There’s less worry about having a major meltdown or

having a Plan B to address potential problems,

because the tools and the solution deployment land-

scape have changed so drastically.

If something doesn’t work, you just do it again. You do

it again because now it’s affordable and you haven’t

burned a lot of money in cycles. You’re in an environ-

ment that allows you to fail gracefully, recover quickly,

and get the thing right.

Face it: You’ve run into situations where you’ve

screwed up the configuration. Maybe not in a major

way, but enough that the customer is confused and

irritated. It’s the nature of this work.

You’re always going to deal with a certain degree of

imprecision, whether it’s the words on a piece of

paper or the flow charts on the whiteboard. The

requirements and all the things we’ve come to know

and love through 40 years of systems implementation

are still important, but ultimately, that imprecision

is much more likely to be recoverable in Cloud

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Your ability to take that failed effort and turn it into some-thing of value is much stronger than it is in the on-premise world.

environments. The tools and the configuration and

deployment are so simple, it levels the deployment

model.

Let’s say you did something and it failed. You didn’t

have the right requirements or the right data, or the

right people telling you what you needed. Your ability

to take that failed effort and turn it into something

of value is much stronger than it is in the on-premise

world.

You can chop and change, and make adjustments

quickly. Of course, you still have similar governance

on how you deploy and test. That doesn’t go away.

But the design, unit build, and system testing? Now

you can whip through those cycles much faster than

in any kind of environment I’ve ever seen. It really

doesn’t matter whose tools you’re using. One of the

main reasons for these new deployment advantages

is that the vendors have gone on a diet and put the

skinny on their product offerings. You now have sim-

ple tools, with the excess stripped out. You just want

the core stuff, right? You want to be able to make the

simple turns to provide what the business needs.

1 Vendors with Ripped AbsTools are drastically different from where they

were even five years ago. The development tools

we now have at our disposal are so much better,

mainly because the Cloud-focused vendors went on

a drastic diet. They stripped out many of the non-

essentials, the bloated features that drag everything

down. We’re talking the software equivalent of

having ripped abdominals and zero belly fat .

Tools

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You know this from the basic software you use in

the office. You probably only use 35 percent of that

software’s features every day, maybe another 15-20

percent once a week. When it comes down to it, you

actually barely use the product. And some of the more

arcane features make you hate the product. What you

really want are the simple tools, simple deployment

models, to be able to get things done quickly.

So now you have providers like salesforce.com with

three to four releases of their product a year, unheard

of in the enterprise software, on-premise world. Your

traditional legacy vendors would release at that rate

because of bug fixes, because everything was big,

bloated, and broken.

But now it’s simplified. You have less levers to touch,

but enough to build solutions. It’s a simplification of

the software delivery and application development

models that lends itself to graceful failure and quick

fix. Go ahead and screw it up.

Who hasn’t worked at a company or in an IT shop

where the development projects were way over

budget, failed to deliver what was expected, and were

late and stressful? It’s gone now. You strip that stuff

away, and you take fear and uncertainty out of the

equation. Now you focus on the solution.

It’s a re-simplification of the software delivery model as well as the application development model that lends itself to graceful failure and quick fix.

The bottom line is that you get the right answer more

quickly with less money. You have a fearlessness

you’ve never had and that creates business opportu-

nity. That’s a big differentiator.

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2 Beware the Entrenched VendorThis will come as no surprise but there are a lot of

companies in the IT vendor space who stand to lose a

lot because of the Cloud. So, many vendors are simply

taking their existing services and products — hosting,

outsourcing and co-location — and rebranding them

as cloud products. Their definition of Cloud is trans-

lated into ‘our product’.

So while Cloud transformation is not incredibly

complex, you certainly will see these entrenched ven-

dors make this process seem as complex as possible.

They desperately will attempt to maintain their legacy

applications and tools, and heritage of sales.

But their solutions will always fall short of what’s been

architected from scratch with the Cloud in mind. And

you shouldn’t be afraid of their scare and confusion

tactics. This is inevitable —and quite normal, actually

— but certainly not in your best interests.

What is one vendor’s “flexibility” is often a spaghetti-

mess of production confusion, market chaos, and a

severe lack of understanding regarding what both

business users and application developers truly need

to be successful.

Just remember: Only with infrastructure virtualized or

Cloud-deployed can solution architects and technical

architects design and deploy solutions that will satisfy

the consumer-derived user experience that business

apps need to deliver today.

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3 Don’t Buy the Cloud from a Database VendorDon’t tie yourself to a provider that is already

offering on-premise solutions or software. You want

a vendor that has built its Cloud solution from the

ground up.

Run the other way if the Cloud is coming at you from

a database developer or server vendor. You need to

hold out for a provider for whom customer adoption

and customer ROI are the only metrics that matter.

Those have to be the leading metrics by which they

gauge their business.

And beware a cloaked approach when Cloud is merely

a mix-in, where you have three or four different ways

to buy what you want: Cloud versus on-premise,

versus appliance, versus hosted solution versus co-lo.

Look for simplicity of the offering instead of vendors

coming up with myriad offerings. And look for consis-

tent release cycles that represent a good roll-out and

update strategy.

Today we’re running into a lot of people from the

1990’s in Silicon Valley who are now masterminding

Cloud solution offerings. It’s a community of people

that learned from the ASP outsourcing model, from

the dot.com successes and failures, and from the

retrenching into what is now our modern economy.

They’re seasoned software professionals, but they’re

also driven by the excitement of how different this is.

The resolve and understanding of these kinds of

professionals is what you want in your solution part-

ner. These people are not confused about their role.

They’re focused on the things that matter.

The right provider teams now are in execution mode.

They’re not in R&D mode or vision and value mode;

they have solid products and solid process, and they

are executing on them.

Beware a cloaked approach when Cloud is merely a mix-in, where you have three or four different ways to buy what you want: Cloud versus on-premise, versus appli-ance, versus hosted solution versus co-lo.

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1 The Cloud OpportunistRemember the old guy from the movie The

Shawshank Redemption who was released from

prison and didn’t know what to do? He worked in a

grocery store briefly as a bagger and then he

went back to his tiny room and gave up on life

altogether.

Well, you don’t have to be that guy. Adopting the

Cloud gives you the green light at your parole

hearing, and you walk away from cell block IT and

CIO

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emerge into daylight from the grim and gray prison

of on-premise limitations. And all the outsourcing

consultants and gear vendors are up there in the

guard towers shaking their heads in dismay as you

walk unshackled to freedom, you don’t have to worry

about what it’s going to be like on the outside.

Especially if you take what the term CIO used to

mean and give it some new life.

Chief? Are you kidding me? Squeezed between the

Alphas in senior management on one side and your

own infrastructure-focused team on the other, you

were at the mercy of the swirling whims of stockholder

voting blocs and the inertia that IT has been encour-

aging among its ranks for the last 40 or 50 years. You

were more likely fully in charge of things where you

really did have control, with appellations like Maintainer

of the Gear and Defender of the Line Item.

Information? What is that? It’s a meaningless word,

unchanged from the 14thcentury when it meant

something that was a concept or an idea. Information

is ineffable. Check the box marked “N/A” please. We

treat information as if it is a solid, but it’s not that or

even a liquid, barely a gas. And you’re going to track

it, trap it, refine it, distribute it and meter it? Not with

that infrastructure; no way.

Officer? See above. You get my point. It really comes

down to being an opportunist (lower case) who uses

the Cloud to get at innovation.

Think sports, where opportunists abound: the tennis

player who poaches at the net, the outfielder who

“shades” from the normal position, anticipating where

the ball is going to be hit, the linebacker who crouches

behind the onrushing linemen and then pops up

when the quarterback throws to what he thought was

an open receiver. Interception. Touchdown. Contract

renewal.

An opportunist is someone who profits from the

prevailing circumstances. The prevailing Cloud cir-

cumstances I see right now mean you can align your

process teams with the business units, lower the cost

for each cycle, and solve the problems your custom-

ers, contact centers, and sales teams.

The opportunist who maximizes the Cloud for innova-

tion is going to be noticed. This is not about contrib-

uting to a few rounds of expense reduction as a slash

mode play. You’re not a bagger anymore and you’re

not holing up in a small room. The Cloud redemption

has much more to do with achieving top-line growth

and shareholder value, and if you get that, you just

might be chief after all.

The linebacker who crouches behind the onrushing linemen and then pops up when the quarterback throws to what he thought was an open receiver. Interception. Touchdown. Contract renewal.

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2 The IT SpendWant to be the cIO everyone loves? Then focus on

lower-cost, higher-value solutions that really center

on value, not just spending.

These affordable solutions are cost-effective, exten-

sible, and provide a level of governance and scalability

often overlooked in the current application stack.

The chief technology executive will leverage many

small solutions to build out an enterprise roadmap,

and will design and deploy solutions that show value

at every project release. This focus is a healthy and

positive one for business. Ten years ago it wasn’t

very glamorous, but being competitive and winning

market share is in vogue right now.

Which means that things are back in the hands of

the CFO. Your ability to please him or her with a price

point and an innovation layer that drives revenue and

cost avoidance is the key to your success. Fail in that

endeavor in this market? Game over.

End of story.

Your ability to please the CFO with a price point and an innovation layer that drives revenue and cost avoidance is the key to your success.

3 Creating Value and Vision for Your CEOas you change the value/vision mix for your CEO

or board of directors, you better be pretty closely

mapped to how it’s going to work day to day.

Cloud transformation is like hitting the plunger and

blowing up how IT handles internal and external

customers. And the biggest bang for your buck will

ultimately come in how quickly you can transform

business process and workflow activity.

The key is to find a nimble, innovative strategy that

pares back distractions and creates the cost avoidance

or revenue enhancement that drives every business

model decision. And for your CEO, that influence, that

impact is huge.

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3 Inside the Cloud Transformed EnterpriseWhile external forces are driving macro changes,

the CIO will be planning and executing from the

inside out. Operational center managers, marketing,

sales and service, are all going to embrace your focus

on cost efficient solutions. This is a welcome thawing

of the age-old, totally ingrained divisiveness between

IT and the business.

“On board” is your goal for all departments. For

instance, making sure that the legal team is on board

with the vision and the value. Legal teams are go-

ing to find all kinds of interesting ways to challenge

the vision or the strategy. That’s not unusual. That’s

normal. You’re not going to plop new contracts on

them and not create problems. Remember, back office

functions serve a purpose for negotiation and risk

mitigation.

The trick is to stay involved in the conversation and

make sure that they don’t create situations where you

can’t go in the direction you want to, where you can’t

get the vision and value tied together.

Remember, the Cloud is not about buying a piece of

equipment. Familiarize your teams with the new sub-

scription model, so they’re not treating it like it’s the

same old on-premise, software and hardware procure-

ment model. You’ll need to understand this to get the

finance team on board, because there are plenty of

accounting practices that need to be considered.

Finance, legal and procurement need to understand

why the Cloud is non-negotiable for the health and

future of your company. Get them involved in the

story before you need them to execute.

Get them all focused on how the Cloud needs to be

different from what’s gone before. It will help you

smooth the rough edges.

clOuD DePaRTMeNTal alIGNMeNT

Sales

Marketing

Delivery

Operations

legal

Finance

IT

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1 Retooling for the 21st CenturySome believe the next decade will mark the pe-

riod when companies fundamentally retool for the

21st century. But you could say that the retooling

began 15 years ago and that we are just now seeing

the results of that retooling, the first lift from these

earthbound technologies.

Liberation

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True liberation will occur as forces greater than indi-

vidual companies drive business process forward,

and the CIO will be there to anticipate and harness

value from this progression of changes.

If you’re ever lost in the middle of all of this, look to

large companies’ mergers and talent acquisitions, to

what entrepreneurs are paying attention to, and to

where the venture capitalists are forming funds.

It’s tempting to think about where we may be in the

next ten years, but I want to pull back and use the

conclusion of this discussion to look at where we may

be in three to four years, to synthesize both prophetic

and pragmatic views.

I don’t know who this new company is, but I do know it will be about tools, browsers, watchers and code optimization.

2 The Tools of TomorrowlandToday is about making transactions more secure,

environments easier to scale — a deluge of

deployment plays. You can observe them all right now

rising on the thermals beneath the Cloud.

Tomorrow someone’s going to come along with the

next generation of development tools, Cloud-savvy

tools, like Borland did for PC development. PC devel-

opment took off because of these solid tools.

I don’t know who this new company is, but I do know

it will be about tools, browsers, watchers and code

optimization. They’re going to come up with a suite of

stuff, a combination of infrastructure and governance

and process mapping. Tools that will get us beyond,

or should I say below, the VP of marketing and the

VP of sales. These will be more powerful, with a wide

spectrum to govern and manage appropriately,

and to drive more effective utilization of assets,

storage and computing powers.

And around those tools you’ll find a flock of vendors

offering premium services that can accommodate

your requirements, which happen to be 99 percent

different than other customers. And, following that,

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you’ll see something offerings around data, process-

ing power, or analytics.

So it pays to pay attention to where the tools are

going. There are a lot of us waiting for this, because

we know how much more we can do with what

we’ve already experienced in Cloud transformation.

Whoever comes up with the overwhelming tools will

quickly separate from the pack.

When Disneyland opened the Tomorrowland part

of the theme park in 1955, it offered a vision of the

world as it might be in 1986, including household

conveniences such as microwave ovens and picture

phones. But the most distinctive exhibit was the “TWA

Moonliner,” with V-2 rocket design, atomic-powered to

take passengers into space as easily as we fly them to

Cleveland.

Well, TWA is long gone and we’re still waiting for the

Moonliner. I’m betting these new Cloud tools will

arrive much sooner. And then you’ll really see things

take off.

3 Verne Global, a Green Story When you take the leap and begin to think about

your servers and your software residing securely

outside your shop, say in Nevada or North Carolina,

then you might as well push this to its logical conclu-

sion and think of all the strategic places on the planet

where you might put a data center.

Rising power costs and server densities have put a

sharp focus on managing and reducing data center

energy consumption. In the United States and United

Kingdom, the supply and reliability of electricity is

increasingly in question due to overburdened grids.

The trend toward green policies and government

mandates like the Carbon Reduction Commitment

are also pressuring companies to reduce the carbon

footprint of their power-hungry facilities.

Iceland is now a go-to option for infrastructure. That’s

right, Iceland. Data centers have grown massively over

the past decade, becoming a major part of compa-

nies’ core, strategic infrastructures. At the same time,

a confluence of factors are forcing organizations to

quickly search for alternatives to the usual high-cost

locations.

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Data center efficiency goes beyond knowing if servers

are still up. These days, data center managers are

accountable for energy usage, energy efficiency,

compliance, and regulation. Performance must be

monitored and trends must be predicted to ensure

that the data center is ready for capacity increases at

any time.

Iceland-based Verne Global is helping clients un-

tether from high data center rents, high power costs

and massive carbon footprints. Iceland is an excellent

place to locate your next data center because it elimi-

nates all three. Iceland’s climate provides free ambient

cooling, and connectivity times to Europe and North

America are more than adequate.

Verne Global’s first data center is 100 percent pow-

ered by renewable energy resources and 100 percent

cooled by the natural environment of Iceland, without

the use of chillers or compressors.

Additionally, Verne Global is reducing overall energy

consumption through optimization of data center

design and server utilization. The facility, as well as the

design and construction program is centered around

LEED Gold standards, while meeting the stringent

requirements of today’s computing platforms.

4 Enterprise Software ConsolidationThe coming enterprise software consolidation is

running ahead of what will be consolidation the likes

of which we haven’t seen in 100 years.

Companies in spaces like business services, energy,

software, construction, telco /media and finance will

find ways to create value via acquisition and organic

growth. And companies with broad-based customer

rolodexes will be prepared to offer services to them in

sophisticated ways.

Imagine the seemingly unholy alliance of GE, Google,

and Pacific, Gas and Electric? Or Vodafone, salesforce.

com, Cisco and Duke Energy? Huge mergers will start

to happen within 12 months time. We’ve already seen

Intel take a shot across the bow with the purchase of

McAfee.

Why would they do that? Because security will be es-

sential in the new world of the Cloud, and the people

that own the best security minds and solid products

will do well in positioning the infrastructure solutions

that people and companies require.

The people that own the best security minds and solid products will do well in positioning the infrastructure solutions that people and companies require.

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While initial Cloud adoption has been driven by cost

factors, the explosive growth will only occur when

security is not seen as the barrier but the reason

why you want to get your data away from the weak

barriers of your own firewalls. This is most obvious in

industries such as financial services, healthcare and

government, where regulation and special require-

ments abound and where infiltration and leaks cannot

occur for any reason. But it applies just as easily in the

private sector where customer lists and trade secrets

are proprietary, and even in the not-for-profit realm

where donor information is held in trust.

So now you’re starting to see the early movements,

the overt linkage between hardware providers and

security software. Wait until you see the first unholy

matrimony of a software company and a utility

company and then remember you read it here first.

These new companies will own the grid, as well as the

smart networks, applications, and security to deliver

loads of services, billed through complex metering

and pricing plans. Five years ago commoditized

pricing for virutalization and data services seemed like

madness, but Amazon’s AWS technologies deliver

exactly that today for pennies -- PENNIES -- on the

dollar of what this stuff used to cost.

5 Where My Mouth Is This is not just me jawing about the transformation

and liberation that the Cloud is bringing and will

continue to bring once everyone owns this book

and packs it in their carry-on luggage. This is not me

pontificating atop a lofty summit or finger-pointing

from up in first class (I fly commercial, by the way).

Nor is this me going Keith Moon, shot putting servers

out my hotel window into the swimming pool below.

No, this is me on the phone calling my broker and

selling (or shorting) all my stock in ERP outfitters and

the publicly-traded consulting firms that peddle on-

premise solutions. Dump ‘em, before the bell!

Better yet, I’ll start my own venture fund. If some-

one would kindly drop $120 million in my lap this

afternoon, I’ll go out and launch Lingo Ventures or

Premiseless Partners, and I’ll hang my VC shingle on

Sand Hill Road and get to work finding the entrepre-

neurs who are putting together the major plays for

2015, the year I’ll start returning gobs of money to

my limited partners.

I’ll start with investments in smart-grid technologies.

As an investor I’d head to very large markets, where

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the large utility players are converging and serial

entrepreneurs are attracted by the opportunities to

create value.

Then I’ll head over and invest in Cloud-based software

that’s focused on billing and product configuration,

and vet some security ventures while I’m at it. I’ll put

some advanced network switch and failover product

play in my venture shopping cart, and heading for

home, I’ll scoop up the most promising application

development and monitoring tool companies, the

ones developed exclusively for Cloud apps.

That’s when this will really mean something. When

you not only stake your professional reputation on the

liberating qualities of the Cloud, but when you take

your piggy bank and your 401k and you place it in a

Cloud mutual fund.

6 I’m No OracleYou can tell from my picture that I’m not the guy

who stands on the mountaintop and hands down

prophecy on stone tablets. I don’t look at a moth-

erboard and pretend it has anything Ouija about it,

because you’ll never find the answer in the gear.

And I’m not the wizard in majestic robes at the front

of expectant audience craving a miracle. As you’ve

learned already, what I have to tell you is not going to

be very profound; provocative, I hope, and practical

maybe, but not necessarily profound.

I do have two advantages over most CIO’s in recogniz-

ing what the Cloud means. I worked in Silicon Valley

for many years. Silicon Valley teaches people what it

takes to bring a company to life in a venture capital-

fueled environment. How do you navigate to get

something done right? With nimbleness, even with

the rope-a-dope moves you sometimes have to make.

You don’t waste any time or energy going back and

solving a problem a different way. Leave the ego aside

and just go back and do it again.

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From my standpoint, this Silicon Valley nimbleness is

tongue-and-groove with what it’s going to take to be

successful in the Cloud.

The other advantage is that in my current role, work-

ing all around the world helping companies with their

Cloud transformation strategy, I get to listen to a lot of

folks. I‘ve seem a lot of Transformations to the Cloud,

and everything I’ve been telling you here, is exactly

what I hear every single day.

There is nothing here you can’t find out for yourself

eventually, or maybe pick up along the way. But hope-

fully this book can help you frame it in a way you’ve

never thought about before.

We all know IT is a moving target, and maybe now

you realize that target isn’t on your back anymore.

The bull’s eye is out there, and you’ve been given

better arrows, at less than wholesale prices. Now you

can free up and train more archers so you’re not the

only one shooting at the problem.

I’m no soothsayer, but if it helps, let’s grab coffee and

talk it over. Better make mine a double espresso.

We’ll definitely be adding some rocket fuel to this

story before it’s all said and done.

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At Mike’s day job as Chief Technology Officer and SVP,

Professional Services at Astadia, he helps companies

use the Cloud to transform their businesses.

Scenario planning for Cloud transformation is easy

(and free) online with the IT Transformation ROI

calculator at astadia.com/roi

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Documents

Mike_Lingo_Book_-_Final_Copy