THINK IT Services

I had an opportunity to speak to the Mid-Atlantic CIO Forum at Towson University last week about new strategies and tactics for fully capitalizing on today’s Cloud alternatives. Because the group is composed of CIOs primarily from mid-size and large-scale enterprises with a lot of custom built applications and systems already in place, their biggest challenge is determining how to integrate the latest Cloud services into their legacy operations. Managing ‘hybrid’ Clouds is becoming a common challenge.

I had spoken to this group a couple of years ago when the concept of Cloud computing was just emerging. At that time, they were primarily interested in better understanding what the concept meant and why they should consider it. Like many CIOs, the attendees of this session are now trying to determine where, when and how to deploy Cloud services to meet their day-to-day needs and achieve their long-term corporate objectives.

Although some debate continues to swirl around the merits of public versus private clouds, most industry observers agree that the vast majority of organizations will utilize a mix of on-premise and ‘on-demand’ applications and computing resources to support their business operations. Therefore, the key to success is properly managing this hybrid operating environment to get the maximum value from the new Cloud resources will extending the life of existing on-premise systems and software.

While most IT organizations have been managing mixed environments for a long time, the advent of Cloud-based services adds a new wrinkle to this age-old challenge. Rather than simply acquiring and installing a traditional on-premise system or software application into a traditional computing environment, capitalizing on a leading Cloud solution entails a new set of considerations.

Beyond evaluating a Cloud solution’s ability to meet the organization’s functional requirements, the IT team must thoroughly assess how well the Cloud vendor can deliver on its promises.

This means determining how it has architected its service delivery infrastructure to ensure maximum availability and optimal performance. It is also important to investigate the vendor’s customer support capabilities and policies to fully understand how the vendor will respond if there is a service delivery or other important support issue. This means determining what service level assurances the vendor provides and how it compensates the customer if it fails to meet these obligations.

Equally important is determining the financial viability of the vendor. As a relatively new market segment, the Cloud is attracting a growing assortment of relative start-ups. This “Cloud Rush”, can’t sustain all the players and an industry shake-up is likely. Therefore, many vendors will either fail or be acquired by others. Considering how these scenarios could impact an organization’s dependency on a Cloud service is important.

IT and business decision-makers can also take advantage of a growing number of Cloud vendors that are providing unprecedented transparency regarding the reliability and performance of their services. Many are offering online ‘Trust’ sites that show the availability and latency levels of their services real-time.

A widening array of Cloud-based management tools are also coming to market which provide a ‘single-pane of glass’ dashboard that can help CIOs and their IT teams more easily deploy, monitor, measure and maximize the value of their hybrid Cloud resources.

Disclosure: This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.

Despite some skepticism from industry analysts about the ability of Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) vendors to deliver viable business intelligence (BI) solutions a few years ago, today’s Cloud-based analytic tools are increasingly demonstrating that they can quickly generate tangible benefits to organizations of all sizes, especially mid-market companies.

The growing interest in Cloud-based analytics is easy to understand given the escalating pressures facing businesses contending with rising customer expectations and intensifying competitive. Businesses not only have to synthesize a widening array of internal and external data sources, they must also make timely and useful analysis available to an increasingly dispersed workforce so they can make better day-to-day business decisions.

The Cloud is the perfect enablement platform for analytic tools to respond to these demands. THINKstrategies sees the Cloud responding in three ways.

First, every leading Cloud solution includes a basic set of analytic tools to satisfy users’ rudimentary needs, including activity tracking and reporting capabilities.

Second, every leading Cloud vendor is tracking usage rates and behavior patterns to better understand how their solutions are being utilized so they can continuously fine-tune and enhance their Cloud offerings.

Third, a growing number of Cloud vendors which have gained a critical mass of customers are beginning to examine how they can package the aggregated metadata they are accumulating to produce useful benchmark statistics and key performance indicators (KPIs) that help users understand how they compare and contrast to their peers. This is a unique value-add which only Cloud-based solutions built on a shared, multi-tenant architecture can provide.

IBM’s recent acquisition of DemandTec is the latest example of the growing focus on Cloud analytics in the marketplace. DemandTec delivers Cloud-based analytics software businesses use to track customer online and in-store buying patterns to identify trends so they can make better pricing, packaging, and other marketing decisions to generate higher revenues and profits.

The DemandTec acquisition comes about year after IBM closed another acquisition of a Cloud-based analytics company, called Coremetrics, which focuses on Web analytics which enable users to develop more targeted online marketing campaigns.

As CIOs’ fears about data security and privacy in the Cloud subside, they are being replaced by a growing interest in utilizing Cloud-based analytics tools and the computational power of the Cloud to attain better insight into business effectiveness.

The most appealing aspect of the new wave of Cloud analytic solutions is that businesses don’t have to invest millions of dollars to build costly data warehouses, implement complicated BI software, or hire an army of expensive consultants to try to gain a competitive advantage.

Instead, a growing number of enlightened IT and business decision-makers in mid-sized enterprises are recognizing that they can take advantage of a widening array of Cloud-based analytic tools to achieve their corporate objectives at a fraction of the cost, in far less time, and without the risks associated with legacy BI systems.

This is particularly important to mid-size organizations which lack the skills and financial resources to make major investments in BI systems. Cloud analytics gives these mid-market enterprises tools they otherwise could not afford, and levels the playing field to enable them to gather and interpret real-time data to better compete with larger players and start-ups.

Disclosure: This post was written as part of the IBM for Midsize Business program, which provides midsize businesses with the tools, expertise and solutions they need to become engines of a smarter planet.