IT Power Users Will Lead the Way

Have you ever wondered if your company's utilization of Business Technology is in line with the creative market leaders? The Harvard Business Review recently published an interesting commentary by Susan Cramm entitled "How to Support Your IT Innovators."

Ms. Cramm believes that to realize the full potential from business technology, all enterprises need IT-smart business leaders -- up, down, and across the organization.

According to the results of her ongoing survey, however, business leaders apparently don't feel very smart about their IT adoption and application practices.

• Only 11% personally use and fully leverage the capabilities of the technology currently in place.
• 50% agree with the statement that "business leaders don't understand how to use their systems and technologies."
• And, only 25% of business leaders consider themselves "IT-smart."
  

Liberate the Business Technology Innovators
One person she interviewed said "business groups that have somebody on their team who is an IT expert do much better -- in terms of leveraging technology to meet their needs -- than those who do not." While that may not be profound, it's a noteworthy comment.

Tech-savvy business users perform a valuable function for their less-informed peer group. They are able to determine what is truly possible, with current technology. Why? It's because power-users sometimes have better productivity enhancing tools in their home-based office than they do at their place of work.

How can this be possible? Well, IT managers focused on total control of all physical infrastructure are consumed by operational tasks and remedial user support activity. They have little or no time available to research, test and adopt the best-fit productivity tools for their business user needs.

Don’t Assume, Follow the Informed User
Moreover, there's often a major disconnect between what business users say they need, and what their IT team assumes they would apply. Most organizations use only 64 percent of their enterprise systems core functions, according to a recent Accenture survey.

"About half said they don't need all the capabilities, while a fifth explained that they didn't make use of all the functionality due to lack of time to learn how to apply them," said Accenture.

In summary, Ms. Cramm says that you should identify your lead users, give them more of what they really need, free up your IT team's time to study what they are doing (and why), and then decide how to standardize and scale the most promising innovations to benefit the whole enterprise.

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Demand for Cloud Infrastructure as a Service

Some market studies continue to identify confusion regarding the true meaning of cloud-based services, and the apparent benefits derived by the early-adopters. One recent example comes from a survey of financial professionals in the UK.

However, there is already growing demand from informed executive business and IT decision makers that are eager to move forward with various forms of cloud service deployments.

In fact, Forrester Research has embarked on a new "Cloud and Virtualization Survey Data" series that offers key insights on where the market demand is developing, and they also debunk several stereotypes.

According to Forrester's assessment, Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) offerings, one of the three types of cloud services, is an area of cloud computing that currently receives the most market attention. It centers on two forms of capability: 1) pay-per-use hosting of virtual servers at an external cloud service provider, and 2) operating an internal cloud, where your IT department offers virtual servers-as-a-service.

Enterprise Will Lead the Momentum
Forrester reviewed their latest survey data and uncovered the following indicators of likely buyer interest in, and adoption of, these two forms of IaaS:

• About 25% of all enterprises plan to adopt IaaS via an external service provider.
• Firms are slightly less interested in internal clouds than they are in external IaaS.
• Large business respondents report more awareness, interest, and adoption of external IaaS than small business -- they also report the same for internal clouds.
  

Forrester defines the three layers of the cloud services stack as follows:

Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) - End user applications, delivered as a service rather than as on-premise software.
Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) - Application platform or middleware-as-a-service on which developers can build and operate custom applications.
Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) - Compute-, storage-, or other IT infrastructure-as-a-service, rather than as dedicated capability.

Once again, pay-per-use hosting of virtual servers and internal cloud are part of infrastructure-as-a-service.

Cloud Service Adoption Drivers
Forrester reached an interesting conclusion from their market assessment -- that's contrary to conventional wisdom regarding the initial demand for cloud services. Enterprises are leading the adoption, not small and medium sized businesses (SMBs). Moreover, they have different technology preferences and comfort levels with virtualization.

Forrester also believes that early adopters of IaaS service offerings are driven by the instant provisioning of servers and the pay-per-use pricing model. Furthermore, the enterprise IT operations buyers, unlike developer buyers, may want to integrate their on-premise infrastructure with anything they deploy to a service provider, either temporarily or permanently.

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Verizon Cloud-Based Computing as a Service

Verizon Business introduced an on-demand, cloud-based Computing as a Service (CaaS) solution -- designed to meet the stringent security and performance requirements of their enterprise customers.

This new offering helps businesses take advantage of cloud (IP-based) computing to more efficiently and securely manage IT computing resources -- server, network and storage -- to meet day-to-day business demands.

This CaaS solution, which leverages Verizon's global IP infrastructure and data centers, enables companies to use a Web-based portal to employ computing resources in the quantities and duration dictated by their own business needs.

As a result, businesses pay for the resources used and avoid having to build out for peak capacity requirements by buying new equipment and adding IT or networking staff.

Designed for mid-to-large-sized businesses, CaaS is ideal for new development projects, major events and migrations so that organization can easily and quickly shift IT resources as required.

Just-in-Time Computing Resources
It is also well suited for businesses with seasonal demands such as retailers, companies holding annual benefit enrollments or sales promotions that drive incremental traffic to Web sites. The service is immediately available in the U.S. and Europe, and then will be introduced to the Asia-Pacific region in August.

Verizon's Mike Marcellin explains in a video commentary some of the key features and benefits.

Melanie Posey, research director, hosting & telecom services at IDC said "Verizon has incorporated a number of key elements that make this solution a stand-out in the marketplace. The CaaS combination of flexibility, security, performance and resiliency is well positioned to serve certain enterprise requirements in a nimble, next-generation fashion."

Clearly, we can anticipate that the forward-looking managed and hosted service providers will continue to launch innovative new managed cloud service offerings that meet the selective IT out-tasking needs of their customers.

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