March 31st, 2009

@ Cloud Computing Expo #9 Mike Hill (IBM)

Mike Hill, VP, IBM Cloud Services on How the CIO becomes a hero again:

‘Cloud Computing will have major impacts to the way in which IT is delivered from the data center to its many clients. For the CIO, this can be perceived as a threat to the way in which they manage data center capabilities. In reality, cloud computing offers a huge opportunity to the CIO who now has the capability to offer more responsive, scalable, and available IT services. This presentation provides a perspective on cloud computing’s future and illustrates how the CIO can appropriately leverage cloud to become the hero again.’

Cloud is culmination of capability, developed over 50 years, with a new intriguing business model.  IBM is embracing Cloud Computing.  Today’s talk on why CIOs should embrace it as well.

Interesting, Mike Hill was IBM’s CIO in the ‘90s, driving internal e-business initiatives.  So, he should get the challenges of IT. 

The future: three co-existing delivery models: within the enterprise traditional IT & private cloud, public cloud and a hybrid cloud bridging private & public.

Use public cloud for cost efficiencies and to include public services in your SOA.

New challenges for CIO with cloud:

- scale & responsiveness (ensure)

- manage systems & security

- support audits & certifications

- manage proliferation of systems & applications

- integrate cloud and enterprise services

- provide a range of services

- provide a range of technical support

How to manage these challenges:

- develop cloud architecture and plan

- implement security, audit, and systems management technologies

- use a SOA

- demonstrate ROI

Mike Hill just mentioned the metric I missed from Kristof, 60-80%.  If return is not 60-80%, doing the wrong thing.  I’d have to guess that return there is cost savings, but I’m not certain.  Perhaps someone from IBM reading this can add a comment with some detail.  Mike just came back to this point, it is about % of cost taken out of running environment (related to targeted workloads of course).

Managing security, audit & compliance, and systems requires technologies for the cloud.  IBM is working on building the “right kinds of systems management software” to do this.  Mike cautions, as you are looking at public providers, be sure stringent enterprise requirements re: identity, data privacy, auditing, security & more are accounted for.

Now, Mike is “making an advertisement for SOA”.  “If you aren’t down that path, take a hard look again”.  Need to look at processes and services.

Mike is talking about KPIs, metrics, measurement and scorecards for IT.  Need to take cost out of IT and associated cost out of business.  I like the financial discipline aspects advocated by cloud vendors.  Mike says, if you don’t capture the cost taken out, you’ll never get to reclaim it to invest in new capability.

So, cloud could help IT keep a flat budget overall, but have more $$, higher %, to spend on new business capability delivery.  This, as I recall from my time in IT management, is the holy grail. 

IBM went through near-death experience not embracing a new compute model – client server – and reminds audience to avoid a near death experience.

Posted by brenda michelson at 11:13 am in Blog, provider positions | Permalink | Comments(0)
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