Looking for leverage where tech intersects business
Scott enjoys living at the intersection where technology meets the enterprise. He loves the challenge of business building, and figuring out how to translate innovation into business value. A self-avowed cloud junkie, Scott's been an entrepreneur, executive, consultant and investor in everything from seed-stage startups to the world's leading enterprise IT companies. His family, Illini basketball and Austin are Scott's other passions. Follow him on Twitter or LinkedIn.
The announcement last week that GE (yes that GE) made a $105 million investment in the Pivotal Initiative caught many by surprise. Not only was it strange to see GE make a large direct investment in a technology vendor, it was also odd to see it in a relatively immature market like PaaS. So the [...]
The conventional thinking about business-led adoption of cloud services in the enterprise goes something like this: Frustrated by a non-responsive IT organization, business users become attracted to the innovation, speed, and flexibility offered by cloud vendors and solutions Fearing loss of control, corporate IT puts the brakes on deployments and projects of which they become [...]
Microsoft last week announced the general availability of Azure Infrastructure Services. This marks a notable course correction for Microsoft, which initially provided Azure solely through a Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) model. While many market observers assume that public cloud IaaS in the enterprise is now a three horse race between Amazon AWS, Rackspace and Google, they may [...]
Now that corporate IT is finally taking cloud seriously, we’re starting to see development of more explicit enterprise-wide “cloud strategies”. Whether driven internally or with the help of external consultants, many of these take familiar IT strategy development processes and direct them at cloud. Here are some common pitfalls we’re seeing with many of these [...]
It was an interesting week last week at Cloud Connect Silicon Valley. In addition to the keynotes and track sessions, we also saw the release of the summary results of the latest joint Cloud Connect / Everest Group survey on enterprise cloud adoption. Here are the seven things we took away from the conference, the [...]
One of the more interesting corners of the enterprise market where cloud is starting to drive real disruption and transformation is in the call center. Call center environments are comprised of a variety of systems including interactive voice response (IVRs), automatic call distributors (ACDs), outbound dialers and other components that have traditionally been provided by [...]
Saving money is nothing compared to beating your competitors to market with a better product. This is the revelation that’s rapidly taking hold in the enterprise CIO’s office. Until very recently, most enterprise IT leaders would tell you that their primary goal in moving to cloud computing was related to cost reduction, primarily through server [...]
In one of the more eye-opening recent announcements in the world of enterprise cloud, JPMorgan Chase said last week that it has migrated nearly all of its internal .NET and Java applications to a PaaS model. Over 430 development teams, 2,000 applications and 4 data centers are now in production in a PaaS environment delivered by Apprenda. It [...]
You may recall we talked about Toyota in an earlier post about their impressive use of cloud services to drive back-office transformation. We’d like to shift gears (pun intended) to the front-office to talk about how Toyota is using cloud to transform the customer service experience and how it engages with its customers. Toyota’s vision [...]
Rackspace took quite a beating last week after announcing on Tuesday that cloud revenue growth appears to be decelerating. The stock ended up down nearly 20%, reflecting the fact that Wall Street expectations for growth were high. Rackspace is actually one of the few vendors that makes cloud services growth numbers public, making them subject [...]
When it comes to enterprise cloud and sources of business value, the discussion typically focuses on business agility, flexibility and cost efficiency. One of the most powerful, yet unsung ways that cloud is actually driving enterprise-class business value in practice is through standardization and simplification. In fact some of the most compelling business cases seen [...]
A wide array of players is aggressively attacking the enterprise cloud infrastructure services market. The competitive landscape includes providers from a variety of backgrounds, including hosting companies such as Rackspace, GoGrid, and Tier3; telcos such as AT&T, Verizon, Telstra, and BT; and legacy enterprise IT service providers such as IBM, HP, CSC, and Dell. They’re [...]
Flexible, consumption –based pricing models in most cases make cloud services economically and financially attractive to CFOs. The ability to get IT “off the balance sheet” through subscription-based services is seen as a big positive for cloud migration from a financial point of view. Despite this apparent advantage, there are cases where financial factors can [...]
For many enterprises the cost to operate and maintain complex ERP systems consumes a large part of the IT budget. Given security and application performance requirements, you wouldn’t think that ERP would be on the top of the CIO’s list for cloud migration. Domino Sugar thought otherwise, and successfully migrated their SAP ERP environment to [...]
“Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” Many assume that because Amazon AWS isn’t aggressively building large-scale direct sales, solutioning and support capabilities like IBM and HP that it has no enterprise strategy. Nothing could be further from the truth. Amazon has had an intentional, purposeful strategy for the enterprise market for years. But [...]
Many believe that private clouds are just a stepping stone for corporate IT on a path that will end at the public cloud. Dedicated private clouds allow IT to have full control over the environment, though they don’t provide the cost efficiencies associated with multi-tenant, public cloud IaaS services. This control is helpful for enterprises [...]
While many enterprises are migrating dev / test environments to the cloud, few are using cloud to drive changes in application development like State Street.
In addition to cloud computing, another recent innovation that has the potential to disrupt and dramatically reshape the traditional enterprise data center model is the ARM-based server. ARM refers to a processor architecture that has become ubiquitous in mobile devices, including cell phones and tablets. Interestingly ARM is actually a British company that itself doesn’t [...]
Cloud identity management is a thorny, complex problem. Will we eventually end up with comprehensive platforms for managing cloud identities instead of a series of point solutions? I’m sure we probably will. Will these broad solutions be coming in the near future? Here, I’m a bit more skeptical.
One of the better indicators that corporate IT groups are starting to get serious about cloud is their growing interest in solutions that help them aggregate and manage multiple cloud services. Some call these solutions cloud services brokerage and management, and others term them cloud orchestration. While the market hasn’t yet converged on a common set of [...]
