Tag: Cloud Connect

Video: Lauren Cooney Explains Why Your Dev Team Just Became the CIO at Cloud Connect Chicago | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Lauren Cooney, Senior Director, Software Market & Developer Strategy at Cisco, explains the new cloud computing world order. The consumerization of IT is changing the CIO’s perspectives, and user experience is ascending as a top priority. Lauren talks about empowering the developers and create a better product and better user experience.

Follow Lauren on Twitter @lcooney.

Lauren was a speaker in the New World Order: Your Dev Team Just Became the CIO session — part of the Organizational Readiness track at Cloud Connect Chicago, which Everest Group’s Scott Bils chaired. For more Organizational Readiness resources, visit www.everestgrp.com/ccevent.

Video: Dave Roberts Talks about Enterprise Cloud Adoption at Cloud Connect Chicago 2012 | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Dave Roberts, SVP of Strategy and Evangelism at Service Mesh, talks about balancing an open and closed cloud infrastructure and provides tips on ensuring your cloud project succeed.

Follow Dave on Twitter @sandhillstrat.

Dave was a speaker in the Hard Choices in Enterprise Cloud Adoption session – part of the Organizational Readiness track at Cloud Connect Chicago, which Everest Group’s Scott Bils chaired. For more Organizational Readiness resources, visit www.everestgrp.com/ccevent.

Picture This: a 360° Visual Depiction of Current Cloud Adoption Trends | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Download the Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey Results


We wrote in a blog last week about the top messages that emerged from the extensive enterprise cloud adoption survey we conducted earlier this year in partnership with Cloud Connect. To ensure we’ve “got the backs” of our readers who tend to be right-brained and thus more attuned to images and visual thinking, the following shows the key findings we reaped from the responses of the 346 buyers, providers and advisors who participated in the survey.

Enterprise Cloud Adoption Infographic
Click to expand

As you see:

  •  Cloud adoption is expanding beyond “low hanging fruit” like email and custom applications to include disaster recovery, storage and archiving, and business intelligence and analytics to support Big Data initiatives
  • Buyers’ opinion of the Cloud is extremely positive, with highest satisfaction in ability to create flexible infrastructure, and they have exceptionally high expectations of future benefits
  • Enterprises are increasingly viewing Cloud as an enabler of top line growth, i.e., to reduce time to market for applications, solutions and products, yet providers continue to sell with a cost reduction value proposition

To gain more insights on these and other key findings, you can download the survey summary report, and/or join me at the Cloud Connect Chicago conference on September 12, when I’ll be discussing the survey results in detail. Use code EVERESTGRP to receive 25% off conference passes or claim a free expo pass. For now, up and away on the Cloud!

Top 5 Takeaways from the Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

The enterprise cloud adoption survey jointly conducted by Everest Group and Cloud Connect in mid 2012 shows very interesting trends. Unlike other surveys, this effort includes all the cloud market participants such as cloud providers, buyers, third-party advisors, consulting firms, and cloud enablers. This ensures a 360o view of the market.

The survey summary report is now available and can be downloaded here.

The top five messages emerging out of this survey effort are:

  1. Buyers are willing to transform their infrastructure and business application landscape leveraging cloud models. The growing need for data intensive applications, quicker time to market, flexible infrastructure, and data management is driving this transformation. The survey indicates that over 85% of enterprise buyers have already deployed or plan to deploy cloud-based infrastructure solutions.

  2. Buyers and providers of cloud services need to find a common ground on understanding challenges in cloud adoption. Though security and integration challenges top the list, the buyers believe that their management is more than willing to deploy cloud solutions whereas providers see lack of management buy-in from the buyers as an important barrier.

  3. There is a disconnect between what the buyers hold valuable and what the providers believe is important in cloud adoption. Adopters believe that cloud model enables them to improve top line by increasing productivity and reducing the time to market. Moreover, reduction of total cost of ownership does not drive their cloud adoption whereas providers see it as the most important factor.

  4. Cloud delivery models are significantly impacting the traditional IT buying centers. The survey shows that a considerable portion of IT budget is increasingly getting allocated to the businesses. Moreover, individual business leaders (including C-level executives) have more say in cloud decisions over IT, procurement, or the finance team.

  5. Overall, the sentiments of buyers of cloud services remain very positive. Most of them met their objective, especially from cloud infrastructure solutions. The survey reveals that ~65% of buyers met their objectives from cloud deployment and ~90% decision makers believe that their cloud adoption will increase in the future.

The survey shows that though currently a large part of cloud adoption is driven by industry-agnostic offering, there is a considerable demand for industry specific solutions. We believe that industry flavors will become prominent once a critical mass of cloud adoption is achieved.

Though the survey showed disconnect between the perspective of buyers and providers in cloud adoption, it also revealed common ground on various aspects. For example, in key decision criteria for cloud evaluation, both the buyers and providers believe that security, contract terms and SLAs, fair pricing, and tenure of the provider are important parameter. We believe these common grounds are good for the industry and development of the cloud market as it aligns the expectations of various market participants and should help in creating relevant cloud services.

Overall the enterprise cloud adoption survey shows that despite all the challenges, confusion, barriers, and other issues, market participants are upbeat about cloud adoption. The buyers are quite satisfied with the outcome of cloud adoption within their enterprise IT set-up. Not only is this positive for the industry, but it also establishes the fact that, unlike other hyped-up trends, cloud delivery models are here to stay.

I will be speaking more about the survey results at Cloud Connect Chicago on September 12. We also have an excellent speaker lineup for the Organizational Readiness track, including thoughts leaders from Cisco, InterContinental Hotels Group, salesforce.com, Morningstar, Fidelity, Neovise and Cloudscaling. Read my blog from earlier this month for a sneak preview of the track sessions. Use code EVERESTGRP to receive 25% off conference passes or claim a free expo pass. I look forward to seeing you at Cloud Connect!

Gain the Insights You Need for Next Generation IT Success: the Organizational Readiness Track at the Cloud Connect Conference | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

This blog originally appeared on Cloud Connect Blog. Read the original post.


GE’s Jack Welch once stated, “Change before you have to.” While it’s certainly sage advice, with virtually everything in the cloud computing world evolving so rapidly – the offerings, the providers, the implementation strategies, and the buyers, who these days are most typically business users rather than IT – it’s dauntingly difficult to decide what, how, when and with whom to change.

Yet, following in the footsteps of the highly successful, inaugural Organizational Readiness track at the Cloud Connect conference in February 2012, the sessions at the September 11-12 event in Chicago are all designed to cut through the clutter, and provide deep insights on the organizational issues that are threatening to thwart cloud-oriented next generation IT success.

In “New World Order: Your Dev Team Just Became the CIO” session, industry analyst Vanessa Alvarez and Cisco’s Laura Cooney will discuss the emergence of developers as decision makers, what organizations are doing to adjust to this revolution, the technologies to look at, and pitfalls to avoid.

With budgets increasingly migrating to “shadow” IT driven by business users, it is more critical than ever for CIOs to understand how to serve and enable this new buyer group in a next generation IT environment. During the “Tough Questions You Need to Ask” session, business users who have driven major cloud initiatives will provide answers to questions CIOs may be afraid to ask.

The panel session “Hard Choices in Enterprise Cloud Adoption” will feature three 15-minute drill-down presentations that provide insight into the major choices and decisions organizations face around:

  • Open versus Closed Cloud Infrastructures, and the pros and cons of each
  • Forklift versus Greenfield, and how to determine if you should first focus on moving existing applications to a virtualized environment, or deploy a new infrastructure for greenfield applications
  • Now versus Later, to help CIOs evaluate whether they should accelerate or put a hold on their enterprises’ move to the cloud

“Current Thinking in Addressing Persistent Cloud Challenges” will examine Security and Compliance, Performance, Vendor Management and Lock-In issues, and provide practical, real-world examples of how panelists’ and other organizations are creatively addressing them.

If you haven’t yet registered for Cloud Connect, I hope you’ll visit the conference registration page and sign up today. Use code EVERESTGRP to receive 25% off conference passes or claim a free expo pass. You’ll unquestionably gain strategic, tactical and actionable insights on how to shine much needed light into all things cloud. As Chair of the Organizational Readiness track, I look forward to seeing you in Chicago in September!

Download the Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey Results.

Cloud Connect and Everest Group Launch Global Enterprise Cloud Adoption Tracking Survey | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Download the Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey Results.

The market conversation around enterprise adoption of private, public and hybrid cloud models has been surprisingly light on facts. Data, surveys and analysis tend to focus either on predicting overall market sizes for cloud services (which often strain credulity of even the most ardent cloud supporter), or on high level surveys around planned cloud adoption and perceived issues.  While interesting from a broad market perspective, they provide little insight for IT executives facing hard choices around cloud migration. Decision makers are faced with little hard data on the use cases that are actually being implemented in the enterprises and the value that they’re generating.  This gap creates challenges not just for enterprise CIOs but also for cloud service providers and consultants.

Enterprise Cloud Adoption SurveyIn conjunction with Cloud Connect and UBM TechWeb, Everest Group is excited to announce a new tracking survey focused on better understanding where the “rubber is hitting the road” with enterprise cloud adoption. Targeted at enterprises and vendors alike, our Enterprise Cloud Adoption Survey will focus on identifying global enterprise cloud adoption trends and patterns and where enterprises are seeing value today from the cloud. Our survey will help readers gain visibility and insight into questions such as:

  • What are the use cases that are driving adoption of SaaS, PaaS, IaaS and private cloud?
  • How are cloud adoption patterns and uses cases are differing by vertical? By geography?
  • What cloud infrastructure models are most frequently being deployed (private, public, hybrid)?
  • What cloud management platforms are gaining traction in the enterprise? Where are open source options (OpenStack, CloudStack) being adopted?
  • How does the value being delivered by cloud deployments compare to expectations?

We think some of the more interesting insights will come from seeing how these responses change and trend over time. Our goal is not to provide just a one-time shapshot of adoption, but to conduct an ongoing survey several times a year to surface key trends and patterns. The results from our first joint survey will be announced in conjunction with Cloud Connect Chicago, to be held September 10-13 at the Hyatt Regency O’Hare.

Video Interview: Outlook for Mad Cloud Skills | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Cloud skills are different than traditional IT skills. At the recent CloudConnect conference in Santa Clara, we had a panel discussion on how cloud is changing the CIO’s wish list for new hires.

In this last video blog of the series, Clayton Pippenger, Applications Development Manager at Quest, shares his thoughts on the outlook for hiring cloud skills in the coming years.

In case you are just tuning in, this is the fourth video interview of a series we taped at CloudConnect 2012 in Santa Clara. Everest Group’s Scott Bils chaired the Organizational Readiness track and enlisted an impressive lineup of speakers.

Watch the first video, featuring Francesco Paola of Cloudscaling.

Watch the second video, featuring Simon Wardley of the Leading Edge Forum.

Watch the third video, featuring Erik Sebesta of CloudTP.

Video Interview: Balancing Cloud Decisions between Executive Team and Business Unit | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

At CloudConnect 2012, Everest Group’s Marvin Newell moderated a lively panel discussion on next generation IT governance. The panelists included Thomas Barton, Global Enterprise Architect at Novartis Pharmaceuticals; Jeromy Carriere, Chief Architect at X.commerce; and Erik Sebesta, Chief Architect and Technology Officer at CloudTP.

The panel focused on the governance concept of holding on loosely but not letting go. Though executive buy-in is important for cost-efficient and holistic migration to the cloud, the business unit knows operations and needs the best.

In the third CloudConnect video interview of the series, Erik Sebesta answers the question: How does one balance the decision-making between the executive team and the business unit?

In case you missed the first blog, this is the second video interview of a series we taped at CloudConnect 2012 in Santa Clara. Everest Group’s Scott Bils chaired the Organizational Readiness track and enlisted an impressive lineup of speakers.

Watch the first video, featuring Francesco Paola of Cloudscaling.

Watch the second video, featuring Simon Wardley of the Leading Edge Forum.

Watch the last video, featuring Clayton Pippenger of Quest.

Video Interview: Simon Wardley on Cloud Adoption Inertia | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

In my last blog, you watched Francesco Paola’s response to CIOs’ willingness to fund a “cloud account team.” Another resistance an enterprise could face is the agnostic feeling towards the cloud promise and the resulting reluctance to move to the public cloud at the opportune time because of its perceived insecurity compared to the private cloud.

In today’s video interview, Simon Wardley, researcher for the CSC Leading Edge Forum, answers the question: Do you think enterprises who are adopting private clouds over public clouds are fighting the inertia due to computing utility? 

Simon also added to his first response by explaining how organizations can transform themselves to fight this inertia efficiently.

 

In case you missed the first blog, this is the second video interview of a series we taped at CloudConnect 2012 in Santa Clara. Everest Group’s Scott Bils chaired the Organizational Readiness track and enlisted an impressive lineup of speakers.

Watch the first video, featuring Francesco Paola of Cloudscaling.

Watch the third video, featuring Erik Sebesta of CloudTP.

Watch the last video, featuring Clayton Pippenger of Quest.

Video Interview: How Willing are CIOs to Fund a “Cloud Adoption Team”? | Gaining Altitude in the Cloud

Last week, Everest Group was in Santa Clara at CloudConnect 2012, the defining event of the cloud computing industry. Produced by UBM TechWeb, Cloud Connect brought together IT professionals, developers, infrastructure and service providers, and cloud computing innovators at the Santa Clara Convention Center for a three-day conference.

Our Next Generation IT Practice Leader Scott Bils chaired the Organizational Readiness track, which focused on best practices for enterprises adopting cloud technologies.

One of the track’s sessions titled “Will Culture Eat Your Strategy? How to Turn the Tables” focused on how cloud migration fundamentally changes the way things have always operated. Going to the cloud requires more than merely adopting the technology; rather, it requires an underlining cultural shift and that demands more than a memo saying, “We’ve gone to the cloud. Call IT if you have questions.”

I caught up with Francesco Paola, Vice President of Client Services at Cloudscaling, who was one of the session’s panelists to ask him the million-dollar question: How willing are CIOs to fund a “Cloud Account Team” to drive the adoption of the cloud?

Watch Francesco’s response:

Watch the second video, featuring Simon Wardley of the Leading Edge Forum.

Watch the third video, featuring Erik Sebesta of CloudTP.

Watch the last video, featuring Clayton Pippenger of Quest.

How can we engage?

Please let us know how we can help you on your journey.

Contact Us

"*" indicates required fields

Please review our Privacy Notice and check the box below to consent to the use of Personal Data that you provide.
This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.