Welcome to my new blog: CloudFrontOffice. I'm still writing my service catalog blog.
Cloud computing and virtualization represent a moment of opportunity and also of crisis for IT datacenters.
The opportunity is big: to deliver to the business computing resources on a fully variable basis, scalable both up and down, orders of magnitudes more agile to business demand.
The crisis is also large if IT doesn't embrace these new models. IT will get outsourced, or the cost structure will kills margins, or the lack of agility will allow competitors to run circles around the enterprise's cycle time.
I don't need to scare you, but we are living in times where great companies and brands disappear weekly. Which is I'm going to focus mostly on the opportunity in this blog.
My fundamental thesis is that the private and public cloud revolution requires two organizational and technical structures to come together. One is the IT Factory or BackOffice of IT, and the other is the IT E-Commerce Operations or FrontOffice of IT.
The back office is where a lot of action is centered today. VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, Sun, EMC, NetApp, Novell, RedHat, and many others have delivered what is essentialy a new computing platform that is an evolution of Linux, Windows, and Unix. This has grown fast due to its compelling cost and operational advantage.
This evolution has happened on the back end. Simultaneously, a revolution has emerged in the front end, called cloud computing.
The two aspects that I believe are revolutionary about cloud offering are the predictability of IT infrastructure costs and the variability of that cost structure. Neither of these is true today for IT organizations. You may have predictability but not variability, and that predictability often comes at high costs.
Why is this revolutionary? Ask your CFO: if our sales are down 20%, how important would it be to lower IT infrastructure 20% real-time. And be able to scale those up as soon as sales grow? I'd say he'd be pretty interested.
And how will this new IT communicate with its customers? Through an actionable service catalog that specifies the standard configurations, allowed variations and unit costs. This catalog will provide for self-service configuration, subscription and account management, provisioning integration and billing / consumption reporting are critical elements of the Cloud FrontOffice.
This catalog belongs to a suite of capabilities that will include things like service lifecycle management, to help us understand our offers and what customers want; it will include strategic views, that allows us to understand coming demand, our own capacity to deliver, and to prioritize our resources based on business strategy.
This is what I'm calling the Cloud Front Office. Whether you are now deploying virtualization as first step towards building a private cloudd, or planning to use public clouds, the Cloud FrontOffice is critical.
No catalog. No cloud. Join me in this new exciting journey.
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