Thursday, December 15, 2011

Cloud vs Enterprise IT : Competition View

Cloud Competition

Few days back I blogged about a trend where Cloud is posing an entirely different kind of challenge for Enterprise IT, which is Competition .

Cloud and Enterprise IT : Partners or Competitors

I posted the same thought on Forrester community forum and here are few thoughts from there :

“The trend you are seeing may be related to the fact that IT may already have established outsourcing relationships with consultancies that do not have cloud capability. In this scenario, it is more efficient if the business does an end run around IT to avoid previously sane SLAs but now seem archaic.”

“I've certainly spoken with some firms that regard cloud service providers as competitors to their established way of doing things. In fact, at least a few want to stay away from a "pay by the drink" chargeback model because it put them in direct competition with various infrastructure as a service alternatives.”

“I think this thinking has been going on long before cloud came along, it's just another in a line of approaches that have potential for reducing the headcount in a corporate IT department.  In my opinion, any enterprise IT department that is seeing IaaS or PaaS providers as competition wasn't a partner with the rest of the business to begin with.”

You can read complete set of thoughts here http://community.forrester.com/thread/5875?

So what are your thoughts on this ?

1 comment:

Leo de Sousa said...

I see this more as a culture change issue than a dollars and cents one. I particularly like the comment that if we see IaaS or PaaS providers as competition that we (IT) are not really a partner to the business. I would go one step further and say that if we hold to that competition view, we (IT) are just another supplier and not really part of the business at all.

Back to the culture change, we as leaders need to help show why adopting ?aaS benefits our companies and provides new career development opportunities to our employees. I believe that taking a headcount reduction approach is not the best way to make IT part of the business. Leo