Mike_Lingo_Book_-_Final_Copy

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HEY!YOU!
GETONTO
MY
CLOUD

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HEY! YOU! GET ONTO MY CLOUD
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HEY!YOU!
GETONTO
MY
CLOUD
MIKE
LINGOWITHJONOBERMEYER
A S T A D I A P R E S S

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toallthosewhotaughtme
thaticandoanythingand
everythingisetmymindto:
Jeanne Kibler, John Doe and Exene, Mike Watt
and D. Boon, Jeanette Guthrie, my mom and
dad Helene and Jack Lingo, Michael Marendo,
and last but not least my wife Rebecca, who
bears a big challenge in raising three awe-
some children named Meejung, Minna and
Noah while I traverse the globe servicing
clients every day of the week. I’m humbled by
your dedication and perserverance.
Thanks also to John Miller and Jon Obermeyer
for their patience with me. Thank you for
making this possible!
First edition
Copyright ©2010 by Mike Lingo
All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Astadia Press.
Astadia is a registered trademark.
www.astadia.com
Book design by John Miller
Printed in the United States of America

8
9
LINGOCONTENTS
Foreword
TheCarCommercial 1
Drivers
1 AWarningtoIT 5
2 TCO:TotalCostofOnerous 8
3 BlametheConsumer 11
4 TimetoRentAgain 15
5 DoingMorewithMore 17
6 SavetheSongandDancefortheTalentShow 20
7 APushforPowerConsumption 22
CloudRants
1 ThirteenWaysofLookingattheCloud 27
2 TheFailureofOutsourcing 30
3 PlacingBusinessFirst 33
4 TheCoreChallengeoftheCloud 35

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ThreeStories
1 Tasked 37
2 Cured:ANewWayofLookingattheEndUser 40
3 PutMyChartintheCloud,Stat 42
Transformation
1 TheEmpireStrikesBack,orUnleashingIT
asanInnovationCenter 45
2 TheEmpireasWeKnowIt 47
3 InnovationasaDistraction 50
4 StripDistractionAway 52
5 OpportunityforDisruption, ora
NewGenerationofCEO 54
6 TheCloudStoryisaHumanStory 56
7 ShiftingtheSpend 57
8 Engagement 59
9 TheCIOTheyLove 62
People
1 TheDisappearanceoftheSlash 65
2 ProcessPeoplePrevail 67
3 ScaleBacktoScaleUp 68
4 TappingintoTalent 70
Process
1 OwntheRoom 73
2 TheCloud’sSecurityAdvantage 76
3 Scalabilityisa PipeProblem 77
4 WhipThroughtheTurns 79
Tools
1 VendorswithRippedAbs 81
2 BewaretheEntrenchedVendor 84
3 Don’tBuytheCloudfromaDatabaseVendor 86
CIO
1 TheCloudOpportunist 89
2 ITSpend 92
3 CreatingValueandVision foryourCEO 93
4 InsidetheCloudTransformedEnterprise 94
Liberation
1 Retoolingforthe 21stCentury 97
2 TheToolsofTomorrowland 99
3 VerneGlobal,aGreenStory 101
4 EnterpriseSoftwareConsolidation 103
5 WheremyMouthis 105
6 I’mNoOracle 107
CONTENTSCONTENTS

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The ON-PREMISE Business (Sales, Service,
HEY!YOU!
GETONTO
MY
CLOUD

1
LINGO
For this opening chapter, picture me in jeans and
a dark gray t-shirt rather than my standard white
button-down oxford shirt. And I’m standing in front
of gleaming, super-charged hemi muscle car that’s
parked at an angle, the fake suburban street behind
me made to look like it just rained...
People ask me, Mike, why the Cloud? Why now? And
I tell them it’s about having the horsepower they’ve
always wanted, with fewer trips to the gas pump
and very little wallop to your wallet.
Foreword
TheCarCommercial
LINGO

2
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Cut to someone obviously not me, an experienced driver
on a closed circuit, taking the car through its paces...
I tell them the Cloud has a higher safety rating than
standard computing, and you get that safety and
security without compromising at all on what you can
wring out of this baby on the curves in your contact
center, or on slick surfaces like you find on the execu-
tive floors.
Cut to forest canopy layer and lush green tones, tropical
birds abound...
I tell them the Cloud is about helping the environ-
ment, about reducing or even eliminating your
carbon footprint.
Cut to me, in the showroom, filled with happy people,
sunlight dappling, balloons and cake and streamers...
I tell them it’s time to act because Cloud deals have
never been better. I tell them that you don’t even have
to own anything, you just rent, and if you don’t like
the model you’ve chosen, you bring it back and they
give you another one to try out. Like a test drive, but
all the time.
Cut to me standing in front of a cargo ship unloading
thousands of cars onto the lot at a secure port...
And this is not just some special offer because you’re
the head honcho; this is available to everybody. You
want fifty for your fleet by this morning? Fine. You
want five thousand for your global sales force, deliv-
ery around lunchtime? You got it!
There’s never been a better time to get behind the
wheel.

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1 AWarningtoIT
You have sole possession of the secret password and
you enjoy the prestige and the protection of having
specialized knowledge. You have gained the trust of
rulers, and you work in relative quiet behind thick
stone walls in a subterranean environment, bolstered
and funded from coffers that are not of your winning.
Without realizing it, though, you’re mired in a maze.
You’re bogged down with the burdens that may or
may not have been of your own making. The very
Drivers

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LINGO
things that gave you the illusion of security have you
shackled.
Your workers have apprenticed in the centuries-old
tradition, in the rituals and folklore of proven practice.
Their productivity is based on hierarchies, on heritage
and the guilds of governance.
The “friends” that have arrived to help you from the
outside won’t leave when you no longer need them.
They have too much at stake, and they have bolted
themselves into your walls and they inhabit all your tun-
nels and even in your air ducts. They eat from your food
stores and deplete your resources, and toast you from
flagons of exotic ornament. These same friends have
erected monuments and monoliths to their legacy, and
created fortresses within your fortress.
When you ask for change, your adjuvant friends are only
able to show you borrowed and stale plans, smuggled in
from the outside from great distance away and at great
expense. As has been custom, they have provided the
mortar for your bricks. They are intractable.
Some of it’s just the gear, the weighted-down armor and
plating, the fortress-scale armaments and weaponry
of siege-mode and defense. There is nothing light and
nimble to be found. For something to be moved, it must
be taken apart piece by piece, dug out at the footings,
lifted and then rolled on logs across the terrain.
Great changes are at hand. Kingdoms are uniting
around common currency, language and custom.
All around you the borders are in flux, and the territory
beyond the walls is subject at any time to a change in
rulers. These rulers travel in caravans, depend on light
infantry, and when they break camp, they leave you
behind, shackled in the labyrinth within the fortress of
your own making.
You have been able to build most everything you need,
but now you’re cut off from the rest of the business, and
even if you wanted to move closer, you can’t.

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2 TCO:TotalCostofOnerous
Throw out the old metrics. They don’t mean any-
thing in the era of Cloud computing.
Bring down the walls between you and the business,
rid your house of entrenched vendors, and take imme-
diate advantage of the transformation that is at hand
— and the liberation that will follow over the next five
years as these changes roll out to their full potential.
You will most likely have to start from scratch because
the Cloud is so transformational to business process
that any type of half-step will only drag along an
expense and execution model that is fundamentally
flawed.
Modern business applications can’t be concerned
about the network, the data store, and the workflow
challenges inherent in on-premise application devel-
opment environments. Users want application fea-
tures available online, with a simple, intuitive inter-
face. They will pay per month for it, but they won’t pay
millions for software. Those days are gone.
I don’t say this as someone who has something to sell.
I say this because every day I hear the stories of trans-
You’venever
hadthetimeto
reallyworkon
thethingsthat
matter,
thethingsthat
thebusiness
needstoyou
todo.
formation, and I see what can be achieved, things I
never thought possible.
I’m basing this book on my personal experience as a
Chief Technology Officer, with the historical perspec-
tive from my days as a programmer/analyst in early
1990s Silicon Valley, coming out of the housing bust,
learning my trade in conference rooms and hallways.
Here, if you didn’t understand both business and
process, technology was useless. I lived ASP hey-
days of the late 1990s, through the dot.com and its
bubble, where amazingly poor business strategies
were masked as innovation. I lived this firsthand in the
Silicon Valley and I experienced it from classic brick
and mortar companies, software startups, Fortune 100
networking, and telephony companies.
I want to look at where we are as we close down 2010,
and where I think we’re going to be in just a few years
from now. That will be as radical shift as we have seen
so far, perhaps even more so.
And here’s why: As a CIO, you’ve never had the time to
really work on the things that matter, the things that
the business needs to you to do.You’ve been bogged
down with onerous stuff all around you and you’ve
never had the freedom to operate the way the busi-
ness needs you to.You simply can’t realize the potential

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of addressing business process in a fundamental way,
when budgets, personal bandwidth, and technological
capacity limit you on all sides.
There’s going to be a very long list of things that are
suddenly“off your mind”as you make the switch to
the Cloud. This is no longer about scan card access
to a locked server room, or hiding all the resource
requirements to keep the infrastructure going in your
CapEx budgets every year.
And it’s not as complicated as your outside helpers
make it out to be. You won’t need a cadre of 20 people
to help you understand how you can transform your
shop. All you really need is an agile internal team and
a couple of strong support and architecture resources.
This is no longer about entrenched vendors mak-
ing this process as complex as possible in order to
maintain their legacy applications and tools, and their
heritage of sales. This is about blowing up the fun-
damentals of how you service internal and external
customers as an IT services provider.
This is also about freeing your potential from limita-
tions, from solutions based on the narrow availability
of servers, disk, and the people needed to run them in
your shop. And from the burdens that limit you — and
the business.
3 BlametheConsumer
Pull. Tug. Yank. Feeling that?
On one level, this has nothing to do with what we in
the enterprise IT realm have created. The consumer
experience on the web is behind the gravitational pull
of emerging business applications and Cloud solu-
tions. Consumers have come to expect free or very
low-cost applications, delivered over multiple mobile
devices on a high-bandwidth utility that’s as robust
and available as what previous generations expected
from their phone lines and television sets. Yet what
once took decades to fund and build, is now counted
in years, if not months.
The dot.com era unleashed a lot, including free apps
and ubiquitous access. Fortunately, what didn’t last
from that frontier era were the many overvalued
companies and amazingly poor business strategies,
either previously unheard of or incapable of being
understood. The acceleration of the internet and
the venture spending behind the ecosystem left
us with the beginnings of today’s landscape.
If you were there in the midst of the dot.com blaze like
I was, you may not have gotten rich. But one genu-

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inely progressive thing that came from it was how the
consumer web experience rivaled and then outpaced
desktop applications to the point of rendering con-
sumer desktop software completely obsolete.
That’s amazing when you think about it.
We literally do anything you can think of online now –
from our financials and banking, to consumer buying
to vacation planning , and then there are loads of
ways we share our experiences via blogs, and tweets
and Facebook and scads of utilities to tell all our
friends, coworkers, and loved ones where we are and
what we’re doing at any given time from any elec-
tronic device.
TIME SPENT ONLINE (per week)
2004 2010 FORRESTER
6 hours
13 hours
Userswant
application
features
trickledto
themover
time,available
online,and
witha
simple,
intuitive
interface.
Oscar Berg, a Senior Consultant for Acando, has an
interesting thought on the growth of this behavior:
“The main lesson that I learned from the dot.com era
was that people were not ready for the kind of online
lifestyle that we had in mind when building platforms.
We built platforms and features for people like our-
selves — pioneers who were obsessed and enamored
with the new technologies — and not for the aver-
age person. But, today, the situation is very different.
Most people are very comfortable with using the web
for both private and professional purposes, and they
willingly expose things about themselves that they
wouldn’t have dared to think about exposing ten
years earlier.”
Now this has extended to the business paradigm,
where users want application features trickled to
them over time, available online, and with a simple,
intuitive interface. And they are happy to pay per
month for it. But gone are the days when anyone will
pay millions of dollars for software.
Everything’s been compressed and commoditized:
software price points, configuration services dollars,
customizing and deployment solutions, and support.
We all have the dot.com era (the older, bolder but less
pragmatic brother of the Cloud), to thank for that.

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Modern business applications can’t be concerned
about the network, the data store, and the workflow
challenges inherent in the last generation’s on-
premise application development environments.
What is required is a solid set of workflow tools that
are Cloud-configured, and Cloud-deployable with a
solid application development and debugging
platform, with solid monitoring tools surrounding
those applications.
Only with this type of infrastructure (virtualized or
Cloud-deployed) can solution architects and technical
architects design and deploy solutions that will satisfy
this new consumer-derived user experience.
4 TimetoRentAgain
There was a time when the CIO was like the Robert
Duvall character Lt. Col. Bill Kilgore in the film Apoca-
lypse Now, on the beach in full battle dress, calling in
air strikes with all the helicopters buzzing overhead.
But instead of a war zone, the setting was a huge data
center with hundreds of people tending to the gear,
and the CIO proclaiming,“I love the smell of servers in
the morning.”
But nobody has the budget for that anymore. From
the CEO’s perspective, the company spent millions of
dollars and really didn’t get what it paid for and pissed
off a lot of users along the way. There’s no compelling
reason now for us to build and own the applications
or the infrastructure.
You will find that Cloud vendors have created a
network and data security approach that blows away
what you and your internal IT teams can afford to
build. For instance, in the last five years, salesforce.
com on its own has probably spent over a billion
dollars on scalability, security and infrastructure.
There’s a reason that Microsoft, Google and others are
building huge utility-style, grid computing facilities that
The ON-PREMISE Business (Sales, Service,
Therewasa
time whenthe
CIOwaslikethe
RobertDuvall
characterLt.
Col.BillKilgore
inthefilm
Apocalypse
Now,onthe
beachinfull
battledress...
“Ilovethe
smellof
serversinthe
morning.”

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cost hundreds of millions of dollars. It’s not because
they can’t figure out where to spend their money.
They know there is a wave coming: back-to-the-future
hosting, application, functionality and infrastructure.
And if they don’t have investment in the capacity,
customers are going to go with a different provider.
They are building all these facilities because the mar-
ket is there.
As companies focused on our own core businesses,
we really can’t afford to do anything else. It’s like the
housing market. The bottom has fallen out and we
can’t afford to own what we need. We need to start
renting again.
GOOGLE INFRASTRUCTURE INVESTMENTS
DATA CENTER KNOWLEDGE
$131
million
$186
million
$221
million
$239
million
$476
million
2Q‘09 3Q‘09 4Q‘09 1Q ’10 2Q‘10
5 DoingMorewithMore
There’s a lot of noise out there. Terms like“restruc-
turing”and“downturn”and“return to profitability”
ultimately fail to express the magnitude of what is
occurring economically. Whatever someone might say
in a press release or an annual report doesn’t capture
it, because the shock waves are still coming.
It’s turned everything we knew on its head. For
instance, do we really know what we’re talking about
when we say that a business issue is“mission critical?”
In your organization, can anyone honestly tell me
what is mission critical, and what is not mission criti-
cal? And if we can make that distinction, do we really
have the tools to make sure that whatever is mission
critical is a success and that we can benchmark that
success for all the mission critical projects that follow?
If you could catalog them in your organization, I bet
the number of mission critical apps running on some
Microsoft Office application would stun you. And it’s
been that way for 15 years!
This new economic landscape means you’ll have
to clear the decks of most of the strategic planning
you’ve done You’ll likely need to deliver a substantial

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reduction of expense and headcount, scuttle projects
that may have seemed high priority, and think about
reshuffling the deck on your resource partners. There
may be acquisitions and divestitures in combinations
you would have never conceived before, and many of
the targets you prepared for are no longer viable in
the new environment. You’re going to have to do
all this while providing even more support for the
business.
While you may have become accomplished creating
a whole series of contingency plans, this new era of
economic upheaval demands that you become com-
fortable when more things than ever are unforeseen.
But the good news: the Cloud gives you the tools to
address unintended consequences and inadvertent
events much quicker and at lower cost.
This is really not about doing more with less, you’re
actually doing more with more. The new mindset is
to approach each new challenge as a lesson. It’s about
learning how to work with fewer barriers to getting
things done, having more tail-wind, and knowing how
to manage the process. You’re going to spend way
less energy from now on routine maintenance, yet
keeping up with the business will demand more of
your process skills than ever.
Look,thebig
badwolf,the
well-publicized
plummetof
theglobal
economy,has
alreadyblown
downtheshack
withoutyou,
scatteringall
thestrawand
sticksand
bricks.But
thismessis
everythingthat
madeyourjob
impossible.
Get ready to inherit a tsunami of powerful services
that will blast right through your standard defense,
your sandbags of scalability-security-governance.
You’ve tried to build these yourself, but in the Cloud
you find that others have already completed it — and
they didn’t have to borrow half of an FTE from some-
one’s team to get it done.
Look, the big bad wolf, the well-publicized plummet
of the global economy, has already blown down the
shack without you, scattering all the straw and sticks
and bricks. But this mess is everything that made your
job impossible. Those problems are gone now, but
now you have some new ones.

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6 SavetheSongandDance
fortheTalentShow
In the Cloud world, your place at the table is re-
quired more than ever. Now you don’t have to spend
any time on the song and dance because your CEO
and your board are sold, they know what you can do.
Now they just want to know how fast you can bring
up your team and how far you can take this.
The contribution of IT is changing because it’s
being validated every day by the undisputed force
of business investment, the flow of venture capital,
internal infrastructure development dollars, novel
product offerings and service business models,
and the pace of strategic acquisitions within the
computing ecosystem.
A stricter regulatory environment will not only
demand more agile IT shops, but will also create
opportunities for those companies that can incor-
porate new regulations across the enterprise. Those
companies —Cloud companies —have an advan-
tage, since the new regs aren’t being queued into
separate legacy silos, with sluggish traditional proj-
ect timelines and priority metrics. They’ll be
able to stay on pace in pursuit of prospective markets
and revenue growth.
Core competency means more than just shedding
non-essentials. Carving away all those layers calls
for IT leadership that understands the interconnect-
edness and the consequences of removal, the
implications at each step and iteration, and which
outsourcing may be required. This is up to you,
because I’m guessing your incumbent vendors
haven’t been thinking ahead on your behalf. Why
would they, when their own profitability is tied to
your previous, un-agile operating mode?
And this goes beyond the vetting and the shedding.
Flat or stagnant growth at the macro level means
that many will be lulled into thinking that only large
solutions will produce large revenue growth. But it’s a
new game: opportunities can be leveraged, because
the cost and time cycles to test and launch have
fallen so dramatically. Proverbial low hanging fruit
will be more obvious to spot sooner, and your new
set of process tools will help you inform the business
if it contains the seeds for future expansion.

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7 APushforPower
Consumption
OK. Forget the downturn and the subsequent
restructuring and cost-slashing and reactive resur-
gence of a more restrictive regulatory environment.
From my vantage point, there is an even larger force
out there, outside the walls of your IT shop and far
beyond the scope of your company, dwarfing any-
one’s GDP. This one has the potential to become the
most dominant driver of all.
It’s the energy story. There’s not enough of it, first off,
at least deriving from sustainable sources. The oppor-
tunities for IT just in accounting for your company’s
energy consumption is going to fuel a new service
sector: energy accounting. Think of the implications
for anyone doing business in multiple locations, let
alone multiple continents, each with its own meter-
ing and mix of energy sources. Then think how
each business unit is going to answer for its energy
allocation, with an entirely new category on the
management scorecard.
Now let’s talk about the supply side, the energy pro-
viders. As the large energy companies intersect with
information technology applications and require-
ments, energy consumption will be a Cloud catalyst
at several levels:
n Mobile Devices
n Data Centers
n Smart Grid
Green Tech Media is a New York-based integrated
media firm that covers power generation and distri-
bution over the grid, analyzing trends for how power
is consumed by individuals and the larger enterprise.
“Information technology on the whole consumes
about 2% of all energy. So it’s not really a significant
sector as, say, manufacturing,“ observes Green Tech
Media CEO Rick Thompson. ”Yet with Cloud comput-
ing growing at 5%, there are tremendous oppor-
tunities where energy and information technology
intersect.
“Green enterprise not only encompasses helping
the financial institutions and mega-retailers manage
their large power demand, but more granular tech-
nologies like advanced LED lighting and the build
out of automation networks for lighting,”Thomp-
son adds.“Green IT goes beyond analyzing power
consumption to novel products and services where
Frommy
vantagepoint,
thereisaneven
largerforceout
there,outside
thewallsof
yourITshop
andfarbeyond
thescopeof
yourcom-
pany,dwarfing
anyone’sGDP.
Thisonehas
thepotential
tobecomethe
mostdominant
driverofall.

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computing creates more efficient and accountable
transmission and distribution of power over the grid.”
This has far-reaching implications for the Cloud, as
new players such as well-capitalized utilities will cross
these borders and barriers naturally and quickly. You
can be assured that someone is always looking at
power consumption and engineering more power
efficiency and cost savings, from the chip set to
the router card, to the network and ultimately the
largest consumer of power within an enterprise, the
data center.
Think beyond hosted applications and servers. Is it
possible that the on-premise data center is ultimately
a relic for most companies? Will it be too much to
manage from the standpoint of power consumption
and carbon footprint? Are you better off with some
or all of your enterprise computing in a hosted and
green environment, such as a geo-thermal fueled
data center in Iceland?
Thompson of Green Tech offers a savvy scorecard for
monitoring this trend.“We left telecom infrastructure
and entered Green Tech. We began watching where
the entrepreneurs were placing their attention and
the venture capitalists were directing their funding.
And because of smart grid, you’re starting to see the
traditional networking shops bring on board senior
people from the energy companies, and not just
putting out a press release around green tech initia-
tives. We’re talking radical scenarios here as it plays
out. The energy market dwarfs the IT market, and the
global markets are massive. We’ve devoted our entire
company to this, and it merits serious attention for
everyone who has a stake in where information tech-
nology is headed.”
“Beyond generating reliable sources of power, this is
completely an IT game, with giant energy concerns
crossing swords with technology as they usher in
new energy services to consumers.”
“It’s fairly simple,”Thompson concludes.”Everything
beyond transmission is low bandwidth, without
super high speed, and it’s all going to need a back-
end to an enterprise network. Within the energy
companies there’s not as much information technology
expertise as you’d think, and most of the applica-
tions are in separate silos for weather management,
field and outage management. There’s so much
more technology being thrown at them than they
can handle, and that will create large opportunities.
The VC’s see it and the entrepreneurs see it, and the
larger companies are already investing in the talent
to help them get there.”

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1 ThirteenWaysofLooking
attheCloud
1. The Cloud is not about product offerings.
2. The Cloud is not a change agent, paradigm shift
or transformative event.
3. Blogs, tweets and rants are downbursts from the
Cloud, but they are not the Cloud.
CloudRants

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4. The Cloud has very little to do with technology, let
alone information technology.
5. The Cloud is not a source of new business models
or service offerings.
6. The Cloud is not a Cloud computing conference at
the Moscone Center in San Francisco.
7. The Cloud is not disruptive, in the way that some-
one might disrupt a conversation or a meeting in
progress. The Cloud is disruptive in the way that you
wake up one morning in your own bed, and a really,
really quiet tornado has picked up your house and set
it down 50 miles away in an open field.
8. If you could measure the economic impact of the
Cloud as seismic activity, it would not show up at all
on any local Richter scale — until it’s too late.
9. You can learn as much about the Cloud in Reykjavik
as you can in Redwood City (headquarters of Oracle).
10. Your server at lunch might know more about the
Cloud than anyone who manages the servers in your
data center.
TheCloudis
disruptivein
thewaythat
youwakeup
onemorning
inyourown
bed,anda
really,really
quiettornado
haspickedup
yourhouseand
setitdown50
milesawayin
anopenfield.
11. The Cloud will not pull us out of the recession.
12. Johannes Gutenberg might have invented the
Cloud, but he got all caught up with his success with
movable type.
13. The Cloud just happened.

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2 TheFailureofOutsourcing
The IT industry has talked for decades (my entire
working career!) about business process tools, and
techniques and systems which can enable“business
process re engineering.” But just look at the word
“re engineer”and you know all you need to know.
Do you think some original“engineering”discipline
was applied to most of the business processes you
support — those same ones that cause you the most
pain or provide the least benefit?
Once you are unencumbered of the tasks that are
time sinks — because you move those tasks onto
Cloud providers or into managed environments such
as a private Cloud — then you have the potential to
address business process in a fundamental way that
budgets, personal bandwidth, and technological
capacity simply couldn’t provide.
I lived through the ASP heydays of the late‘90s, and
was always amazed when vendors like Corio would
hand me their PeopleSoft application that was,
literally, single-tenant and supremely customized for
my business needs — in a way that wasn’t trivial.
And I also watched that approach fail, and saw folks
move to“hosting”applications to a co-lo facility,
which had the benefit of being less service-based
from the provider, and just getting the“gear”off your
premise. You still managed nearly every service associ-
ated with making sure the gear was compliant with
your infrastructure standards and processes.
And then there’s outsourcing. Outsourcing your busi-
ness processes to outsourcing firms wasn’t the silver
bullet that many thought it was. The idea was to find
cheaper options for expensive infrastructure and
people, but the result was the specialization of
resources, which turned into increased costs and limited
holistic perspectives from new people entering the
job market. The result: complete confusion and chaos
from CFOs, CEOs and COOs on what they actually got
from their IT investment .
So on the other side of being re-engineered, co-located
and outsourced, we discover something profound:
1. Costs need to be cut.
2. Resources need to be evaluated, and change man-
agement plans adopted.
Onceyouare
unencumbered
ofthetasks
thataretime
sinksbecause
youmovethose
tasksonto
Cloud
providers...
thenyouhave
thepotential
toaddress
business
processina
fundamental
way.

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3. CIOs need to respond to their Boards and CEOs with
plans for innovation and not plans for operating like
the cost center of the 1990s.
There is no reason today, this month, this quarter,
I shouldn’t be able to deliver – with a team of eight to
ten — the same amount as traditional service ven-
dors, using their dated methods and staffs of 30-40
people. Being unshackled from that approach is the
most liberating thing that businesses can hope for
with their IT and applications spend.
3 PlacingBusinessFirst
Ten years from now, we will all laugh about how
hard it was to design, build and deploy applications.
All the self-imposed shackles and inventions will seem
antiquated.
Happily, the Cloud presents a totally different method
of working: It’s about real change in how we procure,
develop, and release applications. It’s a laser focus
on what’s required from a business perspective. And
companies are going to spend billions over the forth-
coming years to convert their enterprises into the
Cloud Transformed Enterprise or CTE.
So CEOs need to understand what this means for the
role of IT. Today, any CEO you survey will give you the
pat answer that IT is currently important to the busi-
ness and that it will grow in importance in the future.
They’ll even take it to the tactical level: the demands
are increasing to keep the business competitive. IT’s
expanded role includes workforce mobility, cost analysis,
more data to create meaningful metrics around decision
making, and storage and retrieval and e-commerce on
multiple application and electronic device platforms.

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LINGO
Business
hastakena
backseatto
technology
for30years.
Thisliberation
ofbusiness
potentialwithin
theCloudis
scaringthe
pantsoffITand
CIOsandISVs
tothepointof
itbeingopenly
condemned,
ridiculedor
ruledasafad.
But do you ever see a CEO asked about the degree of
expectation that IT will actually meet those demands?
You won’t, because the priorities and the base of
power have been inverted for decades.
Business has taken a back seat to technology for 30
years. This liberation of business potential within the
Cloud is scaring the pants off IT and CIOs and ISVs to
the point of it being openly condemned, ridiculed
or ruled a fad. That’s all the info you should need to
understand how liberating this technology truly is.
But the Cloud isn’t magic. Technology deployment
options won’t cure poor requirements, bad design
or poor test cases. What the Cloud does, though, is
provide a framework for putting the business first.
And when business process is king, that’s when you
have success.
4 TheCoreChallengeof
theCloud
Don’t get me wrong. This is not going to be easy
for everyone. Working in a Cloud environment will
be challenging for many individuals and for entire
companies.
People will have to work harder and communicate
better, because you are no longer waiting for this
magic gift — for someone to go off and develop
something in a dark corner and bring it back to you,
and you hope it’s the fix. The Cloud dials up the
importance of sitting shoulder to shoulder, working
together and communicating daily, working through
the challenges of each project.
That certainly shouldn’t sound like a challenge, but in
any software project, communication — not technol-
ogy — is the point of failure. The Cloud environment
creates a chance to focus on that communication over
the technology.
This will create a lot of risk in companies that have
learned to be horrible communicators, especially the
communication between IT and the business, and be-

36
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LINGO
tween IT and the external vendors. It no longer works
to stick a vendor in between IT and your business,
then let them take the blame for your organizational
dysfunction and inability to communicate internally.
Companies will still struggle until they find commu-
nicators who understand process with their systems
developers, IT administrators, even the owners and
management team. Those are the people that you
want. Those are the skills that are important to make
sure the investment works.
If you didn’t communicate well before, your dysfunc-
tion only gets exacerbated with the Cloud. You no
longer have an environment where one group goes
off to procure the server farm, while another group
talks to users for months and writes a bunch of words
down that people agree with or don’t disagree with.
It’s a different cycle.
Think about it like a doctor’s office. In the old IT para-
digm, you were sitting there in the waiting room for
a long time, hoping somebody was going to call your
name and that they could tell you what was wrong
with you. It’s different now. There’s not even a waiting
room. The doctor comes to you whenever you need
attention, and it’s all about open dialogue and treat-
ment options.
Thinkaboutit
likeadoctor’s
office.Inthe
oldITpara-
digm,youwere
sittingthere
inthewaiting
roomforalong
time,hoping
somebody
wasgoingto
callyourname
andthentell
youwhatwas
wrongwithyou.
Nowthere’snot
evenawaiting
room.
1 Tasked
So here’s how it will happen: You’re a senior net-
work architect at a large global company and your
CTO doesn’t really appear to know anything about
the Cloud. He arrives at your desk and starts the
same old song and dance, the same one he gives
every time he’s been asked to research something
novel. He confides that it’s probably a total waste of
time, and he’s really looking high and low for ways
to dispel it.
ThreeStories

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LINGO
So your CTO has been tasked, and now you have been
tasked: Deliver a Cloud strategy for the company. You
have three months to get it done.
It’s a blank slate. You have to figure out everything,
including the infrastructure challenges. After all, the
way everybody thinks around your shop is: keep up
with the gear, and the applications, and governance.
You know you’re in the sweet spot of virtualization of
your servers, applications and services at 50-65 per-
cent, but you still cannot control how and when those
services or environments are being setup, scaled and
managed by your app dev teams. Further, you can’t
get the SAN team to install new disks sooner than six
weeks, which hamstrings your app dev teams, and
your infrastructure group. The list goes on. How do
you gain some control to manage the environment in
a simpler, and smarter fashion?
As you dig into the Cloud, it resonates right away. This
may be a way to get out of the vicious cycles of capital
budgets, cost creep, and slow cycle times on projects.
Then you then notice the word“Cloud”thrown around
in meetings with your on-premise vendors. It’s tak-
ing a life of its own, popping up more and more as a
topic at user conferences — those events you used to
Ittakessix
monthsto
mountnew
storage
on-premise,
andnowit
looksasifyou
candothatin
minutes!
attend, but don’t anymore because you’re burdened
with getting your projects across the finish line (180
days late is now a good metric. Receiving accolades for
six month lag time just doesn’t seem right.)
Your company’s competitive advantage needs to be
flawless delivery and reliability, which will be based
on hardcore infrastructure. Job one will be replacing
the servers and managing the virtualization clusters,
finding a way to keep up governance. Your IT head-
count is 500 plus, and half the people within the unit
don’t know the other half.
So how is your life going to be better in this new
model? How will this help with resources constraints,
with the bottlenecks you can see coming every time?
It all sounds like a world of ideas, but what you really
want to know about are the technical underpinnings.
Start with this: It takes six months to mount new stor-
age on-premise, and now it looks as if you can do that
in minutes! But there’s a lot of virtualization involved,
so how does that work in the Cloud? And what about
my applications teams, where do they fit in?
You’re a busy guy and now you’re about to become a
poster child for the Cloud. You’re going to need some
guidance. You need tools. You need a roadmap.

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LINGO
2 Cured:ANewWayof
LookingattheEndUser
Sometimes the issues of technology and adoption
have serious consequences. Here’s one: It involves a
major research hospital and thousands of patients
over a multi-year period. This is a case where Cloud
process and Cloud tools could have a direct impact on
saving lives.
This project is off to a good start: The CIO is enlight-
ened. He knows how to leverage assets, the teams are
experienced with the Cloud, and the project is based
in a part of the country where a lot new IT products
and services are conceived, created and marketed.
Now they are looking at new and different administra-
tive applications no one knows or understands. They
need to drive 6-12 projects at a time. And these are
big projects, in data collection and analysis in support
of research, and treatment of a major disease state.
We’re talking next-gen research and treatment, draw-
ing from multi-center medical populations, but the
data and the processes are literally from the 1950’s
and 1960’s. They’ll gather critical data sets from
100,000 patients over the next five years, collecting
and centralizing it, then getting it quickly to research-
ers and treatment practitioners.
Now add the patient privacy issues and all the chal-
lenges of managing IT in a healthcare environment
within the rigors of clinical research. How do you keep
patient data secure in a multi-center environment?
How do you capture, transfer and store data that will
be the basis for scientific hypothesis, clinical treat-
ment, and potential disease cures?
This is not about outsourcing, off-shoring or all the
nifty flow charts we put in our white papers and
presentations.
A Cloud services company has donated the licenses,
service time, millions of dollars in tailwind, and
technology that will adopted by the IT leadership
supporting the patient study. But will that make a
difference? Are the legacy process issues going to
swamp the potential for success?
This is a title bout. It’s a high-profile project, and a lot
of people are placing their hopes on it. Can the Cloud
deliver when lives — not just cost containment and
project cycle time — are at stake?
Thisisacase
whereCloud
processand
Cloudtools
couldhavea
directimpact
onsavinglives.

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LINGO
3 PutMyChartintheCloud,
Stat
So, here’s a third story. It’s not about thinking about
what the cloud might do for you operationally in your
own IT shop, or in helping a research hospital find
potential breakthroughs in medical treatment. This is
about something that is already working, right there
in the emergency room at your local hospital.
Think about this for starters. The emergency depart-
ment is the single largest access point to most
hospitals in the United States. A 2007 study published
by the National Center for Health Statistics noted
116.8 million emergency room visits in the United
States, about four out of every ten Americans, and
that 18% of emergency patients were seen within 15
minutes of arrival and 12.5 percent of all visits to the
emergency department resulted in hospital admission.
A well-managed emergency department is critical
to the success of any hospital, and hospitals wisely
are turning to emergency staffing partners such as
Lafayette, Louisiana-based Schumacher Group. Doug
Menefee has been CIO for Schumacher Group since
2005, and has upgraded or replaced every enterprise
Approaching
theCloudas
awayto
guaranteethe
integrityand
reliabilityof
healthcaredata
twenty-four,
seven,also
broughtMene-
feedirectlyinto
consideration
ofrelated
benefitsof
flexibility,
scalabilityand
costsavings.
system he inherited to support the hospitals in Schu-
macher Group’s service portfolio.
Menefee approached the challenges from the stand-
point of business continuity.“We staff emergency
departments at more than 150 hospitals, and we
would be crippling ourselves and our clients if our
data center goes down during a hurricane, or even an
unexpected storm that nobody predicts,”explains Me-
nefee.“You just can’t compromise the information a
doctor has at his or her disposal for treating a patient,
nor for that matter the entire team that supports the
M.D. You don’t want to be that patient, either, suf-
fering even more and awaiting the right treatment
because of some catastrophic event that happened to
a computer center far away.”
Approaching the Cloud as a way to guarantee the
integrity and reliability of healthcare data 24/7, also
brought Menefee directly into consideration of re-
lated benefits of flexibility, scalability and cost savings.
“Being able to manage our services over the Internet,
meant we could start right away with 50 percent of
our data-center process hosted in the Cloud, and re-
cently adding the human resources piece has brought
that percentage up to 70 percent.

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LINGO
“When I don’t have to focus on the infrastructure
piece, I’m not in a maintenance role, and I’m able
to allocate funds to innovation, to rolling out new
business solutions and meeting the needs of the
business,“ says Menefee.
Next time you’re in the ER and they ask you for your
insurance card, you might want to ask them if their
patient data is hosted in the Cloud before they roll
you down the hall.
1 TheEmpireStrikesBack,
orUnleashingITasan
InnovationCenter
If you don’t innovate, what is the cost to the
business? Not just the financial cost, the
opportunity cost? Who can put a price tag on
what it means to merely keep the servers running,
or at best, replace one enterprise application
with an application that is fundamentally no
Transformation

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LINGO
different than what you’re replacing? If you don’t have
the time or resources to take the extra step required
for innovation, how can you be expected to move the
dial forward?
Yet companies and organizations today are under
tremendous pressure to cut costs, increase revenue
opportunities and be more in tune with their custom-
ers. The only way to accomplish all three of those
goals is by undertaking initiatives that are so pro-
found, so fundamentally different, that they turn the
IT function inside out.
That’s a scary transformation for the traditional CIO,
especially for one who has decades of experience
in the everything-we-need-is-in-house IT model.
However, we’re now at a point where that story of
innovation can be told. New models and best
practices are emerging, and the application of those
models and best practices creates an innovation
platform from which IT can regain mind share within
the business.
CIOshaven’t
hadthetimeor
resourcesto
pursueimpact-
fulprojectsthat
couldsupport
thesales,
serviceor
mobile
applications
thatincrease
productivity
and
profitability.
2 TheEmpireasWeKnowIt
Traditionally, the IT department has been an empire
unto itself, with empire-scale assets, budgets without
boundaries, and a decidedly internal focus. Saddled
with supporting massive infrastructure, CIO’s haven’t
had the time or resources to pursue impactful projects
that could support the sales, service or mobile appli-
cations that increase productivity and profitability.
Rarely has IT been viewed by the business as a source
of lasting innovation. Until now.
Beyond the scalability and security issues of moving
to the Cloud, innovation-driven CIO’s are searching
for a new management paradigm that reflects an era
where IT assets are now commodities and the funda-
mental role for the empire is one of alignment with
business process and business strategy.
n Once I accept a Cloud solution as the primary
architecture of my stack, how do I repurpose those
under-utilized members of my team who know the
business and are capable of innovation?

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LINGO
n How do I identify the skills and qualities of those
who are best suited to help?
n What is possible now that I am no longer spend-
ing 80 percent of my budget and most of my time
making sure the application servers, network load
balancers and databases are up and running?
n What are examples of this fundamental transforma-
tion from CIO’s who have already blazed the trail,
and lived to tell about it?
Not every CIO is ready or willing to tackle this trans-
formation issue head-on or all at once. For that more
traditional CIO considering slow adoption and an
incremental strategy, the questions might be framed a
bit differently:
n How do I build the case for modernization and a
more measured approach to Cloud computing that
doesn’t threaten the existing infrastructure?
n If I adopt Cloud solutions incrementally, how does
this affect the management of existing IT projects?
n What are some best practices for structuring internal
IT teams to ensure that our core infrastructure is
maintained?
Whatis
possiblenow
thatIamno
longerspend-
ing80percent
ofmybudget
andmostofmy
timemaking
surethe
application
servers,
networkload
balancersand
thedatabases
areupand
running?
n What are ways to utilize and preserve our IT assets in
the Cloud, in the face of increasingly complex and
numerous security threats?
Regardless of your approach, IT has an even more
important role with the business in a Cloud environ-
ment. CIO’s now have at their disposal more power
to increase productivity and profitability across the
enterprise, more effectively integrated with the
business than ever.

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LINGO
3 InnovationasaDistraction
Most will admit that technology innovation has
been over-used as a way of selling projects. In the
classic example, the CIO sells a project to senior
management based on a promised ROI, budget and
timeline, and invariably the project fails to clear
those hurdles.
You’re lucky if you get a 25 percent return on invest-
ment for an IT project. If you come in on-budget with
a project, you’re lucky. If you’re on time, you’re lucky,
but you’re rarely going to get where you promised
you’d get to.
Then management has had no other alternative than
to take the hit, or clean house and fire the CIO, which
has a cost associated with it and provides no guar-
antee of future success. There’s an overall structural
problem that prohibits even the most innovation-
minded CIO’s from having a shot at a breakthrough.
As a CIO, you’re so focused on managing all the other
stuff that you don’t have the time to think about in-
novation or how you can meaningfully support the
business. Innovation is a distraction.
You’re not able to give your company or organization
the ability to connect meaningfully with the people
who buy your product or service.
ON-PREMISE VS. THE CLOUD
ON-PREMISE CLOUD
INFRASTRUCTURE-FOCUS INNOVATION-FOCUS
LARGE PROJECTS RAPID PROTOTYPING
BLIND SHOTS BEST PRACTICE ADOPTION
LOW SUCCESS EXPECTATION INCREMENTAL SUCCESS
INTERNAL-FOCUS CUSTOMER-FOCUS

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4 StripDistractionAway
The Cloud gives you the ability to strip some of that
distraction away. You can build a project successfully,
from the ground up. You have the time and focus to
build slowly, to create the momentum.
The Cloud lends itself to innovative thinking on the
part of the CIO and the ability to incorporate best
practice expertise, because of those things you don’t
have to do anymore.
Some companies can’t unburden themselves from
what they’ve always done. They’re so focused on
building and maintaining on-premise infrastructure
and the staff to support it, that projects become three
times as expensive as projected, are horribly delayed,
and don’t even accomplish what they set out to do.
I know of instances where a company takes 18
months to complete a project, and in that time they
could have easily had that project delivered two or
three times, and at half the cost, but they can’t see
it because they are so mired in the depths of how
they’ve always operated.
This has huge implications for the CIO because there
are new technology initiatives that should be assessed
around governance and compliance, green technol-
ogy, social media tools and mobile productivity ap-
plications, but the mindset has always been focused
on those large monolithic, multi-year infrastructure
projects that CIO’s like to tackle to further entrench
their value to the organization.
The business benefit is that the distraction of innova-
tion is removed and IT leaders can contribute time
spent on keeping the lights on toward new technolo-
gies which further innovation within the business
model.
When a company moves that infrastructure to the
Cloud, it gets to deploy capital in new ways and at a
speed never before experienced.

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LINGO
5 OpportunityforDisruption,
ora NewGenerationofCEO
The competitive advantage of the Cloud is not just
for the large corporation. It’s incredibly enabling for
emerging companies to now afford the broad scope
of computing applications and scalability
heretofore reserved for the giants.
That’s going to be very disruptive, because the CIO’s
of those emerging, more nimble companies have
more than likely worked on the web their entire
career, and for them operating in the Cloud is natural.
These younger CIO’s may not have the gray hair and
the credibility yet, but they understand transparency
and the culture of risk taking, and with these new
affordable tools at hand, they have a much better shot
at leading the charge for innovation.
They understand what it’s like to accomplish some-
thing amazing in 30 days, not 30 months. They’re less
concerned with formality and covering their mistakes,
as they are about figuring out quickly if what they
think might work actually works. It either works or it
doesn’t, and they can move on very quickly to revise
or scrap the project, without really spending a whole
lot of capital.
And most importantly, everything they’re doing is in
alignment with the business units, not separate and
sequestered from the business.
The challenge for some of these younger and more
innovative CIO’s is they may be managing teams of
individuals who are used to a culture of creating and
defending large budgets and projects.
They may be leading people whose career revolved
around having everything in-house, the traditional
brick-and-mortar enterprise. They’re going to be
threatened by any hint of migrating to the Cloud,
because they don’t know where they’ll fit in.
Younger
CIO’smaynot
havethegray
hairandthe
credibility
yet,butthey
understand
transparency
andtheculture
ofrisktaking...

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6 TheCloudStoryIsa
HumanStory
Cloud transformation is ultimately a resourcing story
with a decidedly human element. I may not need
three email administrators anymore. I may need one.
How do I repurpose those individuals I no longer need
to maintain the infrastructure? Maybe it is possible to
turn traditional introverts who like to work with new
gear and gadgets, into outwardly-focused weapons of
innovation?
A prized team member for the CIO will be that indi-
vidual who understands business process mapping
and business process templates, who knows the busi-
ness better than the business people. This might be
someone who used to“gate”innovation, but with the
Cloud, all that falls away.
7 ShiftingtheSpend
To generalize, at least half of your IT budget (and as
much as 80%) is spent on support and infrastructure,
keeping the lights on. The rest was spent on new gear
and new projects. The expectation from everyone
involved was not really high for any return on invest-
ment, because any innovation was a distraction not a
priority.
Adopting a Cloud solution gives the CIO the
opportunity to invert completely that traditional
budget formula, so that the IT spend is now on rapid
project development instead of maintenance. This
fundamentally shifts the balance of where you put
your attention.
Once you accept the Cloud as the fundamental archi-
tecture of your stack, the wind is truly at your back.
Innovation is now a different story.

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On-Premise
New Projects
60%
Infrastructure
35%
New Gear
5%
CLOUD
IT BUDGET COMPARISON
Infrastructure
80%
New Gear
10%
New Projects
10%
8 Engagement
When you think about the traditional power base of
IT, it has historically been a vertical model. The intrac-
table IT organization has thrived as an entrenched
and deeply-rooted entity, but not really connected in
any meaningful way to the business, or the customers
that give the business its reason for existence.
The majority of the IT power structure is in the sup-
port and infrastructure people, the network, database
and help desk people. And over these functions, you
have a thin IT strategy layer trying to shield you from
the business.
This thin layer claims to be in alignment with the busi-
ness, but is never in real alignment. The problem is
that team members that come in at this support level
in an organization were never top-tier consultants.
They aren’t process people who understand how the
business works.

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With a Cloud solution, this thin strategy layer in IT gets
really transformed into something very different, and
business process becomes even more important. For
every component of the business, there’s a horizontal
alignment where IT becomes the business process
partner and a driver of innovation:
The ON-PREMISE Business
Strategy Layer
Support Layer
Networks
Databases
Help Desk
The CLOUD Business
The Business IT Delivery
Business Strategy Strategy Support Innovation
Sales Business Process Support – Sales Innovation
Service Business Process Support – Service Innovation
R&D Business Process Support – R&D Innovation
This is now a horizontal story instead of a vertical
story, because the focus of IT is on business process
support and implementation, not infrastructure sup-
port. It’s shoulder-to-shoulder.
There’s an element of delivery and innovation that
didn’t exist before, and there’s more connectivity than
you have in the older, vertical model. The power base
in this aligned, horizontal model is fundamentally
different. In the vertical IT model, even if you could
afford a process and strategy emphasis, it didn’t really
ever get you what you thought.
Yet, when you remove infrastructure building and
support as the primary area of focus, the people who
are more process-oriented and strategy-oriented
become the most important people in your IT shop
for you as CIO.

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9 TheCIOTheyLove
What you’re really trying to do as a business-savvy
CIO is blur the line between IT and the business.
True breakthroughs in technology involve an iterative
delivery process, which depends more on conversa-
tion and communication ideas, and less on conserva-
tion and the protection of physical and personnel
assets. Innovation occurs within a culture of risk, and
the embracing of small failures in pursuit of larger
successes.
A CIO must also become a good caretaker of the
brand. Given the inside-out transformation of the IT
role, there’s going to be a level of quality and brand-
ing that you’ve never had to worry about before.
Projects are going to land on the CIO’s desk that have
more to do with brand and culture, and will require
greater transparency to the organization.
There will always be a technology underpinning, but
for the most part it’s about those primary business
drivers: revenue growth, brand value and profitability.
The era of the propeller head is over.
Data centers and network architecture have moved to
a realm of commodities, where the prices continue to
drop and someone else is responsible for R&D. In the
Cloud, most of these things are no longer your decisions.
This is going to ask a lot of the CIO who has grown
up in a brick-and-mortar IT environment, the internet
arrived at mid-life or mid-career; to some extent this
involves a wholesale conversion. The seasoned CIO
may be asked to move beyond almost everything
they’ve learned, and embrace a new way of working.
And beyond your own conversion, you’ll have to go
transform your team and optimize them for speed-to-
market delivery. Instead of protecting your powerbase
of people, you’ll need to open up and share them.
When“the empire strikes back,”you will unleash both
innovation and value in those critical areas such as
service, sales and R&D, ultimately reinforcing the core
importance of IT to the business.
Think about it. You’ve often known the answer, but
rarely do you get credit for knowing it. You’re no
longer the guardian of the key card, behind a locked
door with all this equipment. Now, you’re part of the
business.

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1 TheDisappearanceof
theSlash
I remember when I was getting into the technology
space in the early 1990s. I was a programmer/
analyst. I think that slash in the job title might be
telling, because this role has all but disappeared,
removed in the name of specialization. What this job
title meant was that not only did I have to maintain
the technical skills of developing kickass code as a
developer, I had to have the panache of a business
People

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analyst who could sit in understand the business, its
challenges, and specify opportunities and strategies
for deploying business models successfully.
Programmer/analysts have been a dying breed for
years, but we need them now more than ever. Univer-
sities, corporate training programs, and private train-
ing companies need to dig back into the 1980s and
1990s and dust off the training content for this role,
update it and get it back in front of their teams.
There is no better way to leverage the new, modern
Cloud-enabled deployment capabilities than with a
strong solution architect who has really good techni-
cal chops as well. Those resources are in such rare air,
and we better find a way to retrain, recruit and deploy
those resources if we want to leverage everything
we’ve got to offer.
There are some in your organization who can be
trained, mentored and deployed in this role, and if
you want to successfully leverage all that the Cloud
has to offer you need to focus on this task more than
any other.
It will be more critical than vendor selection, procure-
ment negotiations, or application developer skill sets.
I promise.
Theseprocess
peopleare
goingto
belogical
thinkers,
goodcommu-
nicators,with
passionand
energy
forproblem
solving.They
knowthe
businesswell,
andexude
initiative.
2ProcessPeoplePrevail
Who are these new weapons you have at your
disposal? How do you tell your team apart? Which are
the ones with larger potential to align with the new
structure?
It probably has less to do with skill sets, specific work
experience or any type of technical certification,
and much more to do with personal qualities. These
process people are going to be logical thinkers, good
communicators, with passion and energy for prob-
lem solving. They know the business well, and exude
initiative.
They are less interested in tape back-up, and more
focused on taking apart a process and examining the
gaps in the delivery and value chain.

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3 ScaleBacktoScaleUp
Admit it. Outsourcing your business processes to the
outsourcing firms wasn’t the silver bullet that you
thought it was, and it won’t be from now on. But that’s
not going to stop the big outsourcing firms knock-
ing on your door, cloaked in the Cloud, to“help”you
transform your enterprise.
As a case in point, I often see big consulting firms –
from the previous Big Five firms – throw 30 to 40
bodies at Cloud projects because they cannot under-
stand how to give their customers what they need in
a new model. They only understand onsite resources
billing. Nice work if you can get it.
These incumbent providers are locked into a dif-
ferent business model, and the concept of running
enterprise computing at scale on shared infrastruc-
ture, troughed and secure, accessible and governed,
remains to them something very exotic. To them,
security means the self-preservation security of lock-
ing you down to their legacy models.
You want to help your business units. Automation
targets are everywhere, not just in supporting the
sales force, but in your contact center, and accounting
and billing as well. Your internal customers and their
customers —the end users — now expect a differ-
ent experience. You’re going to be much better off
on your own service delivery if you can cover more
ground with the smaller and more mobile teams.
The Cloud helps you rethink lean as a luxury. You don’t
need a cadre of 20 people to help you understand
how you can transform your shop. I am continually
amazed seeing large firms do with 12 people what
I’ve seen accomplished with an internal team and a
couple strong support and architecture resources.
That’s the model. Don’t let them convince you it’s so
scary complicated that you can’t help figure out your
lean roadmap and strategy.

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4 TappingintoTalent
Look at the mess we’ve made. We’ve added an awful
lot of expense to IT solutions over the last 20 years.
As we attempted to cut cost, we’ve only made things
more expensive. Some of it has been absolutely
required and supported an ROI story that drove busi-
ness success.
But this has also created innumerable giveaways for
the technology and outsourced solutions to find the
cheaper options for expensive infrastructure and
people. Mix in the specialization of resources which
has lent itself to increased cost and limited holistic
perspectives. A real quagmire, one that might have
detracted new people from entering the IT job market
since the message was: the people (also known as the
overhead) were the problem.
One welcome thing the Cloud has brought is
employee retention and skill-set building. You’re not
going to see this prevalent anywhere at your next
Cloud convention, it’s not going to be out there as a
demo on the expo floor or in the keynote address.
But you do see a lot more accomplished with smaller
teams of solution architects — the business drivers
with a couple technical resources — than you have
seen with a team of 20 in the past. That gives employ-
ees a strong sense of worth. This is the fundamental
difference: how much you can do with so few.
I go back to my best days in the Silicon Valley, when
failure didn’t really cost that much because there
weren’t huge assets devoted to your project. There
weren’t stakeholders and shareholders to worry
about; you were answering to the intrinsic value you
were creating in the marketplace.
People love to work for that kind of company and I
suspect that if you can build that kind of environment,
where innovation and inventiveness trumps moni-
toring the infrastructure, you’ll stand a good chance
of retaining the talent you have, and stand a better
chance of attracting some new minds. And best of all,
it will be the kind of place where you want to show up
every day.
Onewelcome
thingtheCloud
hasbrought
isemployee
retention
andskillset
building.

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1 OwntheRoom
Once you embrace the Cloud, here’s what you’re
going to lose: No more scan card access to a locked
server room. No more hiding all the resource
requirements to keep the infrastructure going in
your Cap Ex budgets. No more limiting the poten-
tial of the solution based on the narrow availability
triangle of servers, disk and the people needed to
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Now pure, unbridled solution design and process
creativity will drive successful applications,
business models, partner ecosystems and customer
interactions.
Process creativity is your ability to stand at a white-
board, listen to confusing, complex, but important
stuff from the business, put it into context and formal-
ize it so you can enable it with tools and technology.
If you can do this, you have a chance to own the room
again, armed with experience and cache. How well
you can do this will drive how successful you’re go-
ing to be. If you don’t have process creativity in your
arsenal and the members of your IT team don’t either,
then failure is inevitable.
But you will be successful if you can sit in room with
the business people, and understand their processes.
Why? Because you also are the technologists that
know how to implement, develop and deliver their
solutions. So, as programmer analysts, we know the
business challenges and the code.
Unfortunately, what’s happened over the last 20 years
is that we have taken those skill sets inherent in the
programmer analyst — those five or six core compe-
tencies — and made them individual specialties.
Weneedthe
business-
savvy,
technology-
oriented
programmer
analystmore
thanever.
Now it takes four or five people to do the kinds of
things we did holistically.
We need the business-savvy, technology-oriented
programmer analyst more than ever. Interestingly, you
don’t have to be as technologically proficient: All the
things around infrastructure, scalability and security
have been pushed out a level. While there’s risk in
that, I’d rather have that challenge put onto a vendor,
because I can hold that vendor accountable. I can
beat him up if I need to. And I can get the vendor to
do more than my staff has the capability to do.
So it’s easier to attack complex projects now. Of
course, this is not holding back your competitors, so
you need to jump on the opportunity. Put a lever to
the talent and take back the advantage.

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2 TheCloud’sSecurity
Advantage
While security issues may appear to be one of the
most formidable challenges to Cloud adoption, what
a CIO should really fear is what internal users and
development partners are capable of doing with
their data.
Almost all security challenges are data breach issues
created by their own employees leaving a laptop on
a plane or having it stolen with an easily hackable
password.
When the data isn’t on your computer it’s much
harder to find. Manage the devices, the people, and
what they are doing and most of your exposure is
limited.
And then the vendors: Every industry has its
accepted levels of governance and you have to make
sure every cloud infrastructure vendor complies with
your security standards.
3 ScalabilityIsa
PipeProblem
There’s currently a lot of caution around network
scalability and failover. Ultimately, we’re going to buy
some utility computing services, and we need to vet
that our vendors can handle load. After all, there is
immaturity in this space. But realistically, for 90%
applications we will deploy, the real key is to ensure
that our pipes to the internet are redundant, scalable
and have failover options. That way, when someone
cuts some fiber down the street (which seems to hap-
pen to every business about every 5 years) you can
still get to the internet and run your Cloud solutions.
It’s a total turnaround from five to ten years ago, when
the Internet was a“nice to have”and the internal LAN,
at high expense, was redundant, fault-tolerant, and
managed by loads of people, tools, and vendors.
Now we’re flipping it up, and saying that the local LAN
is about a wireless access point, maybe a printer, and
some VPN if required. The internet connectivity is the
part that needs to be redundant, robust and always-
on at any business location. That’s a different network
TheCloud
providesalevel
ofsecurityby
obscurity.
Whenthedata
isn’tonyour
computerit’s
muchharder
tofind.

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engineering problem, and is the most important part
of scalability.
Now you should still put your vendors through their
paces, because that’s due diligence. But ultimately
you have to worry about your pipe more than you
have to worry about whether a Cloud vendor can
truly scale.
4 WhipThroughtheTurns
In Cloud environments, you’ll see failure differently.
In fact, you won’t need to think about failure at all.
There’s less worry about having a major meltdown or
having a Plan B to address potential problems,
because the tools and the solution deployment land-
scape have changed so drastically.
If something doesn’t work, you just do it again. You do
it again because now it’s affordable and you haven’t
burned a lot of money in cycles. You’re in an environ-
ment that allows you to fail gracefully, recover quickly,
and get the thing right.
Face it: You’ve run into situations where you’ve
screwed up the configuration. Maybe not in a major
way, but enough that the customer is confused and
irritated. It’s the nature of this work.
You’re always going to deal with a certain degree of
imprecision, whether it’s the words on a piece of
paper or the flow charts on the whiteboard. The
requirements and all the things we’ve come to know
and love through 40 years of systems implementation
are still important, but ultimately, that imprecision
is much more likely to be recoverable in Cloud

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Yourabilityto
takethatfailed
effortandturn
itintosome-
thingofvalueis
muchstronger
thanitisinthe
on-premise
world.
environments. The tools and the configuration and
deployment are so simple, it levels the deployment
model.
Let’s say you did something and it failed. You didn’t
have the right requirements or the right data, or the
right people telling you what you needed. Your ability
to take that failed effort and turn it into something
of value is much stronger than it is in the on-premise
world.
You can chop and change, and make adjustments
quickly. Of course, you still have similar governance
on how you deploy and test. That doesn’t go away.
But the design, unit build, and system testing? Now
you can whip through those cycles much faster than
in any kind of environment I’ve ever seen. It really
doesn’t matter whose tools you’re using. One of the
main reasons for these new deployment advantages
is that the vendors have gone on a diet and put the
skinny on their product offerings. You now have sim-
ple tools, with the excess stripped out. You just want
the core stuff, right? You want to be able to make the
simple turns to provide what the business needs.
1 VendorswithRippedAbs
Tools are drastically different from where they
were even five years ago. The development tools
we now have at our disposal are so much better,
mainly because the Cloud-focused vendors went on
a drastic diet. They stripped out many of the non-
essentials, the bloated features that drag everything
down. We’re talking the software equivalent of
having ripped abdominals and zero belly fat .
Tools

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You know this from the basic software you use in
the office. You probably only use 35 percent of that
software’s features every day, maybe another 15-20
percent once a week. When it comes down to it, you
actually barely use the product. And some of the more
arcane features make you hate the product. What you
really want are the simple tools, simple deployment
models, to be able to get things done quickly.
So now you have providers like salesforce.com with
three to four releases of their product a year, unheard
of in the enterprise software, on-premise world. Your
traditional legacy vendors would release at that rate
because of bug fixes, because everything was big,
bloated, and broken.
But now it’s simplified. You have less levers to touch,
but enough to build solutions. It’s a simplification of
the software delivery and application development
models that lends itself to graceful failure and quick
fix. Go ahead and screw it up.
Who hasn’t worked at a company or in an IT shop
where the development projects were way over
budget, failed to deliver what was expected, and were
late and stressful? It’s gone now. You strip that stuff
away, and you take fear and uncertainty out of the
equation. Now you focus on the solution.
It’sare-
simplification
ofthesoftware
deliverymodel
aswellasthe
application
development
modelthat
lendsitselfto
gracefulfailure
andquickfix.
The bottom line is that you get the right answer more
quickly with less money. You have a fearlessness
you’ve never had and that creates business opportu-
nity. That’s a big differentiator.

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2 BewaretheEntrenched
Vendor
This will come as no surprise but there are a lot of
companies in the IT vendor space who stand to lose a
lot because of the Cloud. So, many vendors are simply
taking their existing services and products — hosting,
outsourcing and co-location — and rebranding them
as cloud products. Their definition of Cloud is trans-
lated into‘our product’.
So while Cloud transformation is not incredibly
complex, you certainly will see these entrenched ven-
dors make this process seem as complex as possible.
They desperately will attempt to maintain their legacy
applications and tools, and heritage of sales.
But their solutions will always fall short of what’s been
architected from scratch with the Cloud in mind. And
you shouldn’t be afraid of their scare and confusion
tactics. This is inevitable —and quite normal, actually
— but certainly not in your best interests.
What is one vendor’s“flexibility”is often a spaghetti-
mess of production confusion, market chaos, and a
severe lack of understanding regarding what both
business users and application developers truly need
to be successful.
Just remember: Only with infrastructure virtualized or
Cloud-deployed can solution architects and technical
architects design and deploy solutions that will satisfy
the consumer-derived user experience that business
apps need to deliver today.

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3 Don’tBuytheCloudfrom
aDatabaseVendor
Don’t tie yourself to a provider that is already
offering on-premise solutions or software. You want
a vendor that has built its Cloud solution from the
ground up.
Run the other way if the Cloud is coming at you from
a database developer or server vendor. You need to
hold out for a provider for whom customer adoption
and customer ROI are the only metrics that matter.
Those have to be the leading metrics by which they
gauge their business.
And beware a cloaked approach when Cloud is merely
a mix-in, where you have three or four different ways
to buy what you want: Cloud versus on-premise,
versus appliance, versus hosted solution versus co-lo.
Look for simplicity of the offering instead of vendors
coming up with myriad offerings. And look for consis-
tent release cycles that represent a good roll-out and
update strategy.
Today we’re running into a lot of people from the
1990’s in Silicon Valley who are now masterminding
Cloud solution offerings. It’s a community of people
that learned from the ASP outsourcing model, from
the dot.com successes and failures, and from the
retrenching into what is now our modern economy.
They’re seasoned software professionals, but they’re
also driven by the excitement of how different this is.
The resolve and understanding of these kinds of
professionals is what you want in your solution part-
ner. These people are not confused about their role.
They’re focused on the things that matter.
The right provider teams now are in execution mode.
They’re not in R&D mode or vision and value mode;
they have solid products and solid process, and they
are executing on them.
Bewarea
cloaked
approachwhen
Cloudismerely
amix-in,where
youhavethree
orfourdifferent
waystobuy
whatyouwant:
Cloudversus
on-premise,
versusappli-
ance,versus
hostedsolution
versusco-lo.

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1 TheCloudOpportunist
Remember the old guy from the movie The
Shawshank Redemption who was released from
prison and didn’t know what to do? He worked in a
grocery store briefly as a bagger and then he
went back to his tiny room and gave up on life
altogether.
Well, you don’t have to be that guy. Adopting the
Cloud gives you the green light at your parole
hearing, and you walk away from cell block IT and
CIO

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emerge into daylight from the grim and gray prison
of on-premise limitations. And all the outsourcing
consultants and gear vendors are up there in the
guard towers shaking their heads in dismay as you
walk unshackled to freedom, you don’t have to worry
about what it’s going to be like on the outside.
Especially if you take what the term CIO used to
mean and give it some new life.
Chief? Are you kidding me? Squeezed between the
Alphas in senior management on one side and your
own infrastructure-focused team on the other, you
were at the mercy of the swirling whims of stockholder
voting blocs and the inertia that IT has been encour-
aging among its ranks for the last 40 or 50 years. You
were more likely fully in charge of things where you
really did have control, with appellations like Maintainer
of the Gear and Defender of the Line Item.
Information? What is that? It’s a meaningless word,
unchanged from the 14thcentury when it meant
something that was a concept or an idea. Information
is ineffable. Check the box marked“N/A”please. We
treat information as if it is a solid, but it’s not that or
even a liquid, barely a gas. And you’re going to track
it, trap it, refine it, distribute it and meter it? Not with
that infrastructure; no way.
Officer? See above. You get my point. It really comes
down to being an opportunist (lower case) who uses
the Cloud to get at innovation.
Think sports, where opportunists abound: the tennis
player who poaches at the net, the outfielder who
“shades”from the normal position, anticipating where
the ball is going to be hit, the linebacker who crouches
behind the onrushing linemen and then pops up
when the quarterback throws to what he thought was
an open receiver. Interception. Touchdown. Contract
renewal.
An opportunist is someone who profits from the
prevailing circumstances. The prevailing Cloud cir-
cumstances I see right now mean you can align your
process teams with the business units, lower the cost
for each cycle, and solve the problems your custom-
ers, contact centers, and sales teams.
The opportunist who maximizes the Cloud for innova-
tion is going to be noticed. This is not about contrib-
uting to a few rounds of expense reduction as a slash
mode play. You’re not a bagger anymore and you’re
not holing up in a small room. The Cloud redemption
has much more to do with achieving top-line growth
and shareholder value, and if you get that, you just
might be chief after all.
Thelinebacker
whocrouches
behindthe
onrushing
linemenand
thenpopsup
whenthe
quarterback
throwstowhat
hethought
wasanopen
receiver.
Interception.
Touchdown.
Contract
renewal.

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2 TheITSpend
Want to be the CIO everyone loves? Then focus on
lower-cost, higher-value solutions that really center
on value, not just spending.
These affordable solutions are cost-effective, exten-
sible, and provide a level of governance and scalability
often overlooked in the current application stack.
The chief technology executive will leverage many
small solutions to build out an enterprise roadmap,
and will design and deploy solutions that show value
at every project release. This focus is a healthy and
positive one for business. Ten years ago it wasn’t
very glamorous, but being competitive and winning
market share is in vogue right now.
Which means that things are back in the hands of
the CFO. Your ability to please him or her with a price
point and an innovation layer that drives revenue and
cost avoidance is the key to your success. Fail in that
endeavor in this market? Game over.
End of story.
Yourabilityto
pleasetheCFO
withaprice
pointandan
innovation
layerthat
drivesrevenue
andcost
avoidanceis
thekeytoyour
success.
3 CreatingValueandVision
forYourCEO
As you change the value/vision mix for your CEO
or board of directors, you better be pretty closely
mapped to how it’s going to work day to day.
Cloud transformation is like hitting the plunger and
blowing up how IT handles internal and external
customers. And the biggest bang for your buck will
ultimately come in how quickly you can transform
business process and workflow activity.
The key is to find a nimble, innovative strategy that
pares back distractions and creates the cost avoidance
or revenue enhancement that drives every business
model decision. And for your CEO, that influence, that
impact is huge.

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3 InsidetheCloud
TransformedEnterprise
While external forces are driving macro changes,
the CIO will be planning and executing from the
inside out. Operational center managers, marketing,
sales and service, are all going to embrace your focus
on cost efficient solutions. This is a welcome thawing
of the age-old, totally ingrained divisiveness between
IT and the business.
“On board”is your goal for all departments. For
instance, making sure that the legal team is on board
with the vision and the value. Legal teams are go-
ing to find all kinds of interesting ways to challenge
the vision or the strategy. That’s not unusual. That’s
normal. You’re not going to plop new contracts on
them and not create problems. Remember, back office
functions serve a purpose for negotiation and risk
mitigation.
The trick is to stay involved in the conversation and
make sure that they don’t create situations where you
can’t go in the direction you want to, where you can’t
get the vision and value tied together.
Remember, the Cloud is not about buying a piece of
equipment. Familiarize your teams with the new sub-
scription model, so they’re not treating it like it’s the
same old on-premise, software and hardware procure-
ment model. You’ll need to understand this to get the
finance team on board, because there are plenty of
accounting practices that need to be considered.
Finance, legal and procurement need to understand
why the Cloud is non-negotiable for the health and
future of your company. Get them involved in the
story before you need them to execute.
Get them all focused on how the Cloud needs to be
different from what’s gone before. It will help you
smooth the rough edges.
CLOUD DEPARTMENTAL ALIGNMENT
Sales
Marketing
Delivery
Operations
Legal
Finance
IT

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1 Retoolingforthe
21stCentury
Some believe the next decade will mark the pe-
riod when companies fundamentally retool for the
21st century. But you could say that the retooling
began 15 years ago and that we are just now seeing
the results of that retooling, the first lift from these
earthbound technologies.
Liberation

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True liberation will occur as forces greater than indi-
vidual companies drive business process forward,
and the CIO will be there to anticipate and harness
value from this progression of changes.
If you’re ever lost in the middle of all of this, look to
large companies’mergers and talent acquisitions, to
what entrepreneurs are paying attention to, and to
where the venture capitalists are forming funds.
It’s tempting to think about where we may be in the
next ten years, but I want to pull back and use the
conclusion of this discussion to look at where we may
be in three to four years, to synthesize both prophetic
and pragmatic views.
Idon’tknow
whothisnew
companyis,
butIdoknow
itwillbe
abouttools,
browsers,
watchers
andcode
optimization.
2 TheToolsofTomorrowland
Today is about making transactions more secure,
environments easier to scale — a deluge of
deployment plays. You can observe them all right now
rising on the thermals beneath the Cloud.
Tomorrow someone’s going to come along with the
next generation of development tools, Cloud-savvy
tools, like Borland did for PC development. PC devel-
opment took off because of these solid tools.
I don’t know who this new company is, but I do know
it will be about tools, browsers, watchers and code
optimization. They’re going to come up with a suite of
stuff, a combination of infrastructure and governance
and process mapping. Tools that will get us beyond,
or should I say below, the VP of marketing and the
VP of sales. These will be more powerful, with a wide
spectrum to govern and manage appropriately,
and to drive more effective utilization of assets,
storage and computing powers.
And around those tools you’ll find a flock of vendors
offering premium services that can accommodate
your requirements, which happen to be 99 percent
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you’ll see something offerings around data, process-
ing power, or analytics.
So it pays to pay attention to where the tools are
going. There are a lot of us waiting for this, because
we know how much more we can do with what
we’ve already experienced in Cloud transformation.
Whoever comes up with the overwhelming tools will
quickly separate from the pack.
When Disneyland opened the Tomorrowland part
of the theme park in 1955, it offered a vision of the
world as it might be in 1986, including household
conveniences such as microwave ovens and picture
phones. But the most distinctive exhibit was the“TWA
Moonliner,”with V-2 rocket design, atomic-powered to
take passengers into space as easily as we fly them to
Cleveland.
Well, TWA is long gone and we’re still waiting for the
Moonliner. I’m betting these new Cloud tools will
arrive much sooner. And then you’ll really see things
take off.
3 VerneGlobal,aGreenStory
When you take the leap and begin to think about
your servers and your software residing securely
outside your shop, say in Nevada or North Carolina,
then you might as well push this to its logical conclu-
sion and think of all the strategic places on the planet
where you might put a data center.
Rising power costs and server densities have put a
sharp focus on managing and reducing data center
energy consumption. In the United States and United
Kingdom, the supply and reliability of electricity is
increasingly in question due to overburdened grids.
The trend toward green policies and government
mandates like the Carbon Reduction Commitment
are also pressuring companies to reduce the carbon
footprint of their power-hungry facilities.
Iceland is now a go-to option for infrastructure. That’s
right, Iceland. Data centers have grown massively over
the past decade, becoming a major part of compa-
nies’core, strategic infrastructures. At the same time,
a confluence of factors are forcing organizations to
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Data center efficiency goes beyond knowing if servers
are still up. These days, data center managers are
accountable for energy usage, energy efficiency,
compliance, and regulation. Performance must be
monitored and trends must be predicted to ensure
that the data center is ready for capacity increases at
any time.
Iceland-based Verne Global is helping clients un-
tether from high data center rents, high power costs
and massive carbon footprints. Iceland is an excellent
place to locate your next data center because it elimi-
nates all three. Iceland’s climate provides free ambient
cooling, and connectivity times to Europe and North
America are more than adequate.
Verne Global’s first data center is 100 percent pow-
ered by renewable energy resources and 100 percent
cooled by the natural environment of Iceland, without
the use of chillers or compressors.
Additionally, Verne Global is reducing overall energy
consumption through optimization of data center
design and server utilization. The facility, as well as the
design and construction program is centered around
LEED Gold standards, while meeting the stringent
requirements of today’s computing platforms.
4 EnterpriseSoftware
Consolidation
The coming enterprise software consolidation is
running ahead of what will be consolidation the likes
of which we haven’t seen in 100 years.
Companies in spaces like business services, energy,
software, construction, telco /media and finance will
find ways to create value via acquisition and organic
growth. And companies with broad-based customer
rolodexes will be prepared to offer services to them in
sophisticated ways.
Imagine the seemingly unholy alliance of GE, Google,
and Pacific, Gas and Electric? Or Vodafone, salesforce.
com, Cisco and Duke Energy? Huge mergers will start
to happen within 12 months time. We’ve already seen
Intel take a shot across the bow with the purchase of
McAfee.
Why would they do that? Because security will be es-
sential in the new world of the Cloud, and the people
that own the best security minds and solid products
will do well in positioning the infrastructure solutions
that people and companies require.
Thepeople
thatownthe
bestsecurity
mindsandsolid
productswill
dowellin
positioningthe
infrastructure
solutionsthat
peopleand
companies
require.

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While initial Cloud adoption has been driven by cost
factors, the explosive growth will only occur when
security is not seen as the barrier but the reason
why you want to get your data away from the weak
barriers of your own firewalls. This is most obvious in
industries such as financial services, healthcare and
government, where regulation and special require-
ments abound and where infiltration and leaks cannot
occur for any reason. But it applies just as easily in the
private sector where customer lists and trade secrets
are proprietary, and even in the not-for-profit realm
where donor information is held in trust.
So now you’re starting to see the early movements,
the overt linkage between hardware providers and
security software. Wait until you see the first unholy
matrimony of a software company and a utility
company and then remember you read it here first.
These new companies will own the grid, as well as the
smart networks, applications, and security to deliver
loads of services, billed through complex metering
and pricing plans. Five years ago commoditized
pricing for virutalization and data services seemed like
madness, but Amazon’s AWS technologies deliver
exactly that today for pennies -- PENNIES -- on the
dollar of what this stuff used to cost.
5 WhereMyMouthIs
This is not just me jawing about the transformation
and liberation that the Cloud is bringing and will
continue to bring once everyone owns this book
and packs it in their carry-on luggage. This is not me
pontificating atop a lofty summit or finger-pointing
from up in first class (I fly commercial, by the way).
Nor is this me going Keith Moon, shot putting servers
out my hotel window into the swimming pool below.
No, this is me on the phone calling my broker and
selling (or shorting) all my stock in ERP outfitters and
the publicly-traded consulting firms that peddle on-
premise solutions. Dump‘em, before the bell!
Better yet, I’ll start my own venture fund. If some-
one would kindly drop $120 million in my lap this
afternoon, I’ll go out and launch Lingo Ventures or
Premiseless Partners, and I’ll hang my VC shingle on
Sand Hill Road and get to work finding the entrepre-
neurs who are putting together the major plays for
2015, the year I’ll start returning gobs of money to
my limited partners.
I’ll start with investments in smart-grid technologies.
As an investor I’d head to very large markets, where

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the large utility players are converging and serial
entrepreneurs are attracted by the opportunities to
create value.
Then I’ll head over and invest in Cloud-based software
that’s focused on billing and product configuration,
and vet some security ventures while I’m at it. I’ll put
some advanced network switch and failover product
play in my venture shopping cart, and heading for
home, I’ll scoop up the most promising application
development and monitoring tool companies, the
ones developed exclusively for Cloud apps.
That’s when this will really mean something. When
you not only stake your professional reputation on the
liberating qualities of the Cloud, but when you take
your piggy bank and your 401k and you place it in a
Cloud mutual fund.
6 I’mNoOracle
You can tell from my picture that I’m not the guy
who stands on the mountaintop and hands down
prophecy on stone tablets. I don’t look at a moth-
erboard and pretend it has anything Ouija about it,
because you’ll never find the answer in the gear.
And I’m not the wizard in majestic robes at the front
of expectant audience craving a miracle. As you’ve
learned already, what I have to tell you is not going to
be very profound; provocative, I hope, and practical
maybe, but not necessarily profound.
I do have two advantages over most CIO’s in recogniz-
ing what the Cloud means. I worked in Silicon Valley
for many years. Silicon Valley teaches people what it
takes to bring a company to life in a venture capital-
fueled environment. How do you navigate to get
something done right? With nimbleness, even with
the rope-a-dope moves you sometimes have to make.
You don’t waste any time or energy going back and
solving a problem a different way. Leave the ego aside
and just go back and do it again.

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From my standpoint, this Silicon Valley nimbleness is
tongue-and-groove with what it’s going to take to be
successful in the Cloud.
The other advantage is that in my current role, work-
ing all around the world helping companies with their
Cloud transformation strategy, I get to listen to a lot of
folks. I‘ve seem a lot of Transformations to the Cloud,
and everything I’ve been telling you here, is exactly
what I hear every single day.
There is nothing here you can’t find out for yourself
eventually, or maybe pick up along the way. But hope-
fully this book can help you frame it in a way you’ve
never thought about before.
We all know IT is a moving target, and maybe now
you realize that target isn’t on your back anymore.
The bull’s eye is out there, and you’ve been given
better arrows, at less than wholesale prices. Now you
can free up and train more archers so you’re not the
only one shooting at the problem.
I’m no soothsayer, but if it helps, let’s grab coffee and
talk it over. Better make mine a double espresso.
We’ll definitely be adding some rocket fuel to this
story before it’s all said and done.

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At Mike’s day job as Chief Technology Officer and SVP,
Professional Services at Astadia, he helps companies
use the Cloud to transform their businesses.
Scenario planning for Cloud transformation is easy
(and free) online with the IT Transformation ROI
calculator at astadia.com/roi

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