Every CIO or C Suite member that I meet today considers their Enterprise needs and corresponding IT Solutions getting more and more complex every day. They have their hands full with large IT teams (internal or outsourced or a combination) maintaining a ‘business-as-usual’ scenario. While IT systems continue to do what they were supposed to do and might be working well, they were designed and built for business realities of a decade ago, maybe more. It leaves little scope to ingrain the innovations and needs of today’s enterprise i.e. introduce a mobile or social angle to the end user experience. This reality is not just as a technology limitation, it’s also due to the fact that IT teams are so bogged down by day to day issues, there’s no bandwidth left for creativity or innovation. The systems need armies of IT personnel doing hardware maintenance, patching, testing, change management, release plans, documentation etc. They are feeling the pain of managing multiple disparate applications, multiple product / services vendors, integrating a wide array of applications using multiple integration frameworks, constantly upgrading them, handling different technology stacks for each of the applications, maintaining skilled technical manpower and keeping control of Enterprise IT budgets. All this while their core business area is probably far removed from running IT systems.
In this scenario, every CIO is left wondering whether he is missing the bus by not moving to the cloud. Extensive carpet bombing of cloud related campaigns by today’s product vendors drives the message that all or most of the previously mentioned issues will disappear overnight. Moving everything to cloud appears to be the magic wand.
Easier said than done? Can they? Stay tuned for my next blog on what am hearing from my PeopleSoft customers.
Contributed by Prashant