It's been well over a year that Forrester's James Staten (@staten7) has been gently orating from the rooftops that "you are already hybrid."  In his foresight, he was referring to the broad existence of so-called shadow-IT, the tendency of competent non-IT folk to pull out their credit cards and purchase public cloud services and SaaS services, thereby solving their own problems.

This week, a spate of articles from

People, Process, Technology for Cloud Service Providers

There’s been a lot written in cloud circles about the preparations enterprises need to make to prepare for the move to cloud - but what about service providers? A lot of service providers are coming from a managed hosting, managed services or even a telco background and are now building a cloud business. The planning, provisioning, marketing & selling of cloud services can be vastly different from these more traditional IT services. Potential cloud...

In the mobile revolution, modern IT organizations can take advantage of the big loads of data spilling out of phones and tablets to work smarter and faster. These clingy devices are highly efficient information aggregators. By adding context to each customer engagement, IT can pair a specific job with the best available service agent, based on whereabouts and situation, experience and schedule.

While most sensory data, such as

With Amazon's rapid success in the cloud market comes increased awareness of what it can, and even more importantly, cannot do.

The success is easy to explain, with Amazon's attractive price point and ever-growing set of technical functionality. The roadblock to wider adoption is equally easy to explain:

"Businesses want a full...

CIOs, engaged in cloud initiatives, have identified one of their top goals - a need for a cloud strategy. The reason; cloud initiatives not only directly impact technology but the effect extends significantly to business processes and organisational resources. A strategy that aligns process, technology and business service delivery is critical to the future returns on the initiative.

During the course of IT’s mere fifty years of evolving operational models nothing has accelerated, and to varying degrees disrupted the norms...

In some ways, everything about IT is about creating uniformity. Standard configurations. Synchronized patches. 1000 identical laptops shipped to all employees. We place a high premium on "everything being exactly the same."  And for good reason - if everything is the same, management and administration becomes far far easier. And while we enjoy the fantasy of racks and racks of identically-configured servers humming away in the icy cold data centre of the future, anyone who knows what a data centre smells like (mmm, silicon)...

In the midst of strong cloud competition coming from many different sources as well as rampant cloud-washing in the market, service providers need to differentiate and add value to their cloud offerings in order to be relevant. However, differentiation often drives up costs. It’s much cheaper to offer the plain vanilla version of everything, including cloud services. Sure, customers will pay a premium for things like ongoing compliance, security and service levels, but service providers need to ensure the cost  of differentiation...