Application Deployment versus Application Delivery

'Deployment mindset lands enterprises into trouble'

Deployment is a term locked in the distributed computing era that has little relevance to today’s far more complex, dynamic world

Idhries Ahmad

Monday, February 11, 2008

In an interaction with Idhries Ahmad of CIOL, Souma Das, gives a detailed overview of application delivery mindset and how it scores over application deployment. Souma also talks about the changing role of CIO and state of preparedness of IT departments in enterprises.

CIOL: Organizations have always been looking at business continuity, and this continuity with the expansion in business plans and reach is becoming more complicated. It is getting more Web-based if compared to earlier days. How effective are CIOs to deal with such issues?

Souma Das: CIOs play a vital role in the implementation of an application delivery in organizations as they make application delivery a strategic priority. CIOs today are faced with increasingly challenging requirements — improving business processes, improving customer experience, and making IT more agile and responsive to today’s fast-paced business environment — all while reducing IT costs.

This means moving from the traditional mindset of incremental application and infrastructure improvements to a system that can change on-demand. By fostering an application-centric mindset and investing in an application delivery infrastructure, CIOs have a single policy-driven infrastructure that provides the necessary business relevancy, agility, and focus to tackle these requirements.

CIOs are increasing recognizing the needs to designate key application delivery owners across IT. The goal is simple: Allow any user to connect to any app with a great user experience and the right level of security. Unfortunately traditional organizational silos often prevent this goal.

As a result, each new application roll out involves fixed assumptions about the app and users that are hard-coded into the infrastructure. This creates severe business limitations the moment one of those assumptions changes, which inevitably occurs.

CIOL: So where does a CIO step in and make sure enterprise is agile and business processes are streamlined and efficient.

Souma Das: To break this inefficient chain, CIOs will need to designate key IT owners who are responsible for implementing and maintaining a flexible, dynamic application delivery infrastructure that can support any new application now and in the future.

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