IT is an interesting challenge for CIOs: Paul Strong

JAIPUR, INDIA: "IT is an interesting challenge for CIOs. The one who want to be different would like to be chief innovation officer," opined Paul Strong, Global CTO, VMware addressing the delegates of C-Change-2014.

How will IT be innovated to allow a company to grow? Companies generally believe in apps and services they display to their own customers. Companies need to install the app, integrate and manage it, and so on, said Strong.

"You also need people with the right skills to manage and facilitate these apps. When you want to change the apps, you need a ticket. You end up with tickets for everything - databases, OSs, networking, storage, security and so on," he added.

There are ten thousands of applications. The challenge is: how do you make these evolve for your business? There should be a simple way of looking at things. The question is: how do we simplify IT?

The 80-85 percent of delivery is software and people. You get the economies of purchasing power, but there is diversity that needs managing.

Automation is flexibility, felt Strong and further added, "The dominant cost turns into energy. There are lot of benefits in simplicity. The first is, you actually go to the cloud. Another way of simplifying things is standardizing. Complexity drives up costs. The x86 isn't just the dominant platform today."

Another key area is virtualization, he said.

Virtualization is very profound. "We can get several choices on how to do an SLA. We have now separated the applications from the network. It gives us the flexibility to get the right SLA. Hence, we have automated, to simplify the management of all of the applications. This is what a software-defined data center is all about," noted Strong.

"In terms of delivering choice, there are internal/external choices. This is what we also know as a hybrid cloud. What do we see happening around all of this? Now comes the opportunity to innovate. Cloud is all about a business model. It is all about self-service, instant provisioning, pay-per-use, cost-efficient and elastic."

Strong further added that companies that don't virtualize spend 70-75 percent of their time in just keeping their lights on. Cloud has removed the barrier of entry for using IT. The rate of innovation continues to go up. Cloud has also helped in restructuring and managing the IT infrastructure. Rate of innovation has been going up. Failure is the currency by which we acquire knowledge.

India is on a cusp to leverage all of this, he said. We have now moved from a stateless client to a rich, mobile client with content. The world has moved on from business logic to business process mashups. The old world OLTP database has moved ahead to real-time streaming analytics and Big Data.

Strong said: The new use cases of IT are interesting. From labour automation to business model transformation, individual worker productivity has moved ahead to team and corporate productivity growth, and non-human-scale computing has now moved to data-based products and services.

The new business today is changing the costs of inputs, eliminating value chain intermediaries, introducing new monetization models, driving customer preference in an existing market, and serving an underserved market in a new way. All you need to do is to push the reset button on IT. Cloud is all about instant gratification, he added.

So, how does IT safely and securely enable all of this? It is all about the apps, concluded Strong.