Telescope: What HP did, won't work for Dell

MASSACHUSETTS, US: Conventional wisdom has long suggested that the Cloud opportunity is big enough for everyone to have a place at the table but I'm not sure that will be the case.

So says this ace analyst with a horizon that is not only long and wide but also sharp — in a 3D way.

It wasn’t raining when Noah built the Ark, as they say. Some people can see beyond the weather reports not just because they can, but because they want to.

Charles King, Principal Analyst, Pund-IT Inc. has often interpreted industry shifts in a connotation that often evades others’ eyes. Someone with just the right mix of wisdom and pragmatism when it comes to finding out the mysteries that lie dangerously silent deep within the sea of news and information about the enterprise industry. Here’s some one who does not trawl, but deep dives.

Do you see the orbits of enterprise industry changing a lot with all the shake-up and changes that the big cheeses like HP are moving on to? What would be the honey pots as we move forward - Software, On-demand, Hardware, Services or something else?

HP's announcement of plans to sell/spin-off their PC division seems to indicate traditional systems vendors making a fundamental strategic shift away from client endpoint devices. That isn't the case for every vendor, certainly. Dell, for example, is firmly wedded to PCs, particularly in higher-end consumer systems, and business solutions wedded to associated services. But PCs' historically tighter margins and sensitivity to economic fluctuation make that a difficult business for vendors attempting to maximize their operating profits. At this point, both HP and Oracle are reshaping themselves in IBM's image as providers of the IT infrastructures underlying business- and consumer-focused services including cloud, SaaS, etc. It will be interesting to see if there's enough room for that much competition in those markets.

What is your analysis of all the moves (baby steps or giant strides) into the Enterprise market as taken by the Google genre and followed by Microsoft etc? Similarly, the reverse handshake attempted by traditional Enterprise big cheese like Oracle, SAP, IBM etc? How far and fast will this on-demand, on-device wave of enterprise solutions go? What might be (or would be) the party-poopers here?

I'd add Amazon here, too (via their AWS offerings) but all three companies are coming at it from different places. Amazon uses web-based services to further leverage their massive IT infrastructure investments. Google recognizes that their brand and search platform provide entry points for disrupting traditional software/services markets (and making a potentially pretty penny in the process). Microsoft's efforts reflect an understanding of the potential damage that full commoditization of IT could have on traditional IT brands and businesses. In a cloud-based world, few users will know or even care about the brand of the OS or applications used to deliver online services--they'll just expect them to work. That will place companies like Microsoft in an increasingly difficult position.

How?

Azure represents one strategy to survive those changes. A wild card in this scenario is the role traditional service providers will play in cloud hosting and what sort of friction might develop between them and vendors that go the cloud hosting route. Conventional wisdom has long suggested that the opportunity is big enough for everyone to have a place at the table but I'm not sure that will be the case.

Talking of 'disruptive' are there actually any 'real' disruptive trends or tech-changes happening (or to happen in future)? If yes, what's your pick?

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The shift to ultra-mobile computing and increasingly powerful small form factor devices (smart phones, tablets & ultra-light laptops) has inspired a massive shift in vendor and end user behaviors over the past half-decade that I expect that to continue for some time. Given the historic trend of technology to deliver greater performance in ever smaller and cheaper packages, it's virtually a certainty.

Do you agree with Carr when his arguments indicate that Cloud will put Internal IT departments out of business? Cloud will make Internal IT teams redundant? Does that also correspond to the concomitant demands of making IT turn into a revenue-spinner?

The highly/totally automated "lights out" data centers envisioned by most cloud proponents will splinter or shatter many traditional IT positions/skills, but it will also help generate new necessary roles. EMC's recent launch of programs that aim to train/certify 'information architects' for advanced analytics processes reflects the sort of changes I expect to see more of over time.

How much orthogonal a force would Cloud be for traditional IT environments and other areas - how will it impact evolution of other IT ingredients like applications, protocols, networking, storage, software, standards etc?

From a practical standpoint, cloud simply adds additional abstraction players to traditional IT ingredients but its effects aren't even or common across all. For example, since cloud-based applications/workloads aren't associated with specific systems, effectively mapping them to the right storage assets is a critical process. In many instances, networks play far more critical roles in cloud infrastructures than they do in traditional datacenters, mainly because inadequately provisioned networks can create difficult or fatal bottlenecks. Cloud standards issues are often, as is common in virtually every emerging technology, a rat's nest of conflicting vendor strategies and intentions.

Overall, any advice to a CIO to be faster and smarter on the technology curve and navigate the whole enchilada of obsolescence and heterogeneity better?

"Caveat emptor" (Latin for 'let the buyer beware') is probably the best advice I can offer. There are some innovative and valuable cloud solutions available in the market today. But there are also technologies and products out there that deliver far less then they promise. Most CIOs already have the skills they need to navigate this new terrain--carefulness, intelligence, skepticism, a willingness to learn from but also to demand the best from their chosen vendors. At the end of the day, the benefits of any technology are found in how well and how much better it allows you to run your business. That will be as true in tomorrow's world of cloud computing as it is in yesterday's and today's IT solutions.