A post from Organizational Readiness Track Chair, Scott Bils.

“The technology is the easy part.  It’s the cultural issues that are hard.”

This quote from a recent conversation with a Fortune 500 CIO perfectly summarizes why we’re holding the first-of-its-kind Organizational Readiness track at Cloud Connect.   As enterprise adoption of public and private clouds continues to accelerate, the majority of focus continues to be on technical issues.  Organizational and cultural issues though are starting to pose significant barriers and challenges as CIOs work to implement their cloud strategies.  Just a few of these emerging issues facing enterprise IT include:

• What does our future IT organization need to look like?  How do our key roles, processes and skills need to change?
• How do we overcome internal resistance to cloud adoption?  How do we help employees make the paradigm shift, and rethink IT, services, and even their own roles?
• How does our governance need to change in a world where business users have much more choice and control?
• How we ensure we have the internal skills we need to support cloud?  How can we compete in the market for increasingly scarce talent?

Just as the shift from mainframe to client / server architectures drove a wave of transformation for IT organization and governance, so is the migration to cloud services.   The focus of our track will be on exploring the ‘soft issues’ around enterprise cloud adoption, and discussing emerging models for success for building next generation IT organizations.

The track will include sessions that will surface the around real organizational, cultural, skills that are emerging with enterprises migrating their environments to the cloud.  These sessions include ‘Will Culture Eat Your Strategy? How to Turn the Tables’, where Simon Wardly will lead a discussion around how IT leaders can overcome the cultural barriers to change.  We’ll have a series of panels and discussions on how enterprises are navigating the organizational changes being driven by cloud, which will include IT leaders from Best Buy, eBay, Novartis, InterContinental Hotel Group and others.  David Linthicum’s session on ‘In Search of Mad Cloud Skills’ will help us understand the new cloud skills that will be required in the enterprise, and where to find them.

Failing to address the organizational issues associated with transformational change can doom even the best cloud strategies and technologies.  Join our Organizational Readiness track to learn how to effectively prepare your organization to embrace the change that’s coming with your migration to cloud.

Not registered for Cloud Connect yet?  Visit the conference registration page and use code CPNCDCC07 to save 25% on conference passes or get a free expo pass and learn how to join what I’m sure will be an exciting and insightful event.

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A post from Cloud Connect’s Private Cloud Track Chair, Dave Roberts.

When cloud computing was young, most people theorized that the industry and foundational technology would develop very similarly to the early days of electric utilities. All this capital investment in enterprise IT, people said, would be replaced by the purchase of computing as a service from open market producers. Instead of buying and depreciating large hardware and software systems, we’d leave those purchases to the service providers and buy our computing “by the drink,” paying only for what we used. When we were done, we’d flick the computing equivalent of a light switch and the meter would stop. If you’re old enough to remember, before we called it “cloud computing,” we originally called it “utility computing.”

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Hey everyone. Jason Quesada here, Digital Media Marketing Manager for Cloud Connect. Did you know that we are just 11 weeks away from Cloud Connect Santa Clara? All of the cool and latest cloud solutions will be displayed on the Cloud Connect expo floor. We are going to make it rain at Cloud Connect and we are asking you to join us! Continue Reading »

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Nati Shalom, CTO of GigaSpaces, writes about new cloud platforms. 

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Global thought leadership organizations Gartner, IDC, and Merrill Lynch, just to name a few, all concur that cloud technologies, which already constitute a more than $16bn dollar annual market, are only expected to grow and some even predict multiply tenfold by 2015.  With more than 50% of respondents citing business agility as a primary driver for migrating to the cloud (as brought forth in a recent Sand Hill survey of 500 IT decision makers), this is almost an ironic scenario with the silo-oriented approach widely dominating the cloud market today that has spawned a rather cumbersome process for organizations who require quick time-to-market when rolling out new business products.

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