While the definition of cloud computing is at best a bit fuzzy, the goal of cloud computing is extremely clear. That goal is to make a significant improvement in the cost effective, elastic provisioning of IT services. As will be explained in this newsletter, complexity is the enemy of cloud computing.
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In a recent article, Geir Ramleth the CIO of Bechtel stated that he benchmarked his organization against some Internet-based companies. According to that article, “Bechtel operates 230 applications, and it runs 3.5 versions per application. That means it maintains approximately 800 applications at any given time. When you look at Salesforce.com, not only are they running one application, but they are running one version and they are only running it in one location,” Ramleth says.
We don’t see how Bechtel or any other IT organization will be able to fundamentally reduce cost and become more agile if it continues to offer a highly complex set of services. In the example that Ramleth gave, his organization will incur significant extra cost in part because it has to allocate resources to support on average 3.5 versions of each application. If his organization wants to make a change to some component of the IT infrastructure that supports one of the 230 applications they operate, they have to devote additional time to quality assurance to test how the change impacts each version of the application.
Bechtel is not the only IT organization that supports a complex environment. Many IT organizations utilize multiple WAN providers, develop a lot of custom applications, perform extensive customization of third-party applications, and have multiple systems for functions such as enterprise resource planning or supply chain management.
We believe that any IT organization that is serious about cloud computing has to get serious about simplifying the services that it provides. What do you think? Do you work in a highly complex IT environment? Is any effort being made to simplify that environment? Write to us and let us know. Also, we are performing a survey to help identify the concrete steps that IT organizations are taking to implement cloud computing. If you have a few minutes to fill out the survey, it will help us to cut through the hype and understand what IT organizations are actually doing relative to cloud computing.
