A confluence of factors is ushering in a 'new normal' for the IT industry, shifting CIOs' focus from managing infrastructure to optimising the delivery of business services for innovation and growth.
So said David Dobson, CA Technologies executive VP and group executive in the customer solutions group, in a keynote address at CA World, in Las Vegas, yesterday.
He explained that CIOs were dealing with a 'moment of transformation' in IT, as various elements including cloud computing, virtualisation, and the consumerisation of IT converged to reshape the industry.
Dobson argued that the recession provided the final push to make cloud a reality. “We've been talking about utility computing for the past 10 or 12 years, but it's really only in the last few years that the cloud has really taken off,” he said.
“We experienced accelerating demand at the exact same time as IT budgets shrank in response to the recession. Everyone is scrambling to do more with less to become more agile and to find more cost-effective ways to support the business,” Dobson added.
He said the result is a fundamental shift that offers tremendous opportunity for competitive differentiation - as well as major strategic challenges.
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For CIOs to survive in this climate, they'll have to deal with new levels of complexity by automating processes and making more informed planning decisions across vendors and platforms,” said Dobson. “This will allow them to successfully shift resources to innovation and growth, rather than remaining bogged down in maintenance and operations management.”
He argued that the gap between IT and business needs is unsustainable, and said the cloud is changing that.
“The reality is that we're dealing with a huge amount of IT complexity. You're managing a large data centre with infrastructure from various vendors; you're experimenting with applications and infrastructure in the cloud. But whether you're adopting a private cloud, public cloud, or a hybrid of these models, you're going to need to manage and secure a multi-vendor, multi-platform, cloud-enabled environment.”
This move from IT-centric to business services-centric management is game changing, noted Dobson, and the ubiquity of the Internet provides incredible capacity to open up and deliver services, he added.
Innovation roadmap
It's with this in mind that CA announced its new strategy, a business services innovation value roadmap, which enables organisations to leverage cloud-enabled solutions so their workforce can focus on the core business, rather than managing IT.
The framework is structured around four capabilities: model, assemble, automate and assure, with security wrapped around these various functions.
Organisations can also use the 'assemble' tool to compile service resources from mainframe, distributed and virtualised environments, as well as third-party apps and cloud services, into service bundles. They can then automate these customised solutions to orchestrate services across physical virtual and cloud environments.
The 'assure' capability allows CIOs to apply monitoring, predictive analytics and performance optimisation across the IT value chain to ensure service levels and reliability, according to CA. Finally, security is built in at the core and access is controlled through content and identity awareness.
According to Dobson, this move towards business services innovation has guided the company's acquisitions over the past 18 months.
The CA Lisa service modelling and simulation solution, for example, is built off technology from its acquisition of ITKO. The CA Capacity Management product offers predictive analytics from its Hyperformix acquisition, and the 'clone and click' capabilities, come from the CA AppLogic platform.
But the real power, said Dobson, comes from combining these technologies on a common platform, which enables IT to deliver business services innovation with improved speed, cost/risk efficiencies and performance.
* Lezette Engelbrecht is hosted in Las Vegas by CA Technologies Southern Africa.
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