EMA Research Blog: Navigating IT and Security Horizons

When designing the EMA Radar Report, I was unaware of this video of Gideon Gartner answering a question about the Gartner Magic Quadrant.  I only learned of this on twitter last week. Gideon is asked what he would do different if doing the Magic Quadrant today. His answer…he would use spider diagrams.  This is exactly what we do in the EMA Radar Report. First published in December 2009, we have published five reports to date with five pending for the first half of 2011 (see the list at the bottom of this post).

In the research I mentioned in my earlier blog on “Operationalizing Cloud,” we looked at a lot more than technology adoption.  We looked at organizational and process requirements as well. And we also looked at change. As it turned out, 70% of our respondents said that once begun, their cloud initiatives needed rethinking or redirection!! [...]

EMA has just collected some new data regarding how IT organizations are seeking to assimilate cloud services from a top-down, service management perspective. The data gathered in December of 2010, spanned 155 global respondents with high percentages of executives (better than 50% director and above) – as the goal was to understand how senior management and cross-domain organizations that usually have senior executive leadership are leveraging cloud computing.

A lot comes to mind with a title like this one.  So, let’s start by wiping away areas like politics and finances (except as they relate to IT), births, deaths, marriages and celebrities.  In fact, there’s still a very long list of possibilities by just focusing on IT and everything that goes into managing and optimizing services - let alone all of the trends around cloud.

Cloud SaaS can be a cost effective and  fast way to buy and start using software (see my top ten reasons to do SaaS).  However, while cloud SaaS can be great when done right, it can be painful to use when done wrong.  With the increasing interest, adequate bandwidth for delivery, and a marketplace ready to try SaaS applications, many traditional software companies are considering a SaaS option.  The greatest risk to the success of SaaS is poorly done SaaS ruining the market by disappointing early adopters and creating a bad reputation for SaaS.  I am concerned that traditional software companies, rushing in to a SaaS delivery model and under estimating what is required to do SaaS right, are the most likely to do SaaS poorly.

Software as a Service (SaaS) is a model of software delivery where customers access network-based software.  This is far from a new concept and has had many names in the past, such as service bureau (in the 1980’s), ASP (in the 1990’s), hosted software or on-demand software in the early 2000’s and most recently Cloud SaaS as defined by NIST:

Over the Thanksgiving holidays, I’ve had time to reflect on a concept that I’ve decided to call “Contrarian Accelerators.” The first name I came up with as “Perverse Accelerators” – which seemed more memorable, but a tad politically incorrect, somehow. The best adjective – and I’m open to suggestions – would fall somewhere between “contrarian” [...]

Sometimes… OK most of the time …  the terms and words we use for “things” in service management are in themselves landmines. One of the worst culprits is of course the term “CMDB” which I like to compare to ‘The Holy Roman Empire” – which as H.G. Wells pointed out was neither “holy” nor “Roman” [...]

Since this is my first blog entry, I thought it might be nice to set the stage for what I mean by “MegaTrend” and more importantly, what this blog might be about. Just to be clear, I didn’t originally pick the term.  I pretty much woke up one morning and found it in my title, [...]

When you are looking at buying a new IT Management tool, do you put most of your emphasis on features, with only some consideration to cost to acquire?  What about the effort to deploy and operate?  You may only spend a few weeks or months doing the initial deployment, but you will have to administer the product for years.  How do you factor these other considerations against features?