EMA Blog: Business Intelligence and IT Management

Put this picture in your mind’s eye – It’s a beautiful sunny weekday and you’re sitting by a pool catching the sun’s rays and a cool breeze.  Strategically placed within arm’s reach beside you is some kind of fruity drink with a tiny bamboo umbrella in it.  You are working (yep, I said working!).  You punch in the last financial figures into your iPad and check your calendar to see it’s time for the board meeting, which you dial into using your smartphone.  Alright, truth-to-tell, you’re more apt to be using your mobile device while waiting on a line at the bank than sitting by a tropical pool, but the basic point is the same – mobile devices mean freedom for employees.

The industry seems to be nearing an inflection point in its attitudes towards cloud computing—as best I can tell from headlines, commentaries and ongoing dialog with IT deployments and vendors.   If I had to put a few simple words around it, the era of “mythic hype” surrounding cloud is nearing its end and diffusing into a much [...]

See Dennis’ recent blog post on the state of cloud computing, posted at BSM Digest, here: http://www.bsmdigest.com/clouds-iron-fist

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.

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: