Category Archives: Applications

Let The User Dialogue Begin…ITaaS Focus Groups Are An Important Step

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Any good business owner will tell you, getting inside your customer’s head through firsthand interaction is invaluable for shaping services and products to meet their needs. And the value of user feedback on our new IT-as-a-Service catalogue is no exception.

That’s why I was excited recently to participate in our first focus groups to get business users’ thoughts on our new service catalogue portal, through which they will request services – the focal point of EMC IT’s transition from a traditional IT operation to an ITaaS model.

It wasn’t just what the eight business users from Massachusetts and Ireland had to say about the portal design, though their comments were immensely helpful. It was also the fact that we have begun this vital conversion for understanding their experiences and perspectives. After months of weighing whether we were ready to engage them, we are now hearing from them. The door is open to communicating with those we are trying to best serve. Positive or negative, I was fascinated to hear whatever they had to say and I can’t wait to hear more.
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The Proof is in the Process: People, Process and Technology are Essential for Successful IT Operations.

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The Proof is in the Process
People, Process, and Technology are essential for successful IT operations.

These days we are all talking about IT cloud enablement or IT-as-a-Service, and increasingly these conversations are now about optimizing IT processes to facilitate successful cloud deployment. Based on my own past experience as a technologist, I thought that the most important (and cool) thing to do in IT was deploy the latest and greatest technology. However, today, I am linking technology evolution to process integration because only by optimizing our IT processes will we enable cloud computing successfully. I recently read Peter Fingar’s book, “Dot.Cloud: The 21st Century Business Platform“, and I’m sold on his notions of how the cloud can be applied to day-to-day business operations.

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Platform-as-a-service – a shallow dive

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In the last post, we talked about how the ultimate nirvana is for the business to do self-service provisioning of services from a service catalog. This is somewhat easy to think about when we consider compute, storage and network services – the virtual bare metal gets provisioned within a short period of time and is made available for the user. The SLAs are typically around uptime, recovery point objective (RPO) during failure, recovery time objective (RTO) after failure, etc. This concept becomes more interesting when we talk about PaaS.

The Platform in PaaS refers to a set of capabilities that start with a base of (mostly) software components sitting above the virtual bare metal – examples we have talked about include basic capabilities such as a database, web server and application server but also extend into larger value-added capabilities such as application frameworks (Spring, .Net, force.com), content management, integration, security and information lifecycle management.

Now, once the slice of the platform is provisioned, who can configure or program to the platform ? Continue reading →