Virtualisation do not chose for today consider tommorow

Good morning, last week of my 3 month research in to IT strategy, so I have been compiling the report, and cannot share any of my findings until the report is published in September. However, today is final read through on 3 sections, then to complete the glossary, then that is it finished. The report captain will have the task of Quality Checking (QC) the whole document, and must spot any inconsistencies.

The rest of week will be working on my presentation for VMworld in September, so if you are going I will see you there.

Virtualisation Market Hots Up

The whole market in virtualisation is dynamic and as such represents a daunting prospect for many CIOs, who must decide which vendor I go with, and what are the gotchas that the technology has hidden.
My advice is to not look beyond a 3-5 year time frame, as the market is changing rapidly, and a leading vendor today may not be then, or the technology will have changed. You do not want to make a 100% life time choice of Betamax, it was the best technology, but VHS won the battle, so beware consider the value you can get, and build in the cost model a complete replacement of the solution in 5 years. Then review the figures and see if they make sense

Vmware changes at the top

Not much to blog about in terms of my day, it has been heads down writing the report, and will be for the next two weeks.

Vmware ditch the Green agenda

Vmware announced this week that they have voted Dianne Green out as CEO and president, to be replaced by an ex Microsoft and EMC SVP. The key question is why and what does this mean for virtualisation and Vmware in particular.
My view is that Dianne, as nice as she was, was destined to be moved out because Vmware have become increasingly isolated in the virtualisation market, or to be exact they are loosing the marketing war on interoperability of virtualisation. I like most others assumed Dianne would be given time to show how Vmware was going to react to the Microsoft Hyper-V entry to the market.
I guess the vote indicates that the board did not believe her approach would address the issue of increased competition in the market. Her replacement, being from EMC, and an ex Microsoft executive, is an interesting choice, and indicates that EMC is taking a more hands-on approach to Vmware than is visible.
I would expect Vmware to start to be more vocal about its partnerships, and begin to build more open links with the likes of Citrix, Microsoft and others. The virtualisation market is still in a state of flux, and just because Vmware is dominant today, does not mean it will be in three years time. To maintain its lead Vmware must re-invent it’s self, and be the champion of interoperability between hypervisors. By doing this, it will increase the potential market size, and therefore increase its share of the revenues.
An area that remains potentially very fertile is that of desktop virtualisation, in this space Vmware has made some strides, but with Citrix having a massive install base of terminal services customers, Vmware must work hard to build on its brand name.
These are I believe interesting times for Vmware, they have every thing to gain, and every thing to lose, so must walk a certain line if they are to remain the face of virtualisation. What now for Dianne, well I would expect her and some colleagues to begin a new start-up in an adjacent market, and try to once again become a dominant figure on wall street.

A Damp day in Hull

It was a 5 am start to the week, but the rain made it feel more like winter, which takes the pleasure away from the 3 hour drive. A day in the office today, so chance to discuss topics with colleagues and generally update each other on what we are doing. It sparks many different conversations on different topics. The one thing you miss working from home.

CTO or CIO who holds the power

The role of IT is changing and it is moving towards a period of transition to a position where IT is embedded in the organisation, and is managed more locally by the people it is designed to help, but still needs the holistic cross departmental perspective. This transition I believe will be the catalyst for the clarification of the roles of CIO and CTO, which is currently not clearly defined (in fact the organisational structure is very haphazard and examples of the CTO reporting to CIO and visa versa are common). We believe that the office of the CTO should include the architecture, strategy, research and development, and planning operations, while the CIO should be responsible for the delivery of IT as a service to their customers as efficiently and effectively as possible, and be focused on the extraction of business value from the IT resources. The CIO will need to have a voice in the office of the CTO so that operational considerations are taken in to account when designing the architecture in the future.

However, given that the two roles are addressing different needs, and therefore have different agendas, we believe that the current arrangement (as haphazard as it is) is not sustainable in the long term; we consider the two roles need to be separated and not be part of the same department: this would enable the forward looking strategic decisions to be made taking all aspects of organisational needs in to account (IT, people, culture, money and market forces), and operational effectiveness be the prime consideration of the CIO, while the CTO is more focused on the technology and the architecture in particular.