The third layer suggested by Maritz focuses on the transformation of end user computing. One manifestation is the need for IT to be able to support the increasing number of computing devices that end users buy and use. "Seven" was the number tossed about during the course of the conference as the eventual number of devices that IT might have to support per user. IT has to learn to deliver capabilities, regardless of the device employed, and will not have a say in what users can use. Note that this also relates to what is meant by the “post-PC era.”
But this transformation is not about device independence so much as it is about how the role and needs of the end user are changing, such as the ability to digest streams of information, much of which may not be IT managed or controlled, and then be able to recombine and redistribute that data to others. In an era of social collaboration, consumer end users take on new hybrid roles, such as architect and programmer.
Maritz pointed out that having three major transformations going on is unprecedented historically; typically, at most, one transformation is going on at a given time. And he is right. To borrow a term from evolutionary theory, we are in the midst of three punctuated equilibria going on simultaneously. That means that IT has to evolve rapidly in three dimensions.
Evolving on even one dimension is a challenge. Now, all three dimensions are interdependent and interlocking to some extent, so mastering them raises the level of difficulty in trying to reach the highest “cloud” where IT-as-a-service reigns. So when someone breathlessly proclaims a major advance on one layer of change, look and see how it fits in with all three layers of change.
EMC, VMware and, to be fair, many other vendors have long pointed out that getting to the cloud requires a journey. Although stated a number of times in the conference, Maritz pointed out that there are three phases to moving to the cloud: the first is the IT productivity phase, where IT can make the decisions
to improve processes and efficiency (such as server virtualization, where consolidating non-critical servers and workloads is involved). The second phase is business productivity, which involves mission-critical applications and where associated issues such as security and multitenancy are addressed. The third and final phase incorporates IT as a service, which fully employs metrics and service catalogs, and where process automation comes into play.
However, there is a problem with this concept: Organizations shouldn’t stop the journey to the cloud simply by adopting current cloud offerings offered by
third-party service providers, but rather should continue on to "true" cloud destinations where IT really runs as a service. Service providers can provide platform as a service (PaaS), infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and software as a service (SaaS) offerings. Does that make a cloud? Well, yes, in the sense that the service provider may be very efficient, may offer online provisioning of services
(say, compute or storage resources) and has the necessary resource utilization metrics. But the answer is no in a more important sense--even if an IT
organization uses a cloud provider, this does not mean that IT becomes, by definition, a cloud provider. The reason is that the “true” cloud provides IT as services that users select as they want, need and are willing to pay for them.
To illustrate this point, Sanjay Mirchandani, CIO of EMC, gave a keynote describing EMC’s own internal IT journey to the cloud.
In fact, EMC IT had a big presence at the Solutions Pavilion to demonstrate what it has learned/achieved in its own cloud transformation. Mirchandani discussed the movement of EMC IT through Maritz’s three stages, as it focused on delivering IT as a service.
That movement required EMC to optimize IT production for business consumption, which required changing from a projects-focused mentality to one that provides business capabilities. A lot of tasks are involved, such as moving one of EMC’s two main data centers from Westboro, Mass., to Durham, N.C.
Detailing its progress and challenges is very important, as EMC IT can act as the proverbial canary in the coal mine concerning potential roadblocks (to say that EMC has skin in the game would be an understatement), as well as acting as a reference to show customers how they can overcome hurdles along the way.
