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IT has grown used to wave after wave of new trends, new ways of working and new paradigms – the latest of which is cloud computing. Over the last 18 months, cloud computing has gone from industry buzzword to an important challenge for Enterprise IT.  But the market is still immature.  On the supplier side, there are a great many vendors of various cloud computing infrastructure, platform, application, process and orchestration services.  On the customer side, decision-making and implementation are often equally complex, as cloud computing raises all manner of new contract, pricing, licensing, shared-tenancy, security, and compliance issues.

In this Management Update, we will sort through the noise and propose that that there are really two main issues.  In the short term, cloud computing is simply the anticipated evolution of specific IT activities from a product to an online service world. We will examine the benefits, risks and misconceptions associated with this transition before exploring a framework for understanding today’s competitive marketplaces and the customer strategies that are emerging during the early phases of the cloud journey.

But over the long term, the big benefit of the cloud will be the commoditization of computing services.  This will allow Enterprise IT professionals to focus more on front of the business support for customers, partners and new forms of innovation.  To help clients position themselves for this future, we will present an overall framework for leveraging the ongoing life cycle changes that any organization faces, and show how this can be applied to the cloud adoption, production and innovation system.