UC Berkeley just did a great assessment of Office 365 vs. Google Apps.  What I really like is how they were able to make the results easy to understand for their constituency.   As a CIO I often struggle to communicate large, impactful descisions across a large organization.  They did a great job with the “Assessment Matrix” matrix they created that clearly spells out each function by priority, and which platform “wins”.

In this case I think transparency wins.  Good example to learn from!

http://technology.berkeley.edu/productivity-suite/google/matrix.html

When Apple introduced iCloud I wrote an article about the potential impact in the corporate computing space: http://www.wanderingcio.com/2011/06/the-corporate-“icloud”/

In the article I compared what I was doing with Dropbox as sort of my corporate version of iCloud.  It turns out there was a LOT more there than meets the eye.  Dropbox may even have become iCloud had some things gone a bit differently.

Wired has done a great deep dive on this: http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/12/backdrop-dropbox  It’s a good read.

Apple’s announcements at this year’s WWDC keynote will have far reaching effects.  Much has already been written about the impacts to you and me as consumers of Apple products.  But let’s stop and think for a moment about how this will affect our perceptions about technology, and how that will translate into the corporate IT space. (continue reading…)

Technology evolves at the speed of Moore’s Law but IT staffs evolve at the speed of Darwin’s Law.

Each of us knows that complexity is the enemy of corporate IT. Business units find it harder and harder to ignore IT’s cost and complexity – hardware, software, security, maintenance, training, disaster recovery, and all the other things that must be done to support modern information technology. We practitioners in corporate IT just think we have to explain it better.

While we are trying to explain IT to our business colleagues they are getting pitched by vendors who already know that the business heads want to buy a tangible service, not servers and storage. Like you, we have been using ASP/SaaS/Cloud Computing for years. However a dirty little secret is that many of these implementations are started completely outside of corporate IT. Increasingly, with on-demand services, they don’t need to go through their IT departments, they can just “sign up”.

Imagine this for a moment – some of today’s start-up companies may never have any in-house systems – email, CRM, ERP, payroll – at all. They will exclusively use the cloud, even for information that existing organizations would never even consider moving to the cloud. Deciding to keep something in-house or move it to a cloud provider will be simple because they won’t have the capability to run things in house. Their IT staffs will be a tiny fraction of their competitors and what we are used to seeing.

Cloud computing may do to corporate IT departments what the Internet did to travel agencies and book sellers. Now, a lot of people are saying that companies will never trust their precious data to cloud providers. But they will. Cost always wins in the end.

- The Wandering CIO

As a CIO I am charged with delivering high quality, low cost IT services to our business units.  I know what it costs to build data centers, buy servers and storage and manage them – support, backup, disaster recovery and patching.  I know what it costs to buy electricity and network bandwidth, etc.

So when I was setting up this blog I found that I could buy services dirt cheap.  Frankly, I am still astounded at what I could get for less than $50 per year or <$5 a month!  2 years of hosting, and a domain registration for $65 USD*

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This is the type of service and scalability that I’d like to offer our corporate clients. 

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