Every once in a while (here, here), I have the same conversation enough times with customers that I find it useful to bring it to the blog community. Last week at VMworld 2011, I had the opportunity to spend quite a bit of time speaking with customers and partners about Intelligent Automation and what it means for IT to deliver self-service capabilities to their customers (internal, contractors, etc.). During the conversations, a number of questions came up over and over again: Read More »
Tags: CIAC, Cisco Cloud Portal, Cloud Computing, IaaS, intelligent automation, ITaaS, paas, Self-Service Portal
Not a week goes by that I don’t talk with a customer about the reality of IT as a service (ITaaS). The question I am asked most often is, “Does ITaaS really create a competitive advantage for my company?” My answer is always “Absolutely.”
If you’re wondering why I’m so confident about my answer it’s because the ITaaS approach, when embraced by a company, empowers IT to sit closer to the front end of product and service creation. Repositioning IT to the front end allows us to become a strategic advisor to the rest of the company.
As a strategic advisor, IT can develop best practices, lessons learned, and business value examples from actual implementations done within IT’s own organization. These IT learnings help the sales organization and ultimately benefit the customer, which is what creating competitive advantage is all about.
Before I go on, a word about vocabulary. In the ITaaS model IT vocabulary and business vocabulary must be one and the same. If IT is to be a strategic advisor to the business and the decision-makers on the customer side understand business vocabulary, then business vocabulary wins. IT must be able to “talk the talk.”
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Tags: coc-business-of-it, it-as-a-service, ITaaS
With the rapid increase in cloud services adoption, many in the industry are asking: Is the current IT Infrastructure Library (ITIL) service management framework relevant to emerging cloud and IT-as-a-Service (ITaaS) providers? In Cisco IT, we think it is. When our new Texas Data Center 2 (DC2) facility is complete, Cisco IT will be delivering private cloud services to our internal customers and transforming into an ITaaS provider. To find out more about how both Texas DC2 and ITIL are integral to this transformation, read more below.
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Tags: cloud, data center, data center 2011, ITaaS, ITIL, texas
