Simon Walsh, the executive VP at data center services provider Colt, was speaking alongside other vendors at VMworld Europe, just weeks after HP Cloud advisor Lee Kendrie also confirmed the Cloud is likely to cost a lot of people their jobs if they don’t change the way they work.

 

“Definitely, people are scared of losing their role. As we automate there are costs that are reduced and sometimes those do result in headcount changes. It is a real-world fact, and businesses can’t ignore that and still be relevant,” Kendrie says.

 

The fact that once cloud deployments take off they can multiply with ferocious speed probably makes this issue even more pertinent.

 

We covered the need for a change in roles in FOCUS 17, in ‘Don’t get Fired Over the Cloud’, which looked at the responsibilities placed on key decision makers, especially the CIO, that differ due to the Cloud. One wrong turn can easily lead to the chopping block.

 

“You will be fired as a CIO if you don’t know where things are running. You will be fired if something goes down and you don’t know about it,” HP Enterprise Services SVP and general manager of Infrastructure Technology Outsourcing Pete Karolczak says in the piece (you can view this online at under our Digital Editions, Issue17).

 

Don’t blame the cloud

The Cloud should not take all the blame for these shifts in IT culture. Demand for cloud is coming from new end-user requirements and expectations on IT for those who deliver it.

 

IBM’s Smarter Planet program is a perfect example of how requirements in business are changing. IBM manager for Power Systems Software Ian Jarman says Smarter Planet is really about the way technology integrates with the business to provide what the end user requires, not the technology itself. It promotes the key concepts of cloud computing, big data analytics and optimized systems – all elements that require change in the data center, that also move businesses into a more advanced and smart way of using the IT that is available to them.

 

“People want to deploy applications in the private cloud or access new services through the public cloud, which means data center operators are being asked to implement the new virtualization and new dynamic resource management tools that are behind cloud computing,” Jarman says.

 

“We are also seeing new applications driving much larger volumes of data than ever before. Increasing data is not only a challenge for infrastructure management but also for storage management and business analytics.”

 

HP’s Kendrie spends most of his working hours dealing with HP clients, constructing roadmaps for a move to the Cloud. He says the biggest shift for those working with the Cloud will be taking on a service-centric model. “If you look at how cloud is being delivered today, as a particular service, that is what it is all about,” Kendrie says. “This is a market that the user is driving – there is a much higher level of user expectation today. This market says: “Don’t tell me I can’t have something, because I will go out and get it anyway. So the IT organization is going to have to facilitate connectivity and flexibility for the end user.”

 

At the recent Fujitsu Forum in Munich, Fujitsu Technology Services CEO Rolf Schwirz painted an even more precise picture of the future for those working in the data center. “Cloud computing is not a new technology, it is a new delivery model… It is a services business. It will not be about hardware and software and other stuff. Instead, it will actually be about the service-level agreement.”

 

“The questions about the stack will disappear, because customers will buy a service. This means the famous technology brands we see today will become reduced weight in the whole discussion.” It’s a massive shift, especially for those in the technology space that are passionate about technology.

 

Resisting the Cloud

Oxford University operates its IT through a central computing service, internal to the university but run by separate departments. On a daily basis the university deals with sensitive information – from research findings and student results to patient data. The problem is, however, that with each department managing its own IT requirements, the duplication of services has been unavoidable.

 

Recently, Oxford University senior systems engineer John Hutchings and his team undertook a project which will see many Oxford University applications delivered by a central cloud. Hutchings, however, already knows his biggest challenge will be to get the other departments in the university to subscribe to the services being delivered.

 

“One of the headaches has been to provide a multitenant environment and the delegation of access and control required by IT officers out of the college who think that any centralization will be taking away the interesting part of their job. We have to make services as attractive as possible and provide a world-class platform that people basically can’t resist.”

 

The cost could be not only jobs, but the outlay of a “shiny new data center” that has taken a lot of Hutchings’ team’s resources. “On the plus side, not everyone wants to be a service provider, but you do find lots of people who do, and are happy to simply consume,” Hutchings says.

 

New cost models

NTT Europe senior technology officer Len Padilla has been designing custom cloud systems and cloud payment models for NTT’s corporate clients. He recently created software that allows the auditing of cloud services so NTT can charge an airline per customer seated on a flight.

 

“It gives them some costs they can account on and it makes their IT leadership able to speak to the board in a way that the board understands really well (referring to payment models to NTT),” Padilla says.

 

“We are going to eventually stop billing them on utilization of compute resourcing and instead bill them on how many people they put on the airplane.”

 

This is a major change for the way cloud services are delivered by NTT, but one that mimics the growing importance of service delivery. Padilla, however, like Hutchings, says the biggest challenge with such a shift remains with the psychology of the staff.

 

“The technology has always been the easy part. It has been straightforward to extract data. The difficult part is to change people’s mindsets. We have operational people in our company whose thinking we have really tried to turn around. It is more about the customer and provider becoming a business partner rather than client and vendor.”

 

Vendors also seem to be pushing this shift, even if, as Schwirz says, it is removing the importance of the underlying technology. VMware CTO Dr Stephen Herrod, who is also the SVP of R&D, says the infrastructure person used to worry about entities (“I need to buy servers and storage and network”), and the operations team worried about how to keep things running (“How do I satisfy all this demand?”).

 

“There is almost a wall that runs between these two teams, and we want to find a way to converge these – that is what VMware is now really focused on. VMware is doing much of this through management tools for virtualization,” Herrod says.

 

“A great platform is not worth a lot if you can’t manage it, or if it takes manual interventions. Ultimately, what we are trying to do is give the CIO a view on the many things they care about – a single view into IT Capex and Opex, and other reports on a daily basis.”

 

Understanding the cloud

What is really happening is that the operations and infrastructure teams are being asked to think more about the services they deliver and to be more innovative in the approaches they take to ensure the business can reach the new levels of efficiency and service delivery it requires.

 

The CIO, meanwhile, is becoming more of a service broker, according to HP’s Kendrie. “The CIO really needs to listen to what the business needs, and must address what type of service offerings may be best in the cloud, then create a service portfolio or service catalogue that offers those services uniquely and transparently to the business. The CIO must get the best type of service for the business, at the best value,” Kendrie says.

 

“We culturally have to go in and determine if the organization is a bottom-up organization, where they want action and they want to build something quick, or if they want a proof-of- concept, where they want to see cloud work for a particular service, in which case we have to achieve a more technical focus with a specific use case we are engineering for.”

 

Be relevant

Kendrie says the CIO generally has two options: to roll out cloud fast, or to draw up a more lengthy roadmap. This depends on whether the business is concerned with time and speed to market, or transforming its entire organization for cloud. Either way, most consultants these days are encouraging companies to try the cloud, with one or two less important applications before doing a complete overhaul.

 

“My advice to CIOs is to be relevant, understand the business, understand the service and function of what they want, and deliver that as a service. Even if you deliver it as one of two key services, deliver cloud and be successful – then you can transform your model,” Kendrie says.

 

For other staff in the data center wondering how to keep their role relevant, Kendrie says it is all about ensuring the business is in line with the current trends. “That means putting in place the necessary changes to do that. When designing in the field, you really have to encourage people to rise in leadership – to understand their role is still very important, but it will be shifting and that they are moving closer to the customer and will have a greater impact on the business because of this,” Kendrie says.

 

As Colt’s Walsh says: “The CIO can finally become the chief information officer, dealing more with business analytics in a more business-facing role.”

 

And as for the IT department: “The IT department is a workshop at the moment. We are very hopeful that cloud forces computing into the utility model, ultimately, and this is going to be an interesting time for the CIO, the organization and the IT department as a whole,” Walsh says.

 

So there is a plank, but the silver lining in the cloud this time is that there are ways to avoid walking it by changing behaviour and attitudes to business models, making IT an enabler, not only for time-poor technology enthusiasts but for the business overall.