Cloud Blog on Wired site: Time To Value

Well, I guess it is time to get back to blogging. I just had a collaborative blog post with Terri Virnig, our Cloud Business Executive in IBM's Systems and Technology Group. In part we try to highlight one of those key reasons that people have been looking to the Cloud: How to improve their "Time To Value". In other words, from the time that a team has a glimmer of an idea for a new project, product, or service that they would like to create, how quickly can they get that service to market.

As I pointed out in the Wired blog entry, we still see many people in industry that are finding it can take 6-9 months to get a project from concept to start of development. I was even presenting to a group recently where one participant pointed out that it often took them a year to get a new project started, in part because of hardware acquisition cycles, capital funding release, lead times on delivery, software selection, integration of software components, infrastructure integration (assignment of IP addresses often being a time consuming area there!), access to storage, backup strategy, security assessment by the IT/security organization, and the list often goes on and on.

Anyway, the focal of the article is about our recent announcement of our SmartCloud product family, including a particular project from my team known as SmartCloud Entry - a basic self-service environment for managing pools of servers, network infrastructure and storage which integrates an image (or virtual server) catalog, and hardware management in a relatively small footprint server.

I'll try to generate a few additional entries over the next few weeks which highlight some of the capabilities of SmartCloud Entry and its benefits, as well as some idea as to how it fits into the overall SmartCloud family. And, I'll try to share some of the key thinking that we are involved in with IBM Research, our clients, and our various development teams around Cloud uses, Cloud issues, and new Cloud capabilities.