This is the year of accountability for cloud computing. Businesses are demanding that CIOs deliver value and measurable benefits from their cloud projects.
"Clouds have the ability to enable IT organizations to deliver high-performing business services faster and at lower cost, so the business remains competitive and consequently meets their revenue and profit goals," said Ronni Colville, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. "There are few cloud management solutions successfully creating such a reality for customers."
But clouds have certainly come a long way from the science projects of a few years ago. Leveraging these successful prototypes into real business enablers is now the priority for IT organizations around the world. When successfully deployed, clouds are becoming an integral part of managing the business and are the foundation of business IT.
But many organizations continue to struggle to get it right. "Many companies seek to harvest the business benefits of cloud computing rather than 'muddling about' in a perpetual state of experimentation," said Kia Behnia, BMC Software's chief technology officer. "Indra and HCL Technologies are two examples of [our] customers that have found the path to cloud success."
Indra, an IT solutions and services provider in Europe and Latin America, has employed the BMC cloud management solutions to not only reduce its time to market for new services from months to days, but also optimized its hardware and software resources and improved the management of those resources by 90%.
Further, Indra has realized back-end savings of nearly 40% in areas such as compliance and legal enforcement of security policies. Indra, which has over 40,000 employees located in over 118 locations, constructed an environment called FlexIT from which it supports the delivery of outsourcing operations to its customers.