Survival guide: Do's and don'ts for next-gen IT

Computerworld

"The first thing you need to realize is that your business customers can leave or go around you in any number of ways," says Singh. "If people have an iPhone, they're going to use that for work, whether you want them to or not. If IT doesn't provide cloud storage, they'll sign up for their own Dropbox account. They aren't going to wait six to eight weeks for you to provision something for them. You can no longer treat business users as a captive entity. Instead, you'll have to become a consultant to the business and prove to them the value of what IT can do."

IT departments that wish to stay relevant in a BYOD and cloud-based world will need to redefine themselves as service providers. They'll need to make the leap from being technicians responsible for maintaining systems to experts who offer a menu of services and offer intelligent recommendations about which ones will help drive the business forward...

Memo From Appirio: Public Cloud Is A Partner Opportunity

Talkin' Cloud

How can you survive and thrive through the cloud revolution? Appirio Chief Strategic Officer Narinder Singh offered his views on public cloud computing opportunities during the Ingram Micro Cloud Summit today in Scottsdale, Ariz. Here is a live blog covering Singh’s views.

The keynote is especially interesting since so many pundits say VARs, MSPs and cloud consultants should focus on private cloud and Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) opportunities. But Appirio offers a healthy reminder that IT projects involving the public cloud represent big opportunities. Here’s more…

Salesforce.com's front office suite play

ZDNet

Right now it is convenient for Salesforce.com to hammer home the ’social business’ play because that’s how it drives attention as the leader in that space. They also have the benefit of encouraging a large subset of otherwise under employed PR and marketing people to declare expertise in this field and so amplify the broader message. The projected numbers are impressive as well. From the Benioff conference call:

Gartner says that CRM is 15% of the purchase intention of global CIOs this year. That’s the       number one global purchasing intention.

While I am usually down on Gartner I’m not going to argue about that prediction for several reasons. It is sufficiently near term for there to be good reasons to assume they’re not far off the mark and from soundings in the market, CRM as a broad category within the ERP framework is still a big draw. There are other factors in play that reinforce this idea....

3. The explosive growth in demand at Appirio for applications that stitch together elements of the marketing online puzzle with Salesforce.com implies there is much experimentation going on...