Embracing the cloud will give chief information officers (CIOs) and other business and IT decision makers greater control and greater choice, ultimately giving them a competitive advantage over non-cloud believers.
So claims Ajei Gopal, executive vice president of CA Technologies, who used his keynote speech during the company's CA World 2010 user conference in Las Vegas this week to detail his vision of the cloud-flavoured future.
"Instead of being a monolithic supplier of technology services to the business, the IT department becomes the manager of a dynamic supply chain of internal and external resources that delivers services to the business and its internal and external clients. When that happens, all rhetoric about aligning IT with the business becomes irrelevant because now for many organisations IT is the business," he said.
"Here we are at the dawn of a new era We're entering a watershed moment in IT. We're not going to shut the door on the previous age. After all, the mainframe is alive and thriving."
Perhaps pre-empting question about why now is the time to jump up and on the cloud bandwagon, Gopal said that the definition had been the stumbling block thus far.
"The number one barrier to adoption of the cloud was actually agreeing what the definition of the cloud is," he said.
"It's about using new and existing technologies in a new way transforming IT. The point is we have a choice. You are in control. Thousands of companies large and small are finding that the cloud gives them choices that provide them with a competitive advantage."
Joined on stage by comedian Jake Johnannsen, pretending to be CIO Bob Smith of Happyco industries, Gopal warned decision makers against trying to continue with the do more with less' approach of old.
"If you do more with less, year in, year out, eventually you'll be expected to do everything with nothing," he said.
"I promise you every enterprise is going to be cloud connected. [It] allows big enterprises to act with the agility of a small company."
In response to Gopal's point about definition being the biggest barrier to cloud adoption, Johannsen tried to find out what exactly the cloud is. The video below shows how he got on.
Read on for more news from CA World 2010.
