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An enlightened thinker once said that the
middle age is when your broad mind and narrow
waist begin to change places. Unfortunately most
CIOs (middle-aged included) have never had the
leisure to succumb to this reality, since their
jobs makes it mandatory for them to stay ahead
of the curve; hence keep a broader perspective
regarding their IT decisions, although there is
greater flexibility concerning the course of
their waist. In line with these expectations,
CIO/ IT managers have over the past 4 decades
taken revolutionary decisions like moving away
from host-centeric to highly distributed
environments, from large IT farms to a more
consolidated and integrated InfraVision,
migrating their business critical applications
to new platforms, and also retaining legacy
systems then redeploying them for new
applications. All of these decisions have
involved great risks – each with the potential
to end their careers, but the risks had hidden
rewards as well and for some there was no choice
but to take them.
The journey towards Service Oriented
Architectures is one such decision, which IT
users have begun to seriously contemplate. They
have finally started to see the light on
planning and building an infrastructure that
helps reduce complexity and allows for IT
processes to be reused or redeployed. For many
this is an extremely arduous task as it involves
unlearning a lot of old things, and taking risks
on charting a new course altogether.
BUT…. What if they fail?!?
The doubts are causing the CIOs to hunt for
more information, since knowledge always makes
one stronger, and strength helps in taking
risks. The overwhelming complexity of going from
where they are to where they want to be is
fuelling this urge to have better clarity about
their options. An important milestone in this
journey is the consolidation of hardware
resources through virtualisation. There is great
debate, and ambiguity on what can and can’t be
virtualised. What is really possible today, and
what should be the short and long-term goals of
organisations given the many options, is what is
troubling the CIOs.
IDC has been conducting the InfraVision
conferences for the past many years with a goal
of giving CIOs/ IT managers a better clarity on
critical issues facing them today – and of
course helping them keep a broader perspective.
This year, we have decided to run the twin
themes of Virtualisation and Service Oriented
Architectures.
While virtualisation tackles a better
management and utilisation of the available
hardware and network resources, SOA aims at
breaking the traditional monolithic mold of
software applications. The endeavour is to
educate and update the end-users on what is
possible, and illustrate factors that will help
in drawing the priorities in the coming years.
The Virtualisation track will provide an
Infrastructure-centric view of what is available
today and the roadmap going forward, while the
SOA track will strive to define the very premise
of this phenomenon, and the steps necessary to
get there. |
