A: You are absolutely right. I think in today’s environment typically the CIO’s are focusing on cost, on ability and speed of delivery. In the global economy and particularly in local economies, like Asia the construct is such that the speed of delivery is incredibly important. How can different strategies benefit CIOs? Whether or not CIOs prefer cost over delivery, the fact that they are looking at alternative strategies around modernisation is something that will not go unnoticed. This trend has picked up in the last two-three years. Applications can’t run on platforms that are costly or inflexible. Therefore, the focus is on moving the platform as quickly as possible to achieve lower costs as quickly as possible and channel the saved funds into investing in the future. CIOs need to play the role of a business transformer. For example, how can cloud computing help them in protecting investments. How can it decrease cost while allowing the customers to take advantage of the technology? So, to answer your question in precise words, the CIOs need to relook at their application development and life-cycle management strategies and think of flexible models with modern approach.

A: There are two different approaches industry takes to modernise applications. One of the effective ways to look at it is to create a large application project that would include making of pioneer packages, rewriting subcomponents and the customisation of the application. This is an “all-in-one” approach. Second approach is with regard to packaged, point applications which are deployed quickly as per the need of the enterprise. The enterprises need to prioritise how they want to go about the modernisation. According to me, CIOs need to move the platform first – to a more cost-effective platform to deliver immediate cost savings. If they see some tangible savings then those saving can be reinvested into modernising organisational application framework. But I don’t mean to suggest at all that such projects should get delivered at an incredibly high risk. If your company decides to implement SAP ERP, you buy the software and, engage a consultancy and spend next couple of years fine tuning that. It’s a high risk game in which you cannot think of changing the application in near future. But what you can do is that if your current applications are successfully running, move them on to a cheaper platforms. Many customers are using this approach in the order to drive home savings in the range of 60–70%.

A: Valid question! The platform shift and re-hosting has been there for quite some time. There has been a lot of momentum to shift from mainframes to UNIX, Linux and Windows. Lately moving into the cloud has also come up as a very logical choice.

These are all proven next-generation platforms which do not cause continuity issues to the businesses. If you move from Mainframes to UNIX or Linux or Windows, you can achieve up to 70% saving on your annual operations cost.

That’s true, but large enterprises swear by mainframes to run critical applications and do not want to migrate to any of the options that you have mentioned.

I strongly think those enterprises don’t have the relevant information on the next generation platforms. Because the global trends suggest a huge migration from mainframes to cheaper platforms which deliver the same level of performance, security and reliability at lower cost.

A: Cloud-based system architectures are more scalable and flexible than previous architectures, because they are re-hosted, they are simplified and they actually use very cost-effective infrastructure. Second important point is that the world in which we all operate is changing and the way our customers expect systems to be delivered today is very different. Our next generation expects everything to be delivered through the web, through social networks or networking without even bothering about where do they get the access. On top of it all, they believe more in self-service. It makes great business sense to adopt cloud services because not only you pay as per the usage but also the infrastructure doesn’t lie idle. For example in any country across the world, for the first eleven months of the year no one wants to fill in the taxes and during the last month everyone wants to fill in the taxes - not want to but have to. Therefore, we need to have the infrastructure that supports that one month. And guess what! You happily pay for it the entire year. Therefore, cloud architecture allows you to build infrastructure to support such peak loads and you have to pay only for what you have used. You do not have to pay for the wasted capacity for the rest of the year. The commoditization of the future infrastructure models will ft into our cost model and also at the same time the applications modernisation will come into place.

A: The service providers will not vanish. They may decide to be cloud infrastructure service providers. Someone has to
provide that service – why not the service providers?

A: It is not just the CIO who can get benefitted but also the CFO. If a CIO can deliver an application or IT framework which asks for less investment in services, and dramatically lowers the costs and increases the speed of delivery, it will be music to the ears of his/her CFO. Isn’t it? What needs to be delivered is a faster, reliable low-cost platform which can Uncompromisingly run efficient business applications. These are the three things that are appealing to both CIOs and CFOs and they can only be achieved through self-service.

A: You can look at it in two ways: One which evokes a CIO to opt for significant investments to achieve transformation. That’s where the bigger risk is because it asks for a significant investment, significant change and affects what a CIO is expecting from his job to deliver faster to meet the requirement of an organisation. Second is a low risk framework wherein CIOs can move the applications to a cheaper platform and which makes sense to their businesses. It will not only deliver cost savings but also the ability to re-invest the money that you save.

A: I think you are right. CIOs are quite paranoid. I think they need to start from the top before they really understand. I think the CIOs are absolutely correct to ask those questions to anyone they should expect these questions to be answered now. I must share that most of the US government departments including the CIA and parts of the homeland security run using the cloud.

Most secured and most secret organisations can run on a public platform if they need to. So it’s not something that can’t be solved. But CIOs need to differentiate between concerns and paranoia. The security concerns are valid but paranoia is not. The CIOs should ask the right questions and expect most convincing answers.

A: I think the two most important macro trends in the application space will be cloud architecture in platform systems and mobile architectures for the Internet. Those are the two massive trends that we must watch out for.