Interop: IBM Urges Cloud Computing Readiness

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Get ready for cloud computing, because it isn't going anywhere any time soon, IBM proclaimed Wednesday it its keynote presentation at Interop Las Vergas 2010.

"Even though in five years it may be called something different, clouds are here to stay," IBM's vice president of strategy and enterprise initiatives of systems and software and cloud computing CTO Kristof Kloeckner said.

According to Kloeckner, more than 65 percent of CIOs polled by IBM plan to make extensive changes to their business models and processes while 71 percent plan to focus on collaboration and partnership, both areas that are ripe for cloud.

And various forces are colliding, making cloud top of mind in the enterprise: the consummation of IT, the convergence of infrastructure and the "big switch," which introduces new deployment choices, Kloeckner said.

"I think the most powerful notion about the cloud is that it comes from the consumer Internet," he said, adding that consumers have long demanded self-service, interfaces and on-demand access. Later, he added that "IT organizations now have choices how to deploy IT services, where to deploy them and who to source them from."

While the various facets of cloud computing aren't anything wholly new, Kloeckner said it's the combination of the technologies -- virtualization, service automation, SOA and Web 2.0 and usage tracking -- that changes the landscape. And cloud computing tying together several characteristics including on-demand self-service, ubiquitous network access, location independent resource pools, rapid elasticity and flexible pricing models, make it an interesting proposition for the enterprise.

"What is really new is these technologies coming together to change the way IT-based services can be consumed and delivered," he said.

Next: Cloud Users See Benefits

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