I hope that you enjoyed our series on ERP Trends in technology for 2010 and beyond. We’ve, hopefully, given you something to think about and to consider as you plan your IT strategy going forward. One of the more interesting things that we’ve deduced from observing these trends is the increase in services & support. At first glance you would think that this would be counter-intuitive given the advances in software. That is, with the newest versions of software being mostly self-managed—e.g. OEM, Cloud Computing – you would think that the need for specialized labor would decrease but in fact it has increased. Why is that?

In the ongoing saga of Federal adoption of clouds one of the sticky wickets has been the requirement by law that all Federal information systems comply with the Federal Information Security Management Act of 2002, commonly referred to as FISMA. In a very small nutshell FISMA requires that information systems comply with security guidelines that are the responsibility of the National Institute of Standards (NIST) and that these systems are monitored for vulnerabilities.

The only thing hotter and steamier than the weather in D.C. right now is the conversation about cloud. And, it's both tiring and confusing. There are more flavors of cloud than of coffee at Starbucks - private, community, public - not to mention IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS. Venti, double-caramel macchiato, skim-milk latte @ 190°...

Are you ready for the next step?

My interest in virtualization started many years ago, and I have played with Xen, Zones, VmWare, etc.  VmWare is without question the 800 LB gorilla in this space.  They have many, many great features that come at a price.  Sun XVM is a solution that is not quite as mature but comes at a cheaper price and Virtualbox is free and competes with VmWare Player. Sun now has a product line ready for cloud computing:

• CMT Systems
• Intel/AMD Systems

Change has been the one constant for Oracle over the past five years.  Since 2005, Oracle has acquired over 60 companies that have added both new solutions and technical expertise to what was already considered to be one of the premier software development shops on the planet.  Some you’d heard of, like Peoplesoft, Siebel and BEA, others were less well known, but each brought new capabilities to the Oracle “stack” and h

In my previous blog  IT Services Delivery- “From the Ground to the Cloud”, I touched on the five major pillars of ITIL v3 library: 1) Service Strategy; 2) Service Design; 3) Service Transition; 4) Service Operation; 5) Continual Service Improvement, as they pertain to “physical” –  non-virtualized IT environments.  For this blog, I will examine the pillars 1) Service Strategy and 2) Service Design, as they pertain to virtualized or cloud based IT environments.  IT Service Strategies in virtualized environment

Current IT service environments in many enterprises are often faced with the difficult task of leveraging the old, the current and the upcoming technologies.  Dissimilar technologies use legacy applications and legacy systems and are often loosely coupled with current “semi-open systems” while administrators look toward the future with the hope of connecting these existing systems to “newer” technologies.  Even grander is the service provider or service administrator’s hope of keeping in alignment with the five major pillars of ITIL v3 library: 1) Service Strategy; 2) Service Design; 3) Servic