Numerous technologies have impacted the business ecosystem in recent years. Mobile and the cloud, for instance, have shifted vast quantities of enterprise data away from the direct control of IT departments and into the hands of employees. As companies fine-tune their strategies to utilize these trends, an integrated approach may be able to produce the highest gains.
Gartner recently announced that the combination of social, mobile and cloud will likely have a profound impact on the jobs of sourcing managers through 2013. Linda Cohen, vice president and analyst at Gartner, warned against viewing these technologies as siloed. Instead, she suggested that businesses must adopt strategies to view each technological area as part of what Gartner calls the Nexus of Forces. Due to the widespread proliferation of both public and private cloud storage solutions, analysts emphasized demand for IT skills in managing hybrid environments.
“To establish the most appropriate sourcing approach for 2013, sourcing managers must take a more holistic approach and understand wider IT service market trends,” said Frank Ridder, research vice president at Gartner. “To benefit, sourcing managers must consider the influence of the convergence of the Nexus of Forces on the services sourcing life cycle of activities, rather than considering each factor as a separate trend.”
One of the challenges that is likely to emerge as businesses push toward the hybrid model is that many are still in the process of evaluating public offerings, MSPmentor columnist CJ Arlotta reported. As the market matures, companies will need tools to monitor IT ecosystems that span both public and private cloud environments. According to Vikas Aggarwal, CEO of network management company Zyrion, cloud vendors may benefit from providing improved resource management solutions with their offerings or from ensuring interoperability with existing solutions such as CloudStack.
