
Virtualization and Cloud executives share their predictions for 2014. Read them in this VMblog.com series exclusive.
Contributed article by Steve Crawford, VP of marketing and business development at Jamcracker
2014 Predictions – The Year of Agility in Enterprise IT
We've
seen a lot of companies adopting cloud services in 2013, but as this adoption
continues, there is a need for companies to transition their business model to
improve service efficiency and capitalize on its benefits. In 2014, I predict we
will see the following transformations within cloud services and
enterprises:
Opening
APIs to developers
As
organizations adopt the cloud services marketplace model, we expect to see
companies increasingly open APIs to developers. Application developers can
leverage these APIs to create services quickly and will enable organizations to
tap into external resources in order to drive innovation. Companies will publish
APIs as a way to create customer differentiation, new channels of distribution
and revenue streams with faster time-to-market for new applications. It will
also allow them to become more agile, quickly meeting customers' growing
demands.
Supporting
developers throughout the application lifecycle process
Publishing
APIs means that organizations will have to interact with a number of third-party
developers, and it will become important to support those developers through the
application development and delivery lifecycle process. The easier it is for
developers to publish and monetize applications, the more applications will be
developed. Additionally, it will also help expand the developer community, which
translates to a wider variety of applications for customers to purchase. By
streamlining and automating the "develop, deploy and distribute" lifecycle,
developers can quickly create applications, and publish them onto catalogs for
end users to purchase. This will help organizations drive a differentiated
experience for their customers by enabling a rich catalog of
services.
Transitioning
to ITaaS
IT
is moving further away from traditional roles because of the shift to the cloud,
and now they have the opportunity to empower businesses rather than just align
the technology practices. By adopting the IT as a Service (ITaaS) operational
model, IT can act as an agile service provider and focus on meeting the needs
for different lines of business (LOB) in the enterprise. In order to do so,they
will need to shift their focus from projects to products, which will help them
create more value for the organization. This transition will become crucial over
time, as the traditional roles of IT begin to fade away with changes in
architecture and software development lifecycles.
Agility
will drive 2014 as we adopt new roles and set up relationships with third-party
developers. As the cloud services industry grows, it will no longer be a
question of how to deliver but instead, how to enable the entire ecosystem to be
innovative and offer a wider variety of products to
customers.
##
About the Author
Steve
iscurrently VP of marketing and business development at Jamcracker. Prior to
this, he was formerly CMO and VP of Corporate Development for PKWARE, where he
repositioned the company as a cross-platform data security provider, resulting
in 10X revenue growth over 3 years. He was previously with VeriSign during its
growth from pre-IPO to over $2B in revenues, where he led strategic alliances,
launched its enterprise solutions product-line, and grew its service provider
business to over $200M. Steve previously led marketing and business development
at Octel (acquired by Lucent) and R&D programs at Lockheed
Martin.