Bland argues that “vacuum” has been filled with people who are technically savvy but don’t have their feet in any of the technology silos. While they act as a bridge between the CTO and the silos, they don’t sit between them but off to one side and adopt a more consultative approach. He believes this is because a lot of the time the solutions they recommend could be outsourced or in the cloud solutions.
“They should care less about the technology that’s being used,” he says. Organisations are “looking to individuals to think about whether something needs to be sourced from the inside or outsourced”. That job can’t be done by someone inside one of the silos. “If you’re running the networking business, you’re not going to want to outsource it,” Bland explains. “The right people don’t have their feet in the silos so they don’t have a vested interest in it necessarily being in-house. If you give it to the techies, they will try and build it themselves. A business person will focus on the profitability, creativity, effectiveness and cost efficiency to the business.”
The creation of these types of roles is making organisations more agnostic about how and where they source their technology and more amenable to considering those trends which are driving the new style of IT.
But Bland believes the emergence of these new roles should make it easier for channel partners. “Getting airtime with the CTO is pretty rare and very difficult,” he says. “And if you’re talking to people in the technical implementation/design space you inevitably get caught in the war of religion that is technology where people can get very passionate.”
A lot of these things are marketing to try and juggle up something a little bit and make everybody think they need to be reinvesting in IT” – Michael Conway, Renaissance
The people in between won’t think that there’s an inevitable answer to the problem, so partners should focus on “showing them the art of the possible, help them to solve business problems and to understand some of the challenges they face along the way”, Bland says, adding “it’s much easier to have a conversation with someone who doesn’t have a vested interest in building it themselves”.
Liam Halpin, general manager at Dell Ireland, agrees with Bland about the changes in corporate structure. In the old days, IT in larger organisations would have to talk to the network manager, the storage manager and the server manager and bring them all together internally to initiate a project. “That isn’t the case now. Technologies are converging and budgets are converging. We’re moving away from IT to business results projects. Ten years ago, the CIO started life as an It’s about business results and business output.”
He says the nature of what a channel partner does is changing as a result. It’s not enough to talk about products because customers are able to do a lot of their own research on products so they “typically already know what you do. They’re not looking for people to tell them about products or services, they want someone to tell them how to save them money, make them more efficient and look after their customers better. The conversations are about the business and business output”.
Budgets
It’s fair to say that Aidan Rowsome, head of cloud practice at Unity Technology Solutions, is one of those firmly in the new style of IT. Asked if it’s really here, he replies: “Emphatically, yes. From procurement to deployment, computing needs are increasingly dominated by cloud considerations. Traditional IT budgets, particularly CAPEX budgets, are being taken from central IT and spread between individual Line of Business owners. The rise of ‘everything as a service’ means that all computing requirements from storage, applications, platforms, infrastructure can, and are, being ‘rented’ rather than bought, changing CAPEX into OPEX.”
Gerry Harvey, general manager at Commtech, is another one of those firmly in the ‘yes’ camp. “It’s new, completely new,” he states, adding that “enterprise cloud computing has altered the landscape of technology applied to business. This is a radically different approach. It’s not about popular services, or about partially ‘out-tasking’ some processing to the cloud, it’s about mobility, Big Data and advanced analytics to transform business. In fact talking about the cloud as something separate from the business is rather like separating finances from the business”.
Describing the mainframe as the first platform for IT and client server as the second, he says the third platform “is that ecosystem comprising millions of applications accessed by billions of users. Enterprise cloud services cross the entire spectrum, XaaS (everything as a service), infrastructure and applications”.
Richard O’Brien, IT director at Triangle, also believes there is a new style of IT. “A lot of it is down to consumerisation and the smarts that people have when it comes to IT because on their own experience and their personal use of technology. For instance, people use Dropbox seamlessly in their personal lives and they can’t understand why they can’t do so in their work environment. Or they might see other professionals using services – software as a service for example – and wonder why they aren’t.”
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