The SaaS Tax: Unpredictable Cloud Service Costs

“One CEO I recently spoke to has seen his once-tame IT budget nearly double over the past five years—as best as he can tell, at least—with little in the way of productivity gains. The reason? Subscriptions.”

via Chief Executive

How Artificial Intelligence Enables a Diverse Workplace

Artificial intelligence (AI) applications — as an example, virtual personal assistants and chatbots — are being adopted rapidly within the global workplace. By 2024, Gartner predicts that these technologies will replace almost 69 percent of the typical manager’s workload.

via Digital Lifescapes

How Hybrid IT Fuels Demand for Open Cloud Management

Hybrid IT is the result of combining internal and external services — usually from a combination of on-promise data center and public cloud computing resources. But what are the perceived benefits of hybrid IT? What does the hybrid IT market look like today? Here’s recent research findings that offer answers to these questions.

via Digital Lifescapes

High-Cost of Low-Engagement Managers in U.S. Businesses

Managers have the greatest impact on employee engagement, which makes this finding very worrisome: just 35% of U.S. managers are engaged in their jobs, while 51% are not engaged — and 14% are actively disengaged.

via Gallup

How to Manage a Virtualized Software-Defined Infrastructure

Why does implementing a virtualized infrastructure mean that service providers need to fundamentally rethink their approach to management? New approaches, such as software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV), truly add business value — but it’s also a key reason why they create digital service management headaches.

via TMForum

Why Hybrid Cloud Management will Gain Momentum in 2015

IT buyers and cloud computing vendors see “hybrid cloud” differently.  While providers focus on interconnections between their own and their partners’ cloud services, IT buyers want to manage all their environments — hosted and on-premises, virtualized and physical, cloud and traditional — as a pool of resources, via a single cloud management tool. Frost & Sullivan says they’ll get their wish in 2015, as more cloud service providers extend their platforms and APIs to include legacy IT environments.

via Frost & Sullivan

DevOps is Gaining Momentum in More Organizations Worldwide

Continuous deployment of Cloud business solutions in today’s marketplace is a competitive necessity. It’s a business imperative to sustain a competitive advantage. And, continuous deployment of hybrid cloud computing is a challenging and sometimes daunting task, which DevOps can make more manageable.

via Lens360

Typical Journey to Cloud Service Deployment has Hidden Pitfalls

Although demand for Cloud services continues to grow at unprecedented rates, there are still plenty of pitfalls to successfully migrating current or new workloads to the Cloud, according to a recent survey conducted by THINKstrategies. Moreover, 43% of survey respondents have had a failed or stalled Cloud project implementation.

via Datamation

Business Case for Open Hybrid Cloud Management Platforms

Cloud computing has reached a tipping point for enterprises with some 83% of the enterprises we surveyed struggling to bring together all their cloud services — from IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS and from public and private clouds to traditional IT, according to the study entitled “Simplify and innovate the way you consume cloud.”

via Computer Weekly