On premise servers, storage and perpetual licences are not going to disappear within the next years, Private cloud is still growing but at the same time all IT managers and CIOs agree that the Public cloud is gaining momentum.
All analysts and IT vendors agree that Software as a Service or Platform as a Service spending will overtake on premise budgets within 2 to 3 years.
IT departments need to reinvent themselves
IT departments need to reinvent themselves and adapt to this change in order to avoid shadow IT and eventually become obsolete. From the department that used to say NO to the department that enables NOW. This is already happening and will accelerate in the coming years. The big challenge for CIOs and IT professionals is that the set of required skills is different. Expertise at the Infrastructure and Operating System Level – that was essential in the last 2 decades – is becoming obsolete. The change in terms of knowledge and skills set is bigger than the move from Mainframe to PC that some of us experienced in the late eighties.
The transformation is so big as SaaS and cloud technology are forcing the IT departments to think in terms of business benefits and less in technical terms.
IT has traditionally been a highly-technical field where engineers are in charge of configuring on-premise software solutions as well as managing the servers and storage housing and hosting that software. But cloud-based technologies require less technical expertise and more people capable of holding business discussions, business or process analysts who truly understand the business they are working in and know how to take a solution and apply that to business processes.
In a SaaS dominant environment, an engineer or business consultant needs to know what the technology supports and how to configure it or customize it, to build a solution that meets the business needs.
At ASP we are facing the same challenges described above, we need on one hand to help our customers in their current infrastructure and private cloud projects. We need to offer them the services (incident management, change management, configuration management) to support their current infrastructure. We help them with the security issues, firewall and network challenges and other vulnerability protection. But on the other hand we need to allow them to transform their ICT to become more agile, being cloud enabled and SaaS ready.
ServiceNow for solving Service Management challenges
We strongly believe that ServiceNow is the ideal platform to allow this smooth transition. It is a pure software as a service solution and it is targeted initially towards solving Service Management challenges and allowing the IT department to become more customer centric, business and process oriented. What’s more according to a recent study from IDC : ServiceNow adds value by paying back for itself in less that 8 months and gives on average 450% ROI.
ASP just signed an important partnership with ServiceNow allowing us in the next months to propose their ITSM solution on the Belgian market.