Cloud to lower bar, intensify competition
- TAGS:conference, data center, Frank Wander, Gregory Schwartz, P100, Premier 100
- IT TOPICS:Cloud Computing, Data Center, Emerging Technology, Enterprise Apps, Infrastructure Management, Mainframes & Supercomputers, Virtualization
By 2020, businesses that fail to pare their legacy architecture may find their core businesses disrupted by smaller, nimbler companies who have built on SaaS and cloud computing from the ground up. "They will be unencumbered by a legacy of complexity and costly solutions and will be narrowly focused on their core competencies," said Frank Wander, senior vice president and CIO at Guardian Life Insurance Co.
If you’re still using the same legacy applications and infrastructure, well, good luck. That's the picture Wander painted during his state of IT in 2020 presentation at the Computerworld Premier 100 conference this week.
"Cloud based solutions, specifically software as a service, offer a much lower cost of entry for companies that want sophisticated capabilities like an HRIS system. They are able to buy these by the seat, right now, from Workday, and others. That is a big change," he said.
"What I see is a gradual migration from in-house custom built solutions and packages - some of the packages are externally hosted today - to cloud-based software as a service."
Because of that trend, competitors may be able to build a corporation much more quickly. "Just imagine how quick and powerful and nimble they will be, and if you haven't uncluttered your environment -- wow," he said. "That's the challenge for legacy companies that haven't invested in eliminating the baggage they're carrying on the journey."
Guardian Life is moving fast. "We are whittling that down as quickly as we can to invest in our strategies," he said. To that end, the insurer is in the process of consolidating six data centers to two -- one in house and one in a hosted facility. "We will have a pod and put the data center in there on a short-term lease," he said. He's also moving the company from Unix to Linux "in a very large way," has already moved 15 back-end applications to SaaS and is focused now on transitioning e-mail, IT services and HRIS into the SaaS world as well
Your future competitiveness will depend on transforming most of the data center architecture you have in the next decade. "The folks who don't unclutter by the time we get to 2020 will have a tremendous mess," he said.
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