Are you living in the clouds yet — Cloud Centers of Excellence

The last issue of Eye on Innovation focused on Centers of Excellence. Many corporations have established "centers of excellence," an increasingly common phenomenon in companies who are trying to improve performance and achieve results at higher levels. There are Testing Centers of Excellence, Project Management Centers of Excellence, Customer Service Centers of Excellence, and even Innovation Centers of Excellence, to name just a few. The latest — Cloud Centers of Excellence — can incorporate all of the above.

The "cloud" is now the hottest "real estate" where organizations want to relocate their data center functions, mainly for the promise of better delivery of on-demand information and resources within a company and its customers. This update illustrates a unique way Centers of Excellence are being used to demonstrate a hot topic: Cloud computing.

Making the cloud real
Cloud computing provides on-demand, real-time network access to shared resources that can be physically located anywhere across the globe. Because Cloud Computing is more than a simple technology or architecture, organizations must decide what strategic objectives they want to aim at before adopting this course of action. Centers of Excellence can help accomplish this goal.

A demo is worth a thousand words
As demo labs, IT companies like Hewlett-Packard are creating comprehensive cloud solutions from beginning to end of the process that promise businesses a smooth transition to the cloud from their current environment.

A Cloud Center of Excellence is the ultimate showcase, the most complete, integrated system to build and manage clouds. Displayed are all the components of a cloud from servers to storage, networking, software, services and security. Since HP designs the products needed to create and manage a cloud infrastructure, the Center of Excellence enables customers to see a total HP solution working in a unified and seamless way. One of the latest centers of excellence — Hewlett-Packard Cloud Center of Excellence (CCoE) — was opened by OnX Enterprise Solutions, a leading global enterprise data center IT Solutions Provider, in New York City in February.

These centers are designed to show a company's cloud solutions will work so customers can easily evaluate, test and deploy a cloud in its own organizational environment. For example, using the Center technology, a company's representatives can view how the cloud works in the Center and obtain ideas on how to transform their own technology to a private or public cloud based on the needs they have.

Hype surrounding cloud computing
Why is the cloud concept getting so much attention? Cloud applications continue to gain momentum in enterprise applications as buyers are attracted to:

• Faster deployment speeds
• Reduced support needs
• Simpler, more frequent upgrades
• Better end-user adoption and utilization
• Increased efficiency and business agility to scale up or down as needs change.

As the cloud rage surges, can this lead to problems in the near future?  Among the concerns that need to be addressed are privacy, competition policy, standards-setting, security, data sovereignty, and copyright. Again, another way centers of excellence can help the evaluation process.

What's the market projection?
According to Forrester Research Inc., the global market for cloud computing will grow from $40.7 billion in 2011 to more than $241 billion in 2020, and the market for private cloud solutions will grow from $7.8 billion in 2011 to $15.9 billion. With an industry of this size, companies in the United States, Europe and Asia will be scrambling for a piece of the action. For example, to be at the forefront, countries in Asia have created an international "Asia Cloud Academic Forum," embracing "centers of excellence."  Among the questions, they will need to address are how their countries can benefit from Cloud applications, the costs, regulation issues, risks and uncertainties and what impact the Cloud will have on their economies.  How does the Cloud differ from the hosted computing platforms of a prior period?  Centers of Excellence are primed to play an important role in showing the ways in which these solutions can work for businesses. 

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