Avoiding the Sins of the Past

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During EMC’s annual customer and partner conference, EMC World, I spoke with numerous CIOs at various stages of moving their organizations’ workloads to the cloud. Those discussions confirmed that forward-looking CIOs recognize cloud’s potential and are eager to share and receive guidance on how best to maximize IT’s value. No surprise, since IDC estimates that at some point this year 80 percent of enterprise applications will be deployed on cloud platforms.

Part of these CIOs’ motivation is to keep the IT function relevant and valuable in an environment where end-users not only bring their “consumer world” expectations to work with them – but also have new IT sourcing choices, through “X as a Service” and other public cloud options. This dynamic is exacerbated by “bring-your-own-device” and other mobility and consumerization trends. If an IT organization isn’t actively facing these influences, or lacks the agility to support new business and technology demands, business units may independently (and most already are) roll their own IT as a Service initiatives, thus creating “shadow IT.”

Read the full blog post and comment on Reflections – Insights in Trends on IT from EMC’s Senior Leaders.

About the Author: Howard Elias

Howard Elias is president of Services and Digital at Dell Technologies, overseeing global support, deployment, consulting, education and managed services, the IT organization and Virtustream. He also co-leads Dell Technologies Select, an elite sales team focused on serving some of Dell Technologies’ largest customers. Howard is responsible for setting and driving strategy to enable and accelerate the mission-critical business transformations of customers and Dell’s own global operations. Previously, he held various leadership positions at EMC, including president and chief operating officer of Global Enterprise Services. In 2016, he was tapped to be EMC’s lead for the Dell and EMC integration, overseeing the value creation and combination of the largest technology merger in history. Howard joined EMC in 2003 from Hewlett-Packard where he was senior vice president of Business Management and Operations for the Enterprise Systems Group. Prior to Hewlett-Packard, he held executive positions at Compaq, Digital, AST Research and Tandy Corporation. Howard was a co-founder and served on the board of managers for the Virtual Computing Environment (VCE) Company. He currently serves as chairman of TEGNA Inc., a media and digital business company, and is a member of the Massachusetts Business Roundtable. He attended Wayne State University and Lawrence Technological University.
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