Last week, some of my friends felt a sense of loss when they typed “www.sun.com” into their browsers and wound up on Oracle’s home page. Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems took all 9 months to complete – as long as conceiving and delivering a baby – but it did mark the end of an era.
Sun Microsystems, which was founded in 1982 by Scott McNealy, Bill Joy, Andreas Bechtolsheim, and Vinod Khosla, was once upon a time a leader in the computing world. During the Internet boom more than two decades ago, Sun made the servers which powered that boom. Those were the good old days. (more…)
Over the past years, Telecom carriers and service providers have suffered economic pressures, competition, churn and declining revenue. As they grapple to find ways to improve their ARPU from their core services, many in the Telco industry are attempting to diversify into broader business and consumer value-added services, moving beyond the increasingly commoditized telephone and Internet access. Many of them are planning to or are already expanding aggressively into the “Cloud” space.
IT Shared Services refers to the provision of IT services by an IT organization where that service had previously been found in more than one part of the organization or group. Thus the funding and resourcing of the service is shared and the providing department effectively becomes an internal service provider. The key is the idea of ’sharing’ within an organization or group. Hence, the concept of IT Shared Services is similar to collaboration. IT Shared Services is different from the diametrically opposite model of Outsourcing which is where an external third party is paid to provide a service that was previously internal to the buying organization, typically leading to redundancies and re-organization. One purpose of Shared Services is the convergence and streamlining of an organization’s functions to ensure that they deliver to the organization the services required of them as effectively and efficiently as possible. This concept is applicable not just for the IT services, but can also involve the centralizing of back office functions such as HR, Finance, and middle or front offices.
This book is one of the oldest and most successful books on military strategy. It has had an influence on Eastern military thinking, business tactics, and beyond. Sun Tzu suggested the importance of positioning in strategy and that position is affected both by objective conditions in the physical environment and the subjective opinions of competitive actors in that environment. He thought that strategy was not planning in the sense of working through an established list, but rather that it requires quick and appropriate responses to changing conditions. Planning works in a controlled environment, but in a changing environment, competing plans collide, creating unexpected situations.
Every data center project begins with the business plan and business requirements in mind. This is fundamentally the starting point and the first building blocks of a data center project. An enterprise with intention to build a data center facility for their own internal use may have an easier time to establish and understand this starting point. But for a Data Center service provider offering co-location and hosting services, then it gets a little bit complicated.
