Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Ric Telford, Vice President Of Cloud Services, IBM (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra, Pablo Chacin and Saurabh Mallik SM: What is your sense of the integration issue? Is that a barrier to adoption? Is it something people are worried about? Can the integration costs and risks surpass the advantages of cloud computing? RT: It all depends on the scenario. At least in the work we

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Ric Telford, Vice President Of Cloud Services, IBM (Part 3)

RT: That’s a good question. Generally, it’s reports – customized reports for sales people who could use that data, for example, average deal size for customers in a city, or the top twenty opportunities. Finance organizations see common usage of IRR, ROI, and other business calculations such as financial risk and liquidity. Sales and distribution

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Ric Telford, Vice President Of Cloud Services, IBM (Part 2)

SM: What is the situation with cloud application vendors such as Salesforce.com and SuccessFactors, which have cloud applications hosted on their own data centers? Is there a push toward those kinds of applications?

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Pat Toole, CIO Of IBM (Part 5)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Pablo Chacin and Saurabh Mallik SM: Yes, and what you just said applies also to small for-profit businesses. If you look at the numbers, in the United States there are about 28 million small businesses. About 22 million have no employees; these are mom-and-pop small businesses, and there are

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Pat Toole, CIO Of IBM (Part 4)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Pablo Chacin and Saurabh Mallik SM: Okay, let’s now switch the discussion to what you see from where you sit – what would you say are open problems in cloud computing where entrepreneurs can zero in and build businesses to solve problems? PT: Well, I was going to say,

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Pat Toole, CIO Of IBM (Part 3)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Pablo Chacin and Saurabh Mallik SM: Why don’t we go through the six towers? This would just be a small exercise in validating that. PT: Sure. So for business analytics, obviously it’s based on Cognos, based on the Linux on System z platform. For collaboration, we are using LotusLive

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Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Pat Toole, CIO Of IBM (Part 2)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Pablo Chacin and Saurabh Mallik SM: We talked with several CIOs last year, and they all highlighted collaboration as one of their primary areas of focus. In fact, they’ve stressed video conferencing and telepresence as key areas within collaboration. What else?

Thought Leaders In Cloud Computing: Pat Toole, CIO Of IBM (Part 1)

By Sramana Mitra and guest authors Pablo Chacin and Saurabh Mallik This is the first interview in our series on cloud computing. Sramana talks with Pat Toole, the CIO of IBM. He is responsible for advancing the company’s transformation agenda and aligning IBM’s information technology investments with the company’s business strategy. Pat became CIO of

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