by Bryan Doerr, Chief Technology Officer
For our inaugural blog, I think it's fitting to set a stage for what I hope are many postings and debates to follow that address activities, ideas, opinions, and successes related to infrastructure services and Savvis.
When I think about the changes occurring in infrastructure services, and more generally IT application development, it's clear to me that as an industry we're moving into a new phase - not simply incrementally improving. We're moving into an "experience economy" in IT infrastructure services, following the definition of this concept by B. Joseph Pine and James Gilmore in their book "The Experience Economy: Work Is Theater and Every Business a Stage." It's time for IT service providers to stage an IT experience that surpasses the value proposition of past services.
There is a convergence of industry and business forces that will enable this transformation. Service providers are being enabled by greater standardization and software abstraction leading to more portable and reliable software. Underlying physical capacities continue to rapidly increase leading to increased opportunities for virtualization, which leads to greater opportunities for economic benefits for scaling operations. Simultaneous with these changes in the underpinnings of applications, CIO's are again being asked--or told--to increase efficiency by lowering cost and increasing business benefits associated with their applications.
So, if there is a convergence toward the need for a new IT experience, what is that experience? Every service provider will create this according to their vision. The dominating characteristics of this new experience, at least for enterprises and medium-size businesses are control and choice. Greater IT control and choice through increased awareness and more service management options will empower CIO's to achieve more personal success and strategic relevance. Greater IT control and choice will result in lower costs coupled with higher reliability and agility, cementing business relationships between service provider and clients. The cloud computing paradigm being utilized in various types of IT services represents the first step of a new experience in IT services. More will follow.
I hope you visit this space often to see what is new at Savvis and to discuss topics of interest. The near future promises to be one of rapid change for IT service providers and Savvis will be engaged in contributing to the direction and nature of these changes. We welcome your participation in this process.
