• Whatever happened to the market where there were distinct servers, storage, and networks? Fabric is blurring that.
• What the heck is an operating system any more, and what does it matter when I have a virtual pool of distributed resources I need to use?
• Whatever happened to the boundary between consumer technology and enterprise technology? Consumerization of IT. And not just personal technology devices – some IT services are given away for free (and subsidized by advertising). Which leads to boundaries disappearing in business models.
• Whatever happened to the boundary between outsourcing and insourcing? Now we have cloud computing: public, private, hybrid, and every other variation. Looking for a black and white definition of cloud computing? A waste of time – it’s gray!
• What about ownership of intellectual property? Open source, community collaboration. Is it plagiarism if you add value to existing content? In a society of information, can you afford not to build on what’s already out there? What should 21st century students do?
• What about the boundary between trusted enterprise data and untrusted data? Can we really afford to ignore any business information that might be useful? Isn’t it about what we do with the data, rather than whether the data is 100% trusted and owned by the enterprise? The boundaries of data used for business intelligence have been blown completely down. For that matter, we are entering a period of data overload – some we can trust, some we partially trust, some that is impartial, some that is partial. Successful people and businesses will be able to find value in that data. Unsuccessful people and businesses will drown in the data, or hide from it.
• Whatever happened to the boundary between IT and the business? In some cases, being solidified in the form of services-orientation (e.g., cloud computing), in other cases, the boundary simply does not exist. How many business people can afford to be laggards in leveraging the latest IT capabilities? How many IT personnel can ignore business strategy?
• What about the boundary between applications and operations – and security, for that matter? It used to be that developers threw their creations over the wall for operations to run, with a kiss “good luck”. New applications are being written based on operational models, with automated deployment/operations/optimization in mind. Security is being captured as policy that moves with the application.

Virtualization. Consumerization. Cloud. Instant connections and collaboration. I could go on.

An overall IT megatrend today is a complete and utter blurring of boundaries – which we could handle conceptually, but it directly affects people and market competition. It’s a lot harder to re-skill, re-organize, and react to partners that become competitors and competitors that become partners and partners who are also competitors depending on the situation.

If there is one “skill” that is critical for an enterprise to have, and for individuals to have who use and/or help deliver IT capabilities (which, by the way, is everyone) – it’s “agility.” If you depend on the predictability of competition, and the predictability of a job category, you’re not gonna make it. You or your company will become noncompetitive faster than you can say “blur.”

To use Neil MacDonald’s perfect phrase, success requires “Embracing the Blur.”

(By the way, Neil has pointed out an interesting book by Stan Davis, called – not surprisingly – “Blur.” I need to take a look!)

Hey, there’s nothing wrong with saving money, but strategically, virtualization is not primarily about cost-cutting. Strategically, virtualization leads inexorably down a path toward flexible sourcing, and cloud computing.

Even our surveys show that organizations who are well on their way toward virtualization change their points of view – flexibility, agility, speed move to the top of the list.

What is virtualization doing to these people? There are at least five things that virtualization does to unlock the door to cloud computing, and push organizations faster in that direction:

1) Enables economies of scale: This is one way cloud providers squeeze their costs in order to make money. Enterprises can do it too!

2) Decouples users from implementation: It’s amazing to me how many business units are closet server huggers. They like to stipulate how their software is deployed. They like to know where the server is located. They don’t like to share! Virtualization forces the relationship to change from a specific implementation, to service level agreements. It also makes it possible to choose alternate sourcing – because if the customer relationship is services, IT can choose how the implementation is sourced.

3) Speed, flexibility, agility: Early adopters of cloud computing talk about how quickly they can get new servers online. Compared to the 4-6 weeks it takes an average IT shop to deploy a server, just about anything is faster. However, virtual machines can be deployed roughly 30 times faster. It doesn’t take a cloud to improve speed. And, of course, operational processes and management tools need to change to deal with speed. And speed changes business expectations and behavior – it changes culture.

4) Breaks software pricing and licensing: You can’t charge users for physical capacity when only a small portion of that is used. You can’t charge users for every potential server the software might be running on. You’ve got to charge and license based on some kind of usage model. Of course, you can charge whatever you want until users get smart, but change is inevitable.

5) Enables, motivates chargeback: When servers can be delivered in minutes rather than weeks, IT users ask for more – roughly two times as much, based on feedback from our clients. The natural barrier is gone. Unless there is a cost, a friction, associated with a server deployment, how do we make good business decisions? IT needs to focus more on usage accounting, and chargeback is growing as a mechanism to manage virtual capacity usage.

Economies of scale, shifting users to a services-oriented relationship, delivering much faster, forcing software prices to align with usage, charging business units based on usage. Sounds like cloud computing to me.

Virtualization, private cloud, cloud – that’s the natural evolution.

The thing is, most major IT vendors (not all) get this. Why do they care? The time to influence an enterprise’s cloud choices, software architectures, management architectures for the cloud, standards, are when organizations are virtualizing. So is cloud computing on your strategic plan? It may not be on yours, but it certainly is the plan the major virtualization vendors have for you! Be proactive, take charge of your own on-ramp to the cloud, or get taken!

While many core skills haven’t changed, some are becoming more critical, and other skills are new for the 21st century. The world has been changing, in two discontinuous ways, since the early 1990s:

1. The world is more connected, flatter, and moving faster.
   Technology evolution, a maturing world economy, dynamic teaming and collaboration. Windows of opportunity are getting smaller as news flows faster. Reaction time is a critical differentiator.
2. Information is growing rapidly – and all can contribute.
   Information is exploding – but some is accurate, some is not, some are opinions, some are lies, some are personal expressions. Information in the new world is not static – it is interactive and dynamic.

So based on these changes, what are the new and growing skills required in the 21st century? For the benefit of my own school district – and anyone trying to get their arms around the fundamentals – I’ve narrowed the list to seven key skills:

Technology Skills

1. Information Literacy: Navigating, interpreting and effectively using the explosion of information available to us is critical in the 21st century.
2. Media Literacy: IM streams, blogs, streaming video, web conferences – information is being channeled through ever-changing media. The ability to navigate and interpret those media in context, as well as the ability to use those media effectively to communicate are critical skills.
3. Information Technology Literacy: The tools that we use to create or access media that contain information are constantly evolving. Understanding exactly which tools to use, and when, in a constantly evolving tools environment is a critical skill.

People Skills

1. Global Literacy: The world is more connected, and insularity is not an option. Awareness, social and cross-cultural skills are valuable.
2. Flexibility & Adaptability: The world has always been changing, but change happens – and is communicated – faster. Agility is critical in the 21st century.
3. High-Level Knowledge Skills: In a flat world, lower-level skills are a commodity. Critical thinking, problem-solving, creativity and innovation are valuable.
4. Communication & Collaboration: A connected world requires better communication skills, and the ability to dynamically team to accomplish tasks.

Want to dive deeper? I’d recommend the Partnership for 21st Century Skills. And my colleague Daryl Plummer’s post on 20th century thinking. And, of course, my own thoughts on the impact of the web, social software and cloud computing on education. Good luck, and I’d love comments!

It isn’t simply about saving money – although that does help create a business case. It’s about our inevitable cultural speed shift, and it’s driven by our kids.

When I was young, I wanted everything “now”. We all did. But we also learned that reality wasn’t quite so fast. We learned to adjust to the speed of the world. And we entered the workforce.

  It’s different with our kids. They also want everything “now”. The big, big difference is that they often get it. Want some music? Buy it, it’s downloaded, start listening. Want to know what others think about it? Just look at the feedback. Trying to remember that movie with that great line? Just Google it. Don’t like the answer it finds? There are thousands more. Trying to buy something online and the site is too slow? Go to another site. Done.

Two months ago a young local boy was killed in an accident on a Saturday night. Sunday morning the school had teachers contact parents to tell them there had been a death, and counseling would be available for students Monday morning. But before school, hundreds of students became members of a Facebook page memorializing the boy. Kids were sharing rumors and speculation on how the boy died, and counseling each other. The school system was operating at 1980s speed – far too slow.

A few weeks ago my daughter was accepted to her (and our!) first choice college. By the end of the day someone had set up a Facebook page for that school’s class of 2013, more than 200 kids had found it and were talking, my daughter started meeting other students, sharing their majors, talking about dorms. The same day!

Kids want everything now, but unlike my generation, they get it now. What’s important to remember, however, is these kids will become our employees, our business partners, our customers, and our bosses.

Go ahead and save money with virtualization. Use cloud computing for economies of scale and low-cost commodity services. But strategically, it will be about elasticity and speed.

One of the benefits of being massive is the ability to leverage huge economies of scale. Spread fixed costs as thinly as possible. But, when do the costs essentially become linear? I would question whether Google’s costs per compute unit went down much when they extended from one datacenter to two – not to mention when they extended from two to several dozen.

But even more interesting, the assumption is that computing is a commodity. This is only true at a point in time. Computing technologies continue to get cheaper for the same performance, they shrink in space requirements, and perhaps most importantly in today’s world, they consume less power.

Clearly the ability to leverage new technology – to be agile – is an important capability. A megaprovider that cannot adopt new technology quickly can be undercut in price by smaller, agile providers. Or, at least, higher agility reduces the size a provider needs to attain to remain price-competitive with the megaproviders.

How big is big enough? And could this issue lead to a megaprovider struggling to remain competitive with a host of smaller competitors? Can small providers federate in the cloud to take down a megaprovider? The picture in my mind is a huge apatosaurus being take down by a group of velociraptors…

I’m getting an interesting question more often every week: “How do I become more cloud-like – what are cloud providers doing that I can emulate?” Several people at our Web Innovation Summit in L.A. this week have asked me the same question.

The answer is important – for more than seven years, Gartner has been talking about a vision for IT infrastructure and operations that we called “real-time infrastructure.” The concept is simple but powerful – infrastructure should become services-oriented – policies come in, services that meet requirements come out. RTI uses virtualization and automation technologies to ensure provisioning, optimization and availability are handled at low cost, with high agility and appropriate quality of service.

Gartner developed this before IBM’s On Demand, HP’s Adaptive Infrastructure, Microsoft’s Dynamic IT, VMware’s Virtual Infrastructure. On Demand failed because IBM focused almost exclusively top-down – business process change, leveraging their (then new) business consulting force. HP also focused much more on Adaptive Enterprise, and not enough on the underlying Adaptive Infrastructure. Microsoft and especially VMware have been more successful, building RTI from the ground up.

Not surprisingly, Microsoft and VMware are now starting to extend their visions to cloud computing. Cloud computing is a natural extension of RTI concepts – services-oriented, abstracted from users, utility-like, results-oriented, efficient and dynamic, etc.

Gartner’s Infrastructure and Operations Maturity Model defines our view of the roadmap to a real-time infrastructure. We believe this also defines a roadmap to become cloud-like. Virtualization in its many forms is a major part of this evolution.

And, in fact, modernizing an infrastructure to behave more like an internal “cloud” also makes IT a more effective cloud computing user – as cloud offerings mature. Changing the internal mindset to be services-oriented (like sharing equipment with other business units, for heaven’s sake!), the funding model to be usage-based, the management and usage model to be dynamic and flexible – these are all critical enablers to using external cloud services.

And just being able to define service levels themselves – the behavior expected of a service – is critical. If you can’t define that, you can be sure that the first time you decide to use cloud services you will miss the mark.