Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution: How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Can’t Afford to Be Left Behind April 29, 2010

Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution
How Cloud Computing Is Transforming Business and Why You Can’t Afford to Be Left Behind

Author: Babcock, Charles
ISBN-13: 978-0-07-174075-3
ISBN-10: 0071740759
©2010 | 1st Edition | 272 pages , Hardcover
Pub Date: May 2010
Price: US$ 27.95

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Why? Cloud computing is a hot topic both in the national business media as well as with major corporations.

• November 2009, Reuters ran an article on IBM’s recently-launched cloud computing service.
• November 16, 2009, Investor’s Business Daily wrote about how Microsoft’s cloud era is truly taking flight.
• And CNN.com recently produced this helpful video and article: “A trip into the secret, online ‘cloud’”: http://www.cnn.com/2009/TECH/11/04/cloud.computing.hunt/index.html

With Google, Salesforce, and Amazon being the early leaders of the cloud computing trend, business leaders will no doubt need a book as a guide to the management strategies needed to launch their own clouds.

Now that we have your attention…….

About the Book

There’s a great deal of buzz about cloud computing in the ranks of business management. But so far, the discussion has focused on the technology behind it. Yes, technical understanding is needed to explain cloud computing, but its true import can’t be described in terms of technology. It requires a strategic business interpretation. And for business leaders, to fail to understand cloud computing is to risk being left behind in the next round of business computing and the resulting business evolution.

If you think the Internet had a major impact on business, it will pale beside the long term effects of the cloud. The cloud unleashes changes already spawned by the Internet that were creeping forward. It accelerates them, rewards fast moving organizations and punishes slow ones, breaks down traditional hierarchies while building up ad hoc teams. It potentially turns over immense computing power to employees of any rank to provision themselves with the computing power they think they need. Some will use that power foolishly, and be penalized; others will use it with discipline and creativity — in ways their bosses never imagined — and advance. The stakes for all are high.

Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution refocuses the discussion of cloud computing in terms of business strategy. For the business world, this is a force of democratization: it makes large scale, high speed, highly reliable systems available for business analysts, business intelligence experts, line of business managers and researchers who only need to pay for short term use. There’s no need to apply to IT to build out the capacity in the data center. In some cases, the business user activates a major resource with the swipe of a credit card.

The technology is not new — virtualization, loosely coupled systems, Internet networking — have been around for years, but what businesses can do with the combination is new. The convergence is already well underway, but your firm’s senior management has only a hazy notion of it taking place. This book arms them with the critical understanding of how the cloud is going to change how we do business. It will:

• Educate top business management on cloud benefits
• Cultivate end user participation in the cloud
• Reveal how to become an example of leadership on cloud issues
• Help leaders formulate the cloud strategy
• Show businesses how to thrive as cloud computing becomes standard

Book Review

1. Book review on WilfridWong.com. To read, please click HERE
2. getAbstract.com

About the Author

Charles Babcock (San Francisco, CA) has been reporting on the major trends in computing for the past 20 years. He currently serves as editor-at-large at InformationWeek, covering the business application of Web services, virtualization, cloud computing and other topics of interest as they come up. He writes major features and cover stories for InformationWeek, daily stories for its Web site, http://www.informationweek.com, and blog regularly on related topics. He has also been integral in their transtition to the web. He is the former Software Editor and Technical Editor of Computerworld and editor-in-chief of Digital News.

He has been the winner of $400 William Randolph Hearst journalism scholarships for two years in a row in a national competition (third place, investigative reporting; fourth, editorial writing). He was also part of a team of three at InteractiveWeek that won the Jesse Neal award for business writing for an in-depth look at a failed effort to revamp computing systems at McDonalds Corp.

Babcock gives talks at user groups of software companies. I moderate panels or sit on panels at shows, such as the Open Source Business Conference. He organizes, hosts and speaks at InformationWeek-organized Webinars on virtualization and cloud computing. Over the course of a year, he speaks to 800-1,200 people in various settings. He also appears in a regular show of video recorded interviews on Silicon Valley topics, called ValleyView, aired on the InformationWeek Web site.