BT offers ‘beyond the cloud’ guidance for manufacturing CIOs

Speaking at analyst Gartner's Symposium/ITxpo in Orlando, Florida, Neil Sutton, vice president, Portfolio, BT Global Services, suggested that CIOs and CTOs are being confronted with a "deluge of information about everything cloud". He also pointed out that, unhelpfully, some technology companies are simply re-branding products and services as cloud, which he called 'cloud washing.' Sutton reckons CIOs and CTOs need the ability to determine what infrastructure, software and communications services to manage in-house, which to outsource and which to move out into the cloud as a managed service. "Large organisations want to realise the benefits of cloud computing – such as flexibility, more reliable services, reduced financial risk, and lower costs – but they first need to get beyond the confusion," said Sutton. "When all is said and done, what organisations want is to be more efficient and flexible, and make their people more productive. Today, already we are working with global corporations to achieve those ends by delivering infrastructure as a service, communications as a service, and software as a service." Sutton highlighted the innovation underway at BT – explaining, for example, how recent innovations, such as BT's Cloud-Broker capability, developed in BT's labs, will change the way BT customers plan their managed services activities. He also commented on the organisation's Virtual Data Centre, which is already delivering financial and operational benefits. "BT is already assisting some of the largest businesses in the world manage challenges by helping them understand the linkage between the customer, the business, the application and the infrastructure," he said.