Almost time to turn off the lights in the IT center

At OpenWorld this past September, Oracle further embraced the cloud with three new offerings: Database, Java, and Infrastructure. This from a company that was lukewarm on the cloud trend a few years ago. I won’t go on about the benefits of the cloud other than to point out we found cloud-based CRM delivering 1.7 times greater ROI than on premise. We all know that in the end economics always wins. I was presenting at a local organization recently, and when the discussion turned to on demand versus on premise, I (granted, probably dismissively) said the race was already over and on-demand won. It’s time to turn off the lights in the computer center. This didn’t sit well with the entrenched IT folks in the audience who are used to large projects and growing IT center budgets. It was obvious this organization was going to drag its feet as long as possible before transitioning to the cloud. I’d like to say saving jobs is important, but the reality is the days of the corporate IT center are numbered. The quicker organizations move to the cloud the better (and healthier) for those organization’s bottom line.