While many commentators would say that traditional organizations (both vendor and end user) are not making the move to the cloud because of issues around lethargy, inertia, risk-aversion and being process bound, the fact is that despite large organizations having significant resource to put into IT, sometimes they’re just so close to the coalface that they can’t see where to begin. That is part of the impetus for CloudU, which aims to help individual IT pros and business people understand what the cloud can do for them. But it’s also relevant entire organizations or IT teams within them.

To this point, BMC is today announcing a new service offering, the Cloud and Data Center Automation Consulting service. This service offering initiates with 2-3 week cloud planning workshops to develop and design the cloud services, architecture and roadmap for customers. According to Carlos Granda, BMC’s VP of Global Services;

Each cloud planning workshop produces a detailed, phased 18-month cloud roadmap and uses a case design document which includes resource requirements, a project timeline and a financial investment summary. The planning exercise then defines the cloud’s reference architecture and creates the management and operational policies necessary to run the cloud to meet business objectives.

While it would be nice to think that businesses had the ability to self-discover the best cloud approach for them, the reality is somewhat different. So long as BMC’s approach sees it give advice untainted by its own commercial drivers, the service offering sounds like a valuable idea.

One of the tools that BMC will use on the workshops is its jauntily named BMC Atrium Discovery and Dependency Mapping solution. The solution allows organizations to built a complete and dynamic application map – that gets updates as the IT environment changes. The idea is that application owners who often feel that providing detailed documentation to IT is a barrier to them actually getting stuff done, will be able to provide only a limited amount of data and the new tool will automatically discover and audit the applications.

While mapping is fundamentally boring, the reality is that in complex and heterogeneous IT environments there is a high degree of complexity and inter dependency making a move of application (whether it’s a simple on-prem migration or a move to the cloud) a complex and risky business. BMC is trying to minimize these risks.

Ben Kepes

Ben Kepes is a technology evangelist, an investor, a commentator and a business adviser. Ben covers the convergence of technology, mobile, ubiquity and agility, all enabled by the Cloud. His areas of interest extend to enterprise software, software integration, financial/accounting software, platforms and infrastructure as well as articulating technology simply for everyday users.

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