The Cloud Dialogues

Several years ago, my wife decided to get an advanced degree in psychology, and became a counselor. Along the way, I was duly impressed by the therapeutic power of simply talking about a problem in a constructive manner.

These days, I joke that I've become a "cloud therapist" for many of the enterprise IT leaders I meet. They know they have a big challenge ahead of them, they just need to talk about it.

I've been told the conversations are usually helpful, which is good.

Over the years, some of my most stimulating discussions have been with Dave Vellante, founder of Wikibon. Dave and I feed off of each other quite well: freely challenging each other's assumptions, and getting to the meat of the matter before too long.

And we always have fun.

A while back, we thought it'd be great if we could have these great dialogues in a more public forum. We agreed on a series of four interviews, each approaching the enterprise IT cloud challenge from different perspectives.

In the first interview I'll want to explore some of the deeper forces behind the move to cloud-like models for enterprise IT. Understanding why a problem exists in the first place is a big part of conquering any challenge.

Our second session will be looking at why existing approaches aren't working well for most enterprise IT groups. My general thesis is that most enterprise IT leaders want to move in a cloud direction, but are finding it much more difficult than it should be.

No surprise, I want to spend a session on what Oracle is doing to close enterprise IT cloud gaps, and have Dave poke holes as he usually does. Dave can be quite the skeptic.

And I want our final interview to explore different journeys enterprise IT organizations are taking to progressively adopt cloud models -- putting the ideas into practice, moving forward and delivering results.

If the past is any indicator, these should be great conversations -- especially if you enjoy point-counterpoint debates.

If this sounds interesting, I'd invite you to join us: "Conquering Enterprise Cloud" 

Looking forward to seeing you there!