Purists will scoff but I liked this interview with Hyatt’s CIO Mike Blake as he commits to Microsoft mail/Sharepoint in the cloud
“Cloud is a direction we’re already at. We don’t have any apps or solutions that aren’t hosted by a third party or in domain-control of a third party, across the board. This migration started 16 years ago, because we cut a very large outsourcing deal with CSC (www.csc.com) for our reservations and group sales system. Or financial systems are hosted with Oracle (www.oracle.com). Our (Property Management System), Micros Opera (www.micros.com), is hosted by AT&T (www.att.com), and a few are hosted by Micros…”
Many peer CIOs could similarly make the point most of their apps are “hosted by a third party or in domain-control of a third party”
The good news for Mike and other CIOs is that benchmarking against emerging “purer” cloud alternatives is going to make the next couple of rounds of renewals with such incumbent vendors a much more enjoyable experience than it likely has been. As he appears to have found with Microsoft.
