Published on the 07/05/2015 | Written by Beverley Head
One of Australia’s leading chief information officers has delivered a sharp kick to the information technology industry for clinging to old business models at the expense of cloud…
Speaking at CeBIT yesterday David Boyle, CIO of NAB, said: “At times it feels like enterprise-class leading software providers who’ve got the richness of functionality in their platforms – some of them are stuck in the old world and addicted to the drug of upfront revenue recognition and flogging products.”
Vendors’ cloud rhetoric has yet to be matched by reality according to Boyle.
“So my challenge to the IT industry as a whole … is are you moving fast enough to completely redesign your platform to be relevant and agile in fast speed IT or are you still flogging old speed IT offerings?
“If you are still asking for upfront licences rather than having an as-a-service platform for your software offering then it’s no longer relevant – we’re no longer going to buy technology that way.
“I think about your commercial model. I need to understand in depth your schedule and your calendar for continuous evolution of your platform in an as-a-service environment; which release is going to have telemetry, which release is going to have a level of devops capability in it that will enable me to move your functionality into the future world?”
Given that the bank spends A$1 billion a year on information technology, Boyle’s clear message about cloud will resonate for many industry players.
Boyle also warned end users that they shouldn’t be fooled into thinking it was possible to lift legacy applications onto infrastructure-as-a-service and suddenly become more effective and agile.
He acknowledged the rise of two-speed IT as enterprises shifted off legacy and onto more modern computing platforms, describing the opposing ends of the information system spectrum as being either horse drawn carriages or Ferraris, which ascribed to an agile devops culture.
“If you took a horse and cart and put it on a freeway…yes would get from A to B faster, but that doesn’t make it a Ferrari.”
Instead the entire IT stack and culture has to be upgraded. “At NAB some teams are really nailing this – our partnership with Amazon Web Services and Adobe for content management for example where the whole stack is working, the cycle times have gone from six months to six weeks.”
But he stressed: “It’s no good to have infrastructure-as-a-service if the whole operating model is not delivering the benefit all the way through. What we are not keen to be doing is uplift previous generations of business applications and plonk them on IaaS – you get improvements but not agility.”
