Coté

Broadly speaking, CSO responsibilities fall into three categories—strategy development, resource allocation, and strategy execution—but activities within these three categories vary widely. (See Exhibit 1.) Most CSOs are responsible for identification of growth opportunities (84 percent of the executives we interviewed), strategic planning (82 percent), and M&A and divestments (82 percent). Other common responsibilities include monitoring long-term trends and outlook, gathering competitive intelligence, driving cross-business-unit initiatives, and sustaining business model innovation.

“We intend to compete aggressively in the commodity infrastructure-as-a-service marketplace,” he said. “We’re not going to have that alone … our intention is to sell our customers IaaS and the same customer a highly differentiated platform-as-a-service which will let us get better margins and a highly differentiated suite of applications for the cloud.” Oracle's cloud plans

“We intend to compete aggressively in the commodity infrastructure-as-a-service marketplace,” he said. “We’re not going to have that alone … our intention is to sell our customers IaaS and the same customer a highly differentiated platform-as-a-service which will let us get better margins and a highly differentiated suite of applications for the cloud.” Oracle's cloud plans

Continued soft demand for servers around the world resulted in a 3.7 percent decline in sales during the third quarter, according to IDC. A poor showing by IBM, which suffered a 19.4 percent decline in factory revenues during the quarter, enabled Hewlett-Packard to regain the title as the world’s top server maker. Cisco and the ODMs have growth (and a tiny bit from HP), it seems. On the other end, Amazon is selling out of it’s high-end servers, C3, showing that there’s some sort of demand for higher horse power.

Continued soft demand for servers around the world resulted in a 3.7 percent decline in sales during the third quarter, according to IDC. A poor showing by IBM, which suffered a 19.4 percent decline in factory revenues during the quarter, enabled Hewlett-Packard to regain the title as the world’s top server maker. Cisco and the ODMs have growth (and a tiny bit from HP), it seems. On the other end, Amazon is selling out of it’s high-end servers, C3, showing that there’s some sort of demand for higher horse power.

Continued soft demand for servers around the world resulted in a 3.7 percent decline in sales during the third quarter, according to IDC. A poor showing by IBM, which suffered a 19.4 percent decline in factory revenues during the quarter, enabled Hewlett-Packard to regain the title as the world’s top server maker. Cisco and the ODMs have growth (and a tiny bit from HP), it seems. On the other end, Amazon is selling out of it’s high-end servers, C3, showing that there’s some sort of demand for higher horse power.

To speed up development of custom written applications, of course. OpenStack on Wall Street - Developers

To speed up development of custom written applications, of course. OpenStack on Wall Street - Developers

To speed up development of custom written applications, of course. OpenStack on Wall Street - Developers

Last week I was in an online panel with Flexiant and ThinkGrid talking doling out advice for service providers who want to go cloud. Rather than the usual vendor/analyst dynamic, we managed to get an end-user, as it were, on as well, Rob Lovell, CEO of ThinkGrid. The result was a fun discussion: we focused a tremendous amount of getting not only the proper, differentiation and asset-advantaging strategy in place, but also starting small and working iteratively to learn what will work, you know, Lean Startup style.