Larry Carvalho

Solutions from legacy IT vendors face increasing challenges from start-ups. These legacy solutions, while technologically advanced, fall behind when customers evaluate features/function. For example, Amazon built a very successful cloud solution with experience from a large community of start-ups and beat IBM to win the CIA's multi-year cloud deal. Several legacy IT vendors are seeing revenue drop as a result of increased losses to start-ups under current market conditions. While analyzing an uptick of such wins, I noticed a trend that the commonalities between winning solutions included strong community support. In this context, community is a collection of start-ups, partners and/or consumers. Below are some solutions enabled by strong community support that I believe are challenging legacy vendors' solutions. Mobile Mapping and Waze: With advances in mobile adop... (more)

Business Transformation and Systems Integrators

Over the past few months, I have interacted with several organizations that are evaluating changes to their business model to adapt to the cloud-enabled IT ecosystem. Management is in a quandary over maintaining their profitable lines of business while growing revenue in new and emerging areas. The problem they face is that some emerging business lines are only possible with completely revamped business models requiring significant change. Some very large organizations, like Dell, are taking the significant step of going private to enhance the transformation process outside the pu... (more)

Changing Your Business Model with OpenStack

In a recent presentation to Managed Service Providers (MSPs), I stressed that embracing standards had to be on their list of strategic priorities. Cloud solution success is based on a successful assembly of services from multiple providers for which standards play a key role. Included on that list should be OpenStack, the hottest open source project in cloud computing that has drawn the investment and attention of leading IT vendors like AT&T;, Dell, IBM, HP and Red Hat. So, should you care about OpenStack? Cloud-based disruptions in the IT industry began when Amazon started offeri... (more)

Self-Service and Managed Service Provider (MSP) Cloud Solutions

Customer self-service is a theme that is spreading across a number of industries. As a result, numerous jobs, including those in IT, are changing or becoming obsolete, while industries are becoming more efficient. Cloud computing is a key technology enabler in making these changes possible. Last week I spoke at the IBM Edge 2013 MSP summit in Las Vegas, where self-service through automation was emphasized at a number of sessions, with the IBM PureSystems family of products as an enabler. Managed Service Providers (MSPs) are a segment of the IT ecosystem that needs to pay attenti... (more)

Will Microsoft Be Successful in the Cloud?

When you think of IT vendors and cloud computing, companies like Amazon and Google first come to mind because they are very successful with start-ups that leverage their cloud services. HP, IBM and Oracle are making big strides primarily by targeting large enterprises with private cloud solutions. Cisco, EMC and Intel are primarily technology vendors serving as arms providers to cloud service providers. Microsoft falls in a unique category that dominates certain IT segments and covers customers ranging from start-ups, consumers and large enterprises. The recent Microsoft Build co... (more)