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NTEN Trends, Cloud Reality & More
By: Matthew Eshleman
NTEN Trends
NTEN 2012 was a blur and a blast. It was great to get to see so many energized and mission driven folks in one room. I found that there was a lot of diversity in the sessions offered (well maybe 7 sessions on metrics was too many). The IT Salon format, which I helped to push, went very well. One thing that I noticed at this year’s conference was the increasing number of larger organizations represented by their IT Director.
In years past, Peter Campbell IT Director at Earthjustice would be along at the top with an organization of approximately 180 staff in 10 different locations. This year there were many more organizations with 200, 500 or even 700 nodes represented. In our discussion time, I often found that over 50% of the participants were from organizations with over 50 seats.
It was great to see so many of those staff choosing to spend their very limited dollars an attend the NTEN Conference where they could learn something. I’m optimistic that this is a trend that will continue and it’s a challenge to NTEN to keep this group of folks engaged with relevant content and opportunities to connect with their peers.
The Reality of the Cloud
While the cloud was a hot topic in terms of sessions, the vast majority of organizations had yet to move to Google Apps, Office 365 or hosted Exchange services. There was a lot more interest in Office 365 amongst the largest organizations, particularly once the non-profit discount was figured into the equation.
While the cloud was a hot topic in terms of sessions, the vast majority of organizations had yet to move to Google Apps, Office 365 or hosted Exchange services. There was a lot more interest in Office 365 amongst the largest organizations, particularly once the non-profit discount was figured into the equation.
I’ve been impressed with it as a platform, but I still think that there is some maturation needed in order to give IT Directors the confidence that the benefits of moving to the cloud are worth the risks and lack of control that happens when you can’t walk down the hall and touch your server. Most of the folks at NTEN were using the SaaS layer of the cloud and very few were delving down into the cloud Platform as a Service or the Infrastructure as a Service.
The most common IaaS in use was the storage provided by S3 or CloudFiles. The raw capability and steep learning curve often led folks to go with other third parties that provided a more friendly user interface than building their own system. There was some good comments & chatter on the back channel. Here’s the link to my presentation. The hashtag for the session I did on the Rackspace & Amazon clouds is #12NTCldlab.
Session review
I was rather busy this conference presenting or facilitating sessions, so I didn’t get to attend as many other sessions as I usually do. I was happy to hear Donny Shimamoto (@donnyitk) talk about IT budgeting. Judging by the fervent note taking and great questions, I think that his session was well received. It was a challenge to me to take a much longer view of IT budgeting than I’m used to.
I was rather busy this conference presenting or facilitating sessions, so I didn’t get to attend as many other sessions as I usually do. I was happy to hear Donny Shimamoto (@donnyitk) talk about IT budgeting. Judging by the fervent note taking and great questions, I think that his session was well received. It was a challenge to me to take a much longer view of IT budgeting than I’m used to.
Donny recommends developing a 5 year budget because it gives you the chance to see the long term, recurring and replacement costs of various IT initiatives ranging from desktop replacements to major CRM project implementation. I also liked his recommendation for adopting the rubric of Run, Grow, Transform to categories our IT expenditures in such a way that helps us to look at how we are supporting our organizations. 60/30/10 seems like a healthy target to strive for over that 5 year budget period.
Tags: 2012NTC, NTC12, NTENOne Response to “NTEN Trends, Cloud Reality & More”
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Sarah Janczak Says:
April 17th, 2012 at 4:57 pmAwesome IT track wrap up Matt! Thanks so much for everything you did to help make the 12NTC a success.
It’s great to hear that you felt here were more IT Directors in attendance – hopefully we can keep reaching such a necessary segment of the NTEN community. Hope to see you at 13NTC!
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