Mike Vizard, a blogger for IT Business Edge, has been covering enterprise IT issues for 25 years as an editor and columnist for publications such as InfoWorld, eWeek, Baseline, CRN, ComputerWorld and Digital Review. We spoke with Vizard to get his take on the state of IT management and the cloud.

Precise: How would you compare the top three IT issues from when you first started covering the space, to today?

MV: In a way, it’s more of the same. In the ’80s, it was all about PCs, outsourcing, and packaged apps versus custom apps. Today, it’s BYOD, Cloud and SaaS. If you think about that, it’s the long march toward self-service and IT consumerization. IT is starting to figure out that they aren’t about owning the factory anymore but orchestrating services.

Precise: Do you think IT people are happy about that change?

MV: That depends on their level of enlightenment, which is not necessarily tied to their age.

Precise: What do you think the “IT department of the future” will look like, over the next one to three years?

MV: The orchestrations will take place across multiple tiers, and it will all be tied to the value of the service. If it’s not core or it’s not used much, it’s probably going to go external. For an application that’s a true business differentiator, it will likely stay on-premise. In the past, all data was managed equally but now, IT is going to need a better understanding of the value proposition. The business people will also have to engage IT. Both parties are equally responsible for the relationship, but the IT guys often get caught in the middle and may unfairly get blamed when something goes wrong. A lot of people are looking toward the new generation of “millennials” to bridge the gap, but that will take time.

P: What about size? Are smaller IT departments here to stay?

MV: Size is no longer a metric of the value of IT. The number of administrators required has scaled to levels that no human being can handle, so companies need to rely more on IT automation. IT staff will need to operate at higher levels of extraction, with more reliance on tools instead of manual labor and custom scripts for managing servers.

P: And, the CIO role? How is that changing?

MV: The CIO has to focus on getting value from information, and the metric is the mean time for decision-making in the business. Today there are three different types of CIOs–the IT guy who moved up, the business guy who moved over and the consultant who comes in from the outside. None of those models are cutting it because the role needs to bring together equally the business and IT expertise.

P: Is the Cloud really all it’s been hyped up to be, in reality?

MV: I think there is a lot of noise around Cloud but beneath it there is new technology and some new ways of managing IT. Cutting the signal to noise ratio is hard but if you look at cloud computing and draw a line in the sand, it’s about the way we used to manage IT and here is how we will do it moving ahead. IT needs to rethink the way they manage, and adopt more sophisticated tools and technologies to do it.

P: What do you find most annoying when talking to vendors about their products?

MV: Vendors are increasingly acting like they are the center of the universe and they want to control the stack. So you have Cisco, HP and IBM all trying to win the full stack in the name of efficiency and cost savings. That doesn’t reflect any kind of reality. They have an assumption that somehow or another 50 years of IT investment is going to disappear. The situation is that we have multiple platforms and they all need to be optimized. Vendors need to recognize that they are part of an ecosystem and they should do better at making their products work with others.

P: Finally, what do you predict will be deemed the “next big thing” in enterprise IT, once the topic of cloud computing has settled down?

MV: The next big thing will be getting to the business value of the convergence of Big Data, mobile and cloud. We’ll go from conversations on the latest gee whiz technology to stepping back and saying–how do all these new technologies change my business end game. The company that’s close to doing this is IBM, but so far no one is really stitching it together end to end. The industry needs more open frameworks to make it happen. Those frameworks are at best today, rudimentary.

Why do companies need APM software? The answers will vary, but mostly it’s to keep users happy and productive. Sometimes those users are employees who need reliable access to data and reports to better serve customers. Other times, the users are the customers themselves, who will quickly defect to a competitor if they cannot use a product as it was designed or expediently conduct transactions on your website. Here are just two examples of how Precise helps its customers improve application performance, reduce IT spending on troubleshooting and infrastructure management and help drive business objectives.

Global Cosmetics Company

Cosmetics, like fashion, is a constantly-changing industry in which customer behavior and desires must be frequently analyzed to guide product development. One Precise customer, a brand-name cosmetics company, is expanding into markets such as South America, and needs technology that can scale without compromising performance for business users around the world. The company has two major Oracle data warehousing applications, one in the United States and the other in the UK. Employees use the applications to gain intelligence around sales, performance and customer buying trends.

The company had experienced consistent problems with batch processing in the applications, specifically, delays in loading data to the application. As a result, business users were not receiving critical reports when they needed them.

Precise began by conducting an assessment to baseline the performance of the Oracle applications, and then with its longtime partner EMC, developed a storage-tiering strategy. The analysis indicated that upgrading to EMC VMAX technology would deliver significant performance gains and also demonstrated which data sets could be tiered down to existing EMC devices, depending upon business priority. The ability to concretely understand “just enough” technology investments is critical for small and large IT departments today, which are grappling with greater demand yet have static or declining budgets.

The infrastructure and application teams were excited to know that with Precise, both teams can now see the same data and metrics around performance, instead of having to use different solutions and then correlating the data. Beyond expected performance improvements in batch processing, the company’s new infrastructure will be able to support the consolidation of data needed to effectively expand into new markets through the help of ongoing, proactive performance monitoring.

Medical Device Enterprise

When you’re selling products to doctors and clinicians, they better be simple, easy to use and powerful. While medical professionals are increasingly technology savvy, they can’t afford delays when trying to retrieve and analyze patient information. A large maker of medical devices was having trouble with an application it had developed for its physician customers. The application, which makes patient cardiac data available over the Web, had been running poorly for some time and physicians were unhappy. It was taking too long to access the data, which the application was collecting from implanted cardiac rhythm management devices. To make matters more complex, the device maker was using several point solutions to monitor its IT environment — none of which were adequate for monitoring database performance and storage performance.

The medical device company was in the middle of developing a new version of the application to resolve those issues, but it needed to help users now. Through the help of Precise, the company was able to optimize its environment for the old and new version of the physician software and develop a process to manage quality of service during and after migration.

The IT department deployed Precise as its core APM software, delivering a consolidated, end-to-end view of application issues and a more reliable solution to keep its end-customers productive on the job.

Over the coming months, we’ll be sharing more stories that demonstrate how Precise is working in different industries to help companies gain the maximum value from their enterprise applications.