Today, most sizable IT organizations have hundreds, if not thousands, of licenses for software tools that are critical for building and running the databases and applications that power their business. Managing these tools and their associated licenses, including deploying, provisioning, and updating them, is time-consuming and incurs many hidden costs. There are also real productivity costs when IT professionals can’t readily access the tools they need at the right time. On the other hand, putting a bunch of tools on a server with no management, provisioning or usage tracking capabilities around them can come at an even higher cost. So then, where should IT professionals or anyone else responsible for setting up and managing a tools infrastructure look for answers? The latest phenomenon sweeping the IT landscape – cloud computing – may hold the most promise to overcome this issue. The reduced complexity, lower costs and improved scalability afforded by enterprise clouds ar...

The IT industry today consists of a rapidly evolving and massively interconnected network of organizations, technologies, products and consumers. In contrast with the vertically integrated environment of the 1990s and millennium 2000, today’s industry is divided into a large number of domains producing customized components, systems, and services. The degree of interaction between firms in the industry is truly astounding, with substantial number of organizations frequently involved in the design, development, out sourcing, or implementation of even a single module of enterprise software suites. The IT ecosystem began the 21st century by entering a deep recession, made worse by over investments and business failures in the IT, Software and Telecommunications industries. At around the same time, Microsoft Corporation and the US Department of Justice entered into a Consent Decree (“Consent Decree”) that resolved their multi-year antitrust dispute. Since, this period of retrenchment, the ...