Gavin Williams
Gavin is Vice President EALA for Cloud Computing. Gavin has 20 years of experience in Enterprise Customers delivering innovative IT solutions for business benefit. Gavin works with different customers throughout Europe to understand their business needs and helps them set technology strategy and direction. With particular focus on customers who wish to re-gear their IT Organisation and Services within the context of service provision from public/private cloud platforms.
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IT Strategy: Hitting Three Birds With One Stone
One of the reasons I enjoy my role at Avanade is because I get to have discussions with major customers around how disruptive technology shifts, (such as cloud), will make a difference to their business and IT strategies. However, it is quite rare for a customer to deal with these trends in isolation (I wrote [...]
2013 Tech Trends: The Hyper-Convergence Effect
One of the reasons I enjoy my role in Avanade is because I get to have discussions with major customers around disruptive technology shifts (such as cloud) and how they will make a difference to their business and IT strategies. However, it is quite rare for a customer to deal with these trends in isolation. [...]
Cloud and Consumerization… the Power of Choice In Sourcing
One of the reasons I enjoy my role at Avanade is because I get to have discussions with major customers about how disruptive technology shifts (such as cloud) will be to their business and IT strategies. The impact becomes even larger when coupled with other major trends such as Consumerization of IT, (which is what [...]
Cloud and “Pork Barrel” Politics: Why They Make IT Strategy Leaner and More Agile
One of the key principles in economic investment curricula is the principle of “sunk costs.” Bluntly, this means if you have invested in a proposition which you know is losing… don’t throw good money after bad. When it comes to IT strategy, this same principle applies. Traditionally, the extremely high cost of capital would [...]
The Changing Role of the IT Architect: If You’re Not Part of the Solution, You’re Part of the Problem
One of the defining trends in the evolution of computing has been the increasing diffusion of platform and control. Today, we have moved from a single mainframe tended by a small team of specialist administrators through distributed computing to the explosion of corporate/divisional Windows and Linux servers. This trend has taken a further leap forward in recent [...]
Will Cloudsourcing Eliminate Traditional Outsourcing?
In other posts, I have alluded to the fact that the cloud computing paradigm, (with it’s pay-as-you-go financial modelling and it’s prescriptive service descriptions), will present a disruptive factor in traditional sourcing, but I thought I would flesh this out a little more. Fundamentally this is all about what I refer to as the [...]
Cloud Freakonomics
I read a post a little while ago over here talking about Shadow IT. The comment was initially referring to a “scary statistic” where Gartner predicts 35% of enterprise IT expenditures will happen outside of corporate IT budget. While Access applications, or Lotus Notes apps, etc., have proliferated for many years outside of the [...]
The Cloud Battle: Public Vs. Private
The question of Public Cloud versus Private Cloud is one of the most contentious in the field right now. It generates some very heated debate between evangelists of both camps. The answer is of course “Your Mileage May Vary”. The most important thing for an organisation making a decision in this area is that [...]
Cloud Computing: Turning Commitment into Reality
In my previous post, I talked about why the cultural readiness was a sine qua non when moving to the cloud. If that does not exist, then any other efforts are, at best, academically interesting and, at worst, wasted and irrelevant. However, once the cultural commitment has been made, the business needs to set the framework [...]
Cloud Computing – The Difference Between Intention and Commitment
I deal with a lot of customers for whom, (unsurprisingly), cloud is very much on the agenda. However the challenge almost invariably is how they make this happen in reality. One customer had the intention to move 15% of all enterprise workloads into the cloud within a year, but halfway through the year, they [...]
