“If the rate of change on the outside exceeds the rate of change on the inside, the end is near.” That’s Jack Welch offering what may be the most urgent words for today’s IT leaders who are staring down unprecedented external change.

Public cloud services like Amazon EC2 are revolutionizing IT service delivery at a blistering pace. As I’ve asked before: why wait weeks and months when minutes will do?

By comparison, most IT organizations look downright poky. That’s why demand will follow the path of least resistance to the cloud, with or without IT’s blessing.

Sometimes this perspective is dismissed as hyperbolic doomsaying. I’ve heard:

“Our policies will never allow applications to run in the public cloud.”

If you ask me, these are the words of the disintermediated-in-waiting.

It turns out that policy is a dull instrument in the face of economics. When dollars are on the line, even the toothiest policies are quickly defanged.

Chuck...

This article originally appeared in HPC in the Cloud.

At a very young age, my mother told me to consider the source—to never take authoritative pronouncements at face value. I hadn’t thought much about this back in those more innocent days, but as my cynicism has matured, I’ve learned that behind such declarations is often an agenda that’s hidden only in vain.

The worst offending is often the impossibly pithy—slogans that are a little too packaged and pristine to represent any authentic truth. If it sounds too neat and convenient, chances are it’s an agenda-backed instrument of manipulation.

A good example of this is the cautionary refrain from Marc Benioff, CEO of Salesforce.com; and Werner Vogels, CTO of Amazon Web Services:

“Beware of the false cloud!”

These gentlemen are visionaries and revolutionaries in their own rights; they have...

Meet Walter.

Walter thrives on change. He’s nobody’s victim.

He knows that embracing IT automation is the safe bet for his career.

But Walter is a doer. Why isn’t automation a threat?

Because it’s how he controls his own destiny. It’s how he builds his personal brand. It’s how he rides the wave of change, rather than fighting against the tide.

Every so often, everything changes. Our set-your-watch-to-it routines are turned upside down by fundamental market shifts that render yesterday’s truths … false.

In IT, we’re particularly vulnerable to these disruptions. Here, the pace of change tends to clock at a particularly high rate. For some, change is what makes it all interesting. It’s the thrill of the sport.

But for many, change is hugely unsettling.

That is why, in IT, we often see patently dysfunctional behaviors perpetuated ad infinitum. Politics, protectionism, inertia and control freakery all flying...

When we decided to build support for managing Windows apps into the rPath product line, there was a lot of surprise both internally and externally. After all, rPath was founded by a team with strong open source roots which helped build Red Hat into a significant enterprise vendor. We spent a lot of time selling the value of Unix to Linux migrations, with Unix to Windows being the obvious alternative. Why would we all “give up” on Linux in the enterprise and start building Windows solutions?

What we all realized is that rPath’s products are about managing large numbers of systems. We give our users a way of automating how software is deployed to thousands of machines, and we provide strong version control over the full software stack on those systems. There is nothing Linux specific about the problems we solve; the problems are prevalent wherever there are servers running software.

We began this process by supporting standard enterprise Linux offerings (like Red Hat...