CIOs cite Cloud, Mobile as Focus of IT Spending

Grazed from Wall Street Journal. Author: Clint Boulton.

CIOs are focusing the bulk of the growth in their IT spending on cloud computing and mobile technologies, which squares with the findings of Gartner’s new report on global IT spending.

Dominion Enterprise CIO Joe Fuller said mobile application development currently accounts for 26% of his total budget for the marketing services firm, but will rise to 40% by the end of the year as the company seeks to better compete with Zillow and other online brands.

He and his team developed roughly 29 mobile applications to enable customers to access brand websites such as ForRent.com and Homes.com from the iPhone, iPad, Android and Windows Phone handsets. “We want to have the best mobile offerings out there,” Fuller said. “So we’ve got to step it up a notch.” Fuller is also on the process of testing hybrid cloud computing using virtualization software from VMware with the notion to gradually move away from locally-stored software to a complete cloud for its brands…

Land O’Lakes CIO Barry Libenson said he is running most of the company’s dairy and agriculture business on the cloud. He runs business software from Oracle’s cloud, IT help desk applications from newly public ServiceNow, and human resources software from SuccessFactors. He estimates these applications account for roughly 2% of his total IT spend. In mobile, he is building iPad tablet apps for agriculture sales people, mobile field diagnostics software for the crops business and Android and iOS apps that help dairy customers grab recipes on the go. He estimates these activities might account for 1% of his budget.

Cloud computing is also a boon for Hugh Scott, CIO of Energy Plus, a subsidiary of NRG Energy. He said his company launched its public-facing website and customer enrollments engine in the cloud, hosted by SunGuard. He is also testing Amazon Web Services in development environments, and is using an web-based social application called HipChat.

However, Scott is also wary of some of the risks of the cloud, such as the recent AWS outage, which left Netflix, Pinterest and Instagram unable to service their customers last month. “One of the learnings we had early last year when we were starting to play with cloud technologies was that there was always a risk of something like this happening,” Scott said.