Optimizing the IT business supply chain utilizing cloud computing

Information technology applications and systems are essential to businesses and enterprises as they implement business components of the enterprise. In some cases, IT is the business, such as with financial services. Optimizing Return-on-Investment (ROI) in the IT area is essential to the business performance. Reducing cost is one component of ROI, however the predominant value is increasing revenue. IT is essential to the enterprise agilely to exploit new business opportunities. Cloud computing is emerging as a technology for optimizing IT costs and supporting agility. Enterprises are incrementally moving to cloud computing in an exploratory, ad hoc manner. Since, enterprises think in terms of IT Services that IT provides to the business, and an IT service is interconnecting hardware and software resources, the management aspects are conceptually similar to a manufacture or retail supply chain. As a result, exploiting cloud computing is a supply chain management problem for IT services using cloud computing. This paper describes the architecture requirements and implementation of a set of components for optimizing the IT supply chain using cloud computing.