IT agility creates business agility

David Spark reporting for Riverbed at Interop '09, Las Vegas, NV.

On Wednesday, Interop '09 in Las Vegas opened with a keynote from John McAdam, President and CEO of F5, IT architecture infrastructure developers and load balancers. His topic of discussion was "Staying agile in a dynamic world."

For the past few years, and echoed this year once again during CIO Boot Camp, there's constant discussion about synergy between business operations and IT operations. McAdam said the reason for that is IT agility can create business agility.

Value add is the differentiation for businesses. Without it, everyone is a commodity.

Being a leading innovator requires IT agility

IT agility enables increased businesses to speed up and scale out its innovation. Cost is a factor. IT agility can reduce operational costs, even if there is an initial outlay. You'll drop costs in administration and deployment, management and troubleshooting, and purchasing upgrades, said McAdam.

You want to deliver value-added services faster than competitors, McAdam continued. First to market is a competitive advantage. It's not the end all be all, but it is significant.

The innovation of scale is constantly dealing with variance, said McAdam. And variance can come from any of four areas: user interactions, secure access, applications, and data.

To be able to handle the cost, scale, and speed of innovation, what's needed is a unified application and data delivery architecture. That requires an on-premise architecture, discreet and virtualized, plus augmenting some of that architecture with cloud computing, McAdam said. Some IT organizations will put all operations in the cloud for ultimate IT agility. It'll take some time before that happens.

For more, check out all of Riverbed's Interop '09 Las Vegas coverage.