Guest author Esmeralda Swartz is chief marketing officer at MetraTech.

At the inaugural Chief Digital Officer Summit in New York in March, where I moderated a panel discussion with CDOs from such companies as Disney ABC Studios, BBC, PBS and Rogers, defining the emerging role of the CDO was a key topic.

The role of the chief digital officer (CDO) in the enterprise has gotten a great deal of attention in recent months. For example, Gartner predicted that by 2015, 25% of organizations will have a CDO and further estimated that 20% of chief information officers (CIOs) have already taken on the responsibilities of the CDO.

Perhaps the best known example of the impact and influence of CDOs came last fall, when the Obama campaign successfully leveraged a team of digital leaders. All the tools of the trade - text analytics, social network/media analysis, Web personalization, computational advertising and online experiments and testing, among other things - were used for re-elect the President of the United States.

So what exacty is a CDO, and what do they actually do?

Demystifying The CDO

In the digital age, how well information is used may determine the commercial success of products and services. Converting legacy thinking, skills and business practices - along with legacy systems (both back office and front office) - to react to the new digital reality can determine the how competitive legacy businesses can be - especially versus companies that were born digital.

Adapting to the digital era requires a new skill set that existing leadership teams, including CIOs, don’t necessarily possess. At many modern companies, it’s hard to find anything that is not related to digital in some way. How do you separate digital strategies from business strategies?

The answer is you can’t – and you shouldn’t. A successful digital strategy requires a holistic approach, involving Web, mobile, social and traditional platforms.

CDO: Hybrid Of Marketing & Technology

In order for a CDO to be successful, he or she must have the authority and responsibility to execute a digital strategy and not have to beg, borrow and steal from other organizations to get the job done. This is not about running an IT infrastructure. CDOs are responsible for analyzing information and knowing how to leverage it. They are also responsible for knowing how to reach audiences across different platforms.

This is why the CDO role is more of a hybrid between marketing and technology and sits at the right hand of the CEO. Digital expertise, once a subset of the marketing and IT departments, is becoming a growing discipline in its own right. The CDO is part chief marketing officer and part technologist, but an outward-facing rather than inward-looking business leader.

CDO vs. CIO

While it is true that all things digital are powered by technology, CIOs typically focus on back-office technology. They are not generally the internal champions of front-office innovations. The CDO has the responsibility to use technology to connect with the modern customer and craft the experience they get.

Technology must deliver the experience the customer wants, not just what the underlying systems happen to be able to support. The CDO has to be able to acquire information, use analytics to understand customer behavior, and make adjustments based on that data.

That means CDOs need to be able to adjust products, offers and pricing as well as how it is marketed and delivered to the marketplace.

In the digital era, business models cannot be limited to what legacy IT is able to support. Instead, all business systems, including monetization platforms, must adapt to deliver the experiences customers want. Making sure that happens is the true role of the CDO.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

It's official: the cloud is boring. While some of you already felt like cloud was BOA (boring on arrival), the reality is that it's been causing all sorts of headaches within the enterprise. Until now.

As Forrester analyst James Staten suggests, new product announcements from both OpenStack and Microsoft Azure got a muted yawn this past week, which is a Very Good Thing, as he explains:

"[H]o-hum releases like these are signs of maturity that signal to enterprises that it’s now okay to invest. Let’s face it. Most enterprises are conservative. We don’t like to be first with any new, risky technology. That’s why we wait for the 2.1 release before trying something new... We’d like other companies to work all the kinks out of the system, live through all the stability issues and fix all the bugs so we can get a solid release to work with."  

As much as people have tried to hype the cloud over the years, hype is precisely the opposite of what was needed to make cloud mainstream. As such, it's arguably a great sign that cloud is about to surrender the hype crown to Big Data, at least as measured by Google searches (as pointed out by Timo Elliott):

It's about time. As a Unisphere survey (PDF) of Oracle users indicates, cloud is becoming strategic within the enterprise, and much more pervasive. As the survey reveals, 37% of enterprise managers are running or piloting private clouds, which is a jump from 29% two years ago. More significantly, an additional 26%  use public cloud services for enterprise applications, a big boost from 14%. 

This jibes with a new Barclays survey of 100 CIOs, which found them piling into the cloud. Indeed, cloud, second only to Big Data, topped the list of IT spending drivers:

In sum, for years we've known that cloud computing would be big. But that's not what CIOs needed to hear. They needed to know that it could also be boring. We have arrived!

Apparently, native apps have won. We even said so right here on ReadWrite. After all, Facebook apparently likes native more. 

Unfortunately, CIOs missed the memo, and the dirty little secret is that most of the world's software, including apps, is written for use, not sale. That means that most of the world's software is not going to follow what Facebook's mobile strategy is, but rather what those stodgy enterprises do.

Those stodgy enterprises? They're all in on HTML5.

I spent Wednesday afternoon with a who's who of enterprise CIOs and CTOs in New York City, talking about Big Data, cloud and mobile. With the Facebook Phone in mind, I polled the group on its mobile applications. Every single executive - not one exception - was building hybrid HTML5 apps, meaning the bulk of the app is written in HTML5 with a native wrapper to improve performance, add camera access, etc.

Every. Single. One.

And not just a few such apps. The bulk of their apps were hybrid HTML5 apps, both for internal employees and for external customers. 

Going Native?

Sure, there were some native apps, though generally not yet written for Android. ("We can't figure out what to do about Android," said one executive of a major financial services firm.) But overall, the CIOs I talked to, and there were roughly 100 in the room, were basing their mobile app strategy on hybrid HTML5 apps.

The CIO needs are different from Zynga's, or those of other consumer app developers. Many of the apps they're building are informational in nature, or have such a stringent need for broad access that these enterprises simply can't afford to alienate a particular mobile device demographic. They need to support iOS, Android, Windows, Blackberry, etc. And with the vast majority of mobile OSes now sporting HTML5-compatible browsers, the time is ripe for HTML5 apps.

Still Hiring For HTML5

The job numbers bear this out. While HTML5 can get pooh-poohed by consumer app developers like Facebook, it remains the hottest technology skill, as measured by jobs, more than holding its own with iOS and Android in absolute number of jobs:

And trouncing both iOS and Android in terms of relative job growth:

This corroborates Evans Data's finding in early 2012 that 75% of mobile developers were using or expecting to use HTML5, a number that seems to have moved from aspirational to actual in 2013. 

Hence, while the media will tend to focus on what it knows best - consumer apps - CIOs are working away on HTML5 strategies. Just ask Accenture. Yes, there are tradeoffs when going HTML5, just as there are tradeoffs when going native. For enterprise CIOs, however, broad, cross-platform access to employees and customers makes HTML5 a winning solution.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

Remember when "Other" was just a rounding error in market share reports? Now in the server market, it just might be the main event, as Facebook's Open Compute project, cloud computing, and other trends drive buyers to no-name server vendors instead of IBM, HP, and Dell. Time to short the incumbents?

According to new research from Gartner, server veterans like IBM and HP took a beating last quarter, with shipments plummeting 11.5% and 5.9%, respectively, contributing to an overall 0.2% server shipment slowdown. Meanwhile, so-called "whitebox" vendors that make up the "Other" category saw a 22% rise in revenues, and now account for 35.2% of global units shipped. IDC's market data showed largely the same incumbent malaise, with "Other" pumping revenues 14% year-over-year.

It used to be that such whitebox vendors like Quanta Computer, Wistron and Compal Electronics, all based in Taiwan, could be counted on to quietly build products for their name-brand American partners like Dell. No more. As Chris Gonsalves reports, companies like Google and Rackspace have looked to tailor servers to their requirements by going direct to Taiwan's leading ODMs, which has encouraged these vendors to start selling directly to more traditional enterprise accounts.

It's only going to get worse for the incumbents.

Cloud: Friend or Foe?

After all, the whole focus of cloud computing is to commoditize the server, making it a compute resource enterprises rent rather than buy. While not all workloads will move to the cloud, a big percentage will. In the cloud, enterprises simply aren't going to care whose logo sits on a box they can't even see.

And for those who do persist in managing their own datacenters, things like Facebook's Open Compute project may drive enterprises toward designing in lots of "Other." While Open Compute may not matter to most mainstream enterprises, as Mark Hachman points out, it's one more pressure point that incumbent server vendors could do without.

(See also The 5 Big Questions Dell Will Have To Answer To Survive.)

Ironically, the very thing that most threatens legacy server vendors could also save them, and then ruin them anyway: cloud.

IBM just announced it's getting behind OpenStack in a big way, basing all of its cloud services and software on an open cloud architecture. HP and others have also committed to OpenStack or other cloud platforms. Rather than be cannibalized by the public cloud, these server vendors are trying to extend their brands to private clouds, allowing enterprise customers to rent what they used to buy.

The problem, however, is that these vendors might be too successful. 

A Catch-22 in the Cloud

While public clouds like Amazon's AWS have been on a tear, they've still largely been relegated to test and development workloads. What happens when IBM and HP help make CIOs comfortable with the cloud? It's possible that those risk-averse CIOs will stick with the tried and true incumbents. 

But it's just as possible that once enterprises get comfortable with running mission-critical workloads on a private cloud that carries a shiny Dell logo, they'll take the next step into the public cloud, projected to be a $131 billion market by 2017, according to Gartner. Amazon has long argued that the real benefits of cloud computing are lost when trying to replicate them in private cloud deployments. While it's possible that IT will effectively mimic the public cloud, it's just as possible that developers and line-of-business executives will take their CIOs newfound enthusiasm for the cloud and run with it...straight to Amazon, Rackspace, or another public cloud provider.

In so doing, they'll inadvertently be growing "Other's" share of the global server market... and legacy server vendors' desperation to embrace the very thing that may kill them: the cloud. 

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

It's hard to believe, but just 10 years ago open source was considered "communist," an anti-American cancer and the terror of corporate legal departments everywhere. Now, as a recent Harvard Business Review article reports, it's business as usual. Mundane, even. Developers are to blame. Getting projects done proved far easier with open-source software than protracted licensing negotiations for proprietary software.

Now this same human desire to evade bureaucracy and foster productivity is driving broad adoption of cloud services, and this time it's not just developers driving adoption. Lines of business executives are also encouraging Shadow IT to skirt enterprise policies. The catch is that it is also introducing all sorts of security and management quandaries. Skyhigh Networks, a new startup launching today and funded by Greylock, aims to give CIOs insight and some control over these cloud services without becoming a bottleneck on productivity.

Data Security And Shadow IT

Today, services like Dropbox, for storage, and Remember The Milk, for task tracking, are used by employees in most Global 2000 enterprises, but rarely with the approval, or even knowledge, of corporate IT departments. Indeed, the use of cloud-based services is by now so widespread that corporate IT really has little insight into the pervasiveness of these cloud services within their organizations, as cloud pundit Ben Kepes has blogged.

Cloud services help achieve a goal which companies strive for, efficiency. However, cloud services can also be problematic, as they bypass the corporate infrastructure. No big deal, right? Wrong. For example, services may have user agreements that, clicked through quickly by impatient users, transfer IP-ownership over any data stored through their services. Cloud services may also store data in a way that allows information to be hacked by dangerous third parties.

Like the enterprise IT reaction against open-source software 10 years ago, there is a reflexive urge to just say no to cloud services and try to shut down all but a short list of approved ones. Good luck with that. It’s too late to try and cap cloud service adoption. A better approach is to get visibility into all the services running today, put in policies for their safe use, and let employees choose the services that work best for them. Just as happened with open source. Once IT got open-source software blessed by the legal department, with the risks understood and managed safely, there was no looking back. It’s everywhere now. 

Giving The CIO (Some) Cloud Control

Enter Skyhigh Networks. Skyhigh lets IT say "yes" by giving an enterprise visibility into all the cloud services employees are already using (usually 10X what IT has already formally approved), and providing tools to manage any risks and enable adoption.  

Skyhigh offers a cloud-based service that is frictionless to central IT and user experience. Give it 30 minutes and it will cleverly discover all third-party cloud services employees have running (e.g., Dropbox, Box, MindtheMilk, Salesforce.com, etc.), and show you a list of the most dangerous. Skyhigh already has risk profiles on more than 2,000 of the most popular enterprise services using risk metrics from the Cloud Security Alliance, which rates 50+ parameters for both security and legal risk. When IT sees everything running, it can put in place governance policies for employees to safely use all but the most dangerous cloud services. Instead of the CI"no" you have the CIO as guide, enabler, trusted adviser. 

Want a free pass to try Skyhigh? Here you go.

Going forward the service will also analyze use of these services for anomalies, powered by a Hadoop cluster engine. If a service or user behaves outside their norm, Skyhigh can alert IT. Finally, Skyhigh can also meter usage to compare to one's subscription agreements. One Skyhigh customer found that it was using 5,000 fewer Salesforce.com seats than it had purchased. That quickly translated into money in the customer's bank.

Skyhigh is currently being piloted by a handful of Fortune 20 companies, half-a-dozen Fortune 100 companies and another dozen 'normal' size companies like Netflix and Lucile Packard Children's Hospital. In each case, CIOs thought they had 25 to 70 cloud services running. An educated guess, but wrong. The fewest they found was 200+ and in two instances 2,000+, one of which includes a company known for its buttoned-down approach to security.

There's no going back on cloud computing. Like open source, it's here to stay. But also like open source, the best way for enterprise IT to confront the cloud is to understand and enable its sensible use. Skyhigh may offer a serious step toward that goal.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.

You can be forgiven for writing off Microsoft's mobile future. Given that Apple's operating income for its iPhone and iPad devices nearly surpasses Microsoft's total revenue, or that Google's Android market share makes Windows Mobile's share look like a rounding error, it's easy to disregard Microsoft's chances in mobile. That is, unless you're a CIO. Within the enterprise, CIOs continue to rate Microsoft above all other vendors, giving Microsoft some breathing room.

The question is, how much?

The CIO's Pick

Microsoft's Windows Mobile doesn't show up in IDC's latest numbers.  While IDC declares that Windows Phone/Windows Mobile made "market-beating" progress in the fourth quarter of 2012, with sales of Windows-based smartphones up 400% year over year, Android and iOS still combined to claim 87% of the 722 million smartphones shipped globally in 2012. Microsoft's share? Just 3%, according to Gartner.

Yet in Piper Jaffray's quarterly CIO Survey released last week, a full 45% of CIOs picked Microsoft as their most indispensable "mega-vendor." This may not sound like much, but the second-place vendor, Oracle, got half as many CIO votes. The next few vendors include SAP, Cisco, IBM, EMC, Hewlett-Packard and Apple, which got a mere 4%. The reports authors note:

CIOs state that 'there are really no alternatives to Microsoft. [Others said] 'MS services are getting better and will allow us to move more to the cloud,' and 'we are highly invested in their technologies and dependent on them extending their platforms.'

We believe Microsoft's dominance in the enterprise is underappreciated, and some of the threats against Microsoft, such as alternatives to the Windows desktop OS in the enterprise or productivity software, may be over-hyped in the near term. That said, keep in mind that our CIO survey does not address the large consumer business for Microsoft, which faces much more intense competitive pressures than its enterprise business.

In other words, whatever CIOs may want to buy, their employees are purchasing iOS and Android devices in droves. 

Even so, developer interest in the Windows platform may yet save Microsoft.

Sexiest Nun In The Mega-Vendor Convent

Despite its stumbles in mobile, developers continue to hold out hope. At least, developers of a certain age and vocation. According to a new Evans Data developer survey, Microsoft was picked as having "top relevance" among two-thirds of the 450 surveyed, and claimed the top spot among 90% of developers aged 46-50. Google came in second, and was listed as the mobile company set to dominate within three years. Apple? It came in fifth.

Yes, fifth.

Which, frankly, hardly seems credible. Commenting on the results, Creative Strategies analyst Tim Bajarin suggests:

I’m not surprised Microsoft is big with an older generation of developers, but what does that tell you? They’re sticking with a platform they’re comfortable with and hoping Microsoft hits it big. I’d be surprised if any of these developers who say they’re big on Microsoft or Android are not also supporting Apple. They have to be if they want to make any money.

Such results start to make sense if we separate developer interest from enterprise imperatives. According to Appcelerator's quarterly mobile developer survey, iOS and Android interest dwarfs that of Windows:

Source: Appcelerator, 2013

But among the enterprise mega-vendors, the few companies that control the vast majority of enterprise IT budgets, Microsoft tops the field as showing the most leadership in mobile among these same survey respondents:

Source: Appcelerator, 2013

This may not seem like a big deal ("Sexiest nun in the convent"), but given that 73% of enterprises have developed and deployed fewer than five applications, the mobile enterprise is still wide open. Keeping in mind Microsoft's clout with CIOs, even Microsoft's anemic 28% "leadership" rating could be enough to pave its way to significant traction within the enterprise.

Redmond's Fighting Chance

All that said, the bring-your-own-device (BYOD) phenomenon has largely rendered CIO edicts as to device preferences futile. IT has become an order-taker, rather than an order-giver, with regard to mobile devices. Microsoft may be cool with the suits, but it has yet to demonstrate that it can turn the heads of mobile developers.

Even so, it's too soon to count out Microsoft's mobile hopes. Not while it retains such fealty from enterprise CIOs and developers. With Microsoft CFO Peter Klein suggesting that Microsoft is closing in on "write once, run anywhere" cross-platform capability for Windows 8 to run across a wide array of form factors, which would allow the enterprise to have its cake (Windows desktop development) and eat it, too (Windows mobile devices), Microsoft's enterprise value proposition may be too tempting to ignore.