• Strategic alignment of your senior IT and business teams around the business value of cloud solutions
• Insights into opportunities to profitably deploy cloud computing within your organization. 
• Best practices and challenges around cloud adoption
• Understanding of current market trends, best-of-breed vendor offerings, and fit for deployment in your organization

The emphasis in the workshop will be on participation, interaction, and problem-solving in the context of your real-world business and technology landscape. The ideal size of the workshop is 10-12 participants to maximize value and encourage participation.

PROCESS

We begin our workshops with a presentation on state of the cloud:

• Overview and definition(s) of cloud solutions and their business value 
• Understanding of how other early-adopter enterprise customers are deploying cloud in their organizations and what is driving them towards cloud adoption and best practices and challenges
• Insight into the current trends in the cloud market, which cloud technologies are available and maturing, and which vendors are likely to deliver

We then moderate interactive discussions to:

• Develop a common understanding of current state of IT including current business needs and pain points
• Review current technology stack and high-level application landscape to identify cloud deployment and delivery options including core competencies, business needs, ROI, and TCO considerations
• Identify major challenges and hurdles in deploying cloud computing into your environment

Finally, we end the workshop with a call to action. Examples of next steps could be any or all of the following:

• Perform a detailed cloud business case analysis 
• Articulate and document a cloud strategy and roadmap
• Identify and evaluate relevant cloud technologies and vendors
• Perform a proof-of-concept prototyping exercise.

DELIVERABLES