On-demand computing brings a major shift in the way enterprises think about IT challenges. For the past decade or more, the idea was to integrate–to make disparate software applications work together.With on-demand, IT becomes a set of functions a vailable on the network. “This is an architectural change,” says Jason Bloomberg, a senior analyst at Waltham, Mass., research firm ZapThink. “And software architectures have always been very difficult to understand, let alone change.”

“Today, the CIO is fundamentally thinking about making IT meet the needs of the business,” says ZapThink’s Bloomberg. ” In the past, most IT groups weren’t very good at that.Well, the CIO doesn’t want to be the bad guy anymore. In those C-level meetings, he wants to say, ‘We have a flexible IT organization that can meet the needs of the business and do it with low risk.’

Read more at: Enterprise Leadership (BMC Software Magazine)