Gartner's Value Proposition to Clients Coursework

Gartner's Value Proposition to Clients - Coursework Example Gartner works with IT professionals under four key markets: IT end-user professionals, high-tech & telecoms professionals, supply chain professionals and investment professionals. Specifically, with regards to supply management organizations, Gartner is able to provide three services that are highly valuable. Gartner helps SMOs with: (1) the selection of the right products and negotiating for the best terms and pricing; (2) staying current with important innovations and cutting through the technology information overload and hype; (3) networking opportunities with peers in Gartner organized events such as the Outsourcing and Vendor Management Summit and the IT Financial, Procurement and Asset Management Summit. One example of Gartner’s supply chain management initiatives is the AMR Supply Chain Leaders – a product that offers a full portfolio of indispensable services to help organizations maximize their supply chain productivity through strategic advice, best practices and case studies, Gartner analyst inquiry, webinars, custom alerts, and industry-focused insight. (Gartner pdf 2). Gartner acquired AMR Research – the gold standard for research focused on supply chain management – in 2009. What are 5 tips in today's economy that can be shared with Clients? Supply managers to prioritize and enhance forecasting and planning activities as an antidote to imminent global inflation and supply shortages (Minahan 1) In volatile markets, it may be better to run more frequent and smaller sourcing projects to take advantage of fluctuating capacity and costs, as well as technological advances (Minahan 7) What is a hot topic in IT Supply Management today that clients are looking for direction on? What Key Findings, Recommendations can be made? The current hot topic in IT Supply Management today is how to relocate IT applications from Client-Server model to the new paradigm of Cloud computing model. Gartner proposes five ways through which organisations can migrate to the Cloud: re-hosting on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), refactoring for Platform as a Service (PaaS), revising for IaaS or PaaS, rebuilding on PaaS or replacing with Software as a Service (SaaS) (staff reporter 1). Each of these methods has specific situations where their use is preferable to the other. Re-hosting involves moving applications from one hardware environment to another without changing its form. This is appropriate for organizations that want to quickly migrate their systems with minimal revision to their system architecture. Refactoring offers good backward compatibility. Revising allows organizations to optimize their applications to leverage the cloud characteris tics of the Cloud provider’s infrastructure (staff reporter 7). Rebuilding enables one to deploy innovative features in the Cloud provide