As I am entering the beloved annual “planning season,” it occurs to me we are all in the same boat – we are wondering how do we keep up with and best plan for our IT Infrastructure needs? Now, I admit I may have an advantage as I am employed by an IT Infrastructure solutions provider but, what’s good for the goose is good for the gander right?

So, what does my technology roadmap look like for the next year? The next three years? The next five years? While doing some research, I came across a recent survey conducted by IBM with over 3000 CIOs. According to the report, “CIOs are recalibrating their toolsets: While the top 3 priorities remain the same, mobility and cloud computing made the biggest leaps among their visionary plans.”

Cloud computing adds flexibility, and the ability to explore new and alternative technology paths, without risking capital investments that can drag on our P&L for years to come. It also affords me another option when planning for both the short and long term.

So why cloud IT Infrastructure services and why now? When making IT capital purchases, the risk of buying and underutilizing an asset can grow quickly. Companies have been virtualizing infrastructure whenever possible to drive utilization and minimize investments. But the challenge of virtualization grows with the complexity of the environment, which can erode benefits rapidly. As we’ve all experienced, the business is constantly adapting to the market place and IT needs to move with them. What was a fantastic purchase last year can be this year’s boat anchor! Trying to anticipate the needs of the business is at best, a challenge.

Moving to a proven cloud provider allows me to focus on delivering timely solutions. The benefits of having the ability to flex technologies without the long term commitment and delivering highly secure availability and outstanding reliability through a cloud provider, like Internap, are considerable.

As you go into that that time of year we all look forward to (not!), our annual planning season, are you looking at all your alternatives? What portion of your technology investments are moving to the cloud? Is the cloud in your toolkit?

Afford your company (and your team) the flexibility and include the cloud in your lifecycle planning. Providers like Internap can be that key partner you are looking for.

By the way, how’s your 2012 planning going? What’s your biggest concern for next year?

If you are a cable subscriber like me, you probably have thought about cutting the cord to your cable box. My cable bill is $125 per month for HD Digital Video Recorder (DVR), high-speed Internet and a TV package that includes sports and TV Globo from Brazil (for my wife). Since 2001, I have had some form of DVR box in my house, and I cannot live without it. However, I can live without the 100+ channels that I never watch….so why should I pay $125 per month?

Over-the-Top (OTT) online video content options are increasing every day and are encouraging more people to cancel their cable service with savings of up to $80 per month. But, it’s not a mass-exodus just yet. With an OTT service from Netflix, Roku or Hulu, my wife can get all her favorite TV shows like Modern Family and The Soup, but getting every live ATP World Tour tennis match and TV Globo from Brazil would be a challenge today.

The OTT market is growing quickly. IMS Research forecasts that in 2016, OTT video service providers will generate $16.4 billion in revenue. This has made CEOs at cable companies think about how to move features out of the cable box and into the cloud, as Brian Roberts, the CEO of Comcast explains in this video clip.

The cloud is taking the “Battle for the Living Room” to the concept of “TV Everywhere.” For example, cable companies are beginning to allow subscribers to stream some live TV channels to their mobile devices, such as the iPad, but only within the home. A true TV Everywhere service would leverage the cloud and include worldwide access to your favorite TV shows, live sporting events, DVR recordings and even your personal content. With Internap’s cloud storage and Content Delivery Network (CDN), every Live TV channel can be cached in real time so that you can pause, rewind and record Live TV without a DVR cable box. That sure would make your HDTV hanging on the wall look more elegant!

Despite its reputation as a commodity service offering, the data center market is filled with opportunities to differentiate and innovate. Unfortunately, for the most part, these opportunities are left unfulfilled. Why? Due to a behavior that I like to call “paving the goat paths” also known as, “it’s easiest to continue to take the well worn path.” Unfortunately, the easiest path, despite being well worn, isn’t necessarily the best.

The data center industry at large has embraced a path that has lead to the lack of real innovation since the time of the original dot.com bubble roughly a decade ago. Along the way data center providers largely forgot why they were in the data center business to begin with and began to force customers to compromise their business to fit facility specifications instead of finding ways to improve the data center to meet their customer needs. The industry has been able to “validate” its behavior on the basis of two myths: 1) data centers are full so they must be meeting customer needs and, 2) the data center is a commodity necessary to access other valuable services; focus on the valuable services and all will be forgiven.

Several years ago Internap began to change the course of our data centers by focusing on three key themes. First, our data center should be able to supply the power (and cooling) needed by a rack of IT equipment rather than limit equipment based on power draw. Second, our data center must operate as a “home away from home” for enterprise businesses that spend a significant portion of their time in our facilities. Third, our data center is designed with an eye toward green practices that maximize energy efficiency and reduce our dependence on fossil fuels and natural resources.

In roughly 60 days, Internap will open our new data center in Dallas. The facility offers our customers the ability to deploy into cabinets at an advertised 12KW of draw – we can probably do 18KW but we haven’t seen much demand for that density yet. At the same time, the customer amenities from break rooms and lounges to office spaces, provide a place to conduct business rather than simply house it. The facility has me excited not simply because its ours – so this post isn’t a shameless plug altogether – but because its success can excite a stagnant industry, giving IT professionals a chance to get off the “goat paths” and pave a new highway to success.

For weeks, I have been anticipating Target’s launch of Italian luxury knitwear designer, Missoni. I covet Missioni’s luxurious, iconic designs and have been checking Target’s website daily to get a sneak peak of the line including clothing, house wares and shoes! (Flashback to last year’s Liberty of London launch when I coerced unsuspecting Target employees to give me access to the collection before it was put on the shelves.) But I digress.

Turns out, I am not the only one obsessed. Yesterday, Target’s website crashed several times throughout the day as frenzied shoppers inundated the site trying to get their piece of the designer pie. According to a study by the Aberdeen Group, performance problems can account for an average of $117M of revenue lost annually. I wonder how much Target lost yesterday? Not to mention how many frustrated fashionistas were created.

But the real question is, what was missing from their IT Infrastructure solution? The Cloud. The cloud enables enterprises to quickly turn up more capacity during events that create bursts of demand, giving you built-in failover insurance. As an example, many retailers leverage a public cloud solution during the busy holiday buying season. So if your website could possibly take a hit like this, you may want to consider your options with public cloud.

I was recently reading an article on Internetretailer.com that discusses the impact of performance on e-commerce sites which can ultimately lead to a decrease in conversion rates and increase in abandonment rates. Page loads have always been an issue, but the problem is now further exacerbated by increasingly complex content – videos, social media icons, customer reviews and tags for analytics and advertising. Speaking of social media, according to the article, the Google +1 and Facebook “like” buttons on your website can slow page loads by up to a full second. Whoa!

If it feels like your website is being held hostage, it is! The question is what can you do about it? Website Performance Optimization – aka – WPO. WPO technology can boost performance, enhance visibility, expand your user base and increase revenue. While this article does a great job describing the content optimization techniques you can employ to improve the performance of your website, there are also a few changes you can make on the networking side to dramatically improve website performance. To understand the impacts of poor performance and how WPO can positively impact your bottom line – download this Internap infographic.

A few team members from our marketing organization were at Dreamforce 2011 last week in my favorite city in the U.S. – San Francisco, the city by the bay. Dreamforce is billed as the cloud computing event of the year and I can tell you that it did not disappoint.

Metallica headlined the Global Gala and, while my colleagues were banging their heads to “Master of Puppets,” I began to think about Metallica, the big conference themes of cloud, mobile and social and how it all converges. Nothing escapes the impact of technology and the music industry is certainly no exception. It comes as no surprise that Apple has garnered a lot of attention with the announcement of iCloud. Part of iCloud’s appeal is that it will push media to any of your Apple devices. So if you bought an album on your iMac, it would push it to your iPhone or iPad. Research in Motion (RIM), the makers of Blackberry, are incorporating a social twist with their recent announcement of the BBM Music service, which allows users to share their music library with their friends who are also subscribers.

Marc Benioff and his team at Salesforce.com as well as the big three that kept coming up at Dreamforce – Apple, Facebook and Google – have made it clear that we’re all living in a social and mobile world, with the cloud as the foundation. Making a business case for the cloud no longer seems to be the issue. However, determining the right cloud solution for your business can still be perplexing and requires a complete analysis. Download our Decision Brief on Cloud Hosting to help you determine which solution is right for you.

So now, not only is the Cloud the future, it is also cool. Thank you Metallica!