Many enthusiastically chant “cloud, cloud, cloud” but haven’t thought about what it takes for a successful application migration to the cloud.

The tech stack has a problem. It’s serious. It’s pervasive. And it’s insidiously hard to spot. Look at a typical tech-stack diagram; infrastructure at the base, platforms and middleware services above, applications at the top. Everything seems in order? The parts are all there. The diagram reflects how most organizations approach IT: infrastructure first, then platforms and services, finally applications.

Humans are compulsive comparers. We have a natural propensity to view things in our day-to-day lives by setting them against each other. It helps us to choose the most desirable option, prevents us from getting ripped-off, or even fuels our drive to innovate and improve. Let me touch on that last benefit conferred by our urge to compare. Last week, my colleague Rob Duncan waxed eloquent about the characteristics of IT champions at many enterprises. These champions exemplify Gartner’s Mode 2 IT behaviors by innovating with new technologies and IT practices. They compare their status quo to choices that can position their organizations to better compete in their industries by compressing time-to-market, lowering costs, and improving their responsiveness to internal customers. So, we asked a few of our customer champions about comparisons that drove their decisions for application delivery and services and their choice of the Avi Vantage Platform. Across the board, a few common themes came up when they described how they were able to shift focus from the tactical, task-oriented handling of appliances to the much more strategic approach of managing applications.