During a closed beta phase, invited early adopters help to stir interests and create wants for the product, in addition to populating the network with contents, setting tone for the budding community, providing functionality feedback, and load testing infrastructure.

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CIOs remain in charge of physical infrastructure, development, testing, disaster recovery, storage, compliance, risk and security.

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CIOs must understand the functions they support, so they can help these functions quickly put the infrastructure and applications in place to support quickly moving new ideas to market, testing them, and iterating them to general release.

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The import behind that statement is that customers can get on with the business of running a shoe business or a CPG company or a bank and begin withdrawing from the costly, maddening, and ultimately low-value world of evaluating, testing, purchasing, integrating, deploying, monitoring, patching, and babysitting vast swaths of infrastructure and applications and networks and storage.

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