The ongoing move to the cloud, both public andprivate, combined with increasing pressure for businesses to innovate in software and software-based services is creating new challenges for IT and traditional infrastructure. The increasingly rapid innovation and release cycles required to stay competitive today mean monolithic application architectures, conventional product management, and waterfall methodologies, etc. are often ill-suited to rapid innovation. All this can resultin IT being perceivedas a roadblocktoenabling andmeeting the needs of the business.However,over the last few years new development modelsand softwarearchitectures have, for some,enabled rapidinnovation and subsequentsuccess and disruption in the marketplace. IT truly can become “the factory of the 21st century” and akey enabler within the business.In this shortpaper we lookat some of these trends and how they can be adopted to enable businessesto innovate in a world where “speed is market share.