Founder, Chairman and CEO of Adaptivity, Inc, the company that is putting "IT Blueprinting" on the map of Enterprise IT, is adamant: IT must invest in architecture and engineering, and it must do so right away, here and now in 2010, 2011 and beyond.

An innovative IT executive, with an excellent track record in strategy, design, and the implementation of business-aligned enterprise technology platforms across large organizations, before founding Adaptivity Bishop served as SVP and Chief Architect of Wachovia's Corporate Investment Banking Technology Group, where his team designed, built, and implemented a leading-edge service-oriented architecture and utility computing infrastructure. So he knows whereof he speaks.

And speak he does, including an upcoming keynote on The Enterprise Cloud Revolution that he is due to deliver next month at Cloud Expo Silicon Valley, the seventh in the worldwide Cloud Expo series and the biggest yet (November 1-4, 2010 | Santa Clara Convention Center, Santa Clara, CA). He also blogs and appears on discussion panels, in newspaper interviews, and indeed anywhere that enterprise-grade industry thought leadership is to be found.

Cloud Computing Journal was lucky enough to be able to snag him on the day that Adaptivity announced its most exciting news yet: the securing of its first-ever venture funding, in the shape of a $7.2 million Series A round co-led by two of the most respected VCs in the business, namely Noro-Moseley Partners and Intersouth Partners.

Below is the Q&A, brought to you exclusively by Cloud Computing Journal:

Cloud Computing Journal: As a great follower of new IT colloquies wheresoever they emerge let me start by confessing my total admiration for "Living Blueprint" - who coined it, was it you personally or a team effort?

Tony Bishop: This was a team effort. Our client and partner collaboration brought out the concept with us.

Cloud Computing Journal: Did you ever think that the VCs would invest $7.2M in a colloquy?

Bishop: Ha!

Cloud Computing Journal: Just kidding. Did you ever think that VCs would invest $7.2M in a business idea that, to be blunt, is very al dente...not at all low-hanging fruit but really something special and nuanced and Bishopesque?

Bishop: It was a tough sell. The founders put in $3.5M personally and raised another $1M from friends and family first. This afforded us the ability to build out the software platform to a point where the VCs could visualize the applicability and see enough repeatable customer penetration to have the conviction to do the deal. It is ironic that as we approached the deal more venture types started coming out of the woodwork.

Cloud Computing Journal: How much does the success of Adaptivity owe to the synchronicity of the entire Enterprise IT spectrum now moving rapidly and hugely in the direction of dynamic solutions?

Bishop: This concept of dynamic solutions makes Adaptivity's value prop even more compelling. What we see is how the Living Blueprint addresses complexity and the economics of IT through automation, and harnessing the IT intellectual capital of a firm's enterprise IT and its associated vendors. When you take a silo/static IT model with lots of change and then throw dynamic management into the target state mix, it creates a compelling event to ensure everyone is on the same page in terms of priority, building, deploying and governing IT systems and its delivery to the business.

Cloud Computing Journal: Tell us about your hardest customer win. What was the vertical and what were the barriers you had to overcome.

Bishop: An OEM license of our software with a large systems component maker that will be announced in a couple of weeks. We had to show the extensibility of our design studio module that could apply vendor-specific rules, vendor-tailored logic correlation and vendor-specific Blueprint pages that combined their knowledge, our knowledge and select software partners logic into a self-service design platform.

Cloud Computing Journal: How about your largest customer win (to date).

Bishop: A Fortune 50 financial services firm headquartered in the UK. It is a multiple seven figures account.

Cloud Computing Journal: What are your immediate business goals for 2011?

Bishop: Grow our ecosystem of partnerships where we build out a large community of vendor-specific best practices as knowledge modules that our modeling and design studio can apply in providing intelligent decision support and automation across the IT lifecycle of firms' enterprise IT operations. In addition, we will be building our sales and customer delivery support groups to accommodate growing demand.

Cloud Computing Journal: What other huge consolidations are you expecting to witness in Enterprise IT in 2012?

Bishop: Integrated bundles of hardware and software management and runtime stacks - provided in a buy-as-you-use mode deployed locally or in the cloud.

Cloud Computing Journal: What, as a majorly successful CEO in a time of supposed recession, is your advice to other CEOs who've not recently been enjoying the same kind of success that Adaptivity has? Is there a secret sauce?

Bishop: No secret sauce... Two comments - work harder than everyone else and never give up in your focus.