Dana Gardner's BriefingsDirect

IBM feels cozy on sidelines as Oracle-Sun deal languishes in anti-trust purgatory

2009-11-18T06:25:00.001-05:00

You have to know when to hold them, and when to fold them. That's the not just slightly smug assessment by IBM executives as they reflect -- with twinkles in their eyes -- on the months-stalled Oracle acquisition of Sun Microsystems, a deal that IBM initially sought but then declined earlier this year.

Chatting over drinks at the end of day one of the Software Analyst Connect 2009 conference in Stamford, Conn., IBM Senior Vice President and IBM Software Group Executive Steve Mills told me last night he thinks the Oracle-Sun deal will go through, but it won't necessarily be worth $9.50 a share to Oracle when it does.

"He (Oracle Chairman Larry Ellison) didn't understand the hardware business. It's a very different business from software," said Mills.

Mills seemed very much at ease with IBM's late-date jilt of Sun (Sun was apparently playing hard to get in order to get more than $9.40/share from Big Blue's coffers). IBM's stock price these days is homing in on $130, quite a nice turn of events given the global economy.

Sun is trading at $8.70, a significant discount to Oracle's $9.50 bid, reflecting investor worries about the fate of the deal now under scrutiny by European regulators, Mill's views notwithstanding.

IBM Software Group Vice President of Emerging Technology Rod Smith noted the irony -- perhaps ancient Greek tragedy-caliber irony -- that a low market share open source product is holding up the biggest commercial transaction of Sun's history. "That open source stuff is tricky on who actually makes money and how much," Smith chorused.

Should Mills's prediction that Oracle successfully maintains its bid for Sun prove incorrect, it could mean bankruptcy for Sun. And that may mean many of Sun's considerable intellectual property assets would go at fire-sale prices to ... perhaps a few piecemeal bidders, including IBM. Smith just smiled, easily shrugging off the chill (socks in tact) from the towering "IBM" logo ice sculpture a few steps away.

And wouldn't this hold up go away if Sun and/or Oracle jettisoned MySQL? Is it pride or hubris that makes a deal sour for one mere grape? Was the deal (and $7.4 billion) all about MySQL? Hardly.

Many observers think that Sun's Java technology -- and not its MySQL open source database franchise -- should be of primary concern to European (and U.S.) anti-trust mandarins. I have to agree. But Mills isn't too concerned with Oracle's probable iron-grip on Java ..., err licensing. IBM has a long-term license on the technology, the renewal of which is many years out. "We have plenty of time," said Mills.

Yes, plenty of time to make Apache Harmony a Java doppelganger -- not to mention the Java market-soothing effects of OSGi and Eclipse RCP. [Hey, IBM invented Java for the server for Sun, it can re-invent it for something else ... SAP?]

Unlike some software titans, Mills is clearly not living in a "reality distortion field" when it comes to Oracle's situation.

"We're in this for the long haul," said Mills, noting that he and IBM have have been competing with Oracle since August 1993 when IBM launched its distributed DB2 product. "All of our market share comes at the expense of Oracle's," said Mills. "And we love to do benchmarks again Oracle."

Even as the Fates seem to be on IBM's side nowadays, the stakes remain high for the users of these high-end database technologies and products. It's my contention that we're only now entering the true data-driven decade. And all that data needs to run somewhere. And it's not going to be in MySQL, no matter who ends up owning it.

HP offers slew of products and services to bring cost savings and better performance to virtual desktops

2009-11-18T05:24:00.002-05:00

Hewlett-Packard (HP) this week unleashed a barrage of products aimed at delivering affordable and simple computing experiences to the desktop.

These include thin-client and desktop virtualization solutions, as well as a multi-seat offering that can double computing seats. At the same time, the company targeted the need for data security with a backup and recovery system for road warriors. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The thin-client offerings from the Palo Alto, Calif. company include the HP t5740 and HP t5745 Flexible Series, which feature Intel Atom N280 processors and an Intel GL40 chipset. They also provide eight USB 2.0 ports and an optional PCI expansion module for easy upgrades.

The Flexible Series thin clients support rich multimedia for visual display solutions, including the new HP LD4700 47-inch Widescreen LCD Digital Signage Display, which can run in both bright and dim lighting while maintaining longevity, and can be set in either a horizontal or vertical position. With the new HP Digital Signage Display (DSD) Wall Mount, users can hang the display on a wall to showcase videos, graphics or text in a variety of commercial settings where an extra-large screen is desired.

The HP t5325 Essential Series Thin Client is a power-efficient thin client with a new interface that simplifies setup and deployment. All new HP thin clients include intuitive setup tools to streamline configuration and management. These include the ThinPro Setup Wizard for Linux and HP Easy Config for Microsoft Windows.

In addition, HP thin clients also include on-board utilities that automate deployment of new connections, properties, low-bandwidth add-ons, and image updates from one centralized repository to thousands of thin clients.

Client virtualization

Three new client virtualization architectures combine Citrix XenDesktop 4, Citrix XenApp or VMware View with HP ProLiant servers, storage and thin clients to provide midsize to large businesses with a range of scalable offerings.

HP ProLiant WS460c G6 Workstation Blade brings centralized, mission-critical security to workstation computing and allows individuals or teams to work and collaborate remotely and securely. This solution meets the performance and scalability needs for high-end visualization and handling of large model sizes demanded by enterprise segments such as engineering and oil and gas.

HP Client Automation 7.8, part of the HP Business Service Automation software portfolio allows customers to deploy and migrate to a virtual desktop infrastructure environment and manage it through the entire life cycle with a common methodology that reduces management costs and complexity. Customers also capture inventory and usage information to help size their initial virtual client deployment and reoptimize as end-user needs change over time.

The HP MultiSeat Solution stretches the computing budgets of small businesses and other resource-constrained organizations by delivering up to twice the computing seats as traditional PCs for the same IT spend.

HP MultiSeat uses the excess computing capacity of a single PC to give up to 10 simultaneous users an individualized computing experience. This is designed to help organizations affordably increase computing seats and provide a simple setup, as well as reduce energy consumption by as much as 80 percent per user over traditional PCs.

Data protection and backup

To address the problem of mobile workers -- now estimated at 25 percent of the workforce -- potentially losing company data, HP is offering HP Data Protector Notebook extension, which can back up and recover data outside the corporate network, even while the worker is working remotely and offline.

With the Data Protector, data is instantly captured and backed up automatically each time a user changes, creates or receives a files. The data is then stored temporarily in a local repository pending transfer to the network data vault for full backup and restore capabilities. With single-click recovery, users can recover their own files without initiating help desks calls.

De-duplication, data encryption, and compression techniques help to maximize bandwidth efficiency and ensure security. The user’s storage footprint is reduced by deduplication of multiple copies of data. All of the user’s data is then stored encrypted and compressed and the expired versions are cleaned up.

HP introduced HP Backup and Recovery Fast Track Services, a suite of scalable service engagements that help ensure a successful implementation of HP Data Protector and HP Data Protector Notebook Extension.

Workshops and services

To help companies chart their way to client virtualization, HP is also offering a series of workshops and services:

The Transformation Experience Workshop is a one-day intensive session to help customers build their strategy for virtualized solutions, identify a high-level roadmap, and get executive consensus.
The Business Benefit Workshop allows customers to identify, quantify and analyze the business benefits of client virtualization, as well as set return-on-investment targets prior to entering the planning stage.
An Enhanced HP Solution Architecture and Pilot Service ensures the successful integration of the client virtualization solution into the customer’s infrastructure through a clear roadmap, architectural blueprint, and phased implementation strategy.

Products that are currently available include the t5740 Flexible Series Thin Client, $429; the t5745 Flexible Series Thin Client, $399; and is currently available, the LD4700 47-inch Widescreen LCD Digital Signage, starting at $1,799; and the ProLiant WS460c G6 Blade Workstation, starting at $3,044.

The t5325 Essential Series Thin Client starts at $199 and is expected to be available Dec. 1.

Elastra beefs up automation offering for enterprise cloud computing

2009-11-18T05:02:00.002-05:00

Elastra Corp., which provides application infrastructure automation, has upped the ante with the announcement this week of Elastra Cloud Server (ECS) 2.0 Enterprise Edition. The new addition from the San Francisco company will help IT organizations leverage the economics of cloud computing, while preserving existing architectural practices and corporate policies.

Relying on an increased level of automation, the enterprise edition:

Automatically generates deployment plans and provisions sophisticated systems that are optimized to minimize operational and capital expenses. At the same time, applications are deployed to be compliant with the customers’ own sets of policies, procedures, and service level agreements (SLAs).
Cuts the lead times IT needs to create complex development, testing, and production environments by automating the processes traditionally managed by hand or via hand-crafted scripts.
Lets IT organizations maintain control of their operations using familiar tools and technologies while delivering on-demand, self-service system provisioning to their users.

The beta program for the enterprise edition of Elastra Cloud Server involved customers from a variety of industries including: a large European telecommunications company, a leading US federal government systems integrator, and a major IT services and outsourcing company.

Elastra offers a free edition of ECS running on Amazon Web Services and an enterprise edition for private data centers.

I was impressed with Elastra when I was initially briefed in 2007. They have many of the right features for what the cloud market will demand. More data centers will be deploying "private cloud" attributes, and those will become yet larger portions of modern data centers.

BriefingsDirect analysts discuss business commerce clouds: Wave of the future or old wine in a new bottle?

2009-11-16T11:45:00.003-05:00

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript, or download a copy. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Also sponsored by TIBCO Software.

Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.

Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 46. Our topic for this episode of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition centers on "business commerce clouds." As the general notion of cloud computing continues to permeate the collective IT imagination, an offshoot vision holds that multiple business-to-business (B2B) players could use the cloud approach to build extended business process ecosystems.

It's sort of like a marketplace in the cloud on steroids, on someone else's servers, perhaps to engage on someone's business objectives, and maybe even satisfy some customers along the way. It's really a way to make fluid markets adapt at Internet speed, at low cost, to business requirements, as they come and go.

I, for one, can imagine a dynamic, elastic, self-defining, and self-directing business-services environment that wells up around the needs of a business group or niche, and then subsides when lack of demand dictates. Here's an early example of how it works, in this case for food recall.

The concept of this business commerce cloud was solidified for me just a few weeks ago, when I spoke to Tim Minahan, chief marketing officer at Ariba. I've invited Tim to join us to delve into the concept, and the possible attractions, of business commerce clouds. We're also joined by this episode's IT industry analyst guests: Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis; Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink; JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant, and Sandy Kemsley, independent IT analyst and architect. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

This periodic discussion and dissection of IT infrastructure related news and events, with a panel of industry analysts and guests, comes to you with the help of our charter sponsor, Active Endpoints, maker of the ActiveVOS, visual orchestration system, and through the support of TIBCO Software.

Here are some excerpts:

Minahan: When we talk about business commerce clouds, what we're talking about is leveraging the cloud architecture to go to the next level. When folks traditionally think of the cloud or technology, they think of managing their own busine ss processes. But, as we know, if we are going to buy, sell, or manage cash, you need to do that with at least one, if not more, third parties.

The business commerce cloud leverages cloud computing to deliver three things. It delivers the business process application itself as a cloud-based or a software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based service. It delivers a community of enabled trading partners that can quickly be discovered, connected to, and enable collaboration with them.

And, the third part is around capabilities --the ability to dial up or dial down, whether it be expertise, resources, or other predefined best practice business processes -- all through the cloud.

... Along the way, what we [at Ariba] found was that we were connecting all these parties through a shared network that we call the Ariba Supplier Network. We realized we weren't just creating value for the buyers, but we were creating value for the sellers.

They were pushing us to develop new ways for them to create new business processes on the shared infrastructure -- things like supply chain financing, working capital management, and a simple way to discover each other and assess who their next trading partners may be.

... In the past year, companies have processed $120 billion worth of purchased transactions and invoices over this network. Now, they're looking at new ways to find new trading partners -- particularly as the incidence of business bankruptcies are up -- as well as extend to new collaborations, whether it be sharing inventory or helping to manage their cash flow.

Baer: I think there are some very interesting possibilities, and in certain ways this is very much an evolutionary development that began with the introduction of EDI 40 or 45 years ago.

Actually, if you take a took at supply-chain practices among some of the more innovative sectors, especially consumer electronics, where you deal with an industry that's very volatile both by technology and consumer taste, this whole idea of virtualizing the supply chain, where different partners take on greater and greater roles in enabling each other, is very much a direct follow on to all that.

Roughly 10 years ago, when we were going though the Internet 1.0 or the dot-com revolution, we started getting into these B2B online trading hubs with the idea that we could use the Internet to dynamically connect with business partners and discover them. Part of this really seemed to go against the trend of supply-chain practice over the previous 20 years, which was really more to consolidate on a known group of partners as opposed to spontaneously connecting with them.

Shimmin: ... I look at this as an enabler, in a positive way. What the cloud does is allow what Tim was hinting at -- with more spontaneity, self-assembly, and visibility into supply chains in particular -- that you didn't really get before with the kind of locked down approach we had with EDI.

That's why I think you see so many of those pure-play EDI vendors like GXS, Sterling, SEEBURGER, Inovis, etc. not just opening up to the Internet, but opening up to some of the more cloudy standards like cXML and the like, and really doing a better job of behaving like we in the 2009-2010 realm expect a supply chain to behave, which is something that is much more open and much more visible.

Kemsley: ... I think it has huge potential, but one of the issues that I see is that so many companies are afraid to start to open up, to use external services as part of their mission-critical businesses, even though there is no evidence that a cloud-based service is any less reliable than their internal services. It's just that the failures that happen in the cloud are so much more publicized than their internal failures that there is this illusion that things in the cloud are not as stable.

There are also security concerns as well. I have been at a number of business process management (BPM) conferences in the last month, since this is conference season, and that is a recurring theme. Some of the BPM vendors are putting their products in the cloud so that you can run your external business processes purely in the cloud, and obviously connect to cloud-based services from those.

A lot of companies still have many, many problems with that from a security standpoint, even though there is no evidence that that's any less secure than what they have internally. So, although I think there is a lot of potential there, there are still some significant cultural barriers to adopting this.

Minahan: ... The cloud provider, because of the economies of scale they have, oftentimes provides better security and can invest more in security -- partitioning, and the like -- than many enterprises can deliver themselves. It's not just security. It's the other aspects of your architectural performance.

Bloomberg: ... I am coming at it from a skeptic's perspective. It doesn’t sound like there's anything new here. ... We're using the word "cloud" now, and we were talking about "business webs." I remember business webs were all the rage back when Ariba had their first generation of offerings, as well as Commerce One and some of the other players in that space.

Age-old challenges

The challenges then are still the challenges now. Companies don't necessarily like doing business with other organizations that they don't have established relationships with. The value proposition of the central marketplaces has been hammered out now. If you want to use one, they're already out there and they're already matured. If you don't want to use one, putting the word "cloud" on it is not going to make it any more appealing.

Morgenthal: ... Putting additional information in the cloud and making value out of that add some overall value to the cost of the information or the cost of running the system, so you can derive a few things. But, ultimately, the same problems that are needed to drive a community working together, doing business together, exchanging product through an exchange are still there.

... What's being done through these environments is the exchange of money and goods. And, it's the overhead related to doing that, that makes this complex. RollStream is another startup in the area that's trying to make waves by simplifying the complexities around exchanging the partner agreements and doing the trading partner management using collaborative capabilities. Again, the real complexity is the business itself. It's not even the business processes. The data is there.

... Technology is a means to an end. The end that's got to get fixed here isn't an app fix. It's a community fix. It's a "how business gets done" fix. Those processes are not automated. Those are human tasks.

Minahan: ... As it applies to the cloud and the commerce cloud, what's interesting here is the new services that can be available. It's different. It's not just about discovering new trading partners. It's about creating efficiencies and more effective commerce processes with those trading partners.

I'll give you a good example. I mentioned before about the Ariba Network with $111 billion worth of transactions and invoices being transferred over this every year for the past 10 years. That gives us a lot of intelligence that new companies are coming on board.

An example would be The Receivables Exchange. Traditionally sellers, if they wanted to get their cash fast, could factor the receivables at $0.25 on the dollar. This organization recognized the value of the information that was being transacted over this network and was able to create an entirely new service.

They were able to mitigate the risk, and provide supply chain financing at a much lower basis -- somewhere between two to four percent by using the historical information on those trading relationships, as well as understanding the stability of the buyer.
What we're seeing with our customers is that the real benefits of the cloud come in three areas: productivity, agility, and innovation.

Because folks are in a shared infrastructure here that can be continually introduced, new services can be dialed up and dialed down. It's a lot different than a rigid EDI environment or just a discovery marketplace. ... What we're seeing with our customers is that the real benefits of the cloud come in three areas: productivity, agility, and innovation.

... When folks talk about cloud, they really think about the infrastructure, and what we are talking about here is a business service cloud.

Gartner calls it the business process utility, which ultimately is a form of technology-enabled business process outsourcing. It's not just the technology. The technology or the workflow is delivered in the cloud or as a web-based service, so there is no software, hardware, etc. for the trading partners to integrate, to deploy or maintain. That was the bane of EDI private VANs.

The second component is the community. Already having an established community of trading partners who are actually conducting business and transactions is key. I agree with the statement that it comes down to the humans and the companies having established agreements. But the point is that it can be built upon a large trading network that already exists.

The last part, which I think is missing here, and that's so interesting about the business commerce cloud, are the capabilities. It's the ability for either the solution provider or other third parties to deliver skills, expertise, and resources into the cloud as well as a web-based service.

It's also the information that can be garnered off the community to create new web-based services and capabilities that folks either don't have within their organization or don't have the ability or wherewithal to go out and develop and hire on their own. There is a big difference between cloud computing and these business service clouds that are growing.

Shimmin: ... The fuller picture is to look at this as a combination of [Apple App Store] and the Amazon marketplace. That's where I think you will see the most success with these commerce clouds -- a very specific community of like-minded suppliers and purchasers that want to get together and open their businesses up to one another.

... A community of companies wants to be able to come together affordably, so that the SMB can on-board an exchange at an affordable rate. That's really been the problem with most of these large-scale EDI solutions in the past. It's so expensive to bring on the smaller players that they can't play.

... When you have that sort of like-mindedness, you have the wherewithal to collaborate. But, the problem has always been finding the right people, getting to that knowledge that people have, and getting them to open it up. That's where the social networking side of this comes in. That's where I see the big EDI guns I was talking about and the more modernized renditions opening up to this whole Google Wave notion of what collaboration means in a social networking context.
That's one key area -- being able to have the collaboration and social networking during the modeling of the processes.

Minahan: ... We're seeing that already through the exchange that we have amongst our customers or around our solutions. We're also seeing that in a lot of the social networking communities that we participate in around the exchange of best practices. The ability to instantiate that into reusable workflows is something that's certainly coming.

Folks are always asking these days, "We hear a lot about this cloud. What business processes or technologies should we put in the cloud?" When you talk about that, the most likely ones are inter-enterprise, whether they be around commerce, talent management, or customer management, it's what happens between enterprises where a shared infrastructure makes the most sense.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript, or download a copy. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Also sponsored by TIBCO Software.

Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.

ZapThink explores the four stages of SOA governance that lead to business agility

2009-11-16T09:51:00.002-05:00

This guest post comes courtesy of Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink.

By Jason Bloomberg

For several years now, ZapThink has spoken about SOA governance "in the narrow" vs. SOA governance" in the broad." SOA governance in the narrow refers to governance of the SOA initiative, and focuses primarily on the service lifecycle.

When vendors try to sell you SOA governance gear, they're typically talking about SOA governance in the narrow. SOA governance in the broad, in contrast, refers to IT governance in the SOA context. In other words, how will SOA help with IT governance (and by extension, corporate governance) once your SOA initiative is up and running?

In both our Licensed ZapThink Architect Boot Camp as well as our newer SOA and Cloud Governance Course, we also point out how governance typically involves human communication-centric activities like architecture reviews, human management, and people deciding to comply with policies. We point out this human context for governance to contrast it to the technology context that inevitably becomes the focus of SOA governance in the narrow. There is an important technology-centric SOA governance story to be told, of course, as long as it's placed into the greater governance context.

One question we haven't yet addressed in depth, however, is how these two contrasts -- narrow vs. broad, human vs. technology -- fit together. Taking a closer look, there's an important trend taking shape, as organizations mature their approach to SOA governance, and with it, the overall SOA effort. Following this trend to its natural conclusion highlights some important facts about SOA, and can help organizations understand where they want to end up as their SOA initiative reaches its highest levels of maturity.

Introducing the SOA governance grid

Whenever faced with to orthogonal contrasts, the obvious thing to do is put them in a grid. Let's see what we can learn from such a diagram:

The ZapThink SOA governance grid

First, let's take a look at what each square contains, starting with the lower left corner and moving clockwise, because as we'll see, that's the sequence that corresponds best to increasing levels of SOA maturity.

1. Human-centric SOA governance in the narrow

As organizations first look at SOA and the governance challenge it presents, they must decide how they want to handle various governance issues. They must set up a SOA governance board or other committee to make broad SOA policy decisions. We also recommend setting up a SOA Center of Excellence to coordinate such policies across the whole enterprise.

These policy decisions initially focus on how to address business requirements, how to assemble and coordinate the SOA team, and what the team will need to do as they ramp up the SOA effort. The output of such SOA governance activities tend to be written documents and plenty of conversations and meetings.

The tools architects use for this stage are primarily communication-centric, namely word processors and portals and the like. But this stage is also when the repository comes into play as a place to put many such design time artifacts, and also where architects configure design time workflows for the SOA team. Technology, however, plays only a supporting role in this stage.

2. Technology-centric SOA governance in the narrow

As the SOA effort ramps up, the focus naturally shifts to technology. Governance activities center on the registry/repository and the rest of the SOA governance gear. Architects roll up their sleeves and hammer out technology-centric policies, preferably in an XML format that the gear can understand. Representing certain policies as metadata enables automated communication and enforcement of those policies, and also makes it more straightforward to change those policies over time.

This stage is also when run time SOA governance begins. Certain policies must be enforced at run time, either within the underlying runtime environment, in the management tool, or in the security infrastructure. At this point the SOA registry becomes a central governance tool, because it provides a single discovery point for run time policies. Tool-based interoperability also rises to the fore, as WS-I compliance, as well as compliance with the Governance Interoperability Framework or the CentraSite Community become essential governance policies.

3. Technology-centric SOA governance in the broad

The SOA implementation is up and running. There are a number of services in production, and their lifecycle is fully governed through hard work and proper architectural planning. Taking the SOA approach to responding to new business requirements is becoming the norm. So, when new requirements mean new policies, it's possible to represent some of them as metadata as well, even though the policies aren't specific to SOA.

Such policies are still technology-centric, for example, security policies or data governance policies or the like. Fortunately, the SOA governance infrastructure is up to the task of managing, communicating, and coordinating the enforcement of such policies. By leveraging SOA, it's possible to centralize policy creation and communication, even for policies that aren't SOA-specific.

Sometimes, in fact, new governance requirements can best be met with new services. For example, a new regulatory requirement might lead to a new message auditing policy. Why not build a service to take care of that? This example highlights what we mean by SOA governance in the broad. SOA is in place, so when a new governance requirement comes over the wall, we naturally leverage SOA to meet that requirement.

4. Human-centric SOA governance in the broad

This final stage is the most thought-provoking of all, because it represents the highest maturity level. How can SOA help with the human activities that form the larger picture of governance in the organization? Clearly, XML representations of technical policies aren't the answer here. Rather, it's how implementing SOA helps expand the governance role architecture plays in the organization. It's a core best practice that architecture should drive IT governance. When the organization has adopted SOA, then SOA helps to inform best practices for IT governance overall.

The impact of SOA on enterprise architecture (EA) is also quite significant. Now that EAs increasingly realize that SOA is a style of EA, EA governance is becoming increasingly service-orientated in form as well. It is at this stage that part of the SOA governance value-proposition benefits the business directly, by formalizing how the enterprise represents capabilities consistent with the priorities of the organization.

The ZapThink take

The big win to moving to the fourth stage is in how leveraging SOA approaches to formalize EA governance impacts the organization's business agility requirement. In some ways business agility is like any other business requirement, in that proper business analysis can delineate the requirement to the point that the technology team can deliver it, the quality team can test for it, and the infrastructure can enforce it. But as we've written before, as an emergent property of the implementation, business agility is a different sort of requirement from more traditional business requirements in a fundamental way.

A critical part of achieving this business agility over time is to break down the business agility requirement into a set of policies, and then establish, communicate, and enforce those policies -- in other words, provide business agility governance. Only now, we're not talking about technology at all. We're talking about transforming how the organization leverages resources in a more agile manner by formalizing its approach to governance by following SOA best practices at the EA level. Organizations must understand the role SOA governance plays in achieving this long-term strategic vision for the enterprise.

This guest post comes courtesy of Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink.

SPECIAL PARTNER OFFER

SOA and EA Training, Certification,
and Networking Events

In need of vendor-neutral, architect-level SOA and EA training? ZapThink's Licensed ZapThink Architect (LZA) SOA Boot Camps provide four days of intense, hands-on architect-level SOA training and certification.

Advanced SOA architects might want to enroll in ZapThink's SOA Governance and Security training and certification courses. Or, are you just looking to network with your peers, interact with experts and pundits, and schmooze on SOA after hours? Join us at an upcoming ZapForum event. Find out more and register for these events at http://www.zapthink.com/eventreg.html.

Here's why text-based content access and management play crucial roles in real-time BI

2009-11-09T16:46:00.002-05:00

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Kapow Technologies.

Text-based content and information from across the Web are growing in importance to businesses. The need to analyze web-based text in real-time is rising to where structured data was in importance just several years ago.

Indeed, for businesses looking to do even more commerce and community building across the Web, text access and analytics forms a new mother lode of valuable insights to mine.

As the recession forces the need to identify and evaluate new revenue sources, businesses need to capture such web data services for their business intelligence (BI) to work better, deeper, and faster.

In this podcast discussion, Part 3 of a series on web data services for BI, we discuss how an ecology of providers and a variety of content and data types come together in several use-case scenarios.

In Part 1 of our series we discussed how external data has grown in both volume and importance across the Internet, social networks, portals, and applications. In Part 2, we dug even deeper into how to make the most of web data services for BI, along with the need to share those web data services inferences quickly and easily.

Our panel now looks specifically at how near real-time text analytics fills out a framework of web data services that can form a whole greater than the sum of the parts, and this brings about a whole new generation of BI benefits and payoffs.

To help explain the benefits of text analytics and their context in web data services, we're joined by Seth Grimes, principal consultant at Alta Plana Corp., and Stefan Andreasen, co-founder and chief technology officer at Kapow Technologies. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Grimes: "Noise free" is an interesting and difficult concept when you're dealing with text, because text is just a form of human communication. Whether it's written materials, or spoken materials that have been transcribed into text, human communications are incredibly chaotic ... and they are full of "noise." So really getting to something that's noise-free is very ambitious.

... It's become an imperative to try to deal with the great volume of text -- the fire hose, as you said -- of information that's coming out. And, it's coming out in many, many different languages, not just in English, but in other languages. It's coming out 24 hours a day, 7 days a week -- not only when your business analysts are working during your business day. People are posting stuff on the web at all hours. They are sending email at all hours.
If you want to keep up, if you want to do what business analysts have been referring to as a 360-degree analysis of information, you've got to have automated technologies to do it.

... There are hundreds of millions of people worldwide who are on the Internet, using email, and so on. There are probably even more people who are using cell phones, text messaging, and other forms of communication.

If you want to keep up, if you want to do what business analysts have been referring to as a 360-degree analysis of information, you've got to have automated technologies to do it. You simply can't cope with the flood of information without them.

Fortunately, the software is now up to the job in the text analytics world. It's up to the job of making sense of the huge flood of information from all kinds of diverse sources, high volume, 24 hours a day. We're in a good place nowadays to try to make something of it with these technologies.

Andreasen: ... There is also a huge amount of what I call "deep web," very valuable information that you have to get to in some other way. That's where we come in and allow you to build robots that can go to the deep web and extract information.

... Eliminating noise is getting rid of all this stuff around the article that is really irrelevant, so you get better results.

The other thing around noise-free is the structure. ... The key here is to get noise-free data and to get full data. It's not only to go to the deep web, but also get access to the data in a noise-free way, and in at least a semi-structured way, so that you can do better text analysis, because text analysis is extremely dependent on the quality of data.

Grimes: ... [There are] many different use-cases for text analytics. This is not only on the Web, but within the enterprise as well, and crossing the boundary between the Web and the inside of the enterprise.

Those use-cases can be the early warning of a Swine flu epidemic or other medical issues. You can be sure that there is text analytics going on with Twitter and other instant messaging streams and forums to try to detect what's going on.

... You also have brand and reputation management. If someone has started posting something very negative about your company or your products, then you want to detect that really quickly. You want early warning, so that you can react to it really quickly.
We have some great challenges out there, but . . . we have great technologies to respond to those challenges.

We have a great use case in the intelligence world. That's one of the earliest adopters of text analytics technology. The idea is that if you are going to do something to prevent a terrorist attack, you need to detect and respond to the signals that are out there, that something is pending really quickly, and you have to have a high degree of certainty that you're looking at the right thing and that you're going to react appropriately.

... Text analytics actually predate BI. The basic approaches to analyzing textual sources were defined in the late '50s. Actually, there is a paper from an IBM researcher from 1958, that defines BI as the analysis of textual sources.

...[Now] we want to take a subset of all of the information that's out there in the so-called digital universe and bring in only what's relevant to our business problems at hand. Having the infrastructure in place to do that is a very important aspect here.

Once we have that information in hand, we want to analyze it. We want to do what's called information extraction, entity extraction. We want to identify the names of people, geographical location, companies, products, and so on. We want to look for pattern-based entities like dates, telephone numbers, addresses. And, we want to be able to extract that information from the textual sources.

Suitable technologies

All of this sounds very scientific and perhaps abstruse -- and it is. But, the good message here is one that I have said already. There are now very good technologies that are suitable for use by business analysts, by people who aren't wearing those white lab coats and all of that kind of stuff. The technologies that are available now focus on usability by people who have business problems to solve and who are not going to spend the time learning the complexities of the algorithms that underlie them.

Andreasen: ... Any BI or any text analysis is no better than the data source behind it. There are four extremely important parameters for the data sources. One is that you have the right data sources.

There are so many examples of people making these kind of BI applications, text analytics applications, while settling for second-tier data sources, because they are the only ones they have. This is one area where Kapow Technologies comes in. We help you get exactly the right data sources you want.

The other thing that's very important is that you have a full picture of the data. So, if you have data sources that are relevant from all kinds of verticals, all kinds of media, and so on, you really have to be sure you have a full coverage of data sources. Getting a full coverage of data sources is another thing that we help with.

Noise-free data

We already talked about the importance of noise-free data to ensure that when you extract data from your data source, you get rid of the advertisements and you try to get the major information in there, because it's very valuable in your text analysis.

Of course, the last thing is the timeliness of the data. We all know that people who do stock research get real-time quotes. They get it for a reason, because the newer the quotes are, the surer they can look into the crystal ball and make predictions about the future in a few seconds.

The world is really changing around us. Companies need to look into the crystal ball in the nearer and nearer future. If you are predicting what happens in two years, that doesn't really matter. You need to know what's happening tomorrow.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Kapow Technologies.

Role of governance plumbed in Nov. 10 webinar on managing hybrid and cloud computing types

2009-11-05T12:45:00.006-05:00

I'll be joining John Favazza, vice president of research and development at WebLayers, on Nov. 10 for a webinar on the critical role of governance in managing hybrid cloud computing environments.

The free, live webinar begins at 2 p.m. EDT. Register at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/695643130. [Disclosure: WebLayers is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Titled "How Governance Gets You More Mileage from Your Hybrid Computing Environment,” the webinar targets enterprise IT managers, architects and developers interested in governance for infrastructures that include hybrids of cloud computing, software as a service (saaS) and service-oriented architectures (SOA). There will be plenty of opportunity to ask questions and join the discussion.

Organizations are looking for more consistency across IT-enabled enterprise activities, and are finding competitive differentiation in being able to best manage their processes more effectively. That benefit, however, requires the ability to govern across different types of systems and infrastructure and applications delivery models. Enforcing policies, and implementing comprehensive governance, acts to enhance business modeling, additional services orientation, process refinement, and general business innovation.

Increasingly, governance of hybrid computing environments establishes the ground rules under which business activities and processes -- supported by multiple and increasingly diverse infrastructure models -- operate.

Developing and maintaining governance also fosters collaboration between architects, those building processes and solutions for companies, and those operating the infrastructure -- be it supported within the enterprise or outside. It also sets up multi-party business processes, across company boundaries, with coordinated partners.

Cambridge, Mass.-based WebLayers provides a design-time governance platform that helps centralize policy management across multiple IT domains -- from SOA through mainframe and cloud implementations. Such governance clearly works to reduce the costs of managing and scaling such environments, individually and in combination.

In the webinar we'll look at how structured policies, including extensions across industry standards, speeds governance implementations and enforcement -- from design-time through ongoing deployment and growth.

So join me and Favazza and me at 2 p.m. ET on Nov. 10 by registering at https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/695643130.

HP takes converged infrastructure a notch higher with new data warehouse appliance

2009-11-04T13:43:00.000-05:00

Hewlett-Packard (HP) on Wednesday announced new products, solutions and services that leaves the technology packaging to them, so users don't have to.

HP Neoview Advantage, HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture, and HP Converged Infrastructure Consulting Services are designed to help organizations drive business and technology innovations at lower total cost via lower total hassle. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP’s measured focus

HP isn’t just betting on a market whim. Recent market research it supported reveals that more than 90 percent of senior business decision makers believe business cycles will continue to be unpredictable for the next few years — and 80 percent recognize they need to be far more flexible in how they leverage technology for business.

The same old IT song and dance doesn't seem to be what these businesses are seeking. Nearly 85 percent of those surveyed cited innovation as critical to success, and 71 percent said they would sanction more technology investments -- if they could see how those investments met their organization’s time-to-market and business opportunity needs.

Cost nowadays is about a lot more than the rack and license. The fuller picture of labor, customization, integration, shared services suppport, data-use-tweaking and inevitable unforeseen gotchas need to be better managed in unison -- if that desired agility can also be afforded (and sanctioned by the bean-counters).

HP said its new offerings deliver three key advantages:

Improved competitiveness and risk mitigation through business data management, information governance, and business analytics
Faster time to revenue for new goods and services
The ability to return to peak form, after being compressed or stretched.

The Neoview advantage

First up, HP Neoview Advantage, the new release of the HP Neoview enterprise data warehouse platform, which aims to help organizations respond to business events more quickly by supporting real-time insight and decision-making.

HP calls the performance, capacity, footprint and manageability improvements dramatic and says the software also reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with industry-standard components and pre-built, pre-tested configurations optimized for warehousing.

HP Neoview Advantage and last year's Exadata product (produced in partnership with Oracle) seem to be aimed at different segments. Currently, HP Neoview Advantage is a "very high end database," whereas Exadata is designed for "medium to large enterprises," and does not scale to the Neoview level, said Deb Nelson, senior vice president, Marketing, HP Enterprise Business.

A converged infrastructure

Next up, HP Converged Infrastructure architecture. As HP describes it, the architecture adjusts to meet changing business needs, specifically what HP calls “IT sprawl,” which it points to as the key culprit in raising technology costs for maintenance that could otherwise be used for innovation.

HP touts key benefits of this new architecture. First, the ability to deploy application environments on the fly through shared service management, followed closely by lower network costs and less complexity. The new architecture is optimized through virtual resource pools and also improves energy integration and effectiveness across the data center by tapping into data center smart grid technology.

Finally, HP is offering Converged Infrastructure Consulting Services that aim to help customers transition from isolated product-centric technologies to a more flexible converged infrastructure. The new services leverage HP’s experience in shared services, cloud computing, and data center transformation projects to let customers design, test and implement scalable infrastructures.

Overall, typical savings of 30 percent in total costs can be achieved by implementing Data Center Smart Grid technologies and solutions, said HP.

With these moves to converged infrastructure, HP is filling out where others are newly treading. Cisco and EMC this week announced packaging partnerships that seek to deliver simiar convergence benefits to the market.

"It's about experience, not an experiment," said Nelson.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post.

Aster Data architects application logic with data for speeded-up analytics processing en masse

2009-11-03T16:03:00.002-05:00

In real estate, the mantra is "location, location, location." The same could be said for the juxtaposition of applications logic and data. With enterprise data growing at an explosive rate, having applications separate from the mountains of data that they rely on has resulted in massive data movement -- increasing latency and restricting due analysis.

Aster Data, which provides massively parallel processing (MPP) data management, has tackled the location problem head-on with the announcement this week of Aster Data Version 4.0, (along with Aster nCluster System 4.0), a massively parallel application-data server that allows companies to embed applications inside an MPP data warehouse. This is designed to speed the processing of terabytes to petabytes of data.

The latest offering from the San Carlos, Calif., company fully parallelizes both data and a wide variety of analytics applications in one system. This provides faster analysis for such data-heavy applications as real-time fraud detection, customer behavior modeling, merchandising optimization, affinity marketing, trending and simulations, trading surveillance, and customer calling patterns.

While both data and applications reside in the same system, they are independent of one another, but both execute as "first-class citizens" with their respective data and application management services.

Resource sharing

The Aster Data Application Server is responsible for managing and coordinating activities and resource sharing in the cluster. It also acts as a host for the application processing and data inside the cluster. In its role as data host, it manages incremental scaling, fault tolerance and heterogeneous hardware for application processing.

Aster Data Version 4.0 provides application portability, which allows companies to take their existing Java, C, C++, C#, .NET, Perl and Python applications, MapReduce-enable them and push them down into the data.

The Dynamic Workload Management (WLM) helps support hundreds of concurrent mixed workloads that can span interactive and batch data queries, as well as application execution. Includes granular rule-based prioritization of workloads and dynamic allocation and re-allocation of resources.

Other features include:

Trickle feeds for granular data loading and interactive queries with millisecond response times
New online partition splitting capabilities to allow infinite cost-effective scaling
Dual-stage query optimizer, which ensures peak performance across hundreds to thousands of CPU cores
Integrations with leading business intelligence (BI) tools and Hadoop.

More companies want to bring more data to bear on more BI problems. While Aster's benefits and value may be used for high-end and esoteric analytics uses now, I fully expect that there data-intense architectures will be finding more uses. The price, too, is dropping, making the use of such systems more affordable.

Many of the core users of high-end analytics are also moving on architecture-wise. The systems designed five or more years ago will not meet the needs of five or even a few years from now.

What's really cool about Aster Data's approach is the analytics apps can be used, and the languages and query semantics most familiar to users can be used with the new systems and architectures.

I suppose we should also expect more of these analytics engines to become available as services, aka cloud services. That would allow joins of more data sets and they the massive analytics applications can open up even more BI cans of worms.

Survey: Virtualization and physical infrastructures need to be managed in tandem

2009-11-03T14:22:00.006-05:00

If your company uses test and development infrastructures as a proving ground for shared services, virtualization and private cloud environments, you’re not alone. More companies are moving in that direction, according to a Taneja Group survey.

Yet underlying the use of the newer infrastructure approaches lies a budding challenge. The recent Taneja Group survey of senior IT managers working on test/dev infrastructures at North American firms found that 72 percent of respondents said virtualization on its own doesn’t address their most important test/dev infrastructure challenges. Some 55 percent rate managing both virtual and physical resources as having a high or medium impact on their success. The market is clearly looking for ways to bridge this gap.

Sharing physical and virtual infrastructures

Despite the confusion in the market about the economics of the various flavors of cloud computing, Dave Bartoletti, a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group, says one thing is clear: Enterprises are comfortable with, and actively sharing, both physical and virtual infrastructures internally.

“This survey reaffirms that shared infrastructure is common in test/dev environments and also reveals it’s increasingly being deployed for production workloads,” Bartoletti says. "Virtualization is seen as a key enabling technology. But on its own it does not address the most important operational and management challenges in a shared infrastructure.”

Half the survey respondents are funding projects starts in 2009. Another 66 percent of respondents will have funded a project started by the end of 2010.

Noteworthy is the fact that 92 percent of test/dev operations are using shared infrastructures, and companies are making significant investments in infrastructure-sharing initiatives to address the operational and budgetary challenges. Half the survey respondents are funding projects in 2009. Another 66 percent of respondents will have funded a project started by the end of 2010.

The survey reveals most firms are turning to private cloud infrastructures to support test/dev projects, and that shared infrastructures are beginning to bridge the gap between pre-production and production silos. A full 30 percent are sharing resource pools between both test/dev and production applications. This indicates a rising comfort level with sharing infrastructure within IT departments.

Virtualization’s cost and control issues

Although 89 percent of respondents use virtualization for test/dev, more than half have virtualized less than 25 percent of their servers. That’s because virtualization adds several layers of control and cost issues that need to be addressed by sharing, process, workflow and other management capabilities in order to fully maximize and integrate both virtual and physical infrastructures.

“Test/Dev environments are one of the most logical places for organizations to begin implementing private clouds and prove the benefits of a more elastic, self service, pay-per-use service delivery model,” says Martin Harris, director Product Management at Platform Computing. “We’ve certainly seen this trend among our own customers and have found that additional management tools enabling private clouds are required to effectively improve business service levels and address cost cutting initiatives.” [Disclosure: Platform Computing is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Despite the heavy internal investments, however, 82 percent of respondents are not using hosted environments outside their own firewalls. The top barriers to adoption: Lack of control and immature technology.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post.

You'll be far better off in a future without enterprise software

2009-11-03T09:53:00.002-05:00

This guest post comes courtesy of Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink.

By Ronald Schmelzer

The conversation about the role and future of enterprise software is a continuous undercurrent in the service oriented architecture (SOA) conversation. Indeed, ZapThink’s been talking about the future of enterprise software in one way or another for years.

So, why bother bringing up this topic again, at this juncture? Has anything changed in the marketplace? Can we learn something new about where enterprise software is heading? The answer is decidedly "yes" to the latter two questions. And this might be the right time to seriously consider acting on the very things we’ve been talking about for a while.

The first major factor is significant consolidation in the marketplace for enterprise software. While a decade or so ago there were a few dozen large and established providers of different sorts of enterprise software packages, there are now just a handful of large providers, with a smattering more for industry-specific niches.

We can thank aggressive M&A activity combined with downward IT spending pressure for this reality. As a result of this consolidation, many large enterprise software packages (such as enterprise resource planning (ERP), customer relationship management (CRM), supply chain management (SCM) offerings) have been eliminated, are in the process of being phased out, or are getting merged (or “fused”) with other solutions.

Many companies rationalized the spending of millions of dollars on enterprise software applications because the costs could be amortized over a decade or more of usage, and they could claim that these enterprise software applications would be cheaper, in the long run, than building and managing their existing custom code. But, we’ve now had a long enough track record to realize that the result of mass consolidation, need for continuous spending, and inflexibility is causing many companies to reconsider that rationalization.

We can thank expensive, cumbersome, and tightly-coupled customization, integration, and development for this lack of innovation in enterprise software.

Furthermore, by virtue of their weight, significance in the enterprise environment, and astounding complexity, enterprise software solutions are much slower to adopt and adapt to new technologies that continuously change the face of IT.

We refer to this as the “enterprise digital divide.” You get one IT user experience when you are at home and use the Web, personal computing, and mobile devices and applications and a profoundly worse experience when you are at work. It’s as if the applications you use at work are a full decade behind the innovations that are now commonplace in the consumer environment. We can thank expensive, cumbersome, and tightly coupled customization, integration, and development for this lack of innovation in enterprise software.

In addition, no company can purchase and implement an enterprise software solution “out of the box.” Not only does a company need to spend significant money customizing and integrating their enterprise software solutions, but they often spend significant amounts of money on custom applications that tie into and depend on the software.

What might seem to be discrete enterprise software applications are really tangled masses of single-vendor functionality, tightly-coupled customizations and integrations, and custom code tied into this motley mess. In fact, when we ask people to describe their enterprise architecture (EA), they often point to the gnarly mess of enterprise software they purchased, customized, and maintain. That’s not EA. That’s an ugly baby only a mother could love.

Yet, companies constantly share with us their complete dependence on a handful of applications for their daily operation. Imagine what would happen at any large business if you were to shut down their single-vendor ERP, CRM, or SCM solutions. Business would grind to a halt.

While some would insist on the necessity of single-vendor, commercial enterprise software solutions as a result, we would instead assert how remarkably insane it is for companies to have such a single point of failure. Dependence on a single product, single vendor for the entirety of a company’s operations is absolutely ludicrous in an IT environment where there’s no technological reason to have such dependencies. The more you depend on one thing for your success, the less you are able to control your future. Innovation itself hangs in the balance when a company becomes so dependent on another company’s ability to innovate. And given the relentless pace of innovation, we see huge warning signs.

Services, clouds, and mashups: Why buy enterprise software?

In previous ZapFlashes, we talked about how the emergence of services at a range of disparate levels combined with evolutions in location- and platform-independent, on-demand, and variable provisioning enabled by clouds, and rich technologies to facilitate simple and rapid service composition will change the way companies conceive of, build, and manage applications.

Instead of an application as something that’s bought, customized, and integrated, the application itself is the instantaneous snapshot of how the various services are composed together to meet user needs. From this perspective, enterprise software is not what you buy, but what you do with what you have.

One outcome of this perspective on enterprise software is that companies can shift their spending from enterprise software licenses and maintenance (which eats up a significant chunk of IT budgets) to service development, consumption, and composition.

This is not just a philosophical difference. This is a real difference. While it is certainly true that services expose existing capabilities, and therefore you still need those existing capabilities when you build services, moving to SOA means that you are rewarded for exposing functionality you already have.

Whereas traditional enterprise software applications penalize legacy because of the inherent cost of integrating with it, moving to SOA inherently rewards legacy because you don’t need to build twice what you already have. In this vein, if you already have what you need because you bought it from a vendor, keep it – but don’t spend more money on that same functionality. Rather, spend money exposing and consuming it to meet new needs. This is the purview of good enterprise architecture, not good enterprise software.

When you ask these people to show you their enterprise software, they’ll simply point at their collection of Services, Cloud-based applications, and composition infrastructure.

The resultant combination of legacy service exposure, third-party service consumption, and the cloud (x-as-a-service) has motivated the thinking that if you don’t already have a single-vendor enterprise software suite, you probably don’t need one.

We’ve had first-hand experience with new companies that have started and grown operations to multiple millions of dollars without buying a penny of enterprise software. Likewise, we’ve seen billion-dollar companies dump existing enterprise software investments or start divisions and operations in new countries without extending their existing enterprise software licenses. When you ask these people to show you their enterprise software, they’ll simply point at their collection of services, cloud-based applications, and composition infrastructure.

Some might insist that cloud-based applications and so-called software-as-a-service (SaaS) applications are simply monolithic enterprise software applications deployed using someone else’s infrastructure. While that might have been the case for the application service provider (ASP) and SaaS applications of the past, that is not the case anymore. Whole ecosystems of loosely-coupled service offerings have evolved in the past decade to value-add these environments, which look more like catalogs of service capabilities and less like monolithic applications.

Want to build a website and capture lead data? No problem -- just get the right service from Salesforce.com or your provider of choice and compose it using web services or REST or your standards-based approach of choice. And you didn’t incur thousands or millions of dollars to do that.

Open source vs. commercial vs. build your own

Another trend pointing to the stalling of enterprise software growth is the emergence of open source alternatives. Companies now are flocking to solutions such as WebERP, SugarCRM Community Edition, and other no-license and no-maintenance fee solutions that provide 80% of the required functionality of commercial suites.

While some might point at the cost of support for these offerings, we point out the factor of difference between support and license/maintenance costs. At the very least, you know what you’re paying for. It’s hard to justify spending millions of dollars in license fees when you’re using 10% or less of a product’s capabilities.

Enhancing this open source value proposition is that others are building capabilities on top of those solutions and giving those solutions away as well. The very nature of open source enables creation of capabilities that further value-adds a product suite. At some point, a given open source solution reaches a tipping point where the volume of enhancements far outweighs what any commercial vendor can offer. Simply put, when a community supports an open source effort, the result can out-innovate any commercial solution.

There are now a lot of pieces and parts available that are free, cheap, or low cost that companies can assemble into not only workable, but scalable offerings that can compete with many commercial offerings.

Beyond open source, commercial, and SaaS-cum-cloud offerings, companies have a credible choice in building their own enterprise software application. There are now a lot of pieces and parts available that are free, cheap, or low cost that companies can assemble into not only workable, but scalable offerings that can compete with many commercial offerings. In much the same way that companies leveraged Microsoft’s Visual Basic to build applications using the thousands of free or cheap widgets and controls built by the legions of developers, so too are we seeing a movement to free or cheap Service widgets that can enable remarkably complex and robust applications.

The future of commercial enterprise software applications

It is not clear where commercial enterprise software applications go from here. Surely, we don’t see companies tearing out their entrenched solutions any time soon, but likewise, we don’t see much reason for expansion in enterprise software sales either.

In some ways, enterprise software has become every bit the legacy they sought to replace in mainframe applications that still exist in abundance in the enterprise. Smart enterprise software vendors realize that they have to get out of the application business altogether and focus on selling composable service widgets. These firms, however, don’t want to innovate their way out of business. As such, they don’t want to just provide the trains to get you from place to place, but they want to own the tracks as well.

The question is: Is the cost of the proprietary runtime infrastructure you are getting with those widgets worth the cost?

In many ways, this idea of enterprise software-as-a-platform is really just a shell game. Instead of spending millions on a specific application, you’re instead spending millions on an infrastructure that comes with some pre-configured widgets. The question is: Is the cost of the proprietary runtime infrastructure you are getting with those widgets worth the cost? Have you lost some measure of loose coupling in exchange for a “single throat to choke?”

Much of the enterprise software market is heading in direct collision course with middleware vendors who never wanted to enter the application market. As enterprise software vendors start seeing their runtime platform as the defensible position, they will start conflicting with EA strategies that seek to remove their single-vendor dependence.

We see this as the area of greatest tension in the next few years. Do you want to be in control of your infrastructure and have choice, or do you want to resign your infrastructure to the control of a single vendor, who might be one merger or stumble away from non-existence or irrelevance?

The ZapThink take

We hope to use this ZapFlash to call out the ridiculousness of multi-million dollar “applications” that cost millions more to customize to do a fraction of what you need. In an era of continued financial pressure, the last thing companies should do is invest more in technology conceived of in the 1970s, matured in the 1990s, and incrementally made worse since then.

The reliance on single-vendor mammoth enterprise software packages is not helping, but rather hurting the movement to loosely coupled, agile, composition-centric heterogeneous SOA. Now is the time for companies to pull up the stakes and reconsider their huge enterprise software investments in favor of the sort of real enterprise architecture that cares little about buying things en masse and customizing those solutions -- but instead to building, composing, and reusing what you need iteratively to respond to continuous change.

As if to prove a point, SAP stock recently slid almost 10% on missed earnings. Some may blame the overall state of the economy, but we point to the writing on the wall: All the enterprise software that could be sold has been sold, and the reasons for buying or implementing new licenses are few and far between. Invest in enterprise architecture over enterprise software, services over customizations, and clouds over costly and unpredictable infrastructure -- and you’ll be better off.

This guest post comes courtesy of Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at ZapThink.

SPECIAL PARTNER OFFER

Business and technical cases build for data center consolidation and modernization

2009-10-30T15:37:00.018-04:00

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Akamai Technologies.

Data-center consolidation and modernization of IT systems helps enterprises reduce cost, cut labor, slash energy use, and become more agile.

Infrastructure advancements, standardization, performance density, and network services efficiencies are all allowing for bigger and fewer data centers and strategically architected and located facilities that can efficiently carry more of the total IT requirements load.

But to gain the benefits of these large and strategic infrastructure undertakings, the impact on the network beyond the firewall has to be considered. User expectations for performance and IT requirements for reliability need to be maintained, and even improved.

Fewer data centers means longer distances between servers and users. Network services and Internet performance management therefore need to be brought considered to produce the desired effect of topnotch applications and data delivery to enterprises, consumers, partners, and employees at far lower cost.

Here to help us better understand how to get the best of all worlds -- that is, high performance and lower total cost from data center consolidation -- we're joined by James Staten, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research; Andy Rubinson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Akamai Technologies, and Tom Winston, Vice President of Global Technical Operations at Phase Forward, a provider of integrated data management solutions for clinical trials and drug safety. The panel is moderated by me, BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Staten: Oftentimes, the biggest reason to do [consolidation] is because you have sprawl in the data center. You're running out of power, you're running out of the ability to cool any more equipment, and you are running out of the ability to add new servers, as your business demands them.

If there are new applications the business wants to roll out, and you can't bring them to market, that's a significant problem. This is something the organizations have been facing for quite some time.

As a result, if they can start consolidating, they can start moving some of these workloads onto fewer systems. This allows them to reduce the amount of equipment they have to manage and the number of software licenses they have to maintain and lower their support costs. In the data center overall, they can lower their energy costs, while reducing some of the cooling required.

... Most applications actually end up consuming on average only 15-20 percent of the server. If that's the case, you've got an awful lot of headroom to put other applications on there.

We were isolating applications on their own physical systems, so that they would be protected from any faults or problems with other applications that might be on the same system and take them down. Virtualization is the primary isolating technology that allows us to do that.

... More and more applications are being broken down into modules, and, much like the web services and web applications that we see today, they're broken into tiers. Individual logic runs on its own engine, and all of that can be spread across some more monetized, consistent infrastructure. We are learning these lessons from the dot-coms of the world and now the cloud-computing providers of the world, and applying them to the enterprise.

... On average, across all the enterprises we have spoken to, you can realistically expect to see about a 20 percent cost reduction from doing this. But, as you said, if you've got 5,000 servers, and they're all running at 5 percent utilization, there are big gains to be had.

Rubinson: I focus mainly on delivery over the Internet. There are definitely some challenges, if you're talking about using the Internet with your data center infrastructure -- things like performance latency, availability challenges from cable cuts, and things of that nature, as well as security threats on the Internet.

It's thinking about how can you do this, how can you deliver to a global user base with your data center, without having to necessarily build out data centers internationally, and to be able to do that from a consolidated standpoint.

... From the cost perspective, we're able to eliminate unnecessary hardware. We're able to take some of that load off of the servers, and do the work in the cloud, which also helps reduce them.

... In terms of responsiveness, by using the Internet, you can deploy a lot more quickly. It allows us to give that same type of performance, availability, and security that you would get from having a private WAN, but doing it over the much less expensive Internet.

This is really important, as we have seen more and more users that are going outside of the corporate [networks]. People are connecting to suppliers, to partners, to customers, and to all sorts of things now.

... By optimizing the cloud, we're able to speed the delivery of information from the origin as well. That's where it's benefiting folks like Tom, where he is able to not only cache information, but the information that is dynamic, that needs to get back from the data center, goes more quickly.

Winston: When I joined [Phase Forward], it had two different data centers -- one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. We were facing the challenge of potentially having to expand into a European data center, and even potentially a Pacific Rim data center.

By continuing to expand our virtualization efforts, as well as to leverage some of the technologies that Andy just mentioned ... Internet acceleration via some of the Akamai technologies, we were able to forgo that data center expansion. In fact, we were able to consolidate our data center to one East Coast data center, which is now our primary hosting center for all of our applications.

So it had a very significant impact for us by being able to leverage both that WAN acceleration, as well as virtualization, within our own four walls of the data center.

We run electronic data capture (EDC) software, and pharmacovigilance software for the largest pharmaceutical and clinical device makers in the world. They are truly global organizations in nature. So, we have users throughout the world, with more and more heavy population coming out of the Asia Pacific area.

... We have a very large, diverse user base that is accessing our applications 24x7x365, and, as a result, we have performance needs all the time for all of our users.

... Our primary application, our flagship application, is a product called InForm, which is the main EDC product that our customers use across the Internet. It's accelerated using Akamai technology, and almost 100 percent of our content is dynamic. It has worked extremely well.

Staten: ... Users are all over the place. Whether they are an internal employee, a customer, or a business partner, they need to get access to those applications, and they have a performance expectation that's been set by the Internet. They expect whatever applications they are interacting with will have that sort of local feel.

That's what you have to be careful about in your planning of consolidation. You can consolidate branch offices. You can consolidate down to fewer data centers. In doing so, you gain a lot of operational efficiencies, but you can potentially sacrifice performance.

You have to take the lessons that have been learned by the people who set the performance bar, the providers of Internet-based services, and ask, "How can I optimize the WAN? How can I push out content? How can I leverage solutions and networks that have this kind of intelligence to allow me to deliver that same performance level?" That's really the key thing that you have to keep in mind. Consolidation is great, but it can't be at the sacrifice of the user experience.

... The right location [for data centers] has to be optimized for a variety of factors. It has to be optimized for where the appropriate skill sets are. It has to be optimized for the geographic constraints that you may be under.
We're able to take some of that load off of the servers, and do the work in the cloud, which also helps reduce them.

You may be doing business in a country in which all of the citizen information of the people who live in that country must reside in that country. If that's the case, you don't necessarily have to own a data center there, but you absolutely have to have a presence there.

Winston: ... We had users in China who, due to the amount of traffic that had to traverse the globe, were not happy with the performance of the application. Specifically, we brought in Akamai to start with a very targeted group of users and to be able to accelerate for them the application in that region.

It literally cut the problem right out. It solved it almost immediately. At that point, we then began to spread the rest of that application acceleration product across the rest of our domains, and to continue to use that throughout the product set.

Rubinson: ... We recently commissioned a study with Forrester, looking at what is that tolerance threshold [for a page to load]. In the past it had been that people had tolerance for about four seconds. As of this latest study, it's down to two seconds. That's for business to consumer (B2C) users. What we have seen is that the business-to-business (B2B) users are even more intolerant of waiting for things.

It really has gotten to a point where you need that immediate delivery in order to drive the usage of the tools that are out there.

... Just putting yourself in the cloud doesn't mean that you're not going to have the same type of latency issues, delivering over the Internet. It's the same thing with availability in trying to reach folks who are far away from that hosted data center. So, the cloud isn't necessarily the answer. It's not a pill that you can take to fix that issue.

... For Akamai, it's really about how we're able to accelerate. How we are able to optimize the routing and the other protocols on the Internet to make that get from wherever it's hosted to a global set of end users.

We don't care about where they are. They don't have to be on the corporate, private WANs. It's really about that global reach and giving the levels of performance to actually provide an SLA. Tell me who else out there provides an SLA for delivery over the Internet? Akamai does.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Akamai Technologies.

Separating core from context brings high returns in legacy application transformation

2009-10-29T14:35:00.002-04:00

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Gain more insights into "Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line" via a series of HP virtual conferences Nov. 3-5. For more on Application Transformation, and to get real time answers to your questions, register to the virtual conferences for your region:
Register here to attend the Asia Pacific event on Nov. 3.
Register here to attend the EMEA event on Nov. 4.
Register here to attend the Americas event on Nov. 5.

This podcast is the second in a series of three to examine Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line. Through panel discussions we examine the rationale and likely returns of assessing the true role and character of legacy applications, and then further determine the paybacks from modernization.

To gain the most return on modernization projects, many enterprises are separating core from context when it comes to legacy enterprise applications and their modernization processes. As enterprises seek to cut their total IT costs, they need to identify what legacy assets are working for them and carrying their own weight, and which ones are merely hitching a high cost -- but largely unnecessary -- ride.

A widening cost and productivity division exists between older, hand-coded software assets and replacement technologies on newer, more efficient standards-based systems. Somewhere in the mix, there are also core legacy assets distinct from so-called contextal assets. There are peripheral legacy processes and tools that are costly vestiges of bygone architectures. There is legacy wheat and legacy chaff.

With us to delve deeper into the high rewards of transforming legacy enterprise applications is Steve Woods, distinguished software engineer at HP, and Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on Applications Transformation at HP. The discussion is moderated be me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: This podcast is about two types of IT assets: core and context. That whole approach to classifying business processes and their associated applications was invented by Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, etc.

He came up in Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution with this notion of core and context applications. Core being those that provide the true innovation and differentiation for an organization. Those are the ones that keep your customers. Those are the ones that improve the service levels. Those are the ones that generate your money. They are really important, which is why they're called "core."

When these applications were invented to provide the core capabilities, it was 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago. What we have to understand is that what was core 10 years ago may not be core anymore. There are ways of effectively doing it at a much different price point.

As Moore points out, organizations should be looking to build "core," because that is the unique intellectual property of the organization, and to then buy "context." They need to understand, how do I get the lowest-cost provision of something that doesn't make a huge difference to my product or service, but I need it anyway.

The "context" applications are not less important, but ... you should be looking to understand how that could be done in terms of lower-cost provisioning [of them].

Woods: [A lot of the interest in separating core and context in legacy IT applications] has to do with the pain users are going through. We have had customers who had assessments with us before, as much as a year ago, and now they're coming back and saying they want to get started and actually do something. So, a good deal of the interest is caused by the need to drive down costs.

Also, there's the realization that a lot of these tools -- extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools, enterprise application integration (EAI) tools, reporting, and business process management (BPM) -- are proving themselves now. We can't say that there is a risk in going to these tools. They realize that the strength of these tools is that they bring a lot of agility, solve skill sets issues, and make you much more responsive to the business needs of the organization.

... What I created at HP is a tool, an algorithm, that can go into any language legacy code and find the duplicate code, and not only find it, but visualize it in very compelling ways. That helps us drill down to identify what I call the unintended design. When we find these unintended designs, they lead us to ask very critical questions that are paramount to understanding how to design the transformation strategy.

... When you identify the IT elements that are not core and that could be moved out of handwritten code, you're transferring power from the developers -- say, of COBOL -- to the users of the more modern tools, like the BPM tools.

So there is always a political issue. What we try to do, when we present our findings, is to be very objective. You can't argue that we found that 65 percent of the application is not doing core. You can then focus the conversation on something more productive. What do we do with this? The worst thing you could possibly do is take a million lines of COBOL that's generating reports and rewrite that in Java or C# hard-written code.

We take the concept of core versus context not just to a possible off-the-shelf application, but at architectural component level. In many cases, we find that this is helpful for them to identify legacy code that could be moved very incrementally to these new architectures.

... A typical COBOL application -- this is true of all legacy code, but particularly mainframe legacy code -- can be as much as 5, 10, or 15 million lines of code. I think the sheer idea of the size of the application is an impediment. There is some sort of inertia there. An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and it's been at rest for years, sometimes 30 years.

So, the biggest impediment is the belief that it's just too big and complex to move and it's even too big and complex to understand. Our approach is a very lightweight process, where we go in and answer to a lot of questions, remove a lot of uncertainty, and give them some very powerful visualizations and understanding of the source code and what their options are.

... When you go to the legacy side of the house, you start finding that 65 percent of this application is just doing ETL. It's just parsing files and putting them into databases. Why don't you replace that with a tool? The big resistance there is that, if we replace it with a tool, then the people who are maintaining the application right now are either going to have to learn that tool or they're not going to have a job.

If we get the facts on the table, particularly visually, then we find that we get a lot of consensus. It may be partial consensus, but it's consensus nonetheless, and we open up the possibilities and different options, rather than just continuing to move through with hand-written code.
If you look at this whole core-context thing, at the moment, organizations are still in survival mode.

Evans: If you look at this whole core-context thing, at the moment, organizations are still in survival mode. Money is still tight in terms of consumer spending. Money is still tight in terms of company spending. Therefore, you're in this position where keeping your customers or trying to get new customers is absolutely fundamental for staying alive. And, you do that by improving service levels, improving your services, and improving your product.

... The line-of-business people are now pushing on technology and saying, "You can't back off. You can't not give us what we want. We have to have this ability to innovate and differentiate, because that way we will keep our customers and we will keep this organization alive."

That applies equally to the public and private sectors. The public sector organizations have this mandate of improving service, whether it's in healthcare, insurance, tax, or whatever. So all of these commitments are being made and people have to deliver on them, albeit that the money, the IT budget behind it, is shrinking or has shrunk.

The leaders must understand what drives their company. Understand the values, the differentiation, and the innovations that you want and put your money on those and then find a way of dramatically reducing the amount of money you spend on the contextual stuff, which is pure productivity.

Woods: ... Decentralizing the architecture improves your efficiency and your redundancy. There is much more opportunity for building a solid, maintainable architecture than there would be if you kept a sort of monolithic approach that's typical on the mainframe.

... The problem is sometimes not nearly as big as it seems. If you look at the analogy of the clone codes that we find, and all the different areas that we can look at the code and say that it may not be as relevant to a transformation process as you think it is.
The subject matter experts and the stakeholders very slowly start to understand that this is actually possible. It's not as big as we thought.

I do this presentation called "Honey I Shrunk the Mainframe." If you start looking at these different aspects between the clone code and what I call the asymmetrical transformation from handwritten code to model driven architecture, you start looking at these different things. You start really seeing it.

We see this, when we go in to do the workshops. The subject matter experts and the stakeholders very slowly start to understand that this is actually possible. It's not as big as we thought. There are ways to transform it that we didn't realize, and we can do this incrementally. We don't have to do it all at once.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Linthicum's latest book: How SOA and cloud intersect for enterprise productivity benefits

2009-10-26T14:18:00.013-04:00

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download a transcript. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Also sponsored by TIBCO Software.

Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.

Take the BriefingsDirect middleware/ESB survey now.

Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Volume 45. This periodic discussion and dissection of IT infrastructure related news and events with industry analysts and guests, looks at a new book on cloud computing, a step-by-step guide on figuring out the right path to combined cloud and SOA benefits.

Dave Linthicum's new book, Cloud Computing and SOA Convergence in Your Enterprise: A Step-by-Step Guide, has just arrived and digs into the conflation of SOA and cloud computing. Our discussion with Linthicum on his findings is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Linthicum: SOA is the way to do cloud. I saw early on that SOA, if you get beyond the hype that's been around for the last two years, is really an architectural pattern that predates the SOA buzzword, or the SOA TLA.

It's really about breaking down your architecture into a primitive state of several components, including services and data and processes., Then, it's figuring out how to assemble those in such a way that you can not only solve your existing problems, but use those components to resolve problems, as your business changes over time or your mission changes or expands.

Cloud computing is a nice enhancement to that. Cloud doesn't replace SOA, as some people say. Cloud computing is basically architectural options or ways in which you can host your services, in this case, in the cloud.

As we go through reinventing your architecture around the concept of SOA, we can figure out which components, services, processes, or data are good candidates for cloud computing, and we can look at the performance, security and governance aspects of it.

Architectural advantages

We find that some of our services can exist out on the platform in the cloud, which provides us with some additional architectural advantages such as self-provisioning, the ability to get on the cloud very quickly in a very short time without buying hardware and software or expanding our data centers, and the ability to rapidly expand as we need to expand basically on demand.

If we need to go from 10 users to 1,000 users, we can do so in a matter of weeks, not having to buy data-center space, waves and waves of servers, software, hardware licenses, and all those sorts of things. Cloud computing provides you with some flexibility, but it doesn't get away from the core needs to architecture. So, really the book is about how to use SOA in the context of cloud computing, and that's the message I'm really trying to get across.

... As we move toward cloud computing, there are more economical and cost-effective architectural options. There is also the ability to play around with SOA in the cloud, which I think is driving a lot of the SOA. In fact, I find that a lot of people build their first initial SOA as cloud-delivered systems, be it Amazon, IBM, Azure from Microsoft, and some of the other platforms that are out there.

Then, once they figure out the benefits of that, they start putting pieces of it on premise, as it makes sense, and put pieces of it on the cloud. It has the tendency to drive prototyping on the cheap and to leverage architecture and play around with different technologies without the investment we had to do in the past.

... We've got to stop the insanity. We've got control IT spending. We've got to be much more effective and efficient with the way in which we spend and leverage IT resources. Cloud computing is only a mechanism, it's not a savior for doing that. We need to start marching in new directions and being aggressively innovative around the efficiency, the expandability, and ultimately the agility of IT.

... When you're doing SOA and considering SOA within your enterprise or agency, you should always consider cloud as an architectural option. In other words, we have servers we're looking to deploy in middleware, we're looking to leverage in databases we're looking to leverage in terms of SOA. It's governance systems, security systems, and identity management.

Cloud computing is really another set of things that you need to consider in the context of SOA, and you need to start playing around with the stuff now, because it's so cheap. There's no reason that anybody who's working on an SOA shouldn't be playing around with cloud, given the amount of investment that's needed. It's almost nothing, especially with some of the initial forays, some of the prototypes, and some of the pilot projects that need to be done around cloud.

... Software as a service (SaaS) is probably the easiest way to get into the cloud. It also has the most potential to save you the greatest amount of money. Instead of buying a million-dollar, or a two-million-dollar customer reliationship management (CRM) system, you can leverage Salesforce.com for $50-60 a month.

After that, I would progress into infrastructures as a service (IaaS), and that's basically data center on demand. So, it's databases, application servers, WebSphere, and all those sorts of things that you are able to leverage from the data center, but, instead of a data center, you leverage it from the cloud.

Guys like Amazon obviously are in that game. Microsoft, or the Azure platform, are in that game. Any number of players out there are going to be able to provide you with core infrastructure or primitive infrastructure. In other words, it's just available to you over the 'Net with some of kind of a metering system. I would start playing around with that technology after you get through with SaaS.
. . . Instead of having to buy infrastructure and buy a server and set it up and use it, we could go get Google App Engine accounts or Azure accounts.

Then, I would take a look at the platform-as-a-service (PaaS) technology, if you are doing any kind of application development. That's very cool stuff. Those are guys like Force, Google App Engine, and Bungee Labs. They provide you with a complete application development and deployment platform as a service. Then, I would progress into the more detailed stuff -- database, storage, and some of the other more sophisticated services on top of the primitive services that we just mentioned.

... PaaS with that Google App Engine is driving a lot of innovation right now. People are building applications out there, because they don't have to bother existing IT to get servers and databases brought online, and that will spur innovation.

So, today, we could figure out we want to go off and build this great application and do this great thing to automate a business and, instead of having to buy infrastructure and buy a server and set it up and use it, we could go get Google App Engine accounts or Azure accounts.

Huge potential

Then, we can start building, deploying, defining the database, do the testing, get it up and running, and have it immediately. It's web based and accessible to millions of users who are able to leverage the application in a scalable way. It's an amazing kind of infrastructure when you think about it. The potential is there to build huge, innovative things with very few resources.

... Ten years ago, it was very difficult to do a start up. You'd have a million dollars in investment funds just to get your infrastructure up and running. Now, startups can basically operate with a minimal amount of resources, typically a laptop, pointing at any number of cloud resources.

They can build their applications out there. They can build their intellectual capital. They can build their software. They can deploy it. They can test it. Then, they can provision the customers out there and meter their customers. So, it's a great time to be in this business.

... There needs to be a lot of education about the opportunities and the advantages of using cloud computing, as well as what the limitations are and what things we have to watch out for. Not all applications and all pieces of data are going to be right for the cloud. However, we need to educate people in terms of what the opportunities are.

The fact of the matter is that it's not going to be a dysfunctional and risky thing to move pieces of our architecture out into cloud computing. Get them around the pilot. Get them to go out there and try it. Get them to basically experiment with the technology. Figure out what the capabilities are, and that will ultimately change the culture.

... We're going to get to a point where the data is going to be a ubiquitous thing. It doesn't really matter where it resides and where we can access it, as long as we access it from a particular model. It's not going to make any difference to the users either. I just blogged about that in InfoWorld.

In fact, we're getting into this notion of what I call the "invisible cloud." In other words, we're not doing application as a service or SaaS, where people get new interfaces that are web-driven. We're putting pieces of the back-end architectural components -- processes, services, and, in this case, data -- out on the platform of the cloud. It really doesn't matter to them where that data resides, as long as they can get at it when they need it.

Application transformation case study targets enterprise bottom line with eye-popping ROI

2009-10-25T13:15:00.003-04:00

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

This podcast is the first in the series of three to examine Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line. Through a case study, we'll discuss the rationale and likely returns of assessing the true role and character of legacy applications, and then assess the true paybacks from modernization.

The ongoing impact of the reset economy is putting more emphasis on lean IT -- of identifying and eliminating waste across the data-center landscape. The top candidates, on several levels, are the silo-architected legacy applications and the aging IT systems that support them.

Using our case study, we'll also uncover a number of proven strategies on how to innovatively architect legacy applications for transformation and for improved technical, economic, and productivity outcomes. The podcasts coincidentally run in support of HP virtual conferences on the same subjects:

Register here to attend the Asia Pacific event on Nov. 3. Register here to attend the EMEA event on Nov. 4. Register here to attend the Americas event on Nov. 5.

Here to start us off on our series on the how and why of transforming legacy enterprise applications are Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on Applications Transformation at HP, and Luc Vogeleer, CTO for Application Modernization Practice in HP Enterprise Services. The discussion is moderated be me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: When the economic situation hit really hard, we definitely saw customers retreat, and basically say, "We don't know what to do now. Some of us have never been in this position before in a recessionary environment, seeing IT budgets reduce considerably."

That wasn't surprising. ... It was obvious that people would retrench and then scratch their heads and say, "Now what do we do?"

Now we're seeing a different dynamic, ... something like a two-fold increase in what you might call "customer interest" [in applications transformation]. The number of opportunities we're seeing as a company has doubled over the last six or nine months.

If you ask any CIO or IT head, "Is application transformation something you want to do," the answer is, "No, not really." It's like tidying your garage at home. You know you should do it, but you don't really want to do it. You know that you benefit, but you still don't want to do it.

This has moved from being something that maybe I should do to something that I have to do, because there are two real forces here. One is the force that says, "If I don't continue to innovate and differentiate, I go out of business, because my competitors are doing that." If I believe the economy doesn't allow me to stand still, then I've got it wrong. So, I have to continue to move forward.

Secondly, I have to reduce the amount of money I spend on my innovation, but at the same time I need a bigger payback. I've got to reduce the cost of IT. Now, with 80 percent of my budget being dedicated to maintenance, that doesn't move my business forward. So, the strategic goal is, I want to flip the ratio.

... Today, we'll hear about a case study -- with the Italian Ministry of Instruction, University and Research (MIUR). This customer received an ROI in 18 months. In 18 months, the savings they had made -- and this runs into millions of dollars -- had been paid for. Their new system, in under 18 months, paid for itself. After that, it was pure money to the bottom-line.

... Our job is to minimize that risk by exposing them to customers who have done it before. They can view those best-case scenarios and understand what to do and what not to do.

Vogeleer: We take a very holistic approach and look at the entire portfolio of applications from a customer. Then, from that application portfolio -- depending on the usage of the application, the business criticality of the application, as well as the frequency of changes that this application requires -- we deploy different strategies for each application.

We not only focus on one approach of completely re-writing or re-platforming the application or replacing the application with a package, but we go for a combination of all those elements. By doing a complete portfolio assessment, as a first step into the customer legacy application landscape, we're able to bring out a complete road map to conduct this transformation.

We first execute applications that bring a quick ROI. We first execute quick wins and the ROI and the benefits from those quick wins are immediately reinvested for continuing the transformation. So, transformation is not just one project. It's not just one shot. It's a continuous program over time, where all the legacy applications are progressively migrated into a more agile and cost-effective platform.

The Italian Ministry of Instruction, University and Research (MIUR), is the customer we're going to cover with this case, is a large governmental organization and their overall budget is €55 billion.

This Italian public education sector serves 8 million students from 40,000 schools, and the schools are located across the country in more than 10,000 locations, with each of those locations connected to the information system provided by the ministry.

Very large employer

The ministry is, in fact, one of the largest employers in the world, with over one million employees. Its system manages both permanent and temporary employees, like teachers and substitutes, and the administrative employees. It also supports the ministry users, about 7,000 or 8,000 school employees. It's a very large employer with a large number of users connected across the country.

Why do they need to modernize their environment? In fact, their system was written in the early 1980s on IBM mainframe architecture. In early 2000, there was a substantial change in Italian legislation, which was called so-called a Devolution Law. The Devolution Law was about more decentralization of their process to school level and also to move the administration processes from the central ministry level into the regions, and there are 20 different regions in Italy.

This change implied a completely different process workflow within their information systems. To fulfill the changes, the legacy approach was very time-consuming and inappropriate. A number of strong application have been developed incrementally to fulfill those new organizational requirements, but very quickly this became completely unmanageable and inflexible. The aging legacy systems were expected to be changed quickly.

In addition to the element of agility to change application to meet the new legislation requirement, the cost in that context went completely out of control. So, the simple, most important objective of the modernization was to design and implement a new architecture that could reduce cost and provide a more flexible and agile infrastructure.

The first step we took was to develop a modernization road map that took into account the organizational change requirements, using our service offering, which is the application portfolio assessment.

From the standard engagement that we can offer to a customer, we did an analysis of the complete set of applications and associated data assets from multiple perspectives. We looked at it from a financial perspective, a business perspective, functionality and the technical perspective.

From those different dimensions, we could make the right decision on each application. The application portfolio assessment ensured that the client's business context and strategic drivers were understood, before commencing a modernization strategy for a given application in the portfolio.

A business case was developed for modernizing each application, an approach that was personalized for each group of applications and was appropriate to the current situation.

... This assessment phase took about three months with the seven people. From there, we did a first transformation pilot, with a small staff of people in three months.

After the pilot, we went into the complete transform and user-acceptance test, and after an additional year, 90 percent of the transformation was completed. In the transformation, we had about 3,500 batch processes. We had the transformation. We had re-architecting of 7,500 programs. And, all the screens were also transformed. But, that was a larger effort with a team of about 50 people over one year.

... We tried to use automated conversion, especially for non-critical programs, where they're not frequently changed. That represented 60 percent of the code. This code could be then immediately transferred by removing only the barriers in the code that prevented it from compiling.

All barriers removed

We had also frequently updated programs, where all barriers were removed and code was completely cleaned in the conversion. Then, in critical programs, especially, the conversion effort was bigger than the rewrite effort. Thirty percent of the programs were completely rewritten.

The applications are now accessed through a more efficient web-based user interface, which replaces the green screen and provides improved navigation and better overall system performance, including improved user productivity.

End-user productivity is doubled in terms of the daily operation of some business processes. Also, the overall application portfolio has been greatly simplified by this approach. The number of function points that we're managing has decreased by 33 percent.

From a financial perspective, there are also very significant results. Hardware and software license and maintenance cost savings were about €400,000 in the first year, €2 million in the second year, and are projected to be €3.4 million this year. This represents a savings of 36 percent of the overall project.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Global study: Hybrid model rules as cloud heats up, SaaS adoption blazing

2009-10-21T10:28:00.002-04:00

“Cloud” is the game and “hybrid” is the name. A recent global study has encouraging news for cloud-computing enthusiasts, revealing a sharp uptick in the adoption, as well as consideration, of cloud computing. The same study also indicates that those who are adopting cloud aren’t going whole hog, but are taking a hybrid approach -- mixing external and internal clouds.

The study, commissioned by global IT consultancy Avanade, showed a surprising increase in the interest in cloud computing, even from a similar study conducted in January of this year. In January, 54 percent of respondents said they had no plans to adopt cloud computing. By September, that percentage had shrunk to 37 percent.

At the same time, the percentage of companies planning or testing cloud computing increased three-fold, going from 3 percent of respondents to 10 percent.

What’s significant in the report is that less than 5 percent of companies are using an all-cloud model. The rest are relying on a hybrid approach, and report security concerns as the chief factor for being cautious.

Nine months ago, 61 percent of respondents indicated that they were using only internal IT systems and today, that number has dropped to 41 percent. At the same time, those using a combined approach on a global level have increased to 54 percent from 33 percent nine months earlier.

The report says it not clear whether the hybrid model will lead to a pure-play adoption at some point.

SaaS is taking off

One aspect of cloud computing that’s finding wide adoption is software as a service (SaaS), with more than half of the respondents worldwide -- and 68 percent in the US -- reporting that they have adopted SaaS at some level. Despite extremely high satisfaction -- more than 90 percent -- reliability is still an issue. About 30 percent of respondents said they had lost more than a day of business due to a service outage.

Still, the reliability concerns haven’t dampened users’ enthusiasm for SaaS, and 62 percent of respondents reported that they had plans to move into more SaaS within the next year. However, similar to their experience with cloud, users tend to deliver SaaS applications internally, rather than from the third-party provider.

On a global basis, those who deliver SaaS application internally outnumber those who used a third party by a ratio of 2 to 1. In the US, that increases to 4 to 1. Also, those who do use SaaS often rely on multiple providers, with one third using three or more providers. This leads the report to conclude that there is opportunity in the SaaS market.

Other conclusion from the report:

Cloud will continue to make significant inroads for the next year, although there won’t be a migration to a full cloud environment.
The gap is closing between companies with plans to adopt and those without. Avenade sees those curves intersecting in 2011 or 2012.
Despite the widespread adoption of cloud, there will be some applications that should remain on-premises.
SaaS adoption will continue to spread and is spreading faster than other technologies have in the past.

The study was conducted by Kelton Research and surveyed 500 C-level and IT executives worldwide.

BriefingsDirect contributor Carlton Vogt provided editorial assistance and research on this post.

Here's why Apple is doing so well -- it's the top half, stupid

2009-10-21T08:48:00.002-04:00

I've been ruminating the past few days on why Apple is doing so well with it's pricey high-end products and services during a recession. The answer came as I was reading today's New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, whom I deeply admire and read anything and everything he puts out.

Friedman points out that the winners in today's fast-shifting U.S. job market are the ones demonstrating "entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity." He says, "They are the new untouchables," in contrast to other still highly educated but less creative types.

Friedman cites Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz, who explains in the column that the now disadvantaged are "those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want. ... They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

They are also more likely to be using personal computers with nine-year-old operating systems, with little choice but to take what their companies provide in terms of personal productivity IT. They are the 90 percent for whom good enough IT has made them as good as anyone anywhere.

In contrast, it's the "top half" of the labor pool, and more specifically the apparent 10 percent that are "entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity"-focused among them, that know to succeed and win they need the very best computer and associated services, even if it costs $500 more. Nowadays there's no better way to gain an advantage in business and life than to have the best technology.

The people who are succeeding are buying Macs, iPhones, iPod Touches and Apple's services and applications. A flight to quality is usually spurred by disruption and uncertainty. It's not about brand religion or pretty graphics. It's about survival and success when the going gets tough. It works for me, it has to.

A chef doesn't buy the cheapest knifes. A painter doesn't buy the cheapest brushes. A carpenter doesn't buy the cheapest hammer. And all the winners in the economy today -- those that have a say in what they use to do all the digital things so critical now to almost any knowledge- and services-based job -- need the best tools. And they will upgrade those tools just as fast as they can (hence the rapid adoption of Apple's Snow Leopard OS X upgrade in recent months.)

So for all those millions of newly laid off workers who know that "entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity" is their only ticket to a new, fresh start -- those that no longer have an IT department to tell them what to do (at lowest cost) -- they seem to be making a new move to a Mac. I expect they won't soon go back, once they taste the fruits of heightened knowledge productivity.

Because when failure is not an option, you have to have the best tools, especially when the going gets tough. The sad part is that Apple does so well when so many are not.

SOA user survey defines latest ESB trends, middleware use patterns

2009-10-20T13:20:00.000-04:00

Take the BriefingsDirect middleware/ESB survey now.

Forgive my harping on this, but I keep hearing about how powerful social media is for gathering insights from the IT communities and users. Yet I rarely see actual market research conducted via the social media milieu.

So now's the time to fully test the process. I'm hoping that you users and specifiers of enterprise software middleware, SOA infrastructure, integration middleware, and enterprise service buses (ESBs) will take 5 minutes and fill out my BriefingsDirect survey. We'll share the results via this blog in a few weeks.

We're seeking to uncover the latest trends in actual usage and perceptions around these SOA technologies -- both open source and commercial.

How middleware products -- like ESBs -- are used is not supposed to change rapidly. Enterprises typically choose and deploy integration software infrastructure slowly and deliberately, and they don't often change course without good reason.

But the last few years have proven an exception. Middleware products and brands have shifted more rapidly than ever before. Vendors have consolidated, product lines have merged. Users have had to grapple with new and dynamic requirements.

Open source offerings have swiftly matured, and in many cases advanced capabilities beyond the commercial space. Interest in SOA is now shared with anticipation of cloud computing approaches and needs.

So how do enterprise IT leaders and planners view the middleware and SOA landscape after a period of adjustment -- including the roughest global recession in more than 60 years?

This brief survey, distributed by BriefingsDirect for Interarbor Solutions, is designed to gauge the latest perceptions and patterns of use and updated requirements for middleware products and capabilities. Please take a few moments and share your preferences on enterprise middleware software. Thank you.

Take the BriefingsDirect middleware/ESB survey now.

Speaking of SOA: Are services nouns or verbs?

2009-10-19T14:01:00.000-04:00

This guest post comes courtesy of Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink.

By Jason Bloomberg

ZapThink revels in stirring up controversy almost as much as we enjoy clarifying subtle concepts that give architects that rare "aha!" moment as they finally discern the solution to a particularly knotty design problem. Last month's "process isomorphism" ZapFlash, therefore, gave us a particular thrill, because we received kudos from enterprise architects for streamlining the connections between Business Process Management (BPM) and Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), while at the same time, several industry pundits demurred, disagreeing with our premise that services should correspond one-to-one with tasks or subtasks in a process.

Maybe we got it wrong, and inadvertently mislead our following of architects? Or perhaps the pundits were off base, and somehow ZapThink saw clearly a best practice that remained obscure to other experts in the field?

Upon further consideration, the true answer lies somewhere in between these extremes. Now, we're not reconsidering the conclusions of the process isomorphism ZapFlash. Rather, further explanation and clarification is warranted.

As with any best practice, process isomorphism doesn't apply in every situation, and not every service should correspond to a process task or subtask. That being said, there is also a good chance that some of our esteemed fellow pundits might not be opining from a truly service-oriented perspective, as many of their comments hint at an object-oriented (OO) bias that may be too limiting in the SOA context.

In fact, understanding which services the process isomorphism pattern applies to, and how other services support such services goes to the heart of how to think about services from a SOA perspective.

The object-oriented context for services

In the early days of web services, as various standards committee members tried to hash out how core standards should support the vision of SOA, the SOAP standard for message transport was an acronym for the "Simple Object Access Protocol." The reasoning at the time was that services were interfaces to objects, and hence service operations should correspond to object methods, also known as remote procedures.

SOAP was nothing more than a simple, XML-based way of access those methods. Over time, however, people realized that taking this Remote Procedure Call (RPC) approach to service interfaces is too limiting: It leads to tightly coupled, synchronous interactions that constrain the benefits such services could offer. Instead, the industry settled on document style as being the preferred interface style, which expects requests and responses to conform to schemas that are included in the service contracts by reference, where the underlying service logic is responsible for validating interactions against the relevant schemas.

Document style interfaces provide greater loose coupling than their RPC-style cousins because many changes to a service need not adversely impact existing service consumers, and furthermore, document style interfaces facilitate asynchronous interactions where a request need not correlate immediately with a response. In fact, the W3C eventually dropped the "Simple Object Access Protocol" definition of SOAP altogether, and now SOAP is just SOAP, instead of being an abbreviation of anything.

The answer is straightforward: If a service has no operations, then what it's supposed to do is understood from the context of the service itself.

However, document style interfaces still allow for operations, only now they're optional rather than mandatory as is the case with RPC-style interfaces. The fact that operations are optional is a never-ending sense of confusion for students in our Licensed ZapThink Architect course, perhaps because of the object-oriented pattern of thinking many of today's techies follow, often without realizing it.

How would you ever know what a service is supposed to do, the reasoning goes, if you don't call an operation on that service? The answer is straightforward: if a service has no operations, then what it's supposed to do is understood from the context of the service itself. For example, an insurance company may want a service that simply approves a pending insurance policy. If we have an approvePolicy Service, the consumer can simply request that service with the policy number of the policy it wants to approve.

Nouns vs. Verbs

The insurance policy example brings up a fundamental question. Which is the service, the insurance policy entity or the approve policy task? In other words, should services be nouns or verbs? It's possible to design services either way, as Entity Services, which predictably represent business entities, or as Task Services, that represent specific actions that implement some step in a process, in other words, verbs. Which approach is better?

If you look at the question of whether services should be nouns or verbs from the OO perspective, then services are little more than interfaces to objects, and hence it's best to think of services as nouns and their operations as the verbs. For example, following the OO approach, we might have an insurance policy object with several operations, including one that approves the policy, as the following pseudocode illustrates:

myPolicy = new Policy (); ... successOrFailure = myPolicy.approve ();

The first statement above instantiates a particular policy, while the second one approves it, and returns either success or failure.

Now, it is certainly possible to create a Policy Service as an Entity Service that has an approve operation that works more or less like the example above, with one fundamental difference: because services are fundamentally stateless, you don't instantiate them. Here, then, is pseudocode that represents how an Entity Service would tackle the same functionality:

request to create new policy, specifying create policy operation --> Policy Service --> response with policy number 12345
...
request to approve policy 12345, specifying approve policy operation --> Policy Service --> response with success or failure

Note that we're representing service interactions as input and output messages that contain documents, where in this case, the input documents specify operations. In this example, there is no object in the OO sense representing policy 12345 and maintaining the state information that indicates whether or not that particular policy is approved or not.

Instead, the underlying service implementation maintains the state information. There is only the one Policy Service, and it accepts requests in the form of XML documents and returns responses, also in the form of XML documents. If a request calls the create policy operation, then the Policy Service knows to create the policy, while a request that specifies the approve policy operation follows the same pattern.

Note that the fact that the Policy Service has a document style interface gives us two advantages: First, we can make certain changes to the service like adding new operations without adversely impacting existing consumers, and second, its stateless nature enables asynchronous interactions, where instead of returning success or failure of the approve request, perhaps, the service returns a simple acknowledgment of the request (or perhaps no response at all), and then notifies the consumer at some point in the future that the policy has been approved, either through a one-way notification event or possibly as a response to a further query.

Task services as verbs

While there is a significant role for Entity Services in SOA, it is important to break free from OO-centric thinking and consider other types of services as well that serve other purposes. In fact, there is another way of offering the same functionality as the Entity Service above where the Services represent verbs rather than nouns, what we call Task Services. Here is the pseudocode for this situation:

request to create new policy --> createNewPolicy Service --> response with policy number 12345
...
request to approve policy 12345 -- > approvePolicy Service --> response with success or failure

In this example, neither Task Service has any operations, but rather the functionality of each Service is understood from the context of the Service. After all, what would an approvePolicy Service do but approve policies? If you read the process isomorphism ZapFlash, the benefits of delivering capabilities as Task Services is clear. If you design each Task Service to represent tasks or subtasks in business processes, then it's possible to build a service-oriented business application (SOBA) that is isomorphic to the process it implements.

Combining entity and task services

A casual reading of the process isomorphism ZapFlash might lead you to think we were suggesting that all services should be Task Services. However, in spite of the fact that architects with OO backgrounds often rely too heavily on Entity Services, such services do play a critical role in most SOA implementations.

Remember that in the enterprise context, services expose existing, legacy capabilities and data that are typically scattered across different applications and data stores, limiting the enterprise's agility and leading to high integration maintenance costs, poor data quality, reduced customer value, and other ills all too familiar to anybody working within a large organization's IT department. SOA provides best practices for addressing such issues by abstracting such legacy capabilities in order to support flexible business processes.

Both Entity and Task Services help architects connect the dots between legacy capabilities on the one hand, and flexible process requirements on the other, as the figure below illustrates:

Process, task, and entity service layers

In the figure above, the bottom row contains Entity Services, which directly abstract underlying legacy capabilities. Above the Entity Services lie the Task Services, which may actually be abstractions of individual operations belonging to underlying Entity Services. The top layer contains Process Services, which are typically compositions of Task Services. In other words, Process Services are interfaces to SOBAs, and when those SOBAs are compositions of properly designed Task Services, they will exhibit process isomorphism.

The essential question for the architect is which capabilities to abstract in which service layer. Take for example the Address Change Task Service. Changing addresses is a common example of a particularly challenging task in many large organizations, because address information is typically maintained by different applications and data stores in a haphazard, inconsistent manner. To make matters worse, there may be addresses associated with customers, policies, or other business entities.

When architecting the Customer Entity Service, the core design principle is to pull together the various instances of customer-related information and functionality across the as-is legacy environment into a single, consolidated representation. Such a Service will likely have an update address operation, and the Customer Entity Service's logic will encapsulate whatever individual queries and API calls are necessary to properly update customers' addresses across all relevant systems.

The Address Change Task Service, then, abstracts the Customer Entity Service's update address operation, as well as whatever other address change operations other Entity Services might have. The Service logic behind this Task Service understands, for example, that insured properties in polices have addresses and customers have addresses, and these addresses are related in a particular way, but are by no means equivalent.

The ZapThink take

As is usually the case, architects have several options at their disposal, and knowing which option is appropriate often depends on the business problem, an example of the "right tool for the job" principle. If the business problem is process-centric, say, a need to streamline or optimize the policy issuance process, then implementing SOBAs as compositions of Task Services will facilitate process flexibility.

In other cases, the business problem is more information-centric than process-centric, for example, putting consolidated customer information on a call center rep's screen. In such instances the architect's focus may be on an Entity Service, because the rep is dealing with a particular customer and must be able to interact with that customer in a flexible way.

The big picture of the SOA architect's challenge, of course, is delivering agility in the face of heterogeneity. On the one hand, the IT shop contains a patchwork of legacy resources, and on the other hand, the business requires increasingly agile processes. Understanding which capabilities belong in Entity Services and which belong in Task Services is a critical part of the best practice approach to SOA.

This guest post comes courtesy of Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink.

SPECIAL PARTNER OFFER

What's on your watch list? Forrester identifies 15 key technologies for enterprise architects

2009-10-16T11:02:00.003-04:00

Riding the right -- or wrong -- technology wave can help -- or really, really hurt -- your business. Moving at the right time can be the critical factor between the two outcomes.

Yet new technologies come down the pike at alarming speed. Deciding which will fizzle and which will sizzle -- and when -- can be a daunting and ongoing task. What’s an enterprise architect to do?

Forrester Research has tried to sort things out with a new report, “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch.” And, if even limiting the selection to 15 sounds like a lot to keep your eye on, Forrester has grouped them into five major “themes,” and has ranked the technologies by their impact, newness and complexity.

Calling “impact” the most important criterion, the report says this considers whether the technology will deliver new business capabilities or allow IT to improve business performance.

“Newness” comes in second because it’s likely that enterprises will have to gear up to learn new processes and the processes themselves are prone to rapid evolution. “Complexity” places other demands on the business, requiring more time to learn operations that are more complex than others.

The five themes identified by Forrester, along with their associated technologies, are:

Social computing in and around the enterprise
- Collaboration platforms become people-centric
- Customer community platforms integrate with business apps
- Telepresence gains widespread use
Process-centric data and intelligence
- Business intelligence goes real time
- Master data management matures
- Data quality services become real-time
Restructured IT services platforms
- SaaS will be ubiquitous for packaged apps
- Cloud-based platforms that become standard infrastructure and platform as a service
- Client virtualization is ubiquitous
Agile and fit-to-purpose applications
- Business rules processing moves to the mainstream
- BPM will be Web 2.0-enabled
- Policy-based SOA becomes predominant
- Security will be data- and content-based
Mobile as the new desktop
- Apps and business processes go mobile
- Mobile networks and devices gain more power

The technologies range from real-time business intelligence (BI) with a very high impact, high newness and high complexity to data- and content-based security, which scored a medium in all three categories. I guess that'll keep my friend Jim Koblielus busy for some time.

Forrester limited the report to a three-year horizon for two reasons. First, it represents the planning horizon for most firms and, second, any technology that won’t have an effect in less than three years may be interesting, but it’s not actionable.

The report also says that we're entering a new phase of technology innovation. This analysis is based on Forrester’s finding that technology change goes through two waves. The first involves innovation and growth. This features a rapid evolution of the technology and rapid uptake by businesses. The second phase is refinement and redesign, in which technologies are only incrementally improved.

I hear a lot these day about "inflection points" in the IT market. I hear folks point to the hockey stick growth effect coming for netbooks/thin clients/desktop virtualization/Windows 7. I like to add the smartphones and Android-phones to that category too.

And even if the cloud is a slow burn, rather than hockey stick, the importance of business processes supported by services supported by all the old and new suspects is huge. I call the ability to refine and adapt business processes as the big productivity maker of the next decade --- supported by IT as services.

Perhaps the new Moore's Law is less about systems, and more about what people do with the services those systems enable. What do you think?

Incidentally, the full report is available for download from Forrester.

BriefingsDirect contributor Carlton Vogt provided editorial assistance and research on this post.

Making the leap from virtualization to cloud computing: A roadmap and guide

2009-10-15T12:28:00.009-04:00

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Get a free copy of Cloud for Dummies courtesy of Hewlett-Packard at www.hp.com/go/cloudpodcastoffer.

This latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion focuses on enterprise IT architects making a leap from virtualization to cloud computing.

How should IT leaders scale virtualized environments so that they can be managed for elasticity payoffs? What should be taking place in virtualized environments now to get them ready for cloud efficiencies and capabilities later?

And how do service-oriented architecture (SOA), governance, and adaptive infrastructure approaches relate to this progression, or road map, from tactical virtualization to powerful and strategic cloud computing outcomes?

Here to help hammer out a typical road map for how to move from virtualization-enabled server, storage, and network utilization benefits to the larger class of cloud computing agility and efficiency values, we are joined by two thought leaders from HP: Rebecca Lawson, director of Worldwide Cloud Marketing, and Bob Meyer, the worldwide virtualization lead in HP’s Technology Solutions Group.

The discussion is moderated by me, BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Lawson: We're seeing an acceleration of our customers to start to get their infrastructure in order -- to get it virtualized, standardized, and automated -- because they want to make the leap from being a technology provider to a service provider.

Many of our customers who are running an IT shop, whether it’s enterprise or small and mid-size, are starting to realize -- thanks to the cloud -- that they have to be service-centric in their orientation. That means they ultimately have to get to a place, where not only is their infrastructure available as a service, but all of their applications and their offerings are going in that direction as well.

Meyer: A couple of years ago, people were talking about virtualization. The focus was all on the server and hypervisor. The real positive trend now is to focus on the service.

How do I take this infrastructure, my servers, my storage, and my network and make sure that the plumbing is right and the connectivity is right between them to be agile enough to support the business? How do I manage this in a holistic manner, so that I don’t have multiple management tools or disconnected pools of data.

What’s really positive is that the top-down service perspective that says virtualization is great, but the end point is the service. On top of that virtualization, what do I need to do to take it to the next level? And, for many people now, that next level they are looking at is the cloud, because that is the services perspective.

Lawson: A lot of people are trying to make a link between virtualization and cloud computing. We think there is a link, but it’s not just a straight-line progression. In cloud computing, everything is delivered as a service.

What's really useful about cloud services like those is that they're not necessarily used inside the enterprise, but what they are doing is they are causing IT to focus on the end-game. Very specifically, what are those business services that we need to have and that business owners need to use in order to move our company forward?

... We're learning lesson from the big cloud service providers on how to standardize, where to standardize, how to automate, how to virtualize, and we're using the lessons that we are seeing from the big-cloud service providers and apply them back into the enterprise IT shop.

Meyer: The cloud discussion is important, because it looks at the way that you consume and deliver services. It really does have broader implications to say that now as a service provider to the business, you have options.

Your option is not just that you buy all the infrastructure components. You plumb them together, monitor them, manage them, make sure they're compliant, and deliver them. It really opens up the conversation to ask, "What’s the most efficient way to deliver the mix of services I have?"

The end result really is that there will be some that you build, manage, and manage the compliance on your own in the traditional way. Some of them might be outsourced to manage service providers. For some, you might source the infrastructure or the applications from the third-party provider.

... Then you start to understand the implications of shifting workloads, not losing specialty tools, and really getting to a point when you standardize. You could start to get to the point of managing a single infrastructure, understanding the costs better, and really be more effective at servicing and provisioning that. Standardizing has to happen in order to get there.

I'm not just talking about the server and hypervisor itself. You have to really look across your infrastructure, at the network, server, and storage, and get to that level of convergence. How do I get those things to work together when I have to provision a new service or provide a service?

... You're looking to source something for a service or you're looking to pull assets together. Everybody will have some combination of physical and virtual infrastructure. So how do I take action when I need a compute resource, be it physical or virtual?

Automation makes the transition possible

How do I know what’s available? How do I know how to provision it? How do I know to de-provision it? How do I see it if that’s in compliance?" All those things really only come through automation. From a bottom-up perspective, we look at the converged infrastructure, the automation capabilities, and the ability to standardize across that.

... When it’s gone beyond a server and hypervisor approach, and they've looked at the bigger picture, where the costs are actually being saved and pushed -- then the light goes on, and they say, "Okay, there is more to it than just virtualization and the server." You really do have to look, from an infrastructure perspective, at how you manage it, using holistic management, and how you connect them together.

Hopefully, at HP we can help make that progression faster, because we’ve worked with so many companies through this progression. But really it takes moving beyond the hypervisor approach, understanding what it needs to do in the context of the service, and then looking at the bigger picture.

Lawson: ... Most IT organizations want to be aware and help govern what actually gets consumed. That’s hard to do, because it’s easy to have rogue activity going on. It’s easy to have app developers, testers, or even business people go out and just start using cloud services.

... [But] if IT is willing and able to step back and provide a catalog of all services that the business can access, that might include some cloud services. We try to encourage our customers to use the tools, techniques, and the approach that says, "Let’s embrace all these different kinds of services, understand what they are, and help our lines of business and our constituents make the right choice, so that they're using services that are secure, governed, that perform to their expectations, and that don’t get them into trouble."

We encourage our customers to start immediately working on a service catalog. Because when you have a service catalog, you're forced into the right cultural and political behaviors that allow IT and lines of business to kind of sync up, because you sync up around what’s in the catalog.

There's no excuse not to do that these days, because the tools and technologies exist to allow you to do that. At HP, we’ve been doing that for many years. It’s not really brand new stuff. It’s new to a lot of organization that haven’t used it.

You can start to control, manage, and measure across that hybrid ecosystem with standard IT management tools. ... The organizing principle is the technology-enabled service. Then you can be consistent. You can say, "This external email service that we're using is really performing well. Maybe we should look at some other productivity services from that same vendor." You can start to make good decisions based on quantitative information about performance availability and security.

Oracle's Fusion Apps finally come out from behind the OpenWorld curtain

2009-10-15T12:01:00.002-04:00

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

By Tony Baer

Like almost every attendee at just-concluded Oracle OpenWorld, the suspense on when Oracle would finally lift the wraps on Fusion Apps was palpable. Staying cool with minimizing our carbon footprint, we weren’t physically at Moscone, but instead watching the webcasts and monitoring the Twitter stream from our home office.

The level of anticipation over Fusion apps was palpable. But it was hardly suspense as it seemed that a good cross-section of Twitterati were either analysts, reference customers, consultants or other business partners who have had their NDA sneak peaks (we had ours back in June), but had to keep our lips sealed until last night.

There was also plenty of impatience for Oracle to finally get on with a message that was being drowned out by its sudden obsession with hardware. Ellison spent most of his keynote time pumping up its Exadata cache memory database storage appliance and issuing a $10 million challenge to IBM that it can’t match Oracle’s database benchmarks on Sun.

Yup, if the Sun acquisition goes trough, Oracle’s no longer strictly a software company, and although the Twiterati counted its share of big iron groupies, the predominant mood was that hardware was a distraction.

“This conference has been hardware heavy from the start. Odd for a software conference,” tweeted Forrester analyst Paul Hamerman. “90 minutes into the keynote, nothing yet on Fusion apps.”

“Larry clearly stalling with all this compression mumbo jumbo,” “Larry please hurry up and tell the world about Fusion Apps, fed up of saying YES it does exist to your skeptics,” and so on read the Twitter stream.

There was fear that Oracle would simply tease us in a manner akin to Jon Stewart’s we’ll have to leave it there dig at CNN: “I am afraid that Larry soon will tell that as time has run out he will tell about Fusion applications in next OOW.” A 20-minute rousing speech from Calif. Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger served as a welcome relief from Ellison’s newly found affection for big iron toys.

Ellison came back after the Governator pleaded with the audience to stick around awhile and drop some change around California as the state is broke. The break gave him the chance to drift over to Oracle Enterprise Manager, which at least got the conversation off hardware.

Ellison described some evolutionary enhancements where Oracle can track your configurations trough Enterprise Manager and automatically manage patching. As we’ve noted previously, Oracle has compelling solutions for all-Oracle environments, among them being a declarative framework for developing apps and specifying what to monitor and auto-patch.

The main topic

But the spiel on Enterprise Manager provided a useful back door to the main topic, as Ellison showed how it could automate management of the next generation of Oracle apps. Ellison got the audience’s attention with the words, “We are code complete for all of this.”

Well almost everything. Oracle has completed work on all modules except manufacturing.

Ellison then gave a demo that was quite similar to one that we saw under NDA back in the summer. While ERP emerged with and was designed for client/server architectures, Fusion has emerged with a full Java EE and SOA architecture; it is built around Oracle Fusion middleware 11g and uses Oracle BPEL Process Manager to run processes as orchestrations of processes exposed from the Fusion Apps or other legacy applications. That makes the architecture of Fusion Apps clean and flexible.

But at this point, Oracle is not being any more specific about rollout other than to say it would happen sometime next year.

It uses SOA to loosely couple, rather than tightly integrate with other Fusion processes or processes exposed by existing back end applications, which should make Fusion apps more pliant and less prone to outage.

That allows workflows in Fusion to be dynamic and flexible. If an order in the supply chain is held up, the process can be dynamically changed without bringing down order fulfillment processes for orders that are working correctly. It also allows Oracle to embed business intelligence throughout the suite, so that you don’t have to leave the application to perform analytics.

For instance, in an HR process used for locating the right person for a job, you can dig up an employee’s salary history, and instead switching to a separate dashboard, you can instead retrieve and display relevant pieces of information necessary to see comparisons and make a decision.

Fusion’s SOA architecture also allows Oracle to abstract security and access control by relying on its separate, Fusion middleware-based Identity Manager product. The same goes with communications, where instant messaging systems can be pulled in (we didn’t see any integration with Wikis or other Web 2.0 social computing mechanisms, but we assume that they can be integrated as services.). It also applies to user interfaces, where you can use different rich internet clients by taking advantage of Oracle’s ADF framework in JDeveloper.

Oracle concedes the obvious: Outside of the mid-market, there is no greenfield market for ERP, and therefore, Fusion Apps are intended to supplement what you already have, not necessarily replace it.

That includes Oracle’s existing applications, for which it currently promises at least a decade of more support. But at this point, Oracle is not being any more specific about rollouts other than to say it would happen "sometime next year."

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

CEO interview: Workday’s Aneel Bhusri on advancing SaaS and cloud models for improved ERP

2009-10-14T12:27:00.010-04:00

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Workday.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast is an executive interview with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) upstart Workday, a human capital management (HCM), financial management, payroll, worker spend management, and workday benefits network provider.

I had the pleasure to recently sit down with Workday’s co-founder and co-CEO, Aneel Bhusri, who is responsible for the company’s overall strategy and day-to-day operations.

Bhusri, who also helped bring PeopleSoft to huge success, explains how Workday is raising the bar on employee life-cycle productivity by lowering IT costs through the SaaS model for full enterprise resource planning (ERP).

More than that, Workday is also demonstrating what I consider a roadmap to the future advantages in cloud computing. The interview is conducted by me, BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Bhusri: We're very similar to PeopleSoft in some areas, and in other areas, quite different. We have the same culture -- focused on employees first and customers second. We focus on integrity. We focus on innovation. We brought that same culture to Workday, and our customers are very happy.

The pedigree of the team starts with my co-founder, Dave Duffield. He's an icon in the software industry. He's known for high integrity, innovation, and customer service. Many of us, like me, have been with him for 17 years now and we share that vision and that culture with him. We have set out to build the next great software company.

Much like PeopleSoft, we are taking advantage of a technology shift. PeopleSoft benefited from the shift from mainframe to client-server. When Workday started, people weren’t as focused on how big the shift was from client-server or on-premise computing to what is now called cloud computing or, back then, SaaS.

It now seems like it's even bigger than the shift from mainframe to client-server. This is a massive shift and you see it all across. That's the big difference. We are obviously leveraging a very different technology base.

The thing that Dave and I both took away from PeopleSoft is that you have to stay on top of innovation, and that's what Workday is doing. We are innovating where the large ERP vendors have stopped.
One of the reasons why the margins are so high for the [legacy ERP vendors] is that they are at the tail end of the technology life cycle. They are not really innovating.

... One of the reasons why the margins are so high for the [legacy ERP vendors] is that they are at the tail end of the technology life cycle. They are not really innovating. They are collecting maintenance payments. We all know that maintenance is very, very profitable. Well, when you start in a new technology, it's mostly investing. Usually, when the profitability rates get that high, it means that there is a new technology around the corner that will start cutting into those profitability rates.

... ERP is now 15 years old and just needs to be rewritten. The world has changed so dramatically since the original ERPs were written.

Back then, companies were thinking about being global. Now, they are global. People were not even thinking about the Internet, and now the Internet exists. That was before Sarbanes-Oxley and before the emergence of the iPhone and BlackBerry. All these things pile together to say that it's time to go back and rewrite core ERP. It's no longer valid in today’s world.

... These last nine months have been challenging for everyone. We, as a system-of-record vendor, saw fewer projects out there. At the same time, because of our new model and the cost benefits of the SaaS solutions, we were probably more relevant than we might have been without the economic downturn.

... As the Workday system has gotten more robust, we've really focused on the Fortune 1000 companies, our biggest being Flextronics. Those large, complex organizations with global requirements have a great opportunity for cost savings.
When you add it altogether . . . it averages out consistently to about a 50 percent cost saving over a five-year period.

We had companies that were planning on implementing the traditional legacy systems, but could not afford it. A great example is Sony Pictures Entertainment. They already own the licenses to the SAP HR system, and yet, after careful consideration, determined they didn't have the budget to implement it.

... They will be live in five months, and they will get the benefit of about a 50 percent cost savings, if not more. They basically quoted it as one-half the time at one-third the cost.

... When you add it altogether, really do it on an apples-to-apples basis, and look at what we have taken over for the customers, it averages out consistently to about a 50 percent cost saving over a five-year period.

... The data we have now is not theoretical. It's now based on 60 of our 100-plus customers. Being in production, we have been able to go back and monitor it. The good news about our cost is that it's all-in-one subscription cost, so we know exactly what the costs were for running the Workday system.

... [Many customers] decided that they were not going to take the major upgrade from one of those ERP vendors. A major upgrade is much like a new implementation and it's cost prohibitive.

With our focus on continuing innovation, they are not stuck in time. Every customer gets upgraded every four months to the most current version of the system. So as we are innovating, they are all taking the advantage of that innovation, whether it's in usability, functionality, or a new business model.

I like to think about it as building at web speed, and that's how Google, Amazon, and eBay think about it. New features come out very quickly. There are no old versions of Amazon and eBay that they have to worry about supporting. It's one system for all users. We're able to leverage those same principles that they are and bring out capabilities very quickly, so a customer can identify something that's important to them.
If you can get your administrative applications, your non-mission critical applications . . . delivered from a vendor . . . why not focus your resources on the core enterprise apps you have?

... I think we are a lot like Salesforce. Dave and I have a very good relationship with Marc Benioff. They're focused on CRM, and we're focused on ERP. I think the big difference is that they are focused on becoming a platform vendor, and we are really very focused on staying as an application vendor.

... If you can get your administrative applications, your non-mission critical applications -- CRM, HR, payroll, and accounting -- delivered from a vendor, and you can manage them to service-level agreements (SLAs), why not focus your resources on the core enterprise apps you have?

More and more CIOs are getting that. It does free up data-center space. It also frees up human resources and IT to focus in on what's core to their business. HR and accounting don't have to be specialized in running that system. They have to know HR and accounting, but they don't have to be specialized in running those systems.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Workday.

Engine Yard draws funding as it ushers more developers onto the Ruby services train

2009-10-13T13:40:00.003-04:00

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

Developers are a mighty stubborn bunch. Unlike the rest of the enterprise IT market, where a convergence of forces have favored a nobody gets fired for buying IBM, Oracle, SAP, or Microsoft, developers have no such herding instincts. Developers do not always get with the [enterprise] program.

For evidence, recall what happened the last time that the development market faced such consolidation. In the wake of web 1.0, the formerly fragmented development market – which used to revolve around dozens of languages and frameworks – congealed down to Java vs .NET camps. That was so 2002, however, as in the interim, developers have gravitated toward choosing their own alternatives.

The result was an explosion of what former Burton Group analyst Richard Monson Haefel termed the Rebel Frameworks (that was back in 2004), and more recently in the resurgence of scripting languages. In essence, developers didn’t take the future as inevitable, and for good reason: the so-called future of development circa 2002 was built on the assumption that everyone would gravitate to enterprise-class frameworks.

Java and .NET were engineered on the assumption that the future of enterprise and Internet computing would be based on complex, multitier distributed transactional systems. It was accompanied by a growing risk-aversion: Buy only from vendors that you expect will remain viable. Not surprisingly, enterprise computing procurements narrowed to IOSM (IBM, Oracle, SAP, Microsoft).

Different dynamic

But the developer community lives to a different dynamic. In an age of open source, expertise for development frameworks and languages get dispersed; vendor viability becomes less of a concern. More importantly, developers only want to get the job done, and anyway, the tasks that they perform typically fall under the enterprise radar.

Whereas a CFO may be concerned over the approach an ERP system may employ to managing financial system or supply chain processes, they are not going to care about development languages or frameworks.

The result is that developers remain independent minded, and that independence accounts for the popularity of alternatives to enterprise development platforms, with Ruby on Rails being the latest to enter the spotlight.

In one sense, Ruby’s path to prominence parallels Java in that the language was originally invented for another purpose. But there the similarity ends as, in Ruby’s case, no corporate entity really owned it. Ruby is a simple scripting language that became a viable alternative for web developers once David Heinemeier Hansson invented the Rails framework. The good news, Rails makes it easy to use Ruby to write relatively simple web database applications. Examples of Rails’ simplicity include:

Eliminating the need to write configuration files for mapping requests to actions
Avoiding multi-threading issues because Rails will not pool controller (logic) instances
Dispensing with object-relational mapping files; instead, Rails automates much of this and tends to use very simplified naming conventions.

The bad news is that there are performance limitations and difficulties in handling more complex distributed transaction applications. But the good news is that when it comes to web apps, the vast majority are quite rudimentary, thank you.

The result has propelled a wave of alternative stacks, such as LAMP (Linux-Apache web server-MySQL-and either PHP, Python, or Perl) or, more recently, Ruby on Rails. At the other end of the spectrum, the Spring Framework takes the same principle – simplification – to ease the pain of writing complex Java EE applications – but that’s not the segment addressed by PHP, MySQL, or Ruby on Rails. It reinforces the fact that, unlike the rest of the enterprise software market, developers don’t necessarily take orders from up top. Nobody told them to implement these alternative frameworks and languages.

Although hardly the only cloud provider out there that supports RoR development, Engine Yard’s business is currently on a 2x growth streak. Funding stages the company either for IPO or buy out.

The latest reminder of the strength of grassroots markets in the developer sector is Engine Yard’s securing of $19 million in C funding last week. The backing comes from some of the same players that also funded SpringSource (which was recently acquired by VMware). Some of the backing also comes from Amazon, whose Jeff Bezos owns outright 37Signals, the Chicago-based provider of project management software that employs Heinemeier Hansson. For the record, there is plenty of RoR presence in Amazon Web Services.

Engine Yard is an Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) provider that has optimized the RoR stack for runtime. Although hardly the only cloud provider out there that supports RoR development, Engine Yard’s business is currently on a 2x growth streak. Funding stages the company either for IPO or buy out.

At this point the script sounds similar to SpringSource whose new owner, VMware, is launching a development and runtime cloud that will eventually become VMware’s Java counterpart to Microsoft Azure.

It’s tempting to wonder whether a similar path will become reality for Engine Yard. The answer is that the question itself is too narrow. It is inevitable that a development and runtime cloud paired with enterprise plumbing (e.g., OS, hypervisor) will materialize for Ruby on Rails. With its $19 million funding, Engine Yard has the chance to gain critical mass mindshare in the RoR community – but don’t rule out rivals like Joyent yet.

This guest post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

IT architects seek to bridge gap between cloud vision and reality

2009-10-09T14:44:00.010-04:00

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Free Offer: Get a complimentary copy of the new book Cloud Computing For Dummies courtesy of Hewlett-Packard at www.hp.com/go/cloudpodcastoffer.

The popularity of the concepts around cloud computing have caught many IT departments off-guard.

While business and financial leaders have become enamored of the expected economic and agility payoffs from cloud models, IT planners often lack structured plans or even a rudimentary roadmap of how to attain cloud benefits from their current IT environment.

New market data gathered from recent HP workshops on early cloud adoption and data center transformation shows a wide and deep gulf between the desire to leverage cloud method and the ability to dependably deliver or consume cloud-based services.

So, how do those tasked with a cloud strategy proceed? How do they exercise caution and risk reduction, while also showing swift progress toward an "Everything as a Service" world? How do they pick and choose among a burgeoning variety of sourcing options for IT and business services and accurately identify the ones that make the most sense, and which adhere to existing performance, governance and security guidelines?

It's an awful lot to digest. As one recent HP cloud workshop attendee said, “We're interested in knowing how to build, structure, and document a cloud services portfolio with actual service definitions and specifications.”

Here to help better understand how to properly develop a roadmap to cloud computing adoption in the enterprise, we're joined by three experts from HP: Ewald Comhaire, global practice manager of Data Center Transformation at HP Technology Services; Ken Hamilton, worldwide director for Cloud Computing Portfolio in the HP Technology Services Division, and Ian Jagger, worldwide marketing manager for Data Center Services at HP. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Comhaire: Independent of how we define cloud -- and there are obviously lots of definitions out there -- and also independent of what value cloud can bring or what type of cloud services we are discussing, it's very clear that the cloud service providers are basically setting a new benchmark for how IT specific services are delivered to the business.

Whether it's from a scalability, a pay-per-use model, or a flexibility and speed element or whether it's the fact that it can be accessed and delivered anywhere on the network, it clearly creates some kind of pressure on many IT organizations.

... These companies will have tremendous benefits on the thinking model, the organizing for a service centric delivery model, but they may need to just work a little bit on the architecture. For example, how can they address scalability and the way that supply and demand are aligned to each other, or maybe how they charge back for some of these services in a more pay-as-you-go way versus an allocation based way.

These companies will already have a big head start. Of course, if you're working on an internal cloud, have things like virtualization in place, have consolidated your environment, as well as putting more service management processes in place around ITIL and service management, this will benefit the company greatly. We'll want to have the cloud strategy rolling out in the near future.

Jagger: ... If there are critical applications that you seek for your business, and they're available through the cloud, either from a service provider or through the shared services model, that's going to be far more efficient and cost-effective, subject to terms of ... pay-per-use and security. But once security is addressed, there are definite cost and efficiency advantages.

Hamilton: We're seeing a growing interest in cloud specifically around cost savings. Certainly, in this economy, cost savings and switching from a capital-based model to an operational model, with the flexibility that implies, is something that a number of companies are interested in.

But, I'd also like to underscore that, as we've discussed, the definition of cloud and the variety of different, and sometimes confusing possibilities around cloud, are things that customers want to get control of. They want to be able to understand what the full range of benefits might be.

In a typical internal
So, cost savings as well as agility and new business capabilities really are the three main types of benefits that we are seeing customers go after.
environment it may take weeks or months to deploy a server populated in a particular fashion. In that same internal cloud environment that time to market can be as little as hours or minutes, along with some of the increased functionality.

So, cost savings as well as agility and new business capabilities really are the three main types of benefits that we are seeing customers go after.

Because of the service orientation, this puts a greater emphasis on understanding not just the technological underpinnings, but the contractual service level elements and the virtual elements that go with this.

Comhaire: We often talk about all the benefits, but obviously, specifically for our enterprise customers, there's also an interesting list of inhibitors. In every workshop that we do, we ask our participants to rank what they believe are the biggest inhibitors, either for themselves to consume cloud services or, if they want to become a provider, what do they believe will be inhibiting their potential customers to acquire or consume the services that they are looking for? Consistently, we see five key themes coming as major inhibitors:.
A lot of companies have value chains that they've built, but what if some of the parts of that value chain are in the cloud? Have I lost too much control? Am I too much dependent?

Loss of control. That means I am now totally dependent on my cloud-service provider in my value chain.
Lack of trust in your cloud service provider. That could have to do with the question of whether they'll still be in business five years from now, and also things like price-hikes
Security and vulnerability. Some of that is perceived. If you architect it well, best-practice cloud-service providers can do a great job of actually being more secure than a traditional enterprise dedicated environment. Difficulties around identity management and all of the things to integrate security between the consumer and the provider that are an additional complexity there.
Confidentiality concerning data, because what guarantees do we have, for example, that an employee at a service provider can't take that data and sell it to a government or some other third party?
Reliability -- is the service going to be up enough of the time? Will it be down at moments that are not convenient?
Hamilton: [To get started], the most important thing is to make sure that the executive decision makers have a common understanding of what they might want to achieve with cloud. To that end, we've developed a Cloud Discovery Workshop, which is really a way of being able to frame the cloud decision points and to bring the executive decision makers together.

This Cloud Discovery Workshop does a great job of engaging the executive team in a very focused amount of time, as little as an afternoon, to be able to walk through the key steps around defining a common definition for their view of cloud. It's not just our view or some other vendor's view, but their definition of cloud and the benefits that they might be able to accrue.

They, specifically drill that down into particular areas with a return on investment (ROI) focus, the infrastructure capabilities that might be required, as well as the service management operational and some of the more esoteric capabilities that go hand in hand, addressing security, privacy, and other areas of risk. It's just making sure that they've got a very clear way of being able to document that, and then move forward into more detailed design, if that's the direction they want to move in.

Comhaire: From the workshop customers basically get a better view of the strategy they want to go for. We have an initial discussion on the portfolio and we talk also a little bit about the desired state. In the roadmap service, we actually take that to the next level. So we really start off with that desired state.

We have defined the capability model with five levels of capability. We don't want to call it the maturity model, because for every company, the highest maturity isn't necessarily their desired state or their end state. So, it's unfair to name it "maturity." It's more a capability or an implementation model for the cloud. We have five levels of maturity and then six domains of capabilities.

... One piece of core advice we always give is, "Keep it simple." Rather than bring out a whole portfolio of cloud services, start with one. And, that one service may not have all the functionality that you're dreaming of, but become good at doing a more simplified things faster than trying to overdo it and then end up with a five- or six-year's project, when the whole market will be changed when you can roll out. A lot of the best practice in building the roadmap is to simplify it, so it does not become this four- or five-year project that takes way too long to execute.