Category: Podcasts
November 16th, 2009
BriefingsDirect analysts discuss business commerce clouds: Wave of the future or old wine in a new bottle?
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.
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 leveragi
ng the cloud architecture to go to the next level. When folks traditionally think of the cloud or technology, they think of managing their own business 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.
November 9th, 2009
Here's why text-based content access and management play crucial roles in real-time BI
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.
October 30th, 2009
Internet performance management makes data center consolidation possible
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 an
d 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 24×7x365, 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.
October 26th, 2009
Linthicum's latest book: How SOA and cloud intersect for enterprise productivity benefits
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download a transcript. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints. Also sponsored by TIBCO Software.
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.
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October 25th, 2009
Application transformation case study targets enterprise bottom line with eye-popping ROI
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 basi
cally 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 custom
er. 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.
October 15th, 2009
Making the leap from virtualization to cloud computing: A roadmap and guide
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.
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.
October 14th, 2009
CEO interview: Workday's Aneel Bhusri on advancing SaaS and cloud models for improved ERP
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.
October 9th, 2009
Architects to cloud advocates: Get real
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.
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October 7th, 2009
Successful data center transformation usually requires overdue rethinking of the network
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Most enterprise networks are the result of a patchwork effect of bringing in equipment as needed over the years to fight the fire of the day, with little emphasis on strategy and the anticipation of future requirements. That’s why it’s necessary to reevaluate network architectures in light of newer and evolving IT demands, and overall moves to next-generation data centers.
Nowadays, we see that network requirements have, and are, shifting as IT departments adopt improvements such as virtualization, software as a service (SaaS), cloud computing, and service-oriented architecture (SOA).
The network loads and demands continue to shift under the weight of Web-facing applications and services, security and regulatory compliance, governance, ever-greater data sets, and global-area service distribution and related performance management.
It doesn’t make sense to embark upon a data-center transformation journey without a strong emphasis on network transformation as well. Indeed, the two ought to be brought together, converging to an increasing degree over time.
I recently interviewed three thought leaders at HP on network transformation to help explain the evolving role of network transformation and to rationalize the strategic approach to planning and specifying present and future enterprise networks. They are Lin Nease, director of Emerging Technologies, HP ProCurve; John Bennett, worldwide director, Data Center Transformation Solutions, and Mike Thessen, practice principal, Network Infrastructure Solutions Practice in the HP Network Solutions Group.
Here are some excerpts:
Bennett: Data-center transformation is really about helping customers build out a next-generation data center, an adaptive infrastructure, that is designed to not only meet the current business needs, but to lay the foundation for the plans and strategies of the organi
zation going forward.
In many cases, the IT infrastructure, including the facilities, the servers, the network, and storage environments can actually be a hindrance to investing more in business services and having the agility and flexibility that people want to have, and will need to have, in increasingly competitive environments.
When we talk about that, very typically we talk a lot about facilities, servers, and storage. For many people, the networking environment is ubiquitous. It’s there. But, what we discover, when we lift the covers, is that you have an environment that may be taking lots of resources to manage and keep up-to-date.
… The networking infrastructure becomes key, as an integration fabric, not just between users in business services, but also between the infrastructure devices in the data center itself.
That’s why we need to look at network transformation to make sure that the networking environment itself is aligned to the strategies of the data center, that the data center infrastructure is architected to support those goals, and that you transform what you have and what you have grown historically over decades into what hopefully will be a “lean, mean, fighting machine.”
Nease: The network has basically evolved as a result of the emergence of the Internet and all forms of co
mmunications that share the network as a system. The server side of the network, where applications are hosted, is only one dimension that tugs at the network design in terms of requirements.
You find that the needs of any particular corner of the enterprise network can easily be lost on the network, because the network, as a whole, is designed for multiple constituencies, and those constituencies have created a lot of situations and requirements that are in themselves special cases.
In the data center, in particular, we’ve seen the emergence of a formalized virtualization layer now coming about and many, many server connections that are no longer physical. The history of networking says that I can take advantage of the fact that I have this concept of a link or a port that is one-to-one with a particular service.
That is no longer the case. What we’re seeing with virtualization is challenging the current design of the network. That is one of the requirements that are tugging at a change or provoking a change in overall enterprise network design.
… Too often people are compelled by a technology approach to rethink how they are doing networking. IT professionals will hear the overtures of various vendors saying, “This is the next greatest technology. It will maybe enable you to do all sorts of new things.” Then, people waste a lot of time focusing on the technology enablement, without actually starting with what the heck they’re trying to enable in the first place.
Thessen: In years past, you were effectively just providing local area network (LAN) and wide
area network (WAN) connectivity. Servers were on the network, and they got facilities from the network to transport their data over to the users.
Now, everything is becoming converged over this network — “everything” being data storage, and telephony. So, it’s requiring more towers inside of corporate IT to come together to truly understand how this system is going to work together.
Nease: [Service orientation] is the only way out. With the new complexity that has emerged, and the fact that traditional designs can no longer rely on physical barriers to implement policies, we have reached a point, where we need an architecture for the network that builds in explicit concepts of policy decisions and policy enforcement.
The only way out is to regard the network itself as a service that provides connectivity between stations — call them logical servers, call them users, or call them applications. In fact, that very layering alone has forced us to think through the concept of offering the network as a service.
Bennett: … In parallel with that, we see an increasing drive and demand for virtualizing storage to have it both be more efficiently and effectively used inside the data center environment, but also to service and support the virtualized business services running in virtualized servers. That, in turn, carries into the networking fabric of making sure that you can manage the network connections on the fly.
Virtualization is not only becoming pervasive, but clearly the networking fabric itself is going to be key to delivering high quality business services in that environment.
Thessen: … Networks need to be prepared for the convergence of the communication paths for data and storage connectivity inside the data center. That’s the whole conversion — enhance, Ethernet, Fiber Channel over Ethernet. That’s the newest leg of the virtualization aspect of the data center.
Bennett: Fundamentally, convergence is about better integration across the technology stacks that help deliver business services. We’re saying that we don’t need separate, dedicated connections between servers for high availability from the connections that we use to the storage devices to have both a high-volume traffic and high-frequency traffic accesses to data for the business services or that we have for the network devices and the connections between them for the topology of the networking environment.
Rather, we are saying that today we can have one environment capable of supporting all of these needs, architected properly for particular customer’s needs, and we bring into the environment separate communications infrastructures for voice.
So, we’re really establishing, in effect, a common nervous system. Think about the data center and the organization as the human body. We’re really building up the nervous system, connecting everything in the body effectively, both for high-volume needs and for high-frequency access needs.
Thessen: … The
Without understanding who is talking to whom, how applications communicate, and how applications get access to other IT services, such as directory services and so forth, it’s really difficult to secure them appropriately.
most important thing is really still the brutal standardization — network modularity, logical separation, utilizing those virtualization techniques that I talked about a few minutes ago, and very well-defined communications flows for those applications.
Additionally, you need those communication flows especially in these SaaS or cloud-computing, or convergence environments to truly secure those environments appropriately. Without understanding who is talking to whom, how applications communicate, and how applications get access to other IT services, such as directory services and so forth, it’s really difficult to secure them appropriately.
… What we focus on is really developing a good strategy first. Then, we define the requirements that go along with business strategy, perform analysis work against the current situation and the future state requirements, and then develop the solutions specific for the client’s particular situation, utilizing perhaps a mix of products and technologies.
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.
Special Offer: Gain insight into best practices for transforming your data center by downloading three new data center transformation whitepapers from HP at www.hp.com/go/dctpodcastwhitepapers.
October 5th, 2009
HP roadmap dramatically reduces energy consumption across data centers
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 data center transformation best practices by downloading free whitepapers at http://www.hp.com/go/dctpodcastwhitepapers.
Producing meaningful, long-term energy savings in IT operations depends on a strategic planning and execution process.
The goal is to seek out long-term gains from prudent, short-term investments, whenever possible. It makes little sense to invest piecemeal in areas that offer poor returns, when a careful cost-benefit analysis for each specific enterprise can identify the true wellsprings of IT energy conservation.
The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion therefore targets significantly reducing energy consumption across data centers strategically. In it we examine four major areas that result in the most energy policy bang for the buck — virtualization, application modernization, data-center infrastructure best practices, and properly planning and building out new data-center facilities.
By focusing on these major areas, but with a strict appreciation of the current and preceding IT patterns and specific requirements for each data center, real energy savings — and productivity gains — are in the offing.
To help learn more about significantly reducing energy consumption across data centers, we welcome two experts from HP: John Bennett, worldwide director, Data Center Transformation Solutions , and Ian Jagger, worldwide marketing manager for Data Center Services. The discussion is moderated by me, BriefingsDirect’s Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Bennett: We, as an industry, are full of advice around best practices for what people should be taking a
look at. We provide these wonderful lists of things that they should pay attention to — things like hot and cold aisles, running your data center hotter, and modernizing your infrastructure, consolidating it, virtualizing it, and things of that ilk.
The mistakes that customers do make is that they have this laundry list and, without any further insight into what will matter the most to them, they start implementing these things.
The real opportunity is to take a step back and assess the return from any one of these individual best practices. Which one should I do first and why? What’s the technology case and what’s the business case for them? That’s an area that people seem to really struggle with.
… We know very well that modern infrastructure, modern servers, modern storage, and modern networking items are much more energy efficient than their predecessors from even two or three years ago.
… If we look at the total energy picture and the infrastructure itself — in particular, the server and storage environment — one of the fundamental objectives for virtualization is to dramatically increase the utilization of the assets you have.
With x86 servers, we see utilization rates typically in the 10 percent range. So, while there are a lot interesting benefits that come from virtualization from an energy efficiency point of view, we’re basically eliminating the need for a lot of server units by making much better use of a smaller number of units.
So, consolidation and modernization, which reduces the number of units you have, and then multiplying that with virtualization, can result in significant decreases in server and storage-unit counts, which goes a long way toward affecting energy consumption from an infrastructure point of view.
That can be augmented, by the way, by doing application modernization, so you can eliminate legacy systems and infrastructure and move some of those services to a shared infrastructure as well.
We’re talking about collapsing infrastructure requirements by factors of 5, 6, or 10. You’re going from 10 or 20 old servers to perhaps a couple of servers running much more efficiently. And, with modernization at play, you can actually increase that multiplication.
These are very significant from a server point of view on the storage side. You’re eliminating the need for sparsely used dedicated storage and moving to a shared, or virtualized storage environment, with the same kind of cost saving ratios at play here. So, it’s a profound impact in the infrastructure environment.
Jagger: Going back to the original point that John made, we have had the tendency in the past to
look at cooling or energy efficiency coming from the technology side of the business and the industry. More recently, thankfully, we are tending to look at that in a more converged view between IT technology, the facility itself, and the interplay between the two.
… Each customer has a different situation from the next, depending on how the infrastructure is laid out, the age of the data center, and even the climatic location of the data center. All of these have enormous impact on the customer’s individual situation.
… If we’re looking, for example, at the situation where a customer needs a new data center, then it makes sense for that customer to look at all the cases put together — application modernization, virtualization, and also data center design itself.
Here is where it all stands to converge from an energy perspective. Data centers are expensive things to build, without doubt. Everyone recognizes that and everybody looks at ways not to build a new data center. But, the point is that a data center is there to run applications that drive business value for the company itself.
What we don’t do a good job of is understanding those applications in the application catalog and the relative importance of each in terms of priority and availability. What we tend to do is treat them all with the same level of availability. That is just inherent in terms of how the industry has grown up in the last 20-30 years or so. Availability is king. Well, energy has challenged that kingship if you like, and so it is open to question.
. . . Converging the facility design with application modernization, takes millions and millions of dollars of data center construction costs, and of course the ongoing operating costs derived from burning energy to cool it at the end of the day.
Now, you could look at designing a facility, where you have within the facility specific PODs (groups of compute resources) that would be designed according to the application catalog’s availability and priority requirements, tone down the tooling infrastructure that is responsible for those particular areas, and just retain specific PODs for those that do require the highest levels of availability.
Just by doing that, by converging the facility design with application modernization, takes millions and millions of dollars of data center construction costs, and of course the ongoing operating costs derived from burning energy to cool it at the end of the day.
… One of the smartest things you can actually do as a business, as an IT manager, is to actually go and talk to your utility company and ask them what rebates are available for energy savings. They typically will offer you ways of addressing how you can improve your energy efficiency within the data center.
That is a great starting point, where your energy becomes measurable. Taking an action on reducing your energy, not just hits your operating cost, but actually allows you to get rebates from your energy company at the same time. It’s a no-brainer.
Bennett: What we are advising customers to do is take a more complete view of the resources and assets that go into delivering business services to the company.
It’s not just the applications and the portfolio. … It’s the data center facilities themselves and how they are optimized for this purpose — both from a data center perspective and from the facility-as-a-building perspective.
In considering them comprehensively in working with the facilities team, as well as the IT teams, you can actually deliver a lot of incremental value — and a lot of significant savings to the organization.
… For customers who are very explicitly concerned about energy and how to reduce their energy cost and energy consumption, we have an Energy Analysis Assessment service. It’s a great way to get started to determine which of the best practices will have the highest impact on you personally, and to allow you to do the cherry-picking.
For customers who are looking at things a little more comprehensively, energy analysis and energy efficiency are two aspects of a data-center transformation process. We have a data center transformation workshop.
Jagger: The premise here is to understand possible savings or the possible efficiency available to you through forensic analysis and modeling. That has got to be the starting point, and then understanding the costs of building that efficiency.
Then, you need a plan that shows those costs and savings and the priorities in terms of structure and infrastructure, have that work in a converged way with IT, and of course the payback on the investment that’s required to build it in the first place.
Gain more insights into data center transformation best practices by downloading free whitepapers at http://www.hp.com/go/dctpodcastwhitepapers.
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.
Dana Gardner is principal analyst of Interarbor Solutions. For disclosures on Dana's industry affiliations, click here or to view his full profile click here.
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