Category: Government
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.
November 4th, 2009
HP takes converged infrastructure a notch higher with new data warehouse appliance
Hewlett-Packard (HP) on Wednesday announced new products, solutions and services that leaves the technology packaging to them, so users don’t have to.
HP Neoview Advantage, HP Converged Infrastructure Architecture, and HP Converged Infrastructure Consulting Services are designed to help organizations drive business and technology innovations at lower total cost via lower total hassle. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
HP’s measured focus
HP isn’t just betting on a market whim. Recent market research it supported reveals
that more than 90 percent of senior business decision makers believe business cycles will continue to be unpredictable for the next few years — and 80 percent recognize they need to be far more flexible in how they leverage technology for business.
The same old IT song and dance doesn’t seem to be what these businesses are seeking. Nearly 85 percent of those surveyed cited innovation as critical to success, and 71 percent said they would sanction more technology investments — if they could see how those investments met their organization’s time-to-market and business opportunity needs.
Cost nowadays is about a lot more than the rack and license. The fuller picture of labor, customization, integration, shared services suppport, data-use-tweaking and inevitable unforeseen gotchas need to be better managed in unison — if that desired agility can also be afforded (and sanctioned by the bean-counters).
HP said its new offerings deliver three key advantages:
- Improved competitiveness and risk mitigation through business data management, information governance, and business analytics
- Faster time to revenue for new goods and services
- The ability to return to peak form, after being compressed or stretched.
The Neoview advantage
First up, HP Neoview Advantage, the new release of the HP Neoview enterprise data warehouse platform, which aims to help organizations respond to business events more quickly by supporting real-time insight and decision-making.
HP calls the performance, capacity, footprint and manageability improvements dramatic and says the software also reduces the total cost of ownership (TCO) associated with industry-standard components and pre-built, pre-tested configurations optimized for warehousing.
HP Neoview Advantage and last year’s Exadata product (produced in partnership with Oracle) seem to be aimed at different segments. Currently, HP Neoview Advantage is a “very high end database,” whereas Exadata is designed for “medium to large enterprises,” and does not scale to the Neoview level, said Deb Nelson, senior vice president, Marketing, HP Enterprise Business.
A converged infrastructure
Next up, HP Converged Infrastructure architecture. As HP describes it, the architecture adjusts to meet changing business needs, specifically what HP calls “IT sprawl,” which it points to as the key culprit in raising technology costs for maintenance that could otherwise be used for innovation.
HP touts key benefits of this new architecture. First, the ability to deploy application environments on the fly through shared service management, followed closely by lower network costs and less complexity. The new architecture is optimized through virtual resource pools and also improves energy integration and effectiveness across the data center by tapping into data center smart grid technology.
Finally, HP is offering Converged Infrastructure Consulting Services that aim to help customers transition from isolated product-centric technologies to a more flexible converged infrastructure. The new services leverage HP’s experience in shared services, cloud computing, and data center transformation projects to let customers design, test and implement scalable infrastructures.
Overall, typical savings of 30 percent in total costs can be achieved by implementing Data Center Smart Grid technologies and solutions, said HP.
With these moves to converged infrastructure, HP is filling out where others are newly treading. Cisco and EMC this week announced packaging partnerships that seek to deliver simiar convergence benefits to the market.
“It’s about experience, not an experiment,” said Nelson.
BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post.
November 3rd, 2009
Aster Data architects application logic with data for speeded-up analytics processing en masse
In real estate, the mantra is “location, location, location.” The same could be said for the juxtaposition of applications logic and data. With enterprise data growing at an explosive rate, having applications separate from the mountains of data that they rely on has resulted in massive data movement — increasing latency and restricting due analysis.
Aster Data, which provides massively parallel processing (MPP) data management, has tackled the location pro
blem head-on with the announcement this week of Aster Data Version 4.0, (along with Aster nCluster System 4.0), a massively parallel application-data server that allows companies to embed applications inside an MPP data warehouse. This is designed to speed the processing of terabytes to petabytes of data.
The latest offering from the San Carlos, Calif., company fully parallelizes both data and a wide variety of analytics applications in one system. This provides faster analysis for such data-heavy applications as real-time fraud detection, customer behavior modeling, merchandising optimization, affinity marketing, trending and simulations, trading surveillance, and customer calling patterns.
While both data and applications reside in the same system, they are independent of one another, but both execute as “first-class citizens” with their respective data and application management services.
Resource sharing
The Aster Data Application Server is responsible for managing and coordinating activities and resource sharing in the cluster. It also acts as a host for the application processing and data inside the cluster. In its role as data host, it manages incremental scaling, fault tolerance and heterogeneous hardware for application processing.
Aster Data Version 4.0 provides application portability, which allows companies to take their existing Java, C, C++, C#, .NET, Perl and Python applications, MapReduce-enable them and push them down into the data.
The Dynamic Workload Management (WLM) helps support hundreds of concurrent mixed workloads that can span interactive and batch data queries, as well as application execution. Includes granular rule-based prioritization of workloads and dynamic allocation and re-allocation of resources.
Other features include:
- Trickle feeds for granular data loading and interactive queries with millisecond response times
- New online partition splitting capabilities to allow infinite cost-effective scaling
- Dual-stage query optimizer, which ensures peak performance across hundreds to thousands of CPU cores
- Integrations with leading business intelligence (BI) tools and Hadoop.
More companies want to bring more data to bear on more BI problems. While Aster’s benefits and value may be used for high-end and esoteric analytics uses now, I fully expect that there data-intense architectures will be finding more uses. The price, too, is dropping, making the use of such systems more affordable.
Many of the core users of high-end analytics are also moving on architecture-wise. The systems designed five or more years ago will not meet the needs of five or even a few years from now.
What’s really cool about Aster Data’s approach is the analytics apps can be used, and the languages and query semantics most familiar to users can be used with the new systems and architectures.
I suppose we should also expect more of these analytics engines to become available as services, aka cloud services. That would allow joins of more data sets and they the massive analytics applications can open up even more BI cans of worms.
October 29th, 2009
Separating core from context brings high returns in legacy application transformation
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.
This podcast is the second in a series of three to examine Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line. Through panel discussions we examine the rationale and likely returns of assessing the true role and character of legacy applications, and then further determine the paybacks from modernization.
To gain the most return on modernization projects, many enterprises are separating core from context when it comes to legacy enterprise applications and their modernization processes. As enterprises seek to cut their total IT costs, they need to identify what legacy assets are working for them and carrying their own weight, and which ones are merely hitching a high cost — but largely unnecessary — ride.
A widening cost and productivity division exists between older, hand-coded software assets and replacement technologies on newer, more efficient standards-based systems. Somewhere in the mix, there are also core legacy assets distinct from so-called contextal assets. There are peripheral legacy processes and tools that are costly vestiges of bygone architectures. There is legacy wheat and legacy chaff.
With us to delve deeper into the high rewards of transforming legacy enterprise applications is Steve Woods, distinguished software engineer at HP, and Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on Applications Transformation at HP. The discussion is moderated be me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
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 are some excerpts:
Evans: This podcast is about two types of IT assets: core and context. That whole approach to classif
ying business processes and their associated applications was invented by Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, etc.
He came up in Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution with this notion of core and context applications. Core being those that provide the true innovation and differentiation for an organization. Those are the ones that keep your customers. Those are the ones that improve the service levels. Those are the ones that generate your money. They are really important, which is why they’re called “core.”
When these applications were invented to provide the core capabilities, it was 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago. What we have to understand is that what was core 10 years ago may not be core anymore. There are ways of effectively doing it at a much different price point.
As Moore points out, organizations should be looking to build “core,” because that is the unique intellectual property of the organization, and to then buy “context.” They need to understand, how do I get the lowest-cost provision of something that doesn’t make a huge difference to my product or service, but I need it anyway.
The “context” applications are not less important, but … you should be looking to understand how that could be done in terms of lower-cost provisioning [of them].
Woods: [A lot of the interest in separating core and context in legacy IT applications] has to do with the pain users are going through. We have had
customers who had assessments with us before, as much as a year ago, and now they’re coming back and saying they want to get started and actually do something. So, a good deal of the interest is caused by the need to drive down costs.
Also, there’s the realization that a lot of these tools — extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools, enterprise application integration (EAI) tools, reporting, and business process management (BPM) — are proving themselves now. We can’t say that there is a risk in going to these tools. They realize that the strength of these tools is that they bring a lot of agility, solve skill sets issues, and make you much more responsive to the business needs of the organization.
… What I created at HP is a tool, an algorithm, that can go into any language legacy code and find the duplicate code, and not only find it, but visualize it in very compelling ways. That helps us drill down to identify what I call the unintended design. When we find these unintended designs, they lead us to ask very critical questions that are paramount to understanding how to design the transformation strategy.
… When you identify the IT elements that are not core and that could be moved out of handwritten code, you’re transferring power from the developers — say, of COBOL — to the users of the more modern tools, like the BPM tools.
So there is always a political issue. What we try to do, when we present our findings, is to be very objective. You can’t argue that we found that 65 percent of the application is not doing core. You can then focus the conversation on something more productive. What do we do with this? The worst thing you could possibly do is take a million lines of COBOL that’s generating reports and rewrite that in Java or C# hard-written code.
We take the concept of core versus context not just to a possible off-the-shelf application, but at architectural component level. In many cases, we find that this is helpful for them to identify legacy code that could be moved very incrementally to these new architectures.
… A typical COBOL application — this is true of all legacy code, but particularly mainframe legacy code — can be as much as 5, 10, or 15 million lines of code. I think the sheer idea of the size of the application is an impediment. There is some sort of inertia there. An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and it’s been at rest for years, sometimes 30 years.
So, the biggest impediment is the belief that it’s just too big and complex to move and it’s even too big and complex to understand. Our approach is a very lightweight process, where we go in and answer to a lot of questions, remove a lot of uncertainty, and give them some very powerful visualizations and understanding of the source code and what their options are.
… When you go to the legacy side of the house, you start finding that 65 percent of this application is just doing ETL. It’s just parsing files and putting them into databases. Why don’t you replace that with a tool? The big resistance there is that, if we replace it with a tool, then the people who are maintaining the application right now are either going to have to learn that tool or they’re not going to have a job.
If we get the facts on the table, particularly visually, then we find that we get a lot of consensus. It may be partial consensus, but it’s consensus nonetheless, and we open up the possibilities and different options, rather than just continuing to move through with hand-written code.
If you look at this whole core-context thing, at the moment, organizations are still in survival mode.
Evans: If you look at this whole core-context thing, at the moment, organizations are still in survival mode. Money is still tight in terms of consumer spending. Money is still tight in terms of company spending. Therefore, you’re in this position where keeping your customers or trying to get new customers is absolutely fundamental for staying alive. And, you do that by improving service levels, improving your services, and improving your product.
… The line-of-business people are now pushing on technology and saying, “You can’t back off. You can’t not give us what we want. We have to have this ability to innovate and differentiate, because that way we will keep our customers and we will keep this organization alive.”
That applies equally to the public and private sectors. The public sector organizations have this mandate of improving service, whether it’s in healthcare, insurance, tax, or whatever. So all of these commitments are being made and people have to deliver on them, albeit that the money, the IT budget behind it, is shrinking or has shrunk.
The leaders must understand what drives their company. Understand the values, the differentiation, and the innovations that you want and put your money on those and then find a way of dramatically reducing the amount of money you spend on the contextual stuff, which is pure productivity.
Woods: … Decentralizing the architecture improves your efficiency and your redundancy. There is much more opportunity for building a solid, maintainable architecture than there would be if you kept a sort of monolithic approach that’s typical on the mainframe.
… The problem is sometimes not nearly as big as it seems. If you look at the analogy of the clone codes that we find, and all the different areas that we can look at the code and say that it may not be as relevant to a transformation process as you think it is.
The subject matter experts and the stakeholders very slowly start to understand that this is actually possible. It’s not as big as we thought.
I do this presentation called “Honey I Shrunk the Mainframe.” If you start looking at these different aspects between the clone code and what I call the asymmetrical transformation from handwritten code to model driven architecture, you start looking at these different things. You start really seeing it.
We see this, when we go in to do the workshops. The subject matter experts and the stakeholders very slowly start to understand that this is actually possible. It’s not as big as we thought. There are ways to transform it that we didn’t realize, and we can do this incrementally. We don’t have to do it all at once.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
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 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 7th, 2009
Successful data center transformation usually requires overdue rethinking of the network
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.
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.
September 30th, 2009
Staying on legacy systems ends up costing IT more
Listen to podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard.
This latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion tackles the high — and often under-appreciated — cost for many enterprises of doing nothing about aging, monolithic applications. Not making a choice about legacy mainframe and poorly utilized applications is, in effect, making a choice not to transform and modernize the applications and their supporting systems.
Not doing anything about aging IT essentially embraces an ongoing cost structure that helps prevent new spending for efficiency-gaining IT innovations. It’s a choice to suspend applications on ossified platforms and to make their reuse and integration difficult, complex, and costly.
Doing nothing is a choice that, especially in a recession, hurts companies in multiple ways — because successful transformation is the lifeblood of near and long-term productivity improvements.
Here to help us better understand the perils of continuing to do nothing about aging legacy and mainframe applications, we’re joined by four IT transformation experts from Hewlett-Packard (HP): Brad Hipps, product marketer for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Applications Portfolio Software at HP; John Pickett from Enterprise Storage and Server marketing at HP; Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on Applications Transformation at HP, and Steve Woods, application transformation analyst and distinguished software engineer at HP Enterprise Services. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Evans: What we’re seeing is that the cost of legacy systems and the cost of supporting the
mainframe hasn’t changed in 12 months. What has changed is the available cash that companies have to spend on IT, as, over time, that cash amount may have either been frozen or is being reduced. That puts even more pressure on the IT department and the CIO in how to spend that money, where to spend that money, and how to ensure alignment between what the business wants to do and where the technology needs to go.
Our concern is that there is a cost of doing nothing. People eventually end up spending their whole IT budgets on maintenance and upgrades and virtually nothing on innovation.
At a time when competitiveness is needed more than it was a year ago, there has to be a shift in the way we spend our IT dollars and where we spend our IT dollars. That means looking at the legacy software environments and the underpinning infrastructure. It’s absolutely a necessity.
Woods: For years, the biggest hurdle was that most customers would say they didn’t really have
to make a decision, because the [replacement] performance wasn’t there. The performance-reliability wasn’t there. That is there now. There is really no excuse not to move because of performance-reliability issues.
What’s changing today is the ability to look at a legacy source code. We have the tools now to look at the code and visualize it in ways that are very compelling.
What has also changed is the growth of architectural components, such as extract transform and load (ETL) tools, data integration tools, and reporting tools. When we look at a large body of, say, 10 million lines of COBOL and we find that three million lines of that code is doing reporting, or maybe two million is doing ETL work, we typically suggest they move that asymmetrically to a new platform that does not use handwritten code.
That’s really risk aversion — doing it very incrementally with low intrusion, and that’s also where the best return on investment (ROI) is. … These tools have matured so that we have the performance and we also have the tools to help them understand their legacy systems today.
Pickett: Typically, when we take a look at the high-end of applications that are going to be
moving over and sitting on a legacy system, many times they’re sitting on a mainframe platform. With that, one of the things that have changed over the last several years is the functionality gap between what exists in the past 5 or 10 years ago in the mainframe. That gap has not only been closed, but, in some cases, open systems exceed what’s available on the mainframe.
It’s not only a matter of cost, but it’s also factoring in the power and cooling as well. Certainly, what we’ve seen is that the cost savings that can be applied on the infrastructure side are then applied back into modernizing the application.
Hipps: This term “agility” gets used so often that people tend to
forget what it means. The reality of today’s modern organization — and this is contrasted even from 5, certainly 10 years ago — is that when we look at applications, they are everywhere. There has been an application explosion.
When we start talking about application transformation and we assign that trend to agility, what we’re acknowledging is that for the business to make any change today in the way it does business — in any new market initiative, in any competitive threat it wants to respond to, there is going to be an application — very likely “applications” plural.
The decisions that you’re going to make to transform your applications should all be pointed at and informed by shrinking the amount of time that takes you to turn around and realize some business initiative.
That’s what we’re seeking with agility. Following pretty closely behind that, you can begin to see why there is a promise in cloud. It saves me a lot of infrastructural headaches. It’s supposed to obviate a lot of the challenges that I have around just standing up the application and getting it ready, let alone having to build the application itself.
So I think that is the view of transformation in terms of agility and why we’re seeing things like cloud. These other things really start to point the direction to greater agility.
… I tend to think that in application transformation in most ways they’re breaking up and distributing that which was previously self-contained and closed.
Whether you’re looking at moving to some sort of mainframe processing to distributed processing, from distributed processing to virtualization, whether you are talking about the application team themselves, which now are some combination of in-house, near-shore, offshore, outsourced sort of a distribution of the teams from sort of the single building to all around the world, certainly the architectures themselves from being these sort of monolithic and fairly brittle things that are now sort of services driven things.
You can look at any one of those trends and you can begin to speak about benefits, whether it’s leveraging a better global cost basis or on the architectural side, the fundamental element we’re trying to do is to say, “Let’s move away from a world in which everything is handcrafted.”
Assembly-line model
Let’s get much closer to the assembly-line model, where I have a series of preexisting trustworthy components and I know where they are, I know what they do, and my work now becomes really a matter of assembling those. They can take any variety of shapes on my need because of the components I have created.
We’re getting back to this idea of lower cost and increased agility. We can only imagine how certain car manufacturers would be doing, if they were handcrafting every car. We moved to the assembly line for a reason, and software typically has lagged what we see in other engineering disciplines. Here we’re finally going to catch up. We’re finally be going to recognize that we can take an assembly line approach in the creation of application, as well, with all the intended benefits.
Evans: … Once we have done it, once we have removed that handwritten code, that code that is too big for what it needs to be in terms to get the job done. Once we have done it once, it’s out and it’s finished with and then we can start looking at economics that are totally different going forward, where we can actually flip this ratio.
Today, we may spend 80 percent or 90 percent of our IT budget on maintenance, and 10 percent on innovation. What we want to do is flip it. We’re not going to flip it in a year or maybe even two, but we have got to take steps. If we don’t start taking steps, it will never go away.
Listen to podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard.
September 1st, 2009
XDAS standard aims to empower IT audit trails from across complex events, perhaps clouds
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.
Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion, recorded at The Open Group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference and the associated 3rd Security Practitioners Conference in Toronto.
We’re going to take a look at an emerging updated standard called XDAS, which looks at audit trail information from a variety of systems and software across the enterprise IT environment.
This is an emerging standard that’s being orchestrated through The Open Group, but it’s an open-source standard that is hopefully going to help in compliance and regulatory issues and in improving automation of events across heterogeneous environments. This could be increasingly important, as we get deeper into virtualization and cloud computing.
Here to help us drill into XDAS (see a demo now), we’re joined by Ian Dobson, director of the Security Forum for The Open Group, as well as Joël Winteregg, CEO and co-founder of NetGuardians. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.
Here are some excerpts:
Dobson: We actually got involved way back in ’90s, in 1998, when we published the Distributed Audit Service (XDAS)
Standard. It was, in many ways, ahead of its time, but it was a distributed audit services standard. Today’s audit and logging requirements are much more demanding than they were then. There is a heightened awareness of everything to do with audit and logging, and we see a need now to update it to meet today’s needs. So that’s why we’ve got involved now.
A key part of this is event reporting. Event reports have all sorts of formats today, but that makes them difficult to consume. Of course, we then generate events so that they can be consumed in useful ways. So, we’re aiming the new audit standard from XDAS to be something that defines an interoperable event-reporting format, so that they can be consumed equally by everybody who needs to know.
The XDAS standard developers are well aware of, and closely involved in, the related Common Event Expression (CEE) standard development activity in Mitre. Mitre’s CEE standard has a broader scope than XDAS, and XDAS will fit very well into the Event Reporting Format part of CEE.
We are therefore also participating in the CEE standard development to achieve this and more, so as to deliver to the audit and logging community an authoritative single open standard that they can adopt with confidence.
Winteregg: My company is working in the area of audit event management. We saw that it was
a big issue to collect all these different audit trails from each different IT environment.
We saw that, if it was possible to have a single and standard way to represent all this information, that would be much easier and relevant for IT user and for a security officer to analyze all this information, in order to find out what the exact issues are, and to troubleshoot issue in the infrastructure, and so on. That’s a good basis for understanding what’s going on the whole infrastructure in the company.
There is no uniform way to represent this information, and we thought
that this initiative would be really good, because it will bring something uniform and universal that will help all the IT users to understand what is going on.
In distributed environments, it’s really hard to track a transaction, because it starts on a specific component, then it goes through another one, and to a cloud. You don’t know exactly where everything is happening. So, the only way to track these transactions or to track the accountability in such an environment would be through some transaction identifiers, and so on.
For auditors or administrator, it is really costly to understand this information and use it
You will be able to track the who, the what, and the when in the whole IT infrastructure, which is really important these days . . .
in order to get relevant information for management to have metrics and to understand what’s really happening on the IT infrastructure.
Audit information deals a lot with the accountability of the different transactions in an enterprise IT infrastructure. The real logs, which are modulated to develop strong meaning for debugging applications, may be providing the size of buffers or parameters of an application. Audit trails are much more business oriented. That means that you will have a lot of accountability information. You will be able to track the who, the what, and the when in the whole IT infrastructure, which is really important these days with all these different regulations, like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the others.
With a standard like XDAS, it will be much easier for a company to be in compliance with regulations, because there will be really clear and specific interfaces from all the different vendors to these generated audit trails.
The standard will be open, but there is a Java implementation of that standard called XDAS for J, which is a Java Library. This implementation is open source and business friendly. That means that you can use it in some proprietary software without having to then provide your software as an open-source software. So, it is available for business software too, and all the code is open. You can modify it, look at it, and so on. It’s on the Codehaus platform.
We’re waiting for some feedback from vendors and users about how it is easy to use, how helpful it is, and if there are maybe some use cases — if the scope is too wide, too narrow, etc. We’re open to every comment about the current standard.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.
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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