November 16th, 2009

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

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 7:09 am

Categories: Agile Development, Application Lifecycle Management, Cloud computing, HP, IBM, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, Microsoft, Progress Software, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, Software Development, Web Services, database, datacenters, governance, management

Tags: ZapThink LLC, Policy, SOA, SOA Governance, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software, Dana Gardner

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

By Jason Bloomberg

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

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

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

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

Introducing the SOA governance grid

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

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

1. Human-centric SOA governance in the narrow

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

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

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

2. Technology-centric SOA governance in the narrow

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

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

3. Technology-centric SOA governance in the broad

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

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

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

4. Human-centric SOA governance in the broad

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

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

The ZapThink take

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

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

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

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November 5th, 2009

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

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 10:27 am

Categories: Agile Development, Amazon, Cloud computing, Developer Tools, Google, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, Microsoft, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, Virtualization, Web Services, Windows, datacenters, governance, mainframe, management

Tags: Governance, Webinar, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Web Services, Enterprise Software, Software, Hardware, Dana Gardner

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 29th, 2009

Separating core from context brings high returns in legacy application transformation

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 12:46 pm

Categories: Agile Development, Application Lifecycle Management, Cloud computing, Developer Tools, Government, HP, Hardware Infrastructure, IBM, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, VMware, Virtualization, datacenters, governance, mainframe, management

Tags: Asset, Legacy Application, Hewlett-Packard Co., Legacy, Tool, Productivity, Podcasts, Operational Planning, Asset Management, Enterprise Software

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 classifying business processes and their associated applications was invented by Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, etc.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we get the facts on the table, particularly visually, then we find that we get a lot of consensus. It may be partial consensus, but it’s consensus nonetheless, and we open up the possibilities and different options, rather than just continuing to move through with hand-written code.

If you look at this whole core-context thing, at the moment, organizations are still in survival mode.

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

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

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

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

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

… The problem is sometimes not nearly as big as it seems. If you look at the analogy of the clone codes that we find, and all the different areas that we can look at the code and say that it may not be as relevant to a transformation process as you think it is.

The subject matter experts and the stakeholders very slowly start to understand that this is actually possible. It’s not as big as we thought.

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

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

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

October 25th, 2009

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

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 10:44 am

Categories: Application Lifecycle Management, Cloud computing, Developer Tools, Enterprise Java, Government, HP, Hardware Infrastructure, Home, IBM, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, Java, Linux, Open Source, Oracle, Podcasts, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, System Z, VMware, Virtualization, database, datacenters, governance, mainframe, management

Tags: Legacy Application, Transformation, ROI, End-user Productivity, Podcasts, Roi/Tco, Strategy, Internet, Finance, Managerial Accounting

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very large employer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

All barriers removed

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

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

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

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

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

October 21st, 2009

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

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 7:46 am

Categories: Akamai, Amazon, Cloud computing, Google, HP, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, VMware, Virtualization, business intelligence, convergence, database, datacenters, governance, mainframe, management

Tags: Software, Software-as-a-service, Avenade, Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Tools & Techniques, Emerging Technologies, Management, Dana Gardner

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

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

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

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

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

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

SaaS is taking off

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

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

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

Other conclusion from the report:

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

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

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

October 20th, 2009

SOA user survey defines latest ESB trends, middleware use patterns

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 10:30 am

Categories: .NET, Agile Development, Apache, Cloud computing, Developer Tools, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Java, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, Open Source, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, content delivery network, datacenters, governance, management

Tags: Enterprise Service Bus, SOA, Survey, SOA User Survey, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Middleware, Web Services, Enterprise Software, Software, Dana Gardner

Take the BriefingsDirect middleware/ESB survey now.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take the BriefingsDirect middleware/ESB survey now.

October 16th, 2009

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

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 8:29 am

Categories: Agile Development, Amazon, Apple, Application Lifecycle Management, BI, Cisco, Cloud computing, Enterprise 2.0, Enterprise Java, Google, HP, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, Microsoft, Open Source, Oracle, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Security, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, VMware, Virtualization, Web Services, Web Technology, business intelligence, convergence, datacenters, governance, iPhone, management

Tags: Forrester Research Inc., Operational Planning, Pricing, Business Intelligence, Tools & Techniques, Strategy, Business Operations, Marketing, Enterprise Software, Software

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

October 15th, 2009

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

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 10:48 am

Categories: Amazon, Cloud computing, Google, HP, Hardware Infrastructure, IBM, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, Open Source, Podcasts, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Silicon Valley, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, VMware, Virtualization, Web Services, business intelligence, datacenters, governance, management

Tags: Hewlett-Packard Co., Information Technology, Server, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Storage Management, Utility Computing, Hardware, Storage, Dana Gardner

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

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 10:57 am

Categories: Agile Development, Application Lifecycle Management, Cloud computing, Google, Government, IT Service Management, ITIL, Microsoft, Oracle, Podcasts, SAP, SaaS, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, Web Services, Web Technology, datacenters, iPhone, mainframe, management

Tags: PeopleSoft Inc., Software-as-a-service, ERP, Workday, BriefingsDirect Podcast, Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP), Software As A Service (SaaS), Managed Hosting, Cloud Computing, Enterprise Software

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

Posted by Dana Gardner @ 12:37 pm

Categories: Amazon, Cloud computing, Google, HP, Hardware Infrastructure, IBM, IT Management, IT Service Management, ITIL, Microsoft, Podcasts, SOA, SOA Governance, SOA architect, SaaS, Software Development, Software Infrastructure, VMware, Virtualization, datacenters, governance, management

Tags: Security, Hewlett-Packard Co., Information Technology, Data Centers, Cloud Computing, Benefits, Virtualization, Storage, Hardware, Data Management

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.

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.