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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

Minahan: When we talk about business commerce clouds, what we’re talking about is leveraging the cloud architecture to go to the next level. When folks traditionally think of the cloud or technology, they think of managing their own 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.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

… We have a very large, diverse user base that is accessing our applications 24×7x365, and, as a result, we have performance needs all the time for all of our users.

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

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

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

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

… The right location [for data centers] has to be optimized for a variety of factors. It has to be optimized for where the appropriate skill sets are. It has to be optimized for the geographic constraints that you may be under.

We’re able to take some of that load off of the servers, and do the work in the cloud, which also helps reduce them.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

Architectural advantages

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Guys like Amazon obviously are in that game. Microsoft, or the Azure platform, are in that game. Any number of players out there are going to be able to provide you with core infrastructure or primitive infrastructure. In other words, it’s just available to you over the ‘Net with some of kind of a metering system. I would start playing around with that technology after you get through with SaaS.

. . . Instead of having to buy infrastructure and buy a server and set it up and use it, we could go get Google App Engine accounts or Azure accounts.

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

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

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

Huge potential

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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 organization 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 communications 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.

Gain more insights into data center transformation best practices by downloading free whitepapers at http://www.hp.com/go/dctpodcastwhitepapers.

Producing meaningful, long-term energy savings in IT operations depends on a strategic planning and execution process.

The goal is to seek out long-term gains from prudent, short-term investments, whenever possible. It makes little sense to invest piecemeal in areas that offer poor returns, when a careful cost-benefit analysis for each specific enterprise can identify the true wellsprings of IT energy conservation.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion therefore targets significantly reducing energy consumption across data centers strategically. In it we examine four major areas that result in the most energy policy bang for the buck — virtualization, application modernization, data-center infrastructure best practices, and properly planning and building out new data-center facilities.

By focusing on these major areas, but with a strict appreciation of the current and preceding IT patterns and specific requirements for each data center, real energy savings — and productivity gains — are in the offing.

To help learn more about significantly reducing energy consumption across data centers, we welcome two experts from HP: John Bennett, worldwide director, Data Center Transformation Solutions , and Ian Jagger, worldwide marketing manager for Data Center Services. The discussion is moderated by me, BriefingsDirect’s Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Bennett: We, as an industry, are full of advice around best practices for what people should be taking a look at. We provide these wonderful lists of things that they should pay attention to — things like hot and cold aisles, running your data center hotter, and modernizing your infrastructure, consolidating it, virtualizing it, and things of that ilk.

The mistakes that customers do make is that they have this laundry list and, without any further insight into what will matter the most to them, they start implementing these things.

The real opportunity is to take a step back and assess the return from any one of these individual best practices. Which one should I do first and why? What’s the technology case and what’s the business case for them? That’s an area that people seem to really struggle with.

… We know very well that modern infrastructure, modern servers, modern storage, and modern networking items are much more energy efficient than their predecessors from even two or three years ago.

… If we look at the total energy picture and the infrastructure itself — in particular, the server and storage environment — one of the fundamental objectives for virtualization is to dramatically increase the utilization of the assets you have.

With x86 servers, we see utilization rates typically in the 10 percent range. So, while there are a lot interesting benefits that come from virtualization from an energy efficiency point of view, we’re basically eliminating the need for a lot of server units by making much better use of a smaller number of units.

So, consolidation and modernization, which reduces the number of units you have, and then multiplying that with virtualization, can result in significant decreases in server and storage-unit counts, which goes a long way toward affecting energy consumption from an infrastructure point of view.

That can be augmented, by the way, by doing application modernization, so you can eliminate legacy systems and infrastructure and move some of those services to a shared infrastructure as well.

We’re talking about collapsing infrastructure requirements by factors of 5, 6, or 10. You’re going from 10 or 20 old servers to perhaps a couple of servers running much more efficiently. And, with modernization at play, you can actually increase that multiplication.

These are very significant from a server point of view on the storage side. You’re eliminating the need for sparsely used dedicated storage and moving to a shared, or virtualized storage environment, with the same kind of cost saving ratios at play here. So, it’s a profound impact in the infrastructure environment.

Jagger: Going back to the original point that John made, we have had the tendency in the past to look at cooling or energy efficiency coming from the technology side of the business and the industry. More recently, thankfully, we are tending to look at that in a more converged view between IT technology, the facility itself, and the interplay between the two.

… Each customer has a different situation from the next, depending on how the infrastructure is laid out, the age of the data center, and even the climatic location of the data center. All of these have enormous impact on the customer’s individual situation.

… If we’re looking, for example, at the situation where a customer needs a new data center, then it makes sense for that customer to look at all the cases put together — application modernization, virtualization, and also data center design itself.

Here is where it all stands to converge from an energy perspective. Data centers are expensive things to build, without doubt. Everyone recognizes that and everybody looks at ways not to build a new data center. But, the point is that a data center is there to run applications that drive business value for the company itself.

What we don’t do a good job of is understanding those applications in the application catalog and the relative importance of each in terms of priority and availability. What we tend to do is treat them all with the same level of availability. That is just inherent in terms of how the industry has grown up in the last 20-30 years or so. Availability is king. Well, energy has challenged that kingship if you like, and so it is open to question.

. . . Converging the facility design with application modernization, takes millions and millions of dollars of data center construction costs, and of course the ongoing operating costs derived from burning energy to cool it at the end of the day.

Now, you could look at designing a facility, where you have within the facility specific PODs (groups of compute resources) that would be designed according to the application catalog’s availability and priority requirements, tone down the tooling infrastructure that is responsible for those particular areas, and just retain specific PODs for those that do require the highest levels of availability.

Just by doing that, by converging the facility design with application modernization, takes millions and millions of dollars of data center construction costs, and of course the ongoing operating costs derived from burning energy to cool it at the end of the day.

… One of the smartest things you can actually do as a business, as an IT manager, is to actually go and talk to your utility company and ask them what rebates are available for energy savings. They typically will offer you ways of addressing how you can improve your energy efficiency within the data center.

That is a great starting point, where your energy becomes measurable. Taking an action on reducing your energy, not just hits your operating cost, but actually allows you to get rebates from your energy company at the same time. It’s a no-brainer.

Bennett: What we are advising customers to do is take a more complete view of the resources and assets that go into delivering business services to the company.

It’s not just the applications and the portfolio. … It’s the data center facilities themselves and how they are optimized for this purpose — both from a data center perspective and from the facility-as-a-building perspective.

In considering them comprehensively in working with the facilities team, as well as the IT teams, you can actually deliver a lot of incremental value — and a lot of significant savings to the organization.

… For customers who are very explicitly concerned about energy and how to reduce their energy cost and energy consumption, we have an Energy Analysis Assessment service. It’s a great way to get started to determine which of the best practices will have the highest impact on you personally, and to allow you to do the cherry-picking.

For customers who are looking at things a little more comprehensively, energy analysis and energy efficiency are two aspects of a data-center transformation process. We have a data center transformation workshop.

Jagger: The premise here is to understand possible savings or the possible efficiency available to you through forensic analysis and modeling. That has got to be the starting point, and then understanding the costs of building that efficiency.

Then, you need a plan that shows those costs and savings and the priorities in terms of structure and infrastructure, have that work in a converged way with IT, and of course the payback on the investment that’s required to build it in the first place.

Gain more insights into data center transformation best practices by downloading free whitepapers at http://www.hp.com/go/dctpodcastwhitepapers.

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

As the recession forces the need to identify and evaluate new revenue sources, businesses need to capture such web data services for business intelligence (BI) to work better and fuller. In Part 1 of our web data series we discussed how external data has grown in both volume and importance across internal Internet, social networks, portals, and applications in recent years.

Enterprises need to know what’s going on and what’s being said about their markets across those markets. They need to share those web data service inferences quickly and easily across their internal users. The more relevant and useful content that enters into BI tools, the more powerful the BI outcomes — especially as we look outside the enterprise for fast shifting trends and business opportunities.

In this podcast, Part 2 of the series with Kapow Technologies, we identify how BI and web data services come together, and explore such additional subjects as text analytics and cloud computing. So, how to get started and how to affordably manage web data services with BI and business consumers as intelligence and insights?

To find out, we brought together Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research, 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:

Kobielus: The more relevant content you bring into your analytic environment the better, in terms of having a single view or access in a unified fashion to all the information that might be relevant to any possible decision you might make. But, clearly, there are lots of caveats, “gotchas,” and trade-offs there.

One of these is that it becomes very expensive to discover, to capture, and to do all the relevant transformation, cleansing, storage, and delivery of all of that content. It becomes very expensive, especially as you bring more unstructured information from your content management system (CMS) or various applications from desktops and from social networks.

… Filtering the fire hose of this content is where this topic of web data services for BI comes in. Web data services describes that end-to-end analytic information pipe-lining process. It’s really a fire hose that you filter at various points, so that the end users turn on their tap and they’re not blown away by a massive stream. Rather, it’s a stream of liquid intelligence that is palatable and consumable.

Andreasen: There is a fire hose of data out there, but some of that data is flowing easily, but some of it might only be dripping and some might be inaccessible.

Think about it this way. The relevant data for your BI applications is located in various places. One is in your internal business applications. Another is your software-as-a-service (SaaS) business application, like Salesforce, etc. Others are at your business partners, your retailers, or your suppliers. Another one is at government. The last one is on the World Wide Web in those tens of millions of applications and data sources.

Accessible via browser

Today, all of this data that I just described is more or less accessible in a web browser. Web data services allow you to access all these data sources, using the interface that the web browser is already using. It delivers that result in a real-time, relative, and relevant way into SQL databases, directly into BI tools, or to even service enabled and encapsulated data. It delivers the benefits that IT can now better serve the analysts need for new data, which is almost always the case.

What’s even more important is that incremental daily improvement of existing reports. Analysts sit there, they find some new data source, and they say, “It would be really good, if I could add this column of data to my report, maybe replace this data, or if I could get this amount of data in real-time rather than just once a week.” So it’s those kinds of improvements that web data services also really can help with.

Kobielus: At Forrester, we see traditional BI as a basic analytics environment, with ad-hoc query, OLAP, and the like. That’s traditional BI — it’s the core of pretty much every enterprise’s environment.

Advanced analytics — building on that initial investment and getting to this notion of an incremental add-on environment — is really where a lot of established BI users are going. Advanced analytics means building on those core reporting, querying, and those other features with such tools as data mining and text analytics, but also complex event processing (CEP) with a front-end interactive visualization layer that often enables mashups of their own views by the end users.

… We see a strong push in the industry toward smashing those silos and bringing them all together. A big driver of that trend is that users, the enterprises, are demanding unified access to market intelligence and customer intelligence that’s bubbling up from this massive Web 2.0 infrastructure, social networks, blogs, Twitter and the like.

Andreasen: Traditionally, for BI, we’ve been trying to gather all the data into one unified, centralized repository, and accessing the data from there. But, the world is getting more diverse and the data is spread in more and different silos. What companies realize today is that we need to get service-level access to the data, where they reside, rather than trying to assemble them all.

…Web data services can encapsulate or wrap the data silos that were residing with their business partners into services — SOAP services, REST services, etc. — and thereby get automated access to the data directly into the BI tool.

… So, tomorrow’s data stores for BI, and today’s as well, is really a combination of accessing data in your central data repositories and then accessing them where they reside. … Think about it. I’m an analyst and I work with the data. I feel I own the data. I type the data in. Then, when I need it in my report, I cannot get it there. It’s like owning the house, but not having the key to the house. So, breaking down this barrier and giving them the key to the house, or actually giving IT a way to deliver the key to the house, is critical for the agility of BI going forward.

Tools are lacking

Today, the IT department often lacks tools to deliver those custom feeds that the line of business is asking for. But, with web data services, you can actually deliver these feeds. The data that IT is asking for is almost always data they already know, see, and work with in the business applications, with the business partners, etc. They work with the data. They see them in the browsers, but they cannot get the custom feeds. With the web data services product, IT can deliver those custom feeds in a very short time.

Kobielus: The user feels frustration, because they go on the Web and into Google and can see the whole universe of information that’s out there. So, for a mashup vision to be reality, organizations have got to go the next step.

… It’s good to have these pre-configured connections through extract, transform and load (ETL) and the like into their data warehouse from various sources. But, there should also be ideally feeds in from various data aggregators. There are many commercial data aggregators out there who can provide discovery of a much broader range of data types — financial, regulatory, and what not.

Also, within this ideal environment there should be user-driven source discovery through search, through pub-sub, and a variety of means. If all these source-discovery capabilities are provided in a unified environment with common tooling and interfaces, and are all feeding information and allowing users to dynamically update the information sets available to them in real-time, then that’s the nirvana.

Andreasen: This is where Kapow and web data services come in, as a disruptive new way of solving a problem of delivering the data — the real-time relevant data that the analyst needs.

The way it works is that, when you work with the data in a browser, you see it visually, you click on it, and you navigate tables and so on. The way our product works is that it allows you to instruct our system how to interact with a web application, just the same way as the line of business user.

…The beauty with web data services is that it’s really accessing the data through the application front end, using credentials and encryptions that are already in place and approved. You’re using the existing security mechanism to access the data, rather than opening up new security holes, with all the risk that that includes.

… This means that you access and work with the data in the world in which the end users see the data. It’s all with no coding. It’s all visual, all point and click. Any IT person can, with our product, turn data that you see in a browser into a real feed, a custom feed, virtually in minutes or in a few hours for something that would typically take days, weeks, or months — or may even be impossible.

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

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

Welcome to a podcast discussion on how to make the most of cloud computing for innovative solving of industry-level problems. As enterprises seek to exploit cloud computing, business leaders are focused on new productivity benefits. Yet, the IT folks need to focus on the technology in order to propel those business solutions forward.

As enterprises confront cloud computing, they want to know what’s going to enable new and potentially revolutionary business outcomes. How will business process innovation — necessitated by the reset economy — gain from using cloud-based services, models, and solutions?

Early examples of applying cloud to industry challenges, such as the recent GS1 Canada Food Recall Initiative, show that doing things in new ways can have huge payoffs.

We’ll learn about the HP Cloud Product Recall Platform that provides the underlying infrastructure for the GS1 Canada food recall solution, and we will dig deeper into what cloud computing means for companies in the manufacturing and distribution industries and the “new era” of Moore’s Law.

Here to help explain the benefits of cloud computing and vertical business transformation, we’re joined by Mick Keyes, senior architect in the HP Chief Technology Office; Rebecca Lawson, director of Worldwide Cloud Marketing at HP, and Chris Coughlan, director of HP’s Track and Trace Cloud Competency Center. The dicussion is koderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Lawson: Everyone knows that “cloud” is a word that tends to get hugely overused. We try to think about what kinds of problems our customers are trying to solve, and what are some new technologies that are here now, or that are coming down the pike, to help them solve problems that currently can’t be solved with traditional business processing approaches.

Rather than the cloud being about just reducing costs, by moving workloads to somebody else’s virtual machine, we take a customer point of view — in this case, manufacturing — to say, “What are the problems that manufacturers have that can’t be solved by traditional supply chain or business processing the way that we know it today, with all the implicated integrations and such?”

As we move forward, we see that, different vertical markets — for example, manufacturing or pharmaceuticals — will start to have ecosystems evolve around them. These ecosystems will be a place or a dynamic that has technology-enabled services, cloud services that are accessible and sharable and help the collaboration and sharing across different constituents in that vertical market.

We think that, just as social networks have helped us all connect on a personal level with friends from the past and such, vertical ecosystems will serve business interests across large bodies of companies, organizations, or constituents, so that they can start to share, collaborate, and solve different kinds of issues that are germane to that industry.

A great example of that is what we’re doing with the manufacturing industry around our collaboration with GS1, where we are solving problems related to traceability and recall.

Keyes: If you look at supply chains, food is a good example. It’s one of the more complicated ones, actually. You can have anywhere up to 15-20 different entities involved in a supply chain.

In reality, you’ve got a farmer out there growing some food. When he harvests that food, he’s got to move it to different manufacturers, processors, wholesalers, transportation, and to retail, before it finally gets to the actual consumer itself. There is a lot of data being gathered at each stage of that supply chain.

Coughlan: As a consumer, it gives you a lot more confidence that the health and safety issues are being dealt with, because, in some cases, this is a life and death situation. The sooner you solve the problem, the sooner everybody knows about it. You have a better opportunity of potentially saving lives.

So we really look at it from a positive view also, about how this is creating benefits from a business point of view.

As well as that, you’re looking at brand protection and you’re also looking at removing from the supply chain things that could have further knock-on effects as well.

Keyes: In the traditional way we looked at how that supply chain has traceability, they would have the, infamous — I would call it — “one step up, one step down” exchange of data, which meant really that each entity in the supply chain exchanged information with the next one in line.

That’s fine, but it’s costly. Also, it doesn’t allow for good visibility into the total supply chain, which is what the end goal actually is.

What we are saying to industry at the moment — and this is our thesis here that we are actually developing — is that, HP, with a cloud platform, will provide the hub, where people can either send data or allow us to access data. What a cloud will do is aggregate different piece of information to provide value to all elements of the supply chain to give greater visibility into the supply itself.

… We have SaaS now, not just to any individual entity in the supply chain, but anybody who subscribes to our hub. We can aggregate all the information, and we’re able to give them back very valuable information on how their product is used further up the supply chain. So we really look at it from a positive view also, about how this is creating benefits from a business point of view.

So, depending on what type of industry you’re in, we’re looking at this platform as being almost a repeatable type of offering, and you can start to lay out individual or specific industry services around this.

We’re also looking at how you integrate this into the whole social-networking arena, because that’s information and data out there. People are looking to consume information, or get involved in information sharing to a certain degree. We see that as a cool component also that we can perhaps do some BI around and be able to offer information to industry, consumers, and the regulatory bodies fairly quickly.

Coughlan: The point there is that cloud is enabling a convergence between enterprises. It’s enabling enterprise collaboration, first of all, and then it’s going one step further, where it’s enabling the convergence of that enterprise collaboration with Web 2.0.

You can overlay a whole pile of things –carbon footprints, dietary information, and ethical food. Not only is it going to be in the food area, as we said. It’s going to be along every manufacturing supply chain — pharmaceuticals, the motor industry, or whatever.

Lawson: The key to this is that this technology is not causing the manufacturers to do a lot of work. … It’s not a lot of effort on my part to participate in the benefits of being in that traceability and recall ecosystem, because I and all the other people along that supply chain are all contributing the relevant data that we already have. That’s going to serve a greater whole, and we can all tap into that data as well.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. 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.

See popular event speaker Howard Dresner’s latest book, Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change, or visit his website.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion on the future of business intelligence (BI) — and on bringing more information from more sources into an analytic process, and thereby getting more actionable intelligence out.

The explosion of information from across the Web, from mobile devices, inside of social networks, and from the extended business processes that organizations are now employing all provide an opportunity, but they also provide a challenge.

This information can play a critical role in allowing organizations to gather and refine analytics into new market strategies, better buying decisions, and to be the first into new business development opportunities. The challenge is in getting at these Web data services and bringing them into play with existing BI tools and traditional data sets.

This is the first in a series of podcasts, looking at the future of BI and how Web data services can be brought to bear on better business outcomes.

So, what are Web data services and how can they be acquired? Furthermore, what is the future of BI when these extended data sources are made into strong components of the forecasts and analytics that enterprises need to survive the recession and also to best exploit the growth that follows?

Here to help us explain the benefits of Web data services and BI is Howard Dresner, president and founder of Dresner Advisory Services, and Ron Yu, vice president of marketing at Kapow Technologies. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Dresner: BI is really about empowering end users, as well as their respective organizations, with insight, the ability to develop perspective. In a downturn, what better time is there to have some understanding of some of the forces that are driving the business?

Of course, it’s always useful to have the benefit of insight and perspective, even in good times. But, it tends to go from being more outward-focused during good times, focused on markets and acquiring customers and so forth, to being more introspective or internally focused during the bad times, understanding efficiencies and how one can be more productive.

So, BI always has merit and in a downturn it’s even more relevant, because we are really less tolerant of being able to make mistakes. We have to execute with even greater precision, and that’s really what BI helps us do.

… The future is about focusing on the information and those insights that can empower the individuals, their respective departments, and the enterprise to stay aligned with the mission of that organization.

… If you’re trying to develop [such] perspective, bringing as much relevant data or information to bear is a valuable thing to do. A lot of organizations focus just on lots of information. I think that you need to focus on the right information to help the organization and individuals carry out the mission of that organization.

There are lots of information sources. When I first started covering this beat 20 years ago, the available information was largely just internal stores, corporate stores, or databases of information. Now, a lot of the information that ought to be used, and in many cases, is being used, is not just internal information, but is external as well.

There are syndicated sources, but also the entire World Wide Web, where we can learn about our customers and our competitors, as well as a whole host of sources that ought to considered, if we want to be effective in pursuing new markets or even serving our existing customers.

Yu: I fully agree with Howard. It’s all about the right data and, given the current global and market conditions, enterprises have cut really deep — from the line of business, but also into the IT organizations. However, they’re still challenged with ways to drive more efficiencies, while also trying to innovate.

The challenges that are being presented are monumental where traditional BI methods and tools are really providing powerful analytical capabilities. At the same time, they’re increasingly constrained by limited access to not only relevant data, but how to get timely access to data.

What we see are pockets of departmental use cases, where marketing departments and product managers are starting to look outside in public data sources to bring in valuable information, so they can find out how the products and services are doing in the market.

… Inclusive BI essentially includes new and external data sources for departmental applications, but that’s only the beginning. Inclusive BI is a completely new mindset. For every application that IT or line of business develops, it just creates another data silo and another information silo. You have another place that information is disconnected from others.

… There is effectively a new class of BI applications as we have been discussing, that depends on a completely different set of data sources. Web data services is about this agile access and delivery of the right data at the right time.

With different business pressures that are surfacing everyday, this leads to a continuous need for more and more data sources.

… Critical decision-making requires, as Howard was saying earlier, that all business information is easily leveraged whenever it’s needed. But today, each application is separate and not joined. This makes the line of business and decision- making very difficult, and it’s not in real time.

An easier way

As this dynamic business environment continues to grow, it’s completely infeasible for IT to update their existing data warehouses or to build a new data mart. That can’t be the solution. There has to be an easier way to access and extract data exactly where it resides, without having to move data back and forth from data bases, data marts, and data warehouses, which effectively becomes snapshot.

… Web data services provides immediate access to the delivery of this critical data into the business user’s BI environment, so that the right timely decisions can be made. It effectively takes these dashboards, reporting, and analytics to the next level for critical decision-making. So when we look deeper into this and how is this actually playing out, it’s all about early and precise predictions.

Dresner: … Some IT organizations have become pretty inflexible. They are focused myopically on some internal sources and are not being responsive to the end user.

To the extent that they can find new tools like Web data services to help them be more effective and more efficient, they are totally open to giving line of business self-service capabilities.

You need to be careful not to suffer from what I call BI myopia, where we are focused just on our internal corporate systems or our financial systems. We need to be responsive. We need to be inclusive of information that can respond to the user’s needs as quickly as possible, and sometimes the competency center is the right approach.

I have instances where the users do wrest control and, in my latest book, I have four very interesting case studies. Some are focused on organizations, where it was more IT driven. In other instances, it was business operations or finance driven.

Yu: … For example, in leading financial services companies, what they’re looking for is on this theme of early and precise predictions. How can you leverage information sources that are publicly available, like weather information, to be able to assess the precipitation and rainfall and even the water levels of lakes that directly contribute to hydroelectricity?

If we can gather all that information, and develop a BI system that can aggregate all this information and provide the analytical capabilities, then you can make very important decisions about trading on energy commodities and investment decisions.

Web data services effectively automates this access and extraction of the data and metadata so that IT doesn’t have to.

Web data services effectively automates this access and extraction of the data and metadata and things of that nature, so that IT doesn’t have to go and build a brand new separate BI system every time line of business comes up with a new business scenario.

… It’s about the preciseness of the data source that the line of business already understands. They want to access it, because they’re working with that data, they’re viewing that data, and they’re seeing it through their own applications every single day.

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

See popular event speaker Howard Dresner’s latest book, Profiles in Performance: Business Intelligence Journeys and the Roadmap for Change, or visit his website.

Are CIOs are making the right decisions and adjustments in both strategy and execution as we face a new era in IT priorities? The combination of the down economy, resetting of IT investment patterns, and the need for agile business processes, along with the arrival of some new technologies, are all combining to force CIOs to reevaluate their plans.

What should CIOs make as priorities in the short, medium, and long terms? How can they reduce total cost, while modernizing and transforming IT? What can they do to better support their business requirements? In a nutshell, how can they best prepare for the new economy?

Here to help address the pressing questions during a challenging time — and yet also a time in which opportunity and differentiation for CIOs beckons — is Lee Bonham, marketing director for CIO Agenda Programs in HP’s Technology and Solutions Group. The interview is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Bonham: We all recognize that we’re in a tough time right now. In a sense, the challenge has become even more difficult over the past six months for CIOs and other decision-makers. Many people are having to make tough decisions about where to spend their scarce investment dollars. The demand for technology to deliver business value is still strong, and it perhaps has even increased, but the supply of funding resources for many organizations has stayed flat or even gone down.

To cope with that, CIOs have to work smarter, not harder, and have to restructure their IT spending. Looking forward, we see, again, a change in the landscape. So, people who have worked through the past six months may need to readjust now.

What that means for CIOs is they need to think about how to position themselves and how to position their organizations to be ready when growth and new opportunity starts to kick in. At the same time, there are some new technologies that CIOs and IT organizations need to think about, position, understand, and start to exploit — if they’re to gain advantage.

Organizations need to take stock of where they are and implement three strategies:

• Standardize, optimize, and automate their technology infrastructure — to make the best use of the systems that they have installed and have available at the moment. Optimizing infrastructure can lead to some rapid financial savings and improved utilization, giving a good return on investment (ROI).

• Prioritize — to stop doing some of the projects and programs that they’ve had on their plate and focus their resources in areas that give the best return.

• Look at new, flexible sourcing options and new ways of financing and funding existing programs to make sure that they are not a drain on capital resources. We’ve been putting forward strategies to help in these three areas to allow our customers to remain competitive and efficient through the downturn. As I said, those needs will carry on, but there are some other challenges that will emerge in the next few months.

Growth may come in emerging markets, in new industry segments, and so on. CIOs need to look at innovation opportunities. Matching the short-term and the long-term is a real difficult question. There needs to be a standard way of measuring the financial benefit of IT investment that helps bridge that gap.

There are tools and techniques that leading CIOs have been putting in place around project prioritization and portfolio management to make sure that they are making the right choices for their investments. We’re seeing quite a difference for those organizations that are using those tools and techniques. They’re getting very significant benefits and savings.

The financial community is looking for fast return — projects that are going to deliver quick benefits. CIOs need to make sure that they represent their programs and projects in a clear financial way, much more than they have been before this period. Tools like Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) software can help define and outline those financial benefits in a way that financial analysts and CFOs can recognize.

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

My latest podcast discussion comes from The Open Group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference and associated 3rd Security Practitioners Conference in Toronto.

We’re talking about security in the cloud and decision-making about cloud choices for enterprises. There has been an awful lot of concern and interest in cloud and security, and they go hand in hand.

We’ll delve into some early activities among several standards groups, including the Jericho Forum. They are seeking ways to help organizations approach cloud adoption with security in mind.

Here to help on the journey toward safe cloud adoption, we’re joined by Steve Whitlock, a member of the Jericho Board of Management. The interview is conducted by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Whitlock: A lot of discussions around cloud computing get confusing, because cloud computing appears to be encompassing any service over the Internet. The Jericho Forum has developed what they call a Cloud Cube Model that looks at different axis or properties within cloud computing, issues with interoperability, where is the data, where is the service, and how is the service structured.

The Cube came with a focus on three dimensions: whether the cloud was internal

The in-source-outsource question is still relevant. That’s essentially who is doing the work and where their loyalty is.

or external, whether it’s was open or proprietary, and, originally, whether it was insourced or outsourced. … There are a couple of other dimensions to consider as well. The insource-outsource question is still relevant. That’s essentially who is doing the work and where their loyalty is.

They’ve also coupled that with the layered model that looks at hierarchical layer of cloud services, starting at the bottom with files services and moving up through development services, and then full applications.

The Jericho Forum made its name early on for de-perimeterization or the idea that barriers between you and your business partners were eroded by the level of connectivity you needed do the business. Cloud computing could be looked at the ultimate form of de-perimeterization. You no longer know even where your data is.

… Similar to SOA, the idea of direct interactive services on demand is a powerful concept. I think the cloud extends it. If you look at some of these other layers, it extends it in ways where I think services could be delivered better.

It would be nice if the cloud-computing providers had standards in this area. I don’t see them yet. I know that other organizations are concerned about those. In general, the three areas concerned with cloud computing are, first, security, which is pretty obvious. Then, standardization. If you invest a lot of intellectual capital and effort into one service and it has to be replaced by another one, can you move all that to the different service? And finally, reliability. Is it going to be there when you need it?

… There are concerns, as I mentioned before — where the data is and what is the security around the data — and I think a lot of the cloud providers have good answers. At a really crude level, the cloud providers are probably doing a better job than many of the small non-cloud providers and maybe not as good as large enterprises. I think the issue of reliability is going to come more to the front as the security questions get answered.

… It’s very important to be able to withdraw from a cloud service, if they shut down for some reason. If your business is relying them for day-to-day operations, you need to be able to move to a similar service. This means you need standards on the high level interfaces into these services. With that said, I think the economics will cause many organizations to move to clouds without looking at that carefully.

Formal relationship

The Jericho Forum is also working with the Cloud Security Alliance on their framework and papers. … It’s a very complementary [relationship]. They arose separately, but with overlapping individuals and interests. Today, there is a formal relationship. The Jericho Forum has exchanged board seats with the Cloud Security Alliance, and members of the Jericho Forum are working on several of the individual working groups in the Cloud Security Alliance, as they prepare their version 2.0 of their paper.

… In addition to the cube model, there is the layered model, and some layers are easier to outsource. For example, if it’s storage, you can just encrypt it and not rely on any external security. But, if it’s application development, you obviously can’t encrypt it because you have to be able to run code in the cloud.

I think you have to look at the parts of your business that are sensitive to needs for encryption or export protection and other areas, and see which can fit in there. So, personally identifiable information (PII) data might be an area that’s difficult to move in at the higher application level into the cloud.

I think the interest in how to protect data, no matter

It’s very important to be able to withdraw from a cloud service, if they shut down for some reason. … You need to be able to move to a similar service.

where it is, is what it really boils down to. IT systems exist to manipulate, share, and process data, and the reliance on perimeter security to protect the data hasn’t worked out, as we’ve tried to be more flexible.

We still don’t have good tools for data protection. The Jericho Forum did write a paper on the need for standards for enterprise information protection and control that would be similar to an intelligent version of rights management, for example.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Welcome to a podcast discussion on Green IT and the many ways to help reduce energy use, stem carbon dioxide creation, and reduce total IT costs — all at the same time. We’re also focusing on how IT can be a benefit to a whole business or corporate-level look at energy use.

We’ll look at how current IT planners should view energy concerns, some common approaches to help conserve energy, and at how IT suppliers themselves can make “green” a priority in their new systems and solutions.

[UPDATE: HP on Wednesday released a series of products that help support these Green IT initiatives.]

[UPDATE 2: HP named "most green" IT vendor by Newsweek.]

Here to help us better understand the Green IT issues, technologies, and practices impacting today’s enterprise IT installations and the larger businesses they support, we’re joined by five executives from HP: Christine Reischl, general manager of HP’s Industry Standard Servers; Paul Miller, vice president of Enterprise Servers and Storage Marketing at HP; Michelle Weiss, vice president of marketing for HP’s Technology Services; Jeff Wacker, an EDS Fellow, and Doug Oathout, vice president of Green IT for HP’s Enterprise Servers and Storage. The panel was moderated be me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Oathout: The current cost of energy continues to rise. The amount of energy used by IT is not going down. So, it’s becoming a larger portion of their budget. … [Executives] want to look at energy use and how they can reduce it, not only from a data center perspective, but also from consumption of the monitors, printers, and desktop PCs as well. So, the first major concern is the cost of energy to run IT.

[They also] want to extend the life of their data center. They don’t want to have to spend $10 million, $50 million, or $100 million to build another data center in this economic environment. So, they want to know anything possible, from best practices to new equipment to new cooling designs, to help them extend the life of the data center.

Lastly, they’re concerned with regulations coming in the marketplace. A number of countries already have a demand to reduce power consumption through most of their major companies. We have a European Code of Conduct, that’s optional for data centers, and then the U.S. has regulations now in front of Congress to start a cap-and-trade system.

IT can multiply the effects of intelligence being built into the system. IT is the backbone of digitization of information, which allows smart business people to make good, sound decisions. … This is a must-do. The business environment is saying, “You’ve got to reduce cost,” and then the government is going to come in and say, “You’re going to have to reduce your energy.” So, this is a must-do.

Miller: One of the key issues is who owns the problem of energy within the business and within the data center. IT clearly has a role. The CFO has a role. The data center facilities manager has a role. … You can’t manage what you can’t see. There are very limited tools today to understand where energy is being used, how efficient systems are, and how making changes in your data center can help the end customer.

Our expertise in knowing where and how changes to different equipment, different software models, and different service models can drive a significant impact to the amount of energy that customers are using and also help them grow their capacity at the same time.

… Everyone needs an ROI that’s as quick as possible. It’s gone from 12 months down to 6 months. With our new ProLiant G6 servers, the cost and energy savings alone is so significant, when you tie in technologies like virtualization and the power and performance we have, we’re seeing up to three months ROI over older servers by companies being able to save on energy plus software costs.

Reischl: Well, we have been investing in that area for several years now. We will have an energy power cooling roadmap and we will continuously launch innovation as we go along. We also have an overall environment around power and cooling, which we call the Thermal Logic environment. Under this umbrella, we are not only innovating on the hardware side, but on the software side as well, to ensure that we can benefit on both sides for our customers.

In addition to that, HP ProCurve, for example, has switches that now use 40 percent less energy than industry average network switches. We also have our StorageWorks Enterprise Virtual Array, which reduces the cost of power and cooling by 50 percent using thin provisioning and larger capacity disks.

Weiss: IT tends to think in terms of a lifecycle. If you think about ITIL and all of the processes and procedures most IT people follow, they tend to be more process oriented than most groups. But, there is even more understanding now about that latter stage of the lifecycle and not just in terms of disposing of equipment.

The other area that people are really thinking about now is data — what do you do at the end of the lifecycle of data? How do you keep the data around that you need to, and what do you do about data that you need to archive and maybe put on less energy-consuming devices? That’s a very big area.

Wacker: [At EDS] we look for total solutions, as opposed to spot solutions, as we approach the entire ecology, energy, and efficiency triumvirate. It’s all three of those things in one. It’s not just energy. It’s all three.

We look from the origination all the way through the delivery of the data in a business process. Not only do we do the data centers, and run servers, storage, and communications, but we also run applications.

Applications are also high on the order of whether they are green or not. First of all, it means reconciling an application’s portfolio, so that you’re not running three applications in three different places. That will run three different server platforms and therefore will require more energy.

It’s being able to understand the inefficiencies with which we’ve coded much of our application services in the past, and understanding that there are much more efficient ways to use the emerging technologies and the emerging servers than we’ve ever used before. So, we have a very high focus on building green applications and reconciling existing portfolios of applications into green portfolios.

How you use IT

Moving onto the business processes, the best data delivered into the worst process will not improve that process at all. It will just have extended it. Business process outsourcing, business process consulting, and understanding how you use IT in the business is continuing to have a very large impact on environmental and green.

You’ve already identified the major culprit in this. That is that the cost of energy is going to continue to accelerate, and to be higher and higher, and therefore a major component of your cost structure in running IT. So everybody is looking at that.

Cloud is, by its definition, moving a lot of processes into a very few number of boxes — ultra virtualization, ultra flexibility. So it’s a two-sided sword and both sides have to be looked at. One, is for you to be able to get the benefits of the cloud, but the other one is to make sure that the cost of the cloud, both in terms of capabilities as well as the environment, are in your mindset as you contract.

One of the things about what has been called cloud or Adaptive Infrastructure is that you’ve got to look at it from two sides. One, if you know where you’re getting your IT from, you can ask that supplier how green is your IT, and hold that supplier to a high standard of green IT.

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.

Standards and open access are increasingly important to users of cloud-based services. Yet security and control also remain top-of-mind for enterprises. How to make the two — cloud and security — work in harmony?

The Open Group is leading some of the top efforts to make cloud benefits apply to mission critical IT. To learn more about the venerable group’s efforts I recently interviewed Allen Brown, president and CEO of The Open Group. We met at the global organization’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Toronto.

Here are some excerpts:

Brown: We started off in a situation where organizations recognized that they needed to break down the boundaries between their organizations. They’re now finding that they need to continue that, and that investing in enterprise architecture (EA) is a solid investment developing for the future. You’re not going to stop that just because there is a downturn.

In fact, some of our members who I’ve been speaking to see EA as critical to ready their organization for coming out of this economic downturn.

… We’re seeing the merger of the need for EA with security. We’ve got a number of security initiatives in areas of architecture, compliance, audit, risk management, trust, and so on. But the key is bringing those two things together, because we’re seeing a lot of evidence that there are more concerns about security.

… IT security continues to be a problem area for enterprise IT organizations. It’s an area where our members have asked us to focus more. Besides the obvious issues, the move to cloud does introduce some more security concerns, especially for the large organizations, and it continues to be seen as an obstacle.

On the vendor side, the cloud community recognizes they’ve got to get security, compliance, risk, and audit sorted out. That’s the sort of thing our Security Forum will be working on. That provides more opportunity on the vendor side for cloud services.

… We’ve always had this challenge of how do we breakdown the silos in the IT function. As we’re moving towards areas like cloud, we’re starting to see some federation of the way in which the IT infrastructure is assembled.

As far as the information, wherever it is, and what parts of it are as a service, you’ve still got to be able to integrate it, pull it together, and have it in a coherent manner. You’ve got to be able to deliver it not as data, but as information to those cross-functional groups — those groups within your organization that may be partnering with their business partners. You’ve got to deliver that as information.

The whole concept of Boundaryless Information Flow, we found, was even more relevant in the world of cloud computing. I believe that cloud is part of an extension of the way that we’re going to break down these stovepipes and silos in the IT infrastructure and enable Boundaryless Information Flow to extend.

One of the things that we found internally in moving from the business side of what our architecture is that the stakeholders understand to where the developers can understand, is that you absolutely need that skill in being able to be the person that does the translation. You can deliver to the business guys what it is you’re doing in ways that they understand, but you can also interpret it for the technical guys in ways that they can understand.

As this gets more complex, we’ve got to have the equivalent of city-plan type architects, we’ve got to have building regulation type architects, and we’ve got to have the actual solution architect.

… We’ve come full circle. Now there are concerns about portability around the cloud platform opportunities. It’s too early to know how deep the concern is and what the challenges are, but obviously it’s something that we’re well used to — looking at how we adopt, adapt, and integrate standards in that area, and how we would look for establishing the best practices.

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.

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

Our latest BriefingsDirect podcast uncovers how to quickly harness the technical benefits of current data centers for cloud computing approaches. We examine how enterprises are increasingly focused on delivery and consumption of cloud-based infrastructure and services.

The interest in cloud adoption is being fueled by economics, energy concerns, skills shortages, and complexity. Getting the best paybacks from cloud efforts early and often and by bringing them on-premises, can help prevent missing the rewards of cloud models later by being unprepared or inexperienced now.

We expect that the way the clouds are built will be refined for more and more enterprises over time. The early goal is gaining the efficiency, control and business benefits of an everything-as-a-service approach, without the downside and risks.

Yet much of what makes the cloud tick is already being used inside of many data centers today. So now we’ll examine how many of the technical underpinnings of cloud are available now for organizations to leverage in their in-house data centers, whether it’s moving to highly scalable servers and storage, deeper use of virtualization technologies, improved management and automation for elastic compute provisioning, or services management and governance expertise.

Here to help us better understand how to make the most of cloud technologies are four experts from Hewlett-Packard (HP): Pete Brey, worldwide marketing manager for HP StorageWorks group; Ed Turkel, manager of business development for HP Scalable Computing and Infrastructure; Tim Van Ash, director of software as a service (SaaS) products in the HP Software and Solutions group, and Gary Thome, chief strategist for infrastructure software and blades at HP. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Van Ash: When IT looks at becoming a service provider, technology is a key part of it, architecting yourself to be able to support the service levels around delivering a service, as opposed to some of the more traditional ways that we saw IT evolve. Then, applications were added to the environment, and the environment was expanded, but it wasn’t necessarily architected around the application.

When IT moves to a service provider role, it’s as much about how they structure their organization to be able to deliver those services. That means being able to not only have the sort of operational teams that are running and supporting the application, but also have the customer-facing sides, who are managing the business relationships, whether they would be internal or external customers, and actually starting to run it as if it were a business.

… It’s also about realizing that it’s not just a cost model, but it is very much a business model. That means you need to be actively out there recruiting new customers. You need to be out there marketing yourself. And, that’s one area that IT traditionally has been quite poor at — recognizing how to structure themselves to deliver as a business.

The technology is really one of the key enablers that come into that and, more importantly, enables you to get scale and standardization across the board, because one of the issues that IT has traditionally faced is that often architecture is forced on them, based on the application selection by the business.

When you start to move into cloud environments, which feature, in many cases, high levels of virtualization, you start to decouple those layers, as the service provider has a much stronger control over what the architecture looks like across the different layers of the stack. This is really one of the areas where cloud [can] accelerate this process enormously.

Brey: Now, not only do you have your scale-out compute environments, you need to also pay attention to the storage piece of the equation and delivering the platforms. The storage platforms need not only to scale to the degree that we talk about into the petabyte ranges, but they also need to be very simple and easy to use, which will drive down your total cost of ownership and will drive down your administrative costs.

They also deliver a fundamentally new level of affordability that we have never really seen before in the storage marketplace in particular. So these combination of things, scalability, manageability, ease of use and overall affordability, are driving what I consider almost a revolution in the storage marketplace these days.

Turkel: In those [cloud] environments, the way that they look at management of the environment, the resilience or reliability of individual servers, storage, and so on, is done a little differently, partially because of the scale of the environments that they are creating.

If you look at many of the cloud providers, what they’ve done is they’ve implemented a great deal of resilience in their application environment, in a sense, moving the issues of resiliency away from the hardware and more into software. When you look at an environment that is as large as what they are doing, it’s somewhat natural to expect that components of that environment will fail at some level of frequency.

Their software infrastructure has to be able to deal with that. … The way that [enterprise IT] service — and the way that they design — the environment has to be somewhat similar to those cloud providers.

Thome: When customers are thinking about going to a cloud infrastructure or shared-service model, they really want to look at how they are going to get a payback from that. They’re looking at how they can get applications up and running much faster and also how they can do it with less effort and less time. They can redirect administrative time or people time from just simply getting the basic operations, getting the applications up and running, getting the infrastructure up and running for the applications, to doing more innovative things instead.

… Unlike the cloud that Ed was talking about earlier where they are able to put things like the resilience and scalability into the software, many enterprises don’t own all their applications, and there are a variety of different applications on a variety of different operating systems.

So, they really need a more flexible platform that gives them an abstraction between the applications and the hardware itself. Products like BladeSystem Matrix, with technologies such as our Insight Orchestration and our Virtual Connect technology, allows customers to get that abstraction.

Customers are looking for those things, as well as the cloud model, a shared-services platform, to be able to get higher utilization out of the equipment.

Turkel: [The cloud] approach … is much

Customers are looking for those things, as well as the cloud model, a shared-services platform, to be able to get higher utilization out of the equipment.

more of a holistic view of the IT environment and selling a broader solution, than simply going in and selling a server with some storage and so on for a particular application. It tends to touch a broader view of IT, of the data center, and so on.

IT has to look at working with the CIO or senior staff within the enterprise IT infrastructure, looking fundamentally at how they change their model of how they deliver their own IT service to their internal customers.

Rather than just providing a platform for an application, they are looking at how they provide an entire service to their customer base by delivering IT as a service. It’s fundamentally a different business model for them, even inside their own organizations.

… We’re also seeing some interesting crossover from another part of our market that has been very traditionally a scale-out market. That’s the high-performance computing (HPC) or technical computing market, where we are seeing a number of large sites that have been delivering technical computing as a service to their customers for some time, way back when they called it time sharing. Then, it became utility computing or grid, and so on.

Now, they’re more and more delivering their services via cloud models. In fact, they’re working very closely with us on a joint-research endeavor that we have between HP Labs, Yahoo, and Intel called the Cloud Computing Test Bed, more recently called the Open Cirrus Project.

Van Ash: The thing that we’re seeing from our customers is how they extend enterprise control in the cloud, because cloud has the potential to be the new silo in the overall architecture. As you said, in a heterogeneous environment, you potentially have multiple cloud providers. In fact, you almost certainly will have a multi-sourced environment.

So, how do you extend the capabilities, the control, and the governance across your enterprise in

If you look at many of the cloud providers, what they’ve done is they’ve implemented a great deal of resilience in their application environment, in a sense, moving the issues of resiliency away from the hardware and more into software.

the cloud to ensure that you are delivering the most agile and the most cost effective solution, whether it would be in-house or leveraging cloud to accelerate those values?

What we’re seeing from customers is a demand for existing enterprise tools to expand their role and to manage both private cloud and public cloud technologies.

… One of the most exciting examples that I have seen recently has been taking the enterprise technology around provisioning of both physical and virtual servers in a self-service and a dynamic fashion and taking it to the service provider.

Verizon recently announced one of their cloud offerings, which is Compute as a Service, and that’s all based on the business service automation technology that was developed for the enterprise.

It was developed to provide data-center automation, providing provisioning and dynamic provisioning to physical and logical servers, networks, storage, and tying it altogether through run book automation, through what we call Operations Orchestration.

Verizon has taken that technology and used that to build a cloud service that they are now delivering to their customers. So, we’re seeing service providers adopting some of the existing enterprise technology, and really taking it in a new direction.

So, while cloud is currently going in a very exciting direction, it really represents an evolution of many of the technologies that we at HP have focused on now for the last 20 years.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. View a full transcript or download the transcript. 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.

View a free e-book on HP SaaS and learn more about cost-effective IT management as a service.

It’s hard to over-estimate the importance of performance monitoring and governance in any move to cloud computing.

Yet most analysts expect cloud computing to become a rapidly growing affair. That is, infrastructure, data, applications, and even management itself, originating as services from different data centers, under different control, and perhaps different ownership.

What then becomes essential in effectively moving to cloud adoption is proper cross-organizational governance. There needs to be a holistic embrace of such governance — with a full spectrum of technologies, services, best practices, and hosting options guidance — to manage the complexity and relationships.

The governance strength will likely determine if enterprises can actually harvest the expected efficiencies and benefits that cloud computing portends.

To learn more on accomplishing such visibility and governance at scale and in a way that meets enterprise IT and regulatory compliance needs, I recently interviewed two executives from Hewlett-Packard’s (HP’s) Software and Solutions Group, Scott Kupor, former vice president and general manager of HP’s software as a service (SaaS) operations, and Anand Eswaran, vice president of Professional Services.

Here are some excerpts:

Kupor: You hear people use lots of terms today about infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), or SaaS. Our idea is that all these things ultimately are variants of cloud-based environments. … So lots of customers are looking at things like Amazon EC2 or Microsoft’s Azure as environments in which they might want to deploy an application.

But when you put your application out there you still care about how that application is going to perform. Is it going to be secure? What does it look like from an overall management and governance perspective? That’s where, in that specific example, Cloud Assure can be very helpful, because essentially it provides that trust, governance, and audit of that application in a cloud-based environment.

Eswaran: If you look at today’s IT environments, we hear of 79-85 percent of costs being spent on managing current applications versus the focus on innovation. What cloud does is basically take away the focus on maintenance and on just keeping the lights on.

When you view it from that perspective, the people who are bothered about, worried about, or excited about the cloud span the whole gamut. It goes from the CIO, who is looking at it from value — how can I create value for my business and get back to innovation to make IT a differentiator for the business — all the way down to people in the IT organization.

These are the apps leaders, the operations leaders, the enterprise architects, all of them viewing the cloud as a key way to transform their core job responsibilities from keeping the lights on to innovation.

In the context of that, cloud is going to be one of the principal enablers, where the customer or the organization can forget about technology so much, focus on their core business, and leverage the cloud to consume a service, which enables them to innovate in the core business in which they operate.

Once the IT organization is free to think about innovation, to think about

The whole focus shifts, and that is the key. At the heart of it, this allows organizations to compete in the marketplace better.

what cutting edge services can they provide to the business, the focus then transforms from “how can I use technology to keep the lights on,” to “how can I use technology to be a market differentiator, to allow my organization to compete better in the marketplace.”

So given that, now the business user is going to see a lot better response times, and they are going to see a lot of proactive IT participation, allowing them to effectively manage their business better. The whole focus shifts, and that is the key. At the heart of it, this allows organizations to compete in the marketplace better.

Kupor: This is really what’s interesting to us about cloud. We’re seeing demand for cloud being driven by line-of-business owners today. You have a lot of line-of-business owners who are saying, “I need to roll out a new application, but I know that my corporate IT is constrained by either headcount constraints or other things in this environment, in particular.”

We’re seeing a lot of experimentation, particularly with a lot of our enterprise customers, from line-of-business owners essentially looking toward public clouds as a way for them to accelerate, to Anand’s point, innovation and adoption of potentially new applications that might have otherwise taken too long or not been prioritized appropriately by the internal IT departments.

… The thing that people are worried about from an IT perspective in cloud is that they’ve lost some element of control over the application. … In cloud now, what you’ve done is you’ve disintermediated the IT administrator from the application itself by having him access that environment publicly.

Things like performance now become critically important, as well as availability of the application, security, and how I manage data associated with those applications. None of those is a new problem. Those are all same problems that existed inside the firewall, but now we’ve complicated that relationship by introducing a third-party with whom the actual infrastructure for the application tends to reside.

Eswaran: What the cloud does is get you back to thinking about a shared service for the entire organization. Whether you think of shared service at an organizational level, which is where you start thinking about elements like the private cloud, or you think about shared applications, which are offered as a service in a publicly available domain including the cloud, it just starts to create exactly the word Scott used, a sense of disintermediation and a loss of control.

… HP Software has traditionally been a management vendor.

. . . we’ve taken all of that knowledge and expertise that we’ve been working on for companies inside the firewall and have given those companies an opportunity to effectively point that expertise at an application that now lives in a third-party cloud environment.

Historically, most of our customers have been managing applications that live inside the firewall. They care about things like performance availability and systems management.

What we’ve done with Cloud Assure is we’ve taken all of that knowledge and expertise that we’ve been working on for companies inside the firewall and have given those companies an opportunity to effectively point that expertise at an application that now lives in a third-party cloud environment.

… As a service, we can point that set of tests against an application running in an external environment and ensure the service levels associated with that application, just as they would do if that application were running inside their firewall. It gives them that holistic service-level management, independent of the physical environment, whether it’s a cloud or non-cloud the application is running in.

Kupor: We don’t expect customers to throw out existing implementations of successfully developed and running applications. What we do think that will happen over time is that we will live in kind of this mixed environment. So, just as today customers still have mainframe environments that have been around for many years, as well as client-server deployments, we think we will see cloud application start to migrate over time, but ultimately live in the concept of mixed environments.

… From an opinion point of view, we expect cloud to be a very big inflection point in technology. We think it’s powerful enough to probably be the second, after what we saw with the Internet as an inflection point.

This is not just one more technology fad, according to us. We’ve talked about one concept, which is going to be the biggest business driver. It’s utility-based computing, which is the ability for organizations to pay based on demand for computing resources, much like you pay for the utility industry.

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.

View a free e-book on HP SaaS and learn more about cost-effective IT management as a service.

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.

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The latest BriefingsDirect podcast focuses on exercising caution, overcoming fear, and the need for risk reduction on the road to successful cloud computing.

In order to ramp up cloud-computing use and practices, a number of potential security pitfalls need to be identified and mastered. Security, in general, takes on a different emphasis, as services are mixed and matched and come from a variety of internal and external sources.

So, will applying conventional security approaches and best practices be enough for low risk, high-reward cloud computing adoption? Is there such a significant cost and productivity benefit to cloud computing that being late or being unable to manage the risk means being overtaken by competitors that can do cloud successfully? More importantly, how do companies know whether they are prepared to begin adopting cloud practices without undo risks?

To help better understand the perils and promises of adopting cloud approaches securely, I recently moderated a panel of three security experts from Hewlett-Packard (HP), Archie Reed, HP Distinguished Technologist and Chief Technologist for Cloud Security; Tim Van Ash, director of software-as-a-service (SaaS) products at HP Software and Solutions, and David Spinks, security support expert at HP IT Outsourcing.

Here are some excerpts:

Van Ash: Anything associated with the Internet today tends to be described as cloud in an interchangeable way. There’s huge confusion in the marketplace, in general, as to what cloud computing is, what benefits it represents, and how to unlock those benefits.

… The [cloud] provider is committing to providing a compute fabric, but they’re not committing, for the most part, to provide security, although there are infrastructure as a service (IaaS) offerings emerging today that do wrap aspects of security in there.

You see more responsibility put on the provider in the [platform as a service (PaaS)] environment, but all the classic application security vulnerabilities, very much lie in the hands of the consumer or the customer who is building applications on the cloud platform.

With software-as-a-service (SaaS), more of the responsibility lies with the provider, because SaaS is really delivering capabilities or business processes from the cloud. But, there are a number of areas that the user is still responsible for, i.e., user management in ensuring that there are perfect security models in place, and that you’re managing entry and exit of users, as they may enter a business or leave a business.

You’re responsible for all the integration points that could introduce security vulnerabilities, and you’re also responsible for the actual testing of those business processes to ensure that the configurations that you’re using don’t introduce potential vulnerabilities as well.

…Typically, what we see is that organizations often have concerns. They go through the fear, uncertainty, and doubt. They’ll often put data out there in the cloud in a small department or team. The comfort level grows, and they start to put more information out there.

Reed: If you take the traditional IT department perspective of whether it’s appropriate and valuable to use the cloud, and then you take the cloud security’s perspective — which is, “Are we trusting our provider as much as we need to? Are they able to provide within the scope of whatever service they’re providing enough security?” — then we start to see the comparisons between what a traditional IT department puts in play and what the provider offers.

For a small company, you generally find that the service providers who offer cloud services can generally offer — not always, but generally — a much more secure platform for small companies, because they staff up on IT security and they staff up on being able to respond to the customer requirements. They also stay ahead, because they see the trends on a much broader scale than a single company. So there are huge benefits for a small company.

But, if you’re a large company, where you’ve got a very large IT department and a very large security practice inside, then you start to think about whether you can enforce firewalls and get down into very specific security implementations that perhaps the provider, the cloud provider, isn’t able to do or won’t be able to do, because of the model that they’ve chosen.

That’s part of the decision process as to whether it’s appropriate to put things into the cloud. Can the provider meet enough or the level of security that you’re expecting from them?

Spinks: We’ve just been reviewing a large energy client’s policies and procedures. … As you move out into an outsourcing model, where we’re managing their technology for them, there are some changes required in the policies and procedures. When you get to a cloud services model, some of those policies, procedures, and controls need to change quite radically.

Areas such as audit compliance, security assurance, forensic investigations, the whole concept of service-level agreements (SLAs) in terms of specifying how long things take have to change. Companies have to understand that they’re buying a very standard service with standard terms and conditions.

Pressure to adopt

Van Ash: Obviously, the current economic environment is putting a lot of pressure on budgets, and people are looking at ways in which they can continue to move their projects forward on investments that are substantially reduced from what they were previously doing.

But, the other reason that people are looking at cloud computing is just agility, and both these aspects – cost and agility — are being driven by the business. These two factors coming from the business are forcing IT to rethink how they look at security and how they approach security when it comes to cloud, because you’re now in a position where many of your intellectual property and your physical data and information assets are no longer within your direct control.

So what are the capabilities that you need to mature in terms of governance, visibility, and audit controls that we were talking about, how do you ramp those up? How do you assess partners in those situations to be able to sit down and say that you can actually put trust into the cloud, so that you’ve got confidence that the assets you’re putting in the cloud are safeguarded, and that you’re not potentially threatening the overall organization to achieve quick wins?

The challenge is that the quick wins that the business is driving for could put the business at much longer-term risk, until we work out how to evolve our security practices across the board.

Spinks: … The business units are pushing internally to get to use some cloud service that they’ve seen out there. A lot of companies are finding that their IT organizations are not responding fast enough such that business units are just going out there directly to a cloud services provider.

They’re in a situation where the advice is, either ride the wave or get dumped. The business wants to utilize these environments — the fast development testing and launch of new services, new software-related solutions, whatever they may be — and cloud offers them an opportunity to do that quickly, at low cost, unlike the traditional IT processes.

Reed: … What we need to do is take some of that traditional security-analysis approach, which ultimately we describe as just a basic risk analysis. We need to identify the value of this data — what are the implications if it gets out and what’s the value of the service — and come back with a very simple risk equation that says, “Okay, this makes sense to go outside.”

… There are certain things where you may say, “This data, in and of itself, is not important, should a breach occur. Therefore, I’m quite happy for it to go out into the cloud.” … Generally, when we talk to people, we come back to the risk equation, which includes, how much is that data worth … and what is the value of the services being provided. That helps you understand what the security risk will be.

Next big areas

Spinks: The big areas that I believe will be developed over the next few years, in terms of ensuring we take advantage of these cloud services, are twofold. First, more sophisticated means in data classification. That’s not just the conventional, restricted, confidential-type markings, but really understanding, as Archie said, the value of assets.

But, we need to be more dynamic about that, because, if we take a simple piece of data associated with the company’s annual accounts and annual performance, prior to release of those figures, that data is some of the most sensitive data in an organization. However, once that report is published, that data is moved into the public domain and then should be unclassified.

We need not just management processes and data-classification processes, but these need to be much more responsive and proactive, rather than simply reacting to the latest security breach. As we move this forward, there will be an increased tension to more sophisticated risk management tools and risk-management methodologies and processes, in order to make sure that we take maximum advantage of cloud services.

Efforts under way

Reed: There are efforts under way. There are things, such as the Jericho Forum, which is now part of The Open Group. A group of CIOs and the like got together and said, “We need to deal with this and we need to have a way of understanding, communicating, and describing this to our constituents.”

They created their definition of what cloud is and what some of the best practices are, but they didn’t provide full guidelines on how, why, and when to use the cloud, that I would really call a standard.

There are other efforts that are put out by or are being worked on today by The National Institute of Standards and Technology, primarily focused on the U.S. public sector, but are generally available once they publish. But, again, that’s something that’s in progress.

The closest thing we’ve got, if we want to think about the security aspects of the cloud, are coming from the Cloud Security Alliance, a group that was formed by interested parties. HP supported founding this, and actually contributed to their initial guidelines.

… If we’re looking for standards, they’re still in the early days, they’re still being worked on, and there are no, what I would call, formal standards that specifically address the cloud. So, my suggestion for companies is to take a look at the things that are under way and start to draw out what works for them, but also get involved in these sorts of things.

… We [at HP] also have a number of tools and processes based on standards initiatives, such as Information Security Service Management (ISSM) modeling tools, which incorporate inputs from standards such as the ISO 27001 and SAS 70 audit requirements — things like the payment card industry (PCI), Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), European Data Privacy, or any national or international data privacy requirements.

We put that into a model, which also takes inputs from the infrastructure that’s being used, as well as input based on interviews with stakeholders to produce a current state and a desired or required state model. That will help our customers decide, from a security perspective at least, what do I need to move in what order, or what do I need to have in place?

That is all based on models, standards, and things that are out there, regardless of the fact that cloud security itself and the standards around it are still evolving as we speak.

Van Ash: We do provide a comprehensive set of consulting services to help organizations assess and model where they are, and build out roadmaps and plans to get them to where they want to be.

One of the offerings that we’ve launched recently is Cloud Assure. Cloud Assure is really designed to deal with the top three concerns the enterprise has in moving into the cloud.

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.

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

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

Better managing server virtualization expansion across enterprises has become essential if the benefits of virtualization are to be preserved and enhanced at scale. I recently had a chance to examine ways that IT organizations can adopt virtualization at deeper levels, or across more systems, data and applications — but at lower risk.

As more enterprises use virtualization for more workloads to engender productivity from higher server utilization, we often see what can be called virtualization sprawl, spreading a mixture of hypervisors, which leads to complexity and management concerns.

In order to ramp up to more — yet advantageous — use of virtualization, pitfalls from heterogeneity need to be managed well. Yet, no one of the hypervisor suppliers is likely to deeply support any of the others.

So how do companies gain a top-down perspective of virtualization to encompass and manage the entire ecosystem, rather than just corralling the individual technologies? To better understand the risks of hypervisor sprawl and how to mitigate the pitfalls to preserve the economic benefits of virtualization, I recently interviewed Doug Strain, manager of Partner Virtualization Marketing at HP.

Here are some excepts:

Strain: Virtualization has been growing very steeply in the last few years anyway, but with the economy, the economic reasons for it are really changing. Initially, companies were using it to do consolidation. They continue to do that, but now the big deal with economy is the consolidation to lower cost — not only capital cost, but also operating expenses.

… There’s a lot of underutilized capacity out there, and, particularly as companies are having more difficulty getting funding for more capital expenses, they’ve got to figure out how to maximize the utilizations they’ve already bought.

We’re seeing a little bit of a consolidation in the market, as we get to a handful of large players. Certainly, VMware has been early on in the market, has continued to grow, and has continued to add new capabilities. It’s really the vendor to beat.

Of course, Microsoft is investing very heavily in this, and we’ve seen with Hyper-V, fairly good demand from the customers on that. And, with some of the things that Microsoft has already announced in their R2 version, they’re going to continue to catch up.

We’ve also got some players like Citrix, who really leverage their dominance in what’s called Presentation Server, now XenApp, market and use that as a great foot in the door for virtualization.

Strain: Because of the fact that all the major vendors now have free hypervisor capabilities, it becomes so easy to virtualize, number one, and so easy to add additional virtual machines, that it can be difficult to manage if technology organizations don’t do that in a planned way.

Most of the virtualization vendors do have management tools, but those tools are really optimized for their particular virtualization ecosystem. In some cases, there is some ability to reach out to heterogeneous virtualization, but it’s clear that that’s not a focus for most of the virtualization players. They want to really focus on their environment.

The other piece is that the hardware management is critical here. An example would be, if you’ve got a server that is having a problem, that could very well introduce downtime. You’ve got to have a way of navigating the virtual machine, so that those are moved off of the server.

That’s really an area where HP has really tried to invest in trying to pull all that together, being able to do the physical management with our Insight Control tools, and then tying that into the virtualization management with multiple vendors, using Insight Dynamics – VSE. … We think that having tools that work consistently both in physical and in virtual environments, and allow you to easily transition between them is really important to customers.

There are a lot of ways that you can plan ahead on this, and be able to do this in a way that you don’t have to pay a penalty later on.

Capacity assessment

It could be something as simple as doing a capacity assessment, a set of services that goes in and looks at what you’ve got today, how you can best use those resources, and how those can be transitioned. In most cases you’re going to want to have a set of tools like some of the ones I’ve talked about with Insight Control and Insight Dynamics VSE, so that you do have more control of the sprawl and, as you add new virtual machines, you do that in a more intelligent way.

We invest very heavily in certifying across the virtualization vendors, across the broadest range of server and storage platforms. What we’re finding is that we can’t say that one particular server or one particular storage is right for everybody. We’ve got to meet the broadest needs for the customers.

…Virtualization is certainly not the only answer or not the only component of data center transformation, but it is a substantial one. And, it’s one that companies of almost any size can take advantage of, particularly now, where some of the requirements for extensive shared storage have decreased. It’s really something that almost anybody who’s got even one or two servers can take advantage of, all the way to the largest enterprises.

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.

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

Welcome to a special sponsored podcast discussion coming from The Open Group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Toronto. This podcast, part of a series from the event, centers on the issue of the enterprise architect (EA) — the role, the responsibilities, the certification, and skills — both now and into the future.

The burgeoning impact of cloud computing, the down economy, and the interest in projecting more value from IT to the larger business is putting new requirements on the enterprise IT department. [See a related discussion on the effect of cloud computing on the architect role.]

So who takes on the mantle of grand overseer as IT expand its purview into more business processes and productivity issues? Who is responsible? Who can instrument these changes, and, in a sense, be a new kind of leader in the transition and transformation of IT and the enterprise?

To help us sort through who takes on the mantle of grand overseer as IT expand its purview, we’re joined by James de Raeve, vice president of certification at The Open Group; Len Fehskens, vice president, Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group; David Foote, CEO and co-founder, as well as chief research officer, at Foote Partners, and Jason Uppal, chief architect at QRS. The discussion is moderated by me, BriefingsDirect’s Dana Gardner.

Here are some excerpts:

Fehskens: One of the things that I’ve seen over my career in architecture is that the focus of architects has moved up the stack, so to speak. Initially the focus was on rationalizing infrastructure, looking for ways to reduce cost by removing redundancy and unneeded diversity. It’s moved up through the middleware layer to the application layer to business process, and now people are saying, “Well, the place where we need to look for those kinds of benefits is now at the strategy level.” That’s inevitable.

The thing to understand, though, is that’s it’s not moving forward in a linear front across the entire industry. The rate of progress is locally defined, so to speak. So, different organizations will be at different points in that evolutionary path.

Uppal: As role of the architect starts to ascend in the organization … it makes a lot of other professionals very nervous about what we do. In this day and age, you have to be very good at what you always did in the rationalization technology, but you also have to be very much almost a priest-like sensitive person, so that you don’t trample on somebody’s feelings.

You have to make sure that you don’t trample somebody else along the way, because, without them, you’re not going to go very far. Otherwise, they’re going to throw a lot of stones along the way. So that’s another a huge challenge that we have from skills of the architect … having this soul that is sensitive to the other professions.

Foote: In the total group of enterprise architects I’ve met, every one of them was a great communicator. They were able to really make people feel comfortable around some very abstruse, very abstract, and, for people who are not technical, very technical concepts. They just could communicate. They could set people at ease. They were nonthreatening, and by the way, most of them, I think, were really close to genius.

Fehskens: One of the architects who I worked with on a fairly regular basis told me that the most satisfying moment in her career was when one of her clients told her, “You make me feel smart.” That for me really encapsulated the communications goal for an architect — to make points about these complex issues so clear that people understand them and feel comfortable with them.

Foote: People really don’t know who enterprise architects are. … [The average HR department person] thinks “architect” is a title that all people in IT want to have … without really grabbing hold and defining the architect. They’ve let the IT organization simply hand out these titles to people as a way to attract them to the organization.

… That lack of control in HR is commonplace today. I tell HR organizations that … You should have a representative to the HR organization that was selected by the CIO or the IT management there to represent them to HR. That person should be the person who advocates also for HR, so that they never are handed job descriptions that do not exist in the company. … Mainly the lack of control is around job descriptions.

De Raeve: The other thing is that architects are, by their nature, extremely adaptive, and they redefine themselves to fit into where there are gaps in the organization where there are needs. They reshape themselves to address those needs. So, we’re sort of like chameleons or shape-shifters, depending on what the organizational context is.

If you’ve got a whole bunch of people doing that, it’s very hard to say, “You people are all basically performing the same role, because it will look different in some respect. See one person do it. It’s even worse. So the only thing you could do is say, “Oh, shape-shifter, some kind of a magician.”

… I think what you’re asking for is the universally agreed professional framework for the enterprise architect, and I’ll give it you the moment we have it. … We’re at an early stage in the maturity of this concept in the profession or in the industry.

… This was the very problem that we were given when developing our certification. We’ve got some documentation, which defines what those skills and experience levels are. You can look at that, if you’re practicing architecture or you are in the architecture space. You could look at that stuff and say, “These are really good things that I ought to be drawing from as I work on my definitions of roles, or as I look at recruiting people or developing or promoting people.” The certification is a separate piece of value.

So, we provide a lot of material that enables you to actually come to grips with what best practice things are, a set of core skills, competencies, and experiences that are needed by successful architects. In response to that, we developed our IT Architect Certification Program (ITAC) for the skills and experience, the ITAC Program, and we also have the TOGAF program, which is more about knowledge.

The community is crying out for it. They may not know that they’re asking for it, but they’re asking for it. One of my things is that I have to go and sell our certification programs to people. So I visit a number of different organizations and explain what we’re doing and what it means.

So, we’ve got the two things: tools to enable organizations to start understanding what best practice is in the space, and then the certification program that allows people to communicate to their customers, their employers, and their next employer that they actually possess these skills and competencies.

Uppal: If we step outside of the IT industry, you’ll see a lot of parallels of other professionals being developed, very similarly to how we develop architects. Architects are not this nebulous thing that just grows. They are developed.

Foote: There are definitely some activities in architecture that you can’t outsource.

I’ve never met a recruiter who specialized in architects. I don’t know that those recruiters exist. They probably don’t, because there isn’t a lot of demand on the outside for hiring architects.

… Most companies that we talk to say, “We like our architects. They’ve done very well, because we trust them. The business trusts them. We trust them. They are good channels of communication. They’ve opened up a lot of thought in our company. We’d really like three times more of these people. How do we accelerate the growth internally?”

They want to know how they can develop architects internally, because they know that they’re not going to get that same quality. Now, these are people who are architecting out of that very delicate core competency, strategic level that you don’t want to share with outsiders — for a lot of reasons.

… I’ve never met a recruiter who specialized in architects. I don’t know that those recruiters exist. They probably don’t, because there isn’t a lot of demand on the outside for hiring architects.

I do think the architects that I see that are brought in from outside are often consultants, formerly of Accenture, IBM, CSC, or one of the large houses. They are brought in basically to calm down the chatter, to educate, and train. They’re there to cleanup a fire, to calm things down, get people on the same page, and then go. Sometimes, that’s the best way to bring in an architect.

Fehskens: In a couple of conversations that I’ve had with people about where we seem to be evolving the role of enterprise architect, they have said basically, “Yeah, these people are going to become in-house management consultants and they’re going to be better for that. They’re going to know your business intimately, because they’re going to have participated in strategic evolution over time.”

There is a lot of merit in that analogy and a lot of similarity. I think the only difference is that what we’re trying to do with EA is bring more of engineering rigor and engineering discipline to this domain and less of the touchy, feely, “do it because I think it’s the right thing to do” kind of stuff — not to disparage management consultants and the like.

Uppal: One of the big differences between management consultant and enterprise architects is that what you put on the table, you have to execute. The management consultant says, “You should do this, this, and this,” and walks away. At the end of the day, if you, as an architect, put something on the table and you can’t execute this thing, you have basically zero value. People are no longer buying management consultants at face value. They want you to execute.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com.View a full transcript or download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

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This week brought an excellent example of how cloud-based services can meet business goals better than traditional IT and process management approaches.

In conjunction with GS1 Canada, HP announced a product recall process Monday that straddles many participants across global supply chains. The pressures in such multi-player process ecologies can mount past the breaking point for such change management nightmares as rapid food or product recalls.

You may remember recent food recalls that hurt customers, sellers, suppliers and manufacturers — potentially irreparably. There have been similar issues with products or public health outbreaks. The only way to protect users is to identify the risks, warn the communities and public, and remove the hazards. It demands a tremendous amount of coordination and adjustment, often without an initial control source or authority.

The keys to making such recalls effective is traceability, visibility and collaboration across many organization boundaries. Traditional “one step up, one step down” methods — the norm today in addressing the tracing of any product — has its limitations in providing required visibility into products across their lifecycle. Without viable information about how food or products get to market, you can’t get them out.

Hence, developing an accurate, single picture of the “life story of a product” is something the industry and the consumers have struggled with continuously, according to Mick Keyes, Senior Architect in HP’s CTO’s Office. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

That “life story of a product” became the nexus of the initiative to create a “cloud traceability platform,” which arrived Monday. The GS1 Canada Product Recall service runs on the HP cloud computing platform for manufacturing to provide users with secure, real-time access to product information so that recalled products are fully traced and promptly removed from the supply chain.

This enables more accurate targeting of recall products. Security enhancements help make sure that only authorized recalls are issued and that only targeted retailers receive notifications. HP will be creating a number of additional specific services that leverage cloud computing to meet specific industry need in other sectors, such as hospitality and retail.

I recently moderated a sponsored podcast discussion on the fast-evolving implications that cloud computing has on companies in industries like manufacturing. The goal is not to define cloud by what it is, but rather by what it can do, and to explore what cloud solutions can provide to manufacturing and other industries.

In addition to Keyes, I was joined in the discussion by Christian Verstraete, Chief Technology Officer for Manufacturing & Distribution Industries Worldwide at HP, and Bernd Roessler, marketing manager for Manufacturing Industries at HP

Here are some excerpts:

Keyes: In the whole area of recall, we’re looking at value-add services that we will offer to regulatory bodies, other industry groups, and governments, so they can have a visibility into what’s happening in real-time.

This is something that’s been missing in the industry up to today. What we’re offering is a centralized offering, a hub, where any of the entities in the supply chain or nodes in the supply chain — be they manufacturers, be they transportation networks, retailers, or consumers — can use the cloud as a mechanism from which they will be able to gain information on whether our product is recalled or not.

In the last few years, we’ve seen a large number of recalls across the world, which hit industry fairly heavily. But also, from a consumer point of view or visibility into where the food comes from, this can be extended to other product areas. It improves consumer confidence in products that they purchase.

It’s not just in the food area. We also see it expanding into areas such as healthcare and the whole pharmaceutical area as well. We’re looking at the whole idea of how you profile people in the cloud itself. We’re looking at how next generation devices, edge of the network devices as well, will also feed information from anywhere in the world into the profile that you may have in the cloud itself.

We’re taking data from many disparate types of sources — be it the food you actually eat, be it your health environment, be it your life cycle — and be able to come with up cloud based offerings to offer a variety of different services to consumers. It’s a real extension to what industry is doing.

Roessler: Cloud services to consumers are distinct, different things, compared to cloud services in the enterprise. From an industry vertical perspective, I think we need to have a particular look at what is different in providing cloud services for enterprises. … Some dimensions of cloud are changing business behavior of companies.

Number one is that everybody likes to live up to the promise of saving costs by introducing cloud services to enterprises and their value chains. Nevertheless, compared to consumer services like free e-mail, the situation in enterprises is dramatically different, because we have a different cost structure, as we need not only talk about the cost of transaction.

In the enterprise, we also need to think about, privacy, storage, and archiving information, because that is the context under which cloud services for enterprises live.

The second dimension, which is different, is the management of intellectual property and confidentiality in the enterprise environment. Here it is necessary that cloud services, which are designed for industry usage, are capturing data. At the moment, everybody is trying to make sure that critical enterprise information in IT is secured and stays where it should stay. That definitely imposes a critical functionality requirement to any cloud service, which might contradict the need for creating this, “everybody can access anywhere,” vision of a cloud service.

Last but not least, it is important that we’re able to scale those services according to the requirement of the function and the services this cloud environment should provide. This is imposing quite a few requirements on the technical infrastructure. You need to have compute power, which you can inject into the market, whenever you need it.

You need to be able to scale up very much on the dependencies, however. And, coming back to the promise of the cost savings, if you’re not combining this technology infrastructure scalability with the dimension of automation, then cloud services for enterprises will not deliver the cost savings expected. These are the kinds of environments and dimensions any cloud provisioning, particularly in enterprises, need to work against.

Verstraete: By using cloud services and by changing the approach that is provided to the customer, at the same time you do a very good thing from an environmental perspective. You suddenly start seeing that cloud is adding value in different ways, depending on how you use it. As you said earlier, it allows you to do things that you could not do before, and that’s an important point.

Gain a good understanding of what the cloud is and then really start thinking about where the cloud could really add value to their enterprise. One of the things that we announced last week is a workshop that helps them to do that – The HP Cloud Discovery Workshop — that involves sitting down with our customers and working with them, trying to first explain cloud to them, having them gain a good understanding of what a cloud really is, and then looking with them at where it can really start adding value to them.

Once they’ve done that, they can then start building a roadmap of how they will start experimenting with the cloud, how they will learn from implementing the cloud. They can then move and grow their capabilities in that space, as they grow those new services, as they grow those new capabilities, as they build a trust that we talked about earlier.

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.

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Complexity of data centers escalates. Managed service providers face daunting performance obligations. And the budget to support the operations of these critical endeavors suffers downward pressure.

In this podcast, we explore how IT search and systems log management as a service provides low-cost IT analytics that harness complexity to improve performance at radically reduced costs. We’ll examine how network management, systems analytics, and log search come together, so that IT operators can gain easy access to identify and fix problems deep inside complex distributed environments.

Here to help better understand how systems log management and search work together are Dr. Chris Waters, co-founder and chief technology officer at Paglo, and Jignesh Ruparel, system engineer at Infobond, a value-added reseller (VAR). The discussion is moderated by me, BriefingsDirect’s Dana Gardner.

Here are some excerpts:

Waters: [Today] there’s just more information flowing, and more information about the IT environment. Search is a great technology for quickly drilling through a lot of noise to get to the exact piece of data that you want, as more and more data flows at you as an IT professional.

One of the other challenges is the distribution of these applications across increasingly distributed companies and applications that are now running out of remote data centers and out of the cloud as well.

When you’re trying to monitor applications outside of a data center, you can no longer use software systems that you have installed on your local premises. You have to have something that can reach into that data center. That’s where being able to deliver your IT solution as software-as-a-service (SaaS) or a cloud-based application itself is really important.

You’ve got this heterogeneity in your IT environments, where you want to bring together solutions from traditional software vendors like Microsoft and cloud providers like Amazon, with their EC2, and it allows you to run things out of the cloud, along with software from open-source providers.

All of the software in these systems and this hardware is generating completely disparate types of information. Being able to pull all that together and use an engine that can suck up all that data in there and help you quickly get to answers is really the only way to be able to have a single system that gives you visibility across every aspect of your IT environment.

And “inventory” here means not just the computers connected to the network, but the structure of the network itself — the users, the groups that they belong to, and, of course, all of the software and systems that are running on all those machines.

Search allows us to take information from every aspect of IT, from the log files that you have mentioned, but also from information about the structure of the network, the operation of the machines on the network, information about all the users, and every aspect of IT.

We put that into a search index, and then use a familiar paradigm, just as you’d search with Google. You can search in Paglo to find information about the particular error messages, or information about particular machines, or find which machines have certain software installed on them.

We deliver the solution as a SaaS offering. This means that you get to take advantage of our expertise in running our software on our service, and you get to leverage the power of our data centers for the storage and constant monitoring of the IT system itself.

The [open source] Paglo Crawler is a small piece of software that you download and install onto one server in your network. From that one server, the Paglo Crawler then discovers the structure of the rest of the network and all the other computers connected to that network. It logs onto those computers and gathers rich information about the software and operating environment.

That information is then securely sent to the Paglo data center, where it’s indexed and stored on the search index. You can then log in to the Paglo service with your Web browser from anywhere in your office, from your iPhone, or from your home and gain visibility into what’s happening in real time in the IT environment.

This allows people who are responsible for networks, servers, and workstations to focus on their expertise, which is not maintaining the IT management system, but maintaining those networks, servers, and workstations.

The Crawler needs some access to what’s going on in the network, but any credentials that you provide to the Crawler to log in never leaves the network itself. That’s why we have a piece of software that sits inside the network. So, there are no special firewall holes that need to be opened or compromised in the security with that.

There is another aspect, which is very counterintuitive, and that people don’t expect when they think about SaaS. Here at Paglo, we are focused on one thing, which is securely and reliably operating the Paglo service. So, the expertise that we put into those two things is much more focused than you would expect within an IT department, where you are focused on solving many, many different challenges.

Ruparel: For 15 years, we [at Infobond] have been primarily a break-fix organization, moving into managed services, monitoring services. We needed visibility into the networks of the customers we service. For that we needed a tool that would be compatible with the various protocols that are out there to manage the networks — namely SNMP, WMI, Syslog. We needed to have all of them go into a tool and be able to quickly search for various things.

We found that the technology that Paglo is using is very, very advanced. They aggregate the information and make it very easy for you to search.

You can very quickly create customized dashboards and customized reports based on that data for the end customer, thus providing more of a personal and customized approach to the monitoring for the customers.

Some of the dashboards are a common denominator to various sorts of customers. An example would be a Microsoft Exchange dashboard. Customers would love to have a dashboard that they have on the screen. At the end of the day, I look at it very simply as collecting information in one place, and then being able to extract that easily for various situations and environments.

These are some things that are a common denominator to almost all customers that are moving with the technology, implementing new technologies, such as VMware, the latest Exchange versions, Linux environments for development, and Windows for their end users.

The number of pieces of software and the number of technologies that IT implements is far more than it used to be, and it’s going to get more and more complex as time progresses. With that, you need something like Paglo, where it pulls all the information in one place, and then you can create customized uses for the end customers.

If I go and set things up without Paglo, it would require me to place a server at the customer site. We would have to worry about not only maintenance of the hardware, but the maintenance of the software at the customer site as well, and we would have to do all of this effort.

We would then have to make sure that our systems that those servers communicate to are also maintained and steady 24/7. We would have multiple data centers, where we can get support. In case one data center dies, we have another one that takes over. All of that infrastructure cost would be used as an MSP.

At the end of the day, I look at it very simply as collecting information in one place, and then being able to extract that easily for various situations and environments.

Now, if you were to look at it from a customer’s perspective, it’s the same situation. You have a software piece that you install on a server. You would probably need a person dedicated for approximately two to three months to get the information into the system and presentable to the point where its useful. With Paglo, I can do that within four hours.

Waters: We have a lot of users who are from small and medium-sized businesses. We also see departments within some very large enterprises, as well, using Paglo, and often that’s for managing not just on-premise equipment, but also managing equipment out of their own data centers.

Paglo is ideal for managing data-center environments, because, in that case, the IT people and the hardware are already remote from each other. So, the benefits of SaaS are double there. We also see a lot of MSPs and IT consultants who use Paglo to deliver their own service to their users.

Ruparel: As far as cost is concerned, right now Paglo charges a $1.00 a device. That is unheard of in the industry right now. The cheapest that I have gotten from other vendors, where you would install a big piece of hardware and the software that goes along with it, and the cost associated with that per device is approximately $4-5, and not delivering a central source of information that is accessible from anywhere.

As far as cost, infrastructure cost wise, we save a ton of money. Manpower wise, the number of hours that I have to have engineers working on it, we save tons of time. Number three, after all of that, what I pay to Paglo is still a lot less than it would cost me.

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

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