Forrester Research

November 4th, 2009

Policy-based SOA will enable increased business value and agility

Posted by Randy Heffner @ 7:36 am

Categories: SOA

Tags: Policy, SOA, Failure Response, Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), Web Services, Middleware, Enterprise Software, Software

One of my favorite Forrester survey statistics to quote about SOA is the proportion of service-oriented architecture (SOA) users that see how important SOA can be for changing their business. In our Enterprise And SMB Software Survey, North America And Europe, Q4 2008 (taken after the start of the current economic crisis), 38% of Global 2000 SOA adopters said they are using SOA for strategic business transformation. This is a very high level of business impact — and far more value than was ever credited to object-oriented or component-based development. Why is this important to note? Many think of SOA first as a technology for reuse, like objects and components, and miss the reality that SOA is much more about business design and flexibility. By missing the business perspective on SOA, they miss the fact that SOA is the foundation for a much broader shift in application architecture and its relationship to the design, monitoring, and optimization of business processes.

And this brings us to the importance of policy-based SOA as an area of technology strategy for enterprise architects to pay attention to. Many SOA adopters already use security and management policy with their SOA-based services, and the future allows a much broader impact by applying other types of policy, including business policy, to SOA implementations. Among Forrester’s top 15 technologies, policy-based SOA is the highest in terms of newness and complexity, which means that, although the potential for business flexibility and value is there, it will take longer to understand, plan for, and adopt policy-based SOA than it will take for other top technologies. As a first step, architects should ensure that they understand the concepts so that they can set the right time frame for building toward policy-based SOA as they build platforms and patterns for SOA.

To begin to understand policy-based SOA, consider security and management. Products like SOA appliances, enterprise service busses (ESBs), and SOA and Web services management solutions provide for policy-based that control service execution. You define a security policy (e.g., “service requests must be accompanied by a WS-Security SAML token to identify the service consumer”) using the SOA product’s administration tool. At runtime, the SOA product intercepts the SOA request, applies the security policy, and either rejects the request (if the policy is not met) or forwards the request to the service for processing. The important point here is that the policy is declared separately from the service, allowing it to change without changing the service itself. In a similar way, policies for production monitoring (e.g., response time and availability) are declared separately and applied at runtime. Some of the benefits of this type of policy separation include:

The active policy is easily and widely visible.If the policy is buried in the service implementation, the only definitive way to determine the active policy is to look at the code.These same concepts can be applied to business policies associated with SOA-based services. Examples of such policies include:

The failure responses are highly configurable.SOA products provide multiple ways to respond to a policy failure, and these can be changed without changing the service.

Monitoring and auditing are both configurable. SOA products can provide dynamically configured data for auditing service operations and usage.

Monitoring may include business-level insight.Besides technical operations data, SOA products can extract business data from service requests and responses, thereby enabling business-level monitoring.

If total expenses are less than $50, route the expense report SOA request to the automated approval service, else route it to the manager approval queue service.

If the submit order SOA request is from a gold customer, mark it to bypass the credit check.

If the medical order SOA request is for a medical procedure from category 1, send an audit copy of the request to the medical quality assurance and risk management queue.

By extracting such decisions from the internals of service implementations, we provide the business with ready access for changing and optimizing business processes. But here’s the issue: Without a broad perspective on SOA policy, organizations can implement policy silos for SOA that duplicate tools and infrastructure for each different type of SOA policy. Security policy might be contained in an SOA appliance silo, management policy might be in an SOA management solution silo, business policy might be in an ESB silo. The two biggest problems this creates are 1) it is difficult to get a complete picture of a given SOA service’s production processing, and 2) it duplicates infrastructure and processes for policy authoring, auditing, and life cycle control.

Therefore, Forrester recommends taking a step back to understand the full possibilities, requirements, and business value of policy-based SOA. This will allow architects to craft an incremental and evolutionary strategy for starting small, typically with security or management policy, and growing into the full range of value available with policy-based SOA.

To read more about policy-based SOA, go to the five-part report series that begins with How To Get Started On SOA Policy Management.

November 2nd, 2009

Client virtualization will help you create your next generation desktop

Posted by Natalie Lambert @ 6:27 am

Categories: Virtualization

Tags: Virtualization, Environment, Client Virtualization, Desktops, Hardware, Phil LeClare

2012. That is the year in which our clients are predicting that their next-generation desktop will be up and running. However, no one company defines this new desktop the same way. Some believe that this desktop will be fully virtualized in a data center and accessible from any device, others see this desktop as only a set of applications delivered to a user when required, and others just look at this desktop as a more manageable, supportable, and lower cost environment than today.

Regardless of how you define your next generation desktop, there is one thing in common factor that will make this all possible – client virtualization. Client virtualization will be the underpinning of all of these new ways of approaching the desktop as it will decouple the desktop and applications from the underlying hardware. Applications will be delivered to users using application virtualization, and users will interact with their desktop using desktop virtualization. In the end, these virtualization technologies are allowing IT to scale their desktop environments to new heights, while at the same time providing greater flexibility, security, manageability, and support than has ever been possible.

When Forrester thinks about client virtualization, it splits into four categories:

• Hosted desktop virtualization: the technology that allows a desktop environment to be run in a data center and gives users the ability to connect to that “desktop” from any internet-enabled device in the world.
• Hosted application virtualization: the technology that allows an application to be run in a data center and gives users the ability to connect to that application from any internet-enabled device in the world.
• Local desktop virtualization: the technology that allows a desktop environment to be run on a user’s device (either directly on bare metal or as a guest on top of the host/native OS).
• Local application virtualization: the technology that isolates applications from other applications and the underlying OS to insure a conflict-free application environment.

According to “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch” report by my colleague Alex Cullen, companies’ infrastructure strategy and associated architecture will shift over the next three years to provide “greater scalability and flexibility while reducing support costs.” Client virtualization will be a key technology in the IT service platform. Just think: in 2012, IT organizations will only focus on delivering the capabilities that truly enable the business – the applications and the productivity environment (AKA the “desktop”) – while dropping the tasks that bring no competitive advantage to the business. On the flip side, users will be thrilled by the opportunity to work from the device of their choosing (including a home PC, thin client, netbook, or even the latest and greatest Mac) in a secure fashion. The way I see it, win-win!

October 27th, 2009

Why mobility will - and does already - matter to IT

Posted by Chris Silva @ 8:56 am

Categories: Enterprise mobility

Tags: Mobile, Network, Information Technology, Mobility, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Chris Silva

Here at Forrester, we spend a good deal of time talking about the future of the mobile enterprise. Whether that’s an emerging standard for a faster, more capable mobile network or a future of all-out mobile connectivity with applications and devices ready to tap into it.

The fact is, while much talk about mobile has a tone of “impending trend” to it, there are currently many mobility initiatives afoot in your organization, some of which IT knows about, some which it may not. So, as it turns out, while mobile seems to be a lot of futurespeak, it turns out it does actually matter to CIOs, and has been highlighted in Forrester’s recent “The Top 15 Technology Trends EA Should Watch” report.

When Forrester thinks about mobility, it splits into three categories:

• Mobile infrastructure — The networks and services that devices tap into, users rely on and mobile applications rely on to function.
• Mobile devices — From laptops and netbooks to iPhones, BlackBerries, and other smartphones, these are the devices hosting those mobile applications and tapping into that mobile infrastructure.
• Mobile applications — What use is a capable, highly-connected device if users can’t use a portable or mobile version of an application on the device?

According to the “Top 15…” report, all three areas: mobile networks gaining in power, mobile devices strengthening and mobile apps going mobile each represent an area of high business impact. The upside of arming your users with the combination of these three technology elements can reap great rewards in productivity, user satisfaction and business efficiency.

Why watch these areas of technology development so closely, then? While mobile devices and networks gaining in capacity and capability is more of an organic trend, reflected by its “medium” label in the “newness” category, understanding which applications will make the best use of these devices, and offer users the best potential for more flexible, efficient workstyles is something many organizations Forrester speaks to are still trying to figure out, hence the “very high” ranking in newness?

What to do, then? Take on the least “new” technologies into consideration first and create a strategy around that platform decision.

Step one, understand what the network and device mix is shaping up to be in your organization. As one example; are you focused exclusively on external network use and are a BlackBerry shop? Explore how external carrier-owned networks can extend users’ connectivity and establish a device migration timeline to take into account RIM’s newest BlackBerry platforms and when and how they’ll enter your environment, how they’ll be managed and secured. Step two, once this is in place, work with application development teams to ensure the capabilities of both the devices and networks that your organization is standardizing on are taken into account when developing mobile applications or evaluating mobile platform vendors.

Thinking about mobile as not just a “now” technology, but taking into account networks, devices, and software as one connected ecosystem will ensure an investment in one of the three, key areas of mobility does not adversely affect the others. After all, successful implementations of technology will allow it to change business for better, not for worse. See the list of recommendations for IT leaders in our Top 15 technology report here.

So next time you’re on a plane, or simply logging into your VPN from the local coffee shop, take note of the experience; is this the way your entire organization should be served in the event of a disaster?

October 22nd, 2009

A Forrester interview with Steve Ballmer about the SharePoint Business

Posted by Matthew Brown @ 6:23 am

Categories: Collaboration

Tags: Microsoft SharePoint, Steve Ballmer, Forrester Research Inc., Steve, Content Management, Collaboration, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Phil LeClare

I had the pleasure to sit down with Steve Ballmer for an interview at the Microsoft SharePoint conference in Las Vegas this week. My research team at Forrester spends a lot of time thinking, researching, and writing about the future of information work. So getting Steve’s view on SharePoint’s decade-long evolution from a basic document sharing application to a broad platform for rapid application development, intranet and internet sites, content management, search, social computing, and composite applications, was something I couldn’t pass up.

Unfortunately, pre-taped interviews are like a ball of pizza dough. They start life with different ingredients, get molded into interesting shapes through the discussion, until they’re eventually pounded and rolled out by communications professionals into something utterly flat and lifeless. This is not a ding on Microsoft, Forrester has its share of communications pros with flour on their hands too. For the video version, click here. But let’s consider several highlights that did and didn’t make the video. Consider that Steve:

• Compares SharePoint to the PC… “In my own mind I compare [SharePoint] to the PC, the PC started off life as a spreadsheet machine, then became a programming machine, a word processing machine, [SharePoint is] a general purpose infrastructure that connects people to people and people to information,” says Steve. Is it just me, or does this analogy say a lot about the scale and scope of Microsoft’s ambition for SharePoint? Of course the millions of people licensed on SharePoint today pales in comparison to the billions of people using PCs. But the recipe for SharePoint does resemble the recipe for the modern-day PC to some extent: mix programmability, broadly available developer tools, common user experience conventions (aka, the “ribbon” interface), and useful applications for communicating, reading, writing, and storing information.
• Doubles down on Windows Phone for mobile access to SharePoint… I asked Steve about mobility, specifically whether the SharePoint team is targeting competing smart phones, like RIM’s Blackberry, or Apple iPhone, with dedicated client applications. The answer was “no,” paired with a big Steve Ballmer style smile.  I thought this a fair question as my colleague Ted Schadler’s Workforce Technographics report recently showed that while only 11% of information workers in companies use a smart phone for work, the number of collaborative applications people use on these devices, and the number of locations workers use these apps from are both very high and growing. Combined with decreasing prices for smart phones, it feels like we’re on the brink of a tipping point where smart phones become a ubiquitous platform for enterprise computing. For now, Steve seems willing to let others build iPhone apps for SharePoint. Is this a mistake? Time will tell, but after a week in Vegas of dropped calls and late delivery of SMS messages on my own iPhone, it’d be a big mistake to call the smart phone race prematurely.
• Positions SharePoint as a serious rapid application development platform.  A big focus of the conference, and the interview, was on developers. Steve disagreed with my argument that SharePoint is not a “serious” development platform in the eyes of IT architects and developers. He countered, “I disagree … I think SharePoint is considered a very serious development platform for rapid application development.” What struck me was his take on the opportunity presented by “the many applications companies build with one man year or less of development.” Having worked in or consulted with IT departments for the majority of my career, I can’t tell you how many that is, but I’m confident saying it’s a whole lot. Many of these apps are built on technologies like Microsoft Access, Visual Basic, Lotus Notes, Java server pages, Active Server Pages, and more. So while high-end middleware companies duke it out for the comparatively few large, transactional, and process-heavy apps of the world, Steve appears completely content for now capturing even a portion of the smaller apps market. To get there, Microsoft must convince enterprise architects that tools like InfoPath Forms and SharePoint Designer can be used without taking down entire SharePoint server farms, something Microsoft has ostensibly failed to do thus far. Is SharePoint 2010 the answer? Won’t know til the Beta is underway in November. But given Steve’s talk of creating a SharePoint “sandbox in the cloud,” my bet is we’ll see lots of liberal arts programmers forged into “SharePoint Developers” over the next decade (whether enterprise architects like it or not).

Is the SharePoint/PC analogy a stretch? Is a dedicated SharePoint mobile client for competing devices a missed opportunity for Microsoft? Will SharePoint 2010 finally lead to the next generation of liberal arts “developers” building small, but useful apps? I’ve got my ideas, what about you?

October 16th, 2009

SharePoint rolls on, gathers no MOSS

Posted by Tim Walters @ 9:54 pm

Categories: Collaboration, Content Management

Tags: Microsoft SharePoint, Microsoft Corp., MOSS, Content Management, Collaboration, Groupware, Enterprise Software, Software, Phil LeClare

Next week’s SharePoint conference in Las Vegas is officially sold out, just another sign of the insatiable appetite for Microsoft’s still-imperfect suite. Cold calling sales reps at lesser companies will look on with envy as each attending prospect or customer shells out a list-price $1,199 for the pleasure of hearing a three-day sales pitch about the 2010 version.

And there appears to be plenty to get excited about. Confidential briefings prior to the conference as well as Microsoft’s carefully crafted “sneak peak” teasers have highlighted many cool new features, crisp UI facelifts, and fixes for some major flaws. Already in July, for example, Forrester colleague G. Oliver Young reported on the game changing impact of SharePoint 2010 for the enterprise 2.0 vendors. Of course, the true test will be how well the numerous new and improved features cohere across the suite to drive comprehensive business value. That’s not a question that will be answered in Las Vegas.

What we do know is that Microsoft has applied MOSS-Be-Gone to the product name. Back in April, SharePoint senior director Tom Rizzo announced the demossification of SharePoint 2010. The official reason is that they removed “Office” in order to avoid any confusion with the Office client. Microsoft Office SharePoint Server becomes Microsoft SharePoint Server – oh, but please don’t call it MSS, since that’s already applied to Microsoft Search Server. As Rizzo wrote in April, “Just remember: SharePoint is SharePoint is SharePoint.”

In other words, MOSS had to go in order to emphasize the billion-dollar SharePoint brand. That’s a smart move on Microsoft’s part, but it won’t keep cynics from believing that it was rather because Microsoft wanted to end any association with troubled super models, old-school Formula 1 drivers, or non-vascular plant forms that reproduce via the explosive release of airborne spores. (Although this last might account for the unchecked reproduction of SharePoint sites in the enterprise.)

Microsoft’s product names, at least on the infrastructure side, have always been an arid landscape of dry-as-dust descriptives that produce inelegant initialisms such as WSS, IIS, MSS, and the mercifully sunset but not to be forgotten MSCMS. With Microsoft Office SharePoint Server, Microsoft (accidentally, I suspect) produced an acronym – a word, rather than a string of initials. Alarm bells must have gone off as it became apparent that MOSS is not only pronounceable, it’s a name that erases any obvious reference to both Microsoft and SharePoint. MOSS has something warm and cuddly about it – search for moss on Flickr and you’ll find several cute puppies and kittens – but it’s the antithesis of brand strategy.

So, adieu, MOSS. From a business perspective, Microsoft is doing the right thing by highlighting SharePoint. But it’s sad to let go of a very rare fun name from Microsoft. No one is going to call their pet SharePoint.

What do you think about the passing of MOSS? Please share below – even if it’s only to be the first Microsoft MVP to announce that you’ve just renamed your dog.

October 13th, 2009

Cloud computing belongs on your three-year roadmap

Posted by James Staten @ 9:18 am

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: Infrastructure, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Investment, Hardware, Finance, Phil LeClare

Welcome to the fourth quarter of 2009; what we at Forrester call planning season for most IT departments. In a typical year, this is the time that infrastructure and operations professionals spend lots of cycles burning through what remains of the 2009 budget and building plans for investment in 2010 with the hope of gathering a bit more budget than last year. Of course this is no ordinary year. Economists and financial prognosticators, like our own Andrew Bartels are predicting a long recovery from the recession and further delays in IT spending. That means another year of your infrastructure getting older. There’s two ways of looking at this problem and thus your budget proposals for 2010:

• You can either predict when you will get the rights to refresh the systems and return to the infrastructure spending patterns of old, or

• You can realize that a long recovery means a new normal for IT spend is in order.

We think the latter is far more fruitful even if it isn’t entirely accurate. It’s both prudent and different because your go-forward infrastructure strategy likely isn’t the same anymore either. If you are like the respondents to our Q3 2009 Enterprise and SMB Hardware Survey, North America and Europe, you:

• Continue to consolidate infrastructure like a mad clear-cutting logging company.

• Are repackaging workloads into VMs faster than an Amazon.com shipping manager.

• Are standardizing like McDonalds – everything from hardware, golden master server images to change management processes as consistent and repeatable as possible.

• Are racing like Usain Bolt to shorten deployment times from weeks or months, to new world records.

• Are learning to love automation – if only in a small way.

In other words, you aren’t buying, running or managing infrastructure the way you used to. So why plan your budget the old way. And further, why budget for the new now, when you can budget for what’s next in your journey. As we noted in our report, Assessing Your Infrastructure Virtualization Maturity, there is a clear path of improvement for infrastructure architecture and that’s toward customer empowerment, deployment standardization, provisioning and capacity management automation and further consolidation – even across business units. Yes, I said it.

In other words you’re evolving into an Infrastructure as a Service cloud. But despite vendor claims for products such as the VMware vCloud, Eucalyptus and Elastra offerings, most enterprises can’t just drop in an IaaS platform and they have a cloud. You have to prepare your organization and your operations staff for this. But that doesn’t mean you can’t achieve this aim in a short time horizon or that you can’t embrace public or hosted cloud infrastructures in the near term.

Forrester feels that cloud computing is one of the Top 15 Technology Trends and that it warrants investment now so you can gain the experience necessary to take advantage of it in its many forms to transform your organization into a more efficient and responsive service provider to the business. Find small non-critical projects to start with so you can learn how best to apply these services to your business and combine this learning with the advice in our Tech Radar to help plot the timing for these investments. Also read through the many cloud computing case studies like those on USA.gov and CryoPort to see how others are doing this. By investigating these top 15 technology trends and shifting to a strategic rightsourcing approach to IT portfolio investment you can hollow out the MOOSE and become more strategic (and viewed more as a change agent) to the business.

October 13th, 2009

Identifying the technologies that will matter

Posted by Alex Cullen @ 7:17 am

Categories: General

Tags: Analyst, Forrester Research Inc., Web 2.0, Team Management, Strategy, Internet, Management, Alex Cullen

CIOs want to know what new technologies they should watch for their firm’s possible use.  They need to know when they should make an investment of time to learn a technology, and educate their business on its potential – or be prepared to answer their questions.  They want to time their own adoption - for example, with cloud-based services, they want to maximize benefits, avoid the bleeding edge, and smoothly fold it in with their plans.  CIOs need a ‘technology watch list’ when they have a central architecture teams, they delegate creating this list to that team.  These teams tap their sources - and one source the architecture teams tap to scan the long list of technologies is Forrester.

At Forrester, we are challenged to identify the top technologies, too.  Our problem is a bit different from our clients – we follow so many technologies, hear from so vendors and thought leaders, and of course every analyst will have their own network and assessment.  To sort through everything that could be on a watch list and pick the ones which CIOs should watch, we involve many analysts and use a simple set of criteria:

It’s got to matter within three years if it’s going to be worth watching.  Of course we all know there are trends in computing architectures or neural networks or others that might have a big impact – but your average business or even aggressive adopters can’t do anything today with these long lead-time technologies.  You might as well save your bandwidth and watch the ones that matter within a reasonable planning & adoption cycle.

It’s got to have a significant impact on business, or on the business of IT.  Business impact is simply ‘can the business do something that it can’t easily do today?’.  Can it better understand customer behavior? Can it drive down the cost of internal processes? IT impact can be both positive or negative:  Does it impact cost positively or negatively?  Does it impact quality positively or negatively? Does it impact IT’s ability to serve business positively or negatively?  Like George Colony, Forrester’s CEO, observed: “Web 2.0 has forever changed the relationship between your company and your customer.” If a technology trend like Web 2.0 will have significant impact, shouldn’t you be looking at it? If it doesn’t have significant impact, why get excited about it? 

It has to be new or significantly different from what’s available today.  There are a lot of impactful technologies in use today that will be more impactful three years from now – but they will be basically the same technologies that are in use today.  CIOs’ organizations are already familiar with them and only need to ‘keep up to speed.’ But others, like business rules engines, will be essentially completely new, and IT will need to ramp up on them, understanding potential benefits and risks before they make their adoption decisions. For existing technologies – it’s ‘business as usual,’ but for new technologies, you have to pick which ones you will ramp up on. 

You need to understand how complex implementation might be.  Complexity drives when you need to start looking.  A technology that could change business strategy will be very complex to adopt – involving multiple stakeholders, and impacting multiple IT and business areas.  It will take a long time to plan so, if the business impact is worth it, you want to start early.  Other impactful technology might be a simple case of acquiring and using. You don’t need a lot of time to plan for it. 

Why is collaboration across Forrester analysts so important?  Simply put, making a prediction which our clients can trust takes more than just one person’s opinion.  With lots of input from analysts across Forrester’s technology coverage, and with an equal amount of vetting by these same analysts, we will produce a more trustworthy prediction of which technologies will matter.  If the consensus of analysts is that real-time, process-centric business intelligence will have a bigger impact than model-driven software development, the chances are it will. 

Which technologies should you watch?  It’s not a matter of ‘cool technologies’ – although they may be fun, or ‘hot technologies’ – although they may be hot for a reason.  It’s really about which ones will matter because of their impact, their ‘newness’ and the potential complexity they bring with them, within a timeframe organizations can plan around.

Over the coming months, Forrester analysts will take a closer look at the 15 technologies we selected, adding what they see on the immediate horizon for 2010.   

Which technologies are on your list? 

October 8th, 2009

The state of US workforce technology adoption

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 7:54 am

Categories: Collaboration, Enterprise mobility, Information Workplace

Tags: Team, Collaboration, Smart Phone, Information Worker, Tool, Workforce, Gen-Y Employee, Recruitment & Selection, Workforce Management, Payroll Solutions

Did you know that among US information workers that:

• 35% use laptops and 76% use desktop computers?
• Only 11% use smartphones?
• 57% are optimistic about technology, but 43% are pessimistic?

We know because we surveyed 2,001 US information workers that use computers in their jobs at firms with 100 or more employees. Here are a few highlights from a report we published today [available to Forrester clients]:

• Most applications are not widely adopted. Email, word processing, Web browsers, and spreadsheets are the top four applications. But even in those apps, the level of involvement or expertise varies widely — while 60% of employees use word processing daily, only 42% actually create documents. Most other applications are used by only a minority of iWorkers.

• There is pent up demand for smartphones. Only one in 10 information workers has a smartphone for work, but one in three agrees that they use a personal mobile phone for work purposes. Twenty-one percent of iWorkers would like to get email outside of work, and 15% would like email on a smartphone. Any way you slice it, this means that there is pent-up demand for smartphones at work.

• Collaboration tools are stalled out, leaving email to reign supreme. Collaboration tools are important for people on a team, particularly if that team is distributed across many locations. But the tools are not widely adopted. For example, only one in four iWorkers uses Web conferencing, and one in five uses team sites. That leaves email with 87% adoption as the default collaboration tool for most people.

• Gen Y employees are getting squashed at work. These younger workers behave very differently from others outside of work, but they are not so different in how they use technology in their jobs. Sixty percent of these 18- to 29-year-olds use social networking at home, but only 13% use it for work — the same percentage as Gen X employees ages 30 to 43.

This data will help Information & Knowledge Management and other IT professionals:

• Improve your negotiating position by using data to drive license discussions. By knowing exactly which applications the workforce is using today and the frequency of use (read: importance) of each application, sourcing and vendor management professionals can bring hard data to the negotiating table.

• Practice lean provisioning, making decisions based on workforce research. By tailoring the workforce technology tool kit to the specific needs of each information worker segment, infrastructure and operations professionals will improve adoption, activity, satisfaction, and productivity. And with tough decisions around desktop virtualization, mobility, and access, quantitative analysis is the right foundation.

• Identify gaps in productivity and barriers to success. CIOs have plenty of scars from the failure of previous technology investments to thrill and delight the workforce. By asking workers what they truly need or why they don’t think they need a new technology, this benchmark will lay the groundwork to prevent future failures.

• Use data to help with tough architecture decisions. “Mobilize every application” is a mantra that rings ever louder in the halls of many IT shops. For an enterprise architect, it’s important to have data to know who’s working at home, who’s working away from his desk, who’s collaborating with customers from a customer site, and what each of those groups needs from technology.

• Talk to business sponsors in the language of metrics. In presenting data on what different groups of information workers need and get from technology, information and knowledge management professionals responsible for a collaboration, portal, or knowledge management program can have a meaningful discussion about adoption, gaps, requirements, and funding.

Questions, comments, thoughts? Please share.

October 2nd, 2009

Assessing the maturity of cloud computing services

Posted by James Staten @ 8:55 am

Categories: Cloud computing

Tags: Middleware, Cloud Computing, Virtualization, Hardware, Phil LeClare

The number one challenge in cloud computing today is determining what it really is, what categories of services exist within the definition and business model and how ready these options are for enterprise consumption. Forrester defines cloud computing as a standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via Internet technologies in a pay-per-use, self-service way.

While definition is crucial to having a fruitful discussion of cloud, the proper taxonomy and maturity of these options is more important when planning your investment strategy. To this aim, Forrester has just published our latest Tech Radar that maps the existing cloud service categories (not the individual vendors within each category) along maturity and value impact lines to help you build your strategic roadmap.

The report identified 11 service categories that fall into three classes of cloud services – software you rent (Software-as-a-service, or SaaS), middleware services and platforms that help developers build cloud-based applications, and infrastructure services and platforms that are places to deploy cloud applications. Note that we did not restrict the second and third categories to Platforms-as-a-service (PaaS) and Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) platforms – because there is value in discrete middleware and infrastructure services in the cloud just as there is in your data center. While Amazon Web Services is clearly an IaaS leader providing a robust set of compute, storage and middleware services, there are also discrete offerings, like Boomi’s cloud integration service that does no more than integration and does not need to be a full platform player to be valuable. In fact there can be significant advantage that comes from this type of focus on just one thing.

Oracle’s Larry Ellison continues to grab headlines for his assertion that the cloud isn’t anything new and to his credit he’s at least half right. Just because applications are delivered from a cloud infrastructure doesn’t mean any of the aspects of application design or components of a service-oriented architecture don’t apply – in fact they have just as much relevance as they did on-premise. But how these services are delivered is what is different. There is a clear difference between an on-premise, single instance deployment of TIBCO and the highly scalable, multi-tenant integration service from Boomi. Tenancy, shared economics, virtualized deployment, and cloud service-to-service integration are game changers for those who are using these services. Not only do they bring potential cost advantage to applications that might otherwise have been deployed on-premise but they create opportunities for new business applications that simply wouldn’t be feasible any other way.

That’s clearly the case for Cryoport, a maker of cryogenic containers for live medical tissue. Delivering these materials safely was very hands-on and expensive until cloud computing came along. Same with genome research; medical research universities and pharmaceutical companies had to make large investments in HPC labs to crunch the massive volumes of DNA data, until cloud computing economics came along.

But cloud computing isn’t the be-all, end-all that many portray and they can’t suit all uses today and may not in the future either. Thus it behooves you to build your roadmap using guideposts to the maturity and applicability of these emerging options. We hope this report helps you bound and plan your cloud investments and look forward to your feedback on how we can assist further.

October 1st, 2009

Cisco Buys Tandberg on its way to be your B2B video conferencing partner

Posted by Ted Schadler @ 7:30 am

Categories: Acquisitions, Collaboration

Tags: Video, Cisco Systems Inc., B2B, Tandberg, Business Person, Corporate Communications, Marketing, Phil LeClare

I spent a day with Tandberg management last week and came away very impressed with some things I can’t share and also some things that I can share. Tandberg has:

• Great HD videoconferencing solutions in room-sized all the way down to Webcam. Yep, a Webcam image looks great in a telepresence room. These guys get telepresence and end point integration.
• A management toolkit that works at enterprise scale. It’s an appliance + video network management solution. This is based on the Codian products that Tandberg acquired. They call it “infrastructure” but I think of it as the NOC for video.
• A commitment to video standards. Take note, Cisco: This will be CRITICAL to business adoption of video for partner collaboration.
• A strong focus on interoperability among network protocols, end points, and video codecs. The Codian acquisition clearly gave them some serious engineering. The goal is to keep the old stuff in the mix as firms build on out their new stuff. It looked good in demo, anyway.
• Strong financials, customer base, and growth. This company is well run and winning share in its market. That team will remain in place.

But they were seeing and losing to Cisco in deals. No longer.

Cisco’s going after the biggest driver of network traffic available: Video. (Transporters are still a ways off I’m told by my Vulcan buddies). But to win and be your B2B video conferencing partner, Cisco needs to get big fast and go beyond telepresence to bring in:

• Everybody’s end point: Cisco, HP (yep!), Tandberg, Polycom, Sony, Teliris, LifeSize, RADVISION, Vidyo, etc.
• Desktop video conferencing, the sleeping bear of iWorker demand about to rise in business. This is classic. A business person goes home Skypes his Mom in Mumbai. Why can’t he do it work? Answer me that! I blieve that desktop video conferencing adoption and value will explode once the bandwidth, cameras, and interop tools are in place. But the experience must be improved dramatically over Skype. If Skype is old VC; then Desktop VC must become telepresence quality. I’ve seen it happening. It’s the real deal and demand will take off.
• Interop between carriers and companies. Companies are tired of just VC’ing with themselves. They want to VC with partners. And that requires a big video switch in the carrier hotels. Hmmm, wonder who could pull that one off?

So with a nod towards the dramatic claims in the press releases and a chuckle when considering Cisco’s historical strategy for acquisition with its five precepts (at least two of which have to go out the window with this acquisition), I think this is a good deal for IT professionals.

Now, what to do next:

• First, go back and demand price rationalization from Cisco. Play Tandberg telepresence rooms against Cisco’s and get the best price and service.
• Second, ask your video conferencing service specialist to get on board with this quickly. They will need new skills. Demand that they get them. You need interop.
• Third, demand interop from Cisco. You need it now. Cisco can help you with Tandberg’s gear and interop long before the acquisition closes.
• Fourth and perhaps most important: DEMAND STANDARDS. You need it to protect your investments.

Have thoughts? Please share.