Category: Vendor Watch
November 20th, 2009
Panel: do cloud computing economic advantages break down in enterprises?
The purpose of information technology is “to provide compute and storage. That’s it. full stop. That compute and storage can be provided by mainframes, private data centers, distributed networks, or by the cloud.”
- Allan Leinwand, venture capitalist
At this week’s Interop conference in New York, I heard a great panel discussion, moderated by AT&T’s Joe Weinman, on the economics of cloud computing. Weinman was joined by Adam Selipsky of Amazon Web Services, Allan Leinwand of Panorama Capital (which invests in cloud vendors), Andy Rhodes of Dell, Harris Tilevitz of Skadden Arps, one of the largest law firms in the world, and William Forrest of McKinsey & Co., author of the last spring’s watershed report on “Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing.”
A public cloud provider, private cloud operator, consultant, network provider, and venture capitalist debate cloud’s business value
McKinsey’s Forrest, for one, stated that while his research “found significant amounts of workloads today could be moved to public cloud providers,” it still “wouldn’t make economic sense to move large chunks of data centers to the cloud.”
Nevertheless, he predicts, “there will be a continued move to the cloud, as there are increasingly attractive economics over people building their own data centers.” He says that these economics keep getting better because “the public cloud guys have built a better box, they buy in volume, and operate more efficiently than most enterprises.”
“The idea that you buy an individual server, that is going away. You either buy racks of servers or go to the cloud.”
Amazon’s Selipsky, needless to say, was bullish on the cloud computing paradigm. He noted that in a government CIO rountable last week, Vicek Kundra, the US CIO, “certified that 45% of all government IT could run on public clouds.”
Selipsky went on to say that cloud computing is suitable for both large and small enterprises. “For start-ups, its a total no-brainer. We also have a lot of big enterprises using our services.” He foresees many enterprises moving to a hybrid cloud environment in the coming years. And, he noted that cloud providers also bring another advantage beyond cost savings: “The biggest benefit of the cloud is that is it enables focus. You can take the intellectual capital of your staff and focus on your business — not IT.”
VC Leinwand, however, says he still sees a “huge gap” between cloud services offered and the ability to effectively manage them in an enterprise environment. “Cloud storage costs one-tenth of onsite data storage,” he points out. But what about configuration, integration, data deduplication, and monitoring? There’s a gap between what the enterprise is used to doing behind the firewall and what cloud providers can do.” He added that he is seeking to fund companies that can help close that gap.
AT&T’s Weinman, for his part, raised doubts about the sustainability of cloud computing economics, which may break down as enterprise management requirements come into play. “I’m not sure there are any unit-cost advantages that are sustainable among large enterprises,” he said. A more likely scenario that will be seen is hybrid adoption of cloud computing in some areas, and private capabilities for others where it makes business sense.
Another option is private clouds, and Skadden’s Tilevitz reports great success at his global law firm of 2,000 partners. Originally, the initiative started after September 11, 2001, as a way to ensure business continuity by operating three regional data centers. Now, built on a Citrix environment, the virtualized environment has evolved into an internal cloud of sorts, from which the firm’s various office access online services. For example, he related, a partner may need to load five million pages of documentation into an online format overnight. “We have more than a petabyte of image data that we keep for seemingly forever that we use for litigation,” he said.
Economies of scale have also kicked in as well. “Our expenses for this private cloud have dropped over time,” Tilevitz said. “I see it as almost a reversion back to the mainframe world. Everyone is now using applications and data remotely.” Tilevitz also said his firm is looking at becoming a “public” cloud provider of sorts as well, selling excess disk capacity online.
November 16th, 2009
SOA helps Coast Guard navigate new tides of homeland security
Did you know the movement of any ship headed toward US waters is tracked by an SOA-aware service running on the US Coast Guard’s systems? And that SOA services are being employed to provide data to an international registry of maritime activity? And there is also an SOA service keeping track of the all the spare parts, equipment, and other assets the Coast Guard maintains? 
The Coast Guard already has close to 25 services that are either already or about to go into production as part of its growing SOA initiative – and more are planned. I recently had the opportunity to speak with Jim Jennis, chief technology officer for the US Coast Guard Operations Systems Center, and Steve Munson, SOA branch chief for the US Coast Guard, about the department’s growing roster of service-orientation initiatives.
The Coast Guard – part of the US Department of Homeland Security – started looking at SOA in early 2007, as a way to address growing requirements to be able to share information not only across its own various units, but with federal, local and international agencies concerned with keeping an eye on vessels entering and leaving US shores. “We had the same conundrum of silos of excellence that many IT organizations have – IT systems tailored in stovepipes within lines of business,” says Munson.
Prior to its SOA implementation, the Coast Guard relied on slower and more manual methods of data sharing with its port partners. “It would either be some form of composed file that would be potentially handed over, or many times, a hard-copy printout or phone call,” Munson relates. In addition, sharing data with its fast-moving cutter fleet was also a challenge. “The cutters get underway and go where they’re needed, so we have fairly low-bandwidth connectivity to these kinds of assets at best,” Munson says. “So were also looking at not only data sharing, but also if there’s a better way with emerging technology to help address some of the problems of being able to use our systems with deployed assets.”
To address these requirements, the Coast Guard implemented an enterprise service bus-centered SOA that enabled asynchronous messaging from Fiorano Software Technologies. The solution was employed in the Coast Guard’s Long Range Identification and Tracking (LRIT) system, which at any given time, is tracking up to 6,000 vessels moving toward or in US waters as well as vessels anywhere else in the world. LRIT tracks signals emitted from vessels every six hours. “That information is running entirely on the Coast Guard’s SOA framework in production,” says Munson. As a result, the Coast Guard SOA requires extremely high-volume services, “processing thousands of messages per second.”
A second system, the Nationwide Automated Identification System (NAIS), relies on a second transponder on ships exceeding 300,000 gross tons, broadcasting navigational information for ships of 300 gross tons or more at three-second intervals. These broadcasts from US territorial waters result in about 2,000 messages per second received in the NAIS system. The Coast Guard is currently protoyping various data services around this system for maritime domain awareness, Munson says.
This is the first of a three-part series. Next post: How the Coast Guard built organizational support for SOA.
November 13th, 2009
Data services may help address a major SOA unknown -- data quality
A couple of months ago, as reported here, Neal Fishman released a book that warned of SOA-based infrastructures helping to spread “epidemics” of viral data across enterprises — since data can be pulled from multiple, formerly siloed sources and quickly distributed across service-oriented systems and applications.
How much data pulled from multiple sources is bad data?
Informatica’s Ash Parikh, a long-time advocate of the data services approach to SOA, has also been warning of this scenario. I have gotten to know Ash through our participation on the Informatica Perspectives site, and recently had a chance to talk to him and Informatica’s Chris Boorman prior to the launch of Informatica 9, which embraces the SOA data services concept.
Ash proposes that organizations adopt a data services layer that provides “a model and standards-based reusable data abstraction layer that can make holistic, accurate and timely information available to an enterprise integration infrastructure, without all the typical complexity and maintenance costs.” He defines a data service as “a modular, reusable, business-relevant service that enables the access, integration, and delivery of complex enterprise data throughout the enterprise and across corporate firewalls in batch, near real-time and real-time modes, including federation.”
As companies move into the next level of SOA maturity, in which services start reaching across enterprise boundaries, many have been struggling to improve SOA’s ability to deliver business value. One factor is companies can’t trust the data that is being pulled in from all the stovepipes into enterprise services. SOA, as Chris puts it, “has lacked the data abstraction layer that enables organizations to basically define the data objects and the rules associated with data objects, that can then be permeated through — whether it be Web services or SQL or batch or anything else — to the applications that are using that data.”
Ash, who has been warning the industry about the quality of data — or lack thereof — surging through SOA-based infrastructures for some time now, says SOA data services open up many new avenues for connecting SOA with enterprise data management. “It’s much more than just data access,” he points out. “It’s making sure the data that is delivered is of the greatest quality.”
SOA data services also helps create a more collaborative environment between IT, data managers, and business data owners. In the real world, Ash says, “when people talk about data, they never talk about ‘data source X’ or ‘data source Y’ that’s sitting in a corner somewhere,” he says. “They report the data as a business representation of data — my customer data, my product data, things like that” This brings things in line with the perspective required of SOA architects, who need to better assure more timely and accurate and consistent views of their data and the product data.
Given this backdrop, I saw that Mike Kavis also has been doing work in this area, and just posted a business case for data services at his site. He describes the issues that can be rectified via an abstracted data layer: real time failover among multiple virtual data centers; managing multi-channel partners with multiple data structures; regulations and laws affecting data management and movement; and data security against direct access to databases.
Maintaining a loosely coupled data services layer takes away the complexities and inconsistencies of attempting to manage multiple data sources. “By abstracting the data layer and creating configurable services as access points to the data, teams can quickly implement solutions in a controlled and standardized manner,” Mike says. For example, they can move quickly “due to the simplicity of the data access and the fact that they don’t need extensive knowledge of the underlying data.”
Ash Parikh also talks about the divide between data management and real-life business needs, something that SOA and data services can help address. For example, he observes, many companies have built great data models, but these models tend to be static. “It’s great to have a model, but I also need a way to find all that information, and to make sure that information I’m finding across a multitude of these data sources – which can be varied in structures and formats — is relevant to me.” Many of these issues can be resolved at the data services abstraction layer, he says.
November 12th, 2009
US defense department IT managers describe latest assault on complex and siloed IT systems
A vexing issue that comes along with service orientation is figuring out who will fund the services being shared across the enterprise. Things get even more interesting in really large organizations with lots of multiple business lines. So you can imagine the complexity of service funding in something as large and complicated as, say, the US Department of Defense.
Funding, establishing user dialog, federation, quicker turnarounds are latest challenges for DoD
Speaking a a recent roundtable on government SOA implementations, Dan Risacher, staff member with the CIO’s office at the Department of Defense (DoD), says DoD is bullish on SOA, and is undertaking serious efforts to service orient its multiple systems. However, one of the greatest challenges is deciding how various services get funded, Risacher says. “In the defense department, we have a tiered structure — very high-level DoD and military departments underneath that. One of the particular challenges with SOA within an enterprise environment, whether that be a federal agency or business, you have different business units each providing their own services. Often the chargeback and the incentive models are the greatest difficulties. We’re struggling with that.”
The roundtable, hosted by Dave Chesebrough, president of the Association for Enterprise Information (AFEI), also included Matthew Swartz, branch head of Enterprise Initiatives for the US Navy, and Mike Darretta, JBoss solutions architect for Red Hat, and covered issues such as funding, integration, and paybacks.
Risacher said DoD formulated and published its SOA strategy in May 2007. The goals of the effort are to “get people to provide services on the network, make sure that those services are visible, accessible and understandable to other users, incentivize people to use them, improvise and use them, and figure out how to manage them from a network operations standpoint as well as a governance standpoint.”
There is a centrally funded model for SOA-based services that exists within the intelligence community, but Risacher says it may be a difficult model for DoD to follow. “The problem is lots of people use a service, and that makes the cost go up — but doesn’t provide any additional resources and revenues to the organization providing that service.”
Overall, however, a service-oriented approach is helping DoD speed up the application development and deployment process, and better target functionality where it is needed. “We have a concept we call ‘communities of interest,’ in which we get groups of related users together who need those capabilities to actually help define what do the services need to be,” Risacher says. “We don’t want to have to wait and figure out in great detail what those services are before we start providing them. But having that dialog enables us to provide services that are actually responsive to what people need.”
The US Navy is also taking an enterprise view of its information technology, according to Matt Swartz. The availability of the Navy Enterprise Portal, along with the Navy Enterprise Information System (NEIS) is seen as a key “initial tactical step towards enabling SOA-type services or the ability for our users in the Navy to access enterprise services.” The various systems and portals are being integrated and federated through an enterprise service bus, he says. “We see this as one day potentially being an enterprise service bus for other capabilities or enterprise SOA services across the Navy, and ultimately connect and federate with other DoD services” he adds.
These capabilities are now delivered via two platforms — Oracle Fusion middleware for NEIS and Microsoft SharePoint for the portal, Swartz elaborates. “We belive that the portal environment will allow us to bring distributed applications together, and also enable information sharing that not currently available to the sailor or the warfighter in these distributed environments.”
For the defense department, SOA has been an incremental journey, versus a huge sweep of its technology landscape, says Risacher. “We’re focusing on things that are scalable, cost effective. How do I do things in a spiral kind of capability… where I’m fielding new capabilities as I go along — rather than trying to take a big-bang waterfall type of approach, trying to figure it out all up front in the requirements phase.”
There is enormous cost-savings potential as well, especially from an integration standpoint, he added. “For large DoD systems, we often find that each connection costs $1 million a year to maintain – that’s not an exaggeration. When I have to go out pay one big defense integrator and some other second defense integrator to make their systems talk to each other — and inevitably something changes either in the interconnect or the data standards change — it ends up being very expensive to have a whole lot of those links. So I’m trying to get that down to where we have a much smaller set of interfaces, rather than a very large set of interconnections.”
The name of the game is faster turnaround of IT capabilities, Risacher continued. “We’re trying to influence acquisition strategy needs to focus on smaller and shorter deliverables, so we can task as we learn, reduce risks, and get those capabilities out faster. We’re focusing on standards and open architecture, and how to share some IT resources. It’s a big, difficult shift for an organization as large as defense department.”
It’s interesting to see how a large, complex organization such as DoD is wrestling with many the same issues — and sees the same kinds of opportunities as smaller, commercial organizations. As DoD and other federal agencies work through some of the issues around service orientation — such as governance, funding, federation, and security — there will be some best practices emerging for private businesses as well.
November 9th, 2009
Enterprise mashup, defined
Kudos to JackBe’s
You may recall that last spring, following a TV news interview, Luis was not happy with the explanation he gave to describe enterprise mashups. JackBe sponsored a couple of contests, along with a lot of discussion among practitioners and analysts.
Here, at last, is the working definition Luis and his team have arrived at:
“Enterprise Mashups are secure, visually rich Web applications that expose actionable information from diverse internal and external information sources.”
Wait — that’s not all. The JackBe crew also sought to answer the question of “why” people need enterprise mashups. They didn’t want enterprise mashups to be solutions in search of problems, as has been the case with many a technology initiative:
“Poor decisions are often made because decision-makers do not have the right information at the right time. Enterprise mashups deliver new insights and enable better decisions through personalized access to the right, real-time information for the specific problem at hand.”
And finally, the JackBe crew also addressed the “how” aspect — as in how enterprise mashups can be created:
“An enterprise mashup platform is a technology suite that enables the rapid, collaborative, user-driven creation of Enterprise mashups without the complexities, costs and risks of traditional information integration projects.”
In this last passage, the user-created aspect of enterprise mashups are included in the definition. This is where mashups can potentially deliver business benefits, as more flexibility can be put into users’ hands. And, as the “why” part of this definition shows, enterprise mashups put decision makers in touch with performance data from across the organization. The greatest challenge to delivery of information at this time is the time it takes to prepare and deliver reports. Let’s give end-users the tools to quickly and configure their interfaces to back-end enterprise applications and data.
October 26th, 2009
EAI: square peg trying to fit into round hole of data integration
There’s a large gaping hole in the capabilities enterprise application integration (EAI) – and its successor, enterprise service buses – can deliver. Current middleware strategies fall short in addressing data integration and data quality issues – and this is costing organizations.
These are points raised by Dave Linthicum and Ash Parikh in a recent Webinar, I had the opportunity to moderate, posted over at the ebizQ site. Dave, who literally wrote the book on “Enterprise Application Integration” back in the 1990s, says EAI and ESB approaches are not suited for today’s high-transaction data integration needs, and have great limitations. But still, many organizations persist in attempting to plug in these types of solutions into vexing business problems that require a more holistic architectural approach. “There are a lot of people trying to put square pegs into round holes,” he says.
Dave says that while the square-peg-in-a-round-hole approach will work for a while, it’s far more costly in the long run. “With EAI and ESB technology, there are certain instances and problem domains where they’re a fit,” he explains. “But you need to understand there are certain limitations that are part of that technology that should be considered. Ultimately, if you don’t consider them and pick those technology approaches anyway, you’re going to start running into walls that are very difficult to back up and get around as you move the architecture forward.”
I posted a summary of points raised in the Webinar here at the Perspectives site.
October 23rd, 2009
Anne Thomas Manes: SOA can be resurrected, here's how
SOA may have its detractors, but done right, it lays the groundwork for a new service-oriented paradigm going forward.
I’m at this year’s International SOA Symposium in Rotterdam, and the prevailing theme is “Next-Gen” SOA, in which we see service-orientation emerge from its bout with the skeptics to take a stronger role within the enterprise.
Thomas Erl, the conference organizer and prolific author on SOA topics, launched the event, noting that we are moving into a period of Next-Generation SOA, with the foundation of principles and practices being laid within many entreprises.
Next up was Anne Thomas Manes of Burton Group, who declared in a post at the beginning of the year that “SOA” — at least as we knew it — was “dead.” However, the second part of Anne’s post was “Long Live Services,” which is the theme that she picked up on in her keynote address.
“Business wasn’t really interested in buying something called ‘SOA,” she declared, adding that in her own research, fewer than 10% of companies have seen significant business value in their efforts.
However, that is not to diminish the importance of service oriented architecture. “The average IT organization is in a mess,” she says. “The average business has 20 to 30 core capabilities. Why do they need 2,000 applications to support those 20-30 capabilities?”
“We should be service orienting everything we do,” she contends. What’s getting in the way is the feeling that an “SOA program” needs to be launched to get there, she states. “We have an opportunity at this point to resurrect SOA. We need a different approach, one based on architectural principles.”
Anne also observed that current cloud computing initiatives bear a striking resemblance to SOA efforts. “All the discussions I hear about cloud are the same discussions we had about cloud four to five years ago,” she says. “How are applications in the cloud going to talk to the applications back home without intrinsic interoperability?”
I also had the opportunity to lead a panel discussion later in the day, joined by Anne, along with Microsoft’s John Devadoss (great to finally meet you in person, John!), Stefan Tilkov, and Clemen Utschig-Utschig of Oracle. Anne further elaborated on her thinking behind the “Dead” post, emphasizing her point that both end-user organizations and vendors are still too wrapped up in the idea of delivering some type of “SOA” package, versus delivering agility and flexibility. However, she noted, “Everything we do should be service oriented.”
Stefan Tilkov agreed with Anne on that point, but took issue on whether cloud computing represents some new phase of SOA. Cloud represents a different type of functionality and best practices, he emphasized.
I’m also part of the SOA Manifesto Working Group, which is meeting at the Symposium to draft a set of overarching principles to guide SOA efforts. We expect to announce the final document at the end of the conference — I’ll keep you posted.
October 19th, 2009
HR specialist asks Oracle: where's the 'fusion'?
In an analysis of last week’s announcement at Oracle OpenWorld that Oracle would finally be releasing its Fusion Applications next year, HR technology specialist Bill Kutik wondered out loud where and when we’ll see Fusion HCM (Human Capital Management) emerge in an SOA-ready configuration.
Despite Larry Ellison’s public pronouncement at the end of the show that Oracle will soon pull the trigger and release the new offerings, including Fusion HCM, Bill is still skeptical as ever. As he put it in a recent editorial in Human Resource Executive:
“From the short demos CEO Larry Ellison showed on stage at Oracle Open World — and even after examining enlarged screen shots from them — Oracle Fusion HCM seems to be only on par with our best current software.”
Bill alludes to the original promise of SOA in this regard, in which analysts and vendors predicted that new capabilities could be assembled in a relatively easy fashion to meet changes in the business requirements — a la Lego blocks. It seems that’s been a difficult state to reach, he says — and wonders if Fusion Applications will meet this vision. He expressed skepticism at Ellison’s continued pronouncements that SOA will enable Fusion to “easily connect to existing apps, even SAP.”
Bill is disappointed that more isn’t being said about the capabilities of Fusion HCM when it does arrive, and is even more than annoyed that Oracle is keeping everyone in the dark about it. He also says there has yet to be a clear migration path discussed for PeopleSoft and Oracle E-Business Suite customers.
He wasn’t all sour on the announcement, however — he’s glad to see Larry Ellison talked up the emerging Talent Management application that will be part of Fusion.
Additional note: The latest version of PeopleSoft Enterprise (9.1) was launched September 30. Paco Aubrejuan, Oracle vice president and general manager of PeopleSoft, will be holding a Webcast on October 28, 11:00 a.m. Pacific to discuss the latest release. (Register here.)
October 15th, 2009
Oracle's Ellison: Fusion finally coming to fruition
I was at Oracle OpenWorld in rain-drenched San Francisco this week, but the clouds parted when it came time for CEO Larry Ellison’s finale keynote, in which he outlined the company’s Fusion Application strategy. (Unfortunately, however, I had to fly out before the Aerosmith concert at the event later that evening. As they would put it, “My get up and go must have got up and went…”)
Ellison announced that Oracle would be launching its ERP-focused Fusion Applications in 2010, and they will be deployable both on-premises and in the cloud. The cloud angle is somewhat ironic, since Ellison is known to be not too keen on cloud computing — he recently said, in fact, the concept has been co-opted by “venture capitalist ‘nitwits’ on Sand Hill Road.”
Fusion Applications, not to be confused too deeply with Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g (which does form the foundational layer, however) is an integrated offering that will incorporate Oracle’s original and acquired software assets, including Oracle E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Siebel, and JD Edwards. The Fusion Application suite will also include business intelligence and analytical capabilities that will be embedded with all components of the suite.
ZDNet colleague Sam Diaz provides great coverage of the Ellison keynote. My colleague Tony Baer, who has been following Oracle for some time, also provides some insightful perspectives on Oracle’s thinking via guest post at Dana Gardner’s ZDNet site. Tony talks about the SOA aspects of Fusion: “It uses SOA to loosely couple, rather than tightly integrate with other Fusion processes or processes exposed by existing back end applications, which should make Fusion apps more pliant and less prone to outage. That allows workflows in Fusion to be dynamic and flexible.”
October 12th, 2009
'Lean IT': another buzzphrase for something we've been trying to do all along?
Customer in a restaurant: Waiter, bring me a steak, and make it lean.
Waiter: Okay, sir. Which way?
As reported in my last post, Sandy Kemsley has done a great job of covering Forrester’s Business Technology Forum, which focused on Lean IT.
But which way is IT supposed to lean? Alas, it seems Forrester is helping to heap another buzzphrase on the world that seems to describe things that have already been in motion for years. (Some say this is the case with service oriented architecture as well, by the way.)
What, exactly, is ‘Lean IT’? Wikipedia’s definition of Lean IT is vague and convoluted:
“Lean IT is the extension of lean principles to the development and management of information technology (IT) products and services. Its central concern, applied in the context of IT, is the elimination of waste, where waste is work that adds no value to a product or service.”
Yeah, so? Again, haven’t organizations been battling waste in IT since day one?
I don’t know who coined the phrase “Lean IT,” but it takes a page from “Lean Manufacturing,” which tightened up that sector in the 1980s and 1990s to survive the onslaught from more efficient and quality-driven overseas competition. Noah B. Kindler, Vasantha Krishnakanthan, and Ranjit Tinaikar of McKinsey & Company discussed the concept back in May 2007, claiming that application development and maintenance (ADM) productivity can be boosted up to 40% by eliminating waste from routine processes. “Application development and maintenance is a prime candidate for lean methods not only because it involves a great many processes with the potential to be optimized but also because large differences in productivity among organizations suggest that some are far less efficient than others,” they said. As they put it:
“Each category of waste in manufacturing has a counterpart in ADM, which can be thought of as a kind of factory that develops new applications according to business requirements. Changes to an application’s requirements are one common source of ADM waste, causing many of the classic varieties identified in lean: designers rework their specifications, coders wait for specifications to stabilize, testers overproduce as their testing environments have to be set up repeatedly, unmet requirements pile up in a large backlog. As in manufacturing, systematically eliminating these sources of waste improves the delivery time, quality, and efficiency of the ADM end product.”
So they equate IT operations with a manufacturing process. Which makes sense, and is something we’ve discussed in this blogsite before (here, here, and here). By introducing assembly-line processes and greater automation to software development, we can definitely tighten up the process.
In past posts, I quoted IBM’s Dr. Irving Wladawsky-Berger and Microsoft’s Jack Greenfield, both who said we were at the dawn of a new era of IT — “industrialization.” Wladawsky-Berger said that IT-delivered services are starting to become more componentized, standardized, and mass-consumable across the spectrum, just as manufactured goods were a century ago. Greenfield talked about the concept of the “software factory,” defined as “a development environment configured to support the rapid development of a specific type of application. While software factories are really just the logical next step in the continuing evolution of software development methods and practices… introducing patterns of industrialization.”
He said, however, that “our IT infrastructures are nowhere near ready to handle this explosive growth of information and service. Much of IT, - including applications, data centers, systems management, and so on, - is way too ad-hoc and custom designed, sort of like manufacturing was decades ago….”
So, is Lean IT the right thing at the right time to seize upon this impending industrial revolution of IT services? The McKinsey authors identify the following areas for “waste reduction” in software assembly: flow processing to reduce overcapacity or excess inventory; release schedules to help prioritize projects; staff and supplier workload balancing; greater standardization; segmentation of projects by complexity to route projects to the proper resources; and and by avoiding unnecessary overhead for simple tasks; and quality ownership that extends to all groups involved in software production — not just QA.
These are are well and good goals, and I’m sure every organization can benefit greatly by applying these principles to their IT operations. But is there anyone who hasn’t been already trying to move these efforts forward? What does Lean IT bring to the table? Consider everything that has been underway in recent years:
- Service oriented architecture: Formerly siloed applications are decomposed into reusable services that are made available across enterprises.
- Agile development: Developers work side by side in an iterative way with business users throughout the process.
- Virtualization: Physical IT systems and resources are abstracted into a software-based enterprise service layer.
- IT automation: Routine IT processes formerly handled manually are handled on a systematic basis by the software and machines themselves.
- Cloud computing/outsourcing: Non-critical IT tasks and applications are acquired from more specialized providers, mainly on a pay-per-use or contractual basis.
- Business process management: Business workloads are decomposed and automated.
- ITIL: Best practices and principles for IT services applied uniformly across organizations.
References I’ve been seeing to Lean IT seem quite provincial — optimizing IT processes at the ground level without bringing in the larger picture — the transformation of the business. Lean IT lacks the expansive thinking that Wladawsky-Berger and Greenfield have in mind for the coming industrial revolution in IT services.
And, again, it begs the question: what does Lean IT offer that we haven’t been trying to do already?
October 2nd, 2009
Biggest cloud of all: Amazon EC2 makes about $220 million a year
Anyone wondering how the commercial cloud computing business model is working should look no further than Amazon Web Services.
Randy Bias just published estimates that AWS is pulling in about $220 million annually for its Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2) offerings. He bases his conclusions on “actual verified EC2 numbers plus some guesses and a rough model of it’s current annual usage.” He also estimates that AWS runs about 40,000 servers to support the service. EC2 probably grew at a rate of 10% from year to year, Randy believes.
Not bad for a business model based on increments of 10 cents to 80 cents an hour for standard usage. EC2 is a Web service that provides resizable compute capacity in the cloud.
With these numbers in hand, Randy also observes that they may also tell the story about the overall size of the infrastructure cloud computing (Infrastructure as a Service) market. Randy sizes this marker at about $400 million to $600 million, and growing about 10% to 20% annually.
The EC2 revenues represent about 1% of Amazon’s revenues for the most recent fiscal year. ($19.2 billion.) Amazon has really effectively leveraged the capacity from its retail business to offer services to the rest of the market. Is this something other companies with large IT infrastructures can contemplate?
September 28th, 2009
Android as mobile SOA: consider the possibilities
“Android guy” Sam Herren points out that the applications that run or will run on Android are interoperable in a service-oriented way. “I would like to position Android’s client interface with Calendar, Contacts, and Gmail as mobile SOA,” he says.
Applications such as Gmail, Calendar, Contacts, and Google Voice “are separate and have separate UIs, but they share common data that lives on the phone and simultaneously in the Google cloud,” Herren observes. “Android was built as a mobile deliverer of Google’s main services so instead of being layers of apps above the OS they are tightly integrated.”
Hmm. Based on this line of thinking, you could look at iPhone as a mobile SOA device as well. And, as previously surfaced here at this blogsite, there’s a strong analogy that can be made between SOA and the way iTunes is structured. Or, MP3 for that matter. Along with the big honking enterprise SOAs we focus on, we’re also surrounded by lots of mini-SOAs.
September 24th, 2009
Enterprise mashup proponents start organizing
As reported a couple of days ago, the enterprise mashup market promises to be a huge one, growing to almost $2 billion in a few years. So it’s high time people involved in this space start organizing and working around some standards everyone can agree on.
Can enterprise mashup proponents avoid the mistakes made with ESBs?
A new consortium, called the Open Mashup Alliance, is the first effort to coalesce around this growing phenomenon. The group’s stated mission is to promote “the successful use of Enterprise Mashup technologies and adoption of an open language that promotes Enterprise Mashup interoperability and portability.”
One of the founding members is ZDNet’s resident Enterprise Web 2.0 guru, Dion Hinchcliffe. Additional charter members include Adobe, Bank of America, Capgemini, HP, Intel, JackBe, Kapow Technologies, ProgrammableWeb, Synteractive, and Xignite.
One of the OMA’s first endeavors is to shepherd the budding Enterprise Mashup Markup Language (EMML) specification for submission to a standards body. EMML is an XML-based, domain-specific language that was designed to address the characteristics that make mashups easier to create and reuse.
There were a bunch of supporting quotes included with the OMA’s announcement, but I think Michael Ogrinz, principal architect at Bank of America and author of the book Mashup Patterns, said it best: “For enterprise mashups to take hold, we need to remove the ‘vendor lock-in’ concerns raised by today’s proprietary toolsets. We also need to inspire the innovative minds of the open-source community to start working in this space. By establishing an open standard for mashups, the OMA and EMML addresses both of these issues.”
Perhaps the industry learned some lessons from another development that proliferated without guiding standards — the enterprise service bus. One of the fiercest criticisms of ESBs has been the way vendors took off in all different directions with their implementations before standards could be established. Perhaps we can avoid this with enterprise mashups. But the looming market size must be a huge temptation.
September 23rd, 2009
Cisco practices what it preaches, crosses boundaries with SOA
Cisco Systems apparently is doing a great job of practicing what it preaches when it comes to doing business over the network. The network systems provider — which promotes SOA and SONA (service oriented network architecture) — recently launched a “Commerce Transformation” initiative, based on SOA principles, that enabled the company to create a solid architectural and technology foundation for both existing and future application development. And the company is getting measurable results.
Cisco more than tripled transactions to $4 billion in a year via its SOA-based partner application
The initiative netted Cisco top honors as the most compelling case study for 2009, as determined in a competition held by the SOA Consortium and CIO Magazine. Brenda Michelson, a colleague over at ebizQ and a judge for the case study competition, provides a detailed description of the Cisco Systems SOA program.
The first project, the Partner Deal Registration (PDR) application, provided outside partners secure access to “Cisco pricing concessions and programs, leveraging reusable enterprise-class business services such as corporate pricing, configuration, and partner profiles that were coupled with flexible business rules for price lists, contractual discounts, and promotions, among others.”
Part of the challenge was bringing together more than 400 diverse applications based on various acquisitions, Brenda relates. “Consequently, several core business processes such as product ordering and pricing were becoming inconsistent, monolithic, complex, and inflexible to change. A lack of comprehensive end-to-end monitoring was also a concern.”
Benefits seen as a result of the program included improved process agility, productivity, detail tracking, and growth in the number of partners, deals, and bookings. “Six months after initial project rollout, the system had more than 9,000 partner users worldwide and had processed 37,000 deals worth $1.2 billion. Nearly a year later in June 2009, there were close to 20,000 partner users, and 56,000 deals worth $3.92 billion net had been processed.”
Cisco had a very comprehensive governance structure for its SOA, led by cross-functional councils comprising business and IT leaders were tasked with the planning and execution of an integrated capabilities roadmap, Brenda relates. Once the roadmap was finalized, an SOA project team consisting of an enterprise architecture team, business architects and IT architects evaluated the use of SOA. The EA team, which also acted as an SOA center of excellence, built a framework for the identification, creation, reuse, governance and monitoring of services and composite applications.
Brenda outlined some of the lessons learned. Some are well-accepted operating procedures across the industry, such as SOA governance, being about the business versus technology, and employing both a top-down and bottom-up approach becoming essential. Interestingly, one of the lessons is that business process management (BPM) needs to be part of the SOA equation. Also, the Cisco folks point out, “when you are a large company, most of the benefits will come from volume, so target simple things (services) with high volume.”
September 16th, 2009
First there was WS-*, now we have REST-*
Should we call it “REST-star” or “REST-splat”?
Paul Krill reports that Red Hat has launched a community-based standards set it is calling REST-*, which could serve as a counterpoint to the WS-* specifications for Web services. Red Hat says it hopes to work with major vendors such as IBM and Microsoft, “to define standards or recommendations for REST-based system integration.”
Mark Little, CTO of JBoss/Red Hat, announced the new initiative at the recent JBoss World conference in Chicago, noting that the WS-* series of Web services have become complex. “Maybe REST is a better way of doing certainly Internet-scale integration, but one of the problems of REST is it lacks clear guidelines,” for enterprise capabilities, such as security, transactions, and high availability.”
Red Hat even now has a home page for the REST-* effort, which outlines the vision, specifications, and community for the standards set.
Red Hatter Bill Burke makes the case for REST-* thusly:
“While REST has gained huge momentum in the SOA community, there hasn’t been a lot of standardization of traditional middleware services. The REST-* community aims to introduce new REST-based standards for these traditional services where none exist and provide well-defined guidelines where protocols do exist.”
There are two efforts now underway as part of the REST-* set:
REST-* Transactions: A specification that attempts to define a RESTful interface for transactions. “It describes the interaction between coordinator services and transaction participants as well as how transactions can propagate in distributed applications. It defines both a 2-Phase-Commit model as well as a Forward-Compensation protocol.”
REST-* Messaging: Messaging encompases publish and subscribe and point-to-point protocols. This specification defines a RESTful interface for queues (p2p) and topics (pub/sub).
Not everyone is welcoming the new initiative with open arms. Anne Thomas Manes, for one, says she’s “got a bad feeling about this.” She points out that REST-* may stray from REST principles, and “you won’t attain the desirable RESTful characteristics (scalability, serendipity, network effects, etc) that REST is supposed to enable.”
“A more useful effort would be one that defines RESTful patterns that support and enable mission-critical capabilities like reliable delivery, transactional integrity, and the like. But please, let’s not reinvent CORBA on REST. Here’s hoping the whole REST-* thing just dies out.”
Sure, mistakes were made with SOAP and WS-*, and Burke admits that “blind idealism,” combined with Red Hat’s experience with communities, will guide this latest effort past obstacles, complexities, and pitfalls. Red Hat is “jumpstarting and founding the standards body itself,” and is “battle tested in specifications efforts at the JCP and other bodies.” Burke adds that “we’ve often been frustrated by the closed and inflexible attributes of these organizations. We feel our open source roots and ideals make us an excellent candidate to drive and host standardization efforts.”
September 8th, 2009
Cloud may complicate SOA load balancing act
One of the major selling points of SOA and cloud computing is that service consumers don’t have to worry about the platform and hardware that the service is hosted on, be it somewhere else within the enterprise or maintained by an outside third party.
SOA’s greatest risk? Too much success, catching planners unprepared
Providers of services (and users), however, need to assure the availability of the service, and how much stress the underlying infrastructure can take as the service is repeatedly accessed. Lori MacVittie just posted a detailed analysis of the load balancing challenge associated with SOA-based deployments.
Lori cites a post by Stephan Koser, who provides a vivid scenario of what can go wrong with unbalanced SOA.
To function effectively, Lori observes, any load-balancing algorithm put into to place to assure availability and scalability of the service-delivery network be able to take into consideration the current load being handled by the particular server handling the request:
“This requires that the load balancer, the application delivery controller, be aware of the application, its environment, as collaboration well as the network and the user. It must be able to make a decision, in real-time, about where to direct any given request based on all the variables available. That includes CPU resources, what the request is, and even who the user/application is.”
However, when the cloud paradigm is introduced, this ability to see and monitor the systems providing services is, well, clouded over. If anything, Lori warns, cloud computing leads to poor visibility and renders load-balancing strategies useless. “The belief that the infrastructure should be ‘hidden’ from the user (that’s you) means that configuration options – like the load balancing algorithm – aren’t available to you as a user/deployer of cloud-based applications. Even though load balancing is going to be used to scale your application, you have no clue or control over how that’s going to occur.”
Lori very aptly points out that despite all the emphasis on virtualization, “applications are not islands,” and the ability to deliver and manage applications ” requires collaboration between a growing number of components in the data center.” Load balancing is a good start.
There’s plenty of talk about SOA failure, but, ironically, the greatest risk may come from too much SOA success. Organizations deploy shareable services, only to have them pounded into the ground by a growing number of requesting applications. Here’s a case where SOA costs may be driven up by the need to quickly put in or provision additional hardware. Cloud adds a new dimension to the challenge.
August 31st, 2009
Wal-Mart to compete against Amazon; are Wal-Mart Web Services next?
Wal-Mart, the gigantic discount retail which is able to offer discounts via a well-orchestrated systems-based supply chain, announced it is launching an online marketplace featuring close to a million items from various sources.
Speculation is that this is Wal-Mart’s move to capture some of the success Amazon has seen in the online space. While the retail sector suffered through the recent economic downturn, Amazon blazed along with barely a hiccup.
Now, if Wal-Mart really wants to take on Amazon across the board, they should consider an entree into the cloud space, such as that dominated by Amazon Web Services. Amazon essentially took its vast array of IT assets built for its e-commerce operation and turned it into a shared offering for the business IT sector.
Will we eventually see Wal-Mart do the same with its massively expanding IT infrastructure? Wal-Mart Web Services, anyone? (This is a tongue-in-cheek speculation, sort of…)
August 27th, 2009
Cloud: the SOA we always wanted, but never had?
Is cloud computing — in which services are produced and consumed across entities — paving the way for a massive wave of service oriented architecture adoption across businesses?
‘Cloud is SOA done right’
I recently had the opportunity to join a lively panel discussion led by Phil Wainewright to ruminate over this question, and we came to a general conclusion that cloud, indeed, is making SOA an easier sell to businesses. The consensus seemed to be that cloud is helping to boost the advantages promised by service orientation to a firmer business footing.
Phil and I were joined by David Bressler, principal architect with Progress Software, and Ed Horst, vice president of product strategy for AmberPoint. (Listen to the 45-minute interactive panel discussion here, read the full transcript here.)
I know many of you will correctly point out that cloud and SOA are different entities, with SOA focusing on the architecture and cloud on delivery of services. But consider the ways cloud is turbo-charging SOA. In some cases, SOA proponents have been struggling for years to get things moving in the right direction, and cloud is providing some new oomph and vitality to the effort:
- Cloud (as SOA should be) is well understand, and often demanded, by the business
- Cloud (as SOA should be) is platform, language, and technology agnostic
- Cloud (as SOA should) provides greater visibility and transparency to actual IT costs
- Cloud (as SOA should) necessitates binding contracts between service providers and consumers
- Cloud (as SOA should be) is based on trust between service providers and consumers
- Cloud (as SOA should) originates from business requirements
As Phil — who has been tracking developments in this space since launching LooselyCoupled.com almost a decade ago — put it, “Cloud is SOA done right.”
The panel kicked off with a discussion of the advantages cloud brings to the table, including service functionality across firewalls, more rapid delivery of information technology, and greater opportunities for integration. However, Phil pondered whether these are all the benefits that SOA was supposed to deliver.
Dave observed that cloud enables these advantages “through a way that allows you to use external providers to jump start that. “By doing that, it becomes much more component driven.” Plus, actual costs of business and IT services are more visible. Often, he added, a lot of infrastructure inside the enterprise “is discounted because there’s no clear or immediate benefit.”
Both SOA and cloud “have the same benefits because they both are essentially — fundamentally, architecturally, the same thing,” Dave continued. “But that’s where SOA leaves it — as an architecture. Cloud is about external providers providing services and wrapping those things — including the contract, the SLA — and then delivering that to different constituents.”
I pointed out that the ramp-up to SOA provided some foundation for the cloud experience, since “one of the big issues that many companies had to come to terms with in SOA is the establishing service level agreements, because they necessarily didn’t know where the service was originating — from another part of the enterprise, or crossing the firewall.” reliability and scalability also needed to be guaranteed.
Ed noted, however, that whether its SOA or cloud, enterprise service consumers do typically have a handle on who is providing the service. “In a lot of the customer examples that we have — telco, healthcare, those kinds of things — they’re still interacting with a well-known group of users,” he pointed out. “It’s not random, you-don’t-know-who-you’re-interacting-with kind of situation.”
There are also lessons to be drawn from the SOA experience that can be applied to cloud computing as well, Ed said. For one, “start with a specific project that has some kind of reasonable boundaries to it, that’s going to have daily business impact when it’s done. You want something that has regular use.” Also, Ed advised, “avoid the “boil-the-ocean architecture approach where we’re going to get everything to be cloud before we really do anything in cloud — we’ve seen that in SOA.” He recounted how one company developed a 72-page book of specifications, looking at every possible policy consideration, before they even started working with an SOA methodology. “Those boil-the-ocean approaches probably fail more often than they succeed,” he said.
The best approach for SOA — and now for cloud — is more of a hybrid strategy that focuses on specific projects, but employs a broad-brush architectural approach. “One of the more successful strategies I’ve seen is kind of a hybrid of kind of broad strokes as to where the overall architecture is going, where we really want to end up in two, or three, or four, or five years even — but with some real practical realities around that initial project.” Also, another lesson from SOA: “Govern early and often. You don’t usually regret having done that early on — but you oftentimes regret not having done it if you don’t.”
I added this thought to the conversation: if one was to be attending a conference ten years from now, “you will see that cloud did change the way we look at SOA and for a couple of reasons.” First, through cloud computing, the business gained a better understanding of service orientation. “If you want to sell SOA to the business, pitch it as cloud.”
Dave also raised the issue of cost structure, and how cloud — for better or worse — provides greater visibility into hidden costs that SOA does not address.
He illustrated the point this way:
“You and I are working in the same company. You have a service, I’m using that, we shake hands. ‘Phil, throw an extra server in there because I’m going to add some capacity. How much capacity? I don’t know yet. Okay, let’s go play golf.’ But now, I’m paying you to do the same thing as a cloud provider and I’m going to look at the bill. ‘Ooh, how come there are two servers on the bill?’ You might then go to your team say, ‘find another service somewhere and put it in.’”
The cloud providers will provide their services at a specific cost, that’s the actual cost plus whatever the margin may be. Whereas, internal IT has always been kind of subsidized. If you need a project, you get internal IT to put it together for you, and delivered for you, and a lot of those costs either were hidden, and were dispersed across the enterprise. Cloud is forcing organizations to look at the actual cost of service delivery and perhaps the alignment more with what the market will be.
August 3rd, 2009
A brief history of complex event processing
Confused about the CEP market? Join the club. Paul Vincent has prepared an excellent timeline of the growth of the complex event processing (CEP) market, documenting the entree of major vendors. And, as Paul says, it will be interesting to see how the chart continue to evolve over the coming year. Notice how everyone is poised to spring into 2010.
Source: Paul Vincent, TIBCO
July 29th, 2009
Point-counterpoint: Is SCA the limit?
There’s been a blogstorm swirling around Service Component Architecture (SCA), and Loraine Lawson has done a great job of summing up both sides of the discussion.
To sum up, there are two points of view on the efficacy of SCA:
Anti-SCA: “SCA is heavily being driven by the vendor community and SCA breaks many of the rules of SOA that have been touted by these same vendors for the past six years…. SCA is a step backwards in software engineering. It’s an abandonment of the SOA principles that have failed because of lack of investment in proper architecture toward a pure programming model driven by software engineers. Thus, the goal here is once again to allow poorly-designed systems to be built by software engineers with very little architecture experience so they can claim to have some attributes of SOA.” -JP Morgenthal
Pro-SCA: “SCA is a key new technology that will help people achieve… greater simplicity, better service design, higher productivity and less dependence on large software stacks. I hope anyone… interested in these goals takes the time to take a closer look at the technology.” - Michael Crowley, author of Understanding SCA: Revolutionize How You Build BPM Applications.
Loraine observes that organizations need to concentrate on business requirements, not tools — and nurturing the skills that can help meet those needs.
Joe McKendrick is an author and consultant with deep knowledge and insights regarding trends and developments in the technology industry. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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