February 8th, 2010
Is cloud computing hype, or something riskier?
Ask a group of eight IT industry analysts what 2010 will bring, and you will get 100 different answers.
In the latest BriefingsDirect podcast, ZDNet compatriot Dana Gardner attempted just that, and one topic seem to rise to top the list above all others: cloud computing.
Is it because cloud computing is lighter than air, or is it really a tectonic plate shift? While four of us (including myself) put cloud on top of the list, two others poured cold water on the trend. (Two others did not mention cloud as a major 2010 trend.)
Jason Bloomberg, for one, says most larger enterprises are not ready for the cloud. “I just don’t see cloud computing striking it big in 2010,” he said. “When we talk to enterprise architects, we see a lot of curiosity and some dabbling. But, at the enterprise scale, we see too much resistance in terms of security and other issues to put a lot of investment into it.” Smaller organizations, on the other hand, are more inclined to sign on to the cloud.
Tony Baer also pooh-poohed the rise of cloud in 2010, noting that cloud is “not going to be the ‘new normal’ [my words by the way].” Expect to see the same demons we wrestled with outsourcing over the years, Tony said. “We’re going to see this year an uptake of all the management overhead of dealing with cloud and virtualization, the same way we saw with outsourcing years back, where we thought we’d just throw labor costs over the wall.”
Brad Shimmin, who sees a banner year ahead for cloud, nevertheless echoed Jason’s view that cloud will be more likely seen among smaller enterprises. With vendors offering hybrid, premise/cloud, and appliance/service offerings, “it’s going to really let companies, particularly those in the small and medium business (SMB) space, work around IT constraints without sacrificing the control and ownership of key processes and data, which in my mind is the key, and has been one of the limiting factors of cloud this year.”
Dave Linthicum, captain of the cloud, is bullish on the concept, but warns that 2010 may see its share of thunderheads. He foresees cloud crashes making headlines this year.
“We’ve got two things occurring right now,” Dave said. “We’ve got a massive move into the cloud…. We have the cloud providers trying to scale up, and perhaps they’ve never scaled up to the levels that they are going to be expected to scale to in 2010. That’s ripe for disaster. A lot of these cloud providers are going to over extend and over sell, and they’re going to crash. Performance is going to go down when the Internet first took off. …They’re growing very quickly, they are not putting as much R&D into what these cloud systems should do, and ultimately that’s going to result in some disasters.”
(Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy.)
February 3rd, 2010
Is SOA an 'app store' for the enterprise?
With all the new excitement swirling around Apples’ upcoming entry into the market, the iPad, perhaps its time to sit back and think about Steve Jobs’ business model as it relates to the way we acquire services and content. That is, the idea that applications (or services or whatever) are sitting out there in a common catalog, ready for use anytime you need it and send a few dollars/euros/pounds/rupees their way.
Dion Hinchcliffe, a fellow contributor here at ZDNet, published some thoughts about the app store model and how its shaping our perceptions of how a software delivery system should function.
That is, the app store supports an ecosystem of developers and creators, but acts as a governance mechanism to make sure the crappy and malicious stuff doesn’t degrade and contaminate the ecosystem. Apple and Amazon maintain app stores that provide a consistent and reliable source for services and software.
Sounds like the job of SOA in the enterprise, does it not? SOA is based on maintaining a core directory of available services that can be quickly accessed by end-users across various departments. In theory, the services are well-vetted, secure, and consistent.
Let’s take another page from the Apple playbook and look at another analogy.
For quite some time, we have talked about the concept of accessing SOA-ready services through public online marketplaces, and how that could shake up the way we approach IT. We’re seeing manifestations of this model through cloud computing.
A few months back, I cited an interesting analogy from George Ravich, interview, who suggests SOA-based services be made available to enterprise users the way iTunes are available online, ready to plug into a framework. “the SOA service catalog promises to have the same impact on enterprise computing as the iTunes playlist has had on listening to music.”
To recap how Ravish described it: An SOA-aware service — such as customer authentication — can be plugged into a company’s “playlist”:
“Prior to the iPod, people listened to songs on a vinyl record or a CD in the order that the publisher determined. If you wanted to play several songs from different albums, it was a complicated and time-consuming activity,. Now, with an iPod, you can take the individual songs you own and create an endless number of play lists. Each song track is reusable in different settings and situations, under the full control of the listener.”
“Similarly, prior to SOA, enterprise applications trapped business processes within inflexible workflows. Without extensive IT development the reuse of any single business process became unfeasible within these systems, leading to multiple versions of the same process being developed separately for different applications and channels.”
February 1st, 2010
SOA, Agile and Cloud will pave the way to Lean IT
The recent debacle involving Toyota’s sticky gas pedals puts a taint on the auto manufacturer’s legendary emphasis on lean manufacturing. Some analysts are speculating that the company’s relentless drive to lean processes may have undercut quality in an increasingly complex enterprise and product line. In a new Wall Street Journal analysis, Daisuke Wakabayashi speculates that “Toyota’s recent problems highlight how certain elements of this approach—eliminating overlap by using common parts and designs across multiple product lines, and reducing the number of suppliers to procure parts in greater scale—can backfire when quality-control issues arise.”
Lean businesses leave IT staff in a state of quiet desperation. Time for IT to also adopt the lean philosophy
However, Toyota’s track record over the decades — along with many other companies — demonstrate that lean manufacturing is very effective at improving quality overall while wringing inefficiencies out of supply chains and operations.
In fact, cost-cutting itself, the prime mission of every C-level executive these days, essentially becomes a secondary consideration of the lean approach. As organizations adopt lean methodologies and practices, streamlined costs become a natural byproduct of the process.
Is the lean philosophy something IT organizations should consider as well? I recently had a chat with Steve Bell, author of Lean Enterprise Systems: Using IT for Continuous Improvement, and co-author, with Mike Orzen, of an upcoming work on the topic, Lean IT - Enabling and Sustaining Your Lean Transformation, to get his take on “Lean IT,” which emphasizes doing things faster and better to drive out inefficiencies.
There’s no end to the discussions about agile and flexible IT operations that can support rapid response to unpredictable operating conditions, such as the financial tsunami that swept through in 2008 and 2009. However, is IT ready and capable of such an adaptation?
Right now, Steve says, our system for managing enterprise IT is broken. Millions of dollars are wasted every year on technologies and projects that either end up not being used, or render business processes more complicated than they were before.
Why can’t the same lessons learned from the manufacturing sector be applied to enterprise IT management across all industries?
Approaches such as SOA, Agile development, and cloud already are part of the lean IT equation, Steve points out. SOA is especially suited as a vehicle for lean IT because of its modular approach to software development and deployment. “The same as interchangeable parts and order configurations and product design for reusability of components was an important factor in the ’50s and ’60s for manufacturing transformaton,” Steve says. “Component architectures and software has been important for years, and service oriented architecture is giving more agility to reusing elements of business logic.”
The drive to service oriented architecture is also part of the same drive to cloud, Steve says. “IT organizations are going to have to move all of their shared repeatable services into a utility model. Whether they host it internally or host it externally doesn’t matter.” He adds that some organizations moving into internally hosted cloud models are seeing productivity gains. By applying the lean philosophy to drive inefficiencies out of repeatable processes, IT organizations can focus on process improvement and leadership in the non-repeatable aspects of their operations, which involve development, creativity, and discovery.
The No. 1 takeaway from implementing lean methodologies into IT and software management is you don’t cut costs simply because costs need to be cut, Steve adds. “The quickest way to lose weight is to give blood, but the patient isn’t very healthy when you’re done. You’re weakened, and you’ve lost a lot of your intellectual capital. If you simply try to attack cost, and short-term cost reduction, all you end up doing is killing the patient.”
Lean means more than simply cutting costs or streamlining, Steve says. Lean, as successfully applied to manufacturing, means doing things “simpler, faster, better, cheaper,” he says. “Notice that the last item on the list is cheaper. If you adopt a systems perspective into every business process. You find where the waste is and you drive it out, focusing on doing things faster and with higher quality, cost will naturally be driven out of the system.”
In lean IT, the focus is on collaborative teamwork—represented by all parts of the business—to deliberatively and systematically tackle problems. Right now, IT is forced to fight fires every day, Steve points out. The focus of lean IT is to put forth “a set of principles that says you are going to slow down in order to speed up,” he explains.
Many companies are focusing on lean and Six Sigma to improve operations, but ignore the IT side of the house. “What ends up happening in a lot of companies that are implementing lean or Six Sigma is their business teams think they’ve solved their problems, and then they throw grenades over the wall to the IT department. There’s still lack of collaboration and lack of partnership, which is why a lot of business-driven system implementations are misguided.”
IT managers and professionals are generally systemic thinkers and problem solvers, he continues. “But they’re put in a position where they’re fire-fighting all day long. They dont have enough staff, they have too man projects, some IT departments have three-to-four-year-long backlogs. So they spend their days in quiet desperation and frustration, being reactive.”
January 31st, 2010
Why service orienting is hard to do
Geek & Poke’s Oliver Widder sheds some light on one of the biggest communications obstacles between IT and business users. Business users want technology solutions yesterday. Then they’ll need something else tomorrow. Question is, how can technology planners and architectures get ahead of the fire-fighting?
From Geek & Poke www.geekandpoke.typepad.com/geekandpoke/
January 28th, 2010
Passwords remain weakest link in Web security
WS-Security, SSL, encryption, digital certificates… We know the deplyment and consumption of cross-enterprise and inter-enterprise services opens us up to all kinds of vulnerabilities, and there are all kinds of security protocols and solutions to address this in a multi-layered fashion.
But we still can’t seem to get the most essential piece of the puzzle right: user passwords. Imperva, a security vendor, recently released an analysis of weak passwords used at a popular social networking site, which were exposed to public view by the hacker.
ZDNet colleague Dancho Danchev, a well-known expert in all things security, also weighed in on this new revelation.
As Imperva puts it, we have made precious little progress over the past two decades in improving passwords — long considered the Achilles heel of Web security.
“The shortness and simplicity of passwords means many users select credentials that will make them susceptible to basic, brute force password attacks… Ironically, the problem has changed very little over the past twenty years. In 1990, a study of Unix password security revealed that password selection is strikingly similar to the 32 million breached passwords. Just ten years ago, hacked Hotmail passwords showed little change. This means that the users, if allowed to, will choose very weak passwords even for sites that hold their most private data.”
Imperva released a list of the 20 most commonly used (and therefore worst) passwords, culled from a hacking incident that took place in December at RockYou.com, a photo-sharing and slideshow site. Reportedly, 32 million usernames and passwords were breached. (RockYou.com issued a statement indicating that it temporarily shut down its platform after the incident, and now employs encryption technology.)
Imperva posted a summary of the passwords, along with advice on how to create stronger passwords.
The most common passwords are as follows. Is yours among them?
- 123456
- 12345
- 123456789
- Password
- iloveyou
- princess
- rockyou
- 1234567
- 12345678
- abc123
- Nicole
- Daniel
- babygirl
- monkey
- Jessica
- Lovely
- michael
- Ashley
- 654321
- Qwerty
It’s notable how many people apparently use their first names as passwords. Notice how also, in the case of no. 7, the password is simply the name of the site.
The greatest danger, Imperva points out, is that it wouldn’t take long for a hacker to break into a percentage of accounts using the weak passwords with a brute force attack. It’s simply a numbers game:
Citing NASA guidelines, Imperva recommends that all passwords be at least eight characters, and contain a mix of four different types of characters – upper case letters, lower case letters, numbers, and special characters such as !@#$%^&*,;” If there is only one letter or special character, it should not be either the first or last character in the password.
Of course, context is important as well. For online banking, email accounts, Website administration access, and so forth, the stronger the password, the better. However, there are countless information sites — online journals, analyst firm sites, and so on, that require password access, and fumbling with a unique strong password every time you want to read a white paper is just plain annoying.
Accordingly, Imperva advises users to “choose a strong password for sites you care for the privacy of the information you store.” If you’re concerned about being able to remember the code, here’s a little memory-jogging trick: “Take a sentence and turn it into a password. Something like ‘This little piggy went to market’ might become ‘tlpWENT2m.’”
Imperva recommends that administrators enforce strong password policy, especially if sensitive data is on the line. Another word of advice: “Make sure passwords are not transmitted in clear text. Always use HTTPS on login.” Also password files should be encrypted before being stored in a database.
Also worth consideration: requiring passphrases instead of passwords. “Although sentences may be longer, they may be easier to remember. With added characters, they become more difficult to break.”
January 27th, 2010
SOA and cloud by the numbers: what the data tells us so far
There have been a lot of statistics floating around pertaining to SOA and cloud, and we’ve reported on a bunch of them here at this blogsite. Here, for your at-a-glance reference, is a summary of service-oriented surveys and research we’ve seen in recent months:
Ninety-two percent of companies say their SOA initiatives met or exceeded business unit objectives, while only eight percent say they did not. CA released the results of a survey that explored SOA failure, and who takes charge. The survey, which covered 615 companies in the process of SOA-based efforts, actually found scant evidence of widespread SOA failures. The survey also included an “SOA Pain Scale” that is self-explanatory.
Percentage of companies using SOAP dropped from 54% in 2008 to 42% in 2009. The number primarily using or considering REST-based Web services is predicted to grow by a proportional amount, from 14% to 24% over the same time frame. The ground under SOA — long solid SOAP territory — appears to be shifting to more lightweight service approaches. A new survey of 270 business professionals, just released by InformationWeek, finds that one out of four have moved into service oriented architecture, and many are opting more lightweight approaches such as REST over SOAP.
About 13% of large enterprises and 10% of small to medium-size companies have adopted cloud-computing-based applications. A survey from the SHARE users group (large IBM system users) also finds a strong link between cloud computing and other virtualization strategies, to the point where cloud computing is a logical extension of more advanced internal virtualization efforts.
SOA market growing 17% a year; to reach $10 billion by 2015. Wintergreen Research undertook the almost impossible task of attempting to measure the SOA market (where does it begin and end? Middleware? Applications? Tools?). The group released a six-year forecast of the SOA infrastructure industry, calculating that the market will grow to from the current $3.3 billion to $10.3 billion by 2015.
Forty percent of companies with SOA-based methodologies do not measure the time to achieve return on investment for their SOA efforts. A Gartner survey finds about half of the non-adopters say they haven’t moved to SOA “because they cannot articulate and demonstrate the business value of it.”
Only one percent have negative experience with SOA to the point they would put the kibosh on it. A Forrester Research survey of 2,227 IT executives finds that only one percent of current SOA adopters say they have received little or no benefit from the methodology — that’s right, only one percent. Sixty percent said they have seen some benefits.
New IT initiatives on Wall Street include enhancing electronic trading tools (69%), improving data capacity and bandwidth (58%), and improving technology framework and infrastructure (58%). A survey released by IBM and Securities Industry and Financial Markets Association finds Wall Street cleaning up its act with projects that involve SOA.
Forty-nine percent of enterprise developers expect to deploy apps in a private cloud environment sometime over the coming year. An Evans Data survey of 500 developers finds enthusiasm for the cloud, but also plenty of concern about security and reliability.
About 33% of companies now employ enterprise mashups. Business Insights estimates the enterprise mashup market, worth around $161 million in 2008, will expand more than tenfold to $1.74 billion by 2013 — fueled by SOA.
Number of companies planning for cloud computing tripled in nine-months’ time. A survey from Avanade shows a 320% increase in respondents reporting that they are testing or planning to implement cloud computing. The study also found that while companies are moving toward cloud computing, there is little support for cloud-only models (just five percent of respondents utilize only cloud computing). Rather, most companies are using a combination of cloud and internally owned systems, or hybrid approach.
January 25th, 2010
SOA Skills Add 37% Premium to Salaries, Survey Shows
A new salary survey by career site Dice.com confirms that employers place a premium on SOA-related skillsets. Their latest survey of 19,000 IT professionals puts the average rate for IT positions involving service-orientation work at $107,827 a year. This is 37% over the average for all the IT positions covered – $78,845.
SOA second highest-paid skills in latest survey
SOA skills are the second-highest paid skills found in the survey. Leading the pack were professionals versed in ABAP- Advanced Business Application Programming ($115,916).
Applications server skills JBoss and WebLogic joined the $100,000 salary ranks with annual salaries topping $101,869 and $100,313, respectively.
I spoke with Tom Silver, Senior Vice President, North America at Dice about the results. This is the first year they’ve measured the impact of SOA skills on IT jobs, so historical comparisons were not available. He noted that SOA was a part of many job classifications, from security engineer to development engineers to IT managers.
He also observes that jobs calling for SOA skills is a relatively small but growing sector of the IT world. “The number of jobs that are looking for SOA skills is still relatively small – we have about 2,100 jobs on the site right now that call for SOA skills,” he points out. “That’s 2,100 out of roughly 50,000, so gives you an idea as far as the percentage of jobs, which is still relatively small, four percent or so. But this number is up eight percent versus a year ago. The overall number of tech jobs on Dice for the same period year over year is down about 12%.”
The number of jobs calling for cloud skills is even smaller, about 300 openings at this time. “It didn’t pop to the top of our top 10 list, which is a little bit surprising for us,” he says.
Silver also has a word of caution for IT employers – the economy is beginning to expand again, and there’s a great deal of disenchantment among the IT ranks. “Not surprisingly, coming off of a year like we just came off of, where many tech professionals were asked to do a lot more with a lot less. They’re not happy about it. And dissatisfaction overall with their jobs has gone up.”
As a result, Silver says, “as the job market starts to improve, those that have particularly in-demand skillsets – like SOA – are going to be looking around. There’s a real good chance as the market opens up, those that have those kinds of skills will walk.”
“Employers really pushed their people in the last two years. We’re warning employers now that retention will become one of the biggest issues in terms of making sure they have required tech professionals they need in order to meet their goals. Retention will become a much much bigger issue going forward.”
January 20th, 2010
Another view: Why IT should not be run as a business
Bob Lewis, writing in InfoWorld, says the information technology department should not be run as as a business — in fact, he regards the practice as “a train wreck waiting to happen.”
IT executives as business leaders versus order-takers
Why? Because unlike an outside vendor, IT is too heavily vested and tied into the day-to-day operations of the overall business, he says. He refutes the idea — promulgated by analysts, consultants, and ITIL — that CIOs should run IT as a business, serving internal “customers.”
Lewis quotes Bassam Fawaz, CIO of a large global logistics company, who dismisses the IT-as-business approach as largely fanciful theories coming out of IT think tanks. Lewis agrees, saying that in reality, well-run businesses view IT is a strategic partner to the rest of the business, “not a subservient order taker content to process work requests while accepting the blame for everything that goes wrong.”
The fallacy is acting as if everyone inside the company is a customer, Lewis argues. As a result, IT executives get endlessly haggled by business managers who want to know why internal IT services cost so much more than cheap outside services — never mind security, redundancy and uptime.
As Fawaz put it:
“I am drawing on real-life examples, where a boneheaded software design was delivered to the requirements of the business process owner but made the software dead on arrival as users shied away from using the non-intuitive and unnecessarily complicated program…. IT should relinquish its increasing stance as an order taker, and earn and advance its intended role as the qualified engineer of what makes a business hum.”
Lewis also takes on the chargeback model in his editorial, noting that chargebacks “are an attempt to use market forces to regulate the supply and demand for IT services. If that’s the best a business can do, it means the business has no strategy, no plans, and no intentional way to turn ideas into action.”
Instead of a vendor-client relationship with services chargebacks, Lewis advocates, IT needs to be deeply integrated into the core business, with proper governance driving IT priorities and how money is spent. This calls for CIOs and IT executives to step up and take leadership roles within their organizations:
“When IT is integrated into the heart of the enterprise, its priorities aren’t defined by who has the budget to spend (by chargebacks). Rather, they’re defined by a company leadership team whose members have a shared purpose, who understand what the company must do to achieve that purpose, and who understand the role new technology will play.”
Bob Lewis raises some good issues. I’ve spoken with CIOs and IT executives that sit with their CEOs and CFOs in decision-making sessions, and there’s a great deal of effectiveness in their ability in helping their organizations leverage technology for business expansions.
The bottom line is that with cloud computing and SOA, it is much easier for business executives to shop around for services from the outside world — and they will do it. Lewis may see the supply-and-demand model as applied to internal IT services as limited in vision, but these forces will drive decisions. Will IT be relegated to being one of the bidding vendors, or will it be elevated to a role in which it is facilitator and manager of all services, whether they come from the inside or from the outside?
January 19th, 2010
Yes, we still need design-time governance in the cloud
Todd Biske, enterprise architect extraordinaire and author of SOA Governance: The Key to Successful SOA Adoption in Your Organization, recently weighed in on Dave Linthicum’s remarks that cloud computing will soon kill design-time governance. Todd says there is an important role for design-time governance in the cloud.
Service consumers still need to govern from the earliest stages of service lifecycles
As Dave explains it, with cloud computing, it’s essential to have runtime service governance in place, in order to enforce service policies during execution. This is becoming a huge need as more organizations tap into cloud formations. “Today SOA is a huge reality as companies ramp up to leverage cloud computing or have an SOA that uses cloud-based services,” he says. “Thus, the focus on runtime service execution provides much more value.”
Todd says au contraire, while runtime governance is very important to cloud computing, it’s critical to be able to manage services across their entire lifecycles, from the earliest phases of the service contract. Todd says the issue may be Dave’s definition of design-time governance, which is one many in the industry apply — the “notion that design-time governance is only concerned with service design and development.” Todd notes that governance should actually be thought of in three timeframes; “pre-project, project, and runtime.” As he explains it:
“There’s a lot more that goes on before runtime than design, and these activities still need to be governed. It is true that if you’re leveraging an external provider, you don’t have any need to govern the development practices. You do, however, still need to govern the processes that led to the decision of what provider to use; The processes that define the service contract between you and the provider, both the functional interface and the non-functional aspects; and the processes executed when you add additional consumers at your organization of externally provided services.”
I’ll add to the discussion that many organizations — and departments within organizations — are becoming both providers and consumers of services. Some organizations or vendors will still publish more than they consume, others will consume more than they publish. But the lines are getting blurrier all the time.
January 15th, 2010
.NET, great disruptor of the decade
I got some pushback from readers in response to my recent post on “Disruptive technologies: the top eight that left their mark in software development,” pointing out that Microsoft’s .NET should have been included on the list as a leading disruptive force in the ’00s decade.
While the original list is a citation from Richard Watson, I think the readers have a point, as I’ll explain in a minute. As one reader put it:
“.NET should be number 1 on your list. When did Java hit the scene…1996. When did .NET…2002. What is the market share now…50/50. .NET has done so much more than Java in the time frame you are referencing. Visual Studio has had four full releases in 2002, 2003, 2005, and 2008. Microsoft has released the largest free code base compared to any other company. Microsoft’s Web service development platform has made it easier than the rest to interop data. Microsoft’s UI development in Web, Windows, Mobile, and now Silverlight have reached so many devices with simple developer experiences.”
Another reader echoed similar sentiments:
“.NET was a huge disruption. I would argue that there are a huge number of commercial sites running on .NET, including all those Sharepoint sites. In my opinion, as an MS developer, .NET has had a far greater impact than Ruby or Spring. Think of ASP.Net, ADO.Net and Linq, WCF, WPF, etc.”
Still another reader put it this way: “If .NET and C# had come out at the same time as Java, we wouldn’t even be talking about Java today, since .NET and C# clearly outshine both the JVM platform and the Java language.”
My take: .NET and the .NET Framework were probably just as disruptive as open source, especially to the emerging SOA space, over the past decade.
Why? Because Microsoft brought service orientation to the unserved and underserved part of the market that couldn’t afford SOA. As it first developed, SOA was a luxury for the well-heeled. To put SOA into action, you needed robust tools, a proprietary application server that handled all the plumbing and protocols underneath, and expensive consultants to make it all happen. SOA was a nice high-margin business of vendors. With the rise of .NET, the ability to create and deliver standardized services was made available to companies with small or non-existent IT budgets. Open source tools and platforms are seen as great disruptors for this very reason, but .NET fits into this category as well.
Readers, what do you think? Should .NET rank as one of the great disruptors of the 2000s decade?
January 14th, 2010
Evans Data survey also predicts more enterprise movement to the cloud
My recent post on Gartner’s projection that one out of five enterprises will eject all their assets within two years — mainly due to cloud computing — generated quite a bit of discussion, pro and con. Many expressed skepticism that companies would be willing to put their data and resources in the hands of third parties.
A new survey out of Evans Data buttresses predictions that many enterprises will be turning to the cloud for IT resources, at least to some extent. Sixty-one percent of 400 developers in Evans Data Corp’s recent Cloud Development Survey report that at least some of their IT resources will move to the public cloud within the next year.
However, only a handful, 13%, say they will move most of their IT resources to cloud configurations. What we’re more likely to see over the coming years is more of a “hybrid” model, with both on-premise and off-premise IT assets.
The survey also looked at infrastructure vendors riding the cloud wave. MySQL is the preferred database for use in the public cloud, cited by over 55% of the developers. VMWare is the favorite hypervisor vendor or user in a virtualized private cloud (28.6%) followed by Microsoft and IBM.
(Disclosure: I have authored Evans Data survey reports in the past, but not this one.)
January 13th, 2010
Gartner issues its own 2012 prediction: end of IT as we know it
Which will come first: the end of the world on December 21, 2012, or one-fifth of organizations dumping their IT assets?
I don’t know about the first item, but the Mayans certainly didn’t seem to see the cloud computing wave coming. But Gartner says it did, and issued a prediction that by 2012, 20 percent of businesses will own no IT assets. Gartner says this is a result of cloud and virtualization, and extends to client systems as well — employees will be using their own personal desktops, notebooks, and devices on corporate networks. In other words, all third-party ownership:
The need for computing hardware, either in a data center or on an employee’s desk, will not go away. However, if the ownership of hardware shifts to third parties, then there will be major shifts throughout every facet of the IT hardware industry. For example, enterprise IT budgets will either be shrunk or reallocated to more-strategic projects; enterprise IT staff will either be reduced or reskilled to meet new requirements, and/or hardware distribution will have to change radically to meet the requirements of the new IT hardware buying points.
No IT assets in two years? That prediction seems pretty extreme, even for the most enthusiastic cloud-embracing enterprises. Perhaps one out of five companies will be running a majority of their applications in the cloud by then.
It’s a very plausible scenario for startups and small companies, however. As noted before at this blogsite (see “The $80 data center: cheap computing or head in the cloud?“, small companies can tap into data center power for just a few dollars a month. That’s disruptive. And, perhaps larger organizations with a lot of IT will even start making services available to outsiders. But there’s a lot of IT out there within organizations, and we’ll continue to see more, not less.
(Thanks to InfoWorld’s John Brodkin for the pointer to this release.)
January 13th, 2010
CIOs: speed to market is the only remaining competitive advantage
Is it high time to anoint the CIO as “Chief Innovation Officer”?
Wal-Mart, Best Buy and McDonald’s CIOs: technology no longer a competitive weapon
I had the opportunity to observe a panel at this week’s National Retail Federation show in New York, in which the CIOs of Wal-Mart, McDonald’s, and Best Buy discussed their roles as change agents within their organizations.
The keyword coming out of this CIO summit was “innovation.” The challenge was knowing where the obstacles to innovation are, and working more closely with the business to unleash the creative forces of the business, the CIOs agreed.
Not such an easy task, of course. First of all, there aren’t many technologies particularly unique that give one company an edge over another. With information widely available across the Web, and IT offerings fairly standardized, a company’s secret sauce — be it processes or technology — cannot stay that way for long. “There are very few secrets out there anymore,” said Rollin Ford, CIO of Wal-Mart. “The only competitive advantage becomes the speed aspect. Organizations need to keep embracing innovation and new technology models. At the end of the day, it’s about getting from point A to point B quicker than everybody else.”
Neville Roberts, enterprise CIO of Best Buy, said he especially feels the pressure in the fast-moving electronics retailing businesses. “A lot of our revenues come from innovation, but it gets copied quickly,” he said. “We have to get innovation out there quickly. We have to bring things to fruition quicker than everyone else.”
It’s key to tie all technology initiatives to support the business, Rollin also said. Many IT managers have spent years of work integrating their systems, he pointed out. That’s all well and good for IT efficiency. But without that business focus, “you can integrate systems until the cows come home, but it’s just like pushing a noodle,” he said.
For global chains such as McDonald’s the challenge is blending and leveraging existing assets with new initiatives. David Grooms, CIO of McDonald’s, said his company’s challenge is to focus on and engage customers at all levels. This presents challenges for environments with legacy systems. “McDonald’s is more of a ‘fast-follower’ of technology. You don’t get rid of all those legacy systems overnight. It’s an evolutionary move forward.”
For large organizations, the key is having a consistent, well-thought-out enterprise architecture that ensures information and common services are shared across the enterprise, from corporate offices to individual stores. “We need to be as SOA-compliant as we can possibly be,” said Best Buy’s Roberts.
However, no matter how elegant an IT infrastructure gets, CIOs and IT managers can’t sit back and rest on their accomplishments, Rollin said. “You have to wake up every day and say, ‘What are we missing?’ Every day you have to get up and run faster than the next guy.” This “healthy paranoia” wouldn’t necessarily be a hardship on IT staff either, he added. “People don’t want to do the same thing everyday. They want different challenges.”
January 11th, 2010
Disruptive technologies: the top eight that left their mark in software development
The past decade has certainly been the age of disruption, a process painful to many but ultimately paving the way to new business models and innovation.
Richard Watson just posted his list of the most disruptive application development technologies to hit the scene during the ’00s — and boy, did they leave their mark
- Spring Framework: Disrupted Java Enterprise Edition (Java EE and J2EE) by offering a lighter, easier-to-use framework.
- Ruby on Rails: Disrupted Java and .NET, offering an easier way to develop Web applications.
- Eclipse: Disrupted many if not all Integrated Development Environments with its open source offerings.
- Amazon Web Services: Disrupted managed hosting providers by providing simple and uncomplicated access to capabilities on a piecemeal basis.
- JBoss Application Server: Disrupted the commercial app server business with its open-source offerings.
- MySQL and other open source databases: Disrupted the commercial database market.
- Apache Ant: Disrupted Make and proprietary build systems.
- JUnit/xUnit: Disrupted developers’ mindsets, encouraged testing of code.
What do all these technologies have in common? They brought robust approaches only available to a few deep-pocketed corporations with giant IT staffs to the “masses” — those organizations with smaller budgets and fewer hands on deck. From the SOA perspective, we started the early years of the decade (at least from 2003, when we first started talking about SOA) relying on commercial, proprietary solutions that often cost quite a bundle — and required consulting assistance to go with it. Now, while we may still require consultants, we also have many low or no-cost solutions that can be tapped into to move SOA forward. As a result, SOA is no longer a luxury exercise for deep-pocketed corporations; it’s a practice that can be undertaken on a more widespread basis.
January 6th, 2010
Design-time governance killed in the cloud?
Will the cloud computing paradigm kill off design-time service governance as a separate practice?
How badly do we need design-time governance in the cloud era?
Dave Linthicum recently posted his predictions on technology areas cloud computing may eventually kill off, and one of them is design-time service governance, a lynchpin of many SOA-based efforts.
As Dave explains it, with cloud computing, it’s essential to have runtime service governance in place, in order to enforce service policies during execution. This is becoming a huge need as more organizations tap into cloud formations. “Today SOA is a huge reality as companies ramp up to leverage cloud computing or have an SOA that uses cloud-based services,” he says. “Thus, the focus on runtime service execution provides much more value.”
Many of the existing runtime SOA governance players support enough design and implementation capabilities that separate design-time tools are not required, Dave adds.
However, some others beg to differ with Dave’s assessment. Jeff Papows, for one, believes “nothing could be further from the truth” in terms of the role of design-time governance in the cloud.
In fact, if anything, the rise of the cloud computing paradigm calls for greater attention to design-time governance. As Jeff puts it:
“If we cut corners at the beginning of the development process, we will almost always create gaps in the cloud resulting in the proliferation of bad code and applications. If in fact more services are accessed, sometimes anonymously, from God knows where, in fact the quality of those services now destined to be used and reused must in fact of an even higher quality. Sounds like design time governance to me.”
The growing utilization of cloud resources brings forward new design governance challenges, Jeff argues.” For example, when and how should cloud resources be used, do they support the proper technologies, functionality and performance we expect?”
In the SOA world, we’ve been preaching both sides of governance as the vital core of any SOA effort. And with good reason. Ultimately, as SOA proliferates as a methodology for leveraging business technology, and by extension, services are delivered through the cloud platform, people and organizations will play the roles of both creators and consumers of services. The line between the two are blurring more every day, and both design-time and runtime governance discipline, policies, and tools will be required.
Readers, let’s hear your views on the subject. How badly do we need design-time governance in the cloud era?
January 4th, 2010
New 'Orderly' schema threatens XML dominance?
Back in September, Jack Vaughan went out on a limb (or is that branch?) and predicted the eventual fading of XML, long the lingua franca of the Web services age. (See “XML on the wane? Say it isn’t so, Jack.”) Jack said that with the growing popularity of Rich Internet Applications an enterprise mashups, it’s conceivable that we may see less and less XML.
Now, Ganesh Prasad has identified what he describes as a new nail in the proverbial XML coffin. Up until now, he writes, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) offered a viable alternative to XML, but lacked rigor around data definition. JSON Schema was then developed to address this rigor gap, but tended to be “long-winded” with a “cumbersome syntax.”
Now, Ganesh says, this long-windedness has been rectified with the launch of Orderly, a new schema language developed by Lloyd Hilaiel “that is far more compact than JSON Schema and yet round-trips to JSON Schema quite effectively.”
So what?
Orderly may make life more, well, orderly for SOA practitioners, Ganesh advocates. With Orderly, “SOA architects can recommend the use of the simpler JSON data format instead of XML without having to worry about the lack of rigour in data definition,” he says. “Data architects, designers and developers can use Orderly to design schemas without bothering about JSON Schema’s cumbersome syntax. JSON parsers can work with the equivalent JSON Schema to validate a piece of JSON data without the need to understand two different syntaxes.”
Has XML already become a (gulp) legacy mark-up language? It’s still the foundation of many integration efforts, Web services, and SOA projects, so it’s not going away anytime soon. But will Lloyd Hilaiel’s new creation give architects and developers a sleeker alternative to work with?
January 4th, 2010
Welcome to 2010, a year about nothing...
My counterpart over at IT Business Edge, Loraine Lawson, did a great job of wrapping up some popular predictions for the year ahead in terms of all things SOA-ish and IT-related, topped off by Miko Matsumura’s proclamation that “Nothing (much) will happen.”
The year ahead — SOA without SOA?
Good deal. Maybe a low-key year is just what we need after the roller-coaster ride of 2008-2009. And, the endless soul-searching and debate around whether to service orient or not will simply get down to the roll-up-your-sleeves-and-make-the-stuff-work stage.
Loraine also calls out James Governor’s prediction about SOA, in which he proclaims the year ahead will witness “SOA without the SOA.” That is, we’ll be seeing plenty of service orientation without the acronyms.
Loraine quotes Ecclesiastes and the Byrds, observing that perhaps it’s time to turn, turn, turn: “‘for everything there is a season, a time for every purpose under heaven.’ Rather than being a time for new investments and demanding more money for uncertain ventures, maybe 2010 will be a time for completing what we’ve started, and perhaps even reaping what we’ve sown. Maybe, just maybe, IT will actually deliver on those long-ago promised ROIs.”
Great thoughts. My own prediction is that this will be an expansion year for businesses, and service oriented approaches will play a large part in those expansion plans. We may not get the hype and razzle dazzle, but we’ll certainly see how SOA can stand up and deliver where it counts.
December 31st, 2009
Three reasons SOA will boost outsourcing
A few years back, I published a piece on how SOA will enable outsourcing strategies. Since then, cloud-based services have burst on the scene in a big way, so it may be time to revisit the predictions. Here is an updated point of view.
As more enterprises adopt service-oriented architecture principals and practices, outsourcing may become an easier, more manageable option. I think SOA principles will boost outsourcing for three reasons:
- Busy IT shops — especially those with large enterprise systems — may not have enough human resources to effectively deploy SOA-aware systems. IT managers, analysts, and architects will need to become business analysts, and spend a good deal of their time working with business units. They will either turn to third party firms either for assistance with SOA, or to take on IT-centric tasks to free up IT to better pursue SOA.
- Infrastructures based on SOA principles will lower the barrier of entry for outsourcing providers, which will in turn multiply their numbers, heightening competition and lowering prices. This will energize the outsourcing market.
- The growing standardization and “hot-swappability” of SOA-aware components makes it easier to outsource — perhaps as cloud-based services — pieces of the IT infrastructure. This may make outsourcing less of the onerous either/or business decision it has been, as chunks of applications or services can be outsourced or brought in house as the situation fits, with minimal disruption to IT operations and priorities. As a result, we’ll see more “micro-outsourcing” and less big-ticket-turn-the-whole-operation-over types of deals.
December 31st, 2009
Survey shows SOA success is in the eye of the beholder
It’s been quite a year of soul-searching for SOA proponents and critics alike, so it’s only appropriate we wrap up 2009 with discussion of Forrester Research statistics that show that SOA has made impressive gains — at least in the view of those companies who feel they have some form of SOA. As Loraine Lawson so aptly puts it in a post about the survey, “it’s impossible to tell how those companies implemented SOA.”
Loraine shares some of Forrester’s latest observations, published in December and covering the SOA investment plans of a range of organizations, from the Global 2000 to large companies of at least 1,000. The study finds some cause for optimism about the course service oriented architecture continues to take:
“Sixty-eight percent of enterprises say they are using SOA or will be using it by the end of 2010. Fifty-six percent are using SOA now, and that number jumps to 74 percent when considering only Global 2000 organizations. All this SOA usage is not just industry hype and experimentation, either. SOA has been delivering tangible results that make IT executives want more of it: 52 percent of current enterprise SOA users say it has delivered enough benefit that they plan to expand its use, while only one percent of SOA users say they are cutting back on SOA because they see little or no benefit. However, getting SOA right takes work: 18 percent of enterprise SOA users say they are struggling to get the benefits.”
Again, along with the fact that a majority of SOA users are happy with the results, there is that one percent statistic which Forrester found back in the spring — only one out of 100 SOA projects have been outright canceled due to perceived failure. But enterprise agility is always a fast-moving target, and today’s success story constantly needs to be updated.
December 30th, 2009
Survey: business views IT more positively in wake of economic slump
Usually, when push came to shove as budgets tightened, executives were quick to put the axe to information technology departments and projects — perceived as cost centers and the biggest targets in the organization. This time around, though, things were different.
New McKinsey & Company survey finds IT may its own toughest critic
New research out of McKinsey & Company shows ithat n the wake of the recent economic hurricane, many non-IT executives seemed to have developed a healthier appreciation for their information technology functions. Business executives, overall, seem pleased with the way IT helped organizations navigate the rough seas. IT leaders, however, feel they could be doing better.
This gap between IT and business perceptions was released in a recent McKinsey & Co. study of 444 higher-level executives from a range of industries and geographies. The authors, Roger Roberts and Johnson Sikes, report that the recent economic downturn only increased awareness of the role IT can play in improving business processes and reducing costs.
McKinsey found that non-IT executives by and large believe their IT functions responded effectively to the crisis. A majority, 55%, say current performance in providing basic IT services is very or extremely effective—an increase from last year’s 50% level.
It turns out IT may be it’s own toughest critic. However, less than half of the IT executives surveyed say their management of IT infrastructure is extremely or very effective. Only 30% say their IT governance is extremely or very effective, and only 21% are happy with the ability of IT to add value to their business, compared to 30% of non-IT executives.
(Panel discussion finds consensus that governance is vital as businesses go into expansion mode. Details in my previous post.)
A majority of non-IT executives also are mainly pleased with IT’s ability to deliver projects on time and on budget (more than 30% say IT is very effective, and 33% say IT is somewhat effective).
The survey also suggests that organizations that took the most advantage of information technology going into the recent downturn may have come out the strongest.
In terms of IT spending in the coming year, while 60% intend to hold the line on IT operating expenses, but close to half, 45%, expect to see new investments in IT.
There’s been no shortage of discussion of the “IT-business alignment gap,” and particularly the perception that IT seems out of touch of the business. In this side-by-side research, McKinsey & Company indicates that IT executives are well aware of the shortcomings of their systems in terms of keeping up with the business. For now, though, it appears IT has emerged as the heroes that helped pull companies through the economic tsunami. But IT executives have no time or inclination to bask in the glow.
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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