By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 3rd March 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Security. It's one of the major issues that keeps cloud computing from working its way deeper and more quickly into the enterprise IT mainstream.

But what are the potential threats around using cloud services? How can companies make sure business processes and data remain secured in the cloud? And how can CIOs accurately assess the risks and benefits of cloud adoption strategies?

Hewlett-Packard (HP) and the Cloud Security Alliance (CSA) answer these and other questions in a new research report entitled, "Top Threats to Cloud Computing Report."

The report, which was highlighted during the Cloud Security Summit at the RSA conference this week, taps the knowledge of information security experts at 29 enterprises, solutions providers and consulting firms that deal with demanding and complex cloud environments. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Mastering next-gen IT
As Cloud Security Alliance Founder Jim Reavis sees it, cloud services are the next generation of IT that enterprises must master—and it's imperative that companies understand and mitigate security threats that accompany the cloud.

"The objective of this report was to not only identify those threats which are most germane to IT organizations but also help organizations understand how to proactively protect themselves," Reavis said. "This is the first deliverable in our cloud threat research initiative, which will feature regular updates to reflect participation from a greater number of experts and to keep pace with the dynamic nature of new threats."

Cloud computing abuse
The Top Threats to Cloud Computing Report shines a light on vulnerabilities that threaten to hinder cloud service offerings from reaching their full potential. HP and the Cloud Security Alliance warn companies to be aware of the abuse and nefarious use of cloud computing. The report specifically points to the Zeus botnet and InfoStealing Trojan horses as a prime examples of malicious software that has compromised sensitive private resources in cloud environments.

Cloud services are the next generation of IT that enterprises must master—and it's imperative that companies understand and mitigate security threats that accompany the cloud.

Beyond malicious software, the report pegs sites that rely on multiple application programming interfaces (APIs) as typically representing the weakest security link. That's because one insecure API can impact a larger set of members using the evolving social Web, which presents data from disparate sources.

Rounding out the list of common cloud threats covered in the report are malicious insiders, shared technology vulnerabilities, data loss and leakage and account/service and traffic hijacking.

The RSA-debuted full report is available on the CSA Web site.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 1st March 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

In a move to tap into the small- to mid-sized business (SMB) data center market, Hewlett-Packard (HP) just rolled out a set of services aimed at helping smaller outfits drive the same IT efficiencies as larger enterprises.

The portfolio is designed to improve efficiency and increase IT budget flexibility, while mitigating risks and maximizing return on investment (ROI) from existing IT skills and assets. The services also target dealing with rapid change and the simplifying of management of multi-vendor environments. HP also launched procurement options for custom integration operations and improvement services. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“Our new services are based on drivers that impact owners of small- to mid-sized data centers,” said Ian Jagger, worldwide marketing manager of Infrastructure and Operations for HP’s Technology Services Group. “These services help our customers deal with the challenge of managing IT complexity and sprawl, space and infrastructure limitations, and limited IT budgets and staff.”

Improving operational efficiency
Recognizing the SMB organizations' requirements around speed, efficiency and 24/7 resource accessibility with shared virtual IT services, HP is delivering four new services designed to help clients gain tighter environment-wide control and broader, deeper visibility into support-related functions.

HP Multivendor Support Services works to help clients increase service levels and reduce the complexity and costs of managing heterogeneous IT environments. By exercising global buying power among vendors and suppliers, HP said it can effectively lower the cost of support contracts.

These services are entirely differentiated because only licensed engineers can deliver these services and HP’s competitors don’t have licensed engineers.

“We have been offering multi-vendor support solutions to our customers,” says Dionne Morgan, worldwide solutions marketing manager for HP’s Technology Services group. “In addition to IBM and Dell servers, we also now support Sun servers and Sun Solaris 10 for HP ProLiant servers. And for HP Integrity servers we’re now supporting Novell, SUSE Linux and Microsoft Windows Server 2008.”

On the operational efficiency front, HP also announced HP Insight Remote Support to monitor a customer’s environment around the clock and provide remote diagnostics, troubleshooting and a support solution. HP added support for VMware virtual environments. Meanwhile, HP Active Chat offers real-time Web chat support for problem and the HP Data Center Training Symposium will move to help companies develop a custom training plan to increase the effectiveness of IT staff.

Increasing computing capacity
HP also announced value assessment services structured for data centers up to 5,000 square feet in size. The services work to help SMBs find ways to increase computing capacity and cut energy costs.

The new services include Basic Capacity Analysis for Smaller Footprints Assessment, Infrastructure Condition and Capacity Analysis for Smaller Footprints Assessment, and Energy Efficiency Analysis for Smaller Footprints Assessment.

“These services are entirely differentiated because only licensed engineers can deliver these services and HP’s competitors don’t have licensed engineers,” Jagger says. “Our competitors have to partner with specialist companies to deliver these services. We’re also restructuring these services to be sold by our channel partners.”

Offering flexible purchase options
Finally, HP promises to make it easier for SMBs to procure value services that will help them better manage limited resources and drive business value from their technology infrastructure through HP Units of Service and HP Proactive Select Services.

“We’ve taken the customized services available from our technical services portfolio and converted them into what we call Units of Service,” Jagger says. “A Unit of Service is a deliverable at a highly granular level. Any given custom service could be made up of multiple Units of Service.”

HP Proactive Select Services let clients move to a variable budget model, acquiring expert resources on-demand to address changing data center needs.

HP Units of Service gives SMBs access to value services from HP through channel partners that aim to maximize ROI and set the stage for business growth. For example, SMBs can tap into HP custom data center consulting services such as relocation, integration, operations and improvement.

HP Proactive Select Services let clients move to a variable budget model, acquiring expert resources on-demand to address changing data center needs. HP has included Server Firmware Update Installation Service, Technical Online Seminars, Virtual Tape Library Health Check and LeftHand SAN/iQ Update Service to its portfolio.

“With these services, companies can focus their IT staff on strategic IT investments that differentiate them in the marketplace,” Jagger says. “What you’re seeing here is more and more services brought to customers at a value level through the channel that allows them to focus where they can drive the greatest ROI from staff.”

The SMB IT services and support market is ripe for efficiency and lower total costs. And the SMB arena is also a prime user for upcoming cloud and hybrid-sourced services. So now everything as a service can go anywhere.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 24th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Electric Cloud has accelerated the software production management field with improvements to two key products: ElectricAccelerator and ElectricCommander 3.5.

ElectricAccelerator boasts a new feature that provides parallel processing and subbuild technology. Dubbed "Electrify," the patented technology promises to speed development on private or public compute clouds by applying the benefits of parallelization to new development tools and tasks.

With Electrify, developers can conduct parallel testing or data modeling on their desktop, in a private cloud or on a dedicated server. Meanwhile, the subbuild technology works to help developers avoid unnecessary or broken builds by identifying only the components required for the current project. [Disclosure: Electric Cloud is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Removing production bottlenecks
“Our goal is to remove the bottlenecks in software production wherever they exist,” explains Electric Cloud CEO Mike Maciag. “ElectricAccelerator speeds Make, NMAKE, Visual Studio, and Ant builds by 10–20x. With Electrify we are broadening the technology to enable these benefits for virtually any compute-intensive development task.”

Maciag offers the example of teams standardizing on tools like SCons. With Electrify, he says, those teams can leverage the benefits of centralization to speed builds, reduce hardware costs and curb server sprawl. The technology also makes way for developers to support multiple configurations through ElectricAccelerator’s virtualization capabilities. All this means more control for developers and fewer headaches for IT.

Commanding the cloud
Electric Cloud's ElectricCommander 3.5 offers a customizable and extensible version of its tool for automating and managing the build-test-deploy process in software development. Developers can customize ElectricCommander 3.5 to extract and display data from the defect tracker along with relevant build and test results. This lets build managers track the status of each fix and receive notification when QA has resolved the issue.

ElectricCommander 3.5 also offers user interface (UI) customization that lets development teams or managers create a custom screen to create and execute a build or test request with the appropriate parameters.

In other words, the UI is purpose-built for the developer’s role or environment. The new version also automates and manages what Electric Cloud calls “error-prone, manual pieces of the build-test-deploy process” to make software production faster and more efficient.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.

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By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 22nd February 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

Mobile application development is full of hard choices. Although there is a seemingly insatiable appetite for ever-smarter handheld mobile devices and the applications these enable, developers have to decide which subset of the available mobile market they want to write applications for, in order to get a worthwhile and profitable return for their effort.

At one time it seemed like there might have been some uniformity and a common platform might emerge, but most attempts have faltered, and ultimately fallen short of the ideal they set out to achieve—SIM toolkit (too simple), WAP (too telco), Java (too fragmented), Symbian (too European?). None of these approaches were directly at fault. They simply satisfied a set of needs at a moment in time in the evolution of mobile devices that made the best of prevailing hardware and network limitations. The problem for each of them has been the speed of evolution of mobile capability.

True, handheld mobile devices are still limited by screen size and the lack of a ‘real' keyboard, and despite continual improvements in wireless data transmission technology, there will not be as much bandwidth radiated over air waves as that channelled down copper wires or glass pipes.

There are already plenty of handheld devices with bright readable screens capable of fast and watchable video, 3D graphics and the potential for 3DTV/video in the near future. Touch screens, haptics (buzz) feedback, accelerometers, compasses, GPS now augment the input options and user interfaces of increasing numbers of devices. Most have decent audio capability, many for music and ringtones, and of course they should all have decent enough audio for phone use (although this is not always the case as early BlackBerry and Apple users opined). The functionality is in place for some fantastic 'killer' applications and for smart developers to exploit.

However there is little uniformity as hardware manufacturers strive to get the best out of their devices and network operators do likewise with their networks and the tweaks they often demand from the handset providers. There is still, too, an industry propensity towards overly proprietary tendencies, something that was mostly beaten out of the IT industry in the 1990s as the internet and associated open protocols and standards took hold.

What many in the mobile industry fail to recognise is that real momentum stems from a wide swell of common interest, rather than the generally chaotic shoves of narrow vested interests. In spite of this, the mobile operator community are (again) having an attempt to pull things together through the Wholesale Applications Community initiative. A creditable concept, although it could appear a bit like a nervous reaction to Apple's success with its App Store, and the other efforts of hardware companies, from Nokia to BlackBerry and Samsung, rather than some groundbreaking idea.

The initiative has, on the face of it, a very significant group of operators lined up in support and, between them, they account for over 3 billion subscribers worldwide. These operators and their industry body, the GSMA, can help push towards common standards, closer links between fixed and mobile and perhaps common platforms for mobile applications. All good stuff, especially if the hardware manufacturers line up to standardise too, although some will see this as a loss of differentiation.

The real issue is, what do developers do in the meantime? Harmonisation towards a 'precious few' rather than an unwieldy handful of mobile platforms might help their long term cross platform and portability challenges, but, right now, developers needs to be able to create applications that will sell in large enough numbers to pay the bills. It is not simply a matter of being able to develop for a platform, or even an easy way to download and sell—there has to be user appeal, and in large enough numbers of them for developers to cost effectively reach.

That means technically taking advantage of the 'cool stuff' that users want—in whatever 'fruit'-named box it appears—across as many subscribers' handsets that are out there now, not just those that will be ready to ship 'in time for Christmas'. Also, from a commercial perspective, developers will need to be able to charge enough to recoup their effort—which is always greater if more platforms and differences have to be traversed—and not pay too great a 'tax' to online stores, whether these are operator led or not.

In short, the mobile industry, and the operator community in particular, needs to recognise that its success is dependent on the success of the broader ecosystem, and the big fish need to stop trying to eat up the food of the little ones. For more thoughts on stimulating the mobile applications market, download Quocirca's free paper regarding Mobile Application Momentum.

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By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 12th February 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

Terms like ‘unified communications’ (UC) look great on the marketing slides of product vendors, but what do they really mean to those who are, or ‘may be if it can be shown to be worthwhile’, prospective customers? Frankly, not a lot.

The soft and intangible vendor promises that accompany UC don’t always translate into the real benefits that most customers are actually looking for. After all, in many job roles ‘productivity’ is down to employee attitude and time management rather than the clever use of the latest communications tools. Such tools are not always what they seem once the shiny marketing veneer has been rubbed off. Whilst it is true that many communications technologies are converging through the sometimes grudging acceptance of common underlying standards, most vendors are still trying to add that extra bit of differentiation or ‘value add’ that makes their products unique, or, as some might term it, ‘proprietary’ and in some cases ‘incompatible’.

Is this a problem? Well, not for customers who believe a particular vendor’s products will fill all their current and near term needs, or that communications technology will not advance too quickly, or that they will not get overtaken by other changes to the business. That may be the case for a select few, but it’s pretty likely that whatever is implemented will have to fit in with other products, be upgraded or replaced from time to time; to do this there must be a fair amount of flexibility.

So, the first question that should be asked by potential customers of the amalgam of products that will be required to deliver unified communications is ‘what will it look like for us?’.

This is often a tricky question when tabled directly at a specific product vendor, as it is always difficult to demonstrate the fit of its products with others. For example some vendors focus on the desktop, others on IP phones and others in hosted services. It doesn’t matter whether these are all competitive or complementary, but a suitably equipped reseller or integration partner ought to be able to showcase multiple vendors’ products and offer an integrated UC solution.

This is all very well—if all that the customer needed to do was look at the technology—but to really understand the impact, they need to feel it and see it applied to the needs of their specific, and probably complex, environment.

This demands more from the channel partner than the ability to showcase, sell and support various vendors’ technology. They have to demonstrate the ability to integrate them, not only with a customer’s legacy communications tools, but also with that customer’s existing processes, people and working practices. In an ideal world part of the sales process would be to run a pilot where the customer makes a significant commitment with its own systems and people. But this is tough on resources and times are hard so more upfront justification is necessary.

Budding unified communications specialists could take a leaf out of the book of systems integrator and managed services company, Logicalis, which has taken a more direct approach. Logicalis has built a proof of concept staging environment that brings together technology from the major unified communications vendors and allows them to be connected in a variety of ways. The setup is distributed, making use of several locations and has the capacity for building a simplified model of a prospective client’s current communications and then demonstrate how different technologies could be applied to support UC. Diversity of product and technical knowledge helps, but by far the most important success factor will be how well Logicalis understands and models the communications processes of its customers—i.e. its “value add”.

Positive approaches have been adopted by others. Managed communications company Azzurri has recognised that customers look for PBXs and telephony from established telephony vendors and IT products from traditional IT vendors to get a best of breed fit, but Azzurri starts by asking ‘what type of users do you have?’ not ‘how many?’. Systems integrator 2e2 thinks beyond UC in isolation and looks at how communication enables and optimises business processes—2e2 would be disappointed if its customers saw UC as simply a phone system replacement.

Communication, ultimately, is between people, not devices. Joining up the gaps between media and modes of communication in the way that unified communications proponents promote is therefore only worthwhile if it makes a positive change to employee behaviour, streamlining processes, boosting productivity and reducing costs. But without a demonstration of specific impact, these are vague marketing statements.

Any company looking to invest in unified communications should seek out those channel partners—value added resellers, integrators or service providers—who can help with the details of integration—not between technologies, but between people.

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By: Clay Ryder, President, Sageza Group, Inc. Posted: 11th February 2010 Copyright Sageza Group, Inc. © 2010

IBM has announced its latest generation of its Power-based servers, the new POWER7 system, which is designed to manage demanding emerging applications such as smart electrical grids and realtime analytics for financial markets, which rely on processing an enormous number of concurrent transactions and data while analyzing that information in real time. The new systems enable clients to manage applications and services at lower cost through technology breakthroughs in virtualization, energy savings, more cost-efficient use of memory, and price performance.

The new systems and management software announced include:

• IBM Power 780, a new category of scalable, high-end servers, featuring an advanced modular design with up to 64 POWER7 cores, and the new TurboCore workload optimizing mode. TurboCore can deliver up to two times the per-core performance of POWER6-based systems.
• IBM Power 770, a modular enterprise system with up to 64 POWER7 cores, featuring higher per-core performance over POWER6 processors while using up to 70% less energy for the same number of cores as in the IBM Power 570.
• IBM Power 755, a high-performance computing cluster node with 32 POWER7 cores that is Energy Star qualified.
• IBM Power 750 Express, an Energy Star qualified server targeting mid-market organizations by offering four times the processing capacity of its predecessor, the IBM Power 550 Express, in the same energy envelope.
• IBM Systems Director Express, Standard, and Enterprise Editions, which offer newly simplified packaging of management software including the advanced virtualization management capabilities of VMControl. VMControl permits the management of multiple Power servers as one entity, which can reduce management cost and complexity.

The company also indicated that it has significantly increased the parallel processing capabilities of POWER7 systems across both hardware and software in order to support managing the millions of concurrent transactions in transaction processing and database workloads as well as delivering “throughput” computing, that is optimized for running massive Internet workloads.

Availability: The Power 750 Express and 755 planned volume ship date is February 19 and the Power 770 and 780 planned volume availability is March 16. The IBM Systems Director Editions, supporting both POWER7 and POWER6 models, planned availability is March 5.

Net/Net: The sheer size of this announcement cannot be underestimated; just one glance at the press release shows a litany of technology and product detail that is not easily dismissed as “just another upgrade.” The announcement of POWER7 is much more than a bigger, better, cheaper POWER6, even though there are numerous technological achievements to challenge even the most technically adroit. But despite all this technical celebration, the overall positioning of POWER7 is that the latest and greatest POWER systems are focused on meeting the needs of business through enhanced financial, not technical, performance. What irony.

To adequately discuss all of the technical achievement of POWER7 would take far more than this forum permits; however, there are a few items which we believe illustrate why POWER7 should prove appealing to its target market. These are the number of cores and the degree of multithreading delivered by the POWER7, improvement in energy efficiency, the holistic solutions focus afforded by IBM, and an overall market message about financial/business efficiency.

The new POWER7 processor has eight cores with four threads each, which is 4x the maximum number of cores in POWER6 systems and 8x the number of threads per chip. With the TurboCore mode, four cores are deemed active and most of the resources backing all eight cores are put behind the four active cores thus increasing the cache and memory bandwidth, and allowing the clock speed to be increased, which can result in significant per-core performance gains. From a purely computational and transaction processing perspective, this achievement of POWER7 is admirable. However, this is only part of the story.

Through POWER7’s Intelligent Energy technology, organizations can power up or shut down various sections of the server as well as dynamically adjust processor clock speeds based on thermal conditions and system utilization, on a single server or across a pool of multiple servers. The integration of energy management spanning the processor, firmware, PowerVM virtualization, OS, up through IBM Active Energy Manager Software (included in Systems Director Standard and Enterprise Editions) allows organizations to tune not only their systems performance and overall energy usage but also the specific price/performance yield of each processor and, by extension, applications supported by each processor. This degree of energy management flexibility illustrates the energy efficiency on a performance per-watt basis afforded by the POWER7 over competitive platforms such as x86, SPARC, and Itanium-based solutions.

In the press release, IBM stated that the new POWER7 systems can manage millions of realtime transactions and analyze the associated volumes of data typical of emerging applications such as the smart electrical grid. This is an interesting for a couple of reasons. While there has been an increasing focus on improved energy efficiency in the datacenter, the reality is that improved energy efficiency across the board would benefit not only data centers, but any business or consumer connected to the grid, as each pays to support the considerable overhead involved in the creation, management, and delivery of electricity. Unlike the historic grid, where control and reporting points are limited and their data only accessible to the system operator, the smart grid requires realtime data from orders of magnitude more data points, all of which needs to collected, analyzed, and reported not only to the system operator, but to the entire customer base as well. A major utility moving to a smart grid pilot could go from processing less than one million meter reads per day to tens of millions meter reads per day in a smart grid.

Being able to collect, analyze, and execute on the volume of information inherent in a smart grid would allow a utility to achieve a higher utilization of its generation, distribution, and billing assets. It would also permit more flexibility in determining which assets would be pressed into service; given each has unique price/performance characteristics. However, when one stops to think about it, this quest for utilization and efficiency is shared by most any organization. Achieving the maximum utilization and hence leverage of corporate resources is all about achieving maximum ROI. The notion of the Smarter Planet intersects with the Smarter Pocketbook and for more than just those who are deploying smart grids or financial marketplaces.

In order to thrive, not just survive, in the new economic reality of the 2010s, organizations of all stripes will have to maximize their efficiency on several fronts. A Smarter Planet that drives more data collection and information generation will challenge organizations to respond to market forces more rapidly than ever before. At the same time, the potential for more closely matching supply with demand, cost with revenue, etc. has never been greater, in turn providing the opportunity for new-found business efficiency. This is where the efficiency theme of the POWER7 resonates so very well.

Through TurboCore mode, clever organizations could maximize their ROI on software licenses that are charged on a per-core basis. An organization could turbocharge the core to get more performance, yet maintain, or even possibly reduce, the number of cores licensed in order to support the application’s users. With POWER7’s ability to support ten virtual machines per core, the number of servers made available per IT management professional could rise substantially and these servers would be more energy efficient than in the past. While each of these examples is made possible due to a technical improvement, the real value is in the business and financial improvement that the technology offers.

Overall, we are impressed by the technical and business acumen demonstrated by IBM in its latest POWER systems offerings. The technology is impressive and serves notice that the venerable Power architecture is not at all in danger of becoming a stagnating dinosaur any time soon. But more impressive is how Big Blue has wrapped this technological achievement into a much larger and more sophisticated narrative about achieving more with less, and positioning financial efficiency on an even footing with energy efficiency and hardware utilization. In addition, IBM has done this on a sliding scale with solutions that are appropriate for the mid market while scaling up to enterprise class solutions and beyond. While the march of technological advancement will continue to amaze even the most jaded onlooker, the challenge for vendors is how to capture the mindset of their customers and unequivocally demonstrate how their customers’ technology investments will drive business performance and ultimately financial success. To our way of thinking, Smarter Planet, holistic systems management, and POWER7 are great examples of this in action.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 10th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

What are the likely directions for cloud computing? Based on the exploration of expected cloud benefits at a cutting edge global IT organization, the future looks extremely productive.

In this podcast we focus on the thinking on how cloud computing—both the private and public varieties—might be used at CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research in Geneva.

CERN has long been an influential bellwether on how extreme IT problems can be solved. Indeed, the World Wide Web owes a lot of its usefulness to early work done at CERN. Now the focus is on cloud computing. How real is it, and how might an organization like CERN approach cloud?

In many ways CERN is quite possibly the New York of cloud computing. If cloud can make it there, it can probably make it anywhere. That's because CERN deals with fantastically large data sets, massive throughput requirements, a global workforce, finite budgets, and an emphasis on standards and openness.

So please join us, as we track the evolution of high-performance computing (HPC) from clusters to grid to cloud models through the eyes of CERN, and with analysis and perspective from IDC, as well as technical thought leadership from Platform Computing.

Join me in welcoming our panel today: Tony Cass, Group Leader for Fabric Infrastructure and Operations at CERN; Steve Conway, Vice President in the High Performance Computing Group at IDC, and Randy Clark, Chief Marketing Officer at Platform Computing. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:
Conway: Private cloud computing is already here, and quite a few companies are exploring it. We already have some early adopters. CERN is one of them. Public clouds are coming. We see a lot of activity there, but it's a little bit further out on the horizon than private or enterprise cloud computing.

Just to give you an example, we at IDC just did a piece of research for one of the major oil and gas companies, and they're actively looking at moving part of their workload out to cloud computing in the next 6–12 months. So, this is really coming up quickly.

CERN is clearly serious about it in their environment. As I said, we're also starting to see activity pick up with cloud computing in the private sector with adoption starting somewhere between six months from now and, for some, more like 12–24 months out.

Clark: At Platform Computing we have formally interviewed over 200 customers out of our installed base of 2,000. A significant portion—I wouldn’t put an exact number on that, but it's higher than we initially anticipated—are looking at private-cloud computing and considering how they can leverage external resources such as Amazon, Rackspace and others. So, it's easily one-third and possibly more [evaluating cloud].

Cass: At CERN we're a laboratory that exists to enable, initially Europe’s and now the world’s, physicists to study fundamental questions. Where does mass come from? Why don’t we see anti-matter in large quantities? What's the missing mass in the universe? They're really fundamental questions about where we are and what the universe is.

We do that by operating an accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider, which collides protons thousands of times a second. These collisions take place in certain areas around the accelerator, where huge detectors analyze the collisions and take something like a digital photograph of the collision to understand what's happening. These detectors generate huge amounts of data, which have to be stored and processed at CERN and the collaborating institutes around the world.

We have something like 100,000 processors around the world, 50 petabytes of disk, and over 60 petabytes of tape. The tape is in just a small number of the centers, not all of the hundred centers that we have. We call it "computing at the terra-scale," that's terra with two R's. We’ve developed a worldwide computing grid to coordinate all the resources that we have with the jobs of the many physicists that are working on these detectors.

If you look at the past, in the 1990’s, we had people collaborating, but there was no central management. Everybody was based at different institutes and people had to submit the workloads, the analysis, or the Monte Carlo simulations of the experiments they needed.

We realized in 2000–2001 that this wasn’t going to work and also that the scale of resources that we needed was so vast that it couldn’t all be installed at CERN. It had to be shared between CERN, a small number of very reliable centers we call the Tier One centers and then 100 or so Tier Two centers at the universities. We were developing this thinking around the same time as the grid model was becoming popular. So, this is what we’ve done.

Grid sets stage for seeking greater efficiencies
[Our grid] pushes the envelope in terms of the scale to make sure that it works for the users. We connect the sites. We run tens of thousands of jobs a day across this and gradually we’ve run through a number of exercises to distribute the data at gigabytes a second and tens of thousands of jobs a day.

We've progressively deployed grid technology, not developed it. We've looked at things that are going on elsewhere and made them work in our environment.

The grid solves the problem in which we have data distributed around the world and it will send jobs to the data. But, there are two issues around that. One is that if the grid sends my job to site A, it does so because it thinks that a batch slot will become available at site A first. But, maybe a grid slot becomes available at site B and my job is site A. Somebody else who comes along later actually gets to run their job first.

Today, the experiment team submits a skeleton job to all of the sites in order to detect which site becomes available first. Then, they pull down my job to this site. You have lots of schedulers involved in this—in the experiment, the grid, and the site—and we're looking at simplifying that.

We’re now looking at virtualizing the batch workers and dynamically reconfiguring them to meet the changing workload. This is essentially what Amazon does with EC2. When they don’t need the resources, they reconfigure them and sell the cycles to other people. This is how we want to work in virtualization and cloud with the grid, which knows where the data is.

... We’re definitely concentrating for the moment on how we exploit effective resources here. The wider benefits we'll have to discuss with our community.

Conway: CERN's scientists have earned multiple Nobel prizes over the years for their work in particle physics. CERN is where Tim Berners-Lee and his colleagues invented the World Wide Web in the 1980s.

More generally, CERN is a recognized world leader in technology innovation. What’s been driving this, as Tony said, are the massive volumes of data that CERN generates along with the need to make the data available to scientists, not only across Europe, but across the world.

For example, CERN has two major particle detectors. They're called CMS and ATLAS. ATLAS alone generates a petabyte of data per second, when it’s running. Not all that data needs to be distributed, but it gives you an idea of the scale or the challenge that CERN is working with.

In the case of CERN’s and Platform’s collaboration, the idea is not just to distribute the data but also the applications and the capability to run the scientific problem.

Showing a clear path to cloud
CERN is definitely a leader there, and cloud computing is really confined today to early adopters like CERN. Right now, cloud computing services constitute about $16 billion as a market.

That’s just about four percent of mainstream IT spending. By 2012, which is not so far away, we project that spending for cloud computing is going to grow nearly threefold to about $42 billion. That would make it about 9 percent of IT spending. So, we predict it’s going to move along pretty quickly.

... [Being able to manage workloads in a dynamic environment] is the single biggest challenge we see for not only cloud computing, but it has affected the whole idea of managing these increasingly complex environments—first clusters, then grids, and now clouds. Software has been at the center of that.

That’s one of the reasons we're here today with Platform and CERN, because that’s been Platform’s business from the beginning, creating software to manage clusters, then grids, and now clouds, first for very demanding HPC sites like CERN and, more recently, also for enterprise clients.

Clark: Historically, clusters and grids have been relatively static, and the workloads have been managed across those. Now, with cloud, we have the ability to have a dynamic set of resources.

The trick is to marry and manage the workloads and the resources in conjunction with each other. Last year, we announced our cloud products— Platform LSF and Platform ISF Adaptive Cluster—to address that challenge and to help this evolution.

[Cloud adoption] is being driven by the top of the organization. Tony and Steve laid it out well. They look at the public/private cloud economically, and say, "Architecturally, what does this mean for our business?" Without any particular application in mind they're asking how to evolve to this new model. So, we're seeing it very horizontally in both enterprise and HPC applications.

What Platform sees is the interaction of distributed computing and new technologies like virtualization requiring management. What I mean by that is the ability, in a large farm or shared environment, to share resources and then make those resources dynamic. It's the ability to add virtualization into those on the resource side, and then, on the server side, to make it Internet accessible, have a service catalog, and move from providing IT support to truly IT as a competitive service.

The state of the art is that you can get the best of Amazon, ease of use, cost, accessibility with the enterprise configuration, scale, and dependability of the enterprise grid environment.

There isn't one particular technology or implementation that I would point to, to say "That is state of the art," but if you look across the installations we see in our installed base, you can see best practices in different dimensions with each of those customers.

Conway: People who have already stepped through the earlier stages of this evolution, who have gone from clusters to grid computing, are now for the most part contemplating the next move to cloud computing. It's an evolutionary move. It could have some revolutionary implications, but, from a technological standpoint, sometimes evolutionary is much safer and better than revolutionary.

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By: Clay Ryder, President, Sageza Group, Inc. Posted: 28th December 2009 Copyright Sageza Group, Inc. © 2009

The world is getting smarter as it is more instrumented, interconnected, and intelligent. As a result, there is a significant shift in organizations' assumptions about IT and the strategic approach to IT investments. The data center of today is being called upon to deliver a dynamic, realtime, IT infrastructure that can keep up with the demands for information and speed of delivery. Business is transforming as a smarter planet increases the scale, complexity, and diversity of workloads that most any organization will be called upon to support. Pervasive instrumentation will create vast amounts of data and drive new types of applications that require realtime data analysis and predictive intelligence.

Organizations' strategic approach to IT infrastructure must evolve to meet the corporate need not only of today, but of tomorrow as well. Historically, workloads often have been deployed in a siloed fashion. While there may have been organizational and financial biases within business that favored this approach, the resultant infrastructure suffered from an inherent inefficiency in operations combined with high demands on floor space, energy consumption, and cooling capacity. In addition, the sharing of applications and data across the corporation was often difficult in such a scenario, which leads to underutilized assets.
Rigid technological constraints combined with complexity made change difficult to achieve which resulted in increased operational expense and a competitive disadvantage for organizations. Further, this has challenged regulatory compliance and security initiatives as well as limiting organizations' efforts to implement industry best practices. In a nutshell, businesses are unnecessarily being exposed to risk.

To meet their current and future business requirements, organizations must change their IT strategy to an expectation of a dynamic IT infrastructure that seamlessly blends business process with IT resources to enable the making of informed, realtime decisions at the point of business impact. The challenges in implementing a dynamic infrastructure include creating Workload Optimized Systems that more effectively align technology capability with the business need, managing service delivery across a larger number of more instrumented and interconnected processes and assets, and fundamentally changing storage economics to enable information-led growth without scaling the cost of storage management out of reach.

Long-term corporate viability and competitive success dictate that IT solutions will need to seamlessly integrate visibility, control, and automation across all business and IT assets. Computing solutions must be highly optimized to do more with less. Integrated service management is necessary to provide visibility, control, and automation across business and IT services to ensure consistent, high-quality delivery. The intertwining and leverage of information is by nature realtime and dynamic; the enterprise can no longer afford to have information that is minutes, let alone hours or days removed from reality.
Overall, we have reached a point in time whereby what was good enough in IT is simply no longer good enough. The preponderance of general purpose solutions assembled from commodity hardware and software are arguably inexpensive and relatively simple to acquire, however, their ongoing management expense as well as their historically low levels of utilization do not meet the efficiency and scalability needs of 21st century organizations. Hence, more strategic considerations than initial acquisition cost are paramount when conceiving and deploying IT solutions that will meet the TCO and ROI objectives of businesses today.

For a more in depth discussion of this issue, we invite you to read our white paper, The IBM Workload Optimized Approach: Why Do Systems Matter?, which examines many of issues facing IT organizations in the 21st century. In addition, we review several of the initiatives that IBM has articulated to meet the challenge of delivering dynamic, scalable, and optimized response to the increasing demands of evolving workloads. The complete white paper may be downloaded from IT-Analysis.com, IT-Director.com, or Sageza.com.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd December 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Today's podcast discussion focuses on the economic benefits of cloud computing—of how to use cloud-computing models and methods to control IT cost by better supporting application workloads.

As we've been looking at cloud computing over the past several years, a long transition is under way, of moving from traditional IT and architectural method to this notion of cloud—be it private cloud, at a third-party location, or through some combination of the above.

Traditional capacity planning is not enough in these newer cloud-computing environments. Elasticity planning is what’s needed. It’s a natural evolution of capacity planning, but it’s in the cloud.

Therefore traditional capacity planning needs to be reexamined. So now we'll look at how to best right-size cloud-based applications, while matching service delivery resources and demands intelligently, repeatedly, and dynamically. The movement to pay-per-use model also goes a long way to promoting such matched resources and demand, and reduces wasteful application practices.

We'll also examine how quality control for these cloud applications in development reduces the total cost of supporting applications, while allowing for a tuning and an appropriate way of managing applications in the operational cloud scenario.

Here to help unpack how Cloud Assure services can take the mystique out of cloud computing economics and to lay the foundation for cost control through proper cloud capacity management methods, we're joined by Neil Ashizawa, manager of HP's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Products and Cloud Solutions. The discussion is moderated by me, BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Ashizawa: Old-fashioned capacity planning focuses on the peak usage of the application, and it had to, because when you were deploying applications in-house, you had to take into consideration that peak usage case. At the end of the day, you had to be provisioned correctly with respect to compute power. Oftentimes with long procurement cycles, you'd have to plan for that.

In the cloud, because you have this idea of elasticity, where you can scale up your compute resources when you need them, and scale them back down, obviously that adds another dimension to old-school capacity planning.

The new way to look at it within the cloud is elasticity planning. You have to factor in not only your peak usage case, but your moderate usage case and your low-level usage as well. At the end of the day, if you are going to get the biggest benefit of cloud, you need to understand how you're going to be provisioned during the various demands of your application.

If you were to take, for instance, the old-school capacity-planning ideology to the cloud, you would provision for your peak use-case. You would scale up your elasticity in the cloud and just keep it there.

But if you do it that way, then you're negating one of the big benefits of the cloud. That's this idea of elasticity, and paying for only what you need at that moment.

One of the main factors why people consider sourcing to the cloud is because you have this elastic capability to spin up compute resources when usage is high and scale them back down when the usage is low. You don’t want to negate that benefit of the cloud by keeping your resource footprint at its highest level.

Making the road smoother
What we're now bringing to the market works in all three cases [of cloud capacity planning]. Whether you're a private internal cloud, doing a hybrid model between private and public, or sourcing completely to a public cloud, it will work in all three situations.

The new enhancement that we're announcing now is assurance for cost control in the cloud. Oftentimes enterprises do make that step to the cloud, and a big reason is that they want to reap the benefits of the cost promise of the cloud, which is to lower cost. The thing here, though, is that you might fall into a situation where you negate that benefit.

If you deploy an application in the cloud and you find that it’s underperforming, the natural reaction is to spin up more compute resources. It’s a very good reaction, because one of the benefits of the cloud is this ability to spin up or spin down resources very fast. So no more procurement cycles, just do it and in minutes you have more compute resources.

The situation, though, that you may find yourself in is that you may have spun up more resources to try to improve performance, but it might not improve performance. I'll give you a couple of examples.

You can find yourself in a situation where your application is no longer right-sized in the cloud, because you have over-provisioned your compute resources.

If your application is experiencing performance problems because of inefficient Java methods, for example, or slow SQL statements, then more compute resources aren't going to make your application run faster. But, because the cloud allows you to do so very easily, your natural instinct may be to spin up more compute resources to make your application run faster.

When you do that, you find yourself in is a situation where your application is no longer right-sized in the cloud, because you have over provisioned your compute resources. You're paying for more compute resources and you're not getting any return on your investment. When you start paying for more resources without return on your investment, you start to disrupt the whole cost benefit of the cloud.

Applications need to be tuned so that they are right-sized. Once they are tuned and right-sized, then, when you spin up resources, you know you're getting return on your investment, and it’s the right thing to do.

Whether you have existing applications that you are migrating to the cloud, or new applications that you are deploying in the cloud, Cloud Assure for cost control will work in both instances.

Cloud Assure for cost control solution comprises both HP Software and HP Services provided by HP SaaS. The software itself is three products that make up the overall solution.

The first one is our industry-leading Performance Center software, which allows you to drive load in an elastic manner. You can scale up the load to very high demands and scale back load to very low demand, and this is where you get your elasticity planning framework.

Moderate and peak usage
The second solution from a software perspective is HP SiteScope, which allows you to monitor the resource consumption of your application in the cloud. Therefore, you understand when compute resources are spiking or when you have more capacity to drive even more load.

The third software portion is HP Diagnostics, which allows you to measure the performance of your code. You can measure how your methods are performing, how your SQL statements are performing, and if you have memory leakage.

When you have this visibility of end user measurement at various load levels with Performance Center, resource consumption with SiteScope, and code level performance with HP Diagnostics, and you integrate them all into one console, you allow yourself to do true elasticity planning. You can tune your application and right-size it. Once you've right-sized it, you know that when you scale up your resources you're getting return on your investment.

You want to get a grasp of the variable-cost nature of the cloud, and you want to make this variable cost very predictable. Once it’s predictable, then there will be no surprises. You can budget for it and you could also ensure that you are getting the right performance at the right price. ... If you're thinking about sourcing to the cloud and adopting it, from a very strategic standpoint, it would do you good to do your elasticity planning before you go into production or you go live.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 23rd December 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

For someone who writes regularly about the merits of good quality data it is galling to have to admit that I am now a serial perpetrator of poor quality data. To be specific, the village where I live in Wiltshire (about 100 miles west of London, near Bath, for those of you that don’t know the UK) is now in California. Not to mention Massachusetts.

Let me explain. My wife’s niece lives in the United States and we decided to send her family a gift voucher from Macy’s for Christmas. However, you do not only have to provide the recipient’s details and your own credit card information in order to do this but also your own name and address. But it seems to have never occurred to Macy’s that anyone outside the United States might want to send a Macy’s gift voucher. So it wouldn’t accept my actual address. What was I do? Not send this gift to my wife’s family and preserve data quality integrity? Or make both my niece-in-law (and Macy’s sales department) happy but upset its IT people? I confess that I took the easy road and lied. Not that lying was easy. I tired to pretend that I was in the US armed forces in Europe on the basis that it might allow a European zip code but it wouldn’t. In the end I opened up my card file at random and picked a card, which happened to have a zip code in California so, as far as Macy’s is concerned my village is now near San Francisco.

Worse, I have to confess (again!) that this is not the first time. Because I travel to Boston a lot I took out a Borders Reward card earlier this year. However, once again, I had to enter my address details on line. Worse, the data quality used by Borders is much better than Macy’s. The latter appears to only check your zip code while Borders actually checks to see if your address is valid and if your phone number corresponds to your address. It took me ages to make up a combination that the web site would actually accept.

So, there you have it: I am a serial perpetrator. Worse, having chatted to a number of people about this I have discovered I am not alone! It turns out that lots of people do it: if they want something on-line and the software won’t let them have it and then they’ll invent stuff so that they can get it.

The interesting question is who is to blame? And I don’t think it’s me or my fellow travellers. I think it is companies who don’t think before they do stuff. Whether it’s the developers or the business users in those companies I don’t know but they seriously need to think about the applications they implement and not just technical details, if they want to ensure that they have decent data quality (or sales statistics for that matter—how many Europeans send Macy’s gift cards each year? Clearly, Macy’s has no idea).

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By: Clay Ryder, President, Sageza Group, Inc. Posted: 21st December 2009 Copyright Sageza Group, Inc. © 2009

The importance of systems management in the datacenter should not be underestimated. As deployment of all types and sizes of servers has continued unabated, IT organizations can no longer afford the manpower and resource expense of simply trusting that the vast server farm will operate efficiently without human intervention. While UNIX and mainframe operations have recognized this for some time, for many x86-based server installations, it is only recently that corporate realities have mandated the same degree of operational efficiency and efficacy for all IT servers.

In many organizations the number of x86 servers exceeds that of all others, yet expectations for systems management are often not commensurate. Organizations that have begun to address the manageability and cost considerations of x86 deployments have likely come to realize that while there are many vendors of x86 server hardware, uniform systems management is a less developed craft in this market segment.

Effective systems management is not achieved simply through add-on software; rather it demands a holistic point of view that is manifest through systemic innovation beginning with each component on the motherboard. Further, it must take a view beyond that of the local server that is inclusive of the greater IT environment. As operations and energy consumption continue to become the dominant expenses in the datacenter, accepting a less-than-comprehensive management solution for x86 systems is no longer an option. Given the historic underutilization of x86 servers, this issue becomes even more imperative.
To address this underutilization organizations have approached virtualization as a means to capture greater utilization, efficiency, and cost-effectiveness of x86 server investments. While organizations may have originally limited forays into virtualization to a select set of non-critical services, virtualization is no longer just an experiment or toy; it is an essential component in maximizing IT value. Yet today, most system management approaches have remained bifurcated between the physical and virtual worlds. The growth of virtualization dictates that systems management tools must manage both physical and virtualized resources in a unified fashion to reduce deployment, training, and management expense.

Competitive organizations recognize that x86 installations must deliver the same degree of industry-leading performance, virtualization, energy efficiency, and scalability as other platforms. As result, x86-based solutions must be based upon resilient architectures and management tools that deliver security and high availability. This includes a robust portfolio of hardware and software management solutions by which to meet current demands while delivering the scalability necessary to adjust capacity as business requirements change. In other words, solutions must improve service, reduce cost, and manage risk.
The need to remain competitive has led organizations to demand greater flexibility in IT service delivery. Hence, there is a growing expectation for a dynamic infrastructure and dynamic management tools. The effective convergence of business and IT infrastructure into one dynamic infrastructure can enable new breakthrough service opportunities and provide the basis for business transformation.

In light of these considerations, one vendor has undertaken a holistic approach to address the need for integrate systems management in the x86 server market space. We invite you to read our white paper, Integrated Systems Management: The New Generation of IBM System x Servers, which examines many of the innovations that IBM has brought to x86-based server solutions in its quest to improve overall systems management and help create a dynamic, cost-effective IT infrastructure. The white paper may be downloaded from IT-Analysis.com, IT-Director.com, or Sageza.com.

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By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 17th December 2009 Copyright Quocirca © 2009

There is no doubt that many companies, as well as individuals, will look to keep budgets under control throughout 2010, and Quocirca research often shows that the cost of telecoms is among the more difficult to constrain. Organisations and individuals gain corporate and personal value from remote access, internet connectivity, mobile phones and so on; however, increased use means spending rises, even as tariffs come down.

Telecoms services are not something organisations can do without or arbitrarily cut, but they can better understand and control their use and cost. During a recession, even services previously considered invaluable have had to justify their costs. Some may even turn out on scrutiny to deserve increased investment, but only better use of all services through improved visibility of their true value will justify total telecoms expenditure. Those responsible for telecoms budgets have a choice in 2010—take proactive control or have changes enforced them and where budgets are cut, heads follow. So here are some suggestions for New Year resolutions for those embattled budget managers:

• Rationalise: Assess the current state of supply—what services are currently in use and how will that change? Look to rationalise and consolidate, do not blindly cut back on items bringing in value or that are saving costs elsewhere, but make sure the value is being measured and most importantly clearly visible elsewhere in the business. Make ongoing assessments as employees come and go, or when services and suppliers are replaced. Mind the gaps and do not pay for leavers who have not been replaced.
• Prioritise: Important for shared or limited resources, such as internet access or wide area data connections that often run many services. Identify and protect the business critical ones—this is no time or place for being even-handed. Does the capacity and network performance meet business needs? Are service level agreements (SLAs) being measured and met? Unreliable or cheap connectivity is a false economy if it fails, especially when applications such as e-commerce and conferencing can save other costs such as transport, energy and rent.
• Shop around: look at supplier alternatives to ensure the best deal. Could an existing supplier offer a better discount or an improved quote or could a new one with more options offer a bundle to reduce overall costs? Short term discounts, while welcome, do not address underlying inefficiency issues, so take a strategic view of total communications as well as trying to make item-by-item savings. Staffing or skilling up is expensive, so can elements be incrementally outsourced, e.g. device management, security or billing? This would avoid costly in-house support and keep costs predictable by exploiting flat rate tariffs and per user per month services.
• Converge: The priority should be to combine budgets, not simply buy-in to a technology or vendor solution. However technologies are converging, so keeping IT and communications costs separate—mobile phones, fixed lines, laptops, data cards are often the responsibility of a mix of IT, procurement, finance and facilities—will tend to increase total complexity and cost. Move to consolidated budgets so that decisions are more strategic and less territorial. Then assess real need, and use the ‘shadow IT' effect of consumer technology entering the workplace to business advantage. Not everyone needs a company supplied laptop, mobile email, smart phone or mobile phone. Work out who does and then support employees' own technology choices where it benefits the business, providing this does not cause other costs, e.g. support and security, to run away.
• Lead: Take active control of access, network resource use and end point devices. This is not only for security and consistency, but also to avoid unexpected costs e.g. from former employees continued use or services they no longer have right too (eg lingering mobile phones). It will also be necessary to face up to personal usage; phone systems, home broadband, business supplied mobile phones and Wi-Fi access are rarely exclusively for business use. This does not necessarily need to be curtailed, but must be recognised and managed. Employees need to be aware of their personal usage and commitments to their employer and the tax collectors, and employers must manage responsibly based on a sensible controls and well-communicated company policy.

Many personal New Year's resolutions are made with good intentions, but are quickly broken as time passes, and other matters take precedence. For many organisations it is unlikely that cost concerns will fall in importance in 2010, and resolving to tackle them head on will benefit any business. This may be especially important if preserving their own job is a personal resolution telecoms budget managers would really like to keep.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 16th December 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Hewlett-Packard (HP) has significantly elevated its efforts to become an indispensable full-service supplier to cloud computing aspirants, especially telecommunications, mobile and Internet service providers.

At Software Universe in Hamburg, Germany, HP today announced three new offerings designed to enable cloud providers and enterprises to securely lower barriers to adoption and accelerate the time-to-benefit of cloud-delivered services. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Timing here is critical. As the end users of cloud services seek flexible infrastructure, IP voice, unified communications and call center automation, cloud providers need a fast-track to such low-risk cloud capabilities. HP is also wasting no time as it competes yet more broadly against Cisco Systems in the race to become mainstream means to cloud services.

Among the new offerings:

• HP Operations Orchestration, which will automate the provisioning of services within the existing infrastructure, allowing businesses to seamlessly increase capacity through integration with such things as Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Look for other public cloud providers to offer this as well.
• HP Communication as a service (CaaS), a cloud program that will enable service providers to offer small and mid-size businesses services delivered on an outsourced basis with utility pricing. CaaS includes an aggregation platform, four integrated communications services from HP and third parties, as well as the flexibility to offer other on-demand services.
• HP Cloud Assure for Cost Control, designed to help companies optimize cloud costs and gain predictability in budgeting by ensuring that they right-size their compute footprints.

Cloud Assure was introduced by HP last Spring, and today's announcement moves it to the next level. Neil Ashizawa, manager of HP's Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Products and Cloud Solutions, recently spoke with me about Cloud Assure for cost control. He told me:

"When we first launched Cloud Assure earlier this year, we focused on the top three inhibitors, which were security of applications in the cloud, performance of applications in the cloud, and availability of applications in the cloud. We wanted to provide assurance to enterprises that their applications will be secure, they will perform, and they will be available when they are running in the cloud.

"The new enhancement that we're announcing now is assurance for cost control in the cloud. Oftentimes enterprises do make that step to the cloud, and a big reason is that they want to reap the benefits of the cost promise of the cloud, which is to lower cost."

He then explained how Cloud Assure for cost control works:

"Cloud Assure for cost control solution comprises both HP Software and HP Services provided by HP SaaS. The software itself is three products that make up the overall solution.

• The first one is our industry-leading Performance Center software, which allows you to drive load in an elastic manner. You can scale up the load to very high demands and scale back load to very low demand, and this is where you get your elasticity planning framework.
• The second solution from a software’s perspective is HP SiteScope, which allows you to monitor the resource consumption of your application in the cloud. Therefore, you understand when compute resources are spiking or when you have more capacity to drive even more load.
• The third software portion is HP Diagnostics, which allows you to measure the performance of your code. You can measure how your methods are performing, how your SQL statements are performing, and if you have memory leakage."

These HP-driven means to attain cloud benefits sooner than later come in response to recent surveys in which industry executives clearly stated a need for more flexible computing options in the face of uncertain economic times. They want to be able to dial up and down their delivery of services, but without the time and cost of building out the capital-intensive traditional delivery models.

The market is also looking to cloud services—be they on-premises, from third-parties or both—to provide:

• Elasticity: the ability to rapidly respond to changing business needs with automated provisioning of cloud and physical services
• Cost control: by optimizing efficiency and gaining predictability of costs by ensuring cloud compute resources are “right sized” to support fluctuating business demands
• Risk reduction: through automated service provisioning that reduces manual errors, non-compliance snafus, and downtime of business services and processes.

I think HP has correctly identified a weakness in the SaaS and cloud markets. In many cases, applications and productivity services came to market first, but lacked the enterprise-caliber infrastructure, management, and auditing and fiscal control mechanisms. Now, HP is bringing these traditional IT requirements to the cloud domains, and making them available to the large market of existing providers.

The cloud horse is now in front of the cart, which means the providers can do their jobs better, and more end users can adopt secure cloud services in ways that reassure their mangers and adhere to their governance policies.

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

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By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 7th December 2009 Copyright Quocirca © 2009

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or tagging and its close cousin Near Field Communications (NFC) have both been touted for great and sexy futuristic applications. These range from the tagging and tracking of all consumer goods to the conversion of mobile phones into all purpose ‘super wallets' where simply waving the phone at the checkout would perform the appropriate transaction.

The idea with RFID is quite simple. If you can apply sufficiently low cost tags to items you can replace the line-of-sight constrained barcode with something that can be read automatically over a range of a couple of meters. This opens up applications from stock control and in-store anti-theft detection, to esoteric ones like domestic fridges that automatically trigger a restock event when the last carton of milk is removed, or rubbish bins that notice something should have been recycled.

The problem with this sort of post-cyberpunk ideal is that while cost per tag is falling, the cost and complexity of large deployments of tags, readers and the changes this brings to business processes rises with scale. The benefits may be significant when this occurs, but they also get harder to identify, isolate and quantify. While visible at board level, many individual cost centres will not see significant benefit, making large scale projects harder to justify, so most RFID deployments have been on a smaller scale where value is well defined and clear.

A similar picture is true with NFC, although some large deployments, such as Transport for London's Oyster card, have very worked well, as they are closed applications and have the support of an entire infrastructure. The idea of similar technology on all mobile phones has potential and could ultimately yield plenty of interesting applications, but there are a lot of vested interests and agendas that have to be aligned in the meantime.

Mass market, high tech applications will have their place at some point in the future. However the use of tags and short-range radio devices to read them can work very effectively today in applications where it is necessary to prove that the right action has been taken with a specifically identified object. In other words, assurance or compliance with a specified process can be of higher importance than the "wow" factor, and so worth spending money on.

Compliance applications might seem boring compared to the futuristic opportunity to tag and wave at everything, but they are often of critical importance, and therefore can have huge benefits, usually in mitigating or avoiding risks—including saving lives. There will always be situations where human input cannot be relied on to effectively mitigate the risk.

Consider the needs of maintenance staff working on electrified rail lines for example. When the power line being worked on is switched off it has to be attached to earth to avoid current being induced by other nearby power lines. The heavy duty earthing straps are critical to safety and preventing damage, so deployment must be well controlled, but they also HAVE to be removed before power goes back on. Several straps will be used over the course of one maintenance session, and by a number of engineers, so it is critical to account precisely for all of them.

The difficulty is how to positively identify each strap and know who checks them out. Each one is a weighty coil of 2cm diameter cable, with heavy-duty clamps at each end. Labels or barcodes are difficult to attach and become difficult to use in the challenging outdoor environment next to the tracks.

However, a solution based on radio tags read by nearby readers fits the bill by giving each earthing strap a unique identity. The engineers then use Motorola handheld devices with a snap-on NFC reader and suitable software to link each specific cable to a specific engineer. At some point developments will be taken a stage further and GPS will be used to provide the specific location for each cable while it is in use. All of this information is logged for audit and alert purposes to ensure safety of the workers and avoid damage to tracks and power lines.

While this verification application tags and tracks mobile objects, tags can also be used to validate the location of the tag reader itself. For example security guards can have tag readers attached to handheld mobile devices they may be already carrying for mobile communications as they patrol. Tags embedded around the perimeter and at vulnerable points of the area they are employed to secure can be identified and read, ensuring that the guard has passed that point and at what time. This provides an audit trail that the security process has been complied with.

In each case the reading of a tag is providing a time, person, proximity and location stamp for a business process that depends on repetitive tasks. This will provide authentication to validate a process for compliance purposes, but can also protect assets and perhaps lives. In constraining the solution to meet specific business needs, even the most advanced technologies can be deployed in a cost effective manner.

These applications, provided in this case by customers of one of the UK's mobile data specialists, TBS Mobility, demonstrate not only that there are valid uses for NFC and RFID, but that they do not have to be huge or mass market. There are a number of companies like TBS that combine mobile data experience with an understanding of task-based processes and this is where there can be valuable deployments. They show that even advanced technologies can be quickly applied to existing problems, without the need for a ‘sci-fi' shift in thinking, or sky-high cost or complexity. It's just a matter of understanding the problem and then looking at what technology might fit.

Much against the doom and gloom that many commentators are issuing around RFID and NFC, it is not a case of "ta-ta for now" (TTFN)—but more about getting on with what is necessary, or to use an earthy acronym, "JFDI"...

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By: Martin Banks, Associate Analyst - Datacentre & Mainframe, Bloor Research Posted: 4th December 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

The ease of setup and deployment, coupled to low Capex and Opex requirements, that are the stock in trade of the SaaS delivery model, making it possible for many services to be brought before a far wider and deeper marketplace than otherwise possible. A good example of this is contact management where Contactual is using SaaS to address what has largely been an unserved market—the under-200 seat contact management services operations. This target that was first identified by Contactual back 2000, when founder and CEO Mansour Salame recognised that it had been largely untouched by the big players in contact management systems.

The company has been operating in the North American market ever since, and subsequently in the Pacific Rim area, and has garnered some 1,000 long term customers. Now it is turning its attention towards Europe, initially operating indirectly through local channel partners. The key factor Salame noticed was that while the big players could offer very comprehensive facilities, the entry cost for users could be dramatic and the ability to change and adapt the contact management environment complex and time consuming. Even adding a new help desk staff member could take time.

What Contactual offers is very different from the classic contact management environments, all of which are intended for large installations. In the classic model, the user buys the switch, the EMS management system and the IBR, but the biggest costs can lie elsewhere. As much as two thirds of the cost can go in professional management services to tie the operational service together over the life time of the products that make it up.

Here, even major technology developments such as virtualisation bring only small Opex advantages. The system may use only fraction of a server, but that server only costs $5,000, so the saving is small compared to the on-going professional services costs. In addition, the change management processes involved in adding 10 or 20 seats can be such as to make it uneconomic with large contact management systems. So a growing number of large businesses are using Contactual as the scaling procedure, leaving them the option of adding new seats to the existing environment once there are enough to make it economic to upgrade, or perhaps developing along the OnDemand route.

At the low end of the market the users cannot afford to send either desk staff or line managers on long training courses, so making the system easy to set up, learn and use has been a key part of the design and development. By being SaaS-based, it also means that the seats can be located anywhere in the world, which gives businesses significant operational flexibility, as a small number of contact staff can provide 24 x 7 coverage by working from home and/or by being strategically located around the globe.

Flexibility has been one of the key drivers behind the development of Contactual's offering, so much so that the company claims to have invented the concept of the OnDemand Contact Centre. The key to that flexibility comes from being SaaS-based, as everything from customer interactions to customer and user set up routines are all managed via the internet. That makes any set up process exactly the same regardless of the situation. For example, it is possible to set up for people working from home, a capability already exploited by some customers in difficult locations such as areas where there can be potential problems for staff coming and going at night. Then the nightshift can simply work from home rather than going to the business location.

Another common requirement being found amongst big contact management system users is the need for short-term scalability the classic "we need 100 extra seats for Christmas" scenario. This can be readily made available because the Capex is low—just a PC, a browser and an Internet connection.

It also makes it an ideal service for small businesses that otherwise could not afford their own contact management environment and would have to fight for mindshare amongst the staff of a large outsourcing operation. In fact, a recent internal study showed the average customer for Contactual's services has 19 seats and, in practice, it can go down to just two seats and still be an economic proposition for both the company and the customer, even at a typical cost of $150/seat/month in the US.

Though targeted at the SME marketplace, the system is also finding a role with larger users looking for flexible and economically available scalability, particularly when it is required short-term. It claims that some of this is showing strong signs of turning into permanent service requirements as legacy installations reach the end of their operational lifecycle. The issue here for users is the strategic question of whether a single, large call centre and contact management service is the more appropriate solution for a large, often multi-faceted business, or whether several smaller services, dedicated to the specific needs of those facets, meets the business goals faster, with more agility and with better economics.

The company runs its own HP blade server-based datacentres running Linux and Oracle Real Application Cluster (RAC) and already has platforms in US, Canada, Australia and Japan. It opened a UK datacentre this year, with 10 customers already plus what it claims is a "very healthy" pipeline. An additional European platform will be opened in Frankfurt next year, so it is already able to provide global hosting and full operational redundancy with 4x9s and 5x9s service availability. This allows it to run the systems flat out on the service, rather than sharing resources with other processes or users in a hosted environment.

It uses an N+1 platform approach and the objective is to provide telco-quality service levels to customers. Should there be a platform failure the time taken to restore to full service provision is around 30 seconds. This ability can also be exploited for service upgrades as one platform can be taken off-line, upgraded, and selectively reloaded with customer workloads. The service has been designed to support twice as many simultaneous calls as the number of seats supported.

In operation, the system is particularly easy and straight forward to set up. In fact, as a demonstration it was shown to be possible to set up the basics of a new contact management service using a laptop, browser and a mobile phone dongle while sitting in a hotel foyer. Front line call centre staff can become productive typically within six hours, while experienced call centre managers have been known to set the system up without requiring any training.

There are over 30 standard service reports provided, such as how long calls wait at any chosen point in the call-handling sequence, how long a staff member stays on the phone with any individual call, and the number of calls accepted and abandoned. There is also the ability for users to build their own to suit their operational and business process requirements. In addition, there are a wide range of house-keeping tools and utilities provided, such as voice message management services. It provides out-of-the-box integration with many existing services, such as those provided by Oracle, NetSuite and Salesforce. Microsoft's upcoming CRM system will be supported next year.

New individual users can be set up with all associated communications links in a matter of minutes. The users can then be grouped by work function such as sales, customer support, help desk etc. Skills sets can also be prioritised, and individual staff can be associated with multiple skills to give better operational flexibility. For example, an individual can be ranked high priority in sales and low priority in customer support. This is particularly valuable for smaller businesses where staff resources can be limited, allowing the individual to handle the initial stages of a customer support call if the primary support team is already fully committed.

When calls come in it can be routed via typical key number menus to the appropriately skilled staff group, with an indication that a call is coming in. The next available group member can then accept the call. If no appropriate message is available the call can be forwarded to an individual in another group with low level skills in the required area. Each menu selection is voice driven, and users can easily record and set up the menu messages, even when using a mobile phone in a hotel lobby.

As SaaS develops and more service providers come along, the company does see the potential for contact management to become a focal point for a wider set of interaction management services based on a service like Contactual acting as the SaaS platform. Here, other niche service providers would gain the market potential of aligning their technologies to the Contactual system, rather than trying to build market penetration on their own. It already provides a universal queue for email, chat and voicemail, for example, all of which are primary aspects of the services required for complex customer/supplier/vendor interaction management.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 3rd December 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 47. Our topic this week on BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition centers on how to define, track and influence how people actually adapt to and adopt technology.

Any new information technology might be the best thing since sliced bread,but if people don’t understand the value or how to access it properly—or if adoption is spotty, or held up by sub-groups, agendas, or politics—then the value proposition is left in the dust. Perceptions count ... a lot.

A crucial element for avoiding and overcoming social and user dissonance with technology adoption is to know what you are up against, in detail. Yet, data and inferences on how people really feel about technology is often missing, incomplete, or inaccurate.

In this discussion, we hear from two partners who are working to solve this issue pragmatically. First, with regard to Enterprise 2.0 technologies and approaches. And, if my hunch is right, it could very well apply to service-oriented architecture (SOA) adoption as well.

I suppose you could think of this as a pragmatic approach to developing business intelligence (BI) values for people’s perceptions and their ongoing habits as they adopt technology in a business context.

So please join Michael Krigsman, president and CEO of Asuret, as well as Dion Hinchcliffe, founder and chief technology officer at Hinchcliffe & Co. to explain how Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0 works. Our panel also includes Joe McKendrick, prolific blogger and analyst; Miko Matsumura, vice president and chief strategist at Software AG; Ron Schmelzer, managing partner at ZapThink; Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Sandy Rogers, independent industry analyst, and Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research.

And the discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Hinchcliffe: ... As many of you know, we've been spending a lot of time over the last few years talking about how things like Web 2.0 and social software are moving beyond just what’s happening in the consumer space, and are beginning to really impact the way that we run our businesses.

More and more organizations are using social software, whether this is consumer tools or specific enterprise-class tools, to change the way they work. At my organization, we've been working with large companies for a number of years trying to help them get there.

This is the classic technology problem. Technology improves and gets better exponentially but we, as organizations and as people, improve incrementally. So, there is a growing gap between what’s possible and what the technology can do, and what we are ready to do as organizations.

I've been helping organizations improve their businesses with things like Enterprise 2.0, which is social collaboration, using these tools, but with an enterprise twist. There are things like security, and other important business issues that are being addressed.

Businesses are about collaboration, team work, and people working together . . .

But, I never had a way of dealing with the whole picture. We find that that folks need a deep introduction to what the implications are when you have globally visible persistent collaboration using these very social models and the implications of the business.

Michael Krigsman, of course, is famous for his work in IT project risk—what it takes for projects to succeed and what causes them not to succeed. I saw this as the last leg of the stool for a complete way of delivering these very new, very foreign models, yet highly relevant models, to the way that organizations run their business.

Businesses are about collaboration, team work, and people working together, but we have used things like email, and models that people trust a lot more than these new tools.

There is usually a lot of confusion and uncertainty about what’s really taking place and what the expectations are. And Michael, with Asuret, brings something to the table. When we package it as a service that essentially brings these new capabilities, these new technologies and approaches, it manages the uncertainty about what the expectations are and what people are doing.

Krigsman: Think about business transformation projects—any type. This can be any major IT project, or any other type of business project as well. What goes wrong? If we are talking about IT, it's very tempting to say that the technology somehow screws up. If you have a major IT failure, a project is late, the project is over budget, or the project doesn’t meet expectations or plan, it's extremely easy to point the finger at the software vendor and say, "Well, the software screwed up."

If we look a little bit deeper, we often find the underlying drivers of the project that is not achieving its results. The underlying drivers tend to be things like mismatched expectations between different groups or organizations.

For example, the IT organization has a particular set of goals, objectives, restrictions, and so forth, through which they view the project. The line of business, on the other hand, has its own set of business objectives. Very often, even the language between these two groups is simply not the same.

As another example, we might say that the customer has a particular set of objectives and the systems integrator has its own objectives for the particular project. The customer wants to get it done as fast and as inexpensively as possible. The systems integrator is often—and I shouldn’t make generalizations, but—interested in maximizing their own revenue.

If we look inside each of these groups, we find that inside the groups you have divisions as well, and these are the expectation mismatches that Dion was referring to.

If we look at IT projects or any type of business transformation project, what’s the common denominator? It's the human element. The difficulty is how you measure, examine, and pull out of a project these expectations around the table. Different groups have different key performance indicators (KPIs), different measures of success, and so forth, which create these various expectations.

Amplifying weak signals
How do you pull that out, detect it inside the project, and then amplify what we might call these weak signals? The information is there. The information exists among the participants in the project. How do you then amplify that information, package it, and present it in a way that it can be shared among the various decision-makers, so that they have a more systematic set of inputs for making decisions consistently based on data, rather than anecdote? That’s the common thread.

...We're not selling software. We offer a service, and the service provides certain results. However, we've developed software, tools, methods, techniques, and processes that enable us to go through this process behind the scenes very efficiently and very rapidly.

Rogers: What we discovered in our studies is that one of the fundamental needs in running any type of business project—an SOA project or an Enterprise 2.0 IT project—is the ability to share information and expose that visibility to all parties at levels that will resonate with what matters to them the most, but also bring them outside of their own domain to understand where dependencies exist and how one individual or one system can impact another.

One of the keys, however, is understanding that the measurements and the information need to get past system-level elements. If you design your services around what business elements are there and what matters to the business, then you can get past that IT-oriented view in bringing business stakeholders in aligned management and business goals to what transpires in the project.

Anyway that you can get out—web-based, easy-access dashboard with information—and measure that regularly, you can allow that to proliferate through the organization. Having that awareness can help build trust, and that’s critical for these projects.

Baer: What Dion and Michael are talking about is an excellent idea in terms of that, in any type of environment where there is a lack of communication and trust, data is essential to really steer things. Data, and also assurances with risk management and protection of IT and all that. But, the fact is that there are some real clear hurdles.

An example is this project that my wife is working on at the moment. She was brought in as a consultant to a consulting firm that's working for the client, and each of them have very different interests. This is actually in a healthcare-related situation. They're trying to do some sort of compliance effort, and whoever was the fount of wisdom there postponed the most complex part of this problem to the very end. At the very end, they basically did a Hail Mary pass bringing a few more bodies.

They didn't look for domain expertise or anything. Essentially it's like having eight women be pregnant and having them give birth to a baby in a month. That's essentially the push they are doing.

On top of that, there is also a fear among each tribe of the other coming up with a solution that makes the other tribes look bad. So, I can't tell exactly the feedback from this, but I do know that my wife came in as a process expert. She had a pretty clear view on how to untie the bottlenecks.

Krigsman: We gather a lot of data. The essential elements have been identified during this conversation. ... It's absolutely accurate to look at this tribally. Tony spoke about tribal divisions and the social tribal challenges.

The fundamental trick is how to convert this kind of trust information. Jim was talking about collaborative project governance. All of this relates to the fact that you've got various groups of people. They have their own issues, their own KPIs, and so forth. How do you service issues that could impact trust and then convert that to a form that can then be examined dispassionately. I'd love to use the word "objectively," but we all know that being objective is a goal and it's never outcome that you can ultimately reach.

At least you have a way to systematically and consistently have metrics that you can compare. And then ... when you want to have a fight, at least you are fighting about KPIs, and you don't have people sitting in a conference room saying, "Well, my group thinks this. We believe the project 'blank.' If somebody says the same, my group thinks that." Well, let's have some common data that's collected across the various information silos and groups that we can then share and look at dispassionately.

Schmelzer:... We think that the whole idea of project management is just an increasing fallacy in IT anyway. There is no such thing now. It's really a discrete project.

Can you really say that some enterprise software that you maybe buying or building yourself or maybe even sourcing as a service is really completely disconnected from all the other projects that you have going on or the other technology? The answer is, they are not.

The enterprise is a collection of many different IT projects, some of which are ongoing, some of which may have been perceived to be dead or no longer in development, or maybe some are in the future.

So, it's very hard to do something like discrete project management, where you have a defined set of requirements and a defined timeline and defined budget, and make the assumption or the premise, which is false, that you're not going to be impacting any of the other concurrently running projects.

We think of this like a game of pick-up sticks. The enterprise is a collection of many different IT projects, some of which are ongoing, some of which may have been perceived to be dead or no longer in development, or maybe some are in the future. The idea that you could take any one of those little projects, and manipulate them without impacting the rest of the pile is clearly becoming false.

McKendrick: Michael and Dion, I think you're on the right track. In fact, it's all about organization. It's all about the way IT is organized within the company and, vice-versa, the way the company organizes the IT department. I’ll quote Mike Hammer, the consultant, not the detective, "Automate a mess and you get an automated mess." That's what's been happening with SOA.

Upper management either doesn't understand SOA or, if they do, it's bits and pieces—do this, do that. They read Enterprise Magazine. The governance is haphazard, islands across the organization, tribal. Miko talks about this a lot in his talks about the tribal aspect. They have these silos and different interest groups conflicting.

There's a real issue with the way the whole process is managed. One thing I always say is that the organizations that seem to be getting SOA right, as Michael and Dion probably see with the Enterprise 2.0 world, are usually the companies that are pretty progressive. They have a pretty good management structure and they're able to push a lot of innovations through the organization.

Matsumura:... This type of an approach really reflects the evolution of the best practice of adoption. Some of the themes that we've been talking about today around this sharing of information, communication, and collaboration, are really are essential for success.

I do want to caution just a little bit. People talk about complexity and they create a linkage between complexity and failure. It's more important to try to look at, first of all, the source of the problem. Complexity itself is not necessarily indicative of a problem. Sure, it's correlated, but ice-cream consumption is correlated with the murder rate, just as a function of when temperatures get hot, both things happen to increase. So complexity is also a measure of success and scale.

... The issue it comes down to for me is what Sandy said, which is that the word "trust," which is thrown in at the very end, turns out as extremely expensive. That alignment of organization and trust is actually a really important notion.

What happens with trust is that you can put things behind a service interface. Everything that's behind a service interface has suddenly gotten a lot less complex, because you're not looking at all that stuff. So, the reduction of complexity into manageability is completely dependent on this concept of trust and building it.

Kobielus: ... A dashboard is so important when you are driving a vehicle, and that's what a consolidated view of KPIs and metrics provides. They are a dashboard in the BI sense, and that's what this is, project intelligence dashboard for very complex project or mega programs that are linked projects. In other words, SOA in all of its manifestations.

In organization, you have to steer your enterprise in a different direction. You need obviously to bring together many projects and many teams across many business domains. They all need to have a common view of the company as a whole—its operations, various stakeholders, their needs, and the responsibilities internally on various projects of various people. That's highly complex. So, it’s critical to have a dashboard that's not just a one-way conduit of metrics, from the various projects and systems.

In the BI world, which I cover, most of the vendors now are going like crazy to implement more collaboration and work-flow and more social community-style computing capabilities into their environments. It's not just critical to have everybody on the same page in terms of KPIs, but to have a sideband of communication and coordination to make sure that the organization is continuing to manage collectively according to KPIs and objectives that they all ostensibly agree upon.

Hinchcliffe:... The way the process works is that we come into a client with an end-to-end service. Most organizations—and this is going to be true of Enterprise 2.0 or SOA—are looking at solving a problem. There's some reason why they think that this is going to help, but they're often not sure.

There are often a lot of unstated assumptions about how to apply technology to a business problem and what the outcome is going to be.

We start with this strategy piece that looks at the opportunity and tries to identify that for them and helps them correct the business case to understand what the return on investment (ROI) is going to be. To do that, you really have to understand what the needs of the organization are. So, one of the first things we do is bring Michael's process in, and we try and get ground truths.

There are often a lot of unstated assumptions about how to apply technology to a business problem and what the outcome is going to be. Particularly with SOA, you have so many borders that are typically involved. It's the whole concept around Conway's Law that the architecture tends to look back at the structure of the organization, because those are the boundaries in which everything runs.

One of the ways that we can assure that we have ground truth is by applying this dispassionate measurement process upfront to understand what people's expectations are, what their needs are, and what their concerns are. It's much more than just a risk-management approach. It's a way to get strategic project intelligence in a way that hasn't been possible before. We're really excited about it.

A lot of uncertainty
My specialty has always been focusing on emerging technology. There is always a lot of uncertainty, because people don't know necessarily what it is. They don't know what to expect. They have to have a way of understanding what that is, and you have an array of issues including the fact there are people who aren't willing to normally admit that they don't know things.

But, here is a way to safely and succinctly, on a regular basis, surface those issues and deal with them before they begin to have issues in the project. We then continue on through implementation and then regular assessments on the KPIs that can cause potential issues down the road. I think it's a valuable service. It's low impact, compared to another traditional interview process. This is something most organizations can afford to do on a regular basis.

Krigsman: ... I am so hesitant to use the term psychological, because it has so many connotations associated with it. But, the fact is that we spoke about perception earlier, and there has been a lot of discussion of trust and community and collaboration. All of these issues fundamentally relate to how people work together. These are the drivers of success, and especially the drivers of lack of success on projects of every kind.

It therefore follows that, if we want our projects to be governed well and to succeed, one way or another we have to touch and look at these issues. That’s precisely what we're doing with Asuret and it’s precisely the application that we have taken with Dion into Pragmatic Enterprise 2.0. You have to deal with these issues.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 18th November 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

The idea of things being pervasive is making a comeback. First, IBM redefined the idea of pervasive BI and now Informatica, with the release of PowerCenter 9, has introduced the idea of pervasive data quality. And I would also argue that we should be thinking about the pervasive availability of data: what IBM calls (or called) information on demand and what Informatica is offering through its data services for SOA.

The important point about pervasiveness is that its about little things. Its about the little decisions (micro-decisions) that business people (or automated business processes for that matter) make hundreds of times every day: do we increase your credit rating, do we accept your insurance claim, do we make you a loan? To make those decisions with the minimum amount of stress you need the relevant information, you need to know that it is accurate, and you need to be able to see it right now. So, you need pervasive BI, pervasive data quality and pervasive availability.

Whats essentially new here is the concept of pervasive data quality. The key point here is that data quality touches large numbers of people in the organisation, even if they dont know it. For example, suppose that, as a line of business manager, you have to make some sort of business decision. And suppose further that you knew how reliable the information was that you were going to base that decision on. Would you make the same decision if you knew that the data was 95% accurate or 65% accurate? Almost certainly not: the balance of risk versus reward varies depending on how reliable your information is and with not very accurate data you are more likely to err on the side of caution.

Bottom line: anybody making decisions needs to be able to see data quality metrics (probably via a dashboard) about the information they are using.

In most cases, pervasive data quality wont go further than that. It may not seem like a big change but it is: in most companies, data quality is a back-office activity conducted by a handful of IT people in conjunction with a business analyst or two, plus maybe a data steward. What pervasive does is to take data quality out to the masses: not that they are expected to do data cleansing but that they should be able to see metrics when they need to and, more generally, that they are aware of the issues involved with respect to data that can be trusted, as opposed to not trusted. In time, one might hope that this will lead to a cultural shift whereby staff throughout the organisation recognise the value of high quality data and, indeed, that such a perception itself becomes pervasive.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 5th November 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

If your company uses test and development infrastructures as a proving ground for shared services, virtualization and private cloud environments, you’re not alone. More companies are moving in that direction, according to a Taneja Group survey.

Yet underlying the use of the newer infrastructure approaches lies a budding challenge. The recent Taneja Group survey of senior IT managers working on test/dev infrastructures at North American firms found that 72 percent of respondents said virtualization, on its own, doesn’t address their most important test/dev infrastructure challenges. Some 55 percent rate managing both virtual and physical resources as having a high or medium impact on their success. The market is clearly looking for ways to bridge this gap.

Sharing physical and virtual infrastructures
Despite the confusion in the market about the economics of the various flavors of cloud computing, Dave Bartoletti, a senior analyst and consultant at Taneja Group, says one thing is clear: Enterprises are comfortable with, and actively sharing, both physical and virtual infrastructures internally.

“This survey reaffirms that shared infrastructure is common in test/dev environments and also reveals it’s increasingly being deployed for production workloads,” Bartoletti says. "Virtualization is seen as a key enabling technology. But on its own it does not address the most important operational and management challenges in a shared infrastructure.”

Noteworthy is the fact that 92 percent of test/dev operations are using shared infrastructures, and companies are making significant investments in infrastructure-sharing initiatives to address the operational and budgetary challenges. Half the survey respondents are funding projects in 2009. Another 66 percent of respondents will have funded a project started by the end of 2010.

The survey reveals most firms are turning to private cloud infrastructures to support test/dev projects, and that shared infrastructures are beginning to bridge the gap between pre-production and production silos. A full 30 percent are sharing resource pools between both test/dev and production applications. This indicates a rising comfort level with sharing infrastructure within IT departments.

Virtualization’s cost and control issues
Although 89 percent of respondents use virtualization for test/dev, more than half have virtualized less than 25 percent of their servers. That’s because virtualization adds several layers of control and cost issues that need to be addressed by sharing, process, workflow and other management capabilities in order to fully maximize and integrate both virtual and physical infrastructures.

“Test/Dev environments are one of the most logical places for organizations to begin implementing private clouds and prove the benefits of a more elastic, self service, pay-per-use service delivery model,” says Martin Harris, director Product Management at Platform Computing. “We’ve certainly seen this trend among our own customers and have found that additional management tools enabling private clouds are required to effectively improve business service levels and address cost cutting initiatives.” [Disclosure: Platform Computing is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Despite the heavy internal investments, however, 82 percent of respondents are not using hosted environments outside their own firewalls. The top barriers to adoption: Lack of control and immature technology.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 3rd November 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

... We have a very large, diverse user base that is accessing our applications 24x7x365, and, as a result, we have performance needs all the time for all of our users.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 28th October 2009 Copyright Quocirca © 2009

Virtually every form of endeavour is dependent on access to information and communication in order to provide controls and support for the processes that it entails. While much of this can be accomplished by face-to-face interaction between people or using paper based records, the volumes of information involved and the need to communicate instantly at a distance with increasing numbers of people means that technology is playing a role in most processes. Mobile technology, in particular, can be of great benefit.

However, in many environments it is still paper-based processes that dominate. Quocirca recently interviewed 150 healthcare professionals and 28% thought paper-based processes were so widespread in their workplace that it was a "pen pusher's paradise". This should not be a surprise as there are many critical processes and decisions that have to be made which have far reaching consequences, both medically and financially. Recording the stages of the process to ensure that the right procedures have been followed and who was involved are vital not only for doing what is best for those in care, but also offering the right support and protection to those providing the care, demonstrating compliance with pre-determined procedures in the event of a problem.

There is relentless pressure for increased productivity in healthcare, as in other industries, and consequently the need to automate processes increases. Information captured needs to be verified and shared more readily, and may involve more people in many locations. This means form filling, ticking checklists and getting confirmation signatures and, according to Quocirca's research, security, speed and accuracy of input are the most important factors.

An IT solution based on mobile devices should be able to meet those requirements, but with a wide diversity of technologies and products available, choosing the right elements is a challenge. Despite its widespread use by both commercial organisations and consumers, information technology is relatively fragile; mobile devices break, software crashes and networks connections are lost. In time and life critical environments, these failures can have a profound impact.

There are many reasons why mobile devices might fail, but lack of care or attention by those using them plays a big part. This is rarely a deliberate act on the part of the user and in healthcare often stems from the challenges of the environment workers operate in, where patients are the primary focus for care, not computer hardware.

While few health roles have a need for truly ruggedised technology, improvements in hardware design, sound policies and frequent employee communication have minimised the risk of devices failing. Similarly, the problems associated with software failures can be addressed by choosing simpler and more dedicated or specialised technology. This has the added benefit of users seeing the device as a useful tool for a frontline job, rather than an indication of status only bestowed on managers, or an object of management control.

However, it is still important to look at the specific needs of those who might directly benefit most from the use of mobile IT. Thorough training and ongoing support is necessary to assist all workers transitioning from a paper-based system to mobile technology. It also requires upfront consultation to ensure that automated processes work, and that they will be accepted by staff and any representative trade bodies. In addition to training in basic functionality, there is also a need for ongoing coaching to ensure the new system continues to deliver benefits and does not introduce new complexity or interfere with the primary tasks.

The more complex or intrusive the technology, the more training will be required and the greater the total cost. In the most challenging health environments, like intensive care or emergency response, where workers have many other critical considerations, the last thing they need is to be taking time to learn how to best use the tools at their disposal. It has to become second nature, but all too often training is focused on the technology rather than its use, and is too brief.

The traditional paper-based processes that surround healthcare professionals provide useful controls and guidance but have fallibilities as well as inefficiencies. They are error prone, labour intensive and make it difficult to distribute or process information in a timely fashion. Automating these processes makes sense, and many different mobile technologies, not only the established laptop and PDA, but lightweight simple to use technologies for example Digital Pen and Paper , allow information to be captured, processed and used at the point of need.

The challenge in roles where information processing only plays a secondary part is that much of what IT solutions offer is complex and intrusive. It needs to be kept simple and specific to the task in hand—this is a thought process that not only healthcare, but any industry could benefit from. The research referred to in this article is discussed in Quocirca's report "Light touch, firm impression", which is freely available for download here.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 22nd October 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

I've been ruminating the past few days on why Apple is doing so well with it's pricey high-end products and services during a recession. The answer came as I was reading today's New York Times column by Thomas Friedman, whom I deeply admire and read anything and everything he puts out.

Friedman points out that the winners in today's fast-shifting U.S. job market are the ones demonstrating "entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity." He says, "They are the new untouchables," in contrast to other still highly educated but less creative types.

Friedman cites Harvard University labor expert Lawrence Katz, who explains in the column that the now disadvantaged are "those engineers and programmers working on more routine tasks and not actively engaged in developing new ideas or recombining existing technologies or thinking about what new customers want. ... They’ve been much more exposed to global competitors that make them easily substitutable.”

They are also more likely to be using personal computers with nine-year-old operating systems, with little choice but to take what their companies provide in terms of personal productivity IT. They are the 90 percent for whom good enough IT has made them as good as anyone anywhere.

In contrast, it's the "top half" of the labor pool, and more specifically the apparent 10 percent that are "entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity"-focused among them, that know to succeed and win they need the very best computer and associated services, even if it costs $500 more. Nowadays there's no better way to gain an advantage in business and life than to have the best technology.

The people who are succeeding are buying Macs, iPhones, iPod Touches and Apple's services and applications. A flight to quality is usually spurred by disruption and uncertainty. It's not about brand religion or pretty graphics. It's about survival and success when the going gets tough. It works for me, it has to.

A chef doesn't buy the cheapest knifes. A painter doesn't buy the cheapest brushes. A carpenter doesn't buy the cheapest hammer. And all the winners in the economy today—those that have a say in what they use to do all the digital things so critical now to almost any knowledge- and services-based job—need the best tools. And they will upgrade those tools just as fast as they can (hence the rapid adoption of Apple's Snow Leopard OS X upgrade in recent months.)

So for all those millions of newly laid off workers who know that "entrepreneurship, innovation and creativity" is their only ticket to a new, fresh start—those that no longer have an IT department to tell them what to do (at lowest cost)—they seem to be making a new move to a Mac. I expect they won't soon go back, once they taste the fruits of heightened knowledge productivity.

Because when failure is not an option, you have to have the best tools, especially when the going gets tough. The sad part is that Apple does so well when so many are not.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 9th October 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Corporations, are your business processes slowing you down? If so, you are in good company. Seventy-two percent of organizations say their business processes take too long and need to be streamlined.

So says a new independent survey conducted by Vanson Bourne for Progress Software.

The survey had a single goal, to determine the tools and processes large companies have put in place to support operational responsiveness and the ability to make "real-time" decisions. Vanson Bourne surveyed 400 large companies in the United States and Western Europe to develop its findings.

The bottom line: An overwhelming majority of businesses still feel they have a ways to go before they are equipped to respond to market or customer changes quickly enough to compete well in a global marketplace.

“The quest for faster operational responsiveness is becoming more urgent now that external factors such as social networking have boosted speed of response,” says Dr. Giles Nelson, senior director of strategy at the Apama division of Progress Software. “If organizations can’t keep up with the pace of customer feedback, they will find themselves exposed to competitive threats.”

I recently reached a similar conclusion in a podcast discussion with IT analyst Howard Dresner, with an emphasis on business intelligence (BI) in the stew of real-time requirements. Other firms I've worked with, such as Active Endpoints and BP Logix, call the value "nimble" or the ability to quick orchestrate and adapt processes.

[UPDATE: TIBCO today delivered its iProcess Spotfire product for real-time BI aligned to business process management.]

Sure is a lot of emphasis on real-time data, analysis and process reactivity nowadays! No process like the present, I always say. [Disclosure: TIBCO and Progress are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

On average, 22 percent of U.S. companies surveyed by Vanson Bourne admitted that, by the time they noticed it, they had missed the opportunity to react competitively to a change or trend affecting one of their processes. A lack of information seems to be fueling the problem. More than half of companies identified information gaps in decision-making as a cause.

The good news is that surveyed companies have solutions to the information gap in mind, namely access to real-time data. Ninety-four percent of companies cited the importance of real-time data – and the majority of those companies are making moves to gather it. Some 82 percent are planning to invest in real-time technology by mid-2010 in an effort to speed up internal processes, they said.

As Nelson at Apama sees it, bad news now travels very quickly – and companies need to make sure they’re not stuck in the slow lane when it comes to responding to customer issues.

“The overwhelming majority of people we spoke to recognize the importance of responding quickly to customers and to be much more responsive to changes in market conditions. Unfortunately, in most cases at present the process and information reporting infrastructure can’t match that vision,” Nelson says. “Business Event Processing is becoming the way of dealing with this decision-making lag.”

I'd add a bit more. What we're actually seeing is that corporations now see that they must be able to analyze and act in Internet time. Many of us webby and social-media types have known that for some time, but the urgency has now hit the mainstream bricks (not just the clicks).

Furthermore, the payoffs from becoming a real-time-oriented organization will go far beyond knowing what's being said about you on Twitter. As the economy has shown in the last year, those who can move fast and move well will survive and thrive. The others will find themselves in a downward spiral.

BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post.

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By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 5th October 2009 Copyright Quocirca © 2009

There has been a recent, not-so-subtle, shift in the tone of advertising campaigns for consumer products, which will undoubtedly make it into the business technology world as soon as marketing budgets permit. It follows a curve from the peak of the boom times through the turn downwards to thrift and then to the uncertainty in the decline that follows. No longer is it sufficient to say:

• we offer great stuff: in IT product marketing lingo this is often portrayed as ‘feature packed' or ‘our range of benefits include..' followed by a list of words ending in ‘-bility'
• our prices are lowest: generally turned to expressions such as ‘price-performance ratio' or ‘more bang for the buck' in the technology lexicon

No, the next wave of advertising says ‘we care' and there are even some that say ‘we can be bothered'. This is not a public spirited attempt to demonstrate empathy, but to try to win business. While this may appear like a last desperate throw of the demand creation dice, it does open up some very interesting opportunities for those companies that can really deliver on the promise. However there is a big difference between saying you care, and actually meaning it and doing something about it.

This is particularly true for many companies where technology has had a large impact in the customer interaction and service capabilities. We all recognise the words used to describe service and support, and the perception they might convey if services are badly implemented is somewhat different to the positive impression the provider might have been hoping for:

• ‘your call is important to us' (but not enough for us to put more operators in place)
• ‘call our helpline on 08...' (we make money out of premium rate numbers)
• ‘simply click here for support' (we can blame the internet for the delay)
• ‘use our self service portal' (we don't want to talk to you, it's too expensive)
• ‘please rate this page' (hello? Is anybody there?)
• ‘follow us on Tw...' (anything to stop you actually getting in contact directly)

Generally it is not a fault in the technology itself, but the way it is deployed. There is often a lack of completeness of the solution, one mode or channel is not connected to another or business processes constrained by the physical world have not evolved to meet the ‘Web2.0' speed of online interaction.

The internet makes it simpler to connect millions of customers to thousands of services—one long tail to another—on a common, converged network including telephony and ‘broadcast' media. One global market of the masses. But the problem is that needs of individuals are different and vary with time, location and context, depending on who they are, where they are and what they want at that precise moment.

In this highly connected world there is one group of organisations that have the information available to support a more tailored and precisely pinpointed customer experience—telecoms network operators. Whether in the fixed or mobile domain, they hold subscriber information not only based on demographics, but also past behaviour and current context.

How these organisations choose to exploit this market intelligence about their customers is critical. Operators could choose to offer a range of products and services themselves, way beyond the boundaries of traditional telephony, directly to their subscribers. In some areas they may have success, but the difficult experiences of mobile operators trying to control walled gardens of their own content echoes what occurred in the early days of the internet. It would be far better to act as a smart channel for all others, than a simple seller of a subset of goods.

For too long operators have focussed on the wires, base-stations, masts and antenna as being their most important assets when in reality they are simply basic requirements and the network itself is not a differentiator. The most valuable asset operators have is their subscribers and the business opportunity to be able to offer a conduit for network and context aware services to their partners.

Accurate knowledge about specific customers and their behaviour provides a way to personalise and streamline all elements of customer communications from initially establishing a relationship, through selling to support and the whole lifecycle of services. It will even highlight what leads a customer to move elsewhere, and provide an opportunity to care more about the experiences of customers.

If network operators work with the right partners to use this information sensitively and to the benefit of their subscribers and joint customers, they will certainly be showing they are ‘bothered'. The next step for suppliers showing they really care will probably require a change in attitude from the top, and suitable training of front line staff, but a dose of recession will focus many minds on why caring for customers is good for suppliers too.

Quocirca's report looking at how the provision of e-services may evolve and the role operators might play is freely available here.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd September 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If we can gather all that information, and develop a BI system that can aggregate all this information and provide the analytical capabilities, then you can make very important decisions about trading on energy commodities and investment decisions. Web data services effectively automates this access and extraction of the data and metadata and things of that nature, so that IT doesn't have to go and build a brand new separate BI system every time line of business comes up with a new business scenario.

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

Download a transcript of the podcast and subscribe to the series in iTunes.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 22nd September 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I think the interest in how to protect data, no matter where it is, is what it really boils down to. IT systems exist to manipulate, share, and process data, and the reliance on perimeter security to protect the data hasn’t worked out, as we’ve tried to be more flexible.

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

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By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 22nd September 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

Some time ago I had a bit of a rant about how the overall user experience available in the web today simply doesn't match the expectations of Web 2.0.

Slow response times—or, even worse, inconsistent response times—kill the "cognitive flow" which is presumably where the value of all this "web 2.0" stuff resides. If the user experience of using a web site is painful, you go somewhere else—and if there is nowhere else, you do as little as possible and leave as soon as possible. If you work all day, you "have" to use on-line banking to pay your bills, but if you don't enjoy the experience, you won't be encouraged to think about innovative ways to manage your finances and you probably also won't be tempted to take up the bank's offer to sell you a loan (and go through even more pain) either.

And there's an even more worrying scenario. Companies are widely adopting web communications channels for internal communications. If the user experience of this is frustrating and annoying, internal communications will be disrupted and the effectiveness of the company compromised. How many enthusiasts for Web 2.0 or Process 2.0 have thought of the user experience it provides and how resilient their intended, presumably, good user experience will be? Have they thought of the consequences if "User Experience 2.0" turns out to be dire?

At the end of the last century, this was recognised and addressed at the server end by people like F5 and Citrix, with caching and compression and with moving copies of servers out to the edge of the network. However, you do still need to get the server performance design right—a piece of stupid SQL in your database access code can put end user experience on hold for minutes, or even hours.

Now, however, Ed Robinson, CEO of Aptimize Software has been telling me that 80–90% of the time today, the bottleneck is in the browser. Web pages were simply never designed to carry Web 2.0 loads—embedded pictures, videos, smart applets and so on. If web applications are badly designed, ever time you reload a page there can be dozens of interactions with the server as the browser checks for the latest versions of things that perhaps haven't changed or aren't relevant at the moment.

One aspect of this to consider is the laws of physics. The speed of light in glass fibre is an absolute limit (well, until we get quantum entanglement into routine web applications) and every switch or router in the network path adds more delay. A round trip to a server on the far side of the world takes appreciable time; make too many of them and the user experience turns out to be worse than swimming in treacle (in fact, swimming in treacle apparently isn't too bad, by comparison, because although you meet more resistance, you have more resistance to push against).

Of course, you could always design web applications better—there are established "good practice" principles for web application design. But how many web application developers are seasoned IT professionals with good design skills—even if they are very productive with scripting? And how many SME's could afford to employ an experienced web development team anyway? What you want is an application tool which automatically refactors web designs written to be impressive and work well on a local network, so that they can deliver a consistently good user experience in the real world. And, you want a user experience monitoring tool, so that you can check that you have a problem and whether, in fact, you're fixing it.

Ed Robinson has the first of these tools for sale (and is doing something about the second) and it seems that it's attracting lots of interest—Microsoft for example (where Ed has his background) is using it to make the SharePoint user experience more reliably pleasant. But his sweet spot is with medium size companies at present; small companies want to spend as little as possible at the moment and espouse DIY tuning (although I'd question whether web programming is their real business, in most cases) and big companies can put a professional programming team onto the problem (or, possibly, buy Ed's company).

The Aptimize concept is simple, which is good. It merges the files making up a web page into fewer files, which mean fewer HTTP requests, and faster page load times. It claims to double the speed of SharePoint, ASP.NET or Linux Apache intranets and websites. Even more interestingly, Aptimize is starting to work with Application Performance, to build its WebTuna product into a unified Aptimize, offering the end-to-end monitoring and tuning which is essential for keeping the business connected to its fast-changing website and intranet assets. This could even be a significant part of a COBIT-style Plan/Organise - Acquire/Implement - Deliver/Support - Monitor/Evaluate IT governance process, if web developers bother with such things.

Ed reports hard metrics in support of his claims: Shopzilla found speeding up their pages by 5 seconds resulted in a 25% increase in page views, and a 7–12% increase in revenue, he says (see here, where some other use cases are reported). And in this blog Marissa Mayer (VP of Search product and user experience at Google) is reported describing experiments showing that half a second delay caused a 20% drop in traffic to their site and also killed user satisfaction (although commentators raise some interesting points around the interpretation of her results)..

Aptimize's product seems useful and, I'd suggest, worth taking a look at. But is it going to be enough? Well, I do worry that bad practice is bad practice and that just addressing its symptoms can institutionalise it. Moreover, once you fix one bottleneck another usually appears and it seems possible that Aptimize may mostly fix one kind of problem with one style of web development, albeit both popular ones.

So, I had a chat with a couple of other players in the User Experience space. Bernd Greifeneder of dynaTrace, for example, suggests that people no longer program JavaScript but "squeeze GUI components into ugly AJAX code on the client". Bernd is also concerned about clumsy use of the Hibernate Object Relational mapping framework: "Most customers who use O.R.-mapping (e.g. hibernate) speed development with the O.R. mapper, but then have transactions with hundreds of generated SQL statements in it, of which 90% can be easily eliminated. DBAs tune SQL statements well, but what DBAs don't see is the access layer to the database, and architects are surprised to see with dynaTrace what's going on there". Bernd says he's heard a chief architect complaining that he wasted 5 hours just trying to figure out what one click on the browser caused to happen on the server side—and no matter how much time you waste on the client rendering complex web pages, wasting time in inefficient server code can still be a problem.

Bernd also points out that monitoring real "End User Experience" may not be as straightforward as you might think (dynaTrace integrates with Coradiant for this). Sometimes, all that gets measured is network HTTP request performance or the time taken to load a document. But what about the time the web browser needs for interpreting (or executing in case of Chrome) and rendering that page (which is, as I see it, what Aptimize is mostly addressing) or updating a complex page with loading significant XML content from the server, where rendering takes a lot longer than requesting the content?

Bernd also mentioned that (as well as preparing for the imminent launch of dynaTrace 3.1) dynaTrace is in the process of launching "dynaTrace AJAX edition" on dynaTrace Labs for measuring and diagnosing AJAX applications. "It's available on for early birds, and will be updated in very short cycles" and it focuses on AJAX frameworks and Web 2.0 architecture and performance, rather than debugging.

I also talked to Jim Foley and Alan West (CEO and CTO, respectively) of eoLogic - its eoSense is a debugger and profiler for JAVA EE application server based developments, although its analysis extends out to the client activity. It captures framework, pattern, anti-pattern and best practice knowledge in a codified form that can be used to create abstracted derived models as the application code is exercised. These models are then analysed, as they are created, to detect issues, together with root-cause analysis and possible re-factoring strategies. As you might expect, Jim's experience (presumably, mostly with eoSense customers) is that performance problems still often relate to the sort of architectural and design issues eoSense identifies and addresses, not just to client page performance bottlenecks.

Jim emphasises use of eoSense throughout the lifecycle (or continuously with Agile development), starting at the early stages—fundamental architectural and design issues, if neglected, are the most expensive to deal with in production systems. However, he also says that "the largest portion of our market usage at the moment is in the latter stage testing of applications as performance and other issues manifest themselves as a result of poor architectural QA earlier in the development process". This suggests that the testing and defect-removal marketplace is not terribly mature and bodes well for adoption of Aptimize's approach!

Alan says that the detection of poorly designed web pages is not a major focus for eoSense at present: "to detect some of the problems fixed by Aptimize we would probably have to parse and analyse the contents of the actual webpages and we don't do that, although it is possible. On the plus side we have recently added detection of non-compressed pages and detection of large requests and responses (for Infosys, so these are WebSphere only for the current release)".

Alan does share some of my concerns that the Aptimize approach allows you to fix user experience issues without understanding them at a deep level—which, from one point of view, is great, but it does risk institutionalizing bad practice. He points out: "what if you are masking some other underlying problem—you may have speeded things up by serving your web pages more rapidly but your real problem might be the database. Its important to look at the whole picture [and] you are, to some degree, making yourself dependent on Aptimize".

There are a lot of players with something to say about the "User Experience"—I haven't mentioned Amberpoint, for example, and I'm sure there are others. It is important to match user experience tools to the environment you are developing for and to the issues you have.

In the end there are three things to remember:

• Choose the right metrics and concentrate on the bottlenecks your users actually experience. No matter how many other users experience latency-related Web 2.0 browser delays, if your users have to wait 5 minutes while the server gets their details off a badly-designed database, say, fix that first. Good metrics are vital, so that you can identify real bottlenecks.
• Focus initially on holistic user satisfaction (from surveys, if no better indicators can be found), not just on technical performance metrics. If your users hate using your website because it uses obscure language and has a dreadful colour scheme, telling them how fast it is probably won't keep them coming back to it.
• When you do discover the sources of your users' unhappiness, there are technologies that'll help you to monitor and remove them. They really are worth using! Nevertheless, fixing the root causes as well as the symptoms is probably cost effective in the longer term.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 18th September 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

In a move to meet the growing demand for business process agility, Active Endpoints is readying the next release of its business process management (BPM) suite. The Waltham, Mass.-based modeling tool and process execution firm is rolling out ActiveVOS 7.0 later this month, and I got a sneak peek last week.

Active Endpoints' value has long been modeling, testing, deploying, running and managing business process applications—both system and human tasks. But CEO Mark Taber says version 7 pioneers a new approach to BPM. [Disclosure: Active Endpoints is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“Enterprises are looking to a new generation of process applications to increase agility and improve efficiency. As attractive as building business process applications is, it has been hard for many organizations to do so because the tools have, until now, been too cumbersome, proprietary and expensive,” Taber said. “ActiveVOS 7.0 overcomes these challenges by being innovative, lean, open and affordable.”

What’s new in 7.0?
ActiveVOS 7.0 looks and feels different than its predecessors. For starters, the software has a new design canvas that uses the Business Process Modeling Notation (BPMN) 2.0 specification to create executable BPEL processes. On the innovation front, Active Endpoints points to “structured activities” that accelerate process modeling by offering time-saving drag-and-drop constructions.

In viewing a demo of ActiveVOS 7.0, I was struck by how the business analysts needs are targeted visually, with a rich and responsive interface via the AJAX-based forms designer. The latest version uses the "fit" client approaches, leveraging the better graphics and performance of a RIA. I also liked a ease of the process simulation and improved dashboards and auditing.

Moving the presentation tier power from the server to client gives process designers more flexible access to services directly from forms. These forms can issue standard SOAP calls to access services. The result: end users have direct access to information critical to decision-making.

Finally, Active Endpoints’ latest effort debuts ActiveVOS Central, a customizable application that consolidates user interaction with the BPMN into a single user interface. There’s also support for continuous integration and permalinks for ActiveVOS forms.

Active Endpoints isn’t introducing bells and whistles for the sake of rolling out a new iteration. The company points to key benefits for companies that use version 7: reduced dependence on consultants, application delivery on schedule, and more protection for your investment. All of these features aim to improve productivity and quicken results.

As I told the crew at Active Endpoints: Gone are the days when productivity gains could be realized with a new, faster chip or a better, faster database. Instead, a "new" Moore’s Law has begun to take hold.

This new era law declares that productivity today is better gained from improving business processes and the way human tasks and machines tasks are combined to rapidly improve results. Productivity needs to come from ongoing process innovation and refinement.

ActiveVOS 7.0 ships this month.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 17th September 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Take the BriefingsDirect middleware/ESB survey now.

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By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 17th September 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

Well, there's been some interesting responses to my "MDM tarpit" blog and I have to admit that I was stating a slightly one sided case—but lots of people are explaining how MDM is just wonderful so there's no point in my doing so too.

The point I will accept (and I always have) is that few companies have the luxury of starting from scratch these days—a point also made by Neil Ward-Dutton in "The need for MDM and the role of architecture"—a commentary on my piece made on his blog on this site.

Neil says at one point, "most of the most powerful forces are business forces, and in 99.99% of organisations, their power, when something really big and important happens, will trump any righteous splutterings emanating from IT departments" and at the end of his piece he says: "...have I missed the point?".

Well, yes, I think he has, because he seems to take the old-fashioned view that there is an IT silo and and a Business silo, almost in opposition (and the business gets some sort of divine dispensation for doing it wrong). His piece seems rooted in this old-fashioned siloisation of entirely separate IT and business concerns. Which is one of the routes into the MDM tarpit—like many antipatterns, it is a superficially attractive place to be, until you try to change things and need to get out of it.

In a world where everything runs on software, I don't think this sort of siloisation can be tolerated. IT isn't important in itself, it's a means to a (business) end—and it must be integrated into the business, not merely aligned with it. This isn't just my view: ITIL v3 with its focus on automated business service delivery, not just on IT automation, carries the same message (see, for example, here).

Luckily, the next generation of businesspeople have usually been educated in IT on their way up and have probably decided that pursuing a business career is more fun or more profitable than a career in IT. So the siloisation-based issue (from back from when I was a young DBA) of the IT technicians having to understand the business because the business can't or won't understand IT may be going away. And perhaps the business will now take ownership of the architect's activities as a whole—because they deliver a benefit to the business and the business is (or should be) a major stakeholder in what people think of as "IT architecture".

In other words. when the architects emit "righteous splutterings" these should be coming from within the business, not from a separate "IT group" silo. And if these "splutterings" are ignored, bad consequences will happen—not for the IT people but for the business. And, note, that I'm certainly not suggesting that anybody should pursue aspects of data analysis or architecture that can't be shown to deliver a benefit to the business, although if you work in abstractions, rather than in the physical world, and refrain from instantiating anything that isn't actually useful, the overheads of data analysis and architecture aren't exactly great.

To illustrate this siloisation issue in non-technical terms, using a rather different scenario, think of a business which wants two financial events (balancing payments perhaps) absolutely synchronised on the opposite sides of the world. This is impossible today; in the limit because of latency introduced by the speed of light (which is a lot slower in a fibre network than you might expect). No-one expects business people to understand relativity (although I suspect that a lot of them do these days) any more than they'll understand data analysis, but no matter how much people like Neil think that the business requirement should take precedence over the laws of physics, one of our two financial events will take place before the other—and the business process must take account of this. Sometimes, what the technicians tell you is correct (although it often assumes a whole-lifecycle, rather than a short-term, viewpoint) and the business has to take account of this.

So back to MDM. Yes, I agree that we can't assume that we are starting from a green-field situation, and I was rather amused that Neil used the same merger-and-acquisition situation to justify falling into the tarpit that I did in my blog. However, no matter what compromises are forced upon us, it is always better to work towards "where we want to be" rather than away from it—and this is possible if we can keep both the normative, abstracted model and the physical reality in our heads at one time. I'm not suggesting doing data analysis when it isn't useful and I'm certainly not suggesting that you leave it to the IT group alone—but the disadvantage of ignoring data analysis and making expedient short-term decisions today may be that you find yourself in the tarpit tomorrow, and getting out of it may be even more expensive than investing a little bit in avoiding it.

In other words, although a balance between theory and expediency is needed, I think that (for example) Neil's advice that "functional and business process fit should be the overriding concerns when considering buying packaged applications—it would be foolish to consider the nature of an underlying data model as a purchasing criterion" could turn out to be very bad advice indeed. However, you may only find this out when you try to integrate your packaged solution and its data into your evolving and holistic business processes at some time in the future and find that the data model your package makes you use simply doesn't fit the actual needs of your business as a whole.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 16th September 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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