By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 16th March 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

For many users, one of their only interfaces with information security is via their passwords. Once successfully logged into a system little of the security infrastructure that surrounds them is - or maybe better still should be - visible unless of course something goes wrong.

Unfortunately passwords are a nightmare to manage.

On the one hand we insist that passwords should be difficult to guess, and on the other hand we insist that users never write their passwords down. Never before have we expected so much of our users, and never before have we laid ourselves open to such ridicule.

This article will explore some issues about passwords, password management and user's attitudes to the use of passwords. It is based on a webinar presentation given on 9/3/10 which is available for downloading.

Password 101: Creating Correct Passwords
Organisations all seem to have their own take on the correct use of passwords, but the basics of password creation seem to remain the same;

• The password should be over 6 characters long, ideally around 12 or 14
• Each password should contain a mix of numbers and symbols, lowercase and uppercase letters
• The chosen password should not be in a dictionary, have number or letter sequences or contain information that can be guessed - such as the name of a partner, pet or child

And then we insist it should be easy to remember!

To complicate matters further, some organisations put in place password expiration policies, so that a given password will expire on a regular basis - maybe every 30 days. This can be implemented using system administration tools and users can normally be prevented from entering recently used passwords. This process of refreshing passwords may address issues such as brute force attacks, with the password being changed before an attacker has successfully tried every combination of letters and numbers, but the downside is that some systems allow passwords to be changed by simply adding an incremental number to the end of the password - hardly big time security.

It is better to break down the process of creating a passphrase into logical steps that allows users to form their own more robust secret code.

The first step is to think of a sentence. This can be as ridiculous as a user can think of, within reason. The most important point is that it means something to them, and hopefully only them. This phrase is then broken down into a row of letters that is then further mangled by the addition of extra characters, numbers and symbols.

The resultant pass code should be secure against most types of attack, assuming the user doesn't write it down... Of course therein lies the flaw as the world's most secure passphrase is only as secure as the post it note it is written on.

Password Implementations
Unfortunately, even with seemingly secure passwords we have been let down by the implementation of security systems.

One of the most famous is the LAN Manager hash (or LM hash), an algorithm that is very old dating back to the original days of Microsoft LAN Manager, a networking application that was sold in the early 1990's. The LM hash uses DES, or Data Encryption Standard, which is a well known block cipher. Out of interest DES is showing its age and is now considered no longer fit for purpose as it only has a 56-bit key size, small enough to be brute force attacked within a few hours, but this is not the issue at hand.

In this case, the insecurity of the system is more in the way the security has been implemented rather than the specifics of DES itself. In essence the implementation of LM hash in Lan Manager introduced weaknesses many years ago and which still haunt us today.

This is how daft the implementation of LM Hash is;

• First, passwords are restricted to the ANSI character set. As we have seen this produces a smaller number of character options for a hacker to attack.
• Second, any password longer than 7 characters is divided into two and hashed separately. This basically creates two small targets to attack.
• And finally, all lower case letters are changed to uppercase letters before the hash is computed, again further reducing the combination of letters that need to be guessed.

This has resulted in a weak password model that has been carried forward into later versions of Windows to ensure backwards compatibility, and it is only later versions of Windows such as Vista that switch off this capability by default.

In this case the implementation of the security system has let us down, not the user and their passwords.

Dictionary Words and Crackers
One of the cardinal rules of passwords given to users is Don't use dictionary words. This is often met with a degree of incredulity as they cannot fathom out how anyone could possibly work out their password as there are lots of words in the dictionary.

Password crackers have been around for a long time, and are now very sophisticated pieces of software.

Popular password crackers often have huge lists of standard words. For example the John the Ripper password cracker has a set of word lists in over 20 languages plus lists of common passwords and derivatives (or mangled words) including: Afrikaans, Croatian, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Latin, Norwegian, Polish, Russian, Spanish, Swahili, Swedish, Turkish, and Yiddish.

This amounts to in excess of 40 million entries that can be quickly searched. To put that into context the Oxford English Dictionary has around 170,000 entries covering contemporary English language words.

Brute force attacks can often break passwords relatively quickly which shocks users. Here are some examples for a "fast" PC;

Password: karen
Possible combinations:  >300 million
Time to brute force: 5 minutes

Password: Kraz4uw
Possible combinations:  >3.5 trillion
Time to brute force: 41 days

Password: Kr&46ugH
Possible combinations:  >7.2 quadrillion
Time to brute force: 229 years

Without dwelling on the mathematics this provides an example of an exponential rise in the time to brute force an attack on passwords, and many end users are shocked to see the huge difference a few different characters can make to thwarting  such an attack.

Of course these numbers refer to an average fast PC. The computer power available to large security agencies can significantly reduce the time to crack a password, and the final example could possibly be cracked within 3 months rather than 229 years with the right application of computer horse power.

This is why we insist that passwords are changed every 30 days or so, so that if a brute force attack is underway then it has less chance of succeeding. Users generally love it when you explain things in more simple terms and they get to see the reasons WHY we insist their passwords are structured in such a way. 

Passwords from Real Life
As we have seen, passwords are often the most irritating, badly implemented and annoying parts of an IT security system.

In December 2009, there was a major breach of security at the social networking site RockYou that resulted in 32 million user accounts being released into the wild. Amazingly it was reported that all user account data was stored in plain text, including the user's passwords. The site appears to have been compromised by a relatively simple SQL Injection Attack.

Of course the release of so much private data is a major problem and no doubt has caused some of the users considerable angst. From a security research point of view this is an opportunity to undertake an analysis of real live user data and get to understand contemporary password usage and management. It also enables us to learn from others mistakes and understand how to implement website security properly.

Bizarrely the RockYou system only supported passwords that were between 5 and 15 characters long and the site prevented, or at least actively dissuaded, the use of mixed case, numbers or punctuation in passwords.

Passwords were stored in plain text and then emailed, again in plain text, to the user. Due to their attempt to integrate with other social network sites the RockYou site also encouraged users to enter credentials for other social networking sites into the RockYou site, possibly putting in place a longer chain of insecurities.

A lot of users chose passwords whose length was equal or below six characters and almost 60% of users chose their passwords from a limited set of alpha-numeric characters. Nearly 50% of users used names, slang words, dictionary words or trivial passwords and the most common password among Rockyou.com account owners is 123456

Now I wonder if people were a bit more blasé about this website than they would have been if it was their bank account? You would hope so, but it wouldnt be a surprise if these users were just as bad when managing their online bank account security. Or is it that people are fed up being told what to do and are rebelling against computer security? We dont really know!

We have seen that users will still opt for the easy solution. It is not suggested that a site such as RockYou is a perfect example of a typical organisational IT system, as being a social networking site users are probably young and maybe not too concerned about security of their data in this instance.

The problem arises when they bring such attitudes to the work place and the finance system is protected by such flimsy and ill thought out passwords.

Password management is a nightmare, and an aspect of information security that keeps many CISOs awake at night. The cost of managing passwords only ever seems to increase with the technical support function bearing the cost of the Monday morning password reset calls. The sooner we can manage passwords with greater effect the better.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Nowadays, CIOs need to both cut costs and increase performance. Energy has never been more important in working toward this productivity advantage.

It's now time for IT leaders to gain control over energy use—and misuse—in enterprise data centers. More often than not, very little energy capacity analysis and planning is being done on data centers that are five years old or older. Even newer data centers don’t always gather and analyze the available energy data being created amid all of the components.

Finally, smarter, more comprehensive energy planning tools and processes are being directed at this problem. It requires a lifecycle approach from the data centers to more toward fuller automation.

And so automation software for capacity planning and monitoring has been newly designed and improved to best match long-term energy needs and resources in ways that cut total costs, while gaining the available capacity from old and new data centers.

Such data gathering, analysis and planning can break the inefficiency cycle that plagues many data centers where hotspots can mismatch cooling needs, and underused and under-needed servers are burning up energy needlessly. These so-called Smart Grid solutions jointly cut data center energy costs, reduce carbon emissions, and can dramatically free up capacity from overburdened or inefficient infrastructure.

By gaining far more control over energy use and misuse, solutions such as Hewlett Packard's (HP) Smart Grid for Data Center can increase capacity from existing facilities by 30–50 percent.

This podcast features two executives from HP to delve more deeply into the notion of Smart Grid for Data Center. Now join Doug Oathout, Vice President of Green IT Energy Servers and Storage at HP, and John Bennett, Worldwide Director of Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Bennett: Data center transformation (DCT) is focused on three core concepts, and energy is another key focus for that all to work. The drivers behind data center transformation are customers who are trying to reduce their overall IT spending, either flowing it to the bottom-line or, in most cases, trying to shift that spending away from management and maintenance and onto business projects.

We also see increasing mandates to improve sustainability. It might be expressed as energy efficiency in handling energy costs more effectively or addressing green IT.

DCT is really about helping customers build out a data center strategy and an infrastructure strategy. That is aligned to their business plans and goals and objectives. That infrastructure might be a traditional shared infrastructure model. It might be a fabric infrastructure model of which HP’s converged infrastructure is probably the best and most complete example of that in the marketplace today. And, it may indeed be moving to private cloud or, as I believe, some combination of the above for a lot of customers.

The secret is doing so through an integrated roadmap of data-center projects, like consolidation, business continuity, energy, and such technology initiatives as virtualization and automation.

Energy has definitely been a major issue for data-center customers over the past several years. The increased computing capability and demand has increased the power needed in the data center. Many data centers today weren’t designed for modern energy consumption requirements. Even data centers that were designed even five years ago are running out of power, as they move to these dense infrastructures. Of course, older facilities are even further challenged. So, customers can address energy by looking at their facilities.

Increasingly, we're finding that we need to look at management—managing the infrastructure and managing the facilities in order to address the energy cost issues and the increasing role of regulation and to manage energy related risk in the data center.

That brings us not only to energy as a key initiative in DCT, but on Smart Grid for Data Center as a key way of managing it effectively and dynamically.

Oathout: We're really talking about is a problem around energy capacity in data centers. Most IT professionals or IT managers never see an energy bill from the utility. It's usually handled by the facility. They never really concentrate on solving the energy consumption problem.

Where problems have arisen in the past is when a facility person says that they can’t deploy the next server or storage unit, because they're out of capacity to build that new infrastructure to support a line of business. They have to build a new data center. What we're seeing now is customers starting to peel the onion back a little bit, trying to find out where the energy is going, so they can increase the life of their data center.

To date, very few clients have deployed comprehensive software strategies or facility strategies to corral this energy consumption problem. Customers are turning their focus to how much energy is being absorbed by what and then, how do they get the capacity of the data center increase so they can support the new workloads.

What we're seeing today is that software, hardware, and people need to come together in a process that John described in DCT, an energy audit, or energy management.

All those things need to come together, so that customers can now start taking apart their data center, from an analysis perspective, to find out where they are either over-provisioned or under-provisioned, from a capacity standpoint, so they know where all the energy is going. Then, they can then take some steps to get more capability out of their current solution or get more capability out of their installed equipment by measuring and monitoring the whole environment.

The concept of converged infrastructure applies to data center energy management. You can deploy a particular workload onto an IT infrastructure that is optimally designed to run efficiently and optimally designed to continually run in an efficient way, so that you know you're getting the most productive work from the least energy and the more energy efficient equipment infrastructure sitting underneath it.

As workloads grow over time, you then have the auditing capability built into the software ... so that you can add more resources to that pool to run that application. You're not over-provisioning from the start and you're not under-provisioning, but you're getting the optimal settings over time. That's what's really important for energy, as well as efficiency, as well as operating within a data center environment.

You must have tools, software, and hardware that is not only efficient, but can be optimized and run in an optimized way over a long period of time.

The key to that is to understand where the power is going. One of the first things we recommend to a client is to look at how much power is being brought into a data center and then where is it going.

What you want to do is start collecting that information through software to find out how much power is being absorbed by the different pieces of IT equipment and associate that with the workloads that are running on them. Then, you have a better view of what you're doing and how much energy you're using.

Then, you can do some analysis and use some applications like HP SiteScope to do some performance analysis, to say, "Could I match that workload to some other platform in the infrastructure or am I running it in optimal way?"

Over time, what you can do is you can migrate some of your older legacy workloads to more efficient newer IT equipment, and therefore you are basically building up a buffer in your data center, so that you can then go deploy new workloads in that same data center.

You use that software to your benefit, so that you're freeing up capacity, so that you can support the new workload that the businesses need.

The energy curve today is growing at about 11 percent annually, and that's the amount IT is spending on energy in a data center.

Bennett: That's really key, Doug, as a concept, because the more you do at this infrastructure level, the less you need to change the facilities themselves. Of course, the issue with facilities-related work is that it can affect both quality of service and outages and may end up costing you a pretty penny, if you have to retrofit or design new data centers.

Oathout: Smart Grid for Data Centers gives a CIO or a data-center manager a blueprint to manage the energy being consumed within their infrastructure. The first thing that we do with a Data Center Smart Grid is map out what is hooked up to electricity in the data center, everything from PDUs, UPSs, and error handlers to the IT equipment servers, networking and storage. It's really understanding how that all works together and how the whole topology comes together.

The second thing we do is visualize all the data. It's very hard to say that this server, that server, or that piece of facilities equipment uses this much power and has this kind of capacity. You really need to see the holistic picture, so you know where the energy is being used and understand where the issues are within a data center.

It's really about visualizing that data, so you can take action on it. Then, it's about setting up policies and automating those procedures to reduce the energy consumption or to manage energy consumption that you have in the data center.

Today, our servers and our storage are much more efficient than the ones we had three or four years ago, but we also add the capability to power cap a lot of the IT equipment. Not only can you get an analysis that says, "Here is how much energy is being consumed," you can actually set caps on the IT equipment that says you can’t use more than this. Not only can you monitor and manage your power envelope, you can actually get a very predictable one by capping everything in your data center.

You know exactly, how much the max power is going to be for all that equipment. Therefore, you can do much better planning. You get much more efficiency out of your data center, and you get more predictable results, which is one of the things that IT really strives for, from an SLA to getting those predictable results, day in and day out.

So, really Data Center Smart Grid for the infrastructure is about mapping the infrastructure. It's about visualizing it to make decisions. Then, it's about automating and capping what you’ve got, so you have better predictable results and you're managing it, so that you are not having out wires, you're not having problems in your data centers, and you're meeting your SLA.

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

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 22nd February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Improved data center productivity now appears to be a natural progression from converged infrastructure. Many enterprise data centers have embraced a shared service management model to some degree, and now converged infrastructure applies the shared service model more broadly to leverage modular system design and open standards, as well as to advance proven architectural frameworks.

The result is a realignment of traditional technology silos into adaptive pools that can be shared by any application, as well as optimized and managed as ongoing services. Under this model, resources are dynamically provisioned efficiently and automatically, gaining more business results productivity. This also helps rebalance IT spending away from a majority of spend on operations and more toward investments, innovations, and business improvements.

This latest BriefingsDirect discussion explores the benefits of a converged infrastructure approach, and now how to better understand attaining a transformed data center environment. We'll see how converged infrastructure provides a stepping stone to private cloud initiatives. But, as with any convergence, there are a lot of moving parts, including people, skills, processes, services, outsourcing options, and partner ecosystems.

We're here with two executives from Hewlett-Packard (HP) to delve deeply into converged infrastructure and to learn more about how to get started and deal with some of the complexity, as well as to know what to expect as payoff. Please welcome Doug Oathout, Vice President, Converged Infrastructure at HP Storage, Servers, and Networking, and John Bennett, Worldwide Director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Bennett: I often think of many CIOs as being at the heart of a vise, where, on one side, they have the business pressures. ... They need to support growth. They need to do a faster job of creating acquisitions. They need to spend more on business projects and innovation. They need to exploit technology for business advantage. They need to reduce costs.

On the other side of the vise are the constraints that they have in the environment that get in the way of them successfully addressing the business needs—legacy infrastructure and applications and antiquated methods of managing the infrastructure that make it difficult to be responsive to change, or people with the skills that won’t serve modern technology's needs or environments.

Data-center transformation (DCT) helps enterprises implement a data center and infrastructure strategy that's aligned to their goals and objectives. The key here is that it's customer-driven, and it has to be built around the plans and directions of the targeted organization. This is clearly not a one-size-fits-all type of environment.

For many organizations, those strategies for infrastructure can include traditional shared infrastructure solutions or servers using virtualization and automation with shared storage environments. Increasingly, we've seen a natural evolution into a tighter integration of the capabilities and assets of the data center in the fabric infrastructure.

HP's Converged Infrastructure represents a pretty significant step forward in terms of benefits and capabilities for customers looking at having infrastructure strategy aligned to their future needs. The neat thing is that converged infrastructure can be the foundation for private cloud architectures.

Oathout: About two-thirds, if not 70 percent, of the IT operations budget is spent on maintaining IT and the IT workload within the data center.

When you have a recession, like we just experienced, what happens is that 30 percent spent on innovation or new workload placement gets cut immediately to help manage the budget within an organization. Therefore, in the last 18 months, very little innovation and few new projects were taken on by IT to support new business growth.

Now we have customers who are starting to spend again and who are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They want their IT environment to be more flexible in the future. So, they're looking at their server and storage upgrades, and how they can implement converged infrastructure, so that the new infrastructure is more flexible and can adapt more to the requirements of the business.

As you're going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment. You can also use better and more efficient processes—virtualization, automation, and management. When you put those pools of resources in place, you put them in a virtual environment so they can be shared among applications or can be transferred among applications when needed.

You are in the process now of creating pools of resources, versus dedicated silo resources, like you had prior to the recession, which couldn’t be reused for some of the application, and therefore you couldn’t support business growth.

The opportunity now is to break down those silos, give our customers the ability to share resources in the same footprint they have today, and actually become more efficient, so that when business changes or business needs change, they can adapt to the requirements of the business.

In a converged infrastructure environment, you really don’t want to care about the infrastructure you are putting it on. What you want to care about is that it's resilient, it's optimized, and it's modular, so it can grow and shrink with the application's demand.

Let me give you an example. A server consolidation using virtualization and new server equipment will generally double or triple your capacity within your data center for the same footprint, just by getting the utilization of the servers up, better performance within the servers, and better capabilities within virtual environments. You can basically double or even triple the size of your capacity within your data center.

The same thing holds true for storage. Storage disk drives become twice as dense over a two- or three-year period. The performance of the drives gets better. So, for the same footprint in your data center you can actually fit twice as much storage.

... What you really have is a process change that's required between the IT application managers, the test and development people, and a team that actually runs the infrastructure. They need to talk more about standardization. They need to talk about how their IT comes together.

That's where the Data Center Transformation Workshop that John Bennett's team does helps. It gives you an architecture for future deployments, so that you have a converged infrastructure. You have pools of resources to put new applications down or revamp older applications onto a newer architecture, so it becomes more flexible.

You have to break down that silo or break down that fence between application deployments and what line of businesses are telling the application deployers and the people who run the infrastructure. Customers really do see that as a deployment barrier, but they're working through it, because there are significant benefits on the other side, just due to the fact that you increase agility, lower cost, and you have more money and more people to go do the innovation to support the workloads of future businesses.

Bennett: Good organizations are always rethinking IT. What are the organization's strategy, goals, and objectives? What is it going to take to realize those objectives? What capabilities do we need from IT in order to make those real? And then, how do we make them happen?

This is where the partnership between the technology team and the business team comes into play. The technology team will have more insights into how it can be exploited, and the key thing for the business is to make sure they specify their needs and not specify the answer.

... There's economic return to the organization from being able to roll out a new business service more quickly. There's an economic return to the business from being able to provision more resources when they are needed based on demand, so that demand doesn't disappear. There's a competitive business benefit, which is financial in nature, in being able to respond to competitive threats more quickly.

And a lot of the benefits of this are in the nature of direct cost savings—the consolidation, modernization, and virtualization that Doug spoke to—the savings from energy related projects and investments with Data Center Smart Grid, for example. All are easily quantifiable.

Oathout: A cloud-computing environment is really an application-rich environment that allows you to bring more users on quickly and expand your capabilities and shrink your capabilities as you need them.

Converged infrastructure can be for public cloud, private cloud, or for a web workload or an high-performance computing (HPC) workload or an SAP workload. It doesn't really matter. A converged infrastructure is the optimal deployment of IT to support any kind of application, because it's modular in nature.

It has the flexibility to have more storage, more memory, less CPUs or more CPUs, less storage, or less memory, but it's all modular, so you can put the pieces together as you need them. So, it is a base support for either a cloud environment or a traditional IT environment. It really doesn't matter. It's designed to support both.

A private cloud is the IT department saying, "I'm now going to create a service catalog for my lines of business to develop upfront." You're getting software as a service (SaaS) now sitting on top of either a converged infrastructure or legacy infrastructure. A converged infrastructure is a lot easy to put SaaS on. But, you make that service catalog available to line of businesses, so they can turn on applications as they need them, very quickly.

Then, you can put more users on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, an online application, or a Web 2.0 application. IT is there as a support service now, setting that up, taking it down, and optimizing it over time, depending on the business needs.

So, private cloud is kind of that SaaS that sits on either a converged infrastructure or a legacy infrastructure or uniquely designed infrastructures that you get from some of the public cloud providers. Converged infrastructure is the optimal way to develop and deploy that in a standard data-center environment, and it's in support of a private cloud.

When you start bringing a storage and server and networking platforms together through a flexible fabric, the economies of scale of a shared resources and open systems is going to drive down the cost of acquiring IT. Then, with the software and the services capabilities that companies bring to market, they're going to bring the efficiencies along with them.

So, it is inevitable, starting with the simplest of workloads, moving to some of the hardest of workloads, that you are going to have a converged infrastructure. You are going to have application as a service, whether it's internal or external from a cloud provider, just because the economies of scale are there, and the ability to deploy the stuff is so simple once you get it set up that the efficiencies are also there besides the economies of purchase.

For example, a customer, the Dallas Cowboys, built a new football stadium in the Dallas area. It's a $1.4 billion investment. In the bottom of the thing is their data center. They run 30 different businesses out of the data center in the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

They have built it on a virtual environment. They have BladeSystems. They have the FlexFabric built into the environment. They went from over 500 servers down to 16 blades, with virtual machines running on them for the point of sale environment within the stadium. It drove a smaller footprint, but also the dynamics in the server and storage environment, so they can bring on new applications for the 30 businesses very quickly.

They changed their infrastructure to support their environment. ... They bring applications online and very reactive to the lines of businesses they are supporting. That's what a converged infrastructure really delivers, besides the lower economic cost that John and I have talked about. It's that efficiency to bring new opportunities to the lines of businesses, accelerate business growth, or increase customer satisfaction.

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

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 18th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is pushing deeper into the cloud opportunity with new consulting services that aim to help businesses and government agencies speed cloud-based infrastructure adoption and respond more quickly to market demands for efficiency.

Dubbed HP Cloud Design Service, the new offering advises organizations how to quickly design and deploy scalable, cloud-based infrastructures. HP's consulting services come with risk mitigation in mind and support a hybrid sourcing model that encompass private and public cloud options. HP promises its approach will allow organizations to consume and deliver services that support varied workloads. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

"There's a lot of hype out there, and organizations just can't deal with cool, exciting cloud concepts in a vacuum," says Flynn Maloy, vice president of marketing for HP's Technology Services group. "If you even make a tiny pull of cloud services into your IT environment, it touches everything else in the environment. Our HP Cloud Design Service looks at the big picture."

Anatomy of HP Cloud Design
HP is basing the new consulting services on its own experience with demanding cloud environments, including work with the Defense Information Systems Agency to design a cloud infrastructure solution that accelerates the process of provisioning computing services for U.S. military applications.

A year ago companies were skeptical. Last year they were running pilots. Now, companies are trying to figure out how to leverage cloud innovations internally.

Here's how HP's Cloud Design Service works: First, HP explores a client's business and technical requirements, as well as existing IT investments. HP then creates a customized cloud infrastructure design blueprint and implementation plan, complete with cost estimates and deployment, testing, operational management, service lifecycle management, government and support guidelines.

HP outlines four key benefits of its cloud consulting service: access to a common, flexible framework for cloud engagements, faster time to delivery with mitigated implementation risks, reduced technology redundancies, and the ability to leverage existing HP and non-HP technology investments. The result, according to HP, is a cloud-specific infrastructure that's safe and effective – and meets business objectives.

Mapping the cloud
HP's Cloud Design Service builds on existing HP efforts in the cloud, including the Cloud Discovery Workshop and the Roadmap Service. The Cloud Design Service acts as the next step in an organization's move into the cloud. The updates this week follow earlier moves last summer on cloud consulting services.

As Maloy describes it, the new service sends HP's cloud consultants into an organization's IT environment with sleeves rolled up, ready to help design and build an architecture that leverages the benefits of a shared internal cloud while offering access to external public clouds.

The big question is, are organizations ready to move beyond private clouds to public clouds? Maloy says organizations are kicking the tires, trying to figure out how to bring public cloud innovations into the enterprise. HP, he says, has established best practices to do this safely.

"A year ago companies were skeptical. Last year they were running pilots. Now, companies are trying to figure out how to leverage cloud innovations internally," Maloy says. "Our HP Reference Architecture for Cloud is part of the Cloud Design Service. It has all of the elements we think a robust, well-designed environment takes into account."

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: 9th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Volume 50, focuses on the fallout from the Google’s threat to pull out of China, due to a series of sophisticated hacks and attacks on Google, as well as a dozen more IT companies. Due to the attacks late last year, Google on Jan. 12 vowed to stop censoring Internet content for China’s web users and possibly to leave the country altogether.

This ongoing tiff between Google and the Internet control authorities in China’s Communist Party-dominated government have uncorked a Pandora’s Box of security, free speech and corporate espionage issues. There are human rights issues and free speech issues, questions on China’s actual role, trade and fairness issues, and the point about Google’s policy of initially enabling Internet censorship and now apparently backtracking.

But there are also larger issues around security and Internet governance in general. Those are the issues we’ll be focusing on today. So, even as the U.S. State Department and others in the U.S. federal government seek answers on China’s purported role or complicity in the attacks, the repercussions on cloud computing and enterprise security are profound and may be long-term.

We’re going to look at some of the answers to what this donnybrook means for how enterprises should best protect their intellectual property from such sophisticated hackers as government, military or, quasi-government corporate entities and whether cloud services providers like Google are better than your average enterprise, or especially medium-sized business, at thwarting such risks.

We'll look at how users of cloud computing should trust or not trust providers of such mission-critical cloud services as email, calendar, word processing, document storage, databases, and applications hosting. And we’ll look at how enterprise architecture, governance, security best practices, standards, and skills need to adapt still to meet these new requirements from insidious world-class threats.

So, join me now in welcoming our panel for today’s discussion: Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink; Jim Hietala, Vice President for Security at The Open Group; Elinor Mills, senior writer at CNET, and Michael Dortch, Director of Research at Focus. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Mills: We now have a huge first public example of a company coming out and saying, not only that they've been attacked—companies don’t want to admit that ever and it’s all under the radar—but also they’re pointing the fingers. Even though they're not specifically saying, "We think it’s the Chinese state," but they think enough of it that they're willing to threaten to pull out of the country.

It’s huge and it’s going to have every company reevaluating what their response is going to be—not just how they’re going to do business in other countries, but what is their response going to be to a major attack.

Bloomberg: It’s not as big of a wakeup call as it should be. You can ask yourself, "Is this an attack by some small cadre of renegade hackers or is this attack by the government of the People’s Republic of China? That’s an open question at this point.

Who is the victim? Is it Google, a corporation, or the United States? Is it the western world that is the victim here? Is this a harbinger of the way that international wars are going to be fought down the road?

We’ve all been worried about cyber warfare coming, but we maybe don’t recognize it when we see it as a new battlefield. It's the same as terrorism. It’s not necessarily clear who the participants are.

When you place the enterprise into this context, well, it’s not necessarily just that you have a business within the context of a government subject to particular laws of particular government, you have the supernational, where large corporations have to play in multiple jurisdictions. That’s already a governance challenge for these large enterprises.

We already have this awareness that every single system on our network has to look out for itself and, even then, has levels of vulnerability.

Now, we have the introduction of cyber warfare, where we have concerted professional attacks from unknown parties attacking unknown targets and where it’s not clear who the players are. Anybody, whether it’s a private company, a public company, or a government organization is potentially involved.

That basically raises the bar for security throughout the entire organization. We’ve seen this already, where perimeter-based security has fallen by the wayside as being insufficient. We already have this awareness that every single system on our network has to look out for itself and, even then, has levels of vulnerability. This just takes it to the national level.

Kobielus: I don’t see anything radically or fundamentally new going on here. This is just a big, powerful, and growing world power, China, and a big and growing world power on a tech front Google, colliding. ... There has always been corporate espionage and there’s always been vandalism perpetrated by companies against each other through subterfuge, and also by companies or fronts operating as the agent of unseen foreign power. ... This is international real-politic as usual, but in a different technological realm.

Hietala: In terms of the visibility it’s gotten and the kinds of companies that were attacked, it’s a little bit game-changing. From the information security community perspective, these sorts of attacks have been going on for quite a while, aimed at defense contractors, and are now aimed at commercial enterprises and providers of cloud services.

I don’t think that the attacks per se are game-changing. There’s not a lot new here. It’s an attack against a browser that was couple of revs old and had vulnerability. The way in which the company was attacked isn’t necessarily game-changing, but the political ramifications around it and the other things we’ve just been talking about are what make it a little game-changing.

Dortch: This puts Google in the very interesting position of having to decide. Is it a politically neutral corporation or is it a protector of the data that its clients around the world, not just here, and not just from governments but corporations? Is it a protector and an advocate of protection for the data that those clients have been trusted to it? Or, is it going to use the fact that it is a broker of all that data to sort of throw its muscle around and take on governments like China’s in debates like this.

The implications here are bigger than even what we’ve been discussing so far, because they get at the very nature of what a corporation is in this brave new network world of ours.

Gardner: This boils down to almost two giant systems or schools of thought that are now colliding at a new point. They've collided at different points in the past on physical sovereignty, military sovereignty, and economic sovereignty. The competition is between what we might call free enterprise based systems and state sponsorship through centralized control systems.

Free enterprise won, when it came to the cold war, but it's hard to say what's going to happen in the economic environment where China is a different beast. It's state sponsored and it's also taking advantage of free enterprise, but it's very choosy about what it allows for either one of those systems to do or to dominate.

When you look at Google, Google made itself into a figurehead of representing what a free enterprise approach could do. It's not state sponsored or nationalistic. It's corporate sponsored. So, it would be interesting to see who has the better technology, who has the better financial resources, and ultimately who has the organizational wherewithal to manifest their goals online that wins out in the marketplace.

If an organized effort is better at doing this than a corporate one, well then they might dominate. But so far, we've seen a very complex system that the marketplace—with choice, and shedding light and transparency on activities—ultimately allows for free enterprise predominance. They can do it better, faster, cheaper and that it will ultimately win.

I think, we're really on the cusp here of a new level of competition, but not between countries or even alliances, but really between systems. The free enterprise system versus the state-sponsored or the centralized or the controlled system. It should be very interesting.

Bloomberg: ... If anything, cloud environments reduce the level of security.

They don’t increase it for the very reason that we don’t have a way of making them sovereign in their own right. They’re always not only subject to the laws of the local jurisdiction, but they’re subject to any number of different attacks that could be coming from any different location, where now the customers aren’t aware of this sort of vulnerability.

So, “Trust, but verify,” is a good point, but how can you verify, if you’re relying on a third party to protect your data for you? It becomes much more difficult to do the verification. I'd say that organizations are going to be backing away from cloud, once they realize just how risky cloud environments are.

Mills: Microsoft’s general counsel Brad Smith recently gave a keynote at the Brookings Institute Forum, and he talked about modernizing and updating the laws to adapt specifically to the cloud. That included privacy rights under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act being more clearly defined, updating the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act, and setting up a framework so that differences in the regulations and practices in various countries can be worked out and reconciled.

Hietala: I don’t think there is a silver-bullet cloud provider out there that has superior security to have that position. All enterprises still are going to have to be at the top of their game, in terms of protecting their assets, and that extends to small or medium businesses.

At some point, you could see a cloud provider stake out that part of the market to say, "We’re going to put in a superior set of controls and manage security to a higher degree than a typical small-to-medium business could," but I don’t see that out there today.

Dortch: Many small businesses outsource payroll processing, customer relationship management (CRM), and a whole bunch of things. A lot of that stuff is outsourced to cloud service providers, and companies haven’t asked enough questions yet about exactly how cloud providers are protecting data and exactly how they can reassure that nothing bad is going to happen to it.

For example, if their servers come under attack, can they demonstrate credibly how data is going to be protected. These are the types of questions that incidents like this can and should raise in the minds of decision-makers at small and mid-sized businesses, just as they're starting to raise these issues, and have been raising them for a while, among decision-makers at larger enterprise.

Kobielus: I think what will happen is that some cloud providers will increasingly be seen as safe havens for your data and for your applications, because (a) they have the strong security, and (b) they are hosted within, and governed by, the laws of nation states that rigorously and faithfully try to protect this information, and assure that the information can then be removed—transferred out of that country fluidly by the owners, without loss.

How about governments in general, maybe it's the United Nations who steps in? Who is the ultimate governor of what happens in cyber space?

In other words, it's like the Cayman Islands of the cloud—that offshore banking safe haven you can turn to for all this. Clearly, it's not going to be China.

... In terms of who has responsibility and how will governance best practices be spread uniformly across the world in such areas of IT protection, it's going to be some combination of multilateral, bilateral, and unilateral action. For multilateral, the UN points to that, but there are also regional organizations. In Southeast Asia there is ASEAN, and in the Atlantic there is NATO, and so forth.

Bloomberg: Who decides what is enough? We have these opposing forces. One is that information should be free, and the Internet should be available to everybody. That basically pushes for removing barriers to information flow.

Then you have the security concerns that are driving putting up barriers to information flow, and there is always going to be conflict between those two forces. As increasingly sophisticated attacks develop, that pushes the public consensus toward increasing security.

That will impact our ability to have freedom, and that's going to be, continue to be, a battle that I don’t see anybody winning. It's’ really just going to be an ongoing battle as technology improves and as the bad guys attacks improve. It's going to be an ongoing battle between security and freedom and between the good guys and the bad guys, as it were, and that's never going to change.

Hietala: Large enterprises are going to have to be responsible for the security of their information. I think there are a lot of takeaways for enterprises from this attack. If you're talking about specific individuals, it’s almost hopeless, because your average individual consumer doesn’t have the level of knowledge to go out and find the right solutions to protect themselves today.

So, I'll focus on the large enterprises. They have to do a good job of asset inventory, know where, within their identity infrastructure, they're vulnerable to this specific attack, and then be pretty agile about implementing countermeasures to prevent it. They have to have patch management that's adequate to the task of getting patches out quickly.

They need to do things like looking at the traffic leaving their network to see if people are already in their infrastructure. These Trojans leave traces of themselves, when they ship information out of an organization. When people really understand what happened in this attack, they can take something away, go back, look at what they are doing from a security standpoint, and tighten things up.

If you're talking about individuals putting things in the cloud, that’s a different discussion that doesn’t seem real feasible to me to get them to the point where they can secure their information today.

Kobielus: I don't think Google is going to leave China. I think they are going to stay in China and somehow try to work it out with the PRC. I don't know where that's going, but fundamentally Google is a business and has a "don't do evil" philosophy. They're going to continue to qualify evil down to those things that don't actually align with their business interest.

In other words, they're going to stay. There's going to be a lot of wariness now to entrust Google's China operation with a whole lot of your IT—"you" as a corporation—and your data. There will be that wariness.

Preferred platforms
Other cloud providers will be setting up shop or hosting in other nations that are more respectful of IP, other nations that may not be launching corporate or governmental espionage at US-headquartered properties in China. Those nations will become the preferred supernational cloud hosting platforms for the world.

I can't really say who those nations might be, but you know what, Switzerland always sort of stands out. They're still neutral after all these years. You've got to hand that to them. I trust them.

Bloomberg: In the short-term, the noise is going to die down or going to go back to business as usual. The security is going to need to improve, but so are hacks from the bad guys. It's going to continue, until there is the next big attack. And the question is, "What's it going to be and how big is it going to be?"

We're still waiting for that game changer. I don't think this is a game changer. It's just a way to skirmish. But, if a hacker is able to bring down the internet, for example, targeting the DNS infrastructure to the point that the entire thing collapses, that’s something that could wake people up to say, "We really have to get a handle on this and come up with a better approach."

Hietala: From our perspective [at The Open Group], we're starting to see more awareness at higher levels in governments that the threats and issues here are real. They’re here today. They seem to be state sponsored, and they're something that needs to be paid attention to.

Secretary of State Clinton recently gave a speech where she talked specifically about this attack, but also talked about the need for nations to band together to address the problem. I don't know what that looks like at this point, but I think that the fact that people at that level are talking about the problem is good for the industry and good for the outlook for solutions that are important in the future.

Mills: I think Google is going to get out of China and try and lead some kind of U.S. corporate effort or be a role model to try to do business in a more ethical way, without having to compromise and censor.

There will be a divergence that you'll see. China and other countries may be pushed more towards limiting and creating their own sort of channel that's government filtered. I think the battle is just going to get bigger. We're going to have more fights on this front, but I think that Google may lead the way.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 5th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The growing interest and value in PC desktop virtualization strategies and approaches has its roots in both technology and economics. Recently, a lot has happened technically that has matured the performance and economic benefits of desktop virtualization and the use of thin-client devices.

At the same time as this functional maturity improved, we are approaching an inflection point in a market that is accepting of new clients and new client approaches like desktop virtualization.

Indeed, the latest desktop virtualization model empowers enterprises with lower total costs, greater management of software, tighter security, and the ability to exploit low-cost, low-energy thin client devices. It's an offer that more enterprises are going to find hard to refuse.

In desktop virtualization, the workhorse is the server, and the client assists. This allows for easier management, support, upgrades, provisioning, and control of data and applications. Users can also take their unique desktop experience to any supported device, connect, and pick up where they left off. And, there are now new offline benefits too.

Here to help us learn more about the role and outlook for desktop virtualization, we're joined by Jeff Groudan, vice president of Thin Computing Solutions at HP. The BriefingsDirect interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Groudan: There certainly are some things in the market that are sure driving a potential inflection point [for client virtualization]. The market-driven things coming out of the recession are opening a lot of customers up to re-looking at some deployments that they may have delayed or specific IT projects that they have put on hold.

Just to put it into context, there was recently some data from Gartner. They feel like there are well over 600 million desktop PCs in offices today. Their belief is that over the next five years, upwards of 15 percent of those could be replaced by thin clients. So that's quite a number of redeployments and quite an inflection point for client virtualization.

In addition, there has been an ongoing desire to increase security and a lot of new compliance requirements that the customers have to address. In addition, in general, as they are looking for ways to save on costs, they are consistently and constantly looking for different ways to more efficiently manage their distributed PC environments. All of these things are driving the high level of interest in virtualizing PCs.

One of the key benefits of client virtualization is the ability to keep all the data behind the firewall in the data center and deploy thin clients to the edge of the network. Those thin clients, by design, don't have any local data.

You're also seeing better performance on the hardware side and the infrastructure side. It's really also helping bring the cost per seat of the client virtualization deployment down into ranges that are lot more interesting for large deployments. Last, and near and dear to my heart, you're seeing more powerful, yet cost-effective, thin clients that you can put on the desk and that really ensure those end-users get the experience that you want them to get.

Not an IT panacea
Our general coaching to customers is that client virtualization is not necessary for everyone, for every user group, or every application set. But, certainly, for environments where you need to get them more manageable, you need more flexibility.

When you think about the cost savings of client virtualization, usually the costs come from some of the long-term acquisition costs.

You need higher degrees of automation in order to manage a high number of distributed PCs with the benefits from centralized control, reduced labor costs, and the ability to manage remote or hard to get at locations—things like branches, where you don't have a local IT. Those are great targets for early client virtualization deployments.

All of a sudden, the data-center guys need to be thinking about the end-user. The end-user guys need to be thinking about the data center. Roles and responsibilities need to be hammered out. How do you charge the capital expense versus operational expense? What gets budgeted where? My advice is: as you're thinking about the technical architecture and all of the savings end-to-end, you need to also be thinking about the internal business processes.

We look at this market in two ways, in the context of client virtualization and in the broader context of thin computing. Just zeroing in on client virtualization, we call it Client Virtualization HP. It's desktop virtualization. It's the same animal.

We look at it as a specific set of technologies and architectures that dis-aggregate the elements of a PC, which allows customers to more easily manage and secure their environment. What we're really doing is taking advantage of a lot of the new software capabilities that matured on the server side, from a server virtualization and utilization perspective. We're now able to deploy some of those technologies, hypervisors, and protocols on the client side.

The first is that you don't want to have customers having to figure out how to architect the stuff on their own. If you think about PCs 20–25 years ago, customers didn't know how to architect a distributed PC environment. In 25 years, everybody has gotten good at it. We're still at the early stages on client virtualization.

Our specific objective is figuring out how to simplify virtualization, so that customers get past the technology, and really start to deliver the full benefit of virtualization, without all the complexity.

So our focus is to deliver more complete integrated solutions, end to end from the desktop to the data center, lay it all out, and reference designs so customers can very comfortably understand how to go build out a deployment. They certainly may want to customize it. We want to get them 80–90 percent there just by telling them what we have learned.

Wide applicability across industries
There are opportunities for just about every industry. We've seen certain verticals on the cutting edge of this. Financial services, healthcare, education, and public sector are a few examples of industries that have really embraced this quickly. They have two or three themes in common. One is an acute security need. If you think about healthcare, financial services, and government, they all have very acute needs to secure their environments. That led them to client virtualization relatively quickly.

We certainly have some very exciting launches coming up in the next couple of months where we're really focused on total cost per seat. How do we let people deploy these kinds of solutions and continue to get further economic benefits, delivering better tighter integration across the desktop to the data center?

The ease of deployment of these solutions can get easier and easier, and then ease of use and manageability tools. They allow the IT guys to deploy large deployments of client virtualization with as little touch and as little complexity as we can possibly make it. We're trying to automate these kinds of solutions. We're very excited about some of the things we'll be delivering to our customers in the next couple of months.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 2nd February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

I was a bit distracted from the Apple iPad news due to the marathon Oracle conference Wednesday on its shiny new Sun Microsystems acquisition.

But the more I thought about it, the more these two companies are extremely well positioned to actually fulfill what other powerful companies tried to do and failed. Apple and Oracle may be unstoppable in their burgeoning power to dominate the collection of profits across vast and essential markets for decades.

Apple is well on the way to dominating the way that multimedia content is priced and distributed, perhaps unlike any company since Hearst in its 1920s heyday. Apple is not killing the old to usher in the new, as Google is. Apple is rescuing the old media models with a viable online direct payment model. Then it will take all the real dough.

The iPad is a red herring, almost certainly a loss leader, like Apple TV. The real business is brokering a critical mass of music, spoken word, movies, TV, books, magazines, and newspapers. All the digital content that's fit to access. The iPad simply helps convince the producers and consumers to take the iTunes and App Store model into the domain of the formerly printed word. It should work, too.

Oracle is off to becoming the one-stop shop for mission-critical enterprise IT ... as a service. IT can come as an Oracle-provided service, from soup to nuts, applications to silicon. The "service" is that you only need go to Oracle, and that the stuff actually works well. Just leave the driving to Oracle. It should work, too.

This is a mighty attractive bid right now to a lot of corporations. The in-house suppliers of raw compute infrastructure resources are caught in a huge, decades-in-the-making vice—of needing to cut costs, manage energy, reduce risk and back off of complexity. Can't do that under the status quo.

In doing complete IT package gig, Oracle has signaled the end of the best-of-breed, heterogeneous, and perhaps open source components era of IT. In the new IT era, services are king. The way you actually serve or acquire them is far less of a concern. Enterprises focus on the business and the IT comes, well, like electricity.

This is why "cloud" makes no sense to Oracle's CEO Larry Ellison. He'd rather we take out the word "cloud" from cloud computing and replace it with "Oracle." Now that makes sense!

All the necessary ingredients
Oracle has all the major parts and smarts it needs to do this, by the way. Oracle may need an acquisition or two more for better management and perhaps hosting. But that's about it.

Like Apple, Oracle is not killing the old IT era to usher in the new. Oracle is rescuing the old IT models with a viable complete IT acquisition model. Then it too will take all the real dough.

Incidentally, IBM tried to, and came quite close to a similar variety of enterprise IT domination. That was more than 30 years ago. IBM was an era or two too early. Microsoft tried, and came moderately close—at least in vision—to the same thing, moving from the desktop backward into the data center. But, alas, Microsoft was also an era too early.

Both Sun and IBM were seduced over the past 15 years by the interchangeable parts version of IT ... It's what Java is all about. Microsoft hated Java, never veered from their all-us-or-nothing mantle, which is now passing to Oracle. But Microsoft never had the heft in the core enterprise data center to pull it off. Oracle does.

Yes, Apple and Oracle have clearly learned well from their brethren. And the timing has never been better, the recession a god-send.

So now as consumers, we have some big choices .... er, actually maybe we have a big buy-in, yes, but maybe not too much in the way of choices. As any mainstream consumer and producer of media, I will really need to do business with Apple. Not too much choice. Convenience across the content supply chain has become the killer app. And I love it all the way.

I want my MTV, my New York Times, my Mahler and my Madmen. Apple gets it to me as I wish at an acceptable price. Case closed. The end device is not so important any more, be it big, medium or small, be it Mac or PC. Because of my full-bore consumer seduction, the producers of the content need to follow the gold Apple ring. Same for consumer applications and games, though they are all fundamentally content.

As an IT services buyer, Oracle is making a similar offer. Convenience is killer for IT managers too. Oracle, through its appliances, integrated stack, data ecosystem, tuned high-end hardware, business applications, business intelligence, and sales account heft, leaves me breathless. And taking a next breath will probably have an Oracle SLA attached. Whew!

Critical mass in the accounts that matter
Oracle is already irreplaceable in all—and I mean all—the major enterprise accounts. Oracle can substantially now reduce complexity across the IT infrastructure front, while seemingly cutting costs, apparently reducing risk. But a huge portion of the total savings goes into Oracle's pockets, making it stronger in more ways in more accounts for 20 years. Now they can take the lion's share of the profits in the IT as a service era. I call that dominance.

So let's hear it for the balancing acts still standing. Go IBM! Go Microsoft! Go Google! Go HP! Go SAP! How about Cisco and EMC? You all go for as long as you can, please. Or at least as long as it takes for the next IT and media eras to arrive. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

These handful of companies are about the only insurance policies against Apple and Oracle being able to price with impunity across vast markets that deeply affect us all.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 19th January 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

A growing number of technical and economic incentives are mounting that make a strong case for modernising and transforming enterprise mainframe applications—and the ageing infrastructure that support them.

IT budget planners are using the strident economic environment to force a harder look at alternatives to inflexible and hard-to-manage legacy systems, especially as enterprises seek to cut their total and long-term IT operations spending.

The rationale around reducing total costs is also forcing a recognition of the intrinsic difference between core applications and so-called context—context being applications that are there for commodity productivity reasons, not for core innovation, customisation or differentiation.

With a commodity productivity application, the most effective delivery is on the lowest-cost platform or from a provider. The problem is that 20 or 30 years ago, people put everything on mainframes. They wrote it all in code.

The challenge now is how to free up the applications that are not offering any differentiation—and do not need to be on a mainframe—and which could be running on a much more lower cost infrastructure, or come from a completely different means of delivery, such as software as a service (SaaS).

There are demonstrably much less expensive ways of delivering such plain vanilla applications and services, and significant financial rewards for separating the core from the context in legacy enterprise implementations.

This discussion is the third and final in a series that examines "Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line." The series coincides with a trio of Hewlett-Packard (HP) virtual conferences on the same subject.

Helping to examine how alternatives to mainframe computing can work, we're joined by John Pickett, worldwide mainframe modernisation program manager at HP; Les Wilson, America's mainframe modernisation director at HP, and Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on applications transformation at HP. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: We have seen organizations doing a lot with their infrastructure, consolidating it, virtualizing it, all the right things. At the same time, a lot of CIOs or IT directors know that the legacy applications environment has been somewhat ignored.

Now, with the pressure on cost, people are saying, "We've got to do something, but what can come out of that and what is coming out of that?" People are looking at this and saying, "We need to accomplish two things. We need a longer term strategy. We need an operational plan that fits into that, supported by our annual budget."

Foremost is this desire to get away from this ridiculous backlog of application changes, to get more agility into the system, and to get these core applications, which are the ones that provide the differentiation and the innovation for organizations, able to communicate with a far more mobile workforce.

What people have to look at is where we're going strategically with our technology and our business alignment. At the same time, how can we have a short-term plan that starts delivering on some of the real benefits that people can get out there?

... These things have got to pay for themselves. An analyst recently looked me in the face and said, "People want to get off the mainframe. They understand now that the costs associated with it are just not supportable and are not necessary."

One of the sessions from our virtual conference features Geoffrey Moore, where he talks about this whole difference between core applications and context—context being applications that are there for productivity reasons, not for innovation or differentiation.

Pickett: It's not really just about the overall cost, but it's also about agility, and being able to leverage the existing skills as well.

One of the case studies that I like is from the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF). It's a mouthful, but take a look at the number of banks that the NACF has. It has 5,500 branches and regional offices, so essentially it's one of the largest banks in Korea.

One of the items that they were struggling with was how to overcome some of the technology and performance limitations of the platform that they had. Certainly, in the banking environment, high availability and making sure that the applications and the services are running were absolutely key.

At the same time, they also knew that the path to the future was going to be through the IT systems that they had and they were managing. What they ended up doing was modernizing their overall environment, essentially moving their core banking structure from their current mainframe environment to a system running HP-UX. It included the customer and account information. They were able to integrate that with the sales and support piece, so they had more of a 360 degree view of the customer.

We talk about reducing costs. In this particular example, they were able to save $40 million on an annual basis. That's nice, and certainly saving that much money is significant, but, at the same time, they were able to improve their system response time two- to three-fold. So, it was a better response for the users.

But, from a business perspective, they were able to reduce their time to market. For developing a new product or service, that they were able to decrease that time from one month to five days.

Makes you more agile
If you are a bank and now you can produce a service much faster than your competition, that certainly makes it a lot easier and makes you a lot more agile. So, the agility is not just for the data center, it's for the business as well.

To take this story just a little bit further, they saw that, in addition to the savings I just mentioned, they were able to triple the capacity of the systems in their environment. So, it's not only running faster and being able to have more capacity so you are set for the future, but you are also able to roll out business services a whole lot quicker than you were previously.

...Another example of what we were just talking about is that, if we shift to Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, there is very large insurance company in Spain. It ended up modernizing 14,000 MIPS. Even though the applications had been developed over a number of years and decades, they were able to make the transition in a relatively short length of time. In a three- to six-month time frame they were able to move that forward.

With that, they saw a 2x increase in their batch performance. It's recognized as one of the largest batch re-hosts that are out there. It's just not an HP thing. They worked with Oracle on that as well to be able to drive Oracle 11g within the environment.

Wilson: ... In the virtual conferences, there are also two particular customer case studies worth mentioning. We're seeing a tremendous amount of interest from some of the largest banks in the United States, insurance companies, and benefits management organizations, in particular.

In terms of customer situations, we've always had a very active business working with organizations in manufacturing, retail, and communications. One thing that I've perceived in the last year specifically—it will come as no surprise to you—is that financial institutions, and some of the largest ones in the world, are now approaching HP with questions about the commitment they have to their mainframe environments.

We're seeing a tremendous amount of interest from some of the largest banks in the United States, insurance companies, and benefits management organizations, in particular.

Second, maybe benefiting from some of the stimulus funds, a large number of government departments are approaching us as well. We've been very excited by customer interest in financial services and public sector.

The first case study is a project we recently completed at a wood and paper products company, a worldwide concern. In this particular instance we worked with their Americas division on a re-hosting project of applications that are written in the Software AG environment. I hope that many of the listeners will be familiar with the database ADABAS and the language, Natural. These applications were written some years ago, using those Software AG tools.

Demand was lowered
The user company had divested one of the major divisions within the company, and that meant that the demand for mainframe services was dramatically lowered. So, they chose to take the residual applications, the Software AG applications, representing about 300–350 MIPS, and migrate those in their current state, away from the mainframe, to an HP platform.

Many folks listening to this will understand that the Software AG environment can either be transformed and rewritten to run, say, in an Oracle or a Java environment, or we can maintain the customer's investment in the applications and simply migrate the ADABAS and Natural, almost as they are, from the mainframe to an alternative HP infrastructure. The latter is what we did.

By not needing to touch the mainframe code or the business rules, we were able to complete this project in a period of six months, from beginning to end. The user tells us that they are saving over $1 million today in avoiding the large costs associated with mainframe software, as well as maintenance and depreciation on the mainframe environment.

...The more monolithic approach to applications development and maintenance on the mainframe is a model that was probably appropriate in the days of the large conglomerates, where we saw a lot of companies trying to centralize all of that processing in large data centers. This consolidation made a lot of sense, when folks were looking for economies of scale in the mainframe world.

Today, we're seeing customers driving for a higher degree of agility. In fact, my second case study represents that concept in spades. This is a large multinational manufacturing concern. We will just refer to them as "a manufacturing company." They have a large number of businesses in their portfolio.

Our particular customer in this case study is the manufacturer of electronic appliances. One of the driving factors for their mainframe migration was ... to divest themselves from the large mainframe corporate environment, where most of the processing had been done for the last 20 years.

They wanted control of their own destiny to a certain extent, and they also wanted to prepare themselves for potential investment, divestment, and acquisition, just to make sure that they were masters of their own future.

Pickett: ... Just within the past few months, there was a survey by AFCOM, a group that represents data-center workers. It indicated that, over the next two years, 46 percent of the mainframe users said that they're considering replacing one or more of their mainframes.

Now, let that sink in—46 percent say they are going to be replacing high-end systems over the next two years. That's an absurdly high number. So, it certainly points to a trend that we are seeing in that particular environment—not a blip at all.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 14th January 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Slowly—and sometimes not so slowly—the bricks have been giving way to the clicks for the past 15 years. Plenty of formerly unassailable business models have suffered as a result. The tears flowing for these companies, however, have been few outside their own high, stony walls.

Users, customers, innovators, seekers—the majority bottom sections of the social and economic pyramids—these are the big winners in the many wonderful effects of the Web and Internet. And I, for one, have the freedom, productivity, choice and empowerment to prove it.

Except in one glaring area: banking. We are by no means done on the disruption front.

I have had it with the old financial processes; lack of capability, murky institutions, rips-offs, peonage fees/rates—and especially attitudes. As far as I'm concerned—as a consumer, family, and business—I'm ready to fire them all and move to the inevitable cloud- and open source-based alternatives.

I have had it with credit cards, banks, mutual fund companies, PayPal, debit cards, MasterCard and Visa. As far as I'm concerned they are all fired. They do a lousy job, have suspect security, charge too much, stiff you with hidden fees and raise their rates whenever they want. Why pay 15 percent interest on a credit card when money can be borrowed for less than 2 percent? For their service? For their security? Because they can do a basic two-phase commit?

Merchants hate it, users hate it. Why are we waiting on this? Let the banking disruption rumpus begin!

You want financial industry reform? Screw the Congress, SEC and Fed. Barney Frank and Chris Dodd don't seem to have the stomach and/or power to make much difference. Same with Obama. What we need is real competition—Internet style. The financial industry needs to follow the mainstream media (and others like car makers and hopefully cell phone networks) on a strict diet of lower costs, less egregious profits, less pitiful service—and to be swiftly outmatched on their piss-poor online capabilities.

Like a lot of big, old industries, the banking function is essentially a function nowadays of software, standard protocols, high-performance (yet standard) IT systems ... and, soon, impeccable cloud computing credentials. But they key is the good software, of making things work for the users and community, not just the providers.

A few good transactions
If I can order movies, rent a car, and run a small business online, I should be able to do a few basic financial transactions online. I'd like to do more micro-payments and automated financial and business processes. Credit cards are not the best way to do this. Yet I seem to be stuck with a loan shark when I simply need to be able to order and fulfill a modest online transaction.

So let's have those that are good at what really counts—software and cloud computing experts—offering the banking services that we as consumers and businesses really want.

I'm tempted to write a similar screed about healthcare and mobile telephony, but that will have to wait. But we need to nail banking, finance and insurance first. It impacts all the rest.

The last two years are and should be the last straw. Wake up. In these failed finance industries—the corporate leaders of which we as U.S. taxpayers apparently own in no small degree—"Too big to fail" needs to be replaced with too good to resist. The companies that should be subsidized are the ones that create productivity, lower costs, improve service and propel—rather than hamstring—the economy.

Why, as part of the stimulus, are the governments not creating the legislation to allow a new breed of bank to emerge? Why are the laws not being amended to allow for more—not less!—competition in the financial realm? What choice do we really have? MasterCard and Visa are not a choice.

In other words, we need a viable new cloud banking option era. Marc Andreessen told Charlie Rose when he set up his latest venture fund last year that new online banking was ripe for investment. He's right. Let's get on with it. I'll be your first customer.

Let the big guy do it
Meanwhile, how about Google? Like a dog on a meat truck, they have their teeth into everything else around them. Why not online banking too? You can't blame them for being too big to succeed, can you?

If any of us can explore, learn, compare, shop, order, track, and share your experiences via Google—the actual monetary transactions scattered inside these processes should be a natural included component too. Right?

Is Google the best candidate to create a good, customer-focused cloud banking service portfolio? I think they would provide just the catalyst for change we so desperately need. We can then expect Microsoft to enter the field three years later, perhaps for an added element of choice and change.

MicroCard and Googlesta! Hey, it's a start, and almost certainly an improvement.

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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: 22nd December 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

Large organisations tend to be like applications. They have a bunch of divisions that do particular things but each tends to be siloed. And most of the communications coming from such companies tends to be in siloed format.

As an example, the Information Management group at IBM recently announced that it was acquiring Guardium, the database activity monitoring vendor. Now, that’s very good. It’s an excellent product and it fits well within the information management story. Arguably, IBM may have paid a bit too much but never mind. Taken in isolation this makes complete sense.

The potential problem is that you can’t take it in isolation. Databases don’t exist in isolation, they exist as part of the corporate infrastructure. Similarly, monitoring database activity doesn’t exist in isolation but as a part of an entire environment that has to be monitored for security events and audited for compliance and analysed forensically. This is generally referred to as the SIEM (security information and event management) market though I happen to think this is poor nomenclature (Gartner invented it – surprise!) because it implies that this is only about security or mostly about security, when it clearly isn’t: according to IBM’s own research 70% of companies investing in this technology listed compliance as their main driver or an auditor’s note on the accounts. Only 30% regarded security as the main driver.

Anyway, leaving that aside, the point is that the people in IBM researching the SIEM market is the Tivoli group. And that’s because Tivoli is a major player in the SIEM market.

So, why isn’t Guardium in the Tivoli group rather than IM? Of course, the problem is that it has to be somewhere and it can’t be in both places given IBM’s organisational structure. And while you could change the structure to suit this particular issue it would just cause other problems: it’s a result of the fact that organisations are siloed.

In fact, IBM has a security steering committee that oversees all aspects of security across IBM divisions, so it is aware of both Guardium and Tivoli SIEM and will work with both groups to ensure that the two get integrated over time and with other relevant products as appropriate.

So, IBM has what might be described as an integration layer across its siloed applications. But, and here is actually the issue, it doesn’t talk about it much or market it. There wasn’t even a mention of Tivoli or the overall security strategy in the press releases about the acquisition of Guardium and there really should have been.

Moreover, it is not as if IBM cannot integrate across its silos when in needs to. For example, the Smart Archive Strategy announced at the recent Information on Demand conference brings together elements from content management, Cognos, Optim, Tivoli and hardware groups as well as services and even semantics. What I’d like to see is IBM going public about its broader plans for Guardium because we believe that there is, and needs to be, a clear synergy across the Tivoli and IM groups in this respect. Perhaps we could have a Smart Security Strategy?

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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: 10th November 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Text-based content and information from across the Web are growing in importance to businesses. The need to analyze web-based text in real-time is rising to where structured data was in importance just several years ago.

Indeed, for businesses looking to do even more commerce and community building across the Web, text access and analytics forms a new mother lode of valuable insights to mine.

As the recession forces the need to identify and evaluate new revenue sources, businesses need to capture such web data services for their business intelligence (BI) to work better, deeper, and faster.

In this podcast discussion, Part 3 of a series on web data services for BI, we discuss how an ecology of providers and a variety of content and data types come together in several use-case scenarios.

In Part 1 of our series we discussed how external data has grown in both volume and importance across the Internet, social networks, portals, and applications. In Part 2, we dug even deeper into how to make the most of web data services for BI, along with the need to share those web data services inferences quickly and easily.

Our panel now looks specifically at how near real-time text analytics fills out a framework of web data services that can form a whole greater than the sum of the parts, and this brings about a whole new generation of BI benefits and payoffs.

To help explain the benefits of text analytics and their context in web data services, we're joined by Seth Grimes, principal consultant at Alta Plana Corp., and Stefan Andreasen, co-founder and chief technology officer at Kapow Technologies. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Grimes: "Noise free" is an interesting and difficult concept when you're dealing with text, because text is just a form of human communication. Whether it's written materials, or spoken materials that have been transcribed into text, human communications are incredibly chaotic ... and they are full of "noise." So really getting to something that's noise-free is very ambitious.

... It's become an imperative to try to deal with the great volume of text—the fire hose, as you said—of information that's coming out. And, it's coming out in many, many different languages, not just in English, but in other languages. It's coming out 24 hours a day, 7 days a week—not only when your business analysts are working during your business day. People are posting stuff on the web at all hours. They are sending email at all hours.

... There are hundreds of millions of people worldwide who are on the Internet, using email, and so on. There are probably even more people who are using cell phones, text messaging, and other forms of communication.

If you want to keep up, if you want to do what business analysts have been referring to as a 360-degree analysis of information, you've got to have automated technologies to do it. You simply can't cope with the flood of information without them.

Fortunately, the software is now up to the job in the text analytics world. It's up to the job of making sense of the huge flood of information from all kinds of diverse sources, high volume, 24 hours a day. We're in a good place nowadays to try to make something of it with these technologies.

Andreasen: ... There is also a huge amount of what I call "deep web," very valuable information that you have to get to in some other way. That's where we come in and allow you to build robots that can go to the deep web and extract information.

... Eliminating noise is getting rid of all this stuff around the article that is really irrelevant, so you get better results.

The other thing around noise-free is the structure. ... The key here is to get noise-free data and to get full data. It's not only to go to the deep web, but also get access to the data in a noise-free way, and in at least a semi-structured way, so that you can do better text analysis, because text analysis is extremely dependent on the quality of data.

Grimes: ... [There are] many different use-cases for text analytics. This is not only on the Web, but within the enterprise as well, and crossing the boundary between the Web and the inside of the enterprise.

Those use-cases can be the early warning of a Swine flu epidemic or other medical issues. You can be sure that there is text analytics going on with Twitter and other instant messaging streams and forums to try to detect what's going on.

... You also have brand and reputation management. If someone has started posting something very negative about your company or your products, then you want to detect that really quickly. You want early warning, so that you can react to it really quickly.

We have a great use case in the intelligence world. That's one of the earliest adopters of text analytics technology. The idea is that if you are going to do something to prevent a terrorist attack, you need to detect and respond to the signals that are out there, that something is pending really quickly, and you have to have a high degree of certainty that you're looking at the right thing and that you're going to react appropriately.

... Text analytics actually predate BI. The basic approaches to analyzing textual sources were defined in the late '50s. Actually, there is a paper from an IBM researcher from 1958, that defines BI as the analysis of textual sources.

...[Now] we want to take a subset of all of the information that's out there in the so-called digital universe and bring in only what's relevant to our business problems at hand. Having the infrastructure in place to do that is a very important aspect here.

Once we have that information in hand, we want to analyze it. We want to do what's called information extraction, entity extraction. We want to identify the names of people, geographical location, companies, products, and so on. We want to look for pattern-based entities like dates, telephone numbers, addresses. And, we want to be able to extract that information from the textual sources.

Suitable technologies
All of this sounds very scientific and perhaps abstruse—and it is. But, the good message here is one that I have said already. There are now very good technologies that are suitable for use by business analysts, by people who aren't wearing those white lab coats and all of that kind of stuff. The technologies that are available now focus on usability by people who have business problems to solve and who are not going to spend the time learning the complexities of the algorithms that underlie them.

Andreasen: ... Any BI or any text analysis is no better than the data source behind it. There are four extremely important parameters for the data sources. One is that you have the right data sources.

There are so many examples of people making these kind of BI applications, text analytics applications, while settling for second-tier data sources, because they are the only ones they have. This is one area where Kapow Technologies comes in. We help you get exactly the right data sources you want.

The other thing that's very important is that you have a full picture of the data. So, if you have data sources that are relevant from all kinds of verticals, all kinds of media, and so on, you really have to be sure you have a full coverage of data sources. Getting a full coverage of data sources is another thing that we help with.

Noise-free data
We already talked about the importance of noise-free data to ensure that when you extract data from your data source, you get rid of the advertisements and you try to get the major information in there, because it's very valuable in your text analysis.

Of course, the last thing is the timeliness of the data. We all know that people who do stock research get real-time quotes. They get it for a reason, because the newer the quotes are, the surer they can look into the crystal ball and make predictions about the future in a few seconds.

The world is really changing around us. Companies need to look into the crystal ball in the nearer and nearer future. If you are predicting what happens in two years, that doesn't really matter. You need to know what's happening tomorrow.

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

In real estate, the mantra is "location, location, location." The same could be said for the juxtaposition of applications logic and data. With enterprise data growing at an explosive rate, having applications separate from the mountains of data that they rely on has resulted in massive data movement—increasing latency and restricting due analysis.

Aster Data, which provides massively parallel processing (MPP) data management, has tackled the location problem head-on with the announcement last week of Aster Data Version 4.0, along with Aster nCluster System 4.0, a massively parallel application-data server that allows companies to embed applications inside an MPP data warehouse. This is designed to speed the processing of terabytes to petabytes of data.

The latest offering from the San Carlos, Calif., company fully parallelizes both data and a wide variety of analytics applications in one system. This provides faster analysis for such data-heavy applications as real-time fraud detection, customer behavior modeling, merchandising optimization, affinity marketing, trending and simulations, trading surveillance, and customer calling patterns.

While both data and applications reside in the same system, they are independent of one another, but both execute as "first-class citizens" with their respective data and application management services.

Resource sharing
The Aster Data Application Server is responsible for managing and coordinating activities and resource sharing in the cluster. It also acts as a host for the application processing and data inside the cluster. In its role as data host, it manages incremental scaling, fault tolerance and heterogeneous hardware for application processing.

Aster Data Version 4.0 provides application portability, which allows companies to take their existing ava, C, C++, C#, .NET, Perl and Python applications, MapReduce-enable them and push them down into the data.

The Dynamic Workload Management (WLM) helps support hundreds of concurrent mixed workloads that can span interactive and batch data queries, as well as application execution. It includes granular rule-based prioritization of workloads and dynamic allocation and re-allocation of resources.

Other features include:

• Trickle feeds for granular data loading and interactive queries with millisecond response times
• New online partition splitting capabilities to allow infinite cost-effective scaling
• Dual-stage query optimizer, which ensures peak performance across hundreds to thousands of CPU cores
• Integrations with leading business intelligence (BI) tools and Hadoop.

More companies want to bring more data to bear on more BI problems. While Aster's benefits and value may be used for high-end and esoteric analytics uses now, I fully expect that their data-intense architectures will be finding more uses. The price, too, is dropping, making the use of such systems more affordable.

Many of the core users of high-end analytics are also moving on architecture-wise. The systems designed five or more years ago will not meet the needs of five or even a few years from now.

What's really cool about Aster Data's approach is the analytics apps can be used, and the languages and query semantics most familiar to users can be used with the new systems and architectures.

I suppose we should also expect more of these analytics engines to become available as services, aka cloud services. That would allow joins of more data sets and they the massive analytics applications can open up even more BI cans of worms.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 30th October 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

This podcast is the second in a series of three to examine Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line. Through panel discussions we examine the rationale and likely returns of assessing the true role and character of legacy applications, and then further determine the paybacks from modernization.

To gain the most return on modernization projects, many enterprises are separating core from context when it comes to legacy enterprise applications and their modernization processes. As enterprises seek to cut their total IT costs, they need to identify what legacy assets are working for them and carrying their own weight, and which ones are merely hitching a high cost—but largely unnecessary—ride.

A widening cost and productivity division exists between older, hand-coded software assets and replacement technologies on newer, more efficient standards-based systems. Somewhere in the mix, there are also core legacy assets distinct from so-called contextal assets. There are peripheral legacy processes and tools that are costly vestiges of bygone architectures. There is legacy wheat and legacy chaff.

With us to delve deeper into the high rewards of transforming legacy enterprise applications is Steve Woods, distinguished software engineer at HP, and Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on Applications Transformation at HP. The discussion is moderated be me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: This podcast is about two types of IT assets: core and context. That whole approach to classifying business processes and their associated applications was invented by Geoffrey Moore, who wrote Crossing the Chasm, Inside the Tornado, etc.

He came up in Dealing with Darwin: How Great Companies Innovate at Every Phase of their Evolution with this notion of core and context applications. Core being those that provide the true innovation and differentiation for an organization. Those are the ones that keep your customers. Those are the ones that improve the service levels. Those are the ones that generate your money. They are really important, which is why they're called "core."

When these applications were invented to provide the core capabilities, it was 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago. What we have to understand is that what was core 10 years ago may not be core anymore. There are ways of effectively doing it at a much different price point.

As Moore points out, organizations should be looking to build "core," because that is the unique intellectual property of the organization, and to then buy "context." They need to understand, how do I get the lowest-cost provision of something that doesn't make a huge difference to my product or service, but I need it anyway.

The "context" applications are not less important, but ... you should be looking to understand how that could be done in terms of lower-cost provisioning [of them].

Woods: [A lot of the interest in separating core and context in legacy IT applications] has to do with the pain users are going through. We have had customers who had assessments with us before, as much as a year ago, and now they're coming back and saying they want to get started and actually do something. So, a good deal of the interest is caused by the need to drive down costs.

Also, there's the realization that a lot of these tools—extract, transform, and load (ETL) tools, enterprise application integration (EAI) tools, reporting, and business process management (BPM)—are proving themselves now. We can't say that there is a risk in going to these tools. They realize that the strength of these tools is that they bring a lot of agility, solve skill sets issues, and make you much more responsive to the business needs of the organization.

... What I created at HP is a tool, an algorithm, that can go into any language legacy code and find the duplicate code, and not only find it, but visualize it in very compelling ways. That helps us drill down to identify what I call the unintended design. When we find these unintended designs, they lead us to ask very critical questions that are paramount to understanding how to design the transformation strategy.

... When you identify the IT elements that are not core and that could be moved out of handwritten code, you're transferring power from the developers—say, of COBOL—to the users of the more modern tools, like the BPM tools.

So there is always a political issue. What we try to do, when we present our findings, is to be very objective. You can't argue that we found that 65 percent of the application is not doing core. You can then focus the conversation on something more productive. What do we do with this? The worst thing you could possibly do is take a million lines of COBOL that's generating reports and rewrite that in Java or C# hard-written code.

We take the concept of core versus context not just to a possible off-the-shelf application, but at architectural component level. In many cases, we find that this is helpful for them to identify legacy code that could be moved very incrementally to these new architectures.

... A typical COBOL application—this is true of all legacy code, but particularly mainframe legacy code—can be as much as 5, 10, or 15 million lines of code. I think the sheer idea of the size of the application is an impediment. There is some sort of inertia there. An object at rest tends to stay at rest, and it's been at rest for years, sometimes 30 years.

So, the biggest impediment is the belief that it's just too big and complex to move and it's even too big and complex to understand. Our approach is a very lightweight process, where we go in and answer to a lot of questions, remove a lot of uncertainty, and give them some very powerful visualizations and understanding of the source code and what their options are.

... When you go to the legacy side of the house, you start finding that 65 percent of this application is just doing ETL. It's just parsing files and putting them into databases. Why don't you replace that with a tool? The big resistance there is that, if we replace it with a tool, then the people who are maintaining the application right now are either going to have to learn that tool or they're not going to have a job.

If we get the facts on the table, particularly visually, then we find that we get a lot of consensus. It may be partial consensus, but it's consensus nonetheless, and we open up the possibilities and different options, rather than just continuing to move through with hand-written code.

Evans: If you look at this whole core-context thing, at the moment, organizations are still in survival mode. Money is still tight in terms of consumer spending. Money is still tight in terms of company spending. Therefore, you're in this position where keeping your customers or trying to get new customers is absolutely fundamental for staying alive. And, you do that by improving service levels, improving your services, and improving your product.

... The line-of-business people are now pushing on technology and saying, "You can't back off. You can't not give us what we want. We have to have this ability to innovate and differentiate, because that way we will keep our customers and we will keep this organization alive."

That applies equally to the public and private sectors. The public sector organizations have this mandate of improving service, whether it's in healthcare, insurance, tax, or whatever. So all of these commitments are being made and people have to deliver on them, albeit that the money, the IT budget behind it, is shrinking or has shrunk.

The leaders must understand what drives their company. Understand the values, the differentiation, and the innovations that you want and put your money on those and then find a way of dramatically reducing the amount of money you spend on the contextual stuff, which is pure productivity.

Woods: ... Decentralizing the architecture improves your efficiency and your redundancy. There is much more opportunity for building a solid, maintainable architecture than there would be if you kept a sort of monolithic approach that's typical on the mainframe.

... The problem is sometimes not nearly as big as it seems. If you look at the analogy of the clone codes that we find, and all the different areas that we can look at the code and say that it may not be as relevant to a transformation process as you think it is. I do this presentation called "Honey I Shrunk the Mainframe." If you start looking at these different aspects between the clone code and what I call the asymmetrical transformation from handwritten code to model driven architecture, you start looking at these different things. You start really seeing it.

We see this, when we go in to do the workshops. The subject matter experts and the stakeholders very slowly start to understand that this is actually possible. It's not as big as we thought. There are ways to transform it that we didn't realize, and we can do this incrementally. We don't have to do it all at once.

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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: 26th October 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

This podcast is the first in the series of three to examine Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line. Through a case study, we'll discuss the rationale and likely returns of assessing the true role and character of legacy applications, and then assess the true paybacks from modernization.

The ongoing impact of the reset economy is putting more emphasis on lean IT—of identifying and eliminating waste across the data-center landscape. The top candidates, on several levels, are the silo-architected legacy applications and the aging IT systems that support them.

Using our case study, we'll also uncover a number of proven strategies on how to innovatively architect legacy applications for transformation and for improved technical, economic, and productivity outcomes. The podcasts coincidentally run in support of HP virtual conferences on the same subjects:

Here to start us off on our series on the how and why of transforming legacy enterprise applications are Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on Applications Transformation at HP, and Luc Vogeleer, CTO for Application Modernization Practice in HP Enterprise Services. The discussion is moderated be me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: When the economic situation hit really hard, we definitely saw customers retreat, and basically say, "We don't know what to do now. Some of us have never been in this position before in a recessionary environment, seeing IT budgets reduce considerably."

That wasn't surprising. ... It was obvious that people would retrench and then scratch their heads and say, "Now what do we do?"

Now we're seeing a different dynamic, ... something like a two-fold increase in what you might call "customer interest" [in applications transformation]. The number of opportunities we're seeing as a company has doubled over the last six or nine months.

If you ask any CIO or IT head, "Is application transformation something you want to do," the answer is, "No, not really." It's like tidying your garage at home. You know you should do it, but you don't really want to do it. You know that you benefit, but you still don't want to do it.

This has moved from being something that maybe I should do to something that I have to do, because there are two real forces here. One is the force that says, "If I don't continue to innovate and differentiate, I go out of business, because my competitors are doing that." If I believe the economy doesn't allow me to stand still, then I've got it wrong. So, I have to continue to move forward.

Secondly, I have to reduce the amount of money I spend on my innovation, but at the same time I need a bigger payback. I've got to reduce the cost of IT. Now, with 80 percent of my budget being dedicated to maintenance, that doesn't move my business forward. So, the strategic goal is, I want to flip the ratio.

... Today, we'll hear about a case study—with the Italian Ministry of Instruction, University and Research (MIUR). This customer received an ROI in 18 months. In 18 months, the savings they had made—and this runs into millions of dollars—had been paid for. Their new system, in under 18 months, paid for itself. After that, it was pure money to the bottom-line.

... Our job is to minimize that risk by exposing them to customers who have done it before. They can view those best-case scenarios and understand what to do and what not to do.

Vogeleer: We take a very holistic approach and look at the entire portfolio of applications from a customer. Then, from that application portfolio—depending on the usage of the application, the business criticality of the application, as well as the frequency of changes that this application requires—we deploy different strategies for each application.

We not only focus on one approach of completely re-writing or re-platforming the application or replacing the application with a package, but we go for a combination of all those elements. By doing a complete portfolio assessment, as a first step into the customer legacy application landscape, we're able to bring out a complete road map to conduct this transformation.

We first execute applications that bring a quick ROI. We first execute quick wins and the ROI and the benefits from those quick wins are immediately reinvested for continuing the transformation. So, transformation is not just one project. It's not just one shot. It's a continuous program over time, where all the legacy applications are progressively migrated into a more agile and cost-effective platform.

The Italian Ministry of Instruction, University and Research (MIUR), is the customer we're going to cover with this case, is a large governmental organization and their overall budget is €55 billion.

This Italian public education sector serves 8 million students from 40,000 schools, and the schools are located across the country in more than 10,000 locations, with each of those locations connected to the information system provided by the ministry.

Very large employer
The ministry is, in fact, one of the largest employers in the world, with over one million employees. Its system manages both permanent and temporary employees, like teachers and substitutes, and the administrative employees. It also supports the ministry users, about 7,000 or 8,000 school employees. It's a very large employer with a large number of users connected across the country.

Why do they need to modernize their environment? In fact, their system was written in the early 1980s on IBM mainframe architecture. In early 2000, there was a substantial change in Italian legislation, which was so-called a Devolution Law. The Devolution Law was about more decentralization of their process to school level and also to move the administration processes from the central ministry level into the regions, and there are 20 different regions in Italy.

This change implied a completely different process workflow within their information systems. To fulfill the changes, the legacy approach was very time-consuming and inappropriate. A number of strong applications have been developed incrementally to fulfill those new organizational requirements, but very quickly this became completely unmanageable and inflexible. The aging legacy systems were expected to be changed quickly.

In addition to the element of agility to change applications to meet the new legislation requirement, the cost in that context went completely out of control. So, the simple, most important objective of the modernization was to design and implement a new architecture that could reduce cost and provide a more flexible and agile infrastructure.

The first step we took was to develop a modernization road map that took into account the organizational change requirements, using our service offering, which is the application portfolio assessment.

From the standard engagement that we can offer to a customer, we did an analysis of the complete set of applications and associated data assets from multiple perspectives. We looked at it from a financial perspective, a business perspective, functionality and the technical perspective.

From those different dimensions, we could make the right decision on each application. The application portfolio assessment ensured that the client's business context and strategic drivers were understood, before commencing a modernization strategy for a given application in the portfolio.

A business case was developed for modernizing each application, an approach that was personalized for each group of applications and was appropriate to the current situation.

... This assessment phase took about three months with the seven people. From there, we did a first transformation pilot, with a small staff of people in three months.

After the pilot, we went into the complete transform and user-acceptance test, and after an additional year, 90 percent of the transformation was completed. In the transformation, we had about 3,500 batch processes. We had the transformation. We had re-architecting of 7,500 programs. And, all the screens were also transformed. But, that was a larger effort with a team of about 50 people over one year.

... We tried to use automated conversion, especially for non-critical programs, where they're not frequently changed. That represented 60 percent of the code. This code could be then immediately transferred by removing only the barriers in the code that prevented it from compiling.

All barriers removed
We had also frequently updated programs, where all barriers were removed and code was completely cleaned in the conversion. Then, in critical programs, especially, the conversion effort was bigger than the rewrite effort. Thirty percent of the programs were completely rewritten.

The applications are now accessed through a more efficient web-based user interface, which replaces the green screen and provides improved navigation and better overall system performance, including improved user productivity.

End-user productivity is doubled in terms of the daily operation of some business processes. Also, the overall application portfolio has been greatly simplified by this approach. The number of function points that we're managing has decreased by 33 percent.

From a financial perspective, there are also very significant results. Hardware and software license and maintenance cost savings were about €400,000 in the first year, €2 million in the second year, and are projected to be €3.4 million this year. This represents a savings of 36 percent of the overall project.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 6th October 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 1st October 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

This latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion tackles the high—and often under-appreciated—cost for many enterprises of doing nothing about aging, monolithic applications. Not making a choice about legacy mainframe and poorly utilized applications is, in effect, making a choice not to transform and modernize the applications and their supporting systems.

Not doing anything about aging IT essentially embraces an ongoing cost structure that helps prevent new spending for efficiency-gaining IT innovations. It’s a choice to suspend applications on ossified platforms and to make their reuse and integration difficult, complex, and costly.

Doing nothing is a choice that, especially in a recession, hurts companies in multiple ways—because successful transformation is the lifeblood of near and long-term productivity improvements.

Here to help us better understand the perils of continuing to do nothing about aging legacy and mainframe applications, we’re joined by four IT transformation experts from Hewlett-Packard (HP): Brad Hipps, product marketer for Application Lifecycle Management (ALM) and Applications Portfolio Software at HP; John Pickett from Enterprise Storage and Server marketing at HP; Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on Applications Transformation at HP, and Steve Woods, application transformation analyst and distinguished software engineer at HP Enterprise Services. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: What we’re seeing is that the cost of legacy systems and the cost of supporting the mainframe hasn’t changed in 12 months. What has changed is the available cash that companies have to spend on IT, as, over time, that cash amount may have either been frozen or is being reduced. That puts even more pressure on the IT department and the CIO in how to spend that money, where to spend that money, and how to ensure alignment between what the business wants to do and where the technology needs to go.

Our concern is that there is a cost of doing nothing. People eventually end up spending their whole IT budgets on maintenance and upgrades and virtually nothing on innovation.

At a time when competitiveness is needed more than it was a year ago, there has to be a shift in the way we spend our IT dollars and where we spend our IT dollars. That means looking at the legacy software environments and the underpinning infrastructure. It’s absolutely a necessity.

Woods: For years, the biggest hurdle was that most customers would say they didn’t really have to make a decision, because the [replacement] performance wasn’t there. The performance-reliability wasn't there. That is there now. There is really no excuse not to move because of performance-reliability issues.

What's changing today is the ability to look at a legacy source code. We have the tools now to look at the code and visualize it in ways that are very compelling.

What has also changed is the growth of architectural components, such as extract transform and load (ETL) tools, data integration tools, and reporting tools. When we look at a large body of, say, 10 million lines of COBOL and we find that three million lines of that code is doing reporting, or maybe two million is doing ETL work, we typically suggest they move that asymmetrically to a new platform that does not use handwritten code.

That’s really risk aversion—doing it very incrementally with low intrusion, and that’s also where the best return on investment (ROI) is. ... These tools have matured so that we have the performance and we also have the tools to help them understand their legacy systems today.

Pickett: Typically, when we take a look at the high-end of applications that are going to be moving over and sitting on a legacy system, many times they’re sitting on a mainframe platform. With that, one of the things that has changed over the last several years is the functionality gap between what exists in the past 5 or 10 years ago in the mainframe. That gap has not only been closed, but, in some cases, open systems exceed what’s available on the mainframe.

It’s not only a matter of cost, but it’s also factoring in the power and cooling as well. Certainly, what we’ve seen is that the cost savings that can be applied on the infrastructure side are then applied back into modernizing the application.

Hipps: This term "agility" gets used so often that people tend to forget what it means. The reality of today’s modern organization—and this is contrasted even from 5, certainly 10 years ago—is that when we look at applications, they are everywhere. There has been an application explosion.

When we start talking about application transformation and we assign that trend to agility, what we’re acknowledging is that for the business to make any change today in the way it does business—in any new market initiative, in any competitive threat it wants to respond to, there is going to be an application—very likely "applications" plural.

The decisions that you're going to make to transform your applications should all be pointed at and informed by shrinking the amount of time that takes you to turn around and realize some business initiative.

That's what we’re seeking with agility. Following pretty closely behind that, you can begin to see why there is a promise in cloud. It saves me a lot of infrastructural headaches. It’s supposed to obviate a lot of the challenges that I have around just standing up the application and getting it ready, let alone having to build the application itself.

So I think that is the view of transformation in terms of agility and why we’re seeing things like cloud. These other things really start to point the direction to greater agility.

... I tend to think that in application transformation in most ways they’re breaking up and distributing that which was previously self-contained and closed.

Whether you're looking at moving to some sort of mainframe processing to distributed processing, from distributed processing to virtualization, whether you are talking about the application team themselves, which now are some combination of in-house, near-shore, offshore, outsourced sort of a distribution of the teams from sort of the single building to all around the world, certainly the architectures themselves from being these sort of monolithic and fairly brittle things that are now sort of services driven things.

You can look at any one of those trends and you can begin to speak about benefits, whether it’s leveraging a better global cost basis or on the architectural side, the fundamental element we’re trying to do is to say, "Let’s move away from a world in which everything is handcrafted."

Assembly-line model
Let’s get much closer to the assembly-line model, where I have a series of preexisting trustworthy components and I know where they are, I know what they do, and my work now becomes really a matter of assembling those. They can take any variety of shapes on my need because of the components I have created.

We're getting back to this idea of lower cost and increased agility. We can only imagine how certain car manufacturers would be doing, if they were handcrafting every car. We moved to the assembly line for a reason, and software typically has lagged what we see in other engineering disciplines. Here we’re finally going to catch up. We're finally be going to recognize that we can take an assembly line approach in the creation of application, as well, with all the intended benefits.

Evans: ... Once we have done it, once we have removed that handwritten code, that code that is too big for what it needs to be in terms to get the job done. Once we have done it once, it’s out and it’s finished with and then we can start looking at economics that are totally different going forward, where we can actually flip this ratio.

Today, we may spend 80 percent or 90 percent of our IT budget on maintenance, and 10 percent on innovation. What we want to do is flip it. We're not going to flip it in a year or maybe even two, but we have got to take steps. If we don’t start taking steps, it will never go away.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 21st September 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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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: 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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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 8th September 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion, recorded at The Open Group’s 23rd Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference and the associated 3rd Security Practitioners Conference in Toronto.

We're going to take a look at an emerging updated standard called XDAS, which looks at audit trail information from a variety of systems and software across the enterprise IT environment.

This is an emerging standard that’s being orchestrated through The Open Group, but it’s an open-source standard that is hopefully going to help in compliance and regulatory issues and in improving automation of events across heterogeneous environments. This could be increasingly important, as we get deeper into virtualization and cloud computing.

Here to help us drill into XDAS (see a demo now), we're joined by Ian Dobson, director of the Security Forum for The Open Group, as well as Joël Winteregg, CEO and co-founder of NetGuardians. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Dobson: We actually got involved way back in '90s, in 1998, when we published the Distributed Audit Service (XDAS) Standard. It was, in many ways, ahead of its time, but it was a distributed audit services standard. Today’s audit and logging requirements are much more demanding than they were then. There is a heightened awareness of everything to do with audit and logging, and we see a need now to update it to meet today’s needs. So that’s why we've got involved now.

A key part of this is event reporting. Event reports have all sorts of formats today, but that makes them difficult to consume. Of course, we then generate events so that they can be consumed in useful ways. So, we're aiming the new audit standard from XDAS to be something that defines an interoperable event-reporting format, so that they can be consumed equally by everybody who needs to know.

Winteregg: My company is working in the area of audit event management. We saw that it was a big issue to collect all these different audit trails from each different IT environment.

We saw that, if it was possible to have a single and standard way to represent all this information, that would be much easier and relevant for an IT user and for a security officer to analyze all this information, in order to find out what the exact issues are, and to troubleshoot issue in the infrastructure, and so on. That’s a good basis for understanding what's going on the whole infrastructure in the company.

There is no uniform way to represent this information, and we thought that this initiative would be really good, because it will bring something uniform and universal that will help all the IT users to understand what is going on.

In distributed environments, it's really hard to track a transaction, because it starts on a specific component, then it goes through another one, and to a cloud. You don’t know exactly where everything is happening. So, the only way to track these transactions or to track the accountability in such an environment would be through some transaction identifiers, and so on.

For auditors or administrator, it is really costly to understand this information and use it in order to get relevant information for management to have metrics and to understand what's really happening on the IT infrastructure.

Audit information deals a lot with the accountability of the different transactions in an enterprise IT infrastructure. The real logs, which are modulated to develop strong meaning for debugging applications, may be providing the size of buffers or parameters of an application. Audit trails are much more business oriented. That means that you will have a lot of accountability information. You will be able to track the who, the what, and the when in the whole IT infrastructure, which is really important these days with all these different regulations, like Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) and the others.

With a standard like XDAS, it will be much easier for a company to be in compliance with regulations, because there will be really clear and specific interfaces from all the different vendors to these generated audit trails.

The standard will be open, but there is a Java implementation of that standard called XDAS for J, which is a Java Library. This implementation is open source and business friendly. That means that you can use it in some proprietary software without having to then provide your software as an open-source software. So, it is available for business software too, and all the code is open. You can modify it, look at it, and so on. It’s on the Codehaus platform.

We're waiting for some feedback from vendors and users about how it is easy to use, how helpful it is, and if there are maybe some use cases -- if the scope is too wide, too narrow, etc. We're open to every comment about the current standard.

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By: Dr Alex Horne, Medical Director, North East London Foundation Trust Posted: 3rd September 2009 Copyright North East London Foundation Trust © 2009

For decades, the focus in healthcare business intelligence has been on acute hospitals, almost to the exclusion of all other sectors. Even when other areas began to acquire systems, the tendency was to start with primary care, and then commissioners, and leave mental healthcare as something of an afterthought.

What has caused that to change has been the move towards Foundation Trust status. Over half of all Mental Health Trusts have now achieved foundation status, putting them on a par with their counterparts in the acute sector. As Foundation Trusts enjoy increased autonomy they face a requirement for improved management and more robust financial control, which in turn poses a significant and unique challenge to Mental Health Trusts.

So what are the specific obstacles faced, and what role can business intelligence play in helping to not only meet mandatory mental health reporting requirements, but also to transform healthcare delivery?

Bridging the geographical divide
Mental Health Trusts can operate over hundreds of sites across large geographical areas, and across multiple local authorities and PCTs. A large proportion of the work carried out by Mental Health hospitals takes place on neither an inpatient nor an outpatient basis, but through community contacts.

All of which poses a challenge in ensuring unified and accessible clinical records—multiple case notes at different sites can make it difficult for health and social care teams, clinicians and managers to share patient data effectively to deliver the best possible care.

The deployment of electronic patient record systems will improve accessibility, but challenges remain, both in developing more flexible systems which can be adapted to the needs of the clinicians who use them, and also in educating clinicians on these new systems and the way in which data needs to be recorded.

The approach taken at North East London is to deploy a single data warehouse from Ardentia, to ensure the information silos that can all too easily exist within the distributed geography of mental health are broken down. A web-based approach also means data can be shared more easily. Improving access to data in this way will not only improve care delivery, and meet management reporting requirements, but is also a fundamental building block to transforming healthcare delivery, giving clinicians the ability to lead, in line with the recommendations of the Darzi review.

Business intelligence for business processes
Foundation status requires Trusts to function on a robust and clear business footing. Greater autonomy brings with it the need for more far-reaching management decisions, based on reliable evidence and giving clear understanding of the issues that need to be addressed.

There is also a requirement for far more detailed financial reporting, a mandated requirement from Monitor, which oversees Foundation Trust applications, regulates performance and requires the development of service line reporting to meet these financial requirements.

The challenge for senior clinicians is to understand the financial and management issues related to the care being delivered, in order to ensure more robust management. They need accurate information on resources used, quality of care and financial performance, and to access this, they need powerful business intelligence solutions.

Dealing with complex patient pathways
Many patients with mental health have long-standing and complex needs. Unlike acute physical care—where clear-cut pathways determine the intervention needed—the challenge in mental health is to bring the relevant services together at the right time, according to patient need, ensuring the appropriate care bundles are delivered.

Within the treatment of a single patient for a single condition, there may be moments when the patient moves from one bundle of care to another. This would be the case, for example, when the patient is being treated for a sub-psychotic condition but goes through a psychotic episode in the course of treatment. This all impacts on resource usage and the costs involved.

Mental health trusts therefore require good quality data on multiple patient episodes and need to reason in terms of real pathways of care, in order to develop comprehensive reports and develop the right care package. Business intelligence systems must be able to bring together and link data from many different systems, to build pathways that identify community contacts, therapy sessions, outpatient attendances and so on into coherent pathways, to be analysed as a package.

Bringing it all together
That kind of complex care then needs to be married with financial data drawn from our accounting systems so that we can provide service line reporting and meet the management requirements set out by Monitor.

Looking at the financial implications and management issues associated with the care delivered in this way also does something else that is profoundly important: just as it brings together data about the healthcare activity carried out, the inpatient stays, outpatient attendances and community contacts delivered, with data from accounts, so it brings together clinicians who provide the care with the finance managers who are answerable for the performance of the Trust.

Bringing together clinicians and managers to break down information barriers and meet the unique data challenges within mental health will not happen overnight, but in doing so, will generate unprecedented improvements in patient care.

Creating the clinical leaders of the future
The Department of Health, guided by the recommendations of the Darzi review, is committed to bringing senior clinicians and consultants to the very heart of decision-making. To do so requires clinicians to have an understanding of the wider financial and management issues, and the resulting challenge for Trusts is to provide the necessary data. This is where business intelligence is crucial, bringing together information on care delivered, outcomes and the financial costs attached.

North East London Foundation Trust is working closely with Ardentia to ensure they have good quality service line reporting which provides the data needed on cost, activity and outcome. As a result, for the first time, clinicians will get a more comprehensive understanding of the care delivered, empowering them to make more meaningful decisions, and to work more closely with commissioners to shape future healthcare delivery.

Give senior clinicians the data they need, and you give them the capacity to lead, to function in a business manner as proposed in the Darzi review, and as a result to transform care delivery and meet the needs of those who need it.

http://www.nelft.nhs.uk/ http://www.ardentia.co.uk/

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 2nd September 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Welcome to a podcast discussion on the importance of business process management (BPM), especially for use across a variety of existing systems, in complex IT landscapes, and for building flexible business processes in dynamic environments.

The current economic climate has certainly highlighted how drastically businesses need to quickly adapt. Many organizations have had to adjust internally to new requirements and new budgets. They have also watched as their markets and supplier networks have shifted and become harder to predict.

To better understand how business processes can be developed and managed nimbly to help deal with such change, I recently moderated a panel of users, BPM providers, and analysts. Please join me in welcoming David A. Kelly, senior analyst at Upside Research; Joby O'Brien, vice president of development at BP Logix, and Jason Woodruff, project manager at TLT-Babcock.

Here are some excerpts:

Kelly: What's important is to be able to drive efficiency throughout an organization, and across all these business processes. With the economic challenges that organizations are facing, they've had to juggle suppliers, products, customers, ways to market, and ways to sell.

As they're doing that, they're looking at their existing business processes, trying to increase efficiencies, and they are trying to really make things more streamlined. ... Some organizations are even getting into cloud solutions and outside services that they need to integrate into their business processes. We've seen a real change in terms of how organizations are looking to manage these types of processes across applications, across data sources, across user populations.

... BPM solutions have been around for quite some time now, and a lot of organizations have really put them to good use. But, over the past three or four years, we've seen this progression of organizations that are using BPM from a task-oriented solution to one that they have migrated into this infrastructure solution. ... [But] now with the changes and pressures that organizations are facing in the economy and their business cycles, we see organizations look for much more direct, shorter-term payback and ways to optimize business processes.

O'Brien: It's difficult for an organization, especially right now, to look at something on a one-, two-, or three-year plan. A lot of the BPM infrastructure products and a lot of the larger, more traditional ways that BPM vendors approach this reflect that type of plan. What we're seeing is that companies are looking for a quicker way to see a return on their BPM investment. What that means really is getting an implementation done and into production faster.

When there are particular business needs that are critical to an organization or business, those are the ones they tend try to address first. They are looking for ways to provide a solution that can be deployed rapidly. ... They take the processes that are most critical, and that are being driven by the business users and their needs, and address those with a one-at-a-time approach as they go through the organization.

It's very different than a more traditional approach, where you put all of the different requirements out there and spend six months going through discovery, design, and the different approaches. So, it's very different, but provides a rapid deployment of highly customized implementations.

Woodruff: TLT-Babcock is a supplier of air handling and material handling equipment, primarily in the utility and industrial markets. So, we have our hands in a lot of markets and lot of places.

As a project manager, ... I realized a need for streamlining our process. Right now, we don't want to ride the wave, but we want to drive the wave. We want to be proactive and we want to be the best out there. In order to do that, we need to improve our processes and continuously monitor and change them as needed.

After quite a bit of investigation and looking at different products, we developed and used a matrix that, first and foremost, looked at functionality. We need to do what we need to do. That requires flexibility and ultimately usability, not only from the implementation stage, but the end user stage, and to do so in the most cost-effective manner. That's where we are today.

We looked at why document control was an issue and what we could do to improve it. Then, we started looking at our processes and internal functions and realized that we needed a way to not just streamline them. One, we needed a way to define them better. Two, we needed to make sure that they are consistent and repetitive, which is basically automation.

O'Brien: There's one thing that Jason said that we think is particularly important. He used one phrase that's key to Nimble BPM. He used the term "monitor and change," and that is really critical. That means that I have deployed and am moving forward, but have the ability, with BP Logix Workflow Director, to monitor how things are going—and then the ability to make changes based on the business requirements. This is really key to a Nimble BPM approach.

The approach of trying to get everybody to have a consensus, a six-month discovery, to go through all the different modeling, to put it down in stone, and then implement it works well in a lot of cases. But organizations that are trying to adapt very quickly and move into a more automated phase for the business processes need the ability to start quickly.

... The idea or the approach with the Nimble BPM is to allow folks like Jason—and those within IT—to be able to start quickly. They can put one together based on what the business users are indicating they need. They can then give them the tools and the ability to monitor things and make those changes, as they learn more.

In that approach, you can significantly compress that initial discovery phase. In a lot of the cases, you can actually turn that discovery phase into an automation phase, where, as part of that, you're going through the monitoring and the change, but you have already started at that point.

Woodruff: We saw this as an opportunity not just to implement a new product like Workflow Director, but to really reevaluate our processes and, in many cases, redefine them, sometimes gradually, other times quite drastically.

Our project cycle, from when we get an order to when our equipment is up and operating, can be two, three, sometimes four years. During that time there are many different processes from many different departments happening in parallel and serially as well. You name it -- it's all over the place. So, we started with that six-month discovery process, where we are trying to really get our hands around what do we do, why do we do it that way and what we should be doing.

As a result, we've defined some pretty complex business models and have begun developing. It’s been interesting that during that development of these longer-term, far-reaching implementations, the sort of spur-of-the-moment things have come up, been addressed, and been released, almost without realizing it.

A user will come and say they have a problem with this particular process. We can help. We'll sit down, find out what they need, create a form, model the workflow, and, within a couple of days, they're off and running. The feedback has been overwhelmingly positive.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 1st September 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Foote: There are definitely some activities in architecture that you can't outsource. ... Most companies that we talk to say, "We like our architects. They've done very well, because we trust them. The business trusts them. We trust them. They are good channels of communication. They've opened up a lot of thought in our company. We'd really like three times more of these people. How do we accelerate the growth internally?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 28th August 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 26th August 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Running IT departments as mature business units has clearly become more pressing. Recessionary budget pressures and the need to compare existing IT costs to newer options and investments means IT and business leaders need to understand how IT operates from an IT services management (ITSM) perspective.

The "reset economy" has moved the business and operations maturity process of IT from "nice to have" to "must have," if costs are going to be cut without undermining operational integrity. IT financial management (ITFM) must be pervasive and transparent if true costs are to be compared to alternative sourcing options like data center modernization, SaaS, virtualization, and cloud computing models.

Fortunately, there is a template and tried-and-true advise on moving IT operations to such business unit maturity. The standards and methods around ITIL Version 3 provide a pattern for better IT efficiency, operational accountability and ITSM. Yet there are some common misunderstandings about ITIL and how it can be best used.

To help unlock the secrets and to debunk some confusion about ITIL v3, I recently gathered three experts on ITIL for a podcast discussion on how IT leaders can best leverage ITSM.

Please welcome David Cannon, co-author of the Service Operation Book for the latest version of ITIL, and an ITSM practice principal at HP; Stuart Rance, service management expert at HP, as well as co-author of ITIL Version 3 Glossary; and Ashley Hanna, business development manager at HP and also a co-author of ITIL Version 3 Glossary.

Here are some excerpts of our discussion:

Cannon: IT needs to save costs. In fact, the business puts a lot of pressure on IT to bring their costs down. But, in this economy, what we're seeing is that IT plays a way more important role than simply saving money.

Business has to change the way in which it works. It has to come up with different services. The business has to reduce its cost. It has to find better ways of doing business. It has to consolidate services. In every single one of those decisions, IT is going to play an instrumental role. The way in which the business moves itself toward the current economy has to be supported by the way in which IT works.

Now, if there is no linkage between the business and the way in which IT is managed, then it's going to be really, really difficult for the business to get that kind of value out of IT. So, ITSM provides a way in which IT and the business can communicate and design new ways of doing business in the current economy.

IT is going to drive these changes to the business. What we're seeing in the reset is that businesses have to change their operating models.

Part of an operating model within any business is their IT environments and the way in which IT works and is integrated into the business processes and services. So, when we talk about a reset, what we're really talking about is just a re-gearing of the operating models in the business—and that includes IT.

Rance: A lot of people don't really get what we're talking about, when we talk about service management.

The point is that there are lots of different service providers out there offering services. Everybody has some kind of competition, whether it's internal, a sort of outsourcing, or alternate ways of providing service.

All of those service providers have access to the same sorts of resources. They can all buy the same servers, network components, and software licenses, and they can all build data centers of the same standards. So, the difference between service providers isn't in what resources they bring to bear. They are all the same.

Service management is the capabilities a service provider brings in order to deploy, control, and manage those resources to create some value for their customers. It includes things about all of your processes for managing changes, incidents, or the organizational designs and their roles and responsibilities, and lots of different things that you develop over time as an organization. It's how you create value from your resources and distinguish yourself from alternate service providers.

... What I've seen recently is that organizations that have already achieved a level of ITSM maturity are really building on that now to improve their efficiency, their effectiveness, and their cost-effectiveness.

Maybe a year or two years ago, other organizations that were less mature and a bit less effective were managing to keep up, because things weren't so tight and there was plenty of fat left. What I'm seeing now is that those organizations that implemented ITSM are getting further and further ahead of their competition.

For organizations that are not managing their IT services effectively toward the end of the slump, it's going to be really difficult. Some organizations will start to grow fast and pick up business, and they are going to carry on shrinking.

Hanna: If ITIL has been implemented correctly, then it is not an overhead. As times get tough, it's not something you turn off. It becomes part of what you do day-to-day, and you gain those improvements and efficiencies over time. You don't need to stop doing it. In fact, it's just part of what you do.

... We've gone from managing technology processes, which was certainly an improvement, to managing end-to-end IT service and its lifecycle and focusing on the business outcome. It's not just which technology we are supporting and what silos we might be in. We need to worry about what the outcome is on the business. The starting point should be the outcome, and everything we do should be designed to achieve what's wanted.

Cannon: In terms of trends like cloud, what you're seeing is a focus on exactly what it is that I get out of IT, as opposed to a focus from the business on the internal workings of IT.

... What things like cloud tend to do is to provide business with a way of relating to IT as a set of services, without needing to worry about what's going on underneath the surface. So, business is going to look for clear solutions that meet their needs and can change with their needs in very short times.

They still have to worry about managing the technology. These issues don't go away. It really is just a different way of dealing with the sourcing and resourcing of how you provide services.

... Businesses need to be able to react quickly and ... to be very flexible within a rapidly changing, volatile economy. So, business is going to look for clear solutions that meet their needs and can change with their needs in very short times.

Hanna: An issue that comes up quite a lot is that ITIL Version 3 appears to have gotten much bigger and more complex. Some people look at it and wonder where the old service delivery and service support areas have gone, and they've been taken by surprise by the size of V3 and the number of core books.

When Version 3 came out, it launched with a much bigger perspective right from the beginning. Instead of having just two things to focus on, there are five core books. I think that has made it look much bigger and more complex than Version 2.

It is true that if you go through education, you do need to get your head around the new service life-cycle concept and the concept called "business outcomes," as we've already mentioned. And, you need to have an appreciation of what's unique to the five core books. But, these changes are long awaited and they're very useful additions to ITIL, and complementary to what we've already learned before.

Rance: If you look at financial management in ITIL Version 3, it says you really have to understand the cost of supplying each service that you supply and you have to understand the value that each of those services delivers to your customers.

Now, that's a very simple concept. If you think of it in a broader context, you can't imagine, say, a car manufacturer who didn't know the cost of producing a car or the value of that car in the market. But, huge numbers of IT service providers really don't understand the cost of using its service and the value of that service in the market.

ITIL V3 very much focuses on that sort of idea -- really understanding what we are doing in terms of value and in terms of cost-effectiveness of that level, rather than that procedural level.

Cannon: Financial management really hasn't changed in the essence of what it is. Financial management is a set of very well defined disciplines. Within Version 3, the financial management questions become more strategic. How do we calculate value? How do we align the cost of a service with the actual outcome that the business is trying to achieve? How do we account for changing finances over time?

Rance: A lot of businesses are in the service business themselves. It might not be IT service, but many of the customers we're dealing with are in some kind of service business, whether it's a logistics business or a transport business. Even a retailer is in the service businesses, and they provide goods as well.

In order to run any kind of a service you need to have service management. You need to manage your incidents, problems, changes, finances, and all those other things. What I'm starting to see is that things that started within the IT organization—incident management, problem management and change management—some of my better customers are now starting to pick up within their business operations.

They're doing something very much like ITIL incident management, ITIL change management, or ITIL problem management within the business of delivering the service to their customers.

Hanna: If you're running yourself as a business, you need to understand the business or businesses you serve, and you need to behave in the same way.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 25th August 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Read a full transcript of the discussion. The full podcast is also available on iTunes.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 24th August 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

The current economic downturn highlights how drastically businesses and their IT operations need to change—whether through growth, reductions, or transformation (or all three).

As IT budgets react to such change, leaders need to better understand how to manage such change holistically, and not have change manage them (or worse).

One strong way to be on top of change is by employing IT portfolio management techniques, products, and processes. To learn more about helping enterprises better manage their IT costs and priorities while preparing for flexible growth when the economic tide turns, I recently interviewed Lori Ellsworth, vice president of Changepoint Solutions at Compuware, and David A. Kelly, senior analyst at Upside Research.

Here are some excerpts:

Kelly: It's really hard to improve, if you don't have a way to measure how you're doing, or a way to set goals for where you want to be. That's the idea behind IT portfolio management, as well as project portfolio management (PPM). ... [Leaders need to] take the same type of metrics and measurements that organizations have had in the financial area around their financial processes and try to apply that in the IT area and around the projects they have going on.

[IT portfolio management] measures the projects, as well as helps try to define a way to communicate between the business side of an organization that's setting the goals for what these projects or applications are going to be used for, and the IT side of the organization, which is trying to implement these. And, it makes sure that there are some metrics, measurements, and ways to correlate between the business and IT side.

Ellsworth: IT organizations now are moving toward acting in a more strategic role. Things are changing rapidly in the business environment, which means the organizations that they're serving need to change quickly and they are depending on, or insisting on, IT changing and being responsive with them.

It's essential that IT watch what's going on, participate in the business, and move quickly to respond to competitive opportunities or economic challenges. They need to understand everything that's under way in their organization to serve the business and what they have available to them in terms of resources—and they need to be able to collaborate and interact with the business on a regular basis to adjust and make change and continue to serve the business.

If IT wants to engage in a conversation about moving investments, about stopping something they're working on so they can respond to a market opportunity, for example, they need to understand who are the people, what is the cost, and where can we make changes to respond to the business. ... This isn't about IT deciding on different projects they could work on and what benefit it might deliver to the business. The business is at the table, collaborating, looking at all the potential opportunities for investment, and reaching agreement as a business on what are the top priorities.

Kelly: The other thing that's needed is consistency. When you're making these kinds of decisions, for a lot of IT organizations and organizations in general, if times are good, you can make a lot of decisions in an ad hoc fashion and still be pretty successful.

But, in dynamic and more challenging economic times, you want the decisions that you or other people on the IT team, as well as the business, are making to be consistent. You want them to have some basis in reality and in an accepted process. You talked about metrics here and what kind of metrics can you provide to the Chief Operating Officer.

You need consistency in these dynamic times and also you need a way to collaborate.

Ellsworth: There are a couple of problems with manual processes. They're very labor-intensive. We've talked about responsiveness. We need information to drive decision-making. So, the moment we rely on individual efforts or on people who have to go out and sit through meetings and collect data, we're not getting data that we can necessarily trust. We're not getting data that is timely to your point and we're not able to make those decisions to be responsive.

You end up with a situation where very definitely your resources are busy and fully deployed, but they're not necessarily doing the right things that matter the most to the business. That data needs to be real-time, so that, at multiple levels in the organization, we can be constantly assessing the health and the alignment in terms of what IT is doing to deliver to the business, and we have the information to make a change.

Kelly: To me, it's analogous to what we saw maybe 10 years ago in software development, when a whole bunch of automated testing tools became available, and organizations started to put a lot of emphasis in that area.

As you're developing an application, you can certainly test it manually and have people sitting there testing it, but when you can automate those processes they become more consistent. They become thorough, and they become something that can be done automatically in the background.

We're seeing the same thing when it comes to managing IT applications and projects, and the whole situation that's going on in the IT area.

When you start looking at IT portfolio management, that provides the same kind of automation, controls, and structure by which you can not only increase the quality of the decisions that are being made, but you can also do it in a way that almost results in less overhead and less manual work from an organization.

... Areas such as legacy transformation or modernization are good for this, because you do have to make a lot of decisions ... where you need to gain consensus. [IT portfolio management] can certainly help deliver that return on investment (ROI) much faster.

Ellsworth: It's also an opportunity to reduce the total number of applications, and the follow-on is an approach to being more efficient or investing in the applications that are strategic to the business.

It sounds pretty basic, but the moment an organization starts to inventory all of the projects that are under way and all of the applications that are deployed in production serving the business, even just that simple exercise of putting them in a single view and maybe categorizing them very simply with one or two criteria, quite quickly allows organizations to identify those rogue projects that were under way.

... They will quickly learn, "We thought we had 100 applications, and we've now discovered there are 300." They'll also quickly identify those applications that no one is using. There is some opportunity to start pulling back the effort or the cost they're investing in those activities and either reducing the cost out of the business or reinvesting in something that's more important to the business.

... I'm also seeing an increased interest in participation, from a finance perspective, outside the IT organization. Often, the Chief Information Officer (CIO) and the executive in the finance area are working together.

The line of business executives—the customers, if you will, the CIO— are starting to be more mature, if I can use that expression in terms of their understanding of technology and of how they should be working with technology and driving that collaboration. So, there is some increased executive involvement even from outside IT, from the CIO's peers.

... IT needs to recognize that there are competitive alternatives, and certainly, if IT isn't delivering, the business will go and look elsewhere. In some simple examples, you can see line-of-business customers going out and engaging with a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution in a particular area, because they can do that and bypass IT.

If they're not making the right decisions and doing the things that have the highest return to the business or if they are delivering poorly, it's really about missed opportunity and lower ROI.

Kelly: If you can do some application consolidation, you may be able to consider new deployment opportunities and cloud-based solutions. It will make the decision-making process within IT more nimble and more flexible, as well as enable them to respond more quickly to the line of business owners and be able to almost empower them with the right information and a structured decision-making process.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. The full podcast is also available for download here.

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