By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 21st November 2008 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2008

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In the latest BriefingsDirect Insights episode, recorded Nov. 7, our experts examine SOA governance, how to do it right, its scope, its future, and impact. We interview Todd Biske, author of the new Packt Publishing book, SOA Governance. The panel also focuses on the IT policies that an Obama administration should pursue, as well as ruminate about what a cabinet-level IT director appointee might accomplish.

Please join noted IT industry analysts and experts Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum, and Biske, an enterprise architect at Monsanto. Our discussion is hosted and moderated by yours truly, Dana Gardner.

Here are some excerpts:

On SOA governance ...

Biske: The reason that I decided to write a book on this is actually two-fold. First, in my work, both as a consultant, and now as a corporate practitioner, I'm trying to see SOA adoption be successful. The one key thing I always kept coming back to, which would influence the success of the effort the most, was governance. So, I definitely felt that this was a key part of adopting SOA, and if you don't do it right, your chances of success were greatly diminished.

The second part of it was when the publisher actually contacted me about it. I went out and looked and I was shocked to find that there weren't any books on SOA governance. For as long as the SOA trend has been going on now, you would have thought someone would have already written a book on it. I said, "Well, here's an opportunity, and given that it's not really a technology book, it's more of a technology process book, it actually might have some shelf life behind it." So I decided, why not, give a try.

The reason companies should be adopting SOA is that something has to change. There is something about the way IT is working with the rest of the business that isn't operating as efficiently and as productively as it could. And, if there is a change that has to go on, how do you manage that change and how do you make sure it happens? It's not just buying a tool, or applying some new technology. There has to be a more systematic process for how we manage that change, and to me that's all about governance.

If I just blindly say, "We're going to adopt SOA," and I tell all the masses, "Go adopt SOA," and everybody starts building services, I still haven't answered the question, "Why I am doing this, and what do I hope to achieve out of it."

If I don't make that clear, I could easily wind up with a whole bunch of services and building a whole bunch of solutions. I'll have far more moving parts, which are far more difficult to maintain. As a result, I actually go in the opposite direction from where I needed to go. If you don't clearly articulate, "This is the desired behavior. This is why we're adopting SOA," and then let all of the policy decisions start to push that forward, you really are taking a big risk. It's an unknown risk. You're not managing it appropriately if you don't have an end state in mind.

If you look at traditional IT governance, it is more about what projects we execute, how do we fund them, and structuring them appropriately, and that has a relationship to SOA governance. It doesn't go into the deep levels of decisions that are made within those projects.

If you were to try to set up a relationship, I would put IT governance, and even corporate governance, over the SOA governance aspects, at least, the technical side of it. The other piece of that is, when we talk about runtime governance, IT governance probably is focused on the runtime aspects of it. That's really a key part of this, making sure that our systems stay operational and that the operational behavior of the organization is the way we want it to be. So there is a relationship between them.

Baer: My sense is that, given the current economic environment, you're going to see a lot more in the way of tactical projects. ... We need to look at some jump-starts in a sensible, sort of "lite," like, L-I-T-E governance. That's governance that basically federates, or is compatible with, the software-delivery lifecycle. And, when we get to runtime, it's compatible with whatever governance we have at runtime.

The objective of SOA is to achieve reuse, but it's really to achieve business agility. Therefore, whether we shoot for reuse, initially or not, it will not necessarily be the ultimate measure of success for a SOA initiative. SOA Governance Lite would not emphasize very heavily the reuse angle to start off with. You may get to that at Stage 2 in your maturity cycle.

Koblielus: The flip side right now is that you can look at it as a survivor-oriented architecture. You have a survival imperative in tough times. Do you know if your company is going to be around in a year's time? The issue right now in terms of SOA is, "You want to hold on and you want to batten down the hatches. You want to be as efficient as possible. You want to consolidate what you can consolidate in terms of hardware, software, licenses, competency centers, and so forth. And, you're probably going to hold the line on investment, further applications, and so forth."

For SOA, in this survival oriented climate that we're in right now, the issue is not so much reusing what you already have, but holding on to it, so that you are well positioned for the next growth spurt for your business and for the economy, assuming that you will survive long enough. Essentially, SOA Governance Lite uses governance as a throttle, throttling down investments right now to only those that are critical to survive, so that you can throttle up those investments in the future.

Biske: I'm not a believer in the term "lite" governance. I'm of the opinion that you have governance, whether you admit it or not. An alternative view of governance is that it is a decision-rights structure. Someone is always making decision on projects.

The notion of Governance Lite is that we're saying, "Okay, keep those decisions local to the project as much as possible. Don't bubble them up to the big government up there and have all the decisions made in a more centralized fashion." But, no matter what, you always have governance on projects. Whether it's done more at the grassroots level on projects, or by some centralized organization through a more rigid process, it still comes back to having an understanding of what's the desired behavior that we are trying to achieve.

Where you run into problems is when you don't have agreement on what that desired behavior is. If you have that clearly stated, you can have an approach where the project teams are fully enabled to make those decisions on their own, because they put the emphasis on educating them on, "This is what we are trying to achieve, both from a project perspective, as well as from an enterprise perspective, and we expect you to meet both of those goals. And if you run into a problem where you are unsure on priorities, bubble that decision up, but we have given you all the power, all the information you need. So, you're empowered to make those decisions locally, and keep things executing quickly."

Another parallel we can draw to this is the current economic crisis. The risk you have in becoming too federated, and getting too many decisions made locally, is that you lose sight of the bigger picture. You can look at all of these financial institutions that got into the mortgage-backed securities and argue that their main focus was not the stability of the banking system, it was their bottom line and their stock price.

They lost sight of, "We have to keep the financial system stable." There was a risk in pushing too much down to the individual groups without keeping that higher vision and that balance between them. You can get yourself in a lot of trouble. The same thing holds true in [SOA] development.

On PE Obama's technology leader ...

Baer: Obviously, you need somebody who is going to ... think outside the box. Basically, the government has long been a series of lots of boxes or silos, where you have these various fiefdoms. Previous attempts to unify architectures at the agency levels have not always been terribly successful.

The chief priority for anybody who is ... in a CIO-type of role at the cabinet level is ... to look for getting more out of less. That's essential, because there are going to be so many competing needs for so many limited resources. We have to look for someone who can formulate strategic goals -- and I'm going to have to use the term reuse -- to reuse what is there now, and federate what is there now, and federate with as light a touch as possible.

Kobielus: it comes down to the fact that they're driving at many of the same overall objectives that also drive SOA initiatives. One initiative is to breakdown silos in terms of information sharing between the government and the citizenship, but also silos internally within the government, between the various agencies to help them better exchange information, share expertise, and so forth. In fact, if we look at their position statement called "Bring government into the 21st century," it really seems that it's part of the overall modernization push for IT and the government. They're talking really about a federated SOA governance infrastructure or a set of best practices.

Tech modernization in the government is absolutely essential. Reuse and breaking down silos between agencies is critically important. Brokering best practices across the agencies, specific silo IT and CTO organizations, is critically important. It sounds to me as if Obama will be an SOA President, although he doesn't realize it yet, if he puts in place the approach that he laid out about a year ago, considering that the IT infrastructure in the government is probably right now the least of his concerns.

Biske: [Obama] definitely has a challenge, and I am thinking from a governance perspective. He has taken step one, in that the paragraph that Jim just mentioned, of bringing government into the 21st Century. He has articulated that this is the way that he wants our systems to interact and share information with the constituents.

The next step is the policies that are going to get us there, and obviously he's time-boxed by the terms of his presidency. He's got a big challenge ahead of him, or at least the CTO that gets appointed has a huge challenge. Somehow, you have to break it down into what goals are going to be achievable in that timeframe.

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

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By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 20th November 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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In early November 2008 Lotus announced Symphony 1.2. The release includes support for the Ubuntu Linux operating system, some DataPilot table functions that provide summaries of spreadsheet data, and the Beta version of the Apple Mac support. I wrote about the initial release in 'Lotus Symphony 1 freely accessible to all'.

The Mac beta is the most interest to me as I now use an Apple Mac as my main production machine.

Although it is a beta it has all the functions of the production Windows version, except that it is English only. It is beta because the user interface has to be engineered specifically to make it a good Mac citizen and work in the same way as other Mac applications. IBM has put it out as a public beta because it is keen to get feedback to ensure that it really meets the requirements of the Mac fraternity. I have been using it for a few days and I have come across a few niggles that, if fixed, would improve my enjoyment when using the product but nothing so far that would stop me using the beta as a production environment until the real thing comes out in the first quarter of next year.

The first reason that any Mac user should look at Symphony is that it is a free download with no cost to individual users. Even though it is free it has the full backing of IBM because it is a part of a bigger product set that enterprise users can buy with full support. The user of the free download gets access to the forums which are monitored and moderated by IBM and, through these, can submit bugs and issues as well as submit queries and gets hints and tips from IBM and the Symphony community.

The main reason is the clean and clear user interface. Symphony runs in one window with multiple tabs. The single window supports text documents, spreadsheets and presentations.

To the right of the main window is the properties sidebar which changes its content depended on what I am doing; if I am creating text I have immediate access to fonts, effects and position, whereas if I am positioned on a graphic it includes size and wrap properties. As well as the properties sidebar I can have a Style type sidebar, I am a great believer in using styles to format and markup a document so having the list of styles immediately accessible is a boon.

Apple Macs tend to have very wide screens and I find that having a text window that goes right across the screen is too big and uncomfortable to read. I normally arrange for the text window to take up a half to two-thirds of the screen leaving some screen real-estate for the sidebars.

Symphony functions can be extended with plug-ins; my favourite at the moment is sidenote. It gives me a scratchpad area as an additional sidebar. I use this to keep notes for myself of topics I need to cover in the article (I have just remembered that I need to write about PDF export—it is now on my list and I can concentrate on my current thought of plug-ins). It also enables me to copy and paste interesting snippets from other documents (say a press release) and then paste or modify them to be included in my article. As the Symphony community grows the range of plug-ins will increase with contributions from IBM, donations from the community and commercial plug-ins.

As well as plug-ins the Symphony home page has a gallery which includes clip-art and templates all of which helps users to use Symphony productively.

In a related announcement IBM and Sun announced the ODF Toolkit Union. ODF (Open Document Format) is the native format for Symphony documents. The Toolkit will include ODF DOM API, parser and serializer which will enabler developers to integrate open documents into business applications. Functions could include reporting, scanning, customisation and collaboration.

Finally Symphony includes an export to PDF function. The good thing about this is that it automatically produces tagged PDF which is a prerequisite for creating accessible PDF. The exported PDF for simple documents is fully accessible whilst more complex documents may require some simple and easy touching up.

I would recommend that Mac users try the beta out and feedback any issues to Lotus. If we all do this, the production version, which is planned for 1Q 2009, should be a very attractive productivity tool.

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By: Andy Hayler, CEO, The Information Difference Posted: 19th November 2008 Copyright The Information Difference © 2008

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SAS recently announced a change in their product direction. Currently they have a strong data quality technology in DataFlux, a reasonable ETL technology (Data Integraton Studio) and a niche MDM product (DataFlux qMDM). It is clear that there is a strong link between MDM and data quality, and indeed most MDM vendors either OEM or partner with a data quality tool, unless they have built or acquired their own. Moreover there are natural links between MDM and the world of data integration, since there is limited use of having a master data hub if you can't actually get the data into it or out from it to other systems. Again, most MDM vendors have some form of co-existence strategy with ETL and EAI technologies, while a few have their own offerings as well.

SAS's plan is to bring these three product lines together into a single product offering, covering data integration, MDM and data quality. The three internal development teams have already been redeployed under the DataFlux group, and the intention is to release "Project Unity" in its initial form in Q4 2009, which will bring together the three strands in a single platform. A further release will follow about a year later, bringing in a unified user interface and reporting environment as well as support for unstructured data via its Teragram acquisition.

This is an interesting move. A cynic might say that the DataFlux MDM offering had negligible market presence so further tying it to the successful DataFlux data quality platform made sense, but extending the offering to data integration is a more interesting proposition. Currently the leading integration vendor, Informatica, has steadfastly refused to be drawn into the MDM world, a stance that has puzzled many, this author included. Informatica has acquired two well-thought-of data quality vendors so has plenty of coverage there, but does not attempt MDM. IBM has acquired strong integration technology (Ascential came with a data quality tool) and separate MDM technology (DWL, Trigo), and is doing a decent job of knitting all this together, at least at the Powerpoint level. Oracle and SAP are the only other vendors to really span these three markets, and in their case they have quite separate product lines, mostly concentrating on their own ERP worlds.

Hence this is quite a bold stance by SAS. The Unity platform will not require the underlying SAS platform technologies, so it can be seen as a stand-alone offering. I feel that the merging of the data quality and MDM offerings makes good sense, and I would expect to see other MDM vendors and data quality vendors tying the knot in the coming years. Wrapping in data integration may be biting off more than can easily be chewed, since enterprises are much more attached to their investments in data integration than they are to data quality or MDM tools, and are likely to insist on co-existence with their own deployed data integration platform. However this does give SAS a new angle to attack Informatica accounts, since Informatica lacks an MDM component. It remains to be seen how much traction this approach will get in the marketplace but as Aesop said, "In union there is strength".

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By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 19th November 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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De-duplication of data during backup to save backup space is now common in the distributed and open systems market. It can yield upwards of 95% backup disk space savings and drastically alter the economics calculation related to using tape or disk for archiving. Yet de-dupe has largely by-passed the mainframe world so far.

There are some technical reasons for this to do with the complex way in which mainframes store the different data types; yet, if these are overcome, huge storage savings are there to be had. It means a smaller storage footprint, lower running costs, less energy and cooling and, when data is transmitted to remote sites, a huge saving on WAN transmission bandwidth and time. These factors help make de-dupe attractive in these tough economic times.

Meanwhile, the mainframe world is particularly wedded to tape for backup and archive; that tends to mean long recovery times, whereas de-dupe solutions that write to disk can be recovered much faster.

I mention this because z/OS mainframe users in one country, South Africa, are already using a de-dupe solution successfully. The company that supplies it—Shoden Data Systems—is now launching in the UK through a subsidiary.

A major retailer with z/OS mainframes, Edcon (South Africa's nearest equivalent to M&S with a $3bn turnover), has so far achieved an 11:1 (91%) space-saving using Shoden's solution (which incorporates Data Domain's market-leading de-dupe appliance). It has also eliminated tape altogether and uses de-duped data transmission to a remote site as part of its disaster recovery (DR) plan.

According to Shoden Data Systems UK's CEO John Taffinder, Edcon also achieves much lower maintenance costs, achieves simplified and faster restores, and has re-deployed tape staff.

"There is a problem with tape [on mainframes] but people don't want to spend," said Taffinder. "It is typical to take 3–5 hours to recover and most say they are happy with 24 hour recovery (which in practice means two days to get back to normal)." This problem is of course greatest if tapes need to be physically retrieved from offsite stores.

He added that data migration was much easier with disk, tape libraries were expensive to maintain and disk reliability was higher. I also concur with him that de-dupe should be attractive to mainframers everywhere. Right now, Shoden's solution seems to be the only one out there; so its short-term success may boil down to the market's perception of the economic value.

Edcon avoided purchasing a new tape robot or smaller virtual tape library (VTL) to replace their now unsupportable IBM tape robot; it found the Shoden solution worked out more economical in addition to gaining all the added benefits just described. South Africa is not UK of course but similar ROI calculations can be made here.

How the Shoden solution works is conceptually simple and largely transparent to mainframe operation. ‘QuickRecover' uses Luminex VTL engine(s) to translate the processed data from the mainframe as though going to an IBM 3940 tape drive—taking the processing load away from the mainframe. It uses fibre channel (6-8 FICONs) and allows 1-2 ESCON or FICON tape emulations in changing the data into a format that the Data Domain de-dupe NAS appliance can handle; the output is then captured on an Intel Xeon-based Hitachi blade server (not otherwise available in the UK).

This process is managed through Shoden's own mainframe management GUI console using a management server sitting within the VTL engine. This handles sizing and configurability, recovery management, error logging and dashboard statistics such as de-dupe ratios, performance and pain points. Flexibility is built in so, for instance, it can be arranged as one data set per "tape cartridge".

Shoden in the UK is also able to take immediate advantage of the group's well-established and English-speaking 24x7 first-line support service from South Africa. So while the UK mainframe market is not huge, start-up teething troubles ought to be minimised. Mainframe users seeking to cut costs quickly would do worse than take a close look at how Shoden does it.

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By: Martin Banks, Practice Leader - Datacentre & Mainframe, Bloor Research Posted: 18th November 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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Where there's a recession there is also an opportunity. While excremental in nature, bad economic times can also be just the right fertilizer needed for the next step forward in the application of new ideas or technologies. This one looks set to be a good example of this process in action, particularly in some specific areas of IT.

At one level it is easy to predict that the market sectors which ride out the economic vicissitudes best will be where hardware is not the major investment requirement. This seems to be borne out already with Intel's latest profits warning. The only exception could be where investment in datacentre consolidation, based around tightly managed, high-specification, low-energy, extensively-virtualized servers, could give a boost to the bottom line for some users on the energy-saving front. But even then, the investment would probably be significant enough to make raising sufficient credit difficult. So even gold-plated businesses may find such investments have to be funded from internal resources, making them an even less attractive proposition.

The Cloud and SaaS service delivery models are, however, where the economic clag is most likely to dispense munificence as they can provide low-cost alternative upgrade and enhancement options for users without adding new kit onsite. An example of this is leading SaaS vendor, NetSuite, which just announced a 40%+ rise in like-for-like quarter revenues, while others I have spoken with (all still private companies) happily talk of increasing double-digit growth.

So the penny seems to be dropping for users that Cloud/SaaS does not represent an either/or choice, and a recession is only likely to speed the process. They can add and integrate services that fit both their business needs and their existing onsite resources, a factor which may prove of particular relevance to larger users with well-established IT infrastructures. The fact is that they can use the Cloud/SaaS approach to add resources or services both quickly and cost-effectively. They also have the option to remove the service without being left with the un-used remains of the capital investment, which is likely to be seen as a real advantage in a financial squeeze.

The eventual end of the financial crisis and recession could also be a significant lever in the adoption of Cloud/SaaS into the user community. As the recession ends and growth picks up, the companies with the fastest response to the reappearance of market opportunities will be the ones to benefit most—and they are likely to be the ones that are already experienced in deploying and exploiting Cloud/SaaS solutions.

This could also be the lever that pushes the software vendors to seriously examine their current licencing models, with a move towards the annuity revenue model that will allow pay-per-use Cloud/SaaS business models to flourish. As every business sector is expected to take a financial hit of some kind, now may be a good time for software vendors to take the hit of changing from the upfront one-off licence payment model to the drip-feed annuity model of pay-per-use. None of them have really dared do it during better times as the impact on stock prices would probably have been significant. Now they have an opportunity to do it at a time when stock price fluctuation are no guidance to anything of any current relevance to business.

This is also likely to be the time when new start-up software vendors appear, geared specifically to take advantage of the Cloud/SaaS financial and delivery models. If they avoid the one-off licence payment model they can build their financing around the drip-feed of a growing annuity revenue stream, which should in the long term give them a more stable financial platform.

They will also be looking to exploit the capabilities of the delivery model to deliver flexibility and agility to users within a well-managed environment, for example combining complex mashup capabilities with enterprise-strength governance. Some will also be targeting applications processes that are currently popular as applications but which are not best-suited to Cloud/SaaS delivery models. In both cases, however, collaboration capabilities will be far more important than competitive edge in the marketplace. Software solutions have for years been a collective rather than a single vendor offering and the Cloud will only accelerate this process.

Long term, therefore, this current recession may well end up being seen as the birthplace of Cloud-based Utility Computing, with Service Aggregators meeting end user requirements by brokering packages of services, applications functionality and utilities. They will probably start in vertical market sectors and then grow more horizontal so, yes, there will be aggregators of the aggregators for the biggest users.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 18th November 2008 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2008

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Many enterprises are factoring how to bring more applications into a virtual development and deployment environment to save on operating costs and to take advantage of service oriented architectures (SOA) and cloud computing models.

Finding proven deployment methods and governance for managing virtualized applications across a lifecycle is an essential ingredient in making SOA and cloud-computing approaches as productive as possible while avoiding risk and complexity. The goal is to avoid having to rewrite code in order for applications to work across multiple clouds—public, private or hybrids.

The cloud forces the older notion of "write-once, run anywhere" into a new level of "deploy correctly so you can exploit the benefits of cloud choices and save a lot of money."

To learn more about how enterprises should begin moving to application-level virtualization that serves as an onramp to cloud benefits, I recently spoke with Billy Marshall, founder and chief strategy officer of rPath.

Here are some excerpts:

We're once again facing a similar situation now where enterprises are taking a very tough look at their data center expenditures and expansions that they're planning for the data center. ... The [economic downturn] is going to have folks looking very hard at large-scale outlays of capital for data centers.

I believe that will be a catalyst for folks to consider a variable-cost approach to using infrastructures or service, perhaps platform as a service (PaaS). All these things roll up under the notion of cloud.

Virtualization provides isolation for applications running their own logical server, their own virtual server. ... Virtualization gives you—from a business perspective—an opportunity to decouple the definition of the application from the system that it runs on. ... Then, at run-time, you can decide where you have capacity that best meets needs of the profile of an application.

I can begin sourcing infrastructure a little more dynamically, based upon the load that I see. Maybe I can spend less on the capital associated with my own data center, because with my application defined as this independent unit, separate from the physical infrastructure I'll be able to buy infrastructure on demand from Amazon, Rackspace, GoGrid, these folks who are now offering up these virtualized clouds of servers.

That's the architecture we're evolving toward. ... For legacy applications, there's not going to be much opportunity. [But] they may actually consider this for new applications that would get some level of benefit by being close to other services.

[If] I can define my application as a working unit, I may be able to choose between Amazon or my internal architecture that perhaps has a VMware basis, or a Rackspace, GoGrid, or BlueLock offering.

Another big consideration for these enterprises now is do I have workloads that I'm comfortable running on Linux right now, and so can I take a step forward and bind Linux to the workload in order to take it to wherever I want it to go.

rPath brings a capability around defining applications as virtual machines (VMs), going through a process whereby you release those VMs to run on whichever cloud of your choosing, whether a hypervisor virtualized cloud of machines, such as what's provided by Amazon, or what you can build internally using Citrix XenSource or something like VMware's virtual infrastructure.

It then provides an infrastructure for managing those VMs through their lifecycle for things such as updates for backup and for configuration of certain services on the machines in a way that's optimized to run a virtualized cloud of systems. We specialize in optimizing applications to run as VMs on a cloud or virtualized infrastructure.

With our technology, we enforce a set of policies that we learned were best practices during our days at Red Hat when constructing an operating system. We've got some 50 to 60 policies that get enforced at build time, when you are building the VM. They're things like don't allow any dangling symlinks, and closing the dependency loop around all of the binary packages to get included. There could be other more corporate-specific policies that need to be included, and you would write those policies into the build system in order to build these VMs.

It's very similar to the way you put policies into your application lifecycle management (ALM) build system when you were building the application binary. You would enforce policy at build time to build the binary. We're simply suggesting that you extend that discipline of ALM to include policies associated with building VMs. There's a real opportunity here to close the gap between applications and operations by having much of what is typically been done in installing an application and taking it through Dev, QA and Test, and having that be part of an automated build system for creating VMs.

People are still thinking about the operating system as something that they bind to the infrastructure. In the new case, they're binding the operating system to the hypervisor and then installing the application on top of it. If the hypervisor is now this bottom layer, and if it provides all the management utilities associated with managing the physical infrastructure, you now get an opportunity to rethink the operating system as something that you bind to the application.

When you bind an operating system to an application, you're able to eliminate anything that is not relevant to that application. Typically, we see a surface area shrinking to about 10 percent of what is typically deployed as a standard operating system. So, the first thing is to package the application in a way that is optimized to run in a VM. We offer a product called rBuilder that enables just that functionality.

If you prove to yourself that you can do this, that you can run [applications] in both places (cloud and on-premises), you've architected correctly. ... That puts you in a position where eventually you could run that application on your local cloud or virtualized environment and then, for those lumpy demand periods—when you need that exterior scale and capacity—you might just look to that cloud provider to support that application [at scale].

There's a trap here. If you become dependent on something associated with a particular infrastructure set or a particular hypervisor, you preclude any use in the future of things that don't have that hypervisor involved. ... The real opportunity here is to separate the application-virtualization approach from the actual virtualization technology to avoid the lock-in, the lack of choice.

If you do it right, and if you think about application virtualization as an approach that frees your application from the infrastructure, there is a ton of benefit in terms of dynamic business capability that is going to be available to your organization.

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

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By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 18th November 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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We were recently asked by the editor of one of our few remaining computer technology weeklies, whether we thought that Open Source BI (Business Intelligence) tools such as Jaspersoft and the Eclipse BIRT (Business Intelligence and Reporting Tools) project were a viable and robust alternative to "proper" (expensive) BI tools from the likes of Cognos and Business Objects. Well, we've recently looked at Jaspersoft as just one example of the breed; and the answer is "very probably yes; but it's a bit more complicated than that".

When you consider that many BI problems are probably fairly undemanding and that Jaspersoft, for example, is putting a lot of effort into scalability etc., then that easily justifies this answer. The Jaspersoft toolset supports production and operational reporting, both ad-hoc and dashboard-driven end-user interaction, data analysis and integration with "legacy" stand-alone or embedded BI applications. It is available in French, German and Spanish (Jaspersoft says that its community edition is downloaded more often in Europe than in any other region of the world) and delivered through a "Web 2.0" interface. EnergySys embeds Jaspersoft in the SaaS hydrocarbon allocation and production reporting software it sells to the gas and oil industry. AirVersent embeds Jaspersoft in its mobile management solutions. And Jaspersoft is part of a bigger community; it partners with Talend, for example, for the delivery of information from data integrations; according to Bertrand Diard, Talend's CEO and co-founder, "One of the strengths of open source software is the partner network that exists to provide customers with customised packages that address their most fundamental requirements. The work we do with Jaspersoft is a perfect example of how open source collaboration can reach every level of the customer experience."

So, Jaspersoft is being used successfully for serious enterprise BI already. But, addressing the question posed in the title, it isn't free. Even if you download the software without having to pay for it, there is an Open Source licence with terms that could, conceivably, be enforced. If you you are using it for serious business applications, you need to know where it is deployed and what for. It should be deployed under configuration management. You need to train its users, not only in how to use Jaspersoft but also in how to do BI professionally, so that they can have confidence in the results they get. You may need professional support from Jaspersoft. There is a cost of ownership, even for free software, and although this might well be less than for commercial offerings, you can't just assume this.

Which is part of why the answer to the question posed by this Editor is a bit more complicated than you might expect. Are there especially demanding applications which the established BI players can cope with and Jaspersoft can't? Quite possibly, we really don't know either way (it's hard to prove a negative), but even supposing that Jaspersoft can completely match proprietary BI tools in terms of scalability and performance, there might still be reasons to go with the proprietary tools. They've been around a long time so have a good provenance—their features and issues are well known and understood and there are probably workarounds for any problems. People have confidence in established players—there's a comfort from knowing that if it goes wrong, people will probably blame the tool vendor, not you. Going for an Open Source solution might make you feel vulnerable (for political rather than technical reasons), especially if your company isn't mature enough to manage Open Source software effectively. And you might find a wider choice of high quality consultants are available in the proprietary space (or, you might not—we'd have thought that the real need for consultancy is in question formulation and statistical QA of the results, which ought to be largely product independent).

However, we are confident that Jaspersoft, to be specific, is worthy of consideration for BI applications in general. You shouldn't be making a choice between "Open Source" and "Proprietary" software in your selection process. You should be determining your business-focussed requirements—the business needs/opportunities—and matching the various products against them. Jaspersoft (or anything else) certainly shouldn't be eliminated just because it is Open Source—and if you haven't seriously considered Open Source solutions before, you might be agreeably surprised at what they can do.

More than that, though, there is a particular opportunity for Open Source solutions like Jaspersoft and that is in integrating BI capabilities into an application design from the first, in organisations which have traditionally thought of BI as a "bolt on" afterthought. If we are going to be delivering "holistic business services" and measuring "business outcomes" (and we do think that this is where things are going) then the implication is that a service should provide management-level feedback on its operation as routine. This involves developers in building in more functionality—for, it is presumed, a real business stakeholder—that may not have been envisaged originally. Building a specialised BI functionality from scratch would not be cost-effective (besides, most general developers couldn't build it very well); and the overheads of acquiring a new, proprietary, BI platform with an API and an SDK is, in many organisations, a huge barrier to innovation.

But Jaspersoft is widely used in embedded form already and could be embedded in a "proof of concept" without committing the organisation to managing another expensive relationship with a proprietary software vendor. Jaspersoft puts a BI capability into the developers toolkit with very little overhead. And after you've built the proof of concept, you could always "go proprietary" later if you've found any "implementation issues" with Jaspersoft scaling up. Although we see no reason to think that you will.

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By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 18th November 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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It is the morning of 17 November amd I have just switched my computer on. The first thing that happened was that Firefox upgraded to 3.0.4. At first it looked just like another security update but on closer inspection I discovered a new item on the menu. The menu now includes an accessibility drop down.

I'm still getting my mind around this but it is definitely worth having a look at. For example you can now get a list of all headings on the page and jumped straight to a particular heading. This is something that screen reader users have been able to do for a long time. However this feature was not available for people who have limited use of the keyboard; they just had to scroll down until they found the right heading. Now they can go directly to the right heading and skip immediately to a relevant link or input field.

Just to give a flavour here is the list of items on the accessibility menu:

• Reports - provides an accessibility check on the current page.
• Navigation - lets you navigate to headings as described above and most other object types.
• Text equivalent - includes the ability to hide all images.
• Scripting - includes a variety of ARIA and event options.
• Style - allows users styles and provides standard high contrast options.
• Validators - gives immediate access to the W3C HTML Validator and similar tools.
• Tools - gives access to a variety of automated accessibility testing tools.
• Keyboard - appears to enable users the option of adding extra shortcut keys.

The accessibility menu adds to other accessibility improvements which came in 3.0 including:

• Support of IAccessible2 on Windows.
• Support of ATK/AT-SPI on Linux.
• Improved support of the ARIA recommendation.
• Full Zoom with images.
• The 'Report a broken website tool' now has an Accessibility option, so if you find a problem you can immediately report it.

All of this makes a significant improvement to accessibility of Firefox. My only complaint is that some of the help for these new functions is either missing or of limited value. As I discover more I will write another post.

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By: Martin Banks, Practice Leader - Datacentre & Mainframe, Bloor Research Posted: 17th November 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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The customer base of Edinburgh-based data centre hosting company, Scolocate, is starting to demonstrate what should be an important trend as interest in cloud computing ramps up. The psychological issue that currently faces many vendors of outsourced services such as SaaS and remote hosting—namely that potential customers are concerned about losing control and ownership of their data—at last seems to be dwindling.

Many of those customers are amongst the most naturally security conscious businesses and organisations around. Not only does it have some 25 communications carriers located in its 16,000 square foot facility, but it also hosts the Scottish Health Service, one of the two data centres run by the Scottish Police Force, several other Government Departments, and is now operating as the backbone of the Scottish Education Service.

The fact that with a remote service the user's data is not definably close at hand has been one of the stumbling blocks over which many have baulked when it came to considering using remote hosting services and SaaS. This is despite the fact that companies such as Scolocate can offer far greater levels of data security than those companies can normally provide for themselves, if only because that is core to its business proposition.

To some extent it is, perhaps, the very public losses of valuable, sensitive data that is at last driving businesses and Government departments to look at how the security of their data fits with the opposite requirement of making it readily available to those that need it. In this context, well-managed remote services may at last be seen as providing a better answer, if only because it provides the customers with one, definable, throat to choke.

In addition, it also allows them to provide more services to customers, such as capacity and availability management for example, together with expertise in operating systems management. Patch management in this area can be an issue for users even in a co-location environment and the cost-effectiveness of off-loading these non-core management issues is starting to show through. These are services that have to be undertaken, but can be a burden for many companies for they are not core to their business. But they are the core business for the likes of Scolocate.

Indeed, they are—or at least should be—capable of providing tasks that many customer businesses would prefer to avoid, such as backup management, business continuity, and disaster recovery. Having not only testable, but also fully tested plans for these steps—rather than just an untested, write-up of plans that fulfil an appropriate tick-box—is becoming increasingly important, and providing this is core to the likes of Scolocate.

Though the psychological mood is starting to change, it is still throwing up stumbling blocks. Users may be willing to let their data off premises, but many still like to be nearby. Most of Scolocate's UK-based customers, for example, come from the east coast of the Scottish lowlands rather than a wider geographic spread. Some of it is still obviously practical in nature, as some co-location users still provide their own support for their systems, and therefore do not want to travel too far when problems occur. But the suggestion that this is at least in part a psychological issue is evidenced by the fact that a good measure of Scolocate's business comes from overseas companies operating UK-based subsidiaries.

As these psychological trends pick up speed, the company should also be able to build on its ability to provide hosted backbone services to a wide range of small and medium-sized businesses, removing the need to build their own data centre services, with all that that entails. The backbone hosting side of the business is a good development of that core hosting/co-location business and is in discussion with the Scottish Enterprise Board about providing such a service for the Scottish software business, particularly the smaller start up operations.

Here, SaaS and backbone hosting services like Scolocate have a significant role to play in providing the agility needed to meet changing business requirements without the significant infrastructure investment, energy costs and real estate issues. In addition, the current economic situation plays to its capabilities, particularly in terms of exploiting data centre management expertise. For example, many server vendors quote energy consumption figures that, in practice, are rarely reached, so with good management consumption per rack can be a good deal lower than expected. In addition, experience shows that many systems can be run hotter than specified, requiring less air conditioning resources. Such management skills can reduce the cost burden for users even further.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 17th November 2008 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2008

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Fresh research from IDC on service oriented architecture (SOA) adoption patterns shows what users of SOA identify as essential success factors. The perceptions are critical as more companies cross from experimentation to more holistic SOA use and its required governance management and lifecycle functions.

A recent webinar captures the IDC findings and shows how Hewlett-Packard (HP) is working to help companies adopt SOA successfully. That webinar is now captured as a podcast, transcript and blog.

Join me as I moderate a SOA market adoption trends presentation by Sandy Rogers, program director for SOA, Web services, and integration research at IDC. Sandy is followed by a presentation on SOA lifecycle approaches by Kelly Emo, SOA product marketing manager for HP Software.

Here are some excerpts:

Sandy Rogers: Organizations are looking for much more consistency across enterprise activities and views, and are really finding a lot of competitive differentiation in being able to manage their processes more effectively. That requires the ability to stand across different types of systems and to respond—whether in a reactive mode or a proactive mode—to opportunities.

What we’re finding is that, as we go to this generation, SOA, in and of itself, is spawning the ability to address new types of models, such as event-based processing, model-based processing, cloud computing, and appliances. We’re really, as a foundation, looking to make a strategic move.

The issue is not necessarily deciding if they should go toward SOA. What we're finding is that for most organizations this is the way that they are going to move, and the question is just navigating how to best do that for the best value and for better success.

According to the same poll… What are most interesting are the top challenges in implementing SOA. All of our past studies reinforced that skills, availability of skills, and training in SOA continue to be a number one challenge. What’s really noticeable now is that setting up an SOA governance structure has reached the second most-indicated challenge.

We found in other studies that a lot of organizations did not have strong governance. SOA almost forces these companies to do what they should have been doing all along around incorporating the right procedures around governance, and making that a non-intrusive approach.

…What this is telling us is that we have reached another stage of maturity, and that in order to move forward organization will need to think about SOA as an overall program, and how it impacts both technology and people dimensions within the organization. …We are indeed moving from project- and application-level SOA to more of a system and enterprise scale.

We [also] wanted to look at how SOA's success is actually defined, …and what factors and practices in these organizations that are successful have the most impact. …While technologies are key enablers, most of the study participants focused on organizational and program dynamics as being key contributors to success. Through technology, they are able to influence the impact of the activities that they are introducing into the overall SOA program.

The pervasiveness of SOA adoption in the enterprise was a key determinant of how ... they were being successful. ... If you’re able to handle trust, you’re able to influence organizational change management effectiveness. If you’re able to address business alignment, then you’ll have much more success in understanding the impact on architecture and vice versa.

Domains of SOA success
When we gathered all of this information …we created a framework of varying components, and elements that impacted success. Then, we aggregated these into seven key domains. …The seven domains are: Business Alignment, Organizational Change Management, Communication, Trust, Scale and Sustainability, Architecture and Governance.

We found that enforcing policies, not putting off governance until later on, was very important, [as well as] putting more efforts into business modeling, which many of these organizations are doing now. They said that they wished they had done a little bit more when thinking about the services that were created, focusing on preparing the architecture for much more process and innovation.

Kelly Emo: You heard from IDC the seven critical SOA success factors that came from this in-depth analysis of customers. The point that I want to reiterate here that was so powerful in this discussion is the idea that the seven domains are linked. By putting energy and effort in any one of them, you are setting yourself up for more success across the board.

What we are going to do now is drill down into that domain of governance. …We’ll talk a little bit about the value of using an automated SOA governance platform, to help automate those manual activities and get you there faster.

…We see many of our customers now crossing the enterprise scalability divide with their SOA, looking to incorporate SOA into their mainstream IT organizations, and they’re seeing the benefits of that initial investment in governance help them make that leap.

SOA governance is all about helping IT get to the expected business benefits of their SOA. You can think of SOA governance, in essence, as IT's navigation system to get to the end goal of SOA. What it's going to help IT do, as they look to scale SOA out, is to more broadly foster trust across those distributed domains. It's going to help become a catalyst for communication and collaboration, and it's going to help jump-start that non-expert staff.

The thing that's key about governance is that it helps integrate those silos of IT. It helps integrate the folks who are responsible for designing services with those who actually have to develop the back end implementations and with those who are doing the testing of performance and functionality. Alternately, it integrates them with the organizations that are responsible for both deploying the services and the policies and integration logic that will support accessing those services.

Keeping a perspective on lifecycle governance, your organization can be primed and ready to handle SOA, as it scales, as more and more services go into production, and more and more services are deemed to be ready for consumption and reuse into new composite applications. …The key is to keep a service lifecycle governance perspective in mind, as you go about your governance program, and automation is key. …Automating policy compliance can bring a huge pay off.

What we are finding more and more now is that organizations are actually investing in a role known as service manager, someone who oversees the implication of not only delivering a service over time, but those that are consuming it. I see this as a best practice that can be supported by SOA governance, and which helps empower them by giving them a foundation to set up policies and have visibility in terms of how this service is meeting its objective and who is consuming the service.

You can actually get a dialog going between your enterprise architecture and planning teams, your development teams, and your testing teams, in terms of the expectations, and requirements right upfront, as the concept of the service is being ferreted out.

So why invest in SOA governance now …[when] we’re under a lot of economic pressure, budgets are tight, there's fewer resources to do the same work? This sounds counter-intuitive, absolutely, but this is the right time to make that investment in SOA governance, because the benefits are going to pay off significantly.

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

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By: Tony Lock, Programme Director, Freeform Dynamics Posted: 16th November 2008 Copyright Freeform Dynamics © 2008

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You may have noticed that the IT vendor weather has recently become quite stormy as these organisations claim to see "clouds" appearing from almost each and every direction. There is no doubt that many IT vendors are either talking about this or seeking to bring a variety of offerings to the Cloud market. The question really is, should organisations expect their IT systems infrastructure to become hazy with numerous Cloud offerings?

Let me try to be clear about what I think of as Cloud IT. In fact the term can be deceptive as to my mind there is no single definition or description that absolutely defines cloud offerings. To my mind a cloud offering is any service that runs utilising IT infrastructure resources such as servers, storage or applications etc; that are not hosted within the environment of the organisation and of which it has no legal ownership. In this model very many SaaS (software as a a service) offerings can be found along with many of the pay on demand / pay for consumption infrastructure services.

Indeed the past few weeks has seen Microsoft talking about project Azure at its PDC conference in Los Angeles whilst Salesforce.com held its Dreamforce conference the following week in San Francisco. Both vendors, and indeed most of the rest of the community, speak with almost uniform glee about the importance that "the Cloud" would play as organisations look to develop and deploy production systems free of such traditional IT constraints of capacity limitations and availability of capital budget.

It is more than apparent that many IT vendors are expecting that the use of cloud services will grow very rapidly. Although in truth it is probably fairer to say that "hoping" is a more appropriate verb than "expecting". For my part, and backed up by most of our research statistics, it is clear that SaaS, as opposed to the more generic Cloud computing, is continuing to grow. However it must be said that it is not "explosive growth", rather a more controlled use, with an appropriate approach, rather than an out and out fashion.

I have great faith that the SaaS and generic cloud type models will take a very firm role in the delivery of IT services over the course of the coming years. Note the use of the word "model". Many organisations are already looking to deliver their internal services using the SaaS approach, but running on the company's own infrastructure. There is also a very clear connection between many of the capabilities that the virtualisation of the IT infrastructure that is now being undertaken could essentially end up delivering cloud compute type facilities, but once again hosted on corporately owned kit.

I do see the use of externally delivered SaaS and, ultimately, cloud computing services becoming very strong but there are many obstacles that need to be overcome. These include many matters of privacy and data / service location as many nations already place strong limitations on where and how much information can be processed.

Today many cloud and SaaS services are hosted on systems operating from the USA making them, at least in theory, unsuitable for many uses by non-US located entities. For example, many European nations already have strong privacy laws that restrict how, and sometimes where, data can be stored and processed. Clearly for SaaS and Cloud computing to take off, the weather systems involved need to be far more widely dispersed than is currently the case.

Beyond this there is also a need for both the vendor sales models to evolve, and I do mean evolve as there is no widespread recognition of just how organisations wish to pay for these services. And ultimately, as I have said before (IT Budgets, Clouds and Virtualisation), the manner in which IT budgets are created, operated and ultimately modified requires significant change for virtualisation, cloud and SaaS to really take off in mainstream business. It will happen, but not like an overnight storm.

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By: David Tang, Global VP, VoSKY Technologies Posted: 14th November 2008 Copyright VoSKY Technologies © 2008

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Skype has a great deal to offer business. As well as giving access to the largest VoIP community in the world, with a potential customer base of over 300 million Skype users, it also allows non-Skype users to contact your business and you to contact them, at low cost anywhere in the world.

This opens up a range of telephony applications.

You can use SkypeOut to connect to standard PSTN phones at low cost—meaning you can call non-Skype users cheaply. You can also lease a Skype Online number using Global Direct Inward Dial (DID) to set up local access numbers outside of your town, city or country for incoming calls from non-Skype users.

This allows your customers and business contacts to call you from anywhere in the world for no more than the cost of a local call—enabling your business to create a local market presence anywhere in the world.

Skype also facilitates instant messaging (IM), allowing users to communicate with each other.

Too good to be true?
All sounds great? It is—mostly. The problem with Skype is that its good points can sometimes also be its bad—making it a double-edged sword, especially for IT managers.

A prime example of this is the ability for employees to misuse Skype. Because Skype sits on staff's PCs, separated from the office phone system, there's no control over its usage meaning employees can spend all day chatting on IM without it being picked up by the IT department. Alternatively, if IM is not their thing, they could spend their day making endless un-monitored personal calls to family and friends.

Also Skype users can transfer files back and forth—securely encrypted via the IM client. And therein lies the problem. The closed encryption means the method of transfer is so secure that it bypasses any form of network security such as a firewall—outgoing and incoming—enabling sensitive, or confidential, content to be sent un-audited. Because this is done on the office desktop it can't be managed, so more often than not management don't even know it's happening.

This alone will probably send you running for the hills. But don't be discouraged, the good news is there is an easy, manageable way to put Skype's features at the disposal of all your employees and avoid the corporate pitfalls many encounter, ensuring the best of both worlds.

A solution for a win-win situation
The divide between Skype and the PBX has been bridged with VoSKY's new VIT1/E and VISIP-EX gateways that offer up to 30 outgoing Skype lines in a stackable, rack-mountable unit. These Exchange gateways fully integrate Skype with the company's phone system, tying the Skype Online number to the business to enable Skype DID.

The gateways can be installed in under half a day, with zero changes to existing PBX equipment, phones, or PCs, making it a cost-effective switch over. Staff training is negligible—instead of dialling 9 for an outside phone line, with the gateway, users simply dial ‘8' for Skype and then continue as normal.

The gateways simplify Skype configuration, management and support, putting Skype under the IT manager's full control. It allows staff to make and receive Skype calls on their regular office phones instead of having to use a PC and headset.

This eliminates the need to install Skype on each PC—meaning Skype usage can be monitored by the business in the same way as ordinary calls. Separating Skype from the corporate LAN also alleviates any possible security issues to the company network if Skype is affected by malware.

Furthermore as the gateways only enable Skype's voice capabilities the issue of employees misusing IM or transferring files is eliminated—making it much more secure for the business.

Improve online services
Another benefit of installing the gateway is it allows you to add a Skype-enabled Click-to-Call application to your business website. This feature allows your business to optimise its website for real-time communications with customers. It involves placing a "click here to call me" button or link on your web page, which when selected, sets up a phone call for the visitor with a customer service representative.

Mobile matters
The benefits of connecting over Skype can extend to mobile users too and deploying a fixed mobile convergence solution (FMC) via VoSKY can help curb the costs of your company mobile phone fleet.

With Skype installed on any smart mobile phone that can run the Skype mobile client, the user's call preferences can be set up centrally by the IT team via the gateway to give alternate routing to the mobile user's Skype account.

The Skype call is placed to the mobile via mobile broadband—irrespective of where the user is—and this means the cost of the call is just a small part of the user's mobile data plan. This can mean huge savings compared with even the cheapest mobile monthly tariffs.

Reaping the benefits
The great benefit of Skype is that it is ubiquitous and available everywhere, enabling businesses to communicate with customers and partners for free—something other VoIP providers cannot offer. Together VoSKY and Skype enable the VoIP Intranet concept, which allows cost-effective collaboration with customers and partners.

Furthermore allowing enterprises to connect their worldwide locations via VoSKY and Skype, enables free inter-office communication. VoSKY will connect any type or brand of PBX, whether analogue, digital or SIP.

These Exchange gateways optimise Skype for business, giving your company the opportunity to enjoy the many advantages of Skype, whilst controlling and managing the pitfalls often encountered. As well as supervising employees' usage of Skype features such as IM, taking control of Skype helps ensure any sensitive business data is kept secure.

Experience has also shown that ongoing cost-savings from having Skype mean these gateways solutions pay for themselves in a matter of months, making this solution not only a must for the business savvy, but a must for the financially savvy too.

This could help your business not just survive, but thrive on Skype.

http://www.vosky.com/

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By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 14th November 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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While a fair few vendors now provide continuous data protection (CDP) as part of providing real-time data (file) replication and failover, their claim to provide low cost disaster recovery (DR) is somewhat exaggerated. But if the process is extended to cover the server operating system (physical and/or virtual) and applications, then this claim becomes more credible.

A full-blown DR involves mirroring the whole live system, hardware and software, to a remote location—but that is hugely costly. Using CDP to write out every system as well as file changes to a remote system via a WAN or across internet comes close to matching this at a fraction of the cost.

Most such products, however, do not deal with operating system or application changes, but one that does is Double-Take. Although the need to quickly recover the operating system should be rare—with operating system corruption rarer—this can occur; a system not totally recovered might not then run. So this facility reduces failover and recovery risks versus software that does not provide this.

Despite this, having a few extra ticks in the features box is not alone enough to set the world alight; another couple of elements are equally important. There is every need for the replication software itself to be super-reliable or recovery will be a hit-and-miss affair. Then it has to be easy-to-use or potential users will generally turn away from it. So Double-Take Software has spent time and effort addressing both of these. That approach seems to have been a major catalyst in bringing the company of the same name success.

"Our biggest asset is our reputation," Double-Take's CEO Dean Goodermote told me. "We have a very promotional customer base and we get many sales by word of mouth." So here is one acid test: the users themselves like it enough to tell others.

Emphasising this point, Goodermote said of the Double-Take product that the