By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 15th March 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

One of the biggest questions facing companies today is what to make of cloud computing. Does it signal a major shift in how we approach IT—and the business—or is it just another ride on the hype wave that will disappear if we just wait it out?

HP tackled this question this month with a series of virtual conferences, "Cloud: Practical Advice for Taking the Next Steps," whose aim was to cut through the fog and to try and point business leaders and IT executives in the value-oriented direction.

A panel of industry analysts, practitioners, and HP experts outlined the value proposition of moving to the cloud, the danger of inaction, and how companies can get started on their cloud journey. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

For those who didn't catch the virtual conference live, HP has made the replays available.

Tom Kolopolous, president and founder, of The Delphi Group, opened the series as keynote speaker by stressing the opportunities cloud model provide for innovation, especially during an economic downturn.

Cloud, Kolopoulos said, is a key enabler of innovation. For those who might question the ability to innovate during an economic crisis, Kolopolous had some sage advice: "When you tighten the belt, innovation becomes more of an issue . . . you can’t innovate if your stomach is full. You only innovate when you’re hungry."

Tom Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst of Gartner echoed similar themes in his closing keynote, in which he stressed that the risk of inaction was the greatest risk enterprises face today: "The only choice that’s a really bad choice is to do nothing with cloud computing at this point. Having a strategy and moving forward is very important."

Other speakers included Ken Hamilton, director of Data Center Synergy and Cloud Computing for HP; Tim van Ash, HP director of Products for SaaS; Archie Reed, who is HP’s Chief Technologist for Cloud Security and the author of several publications, including The Definitive Guide to Identity Management; Jim Reavis, Executive Director of the Cloud Security Alliance and president and founder of the Reavis Consulting Group, Chris Whitener, HP Chief Security Strategist; Duncan Campbell, VP Worldwide Marketing, HP; Chris Rence, a CIO from FICO, and Alan Wain, VP Solutions Infrastructure Practice, HP.

Some highlights:

Koulopoulos: My advice is that number one, don’t look at the cloud simply by looking at what’s available today. Think of it as a long-term trend that you will have to adapt to, and you have to begin that adaptation now. You can’t wait until it’s fully evolved.

Begin moving down that road with non-core applications and services that maybe aren’t as critical to the regulatory aspects of your business, to those aspects that would involve more security concerns, and in that way, you acclimate yourself to the cloud. You begin to understand what it means to work, to live, to run a business in the cloud, and the rest of these issues will resolve themselves, and they’ll resolve themselves for the same reason that they always do—because of pure economics.

When the cloud becomes important enough that we rest enough of our economic value on it, we will invest enough to make sure that the security issues have been addressed, but it’s an evolution. So don’t look at the cloud and say, “Well, it’ll never work because today, here’s what exists.” Look at the cloud and say, “I have to evolve with it.”

Bittman: There really are three major benefits. One is cost, the idea of sharing, the idea of economies of scale definitely can reduce cost. But this one, I think, is often overstated and companies that are looking at cloud computing primarily as a cost benefit are probably missing some of the bigger benefits. Another benefit that is very important is quality of service.

In other words, it's the ability to specify explicitly what your service requirements are through a services-oriented interface to set your service levels high or low, to set your performance requirements high or low, depending on what you need, and base your price based on the service levels you need. That quality of service is something that might be very valuable to a business to adjust over time based on changing business dynamic cloud services.

Another part of that that’s important is the ability to change quickly. That gets to the third benefit which I think is the most important, and that’s agility—the ability to spin up a new business, to spin up a start-up requirement in an enterprise, the ability to change your service level requirements or to change your scale very quickly.

This not only helps the bottom line in a typical company but it helps the top line. It can help a business grow. It can provide a competitive advantage to be able to react to a business change very, very quickly at the speed of business instead of at the speed of IT.

Reed: Security, just like cloud, is hard to define. It’s a very broad term when we think about it. It can be many different things for different people. When you get to cloud security, first off, you’ve got to define which part of the cloud you’re talking about—which cloud service, which cloud computing model you’re talking about. Then we can talk about which specific security aspects apply to that part of the model.

What we do is look to standards, taxonomies; ways of talking about this that make sense both to the business people as well as the technology people Cloud computing represents phase 2 of the internet where we’re actually leveraging the internet connectivity to create this utility of computing. It changes everything.

Van Ash: HP’s approach, with Cloud Assure, is really about enabling business confidence in the cloud. It’s about mitigating risk and you talked about risk management earlier. We’re really attacking four key categories. We’re attacking security, performance, availability and service levels, and controlling the ongoing cost. Now, why do we go after those four elements? Well, they’re consistently the top four elements that we see from both analysts and customers alike and they map pretty well to the seven deadly sins that Jim talked about right upfront.

Reavis: Don’t read the research in and of itself and assume you’re g

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 11th March 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

In a move to mainstream predictive analytics, TIBCO Software this week rolled out the latest version of its Spotfire platform.

Dubbed Spotfire 3.1, the latest iteration promises a natural language statistical experience. Spotfire 3.1 aims to help anyone in an organization get fact-based answers to questions that help drive revenue.

The company says its software is not just for analytics gurus but also marketing professionals, business development managers and others who need forward-looking business intelligence in a hurry. [TIBCO Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

"Unlike traditional business intelligence tools, which for the most part aggregate historical trends only, Spotfire 3.1 projects them forward with what-if scenarios," says Mark Lorion, vice president of marketing for TIBCO Spotfire. "Anyone in the company can ask questions on demand and our analytics will provide future predictions based on behind-the-scenes data-driven methods. Users don't have to understand the methods. They just have to ask the questions—and they get answers instantly rather than waiting days like you would with today's business intelligence (BI) tools."

Spotfire 3.1 in action
Let’s say you’re trying to promote a new product in the consumer goods market. Spotfire 3.1 lets you choose input variables based on what you suspect might be driving the advertisement response, such as price, discounts, packaged offers, age of the respondent or length of time as a customer. You would then press a button that asks, "Are these related?"

After you push that button, Spotfire 3.1 works behind the scenes to run predictive models, using analytics and statistics to compile sensitivity analysis and correlations, then return a colorful graph that shows the response rate and which factors are most closely correlated to people clicking on your advertisement.

While BI gives you historical data, the predictive analytics aspect of Spotfire 3.1 offers insights into what could happen next time you run a similar promotion. It can also help you fine-tune your promotions by targeting the customers that clicked on your ad, or offering different promotions to different audiences—and it does it almost instantly.

Unlike traditional BI or static spreadsheets, Lorion says Spotfire 3.1 also includes conditional coloring and lasso and axis marking that allow for better data analysis of patterns, clusters and correlations among sets of variables. The software's multiple scale bar charts and combination bar and line plots offer analysis of unstructured, "free-dimensional" data to identify key outliers and trends amongst the data.

“IT organization and statistician groups aren’t able to respond quickly enough to the many questions that arise from business users, so they go to their gut,” Lorion says. “Spotfire lets you make fact-based decisions rather than gut-based decisions.”

Predictive analytics challenges
Of course, predictive analytics software is not a new concept, and Lorion admits that the predictions are only as good as the quality and breadth of the available data. But predictive analytics is gaining momentum in the enterprise marketplace.

IBM bought predictive analytics firm SPSS last July for $1.2 billion. And IDC predicts the $1.4 billion market for advanced analytics, of which predictive analytics is a subset, will grow 10 percent annually through 2011. Despite tight IT budgets, Lorion is optimistic about the space and the company’s offering.

“The economic downturn has been good for the analytics space because customers need to make reductions and predictions—but they need to be smart about it,” Lorion says. “Companies don’t want to hire PhDs to make sense of their statistics. But we need to drive awareness of our product and educate the market that the power of predictive analytics isn’t in the hands of only a couple of statisticians.”

Spotfire 3.1 works in tandem with Spotfire Application Data Services to let companies analyze data from various sources, including SAP NetWeaver BI, SAP ERP, Salesforce.com, Siebel eBusiness Applications, and the Oracle E-Business Suite.

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: 4th March 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

If you want a realistic view of cloud computing adoption—along with an understanding of what motivates IT executives to invest the cloud, what concerns remain, and what initiatives are planned—you can’t limit your frame to a single industry. The full picture only becomes clear through a cross section of research, manufacturing, government and education fields.

That’s the approach Platform Computing took at a recent supercomputing conference. The company late last year surveyed 95 IT executives across a number of fields to offer insight into how organizations are experimenting with cloud computing and how they view the value of private clouds. [Disclosure: Platform Computing is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The results: Nearly 85 percent intend to keep their cloud initiatives within their own firewall.

“When deploying a private cloud, organizations will need a management framework that can leverage existing hardware and software investments and support key business applications,” says Peter Nichol, general manager of the HPC Business Unit at Platform Computing. “This survey reaffirms the benefits that private clouds offer—a more flexible and dynamic infrastructure with greater levels of self-service and enterprise application support.”

Most organizations surveyed are experimenting with cloud computing—and experimenting is the key word. Eighty-two percent don’t foresee cloud bursting initiatives any time soon. This suggests an appreciation for private cloud management platforms that are independent of location and ownership, and can provide the needed security in a world of strict regulations around transparency and privacy.

Security is chief concern
Forty-nine percent cite security as a chief concern with cloud computing. Another 31 percent pointed to the complexity of managing clouds, while only 15 percent said cost was an issue. Indeed, security concerns are a force driving many IT execs toward private rather than public clouds. Forty-five percent of organizations considering establishing private clouds as they experiment with ways to improve efficiency, increase their resource pool and build a more flexible infrastructure.

. . . The adoption of cloud computing should follow a sequence of evolutionary steps rather than an overnight revolution.

There seems to be some naïveté over the cloud. Nearly three-quarters of those surveyed don’t expect their IT organization infrastructure to change in the face of cloud computing. But that is not a realistic expectation. The move to cloud computing is an evolutionary one and IT organizations must themselves evolve to meet the demands of the organizations and their users. Ultimately, a willingness to evolve begins with an appreciation of the cloud’s value.

“Cloud computing has provided the impetus for IT to make a much needed shift, but many in the industry are still struggling to understand the value of the cloud,” says Randy Clark, chief marketing officer at Platform Computing. “As organizations continue to experiment with cloud to move toward better efficiency and cost-savings, it is best to bear in mind that to ensure success, the adoption of cloud computing should follow a sequence of evolutionary steps rather than an overnight revolution.”

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: 2nd March 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion comes in conjunction with The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference held earlier this month in Seattle.

We assembled a panel to examine service oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing—the relationships, the inter-reliance and the realities. Three years ago, the IT transformation poster child was SOA, and now we're well into the hype curve around cloud computing, but has one actually given way to the other? Are they linear in their relationship, or perhaps mutually dependent in some ways, and to what degree?

We’ll explore now whether SOA has found new value and relevance as a foundation and perhaps catalyst for cloud computing, especially for so-called private clouds. And, we'll see how the emergence of SOA and cloud may be happening in different places inside of enterprises. Shouldn’t one hand get to quickly know what the other is up to and perhaps even work together?

Here with us now, however, to plumb the depths of how SOA and cloud computing do or don’t come together, are Dr. Chris Harding, director of the SOA Work Group at The Open Group; Stephen G. Bennett, Senior Enterprise Architect at Oracle, and Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Search for Salesforce.com. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Harding: Five years ago, when we started getting into SOA, there was a huge amount of excitement and a great deal of buzz about it. Now, we can see that the hype cycle has run its course, but we're still seeing a great deal of technical interest in SOA and we're also seeing that companies are using it and are increasing their use of it. So, there is a steady uptake in the use of SOA, although the excitement about it has died down.

It’s very interesting that service orientation is very much a business concept, and SOA has been about the application of that business concept to the technology. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is very much a technical concept. It’s about what you can do with technology over the Internet.

It is a technical concept, but it has had a really big impact on the business structure. So you can see them as complementary. SOA has been the application of business principles into the technology. Cloud is a technical concept, which has had a huge impact on the business. So, yes, there probably are different parts of the organizations looking at cloud and looking at SOA, but there is a big dynamic that says they should be working together on both of them.

Coffee: I've been covering SOA for a long time. I'd say the people who adopted SOA in the previous decade got considerable upside, but those who did not didn’t really suffer any penalty for not doing so.

In the situation we're in now, where the economics of cloud computing are becoming quite compelling, the downside of not having a SOA is becoming quite apparent. If you don’t have a service environment, then your ability to extend your current assets and integrate them with cloud services is going to be somewhat hampered.

So, people are realizing now that the wait-and-see option is more perilous than it used to be. This is accelerating the actual adoption of what we would call SOA, except that’s no longer the label du jour.

It seems to me that SOA very quickly became a label of products that vendors wanted to sell. So, you saw a lot of things like enterprise service bus (ESB) products and so on.

It became dangerously easy to think that you were doing SOA, if you were buying the tools and failing to appreciate how much of a cultural and management achievement it was to get people to think of themselves not as owners of and the gatekeepers to an IT asset, but instead being publishers of and supporters of a service to other parts of the business.

It’s absolutely critical to understand that you can view SOA as simply a way of integrating the stuff you have, or you can move to the next level and start to think of it as the way you do your business. The way your business units interact with and support each other with the technology is just the enabler for that.

The same is true of the cloud. It's possible to take the existing IT model of isolated applications, each with their own data stores, and replicate that model in the cloud with elastic scalability of capacity. That would be the level of the cloud industry that’s typically called infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Or, it's possible to use the cloud as a much more interesting and fluid medium for interaction among much more granular and business-oriented services at the level that’s traditionally been called in the industry either platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS). It depends on the level at which you choose to consume other people’s application work, instead of doing new application development yourself.

It’s possible to do SOA without the cloud. It’s possible to do better SOA with it. It is also possible to do an isolated silo-oriented architecture locally and also to do that in a cloud environment. Neither one necessarily implies or impels the other.

Bennett: The majority of large enterprises today are doing SOA in one fashion or another at different levels of maturity, whether that’s from the quite immature approach of seeing it as a pure integration play all the way up to seeing it more as a business agility kind of play.

So, it's becoming a norm and, therefore, we don’t need to keep hyping it or pushing it. We need to use the characteristics it offers with other supporting technology strategies such as cloud.

I actually see recession as an opportunity within IT, because it gives you opportunity to reset thinking and reset IT's approach to actually delivering IT to the business.

It's a combination of technologies that are finally ready for prime time, and an ecosystem that’s ready to support those technologies well.

Coffee: The economics of being able to have elastically scalable capacity to be able to handle peak loads without needing to own the peak capacity and wind up with very low utilization rates on your capacity are becoming so compelling that people are asking how they're going to take advantage of this opportunity of this cloud environment.

It's a combination of technologies that are finally ready for prime time, and an ecosystem that’s ready to support those technologies well—providers of services and providers of expert assistance in using those services.

That’s a very important enabling ware, when your major system integration firms begin fully to understand how they can incorporate cloud services into the portfolio of technologies that they make available to their customers. When you put that all together, the downside of not moving to an SOA becomes an embarrassing lack of ability to take advantages of these incredible economies.

... The combination of SOA, which makes your various business units able to cooperate more effectively, with cloud environments, which allow you to handle very "bursty" workloads and conduct very cost-effective pilot projects and scale the ones that work very rapidly, increase the ROI of IT spending.

The IT budget, as a line item, is not conspicuously bigger. In fact, it may actually shrink, because the IT department now is a composer and integrator of stuff that may now be getting done with the operating budget by personnel, who are on the payroll as members of a business unit, instead of members of an IT organization.

Bennett: What people are talking about is the opportunity to redirect costs to area such as business architecture, and business architecture is part of enterprise architecture (EA). That's not purely IT focused, but the wider concern—investing stuff like business capability maps to understand exactly where I should utilize SOA and cloud with my organization—is going to be key.

This will, in turn, enable the consuming enterprises to concentrate on the things that they are particularly good at.

Harding: That certainly must be one of the factors that will enable cloud computing to make enterprises more efficient—the elasticity and the take-up effect. It also has a major effect on the risk that an enterprise needs to take on. But, there is a bigger factor, which is meant to drive down cost, and that is competition.

If you take service orientation and cloud in combination, you’re seeing the ability of people to buy services from different suppliers, for those suppliers to compete, and for those suppliers to concentrate on the services that they are particularly good at. This will, in turn, enable the consuming enterprises to concentrate on the things that they are particularly good at.

So, you don’t need to dissipate your efforts on running an inefficient IT department, which is not your core business. You can outsource that, get a specialist to do it much better, and concentrate on what you're good at. That is the real dynamic that will improve things economically.

Now, from an Open Group perspective, there is a danger that you may become locked into a particular supplier. Part of our role in promoting open systems is to push for the standards to be in place so that that doesn’t happen. Provided we can prevent that locking, it’s altogether a very healthy situation.

Coffee: The granularity of this marketplace is quite surprising to many people who haven’t looked at it closely. We see already people building applications, in which they have shopped the marketplace and found a cloud storage proposition from one provider, a cloud application development platform from another, social networking algorithms and facilities from yet a third provider and have built some really interesting strategic business solutions. It’s quite startling to many people to realize what a supermarket of services has already come into being.

Bennett: The combination of cloud and SOA obviously brings together kind of speed and modularity. Those basic principles are going to allow us to take evolutionary technologies and approaches and probably revolutionize the way that IT actually interacts with the business.

So, in terms of IT being siloed—"please develop and look after this application"—it’s going to be more a move toward collaboration of how we can actually deliver business solutions to the ever-changing business dynamics.

Coffee: Finally, we have an environment in which connectivity and real-time linkage and integration of data and function instead of being costly, brittle, and time-consuming are now nearly free, very resilient, and can be done almost more quickly than they can be described.

This means that people are going to be doing more challenging work and working more closely with business units instead of having their time consumed by arduous, necessary, but relatively low-value tests of infrastructure maintenance.

So the ROI will rise. The relevance to the business of IT will increase. The sophistication of the skills of the person who does IT for a living will be greater 10 years from now than it was 10 years ago or even today, but we’ll all be pretty happy with the results.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 25th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Today’s enterprises are creating web-based content at breakneck speed. Much of this digital content becomes bona fide business records that demand document management with regulatory compliance and legal discovery demands in mind.

That’s why Hewlett-Packard (HP) recently rolled out a web-based records management solution specifically designed to help Microsoft SharePoint customers lower business risks. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.)

Dubbed HP Total Records Information Management (TRIM) 7, the latest version of HP’s advanced records management solution aims to help organizations transparently manage Microsoft SharePoint Server records—including documents and information stored on SharePoint Server blogs, wikis, discussions, forms, calendars and workflows—in a single environment.

A Content 2.0 explosion
As HP explains it, TRIM 7 opens the door for consolidation and simplified management of stored content in multiple formats. Using HP TRIM 7, organizations can capture, search and manage physical and electronic files with complete transparency.

“The explosion in Content 2.0 blogs, wikis and discussions creates new information management challenges for organizations trying to meet an escalating set of regulation,” says Jonathan Martin, vice president and general manager of Information Management Solutions at HP. “HP TRIM allows customers to marry records management best practices and governance with dynamic collaboration platforms such as SharePoint.”

An end-to-end solution
HP TRIM 7 offers two modules to address the records management needs of SharePoint products and technologies: HP TRIM Records Management and HP TRIM Archiving.

HP TRIM Records Management aims to improve business records management via transparent access to SharePoint Server content held in HP TRIM directly from the SharePoint Server workspace.

The explosion in Content 2.0 blogs, wikis and discussions creates new information management challenges for organizations trying to meet an escalating set of regulations.

Since the U.S. Department of Defense has awarded HP TRIM its 5015.2 v3 certification, HP notes, organizations are assured the highest levels of records management control for enterprise content. HP has also made improvements that promise faster indexing and search capabilities, along with shorter response times for legal discovery, compliance requests and audits.

Closing the records management loop, HP TRIM Archiving works to help customers lower the risk of data loss while reclaiming storage and system resources from SharePoint Server. This module can either archive specific list objects in SharePoint Server or complete SharePoint Server sites. All this means organizations can take entire SharePoint Server sites offline without losing access to information.

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: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 24th February 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

Signs of a rebound in printer sales were evident from HP's latest Q1 2010 results which saw its imaging and printing business revenue grow by 4% year-on-year to $6.2 billion. Total printer unit shipments grew 16%, the largest increase in three years, with consumer and commercial printer unit shipments growing 18% and 11%, respectively. What is most notable is the momentum HP has built in its managed print services (MPS) business, which enjoyed a continued growth in Europe.

Quocirca estimates that 15% of enterprises in Europe have adopted some form of MPS to drive both financial cost savings and decrease environmental impact. In an increasingly commoditised market characterised by thin margins and falling prices, capitalising on long term, high value annuity business (through supplies and service) is key to the strategies of printer and copier companies.

HP's continued momentum in enterprise MPS
HP has streamlined its approach in the MPS market with the launch of its Managed Enterprise Solutions global business unit in September 2009, aimed at boosting new growth in its MPS business. It also announced a strategic alliance with Canon to deliver a wider portfolio of products to MPS customers, filling a gap in HP's existing portfolio. Across the globe, HP's MPS reach is wide—it now has more than 2500 customers worldwide across 170 countries.

In Europe, HP's direct MPS sales force targets 1800 enterprise accounts. HP estimates that 80% of these accounts are multi-country businesses. Its European MPS business performed well in Q1 2010: for example, SCHOTT AG that renewed its MPS contract with HP to include 1200 devices and the supply of service and supplies for 3 years. New signings include a $100m printing deal with the Danish Ministry of Finance, and a deal to manage the Norwegian telco Telenor's distributed print environment over 30 sites.

HP's competitive position in the MPS market has undoubtedly been enhanced by the EDS (now HP Enterprise Services) integration. A significant proportion of HP MPS deals are led by HP Enterprise Services account managers who provide HP with valuable depth of engagement with key customers.

Additionally, HP's Printing PayBack guarantee has further helped it demonstrate its cost-savings commitments to potential customers. Under this scheme, any qualified enterprise that does not make the cost savings that HP projects for them, within 12 months, can receive a cheque refunding the shortfall. Provence Health and Services in the US is one company which has adopted an HP MPS with the Printing PayBack Guarantee, with cost savings expectations between 30% and 35%.

HP's MPS initiatives are clearly bearing fruit. Its modular service offerings, multi-region delivery capabilities and its strategic alliance with Canon position it well to offer a comprehensive MPS portfolio for enterprises.

Capturing the midmarket opportunity with QuickPage
Up to now, MPS has largely been the domain of larger enterprises, due to established direct MPS offerings from vendors such as HP, Lexmark, Ricoh and Xerox. However midsized businesses are also waking up to the MPS opportunity with the emergence of more channel driven MPS packages. These range from device-centric offerings, which are typically inclusive service contracts encompassing service and supplies to some packages including the leasing of devices and may also include support, depending on the capability of individual resellers.

More often than not, the most successful resellers in this space have experience in selling copier or cost per page contracts. For resellers who do roll out an MPS, the opportunities are significant—providing ongoing annuity revenue streams and longer term customer relationships. One of HP's key strategies for 2010 is to build momentum in the midmarket through enhancing its contractual offerings. HP relies on its channel partners to develop their midmarket business, and is actively supporting resellers to move from a transcational to contractual sales process.

Its current portfolio of contractual offerings, which includes Channel-led Pay-per-Usage program (CLPPU), Smart Printing Service (SPS) program and Pay-for-Print (PfP) program, will be completed by the launch of QuickPage. With its introduction, HP is providing resellers with a simple packaged service that includes hardware, supplies and support. QuickPage emulates packages from copier-centric vendors such as Xerox PagePack. However QuickPage's key difference is that it includes a lease rental agreement, giving customers the ability to combine hardware, consumables and maintenance costs into one monthly payment (based on expected print volumes).

Quocirca believes that QuickPage fills a gap in HP's existing channel services porfolio by providing a simple packaged service backed by a portal infrastucture that manges reporting, service and support. Given HP's high pentration amongst IT resellers, who have little experience in selling printing contracts, the simplicty of selling and adminstering QuickPage will be fundamental to its success. For those customers who are uncertain about moving to a QuickPage contractual approach to purchasing printing, the benefits lie in predictable monthly expenses, reduced operational expenditure and less time on dealing with printer support issues.

The market for MPS in the mid-market remains wide open with varied offerings from different manufacturers. For resellers who are embarking on the MPS journey, this often means investing in a disparate set of tools and infrastucture to manage different devices. Xerox has already addressed this through its hosted multivendor MPS for channel partners—Xerox Printing Services. While there will always be benefits from a device-centric service in a standardised environment, adding multvendor capababilties to future versions of QuickPage will enable HP to enhance the value proposition for resellers and customers alike.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The next BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Volume 49, hones in on the predictions for IT industry growth and impact, now that the recession appears to have bottomed out. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their top five predictions for IT growth through 2010 and beyond.

To help us gaze into the IT trends crystal ball we are joined by our panel: Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger; Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis; Dave Linthicum, CEO of Blue Mountain Labs; Dave Lounsbury, vice-president of collaboration services at The Open Group; Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink, and JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Shimmin: Mine are geared toward collaboration and conferencing. The first and most obvious is that clouds are going to become less cloudy. Vendors, particularly those in the collaboration space, are going to start to deliver solutions that are actually a blend of both cloud and on-premise.

We've seen Cisco take this approach already with front-ending some web conferencing to off-load bandwidth requirements at the edge and to speed internal communications. IBM, at least technically, is poised do the same with Foundations, their appliances line, and LotusLive, their cloud-based solution.

With vendors like these that are going to be pulling hybrid, premise/cloud, and appliance/service offerings, it's going to really let companies, particularly those in the small and medium business (SMB) space, work around IT constraints without sacrificing the control and ownership of key processes and data, which in my mind is the key, and has been one of the limiting factors of cloud this year.

Number two: I have "software licensing looks like you." As with the housing market, it's really a buyer's market right now for software. It's being reflected in how vendors are approaching selling their software. Customers have the power to demand software pricing that better reflects their needs, whether it's servers or users.

So, taking cues from both the cloud and the open-source licensing vendors out there, we will see some traditional software manufacturers really set up a "pick your poison" buffet. You can have purchase options that are like monthly or yearly subscriptions or flat perpetual licenses that are based on per seat, per server, per CPU, per request, per processor, or per value unit—with a shout out at IBM there—or any of the above.

You put those together in a way that is most beneficial to you as a customer to meet your use case. We saw last year with web conferencing software that you could pick between unlimited usage with a few seats or unlimited seats with limited usage. You can tailor what you pay to what you need.

Third for me is the mobile OS wars are going to heat up. I'm all done with the desktop. I'm really thinking that it's all about the Google Chrome/Android. I know there's a little bit of contention there, but Google Chrome/Android, Symbian, RIM, Apple iPhone, Windows Mobile, all those devices will be the new battle ground for enterprise users.

I think the weapons will be user facing enterprise apps that work in concert with line-of-business solutions on the back-end. We'll see the emergence of native applications, particularly within the collaboration space, that are capable of fully maximizing the underlying hardware of these devices, and that's really key. Capabilities like geo-positioning, simultaneous web invoice and, eventually, video, are really going to take off across all these platforms this year.

But, the true battle for this isn't going to be in these cool nifty apps. It's really going to be in how these vendors can hopefully turn these devices into desktops, in terms of provisioning, security, visibility, governance, etc. That, to me, is going to be where they're going to either win or lose this year.

Four is "The Grand Unification Theory"—the grand unification of collaboration. That's going to start this year. We're no longer going to talk about video conferencing, web conferencing, telepresence, and general collaboration software solutions as separate concerns. You're still going to have PBXs, video codecs, monitors, cameras, desk phones, and all that stuff being sold as point solutions to fill specific requirements, like desktop voice or room-based video conferencing and the like.

But, these solutions are really not going to operate in complete ignorance of one another as they have in the past. Vendors with capabilities or partnerships spanning these areas, in particular—I'm pointing out Cisco and Microsoft here—can bring, and will be bringing, facets of these together technically to enable users to really participate in collaboration efforts, using their available equipment.

And last but not least ... Google Wave is really going to kick in in 2010. I may be stating the obvious, or I maybe stating something that's going to be completely wrong, but I really feel that this is going to be the year that traditional enterprise collaboration players jump head long into this Google Wave pool in an effort to really cash in on what's already a super-strong mind share within the consumer ranks.

Even though they have a limited access to the beta right now, there are over a million users of it, that are chunking away at this writing code and using Wave.

Of course, Google hosted rendition will excel in supporting consumer tasks like collaborative apps and role playing games. That's going to be big.

Linthicum: My top five are going to be, number one, cloud computing goes mainstream. That's a top prediction, I'm just seeing the inflection point on that.

I know I'm going out on the edge on this one. Go to indeed.com and do a search on the cloud-computing jobs postings. As I posted on my InfoWorld blog few weeks ago, it's going up at an angle that I have never seen at any time in the history of IT. The amount of growth around cloud computing is just amazing. Of course, it's different aspects of cloud computing, not just architecture, with people who are cloud computing developers and things like that.

The Global 2000 and the government, the Global 1, really haven't yet accepted cloud computing, even though it's been politically correct for some time to do so. The reason is the lack of control, security concerns, and privacy issues, and, of course, all the times the cloud providers went down. The Google outages and the loss of stuff with T-Mobile, hasn't really helped, but ultimately people are gearing up, hiring up, and training up for cloud computing.

We are going to see a huge inflection point in cloud computing. This can be more mainstream in Global 2000 than it has been in the past. It's largely been the domain of SMBs, pilot projects, things like that. It's going to be a huge deal in 2010 and people are going to move into cloud computing in some way, shape, or form, if they are in an organization.

The next is privacy becomes important. Facebook late last year pulled a little trick, where they changed the privacy settings, and you had to go back and reset your privacy settings. So, in essence, if you weren’t diligent about looking at the privacy settings within your Facebook account and your friends list, your information was out on the Internet and people could see it.

The reason is that they're trying to monetize people who are using Facebook. They're trying to get at the information and put the information out there so it's searchable by the search engines. They get the ad revenue and all the things that are associated with having a big mega social media site.

People are going to move away from these social media sites that post their private information, and the social media sites are going to react to that. They're going to change their policies by the end of 2010, and there's going to be a big uproar at first.

Next, the cloud crashes make major new stories. We've got two things occurring right now. We've got a massive move into the cloud. That was my first prediction. We have the cloud providers trying to scale up, and perhaps they’ve never scaled up to the levels that they are going to be expected to scale to in 2010. That's ripe for disaster.

A lot of these cloud providers are going to over extend and over sell, and they're going to crash. Performance is going to go down—very analogous to AOL’s outage issues, when the Internet first took off.

We're going to see people moving to the cloud, and cloud providers not able to provide them with the service levels that they need. We're going to get a lot of stories in the press about cloud providers going away for hours at a time, data getting lost, all these sorts of things. It's just a matter of growth in a particular space. They're growing very quickly, they are not putting as much R&D into what these cloud systems should do, and ultimately that's going to result in some disasters.

Next, Microsoft becomes cloud relevant. Microsoft, up to now, has been the punch line of all cloud computing. It had the Azure platform out there. They've had a lot of web applications and things like that. They really have a bigger impact in the cloud than most people think, even though when we think of cloud, we think of Amazon, Google, and larger players out there.

With Azure coming into its own in the first quarter of next year in the rise of their office automation applications for the cloud, you are going to see a massive amount of people moving to the Microsoft platform for development, deployment, infrastructure, and the office automation application. The Global 2000 that are already Microsoft players and the government that has a big investment in Microsoft are going to move in that direction.

Suddenly, you're going to see Microsoft with a larger share of the cloud, and they're going to be relevant very quickly. In the small- and medium-sized business, it's still going to be the domain of Google, and state and local governments are still be going to be the domain of Google, but Microsoft is going to end up ruling the roost by the end of 2010.

Finally, the technology feeding frenzy, which is occurring right now. People see the market recovering. There is money being put back into the business. That was on the sidelines for a while. People are going to use that money to buy companies. I think there is going to be a big feeding frenzy in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) world, in the business intelligence (BI) world, and definitely in the cloud-computing world.

Lots of these little companies that you may not have heard about, which may have some initial venture funding, are suddenly going to disappear. Google has been taking these guys out left and right. You just don’t hear about it. You could do a podcast just on the Google acquisitions that have occurred this week. That's going to continue and accelerate in 2010 to a point where it's almost going to be ridiculous.

Lounsbury: I'm going to jump on the cloud bandwagon initially. We’ve seen huge amounts of interest across the board in cloud and, particularly, increasing discussions about how people make sense of cloud at the line-of-business level.

Another bold prediction here is that the cloud market is going to continue to grow, and we'll see that inflection point that Dave Linthicum mentioned. But, I believe that we're going to see the segmentation of that into two overarching markets, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service market (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. So that's my number one prediction.

We'll see the continued growth in the acceptance by SMBs of the IaaS and PaaS for the cost and speed reasons. But, the public IaaS and PaaS are going to start to become the gateway drug for medium- to large-size enterprises. You're going to see them piloting in public or shared environments, but they are going to continue to move back toward that locus of controlling their own resources in order to manage risk and security, so that they can deliver their service levels that their customers expect.

My third prediction, again in cloud, is that SaaS will continue to gain mainstream acceptance at all levels in the enterprise, from small to large. What you’ll see there is a lot of work on interfaces and APIs and how people are going to mash up cloud services and bring them into their enterprise architectures.

Of course all of this is set against the context that all distributed computing activities are set against, which is security and privacy issues.

This is actually going to be another trend that Dave Linthicum has mentioned as a blurring of a line between SaaS and SOA at the enterprise level. You’ll see these well on the way to emerging as disciplines in 2010.

The fourth general area is that all of this interest in cloud and concern about uptake at the enterprise level is going to drive the development of cloud deployment and development skills as a recognized job function in the IT world, whether it's internal to the IT department or as a consultancy. Obviously, as a consultancy, we look to the cloud to provide elasticity of deployment and demand and that's going to demand an elastic workforce.

So the question will be how do you know you are getting a skilled person in that area. I think you'll see the rise of a lot of enterprise-level artifacts such as business use cases, enterprise architecture tools, and analytic tools. Potentially, what we'll see in 2010 is the beginning of the development of a body of knowledge: practitioners in cloud. We'll start to recognize that as a specialty the way we currently recognize SOA as a specialty.

Of course all of this is set against the context that all distributed computing activities are set against, which is security and privacy issues. I don’t know if this is a prediction or not, but I wonder whether we're going to see our cloud harbor in 2010 its first big crash and the first big breach.

We've already mentioned privacy here. That's going to become increasingly a public topic, both in terms of the attention in the mainstream press and increasing levels of government attention.

There have been some fits and starts at the White House level about the cyber czar and things like that, but every time you turn around in Washington now, you see people discussing cyber security. How we're going to grow our capability in cyber security and increasing recognition of cyber security risk in mainstream business are going to be emerging hot topics of 2010.

Kobielus: Number one: IT is increasingly going to in-source much of BI development of reports, queries, dashboards, and the like to the user through mash up self-service approaches, SaaS, flexible visualization, and so forth, simply because they have to.

IT is short staffed. We're still in a recession essentially. IT budgets are severely constrained. Manpower is severely constrained. Users are demanding mashups and self-service capabilities. It's coming along big time, not only in terms of enterprise deployment, but all the BI vendors are increasingly focused on self-service solution portfolios.

Number two: The users who do more of the analytics development are going to become developers in their own right. That may sound crazy based on the fact that traditionally data mining is done by a cadre of PhD statisticians and others who are highly specialized.

Question analysis, classification and segmentation, and predictive analytics is coming into the core BI stack in a major way. IBM’s acquisition of SPSS clearly shows that not only is IBM focusing there, but other vendors in this space, especially a lot of smaller players, already have some basic predictive analytics capabilities in their portfolios or plan to release them in 2010.

Basically, we're taking data mining out of the hands of the rocket scientists and giving it to the masses through very user-friendly tools. That's coming in 2010.

Number three: There will be an increasing convergence of analytics and transactional computing, and the data warehouse is the hub of all that. More-and-more transactional application logic will be pushed down to be executed inside of the data warehouse.

The data warehouse is a greater cloud, because that's where the data lives and that's where the CPU power is, the horse power. We see Exadata, Version 2 from Oracle. We see Aster Data, nCluster Version 4.0. And, other vendors are doing similar things, pointing ahead to the coming decade, when the data warehouse becomes a complete analytic application server in its own right—analytics plus transaction.

Number four: We're seeing, as I said, that predictive analytics is becoming ever more important and central to where enterprises are going with BI and the big pool of juicy data that will be brought into predictive model. Much of it is coming from the whole Web 2.0 sphere and from social networks—Twitters, Facebooks and the like, and blogs. That's all highly monetizable content, as Dave Linthicum indicated.

We're seeing that social network analysis has a core set of algorithms and approaches for advanced analytics that are coming in a big way to data mining tools, text analytics tools, and to BI. Companies are doing serious marketing campaign planning, optimization, and so forth, based on a lot of that information streaming in real-time. It's customer sentiment in many ways. You know pretty much immediately whether your new marketing campaign is a hit or a flop, because customers are tweeting all about it.

That's going to be a big theme in 2010 and beyond. Social network analysis really is a core business intelligence for marketing and maintaining and sustaining business in this new wave.

And, finally, number five: Analytics gets dirt cheap. Right now, we're in the middle of a price war for the enterprise data warehousing stack hardware and software. Servers and storage, plus the database licenses, query tools, loading tools, and BI are being packaged pretty much everywhere into appliances that are one-stop shopping, one throat to choke, quick-deploy solutions that are pre-built.

Increasingly, they'll be for specific vertical and horizontal applications and will be available to enterprises for a fraction of what it would traditionally cost them to acquire all those components separately and figure it out all themselves. The vendors in the analytics market are all going appliance. They're fighting with each other to provide the cheapest complete application on the market.

McKendrick: My number one trend is the impact of the economy. By all indications, 2010 is going to be a growth year in the economy. We're probably in this V shape.

See, I'm actually an optimist, not a pessimist. The world may end in 2012, but for 2010, we're going to have a great economy. It's going to move forward.

For this decade, we're looking forward to the rise of something called "social commerce," where the markets are user-driven and are conversations.

Number two: Cloud computing. We’ve all been talking about that. That's the big development, the big paradigm shift. Clouds will be the new "normal." From the SOA perspective, we're going to be seeing a convergence. When we talk about cloud, we're going to talk about SOA, and the two are going to be mapped very closely together.

Dave Linthicum talks a lot about this in his new book and in his blog work. Services are services. They need to be transparent. They need to be reusable and sharable. They need to cross enterprise boundaries. We're going to see a convergence of SOA and cloud. It’s a service-oriented culture.

Number three: Google is becoming what I call the Microsoft of the clouds. Google offers a browser and email. It has a backend app engine. It offers storage. They're talking about bringing out an OS. Google is essentially providing an entire stack from which you can build your IT infrastructure. You can actually build a company’s IT infrastructure on the back of this. So, Google is definitely the Microsoft of the cloud for the current time.

Microsoft is also getting into the act as well with cloud computing, and they are doing a great job there. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. By the way, Google also offers search as a capability.

Number four: We're going to see less of a distinction between service providers and service consumers over clouds, SOA, what have you. That's going to be blurring. Everybody will be providing and publishing services, and everybody will be consuming services.

You're going to see less of a distinction between providers and consumers. For example, I was talking to a reinsurance company a few months back. They offer a portal to their customers, the customers being insurance companies. They say that they offer a lot of analytics capabilities that their customers don’t have, and the customers are using their portal to do their own analytic work.

They don’t call it cloud. Cloud never entered the conversation, but this is a cloud. This is a company that’s offering cloud services to its consumers. We're going to see a lot of that, and it’s not necessarily going to be called cloud. You're not going to see companies saying, "We're offering clouds to our partners." It’s just going to be as the way it is.

Number five: In the enterprise application area, we've seen it already, but we're going to see more-and-more pushback against where money is being spent. As I said, the economy is growing, but there is going to be a lot of attention paid to where IT dollars are going.

I base this on a Harvard Medical School study that just came out last month. They studied 4,000 hospitals over a three-year period and found that, despite hundreds of millions of dollars being invested at IT, IT had no impact on hospital operations, patient care quality, or anything else.

Morgenthal: Number one: Cyber security. I am beginning to understand how little people actually understand about the differences between what security is and information assurance is, and how little people realize that their systems are compromised and how long it takes to eliminate threat within an organization.

Because of all of this connectedness, social networking, and cloud, a lot of stuff is going to start to bubble up. People who thought things were taken care of are going to learn that it wasn’t taken care of, and there will be a sense of urgency about responding to that. We're going to see that happen a lot in the first half of 2010.

Number two: Mobile. The mobile platforms are now the PC of yesterday, right? The real battle is for how we use these platforms effectively to integrate into people’s lives and allow them to leverage the platform for communications, for collaboration, and to stay in touch.

It seems everywhere I go, people are willing to spend a lot of money on their data plan. So, that’s a good sign for telecoms.

My personal belief is that it overkills information overlook, but that’s me. I know that everywhere I go, I see people using their iPhones and flicking through their apps. So, they hit upon a market segment, a very large market segment, that actually enjoys that. Whether small people like me end up in a cave somewhere, the majority of people are definitely going to be focused on the mobile platform. That also relates to the carriers. I think there still a carrier war here. We've yet to see AT&T and iPhone in the US break apart and open up its doors to other carriers.

Number three: Business intelligence and analytics, especially around complex event processing (CEP). CEP is still in an immature state. It does some really interesting things. It can aggregate and correlate. It really needs to go to that next step and help people understand how to build models for correlation. That’s going to be a difficult step.

As somebody was saying earlier, you had these little Poindexters sitting in the back room doing the stuff. There's a reason why the Poindexters were back there doing that. They understand math and the formulas that are under building these analytical models.

CEP and analytics—and the two tied together. You’ll see that the BI, and data aspects of the BI, side will integrate with the CEP modeling to not only report after the fact on a bunch of raw data, but almost be proactive, and try to, as I said in my blog entry, know when the spit hits the fan.

Number four is collaboration. We’ve crossed the threshold here. People want it. They're leveraging it.

The labor market has not caught up to take advantage of these tools, design them, architect the solutions properly, and deploy and manage them.

I've been seeing some uptake on Google Wave. I think people are still a little confused by the environment, and the interaction model is not quite there yet to really turn it on its ear, but it clearly is an indication that people like large-scale interactions with large groups of people and to be able to control that information and make it usable. Google is somewhat there, and we'll see some more interesting models emerge out of that as well.

Number four is labor. We're at a point where the market is based on all these other things based on the cloud. We had a lot of disruptive technologies hit in the past five years—enterprise mashups, SOA, and cloud computing. The labor market has not caught up to take advantage of these tools, design them, architect the solutions properly, and deploy and manage them.

I think that 2010 has to be a year for training, rebuilding, and getting some of those skills up. Today, you hear a lot of stories, but there is a large gap for any company to be able to jump into this. Skills are not there. The resources are not there and they are not trained. That's going to be a huge issue for us in 2010.

Bloomberg: I'm going to be a bit of the naysayer of the bunch. I just don't see cloud computing striking it big in 2010. When we talk to enterprise architects, we see a lot of curiosity and some dabbling. But, at the enterprise scale, we see too much resistance in terms of security and other issues to put a lot of investment into it. It's going to be gradually growing, but I don't see such a point coming as soon as you might like.

Small organizations are a different story. We see small organizations basing their whole business models on the cloud, but at the enterprise level, it's sort of a toe in the water, and we see that happening in the 2010.

Another thing we don't see really taking off in any big way is Enterprise 2.0. That is Web 2.0 collaborative technologies for the enterprise. You know, "Twitter On Steroids," and that kind of thing. Again, it's going to be more of a toe in the water thing. Collaborative technologies are maturing, but we don't see a huge paradigm shift in how collaboration is done in the enterprise. It's going to be more of a gradual process.

Another thing that we are not seeing happening in 2010 is CIOs and other executives really getting the connection between business process management (BPM) and SOA. We see those as two sides of the same coin. Architects are increasingly seeing that in order to do effective BPM you have to have the proper architecture in place. But, we don't see the executives getting that and putting money where it belongs in order to effect more flexible business process. So, this is another work in progress, and it's going to be a struggle for architects to make progress over the course of the year.

As far as the end of the recession, yeah, we're all hoping that the economy picks up, and I do see that there is going to be a lot of additional activity as a result of an improving economy, but I don't see a huge uptake in spending on software per se.

Spending in IT is going to go up, but in terms of what the executives going to invest in, they're going to be very careful about purchasing software. That's going to drive some money to cloud-based solutions, but that's still just a toe in the water as well.

Software vendors were hoping for a huge year, but they're going to be disappointed. It's going to be a growth year, but it's going to be moderate growth for the vendors.

Those are my first four. Those are the negatives. Not to be too negative, in terms of the positive, what we see happening in 2010 is increased focus on "MSW." You know what MSW is, right? Politely speaking it's "Make Stuff Work." Of course, you could put a different word in there for the S, but Make Stuff Work, that's what we see the architects really focusing on.

They have a good idea now of what SOA is all about. They have a good idea about how the technology fits in the story and the various technologies that have been mentioned on this call, whether it's analytics, data management, SaaS, and the cloud-based approaches. Now, it's time to get the stuff to work together, and that's the real challenge that we see.

The SOA story is no longer an isolated story. We're going to do SOA, let's go do SOA. But, it's SOA plus other things. So, we're going to do SOA, BPM, and the architecture driving that, despite the fact that the CIO may not quite connect the dots there.

SOA plus master data management (MDM)—it's not one or the other now. It's how we get those things to work together. SOA plus virtualization. That's another challenge. Previously, those conversations were separate parts of the organization. We see more and more conversations bringing those together.

SOA and SaaS—somebody already mentioned that SaaS is one segment of the cloud category. It's little more mature than the rest. We see more organizations understanding the connection between those two and trying to put them together. We'll do middleware and we'll do SOA, but we don't really see the connection where we confuse one for the other, and that was a big issue.

We're happy to call this services-oriented, even though the organization, as a whole, may call it variety of different things, depending on the perspective of the individual.

Baer: On cloud and virtualization, basically I agree with Jason, and I don't agree with David or with Joe. It’s not going to be the "new normal." We're going to see this year an uptake of all the management overhead of dealing with cloud and virtualization, the same way we saw with outsourcing years back, where we thought we'd just throw labor costs over the wall.

Secondly, JP, I very much believe that there is going to be convergence between BI and CEP this year. I agree with him that there's not going to be a surge of Albert Einsteins out there. On the other hand, I see this as a golden opportunity for vendors to package these analytics as applications or as services. That's where I really see the inflection curve happening.

Number three: Microsoft and Google. Microsoft will be struggling to stay relevant. Yes, people will buy Windows 7, because it's not Vista. That’s kind of a backhanded compliment to say, "We're buying this, because you didn't screw up as badly as last time." It doesn't speak well for the future.

Google meets a struggle for focus. I agree with Joe that they are aspiring to be the Microsoft of the cloud, but it may or may not be such a good thing for Google to follow that Microsoft model.

Finally, I agree with Jim that you are going to see a lot more business-oriented, whether it's BI, BPM, or IBM buying Lombardi. I hope they don't mess up Lombardi and especially I hope they don't mess up Blueprint. I've already blogged about that.

One other point—and I don't know if this fits into a top five or not—but I found what Joe was talking about very interesting in terms of the let-down on health-care investment in IT. There's going to be lot a of pushing in electronic medical records (EMR) this year. I very much believe in EMRs, but, on the other hand, they are no panacea. We're going to see a trough of disillusionment happen on that as well.

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: 17th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Security may be the hottest topic in IT. But it's also one of the least understood. So BriefingsDirect assembled a panel to examine the need for IT security to run more like a data-driven science, rather than a mysterious art form.

Rigorously applying data and metrics to security can dramatically improve IT results and reduce overall risk to the business. By employing and applying more metrics and standards to security, the protection of IT becomes better, and the known threats can become evaluated uniformly.

Standards like Information Security Management Maturity Model (SM3) are helping to not only gain greater visibility, but also allowing IT leaders to scale security best practices repeatably and reliably.

With standards and greater reliance on data, security practitioners can understand better what they are up against, perhaps gaining close to real-time responses. They can know what's working—or is not working—both inside and outside of their organization.

The security metrics panel and podcast discussion are coming to you from The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Seattle on Feb. 2, 2010. The goal is to determine the strategic imperatives for security metrics, and to discuss how to use them to change the outcomes in terms of IT’s value to the business.

Our panel consists of a security executive from The Open Group, as well as two experts on security who are presenting at the consortium's Security Practitioners Conference: Jim Hietala, Vice President for Security at The Open Group; Adam Shostack, co-author of The New School of Information Security, and Vicente Aceituno, director of the ISM3 Consortium. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions

Here are some excerpts:

Hietala: We think there's a contribution to make from The Open Group, in terms of developing the ISM3 standard and getting it out there more widely. [Being a data-driven security organization means] using information to make decisions, as opposed to what vendors are pitching at you, or your gut reaction. It's getting a little more scientific about gathering data on the kinds of attacks you're seeing and the kinds of threats that you face, and using that data to inform the decisions around the right set of controls to put in place to effectively secure the organization.

A presentation we had today from an analyst firm talked about people being all over the map [on security practices]. I wouldn’t say there's a lot of rigor and standardization around the kinds of data that’s being collected to inform decisions, but there is some of that work going on in very large organizations. There, you typically see a little more mature metrics program. In smaller organizations, not so much. It's a little all over the map.

... The important outputs of a good metrics program can be that it gives you a different way to talk to your senior management about the progress that you're making against the business objectives and security objectives.

That’s been an area of enormous disconnect. Security professionals have tended to talk about viruses, worms, relatively technical things, but haven't been able to show a trend to senior management that justifies the kind of spending they have been doing and the kind of spending they need to do in the future. Business language around some of that is needed in this area.

Shostack: We have an opportunity to be a heck of a lot more effective than we have been. We can say, "This control that we all thought was a really good idea—well, everyone is doing it, and it's not having the impact that we would like." So, we can reassess how we're getting real, where we're putting our dollars.

The big change we've seen is that people have started to talk about the problems that they are having, as a result of laws passed in California and elsewhere that require them to say, "We made a mistake with data that we hold about you," and to tell their customers.

We've seen that a lot of the things we feared would happen haven't come to pass. We used to say that your company would go out of business and your customers would all flee. It's not happening that way. So, we're getting an opportunity today to share data in a way that’s never been possible before.

Aceituno: The top priority should be to make sure that the things you measure are things that are contributing positivity to the value that you're bringing to business as a information security management (ISM) practitioner. That’s the focus. Are you measuring things that are actually bringing value or are you measuring things that are fancy or look good?

Because metrics are all about controlling what you do and being able to manage the outputs that you produce and that contribute value to the business ... you can use metrics to manage internal factors.

I don’t think it brings a bigger return on investment (ROI) to collect metrics on external things that you can't control. It’s like hearing the news. What can you do about it? You're not the government or you're not directly involved. It's only the internal metrics that really make sense.

Basically, we link business goals, business objectives, and security objectives in a way that’s never been done before, because we are painfully detailed when we express the outcomes that you are supposed to get from your ISM system. That will make it far easier for practitioners to actually measure the things that matter.

Shostack: Vicente’s point about measuring the things you can control is critical. Oftentimes in security, we don’t like to admit that we've made mistakes and we conceal some of the issues that are happening. A metrics initiative gives you the opportunity to get out there and talk about what's going on, not in a finger pointing way, which has happened so often in the past, but in an objective and numerically centered way. That gives us opportunity to improve.

Hietala: There's some taxonomy work to be done. One of the real issues in security is that when I say "threat," do other people have the same understanding? Risk management is rife with different terms that mean different things to different people. So getting a common taxonomy is something that makes sense.

The kinds of metrics we're collecting can be all over the map, but generally they're the things that would guide the right kind of decision making within an IT security organization around the question, "Are we doing the right things?"

Today, Vicente used an example of looking at vulnerabilities that are found in web applications. A critical metric was how long those vulnerabilities are out there before they get fixed by different lines of business, by different parts of the business, looking at how the organization is responding to that. We're trying to drive that metric toward the vulnerabilities being open for less time and getting fixed quicker.

Shostack: We've seen over the last few years that those security programs that succeed are the ones that talk to the business needs and talk to the executive suite in language that the executives understand.

We've seen over the last few years that those security programs that succeed are the ones that talk to the business needs and talk to the executive suite in language that the executives understand.

The real success here and the real step with ISM3 is that it gives people a prescriptive way to get started on building those metrics.

You can pick it up and look at it and say, "Okay, I'm going to measure these things. I'm going to trend on them." And, I'm going to report on them."

As we get toward a place, where more people are talking about those things, we'll start to see an expectation that security is a little bit different. There is a risk environment that's very outside of people's control, but this gives people a way to get a handle on it.

Aceituno: The main task of the ISM3 Consortium so far was to manage the ISM3 standard. I'm very happy to say that The Open Group and ISM3 Consortium reached an agreement and, with this agreement, The Open Group will be managing ISM3 from here on in. We'll be devoting our time to other things, like teaching and consulting services in Spain, which is our main market. I can't think of anything better than for ISM3 to be managed from The Open Group.

Hietala: You have metrics and control approaches in various areas and you can pick a starting point. You can come at this top-down, if you're trying to implement a big program. Or, you come at it bottoms-up and pick a niche, where you know you are not doing well and want to establish some rigor around what you are doing. You can do a smaller implementation and get some benefit out of it. It's approachable either way.

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By: Clay Ryder, President, Sageza Group, Inc. Posted: 17th February 2010 Copyright Sageza Group, Inc. © 2010

IBM has announced a new hardware and software offering, known as IBM Scale Out Network Attached Storage (SONAS), that assembles server and storage components into a virtual storage environment to overcome many of the scalability limitations of current NAS technology. SONAS is massively scalable with support for up to 14.4PB in a single system while offering the ability to seamlessly add storage capacity. It features automated tiering, is capable of scanning 1+ billion files in a matter of minutes, and uses policy-driven file-level tiering to enable organizations to specify where data is placed and/or how it is migrated over time. IBM states that the target market for SONAS is midsize to larger enterprises in industries that need to store, access, and manage dramatic growth in file-based data, including verticals such as financial services, insurance, banking, medical and life sciences, digital media and government.

Key business benefits outlined in the announcement include:

• Better control of data through consolidation of islands of data into a single network-based store that is accessible from anywhere in the world and can non-disruptively add storage capacity.
• Smarter use of resources achieved through policy-driven automation and tiered storage management.
• Reduced Operational Costs through hardware consolidation, reduced CAPEX, and maximizing of overall storage ROI as well as minimizing of administration headcount through streamlined and simplified administration, backup, and application access to data.

Net/Net: One simple IT axiom is that the number of files being created on a daily basis continues to grow, seemingly unabated. At the same time, the value of these files increases geometrically as they are made available in a policy-based fashion to an ever growing number of LoB professionals, business partners, customers, and even the world at large. Files represent information, the key component of the information-driven economy, and organizations that are cost-effectively able to capture this growing pool of data and transform it into actionable information are those which will have the competitive advantage in the marketplace.

Files almost seem to create themselves and expand to overfill the available storage space. Just ask any IT professional tasked with managing capacity just how long that “new” free storage capacity lasts after installation. Although for many organizations managing the utilization of servers has become paramount in the quest for organizational efficiency, not as many have fully embraced this reality with respect to storage. This is in part due to some additional challenges that storage management presents compared with servers. Although there are a few exceptions, notably horizontal applications such as email, or desktop productivity applications, most applications deployed in an organization are used by specific groups, departments, or other functional organizations. Thus it is possible to consolidate like applications within a subset of the corporate server resources and manage their level of service with some degree of predictability.

For the most part storage solutions have retained more of the traditional siloed approach than their server brethren, which would seem counter-intuitive given the focus on improved utilization through virtualization in most organizations. Yet part of the challenge lies in the fundamental difference between how storage is consumed and how applications are. As we noted earlier, access to applications can grouped by function with some degree of the physical manifestation mimicking this principle. However, file-based storage (as opposed to block-based storage) has essentially universal appeal to applications so a bevy of applications can end up making substantial demands for file space. In addition, there is the unprecedented growth in unstructured files of most any type finding their way on to network-based storage. The historic approaches that sought to deliver enterprise-wide storage, typically NAS in nature, are ultimately limited in the number of files that could be delivered within a given namespace. As space ran out, extensions to NAS required either that a potentially enormous number of files had to be moved to the new storage to keep associated files together, or users had to deal with their files being stored across multiple file namespaces and the inevitable management headache that entailed.

This is where we believe SONAS has the potential to greatly ease the management and accessibility of universal file systems and help move organizations towards a single universally accessible file store of considerable size. With SONAS, organizations can move towards Cloud-based infrastructures with the knowledge that the sheer demand for file space will not outstrip the ability of the storage infrastructure to keep up with rising demand while keeping the management expense under control. With the scale that Cloud portends, automated policy control and tiering will be absolutely essential in order for organizations to achieve the scale required while being able to match the business value of information being stored with the cost of its storage. Decisions on where data is placed upon creation, where and when it moves within the tiers of the storage hierarchy, where it is copied for disaster recovery, and when it will be deleted would be automated based upon the organization’s defined policy guidelines.

While SONAS has the potential to deliver a single large file system in the Cloud, by no means would it become the sole storage approach for an organization or service provider. By virtue of its file system-based approach to storage, NAS (or now SONAS), is not the most efficient means by which to deliver block-oriented storage for applications such as large database instances or other applications requiring large quantities of raw storage that are under the application’s direct management and control. Hence, even in a cloud environment, a one-style-fits-all approach will not best meet the needs of the organization.

Overall, we are heartened by this announcement as it illustrates a big-picture vision of how the vast number of files that could be found in a Cloud or very large enterprise environment could be managed in much more efficient, streamlined, and cost-effective fashion over past solutions. In line with the notion of efficiency, we are also pleased to read the very business-focused positioning of this technology, a discussion about operational efficiency and improved utilization as opposed to a singular fixation on the zillions of files that could be stored. In any large-scale deployment such as that implied by a Cloud Computing approach, the efficient management of resources, both human and capital, will be paramount for IT success. In the case of storage, this implies a high degree of automation, tiering, and policy definition and enforcement. To our way of thinking, SONAS is a logical extension to the well-understood NAS approach, but one that has the potential to allow NAS to grow far beyond its original design considerations and into its next wave of potential.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 16th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

This podcast discussion looks at ArchiMate, a way of conceptualizing, modeling, and controlling enterprise architecture (EA) and business architecture.

ArchiMate provides ways to develop visualizations and control of IT architecture to more swiftly obtain business benefits. To learn more, we interview an expert on this, Dr. Harmen van den Berg, partner and co-founder at BiZZdesign.

This podcast was recorded Feb. 2 at The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Seattle the week of Feb. 1, 2010. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: I really enjoyed your presentation on ArchiMate. How did the standard come about?

Dr. Harmen van den Berg: ArchiMate was developed in the Netherlands by a number of companies and research institutes. They developed it because there was a lack of a language for describing EA. After it was completed, they offered it to The Open Group as a standard.

Gardner: What problems does it solve?

Van den Berg: The problem that it solves is that you need a language to express yourself, just like normal communication. If you want to talk about the enterprise and the important assets in the enterprise, the language supports that conversation.

Gardner: We are talking about more and more angles on this conversation, now that we talk about cloud computing and hybrid computing. It seems as if the complexity of EA and the ability to bring in the business side, provide them with a sense of trust in the IT department, and allow the IT department to better understand the requirements of the business, all need a new language. Do you think it can live up to that?

Van den Berg: Yes, because if you look at other languages, like UML, which is for system development and is a very detailed language, it only covers a very limited part of the complete enterprise. ArchiMate is focused on giving you a language for describing the complete enterprise, from all different angles, not on a detailed level, but on a more global level, which is understandable to the business as well.

Gardner: So more stakeholders can become involved with something like ArchiMate. I guess that's an important benefit here.

Van den Berg: Yes, because the language is not focused only on IT, but on the business as well and on all kinds of stakeholders in your organization.

Gardner: How would someone get started, if they were interested in using ArchiMate to solve some of these problems? What is the typical way in which this becomes actually pragmatic and useful?

Van den Berg: The easiest way is just to start describing your enterprise in terms of ArchiMate. The language forces you to describe it on a certain global level, which gives you direct insight in the coherence within your enterprise.

Gardner: So, this allows you to get a meta-view of processes and assets that are fundamentally in IT, but have implication for and reverberate around the business.

Van den Berg: You don't have to start in IT. You can just start at the business side. What are products? What are services? And, how are they supported by IT? That's a very useful way to start, not from the IT side, but from the business side.

Gardner: Are there certain benefits or capabilities in ArchiMate that would, in fact, allow it to do a good job at defining and capturing what goes on across an extended enterprise, perhaps hybrid sourcing or multiple sourcing of business processes and services?

Van den Berg: It's often used, for example, when you have an outsourcing project to describe not only your internal affairs, but also your relation with other companies and other organizations.

Gardner: What are some next steps with ArchiMate within The Open Group as a standard? Tell us what it might be maturing into or what some of the future steps are.

Van den Berg: The future steps are to align it more with TOGAF, which is the process for EA, and also extending it to cover more elements that are useful to describe an EA.

It's often used, for example, when you have an outsourcing project to describe not only your internal affairs, but also your relation with other companies and other organizations.

Gardner: And for those folks who would like to learn more about ArchiMate and how to get this very interesting view of their processes, business activities, and IT architecture variables where would you go?

Van den Berg: The best place to go is The Open Group website. There is a section on ArchiMate and it gives you all the information.

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By: David Tang, Global VP, VoSKY Technologies Posted: 16th February 2010 Copyright VoSKY Technologies © 2010

It's funny that some of the most revolutionary technologies are first brought into businesses by individual users, rather than IT departments. Then, when others see the benefits those pioneering users are getting, the technology is quickly adopted company-wide. It happened this way with PC-based fax, then email, and with instant messaging. And it's happening with Skype.

And that's really no surprise. Individuals first embraced Skype because it offered free voice and video calls over the Internet. The adoption rate skyrocketed due to Skype's ease of use and superior voice quality over the public Internet. But now that it operates the world's largest and most reliable Internet communications community, with over 405M registered users, it's also a very attractive infrastructure for business telephony applications. According to Skype, 30% of its users are using Skype for business.

What's more, it complements the communications infrastructure that you already have in place, enabling you to do more with the resources you already have, which is particularly compelling in the current business climate.

So here are five key reasons why corporate IT managers have embraced Skype in their organizations—and how they can deploy and centrally manage it effectively.

It saves—and keeps on saving
Skype isn't just about cost savings—but it's a great benefit nonetheless. It saves your business money on all call costs: national, international, mobile, inter-office, to any user, and it keeps on delivering savings.

With Skype centrally managed in your organisation via PBX-to-Skype gateways you can create global numbering plans, enabling employees to use extension dialling between offices. Site-to-site calls are free, and long-distance calls are handled using SkypeOut to reduce costs. The gateways also centralise Skype provisioning and management, giving IT managers full control and eliminating the need to install Skype on each PC. All Skype voice functions are delivered to users' handsets.

The benefits can also extend to mobile users. With Skype installed on any smart mobile phone that can run the lite version of Skype, the user's call preferences can be set up centrally by the IT team, via the PBX gateway, for alternate routing to the mobile user's Skype account. This is done via mobile broadband under the user's mobile data plan, giving huge savings compared with even the cheapest international mobile tariffs.

It leverages your existing technology
These PBX-to-Skype application gateways can link any office phone system (whether traditional digital switch, or IP / SIP PBX) to Skype, for a low one-time upgrade cost without having to swap out or replace existing equipment. The gateways add anything from 4 to 30 Skype lines to the company PBX, so that Skype calls can be made and transferred between extensions as normal. Employees simply dial 8 for Skype, or 9 for an ordinary line.

None of your investments are made obsolete. You just make your existing assets work harder for your business—and start saving money.

It's easy to manage
The gateways can be installed, and Skype provisioned, in less than half a day, with zero changes to existing PBX equipment, phones, or PCs. The gateway ties the Skype Online number to the business to enable Skype DID. It also simplifies configuration, management and support, putting Skype under the IT manager's full control.

There's no need to install Skype on each PC—Skype usage can be monitored by the business just like ordinary calls, and number schemes easily managed. You set it up and it's under centralised control right away.

Skype is completely free of malware, adware and spyware
So it does not add another potential security threat, or attack vector to your network. How many other corporate networks can say the same?

Skype is encrypted
When Skype users connect, it's over an AES-encrypted session, whether it's via instant message, voice, video, or the sending of files. So Skype communications are secure—giving an advantage over conventional VoIP or voice VPNs.

And of course, with a gateway at each office, you get secure voice VPN working over Skype without paying for expensive leased lines, or having to deploy IP PBXs from the same vendor at every office. That's in addition to the benefits outlined earlier.

So with the cost savings and functionality benefits available to you through Skype usage, what's not to love about it?

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 12th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

This event podcast discussion comes to you from The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference in Seattle, the week of Feb. 1, 2010.

We examine the definition of enterprise architecture (EA), the role of the architect and how that might be shifting with an expert from the Open Group, Len Fehskens, Vice President of Skills and Capabilities. The interview is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: I was really intrigued by your presentation, talking, with a great deal of forethought obviously, about the whole notion of EA, the role of the architect, this notion of "fit for purpose." We want to have the fit-for-purpose discussion about EA. What are the essential characteristics of this new definition?

Fehskens: You'll remember that one of the things I hoped to do with this definition was understand the architecture of architecture, and that the definition would basically be the architecture of architecture. The meme, so to speak, for this definition is the idea that architecture is about three things: mission, solution, and environment. Both the mission and the solution exist in the environment, and the purpose of the architecture is to specify essentials that address fitness for purpose.

There are basically five words or phrases; mission, solution, environment, fitness for purpose, and essentials. Those capture all the ideas behind the definition of architecture.

Gardner: The whole notion of EA has been in works for 30 years, as you pointed out. What is it about right now in the maturity of IT and the importance of IT in modern business that makes this concept of enterprise architect so important?

Fehskens: A lot of practicing enterprise architects have realized that they can't do enterprise IT architecture in isolation anymore. The constant mantra is "business-IT alignment." In order to achieve business-IT alignment, architects need some way of understanding what the business is really about. So, coming from an architectural perspective, it becomes natural to think of specifying the business in architectural terms.

Enterprise architects are now talking more frequently about the idea of "business architecture." The question becomes, "What do we really mean by business architecture?" We keep saying that it's the stakeholders who really define what's going on. We need to talk to business people to understand what the business architecture is, but the business people don't want to talk tech-speak.

We need to be able to talk to them in their language, but addressing an architectural end. What I tried to do was come up with a definition of architecture and EA that wasn't in tech-speak. That would allow business people to relate to concepts that make sense in their domain. At the same time, it would provide the kind of information that architects are looking for in understanding what the architecture of the business is, so that they can develop an EA that supports the needs of the business.

Gardner: So, in addition to defining EA properly for this time and place, and with the hindsight of the legacy, development, and history of IT and now business, what is the special sauce for a person to be able to fill that role? It’s not just about the definition, but it's also about the pragmatic analog world, day-in and day-out skills and capabilities.

Borrowed skills
Fehskens: That's a really good question. I've had this conversation with a lot of architects, and we all pretty much agree that maybe 90 percent of what an architect does involves skills that are borrowed from other disciplines—program management, project management, governance, risk management, all the technology stuff, social skills, consulting skills, presentation skills, communication skills, and all of that stuff.

But, even if you’ve assembled all of those skills in a single individual, there is still something that an architect has to be able to do to take advantage of those capabilities and actually do architecture and deliver on the needs of their clients or their stakeholders.

I don't think we really understand yet exactly what that thing is. We’ve been okay so far, because people who entered the discipline have been largely self-selecting. I got into it because I wanted to solve problems bigger than I could solve myself by writing all code. I was interested in having a larger impact then I could just writing a single program or doing something that was something that I could do all by myself.

That way, we filter out people who try to become architects. Then, there's a second filter that applies: if you don't do it well, people don't let you do it. We're now at the point where people are saying, "That model for finding, selecting, and growing architects isn't going to work anymore, and we need to be more proactive in producing and grooming architects." So, what is it that distinguishes the people who have that skill from the people who don't?

If you go back to the definition of architecture that I articulated in this talk, one of the things that becomes clear is that an architect not only has to have good design skills. An architect also has to be almost Sherlock Holmes-like in his ability to infer from all kinds of subtle signals about what really matters, what's really important to the stakeholders, and how to balance all of these different things in a way that ends up focusing on an answer to this very squishily, ill-defined statement of the problem.

This person, this individual, needs to have that sense of the big picture—all of the moving parts—but also needs to be able to drill in both at the technical detail and the human detail.

In fact, this notion of fitness for purpose comes back in. As I said before, an architect has to be able to figure out what matters, not only in the development of an architectural solution to a problem, but in the process of discerning that architecture. There's an old saw about a sculptor. Somebody asked him, "How did you design this beautiful sculpture," and he says, "I didn't. I just released it from the stone."

What a good architect does is very similar to that. The answer is in there. All you have to is find it. In some respects, it's not so much a creative discipline, as much as it's an exploratory or searching kind of discipline. You have to know where to look. You have to know which questions to ask and how to interpret the answers to them.

Rarely done
Gardner: One of the things that came out early in your presentation was this notion that architecture is talked about and focused on, but very rarely actually done. If it's the case in the real world that there is less architecture being done than we would think is necessary, why do it at all?

Fehskens: There's a lot of stuff being done that is called architecture. A lot of that work, even if it's not purely architecture in the sense that I've defined architecture, is still a good enough approximation so that people are getting their problems solved.

What we're looking for now, as we aspire to professionalize the discipline, is to get to the point where we can do that more efficiently, more effectively, get there faster, and not waste time on stuff that doesn't really matter.

I'm reminded of the place medicine was 100 or 150 years ago. I hate to give leeches a bad name, because we’ve actually discovered that they're really useful in some medical situations. But, there was trepanning, where they cut holes in a person's skull to release vapors, and things like that. A lot of what we are doing in architecture is similar.

What we want to do is get better at that, so that we pick the right things to do in the right situations, and the odds of them actually working are much higher than better than chance.

We do stuff because it's the state of the art and other people have tried it. Sometimes, it works and sometimes, it doesn't. What we want to do is get better at that, so that we pick the right things to do in the right situations, and the odds of them actually working are much higher than better than chance.

Gardner: Okay, a last question. Is there anything about this economic environment and the interest in cloud computing and various sourcing options and alternatives that make the architecture role all the more important?

Fehskens: I hate to give you the typical architect signature which is, "Yes, but." Yes, but I don't think that's a causal a relationship. It's sort of a coincidence. In many respects, architecture is the last frontier. It's the thing that's ultimately going to determine whether or not an organization will survive in an extremely dynamic environment. New technologies like cloud are just the latest example of that environment changing radically.

It isn't so much that cloud computing makes good EA necessary, as much as cloud computing is just the latest example of changes in the external environment that require organizations to have enterprise architects to make sure that the organization is always fit for purpose in an extremely dynamically changing environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The new systems and management software announced include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 8th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

BriefingsDirect now presents a podcast discussion on the ongoing activities of The Open Group's Cloud Computing Work Group. We'll meet and talk to the new co-chairmen of the Cloud Work Group, learn about their roles and expectations, and get a first-hand account of the group's 2010 plans.

Join us as we examine the evolution of cloud, how businesses are grappling with that, and how they can learn to best exploit cloud-computing benefits, while fully understanding and controlling the risks. These topics and more were also under discussion at The Open Group's Architecture Practitioners and Security Practitioners conferences last week in Seattle.

In many ways, cloud computing marks an inflection point for many different elements of IT, and forms a convergence of other infrastructure categories that weren't necessarily working in concert in the past. That makes cloud interesting, relevant, and potentially dramatic in its impact. What has been less clear is how businesses stand to benefit. What are the likely paybacks and how can enterprises prepare for the best outcomes?

We're here with an executive from The Open Group, as well as the new co-chairmen of the Cloud Work Group, to look at the business implications of cloud computing and how to get a better handle on the whole subject.

Please join David Lounsbury, Vice President for Collaboration Services at The Open Group; Karl Kay, IT Architecture Executive with Bank of America, and co-chairman of the Cloud Work Group, and Robert Orshaw, IBM Cloud Computing Executive, and co-chair of the Cloud Work Group. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Lounsbury: One of the things that everybody has seen in cloud is that there has been a lot of take up by small to medium businesses who benefit from the low capital expenditure and scalability of cloud computing, and also a lot by individuals who use software as a service (SaaS). We've all seen Google Docs and things like that. That's fueled a lot of the discussion of cloud computing up to now, and it's a very healthy part of what's going on there.

But, as we get into larger enterprises, there's a whole different set of questions that have to be asked about return on investment (ROI) and how you merge things with the existing IT infrastructure. Is it going to meet the security needs and privacy needs and regulatory needs of my corporation? So, it's an expanded set of questions that might not be asked by a smaller set of companies. That's an area where The Open Group is trying to focus some of its activities.

There is a whole different scale that has to occur when you go into an enterprise, where you have got to think of all the users in the enterprise. What does it take to fund it? What does it take to secure it, protect the corporate assets and things like that, and integrate it, because you want services to be widely available?

Orshaw: A few years ago, there was a tremendous amount of hype, and the dynamics, flexibility, and pricing structures weren't there. It's an exciting time now that you're seeing that from a flexibility, dynamic, and pricing standpoint, we're there. That's both in the private cloud and the public cloud sector—and we'll probably get into more detail about the offerings around that.

A tremendous amount has happened over the past few years to improve the market adoption and overall usability of both public and private clouds.

In a former life, I was CIO of a large industrial manufacturing company that had 49 separate business units. Cloud today can be an issue in the beginning for CIOs. For example, at that large manufacturing company, in order for a business unit to provision new development test environments or production environments for implementing new applications and new systems, they would have to go through an approval process, which could take a significant amount of time.

Once approved, we would have centralized data centers and outsourced data centers. We would have to go through and see if there was existing capacity. If there wasn't, we would then go ahead and procure that and install it. So, we're talking weeks, and perhaps even a few months, to provision and get a business unit up and running for their various projects.

These autonomous business units that weren't very happy with that internal service to begin with, are now finding it very easy to go out with a credit card or a local purchase order to Amazon, IBM, and others and get these environments provisioned to them in minutes.

This is creating a headache for a lot of CIOs, where there is a proliferation of virtual cloud environments and platforms being used by their business units, and they don't even know about it. They don't have control over it. They don't even know how much they're spending. So, the cloud group can have a significant effect on this, helping improve that environment.

Kay: Certainly the leading items like cost savings and time to market are two of the big motivators that we look to for cloud. In a lot of cases, our businesses are driving IT to adopt cloud as opposed to the opposite. It's really a matter of how we blend in the cloud environment with all of our security and regulatory requirement and how we make it fit within the enterprise suite of platform offerings.

The work groups are really focused on trying to deliver some short-term value. In the business use cases, they're really trying to define a clear set of business cases and financial models to make it easier to understand how to evaluate cloud with certain scenarios.

We're seeing a skill-set change on the technical side, in that, if you look at the adoption of cloud, you shift from being able to directly control your environments and make changes from a technical perspective, to working with a contractual service level agreement (SLA) type of model. So it's definitely a change for a lot of the engineers and architects working on the technical side of the cloud.

The Cloud Architecture Group is looking to deliver a reference architecture in 2010. One of the things we've discovered is that there are a lot of similarities between the reference architecture that we believe we need for cloud and what already has been built in the SOA reference architectures. I think we'll see a lot of alignment there. There are probably some other elements that will be added, but there's a lot of synergy between the work that's already going on in SOA and SOI and the work that we are doing in cloud.

Number of activities
Lounsbury: There are a number of activities inside The Open Group. Enterprise architecture is a very large one, but also real-time and embedded systems for control systems and things of that nature. We've got a very active security program, and also, of course, we've got some more emerging technologically-focused areas like service oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing.

We have a global organization with a large number of industrial members. As you've seen, from our cloud group, we always try to make sure that this is a perspective that's balanced between the supply side and the buy side. We're not just saying what a vendor thinks is the greatest new technology, but we also bring in the viewpoint of the consumers of the technology, like a CIO, or, as Karl represents on the Cloud Group, an architect on the design side. We make sure that we're balancing the interests.

We did a number of presentations reaching back to our Seattle conference about a year ago on cloud computing. We've reached out to other organizations to work with them to see if there is interest in working together on cloud activities. We've staged a series of presentations.

We've gotten about 500 participants virtually, and that represents about 85–90 companies participating.

The members decided in mid-2009 to form a work group around cloud computing. The work group is a way that we can bring together all aspects of what's going on in The Open Group, because cloud computing touches a lot of areas: security, architecture, technology, and all those things. Also, as part of that we've reached out to other communities to open a nonmember aspect of the Cloud Work Group as well.

Orshaw: At the end of this, we'll have a complete model for both public and private cloud. It's an exciting endeavor by the team, and I'm excited to see the outcome. We'll have short-term milestones, where we'll produce, document, and publish results every two months or so. We hope, towards the end of the year, to have all of these wrapped up into these global models that I described.

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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: 4th February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion delves into proper planning and implementation of data-center virtualization to gain strategic-level advantage in enterprises.

Because companies generally begin their use of server virtualization at a tactical level, there is often a complex hurdle in expanding the use of virtualization. Analysts predict that virtualization will support upwards of half of server workloads in just a few years. Yet, we are already seeing gaps between an enterprise's expectations and their ability to aggressively adopt virtualization without stumbling in some way.

These gaps can involve issues around people, process and technology and, often, all three in some combination. Process refinement, proper methodological involvement, and swift problem management often provide proven risk reduction, and provide surefire ways of avoiding pitfalls as virtualization use moves to higher scale.

The goal becomes one of a lifecycle orchestration and governed management approach to virtualization efforts so that the business outcomes, as well as the desired IT efficiencies, are accomplished.

Areas that typically need to be part of any strategic virtualization drive include sufficient education, skilled acquisition, and training. Outsourcing, managed mixed sourcing, and consulting around implementation and operational management are also essential. Then, there are the usual needs around hardware, platforms and system as well as software, testing and integration.

So, we're here with a panel of Hewlett Packard (HP) executives to examine in-depth the challenges of large scale successful virtualization adoption. We'll look at how a supplier like HP can help fill the gaps that can hinder virtualization payoffs.

Please join me in welcoming our panel: Tom Clement, worldwide portfolio manager in HP Education Services; Bob Meyer, virtualization solutions lead with HP Enterprise Business; Dionne Morgan, worldwide marketing manager at HP Technology Services; Ortega Pittman, worldwide product marketing, HP Enterprise Services, and Ryan Reed, worldwide marketing manager at HP Enterprise Business. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excepts:

Meyer: The downturn has really forced anybody who is on the front to go headlong into virtualization. Today, we are technically ahead of where we were a year or two ago with the virtualization experience.

Everybody has significant amounts of virtualization in the production environment. They've been able to get a handle on what it can do to see what the real results and tangible benefits are. They can see, especially on the capital expenditure side, what it could do for the budgets and what benefits it can deliver.

Now, looking forward, people realize the benefits, and they are not looking in it just as an endpoint. They're looking down the road and saying, "Okay, this technology is foundational for cloud computing and some other things." Rather than slowing down, we'll see those workloads increase.

They went from just single percentage points a year and a half ago to 12–15 percent now. Within two years, people are saying it should be about 50 percent. The technology has matured. People have a lot of experience with it. They like what they see in results, and, rather than slow down, it's bringing efficiency to things like the new services model.

Morgan: Many people have probably heard the term "virtual machine sprawl" or "VM sprawl," and that's one of the risks. Part of the reason VM sprawl occurs is because there are no clear defined processes in place to keep the virtualized environment under control.

Virtualization makes it so easy to deploy a new virtual machine or a new server, that if you don't have the proper processes in place, you could have more and more of the these virtual machines being deployed and you lose control. You lose track of them.

That's why it's very important for our clients to think about ... how they're going to continue to manage virtualization on an on-going basis, so they keep it under control.

Pittman: Many times small, medium, and large organizations have the virtualization needs, but might not have the skills on hand.

The skill demand and the instant ability to get started is something that we take a lot of pride in, and in the global track record of doing that very well is something that HP Enterprise Services can bring from an outsourcing perspective. That's where HP Enterprise Services comes to add value with meeting customers' needs around skills.

Clement: Our 30-plus years of experience in providing customer training has shown, time and time again, that technology investments by themselves don't ensure success.

The business results that clients want in virtualization won't be achieved until those three elements you just mentioned—technology, process and people—are all addressed and aligned.

That's really where training comes in. Increasing the technical skills of our customers' people is often one of the most effective ways for them to grow, increase their productivity and boost the success rates of their virtualization initiatives.

In fact, an interesting study just last year from IDC found that 60 percent of the factors leading to the general success in the IT function are attributed to the skills of people involved. Our education team can help address both the people and process parts of the equation.

Reed: We see a shift in the way that IT organizations have considered what they think would be strategic to their end business function. A lot of that is driven through the analysis that goes into planning for a virtual server environment.

When doing something like a virtual server environment, the IT organizations have to take a step back and analyze whether or not this is something that they've got the core competency to support. Often times, they come to the conclusion that they don't have the right set of skills, resources, or locations to support those virtual servers in terms of their data-center location, as well as where those resources are sitting.

So, during the planning of virtual server environments, IT organizations will choose to outsource the planning, the implementation, and the ongoing management of that IT infrastructure to companies like HP.

It's definitely a good opportunity for IT organizations to take a step back and look at how they want to have that IT infrastructure managed, and often times outsourcing is a part of that conversation.

Meyer: One thing virtualization does very nicely is blur the connections between the various pieces of infrastructure, and the technology has developed quite a bit to allow that to ebb and flow with the business needs.

And, you're right. The other side of that is getting the people to actually work and plan together. We always talk about virtualization as not an end-point. It's an enabler of technology to get you there.

If you put what we're talking about in context, the next thing that people want to go to is maybe build a private-cloud service delivery model. Those types of things will depend on that cooperation. It's not just virtualization that that's causing but it's really the newest service delivery models. Where people are heading with their services absolutely requires management and a look at new processes as well.

Pittman: We'd like to work with our customers to understand that it's a starting point to consolidate, but there is a lot more in the broader ecosystem consider, as they think about optimizing their IT environment.

One of HP's philosophies is the whole concept of converged infrastructure. That's thinking about the infrastructure more holistically and addressing the applications, as you said, as well as your server environments and not doing one off, but looking more holistically to get the full benefit.

Moving forward, that's something that we certainly could help customers do from an outsourcing standpoint in enabling all of the parts, so there aren't gaps that cause bigger problems than the one hiccup that started the whole notion of virtualization in the beginning.

Morgan: We think about this in terms of their life cycle. We like to start with a strategy discussion, where we have consultants sit down with the client to better understand what they're trying to accomplish from a business objective perspective. We want to make sure that the customers are thinking about this first from the business perspective. What are their goals? What are they trying to accomplish? And, how can virtualization help them accomplish those goals?

Then, we also can help them with their actual return on investment (ROI) analysis and we have ROI tools that we can use to help them develop that analysis. We have experts to help them with the business justification. We try to take it from a business approach first and then design the right virtualization solution to help them accomplish those goals.

Pittman: HP Enterprise Services worked with the Navy/Marine Corps Intranet (NMCI), which is the world's largest private network, serving and supporting sailors, marines, and civilians in more than 620 locations worldwide.

They were experiencing business challenges in productivity and innovation and in the security areas. Our approach was to consolidate 2,700 physical servers down to 300, reducing outage minutes by almost half. This decreased NMCI's IT footprint by almost 40 percent and cut carbon emissions by almost 7,000 tons.

We minimized their downtime and controlled cost. We accelerated transfer times, transparency and optimal performance.

Virtualizing the servers in this environment enabled them to eliminate carbon emissions equivalent to taking 3,600 cars off the road for one year. So, there were tremendous improvements in that area. We minimized their downtime and controlled cost. We accelerated transfer times, transparency and optimal performance.

All of this was done through the outsourcing virtualization support of HP Enterprise Services and we're really proud that that had a huge impact. They were recognized for an award, as a result of this virtualization improvement, which was pretty outstanding. We talked a little earlier about the broader benefits that customers can expect, the services that help make all of this happen.

In our full portfolio within the IT organization of HP, that would be server management services, data center modernization, network application services, storage services, web hosting services, and network management services. All combined, they made this happen successfully. We're really proud of that, and that's an example of the very large-scale impact that's reaping a lot of benefit.

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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: 1st February 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion hones in on storage virtualization. You've heard a lot about server virtualization over the past few years, and many enterprises have adopted virtual servers to improve their ability to manage runtime workloads and high utilization rates to cut total cost.

But, as a sibling to server virtualization, storage virtualization has some strong benefits of its own, not the least of which is the ability to better support server virtualization and make it more successful.

We'll look at how storage virtualization works, where it fits in, and why it makes a lot of sense. The cost savings metrics alone caught me by surprise, making me question why we haven't been talking about storage and server virtualization efforts in the same breath over these past several years.

Here to help understand how to better take advantage of storage virtualization, we're joined by Mike Koponen, HP's StorageWorks Worldwide Solutions marketing manager. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Koponen: Storage requirements aren't letting up from regulatory requirements, expansion, 24x7 business environments, and the explosion of multimedia. Storage growth is certainly not stopping due to a slowed down economy.

So enterprises need to boost efficiencies from their existing assets as well as the future assets they're going to acquire and then to look for ways to cut capital and operating expenditures. That's really where storage virtualization fits in.

We found that in a lot of businesses they may have as little as 20 percent utilization of their storage capacity. By going to storage virtualization, they can have a 300 percent increase in that existing storage asset utilization, depending upon how it's implemented.

So storage virtualization is a way to increase asset utilization. It's also a way to save on administrative cost, and it's also a way to improve operational efficiencies, as businesses deal with the increasing storage requirements of their businesses. In fact, if businesses don't reevaluate their storage infrastructures at the same time as they're reevaluating their server infrastructures, they really won't realize the full potential of a server virtualization.

In the past, customers would just continue to deploy servers with direct-attached storage (DAS). All of a sudden, they ended up with silos or islands of storage that were more complex to manage and didn't have the agility that you would need to shift storage resources around from application to application.

Then, people moved into deploying network storage or shared storage, storage area networks (SANs) or network-attached storage (NAS) systems and realized a gain in efficiency from that. But, the same can happen. You can end up with islands of SAN systems or NAS systems. Then, to bump things up to the next level of asset utilization, network storage virtualization comes into play.

Now, you can pool all those heterogeneous systems under one common management environment to make it easy to manage and provision these islands of storage that you wound up with.

Studies show swift pay-back
A recent white paper recently done by IDC focuses on the business value of storage virtualization. It looked at a number of factors—reduced IT labor, reduced hardware and software cost, reduced infrastructure cost, and user productivity improvements. Virtualized storage had a range of payback anywhere from four to six months, based on the type of virtualized storage that was being deployed.

There are different needs or requirements that drive the use of storage virtualization and also different benefits. It may be flexible allocation of tiered storage, so you can move data to different tiers of storage based upon its importance and upon how fast you want to access it. You can take less business-critical information that you need to access less frequently and put it on lower cost storage.

The other might be that you just need more efficient snap-shotting, a replication of things, to provide the right degree of data protection to your business. It's a function of understanding what the top business needs are and then finding the right type of storage virtualization that matches those.

In order to take advantage of the advanced capabilities of server virtualization, such as being able to do live migration of virtual machines and to put in place high availability infrastructures, advanced server virtualization require some form of shared storage.

So, in some sense, it's a base requirement that you need shared storage. But, what we've experienced is that, when you do server virtualization, it places some unique requirements on your storage infrastructure in terms of high availability and performance loads.

Server virtualization drives the creation of more data from the standpoint of more snapshots, more replicas, and things like that. So, you can quickly consume a lot of storage, if you don't have an efficient storage management scheme in place.

And, there's manageability too. Virtual server environments are extremely flexible. It's much easier to deploy new applications. You need a storage infrastructure that is equally as easy to manage, so that you can provision new storage just as quickly as you can provision new servers.

As a result, you certainly get an increased degree of data protection by being able to meet backup windows and not having to compromise the amount of information you back up, because you're trying to squeeze more backups through a limited number of physical servers. When you do server virtualization, you're reducing the number of physical servers and running more virtual ones on top of that reduced number.

You might be trying to move same number of backups through a fewer number of physical servers. You also then end up with this higher degree of data protection, because with a virtualized server storage environment you can still achieve the volume of backups you need in a shorter window.

From an HP portfolio standpoint, we have some innovative products like the HP LeftHand SAN system that's based on a clustered storage architecture, where data is striped across the arrays and the cluster. If a single array goes down in the cluster, the volume is still online and available to your virtual server environment, so that high degree of application availability is maintained.

For people who want to learn more about storage virtualization and what HP has to offer to improve their business returns, I suggest, they go to www.hp.com/go/storagevirtualization. There they can learn about the different types of storage virtualization technologies available. There are also some assets on that website to help them with the justification of putting storage virtualization within their companies.

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By: Clay Ryder, President, Sageza Group, Inc. Posted: 28th January 2010 Copyright Sageza Group, Inc. © 2010

EMC has announced new high-density configurations of its EMC CLARiiON CX4 and EMC Celerra Gateway systems. The new high-density configurations feature 5,400 rpm 2TB SATA drives that provide double the capacity of 1TB 7,200 rpm SATA drives but at 60% less power per GB. These latest configurations also support EMC spin down technology that powers down inactive disk drives to reduce power requirements by up to 65% over traditional always-spinning solutions. In combination with high-performance enterprise flash drives, and storage efficiency technologies such as EMC FAST, these solutions target organizations that are seeking to more easily manage the growth of storage-intensive applications while reducing power consumption, cooling costs, and floor space requirements in the datacenter or remote office locations.

The high-density CLARiiON CX4 configurations support up to 390 2TB, 5,400, and 7,200 rpm SATA drives as well as high-performance flash drives in a single rack that requires half the floor space and number of power connections over conventional racks with full access to all disk drives from the front of the rack. Organizations that desire CIFS and NFS support can select the high-density Celerra Gateway system, which is based on the CLARiiON CX4.

Pricing/Availability: The new high-density CLARiiON and Celerra Gateway configurations are now available worldwide. EMC has indicated that it will make high-density EMC Celerra unified storage system configurations available later in 2010.

Net/Net: At first blush this announcement might be overlooked as simply an update to a venerable series of storage products. However, upon closer consideration, one can see that these new offerings are a clever approach to meet the growing need for corporate storage that simultaneously addresses several of the ongoing operational challenges in both the datacenter and the remote office. For many, the notion of 5400 rpm and 7200 rpm disk drives in a contemporary enterprise-grade storage solution may seem archaic, yet the crafty inclusion of these seemingly retro technologies facilitates the power-thrifty and high-density achievements of these solutions.

Although performance is always an important factor in any storage solution, not all data demands the highest echelon of performance. When dealing with large quantities of data, it is all the more imperative that organizations successfully match the business value of the data with the cost-effectiveness of its storage. The impressive price/performance ratio of SATA drives combined with the latest 2TB capacity is difficult to overlook especially when this raw capacity is incorporated into storage arrays that offer other performance boosting capabilities. For those who find energy consumption to be a driving consideration, the modest performance tradeoff of an energy-sipping 5400 rpm rotational speed may offer a means by which to increase overall storage capacity in the datacenter while further reducing the power envelope over that of 7200 rpm platters. Additionally, EMC’s inclusion of auto spin down technology further reduces energy consumption as otherwise unused drive arrays are idled and their impact on power consumption diminishes substantially.

Granted, these high-density, smaller footprint storage technologies will not match the performance of high-speed drives common to high-end storage solutions. But that is not the goal of these new offerings; these offerings are about efficiency as manifest in floor space, energy consumption, cooling, and financial performance. Hence it is important to remember how these systems fit into the big picture. First, these systems are not positioned as high-end, high-performance offerings. Second, these systems support EMC FAST, which allows the promotion and demotion of data to primary, secondary, and tertiary storage platforms as demanded by business need. Third, array technology can improve the overall performance of the storage solution, which is after all more than just a standalone storage platter. Last, and most importantly, the efficacy of a storage solution is not measured by the speed or capability of a specific component, but as a holistic undertaking that combines multiple hardware and software technologies with business process to align the solution with the goals of the organization.

With this in mind, we believe that these latest CLARiiON CX4 and Celerra Gateway systems are well positioned to address many of the storage needs within organizations. The focus on efficiency achieved through a clever use of tried, tested, and true storage technology should resonate with organizations that are seeking to balance the multiple constraints inherent in delivering storage services regardless of whether they are datacenter- or remote office-based. These new offerings serve as a reminder that in the quest for the latest and greatest, one can often find the answer in places that might be inadvertently overlooked or easily dismissed. It also illustrates that while EMC prides itself in being a forward-looking company from both a technical and market perspective, the company is quite able to leverage technologies that by themselves may seem less than cutting edge into a solution that addresses contemporary challenges with cutting edge creativity.

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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: 7th January 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

New architectures for data and logic processing are ushering in a game-changing era of advanced analytics.

These new approaches support massive data sets to produce powerful insights and analysis—yet with unprecedented price-performance. As we enter 2010, enterprises are including more forms of diverse data into their business intelligence (BI) activities. They're also diversifying the types of analysis that they expect from these investments.

At the same time, more kinds and sizes of companies and government agencies are seeking to deliver ever more data-driven analysis for their employees, partners, users, and citizens. It boils down to giving more communities of participants what they need to excel at whatever they're doing. By putting analytics into the hands of more decision makers, huge productivity wins across entire economies become far more likely.

But such improvements won’t happen if the data can't effectively reach the application's logic, if the systems can't handle the massive processing scale involved, or the total costs and complexity are too high.

In this podcast discussion we examine how convergence of data and logic, of parallelism and MapReduce—and of a hunger for precise analysis with a flood of raw new data—are all setting the stage for powerful advanced analytics outcomes.

To help learn how to attain advanced analytics and to uncover the benefits from these new architectural activities for ubiquitous BI, we're joined by Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research, and Sharmila Mulligan, executive vice president of marketing at Aster Data Systems. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Kobielus: Advanced analytics is focused on how to answer questions about the future. It's what's likely to happen—forecast, trend, what-if analysis—as well as what I like to call the deep present, really current streams for complex event processing.

What's streaming in now? And how can you analyze the great gushing streams of information that are emanating from all your applications, your workflows, and from social networks?

Advanced analytics is all about answering future-oriented, proactive, or predictive questions, as well as current streaming, real-time questions about what's going on now. Advanced analytics leverages the same core features that you find in basic analytics—all the reports, visualizations, and dashboarding—but then takes it several steps further.

... What Forrester is seeing is that, although the average data warehouse today is in the 1-10 terabyte range for most companies, we foresee the average warehouse size going, in the middle of the coming decade, into the hundreds of terabytes.

In 10 years or so, we think it's possible, and increasingly likely, that petabyte-scale data warehouses or content warehouses will become common. It's all about unstructured information, deep history, and historical information. A lot of trends are pushing enterprises in the direction of big data.

... We need to rethink the platforms with which we're doing analytical processing. Data mining is traditionally thought of as being the core of advanced analytics. Generally, you pull data from various sources into an analytical data mart.

That analytical data mart is usually on a database that's specific to a given predictive modeling project, let's say a customer analytics project. It may be a very fast server with a lot of compute power for a single server, but quite often what we call the analytical data mart is not the highest performance database you have in your company. Usually, that high performance database is your data warehouse.

As you build larger and more complex predictive models you quickly run into resource constraints on your existing data-mining platform. So you have to look for where you can find the CPU power, the data storage, and the I/O bandwidth to scale up your predictive modeling efforts.

...But, [there is] another challenge, which is advanced analytics producing predictive models. Those predictive models increasingly are deployed in-line to transactional applications to provide some basic logic and rules that will drive such important functions as "next best offer" being made to customers based on a broad variety of historical and current information.

How do you inject predictive logic into your transactional applications in a fairly seamless way? You have to think through that, because, right now, quite often analytical data models, predictive models, in many ways are not built for optimal embedding within your transactional applications. You have to think through how to converge all these analytical models with the transactional logic that drives your business.

New data platform
Mulligan: What we see with customers is that the advanced analytics needs and the new generation of analytics that they are trying to do is driving the need for a new data platform.

What you've got is a situation where enterprises want to be able to do more scalable reporting on massive data sets with very, very fast response times. On the reporting side, in terms of the end result to the customer, it is similar to the type of report they are trying to achieve, but the difference is that the quantity of data that they're trying to get at, and the amount of data that these reports are filling up, is far greater than what they had before.

That's what's driving a need for a new platform underneath some of the pre-existing BI tools that are, in themselves, good at reporting, but what the BI tools need is a data platform beneath them that allows them to do more scalable reporting than you could do before.

... Previously, the choice of a data management platform was based primarily on price/performance, being able to effectively store lots of data, and get very good performance out of those systems. What we're seeing right now is that, although price/performance continues to be a critical factor, it's not necessarily the only factor or the primary thing driving their need for a new platform.

What's driving the need now, and one of the most important criteria in the selection process, is the ability of this new platform to be able to support very advanced analytics.

Customers are very precise in terms of the type of analytics that they want to do. So, it's not that a vendor needs to tell them what they are missing. They are very clear on the type of data analysis they want to do, the granularity of data analysis, the volume of data that they want to be able to analyze, and the speed that they expect when they analyze that data.

There is a big shift in the market, where customers have realized that their pre-existing platforms are not necessarily suitable for the new generation of analytics that they're trying to do.

They are very clear on what their requirements are, and those requirements are coming from the top. Those new requirements, as it relates to data analysis and advanced analytics, are driving the selection process for a new data management platform.

We see the push toward analysis that's really more near real-time than what they were able to do before. This is not a trivial thing to do when it comes to very large data sets, because what you are asking for is the ability to get very, very quick response times and incredibly high performance on terabytes and terabytes of data to be able to get these kind of results in real-time.

Social network analysis
Kobielus: Let's look at what's going to be a true game changer, not just for business, but for the global society. It's a thing called social network analysis.

It's predictive models, fundamentally, but it's predictive models that are applied to analyzing the behaviors of networks of people on the web, on the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter, in your company, and in various social network groupings, to determine classification and clustering of people around common affinities, buying patterns, interests, and so forth.

As social networks weave their way into not just our consumer lives, but our work lives, our 'life' lives, social network analysis—leveraging all the core advanced analytics of data mining and text analytics—will take the place of the focus group.

You're going to listen to all their tweets and their Facebook updates and you're going to look at their interactions online through your portal and your call center. Then, you're going to take all that huge stream of event information—we're talking about complex event processing (CEP)—you're going to bring it into your data warehousing grid or cloud.

You're also going to bring historical information on those customers and their needs. You're going to apply various social network behavior analytics models to it to cluster people into the categories that make us all kind of squirm when we hear them, things like yuppie and Generation X and so forth.

They can get a sense of how a product or service is being perceived in real-time, so that the the provider of that product or service can then turn around and tweak that marketing campaign ...

Social network analysis becomes more powerful as you bring more history into it—last year, two years, five years, 10 years worth of interactions—to get a sense for how people will likely respond to new offers, bundles, packages, campaigns, and programs that are thrown at them through social networks.

If you can push not just the analytic models, but to some degree bring transactional applications, such as workflow, into this environment to be triggered by all of the data being developed or being sifted by these models, that is very powerful.

Mulligan: One of the biggest issues that the pre-existing data pipeline faces is that the data lives in a repository that's removed from where the analytics take place. Today, with the existing solutions, you need to move terabytes and terabytes of data through the data pipeline to the analytics application, before you can do your analysis.

There's a fundamental issue here. You can't move boulders and boulders of data to an application. It's too slow, it's too cumbersome, and you're not factoring in all your fresh data in your analysis, because of the latency involved.

One of the biggest shifts is that we need to bring the analytics logic close to the data itself. Having it live in a completely different tier, separate from where the data lives, is problematic. This is not a price/performance issue in itself. It is a massive architectural shift that requires bringing analytics logic to the data itself, so that data is collocated with the analytics itself.

MapReduce plays a critical role in this. It is a very powerful technology for advanced analytics and it brings capabilities like parallelization to an application, which then allows for very high-performance scalability.

What we see in the market these days are terms like "in-database analytics", "applications inside data", and all this is really talking about the same thing. It's the notion of bringing analytics logic to the data itself.

...In the marriage of SQL with MapReduce, the real intent is to bring the power of MapReduce to the enterprise, so that SQL programmers can now use that technology. MapReduce alone does require some sophistication in terms of programming skills to be able to utilize it. You may typically find that skill set in Web 2.0 companies, but often you don’t find developers who can work with that in the enterprise.

What you do find in enterprise organizations is that there are people who are very proficient at SQL. By bringing SQL together with MapReduce what enterprise organizations have is the familiarity of SQL and the ease of using SQL, but with the power of MapReduce analytics underneath that. So, it’s really letting SQL programmers leverage skills they already have, but to be able to use MapReduce for analytics.

...One of the biggest requirements in order to be able to do very advanced analytics on terabyte- and petabyte-level data sets, is to bring the application logic to the data itself. Earlier, I described why you need to do this. You want to eliminate as much data movement as possible, and you want to be able to do this analysis in as near real-time as possible.

What we did in Aster Data 4.0 is just that. We're allowing companies to push their analytics applications inside of Aster’s MPP database, where now you can run your application logic next to the data itself, so they are both collocated in the same system. By doing so, you've eliminated all the data movement. What that gives you is very, very quick and efficient access to data, which is what's required in some of these advanced analytics application examples we talked about.

Pushing the code
What kind of applications can you push down into the system? It can be any app written in Java, C, C++, Perl, Python, .NET. It could be an existing custom application that an organization has written and that they need to be able to scale to work on much larger data sets. That code can be pushed down into the apps database.

It could be a new application that a customer is looking to write to do a level of analysis that they could not do before, like real-time fraud analytics, or very deep customer behavior analysis. If you're trying to deliver these new generations of advanced analytics apps, you would write that application in the programming language of your choice.

Kobielus: In this coming decade, we're going to see predictive logic deployed into all application environments, be they databases, clouds, distributed file systems, CEP environments, business process management (BPM) systems, and the like. Open frameworks will be used and developed under more of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) umbrella, to enable predictive logic that’s built in any tool to be deployed eventually into any production, transaction, or analytic environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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