Cloud computing for enterprises, work it through your head

Here are some great quotes from a Hiperware white paper I just read:

In combination, cluster computing and multi-core computers have the potential to provide unprecedented performance, scalability and reliability for enterprise software.

Much of the significant benefit evident in the ideology of multicore and cluster computing -- lower costs, higher availability and scalability -- is effectively negated by the cost, time, risk and complexity involved in developing and deploying software that can run on these systems.

... What hinders businesses from taking advantage of multicore and clustered hardware is the lack of a simple means – such as a Rapid Application Development (RAD) method – so that software developers can quickly develop, test and deploy
enterprise software on these systems.

By taking the engineering complexity away from multi-core and cluster-computing, Hiperware Platform makes it significantly easier for developers to write software that can be partitioned across multiple computers or CPU-cores or virtual machines.

The new paper goes on to detail several enterprise computing use-case scenarios that show how cloud computing architectures and methodologies, if enterprise developers can exploit them, will rapidly advance cost-benefits.

Cloud computing is not just for Google and Amazon, folks. It will be synonymous with high performance and then good old enterprise mission-critical computing, in all its forms, in the coming years.

The new neat trick will be managing how the clouds and SOAs relate and interact. And that spells more integration as a service, and more federated policy management and enforcement as a service. It's a whole new abstraction for middleware.

Cloud computing could be the next big opportunity for middleware.

Splunk goes 'platform' to extend IT search benefits across more IT management functions

Gaining more insights early and often into what vast arrays of servers, routers and software stacks are actually doing has long been on the top of the IT wish list. Traditional IT management approaches force the trade-off been depth and comprehensive reach, meaning you can't get the full, integrated picture across mixed systems with sufficient clarity.

Splunk's approach to this problem has been to index and make searchable the flood of constantly generated log files being emitted from IT systems, and then aligning the time stamps to draw out business intelligence inferences about actual IT performance.

The San Francisco company took the IT information assembly and digestion process a step further two years ago by creating Splunk Base, an open reservoir of knowledge about IT searched systems for administrators to share and benefit from. [Disclosure: Splunk is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts, including this one on Splunk Base.]

Now, recognizing the power of mashed up services and Enterprise 2.0 tools for associating applications, services, and data, Splunk has gone "platform." Instead of only providing the fruits of IT search to sys admins and IT operators, Splunk has created the means to offer developers easy access to that data and the powerful inferences gleaned from comprehensive IT search. That means the data can go places no log file has gone before.

Through a common set of services and APIs, the Splunk Platform now allows developers and equipment makers to build and integrate applications that include IT-search generated data. Because Splunk collects and manages logs, configurations, messages, traps and alerts -- compiling statistics from nearly every IT component -- the makers of IT equipment can build better management and maintenance applications (not to mention billable services).

In trial use, the Splunk Platform has already been leveraged by OEMs and systems integrators in the form of bundling and embedding Splunk with their own hardware, software and services. The opportunity there is for these OEMs and systems integrators to seek new business opportunities for offering ongoing maintenance and support values for their products and services.

What's more, the applications that the various OEMs, service providers, hosting organizations, and service bureau outsourcers build on Splunk, the more the applications can be used in coordination together, and the findings then integrated for faster problem solving, greater threat response, heightened compliance reporting, and for gaining business intelligence insight into user activity and transactions.

I like this approach because gaining an insight into total datacenter behavior in near real-time has been so difficult, but its importance is growing with the advances in virtualization, mixed-hosting arrangements, co-location, and SOA-based systems and infrastructure. In effect, both the complexity and heterogeneity of systems has kept growing, while the ability to gain common-denominator meta data about systems behaviors hasn't kept pace. We've long needed a way to make all systems "readable" in common ways.

With Splunk Platform and the applications it will spawn, IT information can now much better support and interact with distributed management applications. And we certainly need more innovative applications that can leverage this common meta data about systems to produce better management and quick feedback from systems and users.

Taking this all a step further, many of these applications and services can and should support an ecosystem. By easily distributing their applications and gaining the ability to download other applications created by anyone in the Splunk ecosystem, IT managers and the makers of IT equipment will benefit. To kick-start the effort, the first Splunk-built application on the platform was announced this week. Splunk for PCI Compliance is available for download from SplunkBase.

The application provides 125 searches, reports and alerts to help satisfy PCI requirements, including secure remote access, file integrity monitoring, secure log collection, daily log review, audit trail retention, and PCI control reporting, says Splunk. The goal is to make it simpler and faster for IT managers to comply, to answer auditor questions, and to control access to sensitive systems data. Splunk has taken pains to provide security and access control to the sensitive data, while opening up access to the non-sensitive information for better analysis.

Consequently, Splunk's foray into the developer world and applications ecosystems coincides with the company's release of Splunk 3.2, which now includes a Splunk for Windows version (on the same single code base that runs on Linux, Mac OSX, Solaris, FreeBSD and AIX). New features in Splunk 3.2 include transaction search and interactive field extraction to create easier ways for end users to generate their own applications. The update also extends the platform's capabilities with filesystem change monitoring, flexible roles, data signing and audit trails. A new REST API and SDKs for .Net and Python further opens the platform for more developers.

The Splunk Platform and associated ecosystem should quickly grow the means to bridge the need for transparency between runtime actualities and design-time requirements. When developers can easily know more about what applications and systems do in the real world in real time, they can make better decisions and choices in the design and test phases. This obviously has huge time- and money-saving implications.

The need for such transparency will quickly grow as virtualization and a services-based approach to applications gains stream and acceptance. We have seen some very powerful productivity improvements as general enterprise data has been mined for business intelligence. Now its time to better mine systems data for better IT intelligence.

Nexaweb Advance takes RIA value to the enterprise application modernization imperative

There are so many good reasons to modernize legacy and 3GL/4GL applications that enterprises are moving wholesale to modernization activities, changing entire classes of applications, and aligning them with SOA, SaaS, data center consolidation, ITIL, and energy-conservation/green initiatives.

Oh, and modernization allows you to gracefully get out of the costly fat PC client software support business and focus on the browser-only end points.

The building interest in virtualization is also a spur to getting out the client/server business and making more applications Web-facing and services-based. These moves, in turn, allow for better organizing data into common warehouses and SANs, allowing for BI and other benefits, while reducing storage and back-ups costs. Business continuity also gets a boost, because everything is on the server-side (often of low-cost x86 Linux).

In short, what enterprise's are really up to these days is datacenter transformation, the whole ball of wax, and in which applications modernization is an early and essential ingredient to begin enjoying the larger holistic productivity and costs benefits.

The trick is to keep those same older (and often mission critical) applications performing well, with the rich GUIs that users expect, and quickly leading to the back-end integration flexibility to make the legacy logic also part of any enterprise's SOA patterns.

For those applications deemed no longer mission-critical, application modernization allows for proper sunsetting. It is often worthwhile to cull out the still valued logic, transactional mappings, and data -- and apply them anew to other applications or processes -- before pulling the plug.

Yep, so many reasons to modernize, so few ways to do it without pain, confusion, and cost. And so into this gapping need, Nexaweb today takes its rich Internet application (RIA) solution value with Nexaweb Advance. [Disclosure: Nexaweb is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

For more on the whole rationale and business case for application modernization, check out a sponsored podcast I did with HP Services. ITIL v3 factors into this in a big, so here's some background on that, too.

For Nexaweb, the end game for enterprises is flexible composite workflows, and so the newest offerings are more than tools and platform, there's a professional services component, to take the best practices and solutions knowledge to market as well. The process includes applications assets capture and re-factoring (sort of like IT resources forensics), re-composition, deployment and then proper maintenance. In the bargain, you can gain a enhanced platform, increased automation, and services orientation.

The goal is to harvest all those stored procedures, but target them to newer architectures -- from Struts to Spring -- and move from client/server to Enterprise 2.0, is a leap-frog of sorts. The re-use of logic then allows those assets to be applied to model-driven architectures and the larger datacenter transformation values.

Nexaweb Advance pairs Nexaweb’s Enterprise Web Suite with automated code generation tools and professional services to deliver a model-driven architecture approach to the transformation of legacy PowerBuilder, ColdFusion, C++, VisualBasic, and Oracle Forms applications, according to the Burlington, Mass. company.

We have seen quite a bit of associating RIA values with SOA in the past few years, so I'm happy to see RIAs also becoming essential to other mainstream enterprise imperatives, like datacenter transformation.

Microsoft opens Pandora's box on online services, betting convenience is the killer app

Now that Microsoft has shown how online productivity applications and communications/groupware should be properly packaged, we can enter the new era of worker choice.

It's not that different from the choices developers have been making for years: Do you want the convenience of neat packaging (at the cost of flexibility and choice) or do you want to pick ala carte components that may best meet your needs and avoid lock-in?

Microsoft Online Services (MOS) is being launched for the U.S. today by Bill Gates at the annual Microsoft Office SharePoint Conference. The bevy of applications is designed to appeal to many kinds of users, and businesses of most sizes and character. A limited beta has been set up, with general availability during the second half of this year.

Core services will include Web-based e-mail, calendaring, contacts, shared workspaces, and webconferencing and videoconferencing over the Web. Microsoft is characterizing the services as part of its "software plus services" drive, so it's hard to tell how much of the "software" (that stuff installed on the PC or server) you'll need to use MOS.

Microsoft says these services will be "managed through a single Web-based interface," which sounds like a portal you'll need to log in to to add or manage users. "IT professionals can monitor the performance of the services, add and configure users, submit and track support requests, and manage users and licenses," says Microsoft.

As in development, some shops like a nice big package, with per developer seat licenses. Others give their developers more choice on tools, utilities, desktop OS, frameworks. They seem more interested in the work the developers do, than in how they do it.

We could see a similar breakdown among more general computing users, given the MOS versus Google services offerings so far. This is more than a matter of style or taste, one model is born of and imbued with client/server, and the other is of and imbued with the Web. You know which is which.

So, in effect, Microsoft is placing a Web shell on its old model, just like it put a GUI shell on DOS with DOS 5, and another shell on that with Windows 95.

Of course on costs, the beauty and/or devil is in the details. This is a subscription service, designed for businesses. Those businesses will pay on a per-user subscription basis. Those Microsoft shops, existing customers with Software Assurance on their Microsoft Client Access Licenses (CALs) will get a discount.

So there are two big issues here: Total cost, and convenience. And those will break down differently if you're a Microsoft "Assurance"-level user or a non-Microsoft user. We don't know the numbers yet, but it's going to be the real nut in this.

Microsoft will need to skate delicately on thin ice to make the total cost close enough to the way assurance users pay to prevent them from moving too quickly. But, the total cost will need to be low enough so that the Microsoft way to online SaaS will be marginally competitive against Google and other providers of online productivity applications and communications/groupware as services.

And they way this is set up, it's almost as if Microsoft has given up on competing for individuals, students, SOHOs, and perhaps businesses of less than 50 people. It's almost as if they don;t think they can compete with Google there -- at least not for the foreseeable future.

This is, then, about maintaing the base of the small businesses and department-level buyers of Microsoft products. In essence, this is defense. It is designed to make it confusing or economically difficult to calibrate total costs, given the complexity of factoring installations, older apps, licenses, and the entire 20-year-old hairball.

And what Microsoft must do, in addition to making the true cost-benefits analysis murky, is to absolutely win on packaging and convenience. And this is where Google is vulnerable. Google has still to show, aside from costs, how businesses of all sorts can adopt their services and approach in an easy to manage way, that packages things up neatly for the IT folks, and that make a transition from the hairball easy, convenient, and well-understood.

And so Google continues the march into businesses via the organic, user-generated interest and convenience level. Google takes the early lead on the individuals and younger, greenfield companies.

And Microsoft places a bulwark around its empire This could be a long slog.

OpSource releases OpSource Connect for better integrating SaaS and Web services

OpSource, a software as a service (SaaS) delivery company, is making it easier for SaaS and Web companies to consume and publish multiple Web services with the announcement of OpSource Connect, which will a core component of the OpSource On-Demand Summer 2008 release.

OpSource Connect, which is available immediately, provides a common platform -- the OpSource Service Bus (OSB) -- that will enable integrating SaaS applications in the cloud with legacy enterprise applications behind the firewall, freeing SaaS applications from silos.

OpSource, of Santa Clara, Calif., says that its multi-tenant OSB will change the way companies build and deploy SaaS applications, as well as the way in which those applications interact with and reach new markets. According to OpSource, the OSB provides a "write one, integrate with all" capability for all SaaS applications and Web services.

SaaS is where the growth is expected to be for the foreseeable future. Gartner, for example, sees SaaS growing at a 22.1 percent compound annual rate, which is roughly double the growth of enterprise software as a whole.

Rumor has it that Microsoft isn't waiting around for Gartner to be proven right or wrong and is ramping up its cloud-based applications to mimic its shrink-wrapped offerings.

OpSource Connect APIs provide integration capability for any application. Companies can also use Boomi for OpSource Connect, a visual drag-and-drop application integration environment from Boomi, Inc. This allows integrations with popular non-OSB applications including Salesforce and NetSuite.

Behind the firewall integrations use OpSource Sockets, which provide integration with legacy enterprise applications such as SAP and Intuit QuickBooks. The first OpSource Sockets are based on Boomi Atoms, agents that reside behind the firewall that enable integration without the need for specialized software packages or hardware appliances.

OpSource Connect APIs, Boomi for OpSource Connect and OpSource Sockets are available immediately.

When OpSource On Demand Summer 2008 is released, OpSource Connect will add the ability to use the OSB to not only consume, but publish applications as Web services, allowing each application to become a platform in its own right.

OpSource is also creating a range of services to assist companies in integration and enabling applications. Among these are:

• Web Services Enablement Program: To assist with enabling applications as Web services.
• Certified Integrator Program: To provide assistance in integrating applications in the cloud or behind the firewall.
• Application Directory: To make it easier for companies to find Web services that use the OSB.

In the mind's eye, it's now Marissa versus Monkeyboy

Funny how the mind works. Sometimes it just makes associations whether you want it to or not.

And now that I've read the feature article on Google's Marissa Mayer in San Francisco magazine, the images from that profile are etched into my mind whenever I think of Google, or even go to Google's gaggle of sites, services, and features. There is now continuity between Marissa, Google and me.

These are actually quite pleasant, floating images of a lower Market Street aerie, with purple walls and the home-spun smell of vanilla-laced cupcakes (supported lovingly by pleated paper). There's laughter, intense intelligence, privilege with a purpose, a subdued sensuality, a hammer-hold on the zeitgeist.

Here's a gal with the whole package to capture the hearts and minds of, well ... the world. The cat is out of the bag, she's an It Girl, regardless of her competencies -- and probably despite them. She could even push Steve Jobs off the ohmygawd pedestal. I'm serious.

I don't know if these images are true, but they are hard to resist. You almost want this all to be real, a fantasy that you can believe in. That holds true for Google as a company, as well. You almost want the corporate myth to work out.

It's all generally very positive, easy to sell by not selling it openly. Just like those web services. I probably will want to read more about Marissa. It will be hard not to. And I'll keep experimenting with Google's services right along with the warm, comfy feelings -- from God knows where.

And then there's the mind's eye on Microsoft. Used to be the image of Bill Gates was etched on that, at least for me. Whenever I thought of Microsoft, some how the floating images of Bill sitting in that chartered plane with Warren Buffett, playing cards, beige carpets and couches, stocking feet, off to cure the world of major diseases and ignorance. I wanted to be there too. If I only had $20 billion to kick in, I'd do it. I'd learn to play bridge. Steaks and cherry coke.

And the image of Bill was good for Microsoft -- and it was the public Bill, the philanthropist, The Road Ahead Bill -- not the monopolist and software mogul. And I have even dreamed of Bill Gates. Totally involuntary, I assure you. But that's how powerful these media-fueled images are.

I've even met the guy a few times, and those images do not stick as much as these Jungian archetypes of the total top dog. We must be hard-wired to seek out someone or something to fill this need to define the very top slot, to latch onto something and endow it with such power. Perhaps it's so we know what to aspire to -- both individually and as a culture. These images may be entirely devoid of reality -- yet remain nearly tangible and extremely powerful.

And so as Bill Gates separates in this regard from the Microsoft mental imagery, the dissonance between the archetype and software company will fade too. Can't have it both ways. The Gates mystique will segue to the foundation, to the cures, to the endowment. He shall rise above the corporation, the brand.

What or who will fill the void? Ray Ozzie seems a tad celebrity-shy. I just can't see Ray on Oprah (Marissa would work, though!). Ray's a geek's geek, not an archetype, nosiree. Mundie? Insufficient profile. All these white guys blend together, nothing sticks out.

But wait, look inside yourself. Conjure up Microsoft and what do you now see? Increasingly, especially in light of the Yahoo! takeover bid, a new image is burnishing my thoughts of Microsoft. It's that darned Monkeyboy video clip of Steve Ballmer. I don't want to see it, and yet I do. Can't stop myself.

Ballmer is the only poster child Microsoft has left. He does not blend in, he sticks out. It's a powerful image, but is it the one that Microsoft really wants nowadays? I hate to think that marketing and global persona images count for as much as software proficiency, but I know it does. Why, oh why, does life have to be like some kind of damned popularity contest?

I have not yet dreamed of Steve Ballmer. I have not yet dreamed of Marissa Mayer. But my mind's eye is doing it's thing, and I am but a passenger. It's now the Google-Marissa mental mashup versus the Microsoft-Monkeyboy machination. Google could have an awesome weapon on its hands here.

Funny how the mind works.

RIA wars heat up with arrival of Adobe's AIR and Flex

In the world of Rich Internet Applications (RIAs), the battle for hearts and minds -- not to mention eyeballs and desktops -- heated up this week when Adobe Systems took the wraps off its Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR).

Adobe AIR, according to the buzz on the street, "blurs" the lines between the PC and the Web by allowing users to download Web applications to the desktop and letting them access those applications wherever the user may be. For example, eBay has developed an AIR application, so that bidders not longer have to monitor the eBay Web site or constantly watch their email. Instead, changes in an item they are interested in can be instantly displayed on their desktop.

Adobe announced the beta last fall in lieu of a promised alpha release, and, at the time, I said I hoped the company would move more quickly on completing their work on it, as the RIA market seemed to be catching on quickly. There's talk of a Linux version.

Everyone from the New York Times to niche bloggers are buzzing with trying to handicap the horse race that's now developing among the top contenders, including Adobe's latest entry, and offerings from such other RIA powerhouses as Microsoft's Silverlight and Mozilla's Prism.

Adobe is already planning to make its own applications available in an AIR version, and its Web site lists some major online organizations that have already developed AIR applications. In addition to eBay, these include such household names as The New York Times, AOL, NASDAQ, The American Cancer Society, Nickelodeon, Yahoo!, and Salesforce.com.

Those interested in a more grassroots approach can find over 120 AIR applications at the Airapps wiki.

While the spotlight seems to be on AIR, it's hard to ignore Adobe's other announcement, which is the availability of Flex 3.0, their open-source framework for building highly interactive Web applications, which has also been languishing in beta since last fall.

I recently saw a demo of Workday's human resource management applications build using Adobe Flex, and the ability for users to navigate and customize their work on the fly was very impressive. Workday has artfully crafted on-demand business applications that rival any client-server applications. I expect this to become the standard for online productivity applications, and for AIR to grease the skids for wider adoption of these compelling UIs. [Disclosure: Workday is the new parent of Cape Clear Software, a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Flex 3.0 has added a slew of new functionality to the 2.0 version, as well as enhancing some of the earlier capabilities. Among the new functions:

• Drag and Drop support
• Local File system access
• Local SQLite database storage
• AIR debugging and profiling
• AIR application packaging and signing

There are more at the Flex Web site.

While Flex may tickle the fancy of developers, it's AIR that's caught the attention of the so-called mainstream media, with even the BBC weighing in on the matter. One major issue has already reared its ugly head -- security, with some commentators expressing the fear that users could unwittingly download malicious programs.

The developer will sign AIR applications, and it will be up to the user to decide whether to trust the certificate or not. While it's easy to say that end users should be prudent in their choices, experience has taught us that people often blow right by warning screens and download things they shouldn't. Time will tell how much of a problem this is.

Adobe AIR can be downloaded now. Flex is available for purchase.

Microsoft on open APIs: New tune or blowing more smoke?

It's a radical departure, this news from Microsoft that openness between its products and the rest of the universe is more than a hollow platitude. To take Microsoft at its Word, given this release, is to open an era of an entirely new Microsoft. But is it?

For Microsoft's admitting today that it needs to be more open, should meaningfully support standards, should allow developers access to APIs, should make its documents easy to share, should build new interoperability-friendly APIs for its major products -- this is also admitting that it has tried to thwart or undo these very avenues to progress in the past.

This has to be more then trying to appease the European regulators.

So Microsoft's declaration to embrace openness is at the same time a mea culpa, that it has been employing dirty tricks to seal its products off, and has tried to punish those that would seek to make productivity from the interchange between Microsoft's products and the rest of the universe. And it has been doing it all as a convicted monopolist.

And so we are now supposed to move on. Please see this as a new era of openness, we were wrong (while the price was right), and now we're going to play nice. We love open source, and standards, and API access, and third-party developers. Sorry, so sorry, let's move forward.

So they say.

And to pair this new air of openness with the acid hostile takeover bid for Yahoo offers a few potential insights, if not underscores deep internal conflicts in Redmond.

It is odd that the road to openness demands the takeover of a foe, nee friend. One week we need to outbid the world to grab a company distinctly different from our own (for the engineers), and the next week we need to better love the sharing between people and technology (for the engineers).

What? These market movers strike me as at crosscurrents, at best, or more likely some kind of bi-polar method to software development and deployment amid an advertising-crazed upset of the monopoly apple cart.

And yet, too, the odd pairing makes sense, if you're a cynic.

Because by seeking to buy Yahoo, Microsoft is also making some major mea culpas. By trying to buy Yahoo, Microsoft is in effect agreeing that open source is essential to any competitive, world-class datacenter or cloud fabric of the future. And so then Microsoft needs to change its tune about open source. Sorry, we goofed. Now we'll just buy an open source cloud infrastructure.

If by seeking to buy Yahoo, Microsoft aims to broaden its reach as a purveyor of IT functions as services (beyond the Live stuff to date), then openness and interoperability between its products and Yahoo's services is a must. And again, Microsoft needs to change its tune about openness and interoperability. Sorry, we were wrong about the Web. It's not going away. Our interfaces won't necessarily be the gateway to the Internet assets you need and seek.

If by seeking to buy Yahoo, Microsoft aims to use industry standards to integrate its Windows Everywhere arsenal with the rest of Yahoo -- and most enterprises or portals, for that matter -- then Microsoft needs to change its tune about is depth of use and commitment to open industry standards. Sorry, we should have played nice all along. Who wants proprietary formats, anyway?

For Microsoft to make the Yahoo merger work, the announcements today have to work too. By buying and integrating Yahoo into Microsoft, in essence, forces Microsoft to be integrated with a much larger slice of the real world. Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea culpa.

But what happens after the Yahoo merger, assuming they integrate it all (or at least make it interoperable, presumably leveraging the very standards they so long disdained)? What's to say that everything that Microsoft is pledging to do today, they decide not to do in two years?

Is there no going back? Or is this the means to the ever-larger platform play that Microsoft could not attain -- of extending one monopoly to another? Is this the Web-as-platform acquisition that leads only to increased advertising revenues at the cost of the demise of the original monopoly and those juicy license fees?

I do like what I'm hearing, I just wish it was easier to believe that Microsoft by its very nature has changed along with the need for it to change.

It seems easy for Redmond to cop these mea culpas. It's not as easy for me to forget what made them necessary.