IBM executive defines next generation of enterprise datacenters through cloud computing

IBM Vice President for Enterprise Systems Rich Lechner took the stage at the Forrester Research IT Forum on Tuesday to explore the definition of new enterprise datacenters that will enable new levels of business innovation.

Factors buffeting the definition of the new class of datacenterinclude globalization, a rising tide of information and need for expanded flexibility and adaptability for business models.

To compete, companies need to operate without boarders, and bcome a globally integrated enterprise. "There are huge resource pools emergig around the world ... with new ideas and creativity," said Lechner. It's more than outsourcing, he said, it's about integrating these resources.

The tide of data and devices, of resources, and assets will continue to explode. How can you best use the data that flows all around you?

New business models will evolve, said Lachner. The impact of social networking and peer influences on buying decisions are just beginning to be felt.

Virtualization will remake the landscape IT, as will cloud computing, virtual worlds, and high new levels of scaling when it comes to compute power, said Lechner.

Cloud computing allows an unbounded aspiration of the best user experiences. "It provides anytime, anywhere access to IT resources deliver dynamically as a service," he said. Cloud computing expands capacity almost indefinitely.

IBM's cloud initiatives are allowing technology incubation, data-intense workloads, government-led initiatives and new types of software development support.

IT plus cloud computing can enable change. How to get started? Simplify using virtualization, share infrastructures via SOA, and create a dynamic ability to access data and knowledge, said Lechner.

The world is changing to enterprises without borders, unbounded IT infrastructure, and huge more data sets, and a need for collaboration that increasingly crosses many organizational and sourcing types, he said.

Additionally IBM is learning a lot from Google and vice versa when it comes to cloud computing, said Lechner. Cloud computing allows its practitioners to isolate compute units and make their use far more efficient economically via dynamic provisioning.

For data security, users can physically isolate data using partitioning. IBM for years has been hosting multiple companies on single mainframes with no data protection or privacy issues. The technology exists to leverage the economics of cloud computing while protecting data, said Lechner.

"It's about removing IT has an inhibitor," he said.

Business imperatives theme dominates Forrester's IT Forum conference opener

Forrester Research, the Cambridge, Mass. market research and analysis firm, kicked off its influential IT Forum conference today in Las Vegas with a keynote address by founder and Chairman George Colony on CEO success imperatives.

What the success imperatives do you have? Colony asked a series of CEOs. Here are the seven answers he got:

• Getting, keeping and building the best people.
• Engendering collaboration.
• Reaching global markets.
• Increasing profit.
• Building a positive culture.
• Customers, customers, customers
• Driving innovation.

What was missing from the list? Colony asked the crowd. Technology ... it didn't make the top imperatives, based on CEO priorities. So to move from IT to business technology, there needs to be more connection between what the IT executives focus on to what the CEO focuses on.

Colony ended his introduction to the event with the pithy conclusion that technology is buried in business imperatives, rather than is an imperative itself.

Then Forrester executives and research directors Mike Gilpin and Eric Brown took to stage to welcome the 1,400 conference goers to the 14th annual IT Forum at the Sands Expo Center. They showed McKinsey research that shows that innovation is essential to companies and their growth.

They define innovation as top down and bottom up inside of companies. The cite the iPhone as an example of this innovation. And they cite Amazon's one-click buying process as another. Also, the one laptop per child intitiative and mobile networks in developing markets signal innovation.

Business innovation needs to pull this all together, say Gilpin and Brown.

Forrester VP and Principal Analyst Bobby Cameron implored the conference crowd not to wait to innovate. Businesses need innovation but IT is disconnected from innovation, Cameron said. Part of the goal of the conference is to rectify this.

"Companies say that technology is transformational, but they invest in technology to improve efficiency or reduce costs," said Cameron, based on his research. "They don't do what they say."

Innovation gets stalled. "Sludge in IT's engine stymies innovation," said Cameron. IT needs to stop hesitating, not just focus on costs, and move beyond "heavy processes" and grow more fleet.

Business innovation needs to transform processes, and boost the value and impact of the business on customers and partners, he said

There is confusion on what leads to innovation, said Cameron. "People aren't asking the right questions," he said, adding that investments are decoupled ineffectively from game-changing ideas.

"The innovation continuum" needs to extend across all aspects of business investments and thought leadership and new ideas. There needs to be a better way to join the two, and to get the money to act on good ideas, said Cameron.

Collaboration networks can help bring inventors and transformers into the innovation continuum, even if they exist outside of the company. IT shops need to play the role of brokers for innovation, he said, and to better play the roles of inventor, transformer, financier (to a lesser extent), and broker.

IT should build out innovation networks to become transformation agents. And these IT departments need to make it clear that they play this role.

It's up to the business to become adept at funding innovation, on an ongoing and sustained basis. Part of securing funding requries innovation context, innovation networks, and a process for ownership of funding, said Cameron. The result should be an "Innovation Pipeline," that has its own funding, is governed by an innovation team, and which takes in ideas generated from anywhere, said Cameron.

This pipeline runs in parallel to regular business activities. This allows for sustained innovation, year after year. More businesses need to become innovation leaders, said Cameron.

How to start? Build an innovation culture, by bringing in the right people. Make innovation part of the process, using portfolio management and analyzing the portfolio to identify where innovation already exists. Technologies also need to be in place to capture innovative ideas.

MokaFive announces general availability of LivePC desktop-as-a-service offering

MokaFive, a desktop virtualization company, has announced the general release of v.10 of its Virtual Desktop Solution, a cross-platform desktop-as-a-service (DaaS) product.

The Redwood City, Calif. company says its DaaS solution is already deployed in nearly 50 pilot programs and has been downloaded over 80,000 times. The virtual desktops, known as LivePCs, run on Windows, Macintosh, and MokaFive's BareMetal Linux operating systems.

I've blogged about MokaFive's DaaS product before and have explained how it operates:

By creating a "Live PC" desktop, which contains the operating system and application stack, and having it hosted by MokaFive, administrators can distribute, manage, and update the desktop from a single copy on the host computer. Users sync their local desktop with the copy in the cloud, allowing them to always be able to access the latest pristine version.

When synced with the Live PC, the desktop is loaded onto the local device, whether a PC or even a flash drive. It then runs as a virtual machine on that device and users can work online or offline. Changes made by administrators are reflected in the local device whenever users connect to the Live PC. By using a flash drive, users can access their desktop on any x86-based machine, having all their productivity tools at their fingertips, but leaving no footprint behind once the flash device is unplugged.

MokaFive Virtual Desktop Solution is available in two versions. MokaFive Professional is for enterprise and workgroup deployments and will be sold via annual subscription. MokaFive Express, designed for home users and developers, is available as a free download. A library of LivePCs, created by MokaFive and the user community, is available at the MokaFive lab.

Panda Security delivers cloud-based security management service for SMBs

IT security provider Panda Security has unveiled its Managed Office Protection solution, a security-as-a-service offering aimed at small and medium businesses (SMBs) as well as large companies with a significant number of geographically dispersed offices.

The service from the Panda keeps the total cost of ownership (TCO) to a minimum by hosting all information in the cloud and providing a Web-based console through which administrators can configure security resources.

The lower cost also comes from the small footprint of the Panda agent on each PC, at about 5 MBs it's much smaller than other malware download agents. More details at Panda's blog.

Administrators can also assign profiles across the organization to adapt security measures to individual and department requirements. The service-based protection is also geared toward SOHO workers, who may just use outsourced IT support and repair shops or consultants.

The managed protection product provides "collective intelligence" that automatically detects, correlates, and responds to malware across a network of PCs. The remote management tools, allow IT managers -- or support shops -- to use any computer on the Internet to change user specifications, track IP addresses, and enable and disable security features.

Using a centralized Web console, administrators can configure updated information to protect against zero-day attacks. Updates are completed via peer-to-peer networks from the nearest desktop, minimizing bandwidth consumptions.

Real-time information about detection activity can be accessed by administrators on the Web console. Administrators can be sent suspected threats to PandaLabs for analysis. Periodic security audits can ensure compliance with such regulations as SOX, PCI, HIPAA, among others. Panda provides an ongoing list of current threats.

Because it's a cloud-based service, it can react in near real-time to Internet hazards as they arise, then jettison the updates as small deltas out to the admins or directly to supported PCs. Naturally, the service only supports Windows, but it goes back as Windows 95 and up to Vista. Panda is looking at Mac OS X and Linux support, but demand has not been there, given Windows propensity as a malware target.

Managed Office Protection is available to value added resellers looking to offer security services to clients. Pricing is in the $40 per user per year range. In a related announcement, Panda said that Tech Data Corp., Clearwater, Fla., has signed an exclusive distribution agreement for the product.

I'd like to see the remote access and remore PC support crowd coordinate better with suppliers like Panda. Any and all PC support shold just include services like this. Already many do, but the SOHO market still needs more convenient approaches at the price point Panda is providing.

Panda Managed Office Protection is available immediate and can be downloaded from the Panda Web site.

Ingres brings OpenROAD tool for rapid DB apps development to GPL

Ingres Corp. is hoping for strong community involvement with its Open ROAD rapid application development (RAD) tool by taking it to GPL v2 release.

The Redwood City, Calif., open source database management company has made the new release available on its Web site and said it expects that more users will try the product and build application prototypes. The 4GL OpenROAD provides tools to build and deploy high-performance and high-availability business applications on a variety of platforms. It supports any RDB.

Tony Baer has some thoughts on the move.

OpenROAD applications are designed to overcome a situation where an organization has decades worth of data and data applications on legacy systems and is unable to unlock these systems to leverage the information in more modern platforms, such as hand-held devices and mobile phones.

Ingres is considering an Eclipse plug in soon, and may work toward deeper Eclipse Foundation relations. The community project around OpenROAD is called Empire.

Ingres is already working with partners to provide contributions. Luminary Solutions has outsourced its ProxyGen and "THUG" productivity tools, which add Java integration and server testing capabilities. Bording A/S has developed and contributed key enhancements to the OpenROAD core runtime library, with more contributions coming down the road.

Ingres has also announced that it is stepping up its involvement in the open-source community with several initiatives to drive validation and adoption of open source. Among these are:

• "Community Bundles," or alliances with other open source providers and projects such as Alfresco, JasperSoft, Hibernate, Apache Tomcat, and Eclipse.

• University alliances to drive open source innovation with Carleton University in Ottawa, Canada; Ilmenau University in Germany; and Warwick University in the UK.

• Google Summer of Code, in which students will work with Ingres mentors on a number of projects including the production of Linux and Mac OSX versions of Ingres CAFÉ.

• Ingres Janitors Project, which provides the opportunity to participate in Ingres development and is a forum for new community members to familiarize themselves with the Ingres code.

• Open Source Boot Camp, established by Ingres and Carleton University to introduce college students and staff to the concepts and realities of open source.
  

We've seen lots of tools move toward sunsetting via the open source route, but OpenRoad may have lasting appeal. Developers say it's twice as fast as Java tools for database centric apps. Those apps can be n-tier, or client-server. And MySQL nor Postgres have anything quite like it, so that may drive wider community involvement in the Empire community.

BT licenses Splunk technology to aid in data rentention and compliance monitoring

Communications provider BT has agreed to license IT search platform technology from Splunk to build a managed-security product that will allow customers to preserve 100 percent of the logs on a network. This is designed to satisfy data-retention requirements for compliance mandates.

The search platform from Splunk, San Francisco, will augment London-based BT's existing security monitoring and response services for BT Counterpane, allowing customers to collect, index, and maintain all security data from any application, server, or device.

Traditional log management approaches provide limited support for analyzing new and changing data. BT officials say they chose Splunk because it provides flexibility in dynamic environments and for ongoing compliance with IT data retention requirements.

The BT Counterpane log management solution powered by Splunk will complement managed security monitoring by enabling a fully-indexed, searchable repository of all log activity from any device on the network; provide customers better visibility and control through rich reports and dashboards; and enable thorough security response with real-time search.

Splunk provides large-scale, high-speed indexing and search technology geared toward IT infrastructures. The software, which comes in both free and enterprise versions, allows a company to search and navigate data from any application, server, or network device in real time. [Disclosure: Splunk is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts, including this one on Splunk Base.]

BT operates in 170 countries. Its principal activities include providing local, national and international telecommunications services, higher-value broadband and internet products and services, and converged fixed/mobile products and services. British Telecommunications (BT) is a wholly-owned subsidiary of BT.

Dynamic documents as two-way end points help bind people and processes to SOA

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Making services oriented architecture (SOA) a fixture across larger swaths of enterprise IT and business processes has grown into a top goal. Finding additional innovation to amplify a SOA's value is therefore always welcome.

A separate but related trend in the field, of implementing managed XML-coupled dynamic documents via authoring and content governance, offers just such a high-impact SOA-enhancing value. Dynamic documents provide end points for SOA-delivered content and data, and deliver it into the formats and often required interfaces people -- meaning workers and managers -- need. Dynamic documents also offer many values around ease of language localization, automation of feed-delivered data, and centralized control over highly decentralized content.

Legions of those in the world that actually get things done -- the line of business personnel that must apply the digital world to the physical world -- are surrounded by documents. Documents, from spreadsheets to maintenance manuals, are the historical means through which people manage information. IT systems use documents to reach beyond their glass screens.

IT has not done away with documents, and it is not likely to. People at the end points of SOA-driven business activities will remain sort of like analog-to-digital converters, as well as digital-to-analog converters. They interface between SOAs and the real world, with documents as a bridge. We all do. And our mainstay interfaces consist mostly of static documents ... but increasingly those will be XML-enabled dynamic documents. How convenient!

That's why I found it fascinating to take on a research project to plumb the depths of how SOA and dynamic documents come together. The conclusion, contained in this report, is that those enterprises that implement dynamic documents capabilities can significantly leverage those investments by flexibly extending their SOA values out to those document end points.

The XML-enabled documents, in turn, can provide on-ramps and gathering points for more content and data to enrich the SOA activities. [Disclosure: The research report was sponsored by JustSystems North America, which is also a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

In other words, the trends around dynamic documents and the trends around SOA complement each other well. Architects and those departmental managers dealing with document overload and the need for better management, therefore, ought to be talking to each other. They may be able to help each other a lot.

Furthermore, the investments that organizations make in SOA can powerfully augment the value and utility of what they can do with dynamic documents authoring, management, and governance. It's also fascinating to consider how SOA-level governance and policies can play a role in how documents use and access -- down to a finely granular level -- can be managed and automated. Think of it as total process management -- from mainframe to everyman.

The result is that in the near future documents will behave a lot more like traditional applications, while traditional applications can behave more like SOA-driven processes. It's us to up to make the connections come around full circle.

Here are some excerpts from the report:

Combining the productivity enhancements of XML-based structured authoring and document management with the increasingly strategic benefits of SOAs is a next logical step. Embracing dynamic documents as SOA endpoints may also spur faster adoption of SOA principles and infrastructure.

If the accumulated business knowledge of individuals could better interface with services-enabled applications, organizations could combine the best of human experience with the new levels of IT interoperability. Any knowledge or semantic asset that can be identified, tagged, and contextually related to business functions should be made available to SOA composite applications as services.

This combination – SOA and easily authored dynamic documents – empowers line-of-business teams to innovate around how information is accessed, combined and presented. It allows organizations to improve the speed and efficiency of manual and disconnected document-centric processes, and to dramatically improve technology and knowledge transfer across lifecycles and value chains.

As XML dynamically updates data and content across myriad traditional documents, user benefits transcend the former static formats. Users can update documents, while their structure allows many others to access current data. Elevating workplace knowledge and data via the familiarity of documents -- and then extending that information across multiple business processes -- that’s what SOA is all about.

Companies with SOA projects should seek out documents as consumable resources – especially dynamic documents -- and then enlist them as resources for business-process benefit. Combined, SOA and user-friendly documents can substantially improve productivity, refine processes, integrate people and processes, as well as accelerate the financial payback from investments in both dynamic document publishing and SOA infrastructure.

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BriefingsDirect Insights analysts probe future of online advertising and find transactional lucre lurking

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The future of online advertising captures the headlines and attention when the likes of Microsoft courts the likes of Yahoo! And Wall Street still has a hard time figuring out how much Google is worth, based on just those little text ads next to search results.

But the future of online business has a lot more in store than advertising as we know it. The cloud compute fabrics now being constructed can support a lot more finely tuned matching of buyers and sellers, for consumers and businesses alike.

In the latest BriefingsDirect Insights Edition, Vol. 29, our experts examine the future of online advertising, and how the gathering cloud of services hosts like Google, Yahoo, Microsoft and Amazon will fare in the next era. The consensus moves toward an algorithmic meta-data driven future in which the winners will likely be taking a piece of many online transactions. This real-time marketplace can scale up to global mass media, and down to the audience and location of one.

So join us for our latest BriefingsDirect discussion and dissection of software, services, SOA and compute cloud-related news and events, with a panel of IT analysts. In this episode, recorded May 9, 2008, we gather noted IT industry analysts and experts Joe McKendrick, an independent analyst and ZDNet blogger; Tony Baer, principal at OnStrategies and blogger, and Phil Wainewright, independent analyst, director at Procullux Ventures and ZDNet SaaS blogger. This discussion is hosted, produced and moderated by me.

Here are some excerpts:

I really think people have got this completely the wrong way around. To focus on advertising is just so "0.0," to coin a phrase. Advertising exists only because we don't have the Web. Advertising is something the B2B market has to use through magazines, TV shows, or whatever, because they couldn't reach the consumer directly.

Now, the Web enables people to reach potential consumers and business prospects directly, rather than having to go through this advertising. So, the idea that the software industry is going to get funded by advertising has got it completely the wrong way around. Actually, what is going to happen is that business is increasingly going to use software in order to get closer to its consumers and its prospects. It can actually skip having to spend the money on advertising in order to make that connection.

Let me explain how that might work, instead of running adverts on sites that host discussions about bookkeeping services for small companies, for example, or instead of paying for search ads that pop up when people are searching on the Internet for bookkeeping services for small companies. As a small company, if you are using a financial application to run your company and you want some bookkeeping services, a bookkeeping service might pop up as a menu option in the software. You can sign up for and use an outsourced service over the Internet.

Instead of the bookkeeping service actually having to advertise on the search engines, in the publications, the discussion forums, and the social networking sites, they just pay to have their service made available within a software package that relates directly to the service that they are offering.

Therefore, it's not really advertising any more. It's just product placement at a point where the consumer or the business, in this case, actually needs that service.

Now hold on. So, what we were saying is that business activities and consumer activities more and more move online. Not only will we be doing away with the on-premises software business to a significant extent, but we will be doing away with the advertising business to a significant extent. Then, no longer will the entertainment businesses be glossing themselves with adverts to support themselves, but, increasingly, we'll see placement of services in the context of an activity or process, be it for consumer, entertainment, or business, in the same way that we might go to a shopping mall. People pay rent to the mall organizer, which draws people in, to put their wares out on the doorstep in front of the glass pane, in order for people to pick and choose.

So we are moving from an advertising to a placement or even visibility value, and it becomes rent to those who can draw the people in.

I think that there are some indications that the bloom is off the rose of social networking, both as a significant revenue generator, as well as an application development platform, at least for one of the social networks to become a development platform. That's from some recent revenue indicators from Google that its relationship with MySpace has not proven to be as monitizable as they expected.

Some recent statistic show that the types of applications that have been generated on Facebook are very tenuous, very one-off or fun things that would appeal to teenagers, but not with any significant depth or business value. The amount of activity from developers on Facebook has been slacking off, or at least plateauing, which is not a good indicator.

I remember back in the Web 1.0 boom and the dot-com boom, one of the things that was interesting was the discussion sites were very bad at generating ad revenue, because people didn't click on the ads.

The cost per thousand (CPM) for discussion sites, or for the discussion area of a site, was always a lot lower than other types of sites that were more information heavy. So it's old news about kind of sites where people follow what other people are saying.

People start chasing page views without remembering the reason that they are chasing is to generate value for advertises. They think, "We've got lots of page views," but they don't think back to whether those page views are going to deliver value.

Another memo from Ray Ozzie surfaced a couple of weeks back. You may recall the memo back in 2005, the famous "turn the world upside down" memo that talked about the advertising support of the online model for software. He kind of reinforced that with his latest memo.

It wasn't saying, "We must offer software advertising to support software," but it was more of a discussion about the social mesh, the community, the social networking, a paradigm that's emerging.

It's going to be interesting, but I think it's going to leach into the enterprise over the next couple of decades as well. I'm talking years from now, but it's definitely a model that will be sustaining consumer computing. We are seeing that emerging on the social computing side.

You start looking at migration to digital broadcasting. At some point -- I don't know the exact technology mix involved -- combining that with the Internet, there will be some way of micro casting. There may be a large population segment watching a specific program, but you maybe identified in terms of which demographic you specifically are. It's almost sounding 1984-ish.

I think Google actually realizes that and understands that. Therefore what they are aiming to do is get into TV advertising and all these other sectors. These are vendors that enable this kind of personalization of the message, being a conduit between the prospects and the business that's trying to sell to that prospect, and using software automation to enable that.

They are thinking beyond the old model of advertising, and I think that's Microsoft's problem. Microsoft hasn't really understood this, is still thinking about online advertising as a segment, and is not looking beyond the wider opportunity to use the automation on the Web as a way of just bringing buyers and sellers close together.

This requires a tremendous amount of cloud compute to the same levels we have seen in matching search criteria to results and then matching that to advertising. That advertising is then bought through an auction bid process among those seeking the highest placement. So, if we take that same model and apply it to all sorts of different needs and wants of business, personal, entertainment, and luxury across the board, what do we call it? It's not really advertising.

So, we think that advertising is in the rear-view mirror. We're going to move to a new era of something different or better, perhaps subscription as a business model, where you, in a sense, rent digital assets.

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