IT systems analytics become more crucial as cloud and SaaS adoption raises complexity bar

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. More related podcasts. Sponsor: LogLogic.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud computing are changing the nature of IT systems' performance requirements and heightening expectations for end users from online applications and services.

Increasingly, an extended level of visibility, management, and performance will apply to those serving up applications as services, regardless of their hosting origins or models. The more the apps and services fulfill a need, the more the users will expect even better results and performance.

In other words, the more these organizations succeed, the more they need to scale, leverage virtualization and cloud infrastructure methods, embark of service oriented architecture (SOA) and then keep all the trains running fast and on time. Using the latest tools and analytics -- the equivalent of business intelligence (BI) for IT -- on the systems and across the gathering complexity becomes essential.

To learn more about how systems log tools and analysis are aiding providers of cloud and SaaS, I recently spoke with fellow blogger Phil Wainewright, an independent analyst and director at Procullux Ventures, and SaaS blogger at ZDNet and ebizQ, as well as with Jian Zhen, senior director of product management at LogLogic.

Here are some excerpts:

One thing that's happening is that the SaaS infrastructure is getting more complicated, because more choice is emerging. In the past people might have gone to one or two SaaS vendors in very isolated environments or isolated use cases. What we're now finding is that people are aggregating different SaaS services. ... We're actually looking at different layers of not just SaaS, but also platform as a service (PaaS), which are customizable applications, rather than the more packaged applications that we saw in the first generation of SaaS. We're seeing more utility and cloud platforms and a whole range of options in between.

That means people are really using different resources and having to keep tabs on all those different resources. Where in the past, all of an IT organizations' resources were under their own control, they now have to operate in this more open environment, where trust and visibility as to what's going on are major factors.

If you're going to take advantage of SaaS properly, then you need to move to more of a SOA internally. That makes it easier to start to aggregate or integrate these different mashups, these different services. At the end of the day, the end users aren't going to be bothered whether the application is delivered from the enhanced data center or from a third-party provider outside the firewall, as long as it works and gives them the business results they're looking for.

You have to worry not only about who is accessing the information within your company firewall, but now you have all this data that's sitting outside of the firewall in another environment. That could be a PaaS, as Phil said, it could be a SaaS, an application that's sitting out there. How do you control that access? How do you monitor that access. That's one of the key issues that IT has to worry about.

Obviously, there are data governance issues and activity monitoring issues. Now, from a performance and operational perspective, you have to worry about, are my systems performing, are these applications that I am renting, or platforms or utilities I am renting, are they performing to my spec? How do I ensure that the service providers can give me the SLAs that I need.

... What SaaS providers have been learning is that they need to get better at giving more information to their customers about what is going wrong when the service is not up or the service is not performing as expected. The SaaS industry is still learning about that. So, there is that element on that side.

On the IT side, the IT people have spent too much time worrying about reasons why they didn't want to deal with SaaS or cloud providers. They've been dealing with issues like what if does go down, or how can I trust the security? Yes, it does go down sometimes, but it's up 99.7 percent of the time or 99.9 percent of the time, which is better than most organizations can afford to do with their own services.

Let's shift the emphasis from, "It's broken, so I won't use it," to a more mature attitude, which says, "It will be up most of the time, but when it does break, how do I make sure that I remain accountable, as the IT manager, the IT Director, or the CIO. How do I remain accountable for those services to my organization, and how do I make sure that I can pinpoint the cause of the problem, and get it rectified as quickly as possible?"

One of the great quotes that we recently got from a customer is, "You can outsource responsibility, but not accountability." So, it fits right into what Phil what was saying about being accountable and about your own environment.

The requirement to comply with government regulations and industry mandates really doesn't change all that much, just because of SaaS or because a company is going into the cloud. What it means is that the end users are still responsible for complying with Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX), payment cared industry (PCI) standards, the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and other regulations. It also means that these customers will also expect the same type of reports that they get out of their own systems.

BI for IT, or IT intelligence, as I have used the term before, is really about getting more information out of the IT infrastructure; whether it's internal IT infrastructure or external IT infrastructure, such as the cloud.

Traditionally, administrators have always used logs as one of the tools to help them analyze and understand the infrastructure, both from a security and operational perspective. For example, one of the recent reports from Price Waterhouse, I believe, says that the number one method for identifying security incidents and operational problems is through logs.

We can provide them that information, both from an internal and external perspective. We work with a lot of service providers, as you know, companies like SAVVIS, VeriSign, Verizon Business Services, to provide the tools for them to analyze service provider infrastructures as well.

A lot of that information can be gathered into a central location, correlated, and presented as business intelligence or business activity monitoring for the IT infrastructure.

Increasingly, it comes back to IT accountability. If your service provider does go down, and if the logs show that the performance was degrading gradually over a period of time, then you should have known that. You should have been doing the analysis over time, so that you were ahead of that curve and were able to challenge the provider before the system went down.

If it's a good provider, which comes back to the question you asked, then the provider should be on top of that before the customer finds out. Increasingly, we'll see the quality of reporting that providers are doing to customers go up dramatically. The best providers will understand that the more visibility and transparency they provide the customers about the quality of service they are delivering, the more confidence and trust their customers will have in that service.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. More related podcasts. Sponsor: LogLogic.

BriefingsDirect analysts handicap large IT vendors on how cloud trend impacts them

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.

Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Insights Edition, Vol. 34, a periodic discussion and dissection of software, services, services-oriented-architecture (SOA) and compute cloud-related news and events, with a panel of IT analysts and guests.

In this episode, recorded Nov. 21, our experts focus on the impact that cloud computing will have on the large, established IT vendors. We really are only beginning to understand how the IT services delivery, data management, and economic models of cloud computing will impact the market. If this shift is as large and inevitable as many of us think, the impact on the current IT business landscape will also be large. Some will do well, and some will not. All, I expect, will need to adapt, and the shifts are certainly exacerbated by the deepening global recession.

Please join noted IT industry analysts and experts Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis, and Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger on ZDNet and ebizQ. Our discussion is produced and moderated by me, Dana Gardner.

Here are some excerpts:

Baer: In terms of who is best positioned for all this, I think it's a little too early to tell, because most of the large vendors are only just starting to put their feet in the water. Obviously, IBM, HP, and Microsoft are making moves. SAP has actually had a couple of stumbles on the way there. Oracle has sort of a sitting-on-the-fence strategy.

If we are going to talk about who has consistently positioned themselves as being the poster child, it has been Marc Benioff over at Salesforce.com, where they have evolved from a customer relationship management (CRM) application that you access on demand to expand towards Platform as a Service (PaaS).

Gardner: Who can get kicked in the teeth by this thing?

Baer: Well, Microsoft clearly could get kicked in the teeth, and that's obviously why they've come out with their resource strategy and with their various live-office strategies. Microsoft clearly has the most to lose, because they've been very identified with the rich client.

Gardner: Yet Microsoft has an opportunity to shoot for the moon. They have all the essential pieces. They have a very difficult transformation to make in terms of their business. They have a lot of cash in the bank, and we're in a transformational period.

I think Microsoft has an opportunity to make an offer that developers can't resist -- and probably no one else is in a position to do it -- which is to say, "We will have at least one of the top three clouds. We're going to give you the tools and give you simplicity that Joe the plumber can develop, and we're going to make sure that you have a huge audience of both consumers and businesses that we're going to line up for you."

McKendrick: They've already made a lot of moves in this direction: Software plus Services, the Live offerings. They're already positioning a lot of their product line. They work with Amazon and have offerings through the Amazon service as well. Microsoft gets into everything. Wherever you look, in the enterprise or in computing, they have some kind of offering there. Sometimes, the things don't take off for a while. They sit and bide their time, and eventually it takes hold.

... Thinking about the Microsoft plus Yahoo, it makes really good sense for them both to be a real powerhouse together in cloud computing. Earlier, I stressed that the providers who dominate the cloud world will be those that focus on extreme scalability, scale out, shared nothing, massively parallel processing being able to sift and analyze petabyte upon petabyte of data from all over especially of the Web 2.0 world especially clickstream information, and so forth.

Gardner: On the other hand, for those not shooting for the whole package, is this going to democratize IT?

Shimmin: When you look at the strategy vendors like IBM has, Sun will have, and Cisco has, in terms of how they're rolling out anything that's in the cloud -- whether its PaaS, infrastructure as a service, or SaaS -- they all seem to be doing two things.

One is that they are taking some point solutions that they are going direct with, like IBM with Bluehouse, for example. Secondly, they are going after an independent software vendor (ISV) market. They want to empower folks like amazon.com, Panorama, Pervasive, Peer1, Mosso, Akamai, Boomi, and all those guys. They're really looking to empower them to go out and deliver services.

What these companies are doing is allowing this broader feel, allowing this channel of service providers to exist, using their software and their services, and, in some cases, their actual data-center resources.

Gardner: I think you're saying that the organization that can provide the best ecology of partners and provide the best environment to thrive for many other players will do best, whereas, in the past, it seemed that, as an IT vendor, having the most installed base and the most lock-in offered the path to who did best.

Shimmin: Exactly.

Kobielus: I think you hit the nail on the head, Dana, when you pointed out that success in the emerging cloud arena depends on having a very broad and deep ecology of partners. I see the partner ecosystem as the new platform for cloud computing, being able to put together a group of partners that provide various differentiated features and services within an overall cloud-computing environment.

Then, the hub partner, as it were, provides some core, enabling infrastructure that binds them all together. Core infrastructures such as, for example, a core analytic environment or distributed data-warehousing environment that manages all of the structured, unstructured, and semi-structured data, manages all of the very compute-intensive analytical workloads, CPUs, and other resources that many or all of the partner solutions can tap into -- a basic utility computing environment.

Shimmin: When you look at a company like Microsoft, they seem to be slow to market, and then, once they enter the market, they go really, really fast. They seem to be going really, really fast at the moment with two things, because they have both. They have the infrastructure and they also have the apps. They're going to have both paths.

They have the Azure platform, which is truly a PaaS offering that you use to build your own applications. So it's a layer above the Amazon EC2 infrastructure as a service.

Then they have the full-on SaaS-type products with Microsoft Online Services, which has in it almost the entirety of their collaboration software. So, they have actually sort of leapfrogged IBM Bluehouse a little bit with that.

The point is that these vendors are really looking at their portfolios and seeing which ones fit either of those two models. They're not committing to one or the other, Dana. They're really trying to tackle both ends [the infrastructure and the apps].

McKendrick: Just about every small ISV coming on the market now is offering a SaaS model. This is the way to go with the emerging smaller software-development companies.

For the larger developers, ISVs that are already well-established, it's now another delivery mechanism, another channel to reach their customer base. There are a lot of efficiencies. When you have a cloud model or are working with a cloud model, you don't have to worry about making sure all your customers receive the latest upgrade or deal with problems customers may be having with conflicting software. It's all done once. You do the upgrade once, test it, ensure the quality, deliver it, and it's all done in one location. It makes their job a lot easier.

Kobielus: What the whole trend toward SOA started was the gradual dissolution or deconstruction of the underlying platforms, as you mentioned -- OSs, development environments, and the declarative programming languages. This is all buggy-whip territory now in terms of what large and small software vendors are developing to. Pretty much everyone is now developing to a virtualized SOA, cloud environment.

Most of the large and small vendors that I talk to ... are really looking at more of a flex-sourcing approach to delivering solutions to market. ... Most of the vendors that I talk to now have three broad go-to market delivery approaches for flexible delivery of applications or of solutions. They have everything as a service approach, the appliance approach, and the packaged, licensed software approach.

If you look at cloud computing as a Venn diagram, with many smaller bubbles within it, one of the hugest bubbles is this notion of flexible packaging and sourcing of solution functionality.

The "Chinese Wall" between internal hosting and external hosting is dissolving, as more and more organizations say, "You know what. We want to do data warehousing. We'll license a software from vendor X. We might also use their hosted offerings for these particular data marts. We also might go with an appliance from them, for either our data warehousing hub, a particular operational data store, or another deployment wall where the appliance form factor makes most sense."

Baer: The vision of SOA is that it runs both ways. You publish services and you consume services. ... Through SOA, perhaps companies can look at increasing capacity or tapping into capacity as needed in a grid like fashion, either with each other, or with a provider out there such as Amazon or IBM.

Shimmin: When you look at companies like IBM and Microsoft -- Microsoft with their Software plus Services, and IBM with their Foundation Start Appliance, coupled with their Bluehouse software as a service, coupled with their on-premises collaboration software -- you're talking about a solution that spans those three delivery mechanisms.

The pressures I'm talking about that are making that so for the enterprise buyer is that you don't want to have a full SaaS deployment, and you don't want to have a full appliance deployment. When you consider issues like ownership of data, privacy of that data or SOAs, even transaction volumes, there are facets of your enterprise application that are best suited to running in an appliance, in your data center, or in the cloud.

So, these vendors we are talking about here clearly recognize that need, and are trying to re-architect their software so it can run across those three channels in different ways.

McKendrick: The underlying architecture that a lot of vendors are moving toward to enable that degree of flexible deployment of different form factor -- hosted service, appliance, and packaged license software -- is the notion of shared nothing, massively parallel processing for extreme scale-out capabilities and extreme scale up as well.

In a federated model, where you have different clusters that can be internal, external, or in combinations specialized to particular roles within the application environment, some might be optimized for data warehousing, some might be optimized for business-process management and workflow, and others might be optimized for the upfront delivery, Web 2.0, REST, and all that. But, having shared nothing, massively parallel processing, with a federated middleware fabric in an SOA context, is where everybody is moving their platform and strategy.

Gardner: How about Amazon? That would be in my thinking a pretty good candidate for prom queen right now. Perhaps there will be some polygamy at the prom, because Amazon could team up potentially with say an Oracle and a Salesforce. Can you imagine such a pairing?

Kobielus: Yeah, because Oracle, a couple of months ago, announced that you can now take your existing Oracle database licenses and you can move them to the Amazon EC cloud and the Amazon storage service. So, to a degree, that partnership foreshadows possibly a larger relationship between those two companies going forward.

I think its really an interesting pairing of Oracle plus Amazon. Once again, I always have to hit the analytics thing on the head, because I think database analytics or cloud-scalable analytics is going to be a key differentiator for most application vendors.

Shimmin: With regards to Microsoft's channel, as you and Jim were saying, Microsoft is definitely going to be the queen bee and they are definitely going to make it beneficial to this channel to work with them in their cloud initiatives. At the same time, it's also Microsoft's greatest risk.

When you look at their PaaS with Azure, that makes sense for the channel, because how the channel differentiates is by the services they provide their customers directly, and that comes from developing code. But, when you talk about Microsoft's online services, Office Live, and those things, they are in a very precarious predicament of undercutting the values that their channel partners provide.

They're literally saying, "Hey, why do you need a channel partner for the SMB market, just come right to us and give us your credit card, which you can do for a certain number of dollars a month, and you are running."

Gardner: Right, so perhaps Microsoft has the golden opportunity but the transition is perilous, and execution has to be perfect. Just as we had back in the "anti" days, when all of the Unix vendors got together and created what they called the "anti-Microsoft coalition," all these other cloud providers, ISVs, developers, and all the PaaS people are going to get together and try to provide more of a marketplace, in order to if not staunch Microsoft, at least create that democratic approach to cloud.

Shimmin: I can’t believe I'm saying this -- Microsoft has really done something spectacular here, because it all comes back to the developer. What the developer does drives what software you run on the server, in many cases. What Microsoft has done with the Software-plus-Services program initiative, right now, today, using the 3.5 .NET framework in Windows 2008, you can write code that can be dropped in the cloud or on the desktop automatically. You can just write a rule that says, "If I reach a certain service level agreement (SLA), just kick this piece of code to the cloud."

Gardner: So Microsoft and not the business becomes the arbiter.

Shimmin: Exactly.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.

More than cost savings alone, cloud computing will transform business, say HP and Capgemini

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. Read related white paper. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read complete transcript of the discussion.

Many enterprises and service providers are now grappling with how cloud models and economics will impact them. The specter of a challenging business climate may well hasten the need to seek IT resources that are supported through greater cloud computing approaches -- to save money, as well as to better reach global audiences and gain Web-scale efficiencies.

The goal is to take advantage of what cloud models offer, but to do so with low risk and in alignment with enterprise IT dictates and requirements around management, security, governance, and visibility. There are a host of innovations around the various cloud models that are now just emerging and that we're only beginning to discover. These amount to being able to do business in new ways by using cloud models to accomplish things that simply could not be done before.

To better understand the value and opportunity unfolding around cloud computing, I recently interviewed Andy Mulholland, global chief technology officer at Capgemini; Tim Hall, director of services-oriented architecture (SOA) products at HP Software and Solutions, and Russ Daniels, vice president and CTO of cloud services strategy at HP.

A new white paper, "Capgemini: The Cloud and SOA: Creating an Architecture for Today and for the Future," on some of these very same issues has been published by Capgemini. It is available free (registration required) via download here.

Furthermore, Capgamini's Mulholland, will be delivering several presentations on these challenges and opportunities at the HP Software Universe conference in Vienna this week at a time when Amazon's Web Services are quickly gaining traction in Europe.

Here are some excerpts from the podcast:

When we talk about the cloud ... it's a new model for constructing software. It's a new design pattern, and it allows you to solve problems that really have been out of reach. You can take business needs, which if you tried to address them in the context of traditional IT design and delivery models, would tend to fail or under deliver.

The cloud allows you to go after those problems, to open new markets for the business, to allow it to reach out to customers that it hasn't been able to get to, to improve its differentiation in the market, and to contribute to the real goals of the business itself. That's what we think is exciting about the cloud.

There is this premise that [cloud computing] can help me look at how I manage and reduce my cost. Perhaps more importantly, we should say it the other way around. It enables me to address how I deal with a more variable business pattern and pay for what I need when I need it.

Many of the things a business does today are relatively fixed. ... But what we have is a growing desire and a growing need to find new things in the front office, about how we run our business more effectively, how we get into markets more effectively, and how we trade better. These tend to be small, fast-moving projects. They make a very big difference, and we simply don't want the same time scale in provisioning for them.

Increasingly, probably over the next couple of years, people don't want to spend capital on them. They'll want to pay for them operationally. They represent a new market, a new technique, a new set of standards, and a new set of technologies. All of that comes together in where cloud is going to go and make the difference to businesses.

... You start to recognize there are already a number of very well known brands that sell through the Internet and combine their services. ... The challenge in this is how it moves from being something that a handful of Web-based businesses are using. How do more businesses learn how to exploit that market and take their share of commercial revenue from that market?

When we think about the cloud, we don't think it's just a matter of how infrastructure is packaged, but it's really a combination of the impact of service oriented architecture (SOA) starting to break apart applications. We think more about the services to separate out the data from the applications, so that you can get at the data without having to go through complex application integrations.

There's another piece around taking advantage of Web 2.0 innovations, which includes both how you can create rich user experiences in the context of browsers in these remote execution models, but also significantly it's the social dimension. How can you take advantage of the innovation that's occurred in the consumer space by understanding the importance of bringing people together?

In many companies, they're trying to exploit these things, but they are doing it with a complete lack of structure. By bringing in a cloud model successfully, you're actually introducing some structure to support the very activities that people are increasingly experimenting with in their businesses today.

... If you have been doing new stuff, and you are building new stuff inside the organization, you really ought to have started doing that around SOA. If you're using services correctly internally, then of course, you can cross the firewall and start to use services outside, and blend them together.

Folks are looking at this as an integration technology, instead of a complete transformation of how they deliver service orientation or business services more comprehensively and more flexibly to address some of the unique challenges that the business is facing. ... SOA adoption, as a transformational agenda, is a microcosm of some concepts that apply very specifically to cloud and preparing people for cloud adoption.

What we find with our customers is that many workloads are important to the business, but they are not mission critical. In many of these workloads, good-enough delivery is good enough. ... Distinguishing between those types of workloads, identifying those where good-enough delivery is appropriate, and moving those into virtualized and automated delivery models, positions you to take advantage of external infrastructure capabilities as appropriate.

The key challenge for any IT organization is to understand what the business really needs, where the business value is, and how technology can help deliver that. This question of business-IT alignment is always the heart of the problem, and it will be certainly be true in terms of how the business chooses to go after cloud-based opportunities.

We think the cloud is great for connecting. It's great for connecting business to business. It's great for connecting business to its customers. ... Where is connecting important to your business? That's ultimately a business question, not a technology question. The focus should be on having people who can map from what the business needs to understanding how to exploit this new expressiveness that the cloud brings to solve the most pressing challenges, or to exploit the most exciting opportunities that the business faces.

... [It comes down to] the difference between interactions, which is a lot of this new market, and transactions, which was the old IT market. When you look at any IT system, it's fundamentally about getting a safe transaction to record what you have done. But, if you think about someone trying to decide what they're going to buy from you, like buying an airline ticket, deciding which flight and how much money they're going to pay and which extras they're going to have, it's a lot of interactions.

... We don't think the cloud is great for “transactionality,” for deep, technical reasons. ... The place where the cloud is great is where you're not focused on supporting transactions, but interactions, where you are connecting. It's being able to take state from participants in an extended supply chain and propagate that information up through data feeds, up into a cloud service.

For example, that information might be related to the carbon footprint related to material flowing through an extended supply chain. Each of the participants in an extended supply chain can simply publish a data stream that captures the carbon footprint of the materials that they will be producing. Now, you can run analytics in the cloud, using search-like algorithms, to answer questions about the carbon footprint for some end products. You don't have to do the detailed process integrations. You don't have to provide detailed transactional integrations across the supply chain system to support it.

It's exactly that new expressiveness that allows us to go after problems that we really couldn't have done affordably in the past. Because we couldn't do them that way, we ended up doing things manually and in emergencies. If you think about product traceability, it's the same problem, very difficult to deal with from a technology integration perspective in the traditional ways. As a result, when there's a problem, we have people pawing through information spreadsheets manually and providing the answers too late to be helpful.

... The cloud allows you to deliver the business results that matter. In other words, it really has to be thought of in the context of IT’s technology for business, and the key business challenges that we see our customers facing today are how to develop new markets? How do they take advantage of the abilities they have and deliver them to new customers? How can they understand better what their customers need, and how can they fit in and connect with them?

The cloud provides great capabilities for that. We think that it's still early, and you can see the promise in things like the recommendation engines that you find at online shopping sites. You're searching for something, and, based on your buying history, your demographics, your search behaviors, and then comparing that to the behaviors of others, the site can provide you with suggestions about other things that might be of interest to you as well. The technology helps identify your intentions and then offers suggestions to help you find things better suited for your needs than what you could have expressed or identified yourself.

That's a wonderful opportunity, and to be able to expand that approach into more and more of the ways that a business connects has huge implications.

Relatively speaking, [cloud computing] is unstoppable. The question is whether you'll crash into it or migrate into it. Why is it unstoppable? Because we're watching a business shift, people have to find ways to compete better in the market. Much of that is around. "How do I add smart services? How do I make products more available? How do I communicate directly and intimately with people, so they know what they want to buy from me?" All of those things are already developing in many businesses today, and people are building solutions to do that, sometimes gracefully, and sometimes not at all gracefully.

In other words, just as we had with the PC, where we basically were driven into it, some companies got there in a very ungraceful way and had to figure out afterward how to sort out the mess. Others did have a strategy, and emerged in a very graceful way. I think we're in the same situation. Users wanting social software have taken us there to run and do things better. We've been taken there by businesses needing to get into new markets.

Read complete transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. Read the related white paper. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Linthicum podcast: Cloud computing plus recession equals IT transformation

I had the pleasure of joining long-time IT thought leader and IT executive Dave Linthicum this week for a podcast on cloud computing.

We get into a discussion on the alignment of the dour economic climate with the newer services architectures for mixing and matching IT assets and resources with more flexibility. We also look into some recent news events relating to cloud and the impact and analysis on these issues.

Dave has created a new consulting emphasis on cloud computing, and is finding strong interest from enterprises in the subject and its effects. He also joins me regularly on the BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights podcast series.

If you're interested in understanding how cloud computing is affecting your company and IT department -- especially as a change agent during transformative times -- you may enjoy and benefit from the podcast. You can also subscribe to the ongoing Linthicum cloud podcast or find it on iTunes.

Remote support offers enterprises avenue to cut operational costs while improving IT systems reliability

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read complete transcript of the discussion.

The trend around use of remote support software for monitoring, remediation and IT maintenance automation is gaining steam in the global enterprise IT market. I certainly expect that as companies become even more cost conscious that they will seek to further reduce their total cost of IT operations in any way possible. Remote support best practices and effective use will therefore become even more prominent.

The goal of remote support software and services is to free up on-premises IT personnel to focus on what they do best and to offload routine chores to organizations that can leverage the Internet do IT support remotely at high efficiency and lower cost. The benefits of remote support have become very popular among PC owners, and now the value is becoming popular as a cloud computing service for general server support and data center maintenance worldwide.

To better understand the options for better remote monitoring, resolving, and automating of the ongoing performance support of IT systems, I recently interviewed Dionne Morgan, worldwide marketing manager in HP Technology Services, and Claudia Ulrich, communications manager in Delivery Engineering at HP.

Here are some excerpts:

At many companies, IT managers understand that ongoing administration and maintenance of their existing infrastructure consumes most of the IT budget. ... Far too much time has been spent by IT staff on managing, monitoring, and troubleshooting their IT infrastructure. Obviously, this can be very expensive in both time and money. Too often, there's increased risk and unplanned downtime, which lead to an inability to meet business objectives and achieve business outcomes.

We're also finding that system complexity is adding to the problem. ... When a problem occurs in the infrastructure, finding the source and the nature of the problem -- and then coming up with the resolution -- can also be a daunting task.

It could be anything from actual hardware failure and trying to detect exactly where within the system the failure has occurred, to a need for additional memory or additional hard drive space. Those are some of the typical problems that our customers are facing, and those are the problems where you can automate the process of identifying the nature of that problem and coming up with the solution.

[Enterprises are] moving from traditional phone-in [and help desk] support and on-site delivery to automated events reporting. This is also called "phone home" capabilities. Adding to customers' manageability solution the ability to monitor the complete enterprise environment by automatically submitting incidents to the remote support provider to increase the level of services, which in return improves availability and reduces service cost for the customer.

One reason this helps to manage personnel is because it's going to be constantly monitoring the environment 24/7. Even at the end of the day, when the staff goes home, the system is still monitoring and it helps to filter the actual events that are coming through, so that the IT organization can prioritize which of those events they need to take action on. It's actually removing some of the mundane task of troubleshooting and prioritizing the events or the incidents.

We're looking at the complete, heterogeneous IT environment. This includes servers, storage, network, not only from HP, but also from selected vendors like IBM and Dell servers, as well as Brocade and Cisco switches. ... This also includes industry trends toward virtualization, as well as blade, and cloud computing, as they evolve.

I believe that down the road we'll see an expansion of the products that are covered by remote support. We'll begin to look at the total environment, in addition to the infrastructure. We'll also see organizations looking at how to automate processes, how to help with monitoring and troubleshooting applications.

[For now], remote support is a critical piece of establishing the next-generation data center. HP has defined six enablers to build this next generation data center, and HP Remote Service Pack (RSP) can definitely contribute to these enablers. ... We're really looking at this one foundation to enable consolidation and modernization of data centers, and also to be able to transition between the two, using a common management system.

If you think about Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) and the fact that we have a lifecycle that includes strategy, design, transition, operation, and continued service improvement, this is going to help to automate many of those support processes that you need on an ongoing operational basis and incident management. They can assist with help desk management and asset management.

What we have found with customers is that, when they are using these remote support tools, they're actually able to reduce the amount of time they spend in troubleshooting by 20 percent and they're also able to increase the accuracy of the diagnosis by over 99 percent. So, with these remote support tools, if they're monitoring the heterogeneous environment that will actually speed up the process of troubleshooting and isolating the problem.

Read complete transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Active Endpoints beefs up visual SOA orchestration with added features and expanded OS support

Active Endpoints, the inventor of the visual orchestration system (VOS), has spruced up its flagship offering with enhancements that include operational improvements and expanded operating system and database support.

The Waltham, Mass.-based company has released ActiveVOS 6.0.2, which includes new reporting capabilities, an enhanced ability to reuse plain old Java objects (POJOs), and new platform and operating system support.

The new version of ActiveVOS also addresses the ongoing debate over whether service oriented architecture (SOA) modeling languages such as business process modeling notation (BPMN) can be directly executed by the business process management system (BPMS) or first serialized into an execution-focused language like business process execution language (BPEL). [Disclosure: Active Endpoints is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

According to Active Endpoint's Alex Neihaus, vice president of marketing:

We support the latter approach on the simple theory that models aren’t fully specified and therefore cannot be executed on real machines – on which everything must be specified. That’s why we believe most modeling-oriented BPMSs end up frustrating business analysts and forcing developers to write lots of Java code to implement simple processes.

Neihaus said that the new version is the first iteration of something the company intends to pursue: unification of the visual styles of creating models and process design. An example of this can be found at the Active Endpoints Web site, where the “bordered style” link in the second row of the table shows a screen shot of the new design. Neihaus adds:

It’s just a beginning, but our BPEL processes are beginning to look and feel like BPMN-style models, and vice versa. As we do more of this, we’ll obviate the debate, bring analysts and developers closer together and make it possible to deliver BPM applications more easily.

In other enhancements to the product, service level reporting provides a granular perspective into average process response time, giving users the opportunity to identify and respond to bottlenecks that affect overall process performance.

New reporting capabilities include a summary of the response time of the top ten activities of the process, allowing operations staff to optimize running processes. Rich scheduling helps define the frequency of process execution using any combination of months, weeks, days, hours, minutes and seconds.

ActiveVOS now allows Java objects to maintain state, significantly increasing the number of use cases that can be fulfilled using the POJO capabilities. Previously, developers could reuse POJOs as native web services, providing the ability to invoke stateless Java objects directly from a process.

In addition to the server operating systems, application servers and database systems previously supported, ActiveVOS is now additionally certified with:

• AIX 5.3 with IBM WebSphere Server 6.1 on IBM Series 5 machines
  
  
• HP-UX 11v3 on Itanium with Apache Tomcat, Red Hat JBoss Enterprise Application Platform, Oracle BEA WebLogic Server or IBM WebSphere Server
  
  
• IBM WebSphere JMS server

The latest version of ActiveVOS can be downloaded from www.activevos.com. A free, 30-day trial is available and includes support to assist in the evaluation.

ActiveVOS 6.0.2 is priced at $12,000 per CPU socket for deployment licenses. Development licenses are priced at $5,000 per CPU socket. Pricing is also available for virtualized environments.

Interview: HP’s Tim Hall on heightening roles of governance in SOA, cloud and managing dynamic business boundaries

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read complete transcript of the discussion.

As enterprises scale up of their use of service oriented architecture (SOA), proper governance is providing an insurance effect. By deploying governance alongside and in sync with SOA development and deployment capabilities, enterprises are growing the use of SOA without stumbling -- allowing companies to “crawl, walk, and run” to SOA without losing control.

SOA governance heightens the business benefits of services, increases IT efficiency returns, and reduces the risk that complexity could undermine the services lifecycle in large organizations. Services governance also sets the stage for leveraging cloud and third-party services, while managing the boundary between internal and external services.

To unpack the relationship between SOA, governance, cloud and IT management, I recently interviewed Tim Hall, director of SOA Products for HP Software and Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

The purposes of SOA governance has been to set the architectural vision and direction, lay the ground rules under which those activities are going to take place, and then foster collaboration between architects, and other people who engage in the processes of building solutions for companies, be they consumer focused, or be they within enterprise IT.

The whole thing is tracking your progress, where are you in this journey. It's not about installing a new pack of middleware and then declaring victory. You really have to measure along the way what you are doing, and how far you have gotten. Some measures that people start off looking at are things like reuse.

The whole notion of providing a service is to hide the layers of abstraction and to hide the complexity behind layers of abstraction, so that we can make changes behind the scenes that don't necessarily disrupt or alter the offering of the service. There are a lot of examples of this in the real world. Why hasn't IT been able to do a better job of capitalizing on those things?

This is one of those transformation opportunities. We're not just talking about Web services. We're talking about different ways in which we need to be able to flexibly compose and offer capabilities back to the business through a channel called a service. ... The adoption of services as a fundamental unit of commerce, if you will, within IT does something very fundamental to the way that people work together.

From HP's perspective, we are definitely trying to make sure that the collaboration between architects, quality assurance professionals, and operations personnel are there. That's kind of announcing that the various solution offerings that we're bringing to market are to make sure that none of these is an island. Those control points can reasonably be connected and allow for collaboration across all the different participants.

We're learning lots of interesting things about IT, and in particular, the ways that we can do things better. The whole notion of instilling an architectural vision to support change and flexibility; to give tools to the folks who are building composite systems, so they can better manage the roles and responsibilities for the various people that are participating in that; and better communicate with operations is something that we haven’t done very well.

It's really a matter of mapping your organizational maturity and what you're trying to achieve with the appropriate tools. People shouldn't be running out and buying tools, unless they really understand what problems those tools are going to solve, and the fact that certain organizations can introspect what they have done in the past and say what problems they want us to solve and or avoid.

The lessons that we're learning ... are specifically being applied to SOA right now, [but] have more far-reaching implications. As we look at things, like the different compositional patterns for systems that are coming -- Web 2.0 technologies, Ajax, rich Internet applications (RIAs), putting front ends on some of these things, or cloud computing -- all of these things are interrelated. My question is, should we not be applying these fantastic concepts and activities that we have been establishing through SOA governance more broadly to support all of these different types of next-generation composition?

From HP's perspective the answer is absolutely. The question is at what point are we going to be talking about next-generation application lifecycle management, or next-generation application composition and stop talking about SOA by itself as an island.

... There are more people coming to the table, more constituents coming to say, “How can I connect to these governance activities that are going on for services, but really for the purpose of generating some new business outcomes?” That, to me, is tremendously exciting.

I think one of the things you're going to see -- I'm not sure how far in the future, it's coming up more and more these days -- is an emphasis on understanding the business-to-business connections, or what some folks will call "federation."

I want to be very specific when I say "federation," because it is one of those overloaded terms that creates a lot of mystery. If we can take the wraps off of federation, what we're talking about is a pattern for how to expose the capabilities that I own within my domain to other domains. Those other domains could be within my organization, they could be elsewhere, or they could be third parties.

The good news is that SOA fundamentally supports that type of activity. The question is how well the tools support that activity today.

As we move into a more comprehensive cloud set of offerings, we're going to need to federate the different instances of services, metadata, their ownership, the consumption of those pieces, and really formalizing the relationships of using tools between the consumers and providers of those things.

When I say establishing relationships, I think about trading-partner agreements that get put in place, or supply chain agreements. They get put between supply chain partners about what information they're going to share and in what context they can use that.

We're really talking about doing the same kind of formalization with the consumption and providing of these various capabilities, in order for models like SaaS and cloud to scale up to the level that they need to in order to make a significant impact.

Read complete transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Enterprises can leverage cloud models and manage transition risks using service governance, says HP

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read complete transcript of the discussion.

Much has been said about cloud computing in 2008, and still many knowledgeable IT people scratch their heads over what it all really means. They want to know: How can enterprises best prepare to take advantage of this shift in IT resources -- but avoid transitional risks and uncertainty?

Cloud and on-premises compute grids exploit breakthroughs in technology architecture and the confluence of new business models, this is clear. In times when every dollar counts more than ever, the enticements to experiment with cloud models is powerful. At the same time, there is very little margin for error. Adopting new IT approaches can not injure the business interests, image or fiscal performance of any company.

To understand more about the balance and best practices route to emerging cloud and utility IT values, I recently spoke to executives at Hewlett-Packard (HP) and its EDS brethren. They point to the need to understand the role of services oriented architecture (SOA) and governance in exploring cloud opportunities. The future looks promising for cloud adoption, as long as there's a coordinated and managed approach.

To learn more about enterprise cloud adoption, please join the discussion with Rebecca Lawson, Director of Service Management and Cloud Solutions at HP; Scott McClellan, Vice President and Chief Technologist of Scalable Computing and Infrastructure in HP’s Technology Solutions Group, and Norman Lindsey, Chief Architect for Flexible Computing Services at EDS, an HP company.

Here are some excerpts:

Really, from an enterprise point of view, when running mission-critical applications that need security and reliability and are operating with service-level agreements (SLAs), etc., the cloud isn’t quite ready for prime time yet. There are both technical and business reasons why that’s the case.

As far as the idea of the cost savings, it’s good to look at why that is the case in a few certain areas, and then to think about how you can reduce the cost in your own infrastructure by using automation and virtualization technologies that are available today, and that are also used in the “cloud.” But, that doesn’t mean you have to go out to the cloud to automate and virtualize to reduce some cost in your infrastructure.

The cloud is an evolution of other ideas that have come before it, grid, and before that Web services. All these things combine to enable people to start thinking of this as delivering service with a different business model, where we are paying for it by the unit, or in advance, or after the fact.

Virtualization and these other approaches enable the cloud, but they aren’t necessarily the cloud. What IT departments have to do is start to think about what is it they’re trying to accomplish, what business problem they’re trying to address, as they look at cloud providers or cloud technologies to try and help solve those problems.

We’ve seen people do their own private utilities versus public utilities such as flexible computing services provide. The idea of a private utility is that, within an organization, they agree to share resources and allow the boundaries to slide back and forth to hit the best utilization out of the fixed set of assets or maybe a growing set of assets.

The same idea is in a public utility or a public cloud, except that now a third party is providing those assets and providing that as a service. It increases the concerns and considerations that you have to bring to the party. You have to think about problems that you didn’t have to think about when you had a private utility.

When you go to a public space, security is paramount. What do I do with my proprietary information and service levels? How certain can I get what I need when I need it? The promise with the cloud is great, but the uncertainty has caused people to come up short and decide maybe it’s better if I do it myself, versus utilizing an outside service.

We need to think in terms of which services provide what level of value, based on the complexion of that particular company -- and it’s never going to be the same for all companies. Some companies can use Google Gmail as an email service. Other companies wouldn’t touch it with a 10-foot pole, maybe for reasons of security, data integrity, access rights, regulations, or what have you. So weighing the value is going to become the critical thing for IT.

In the longer term, the more overarching impact of cloud comes when your IT department can deliver value back to the business, rather than just taking cost out. Some examples of that are using aspects of social networking and other aspects of cloud computing, and the fact that cloud is delivered over ubiquitous media, the Internet, to increase share of wallet, increase market share, maybe bring higher margin to a business, and build ecosystems, and drive user communities for a business. That’s where cloud brings value to a business and that’s obviously important.

You can start to look around at your internal capabilities, versus external, and make some decisions as to how you want to solve that problem, whether buying an external service or creating a service internally and delivering it to your customers with your own internal utility. ... This will force IT to come closer to the people in the business and really understand what is the business objective, and then find the right service that maps to the value of that objective. Again, we can’t emphasize it enough. This should really change behavioral dynamics in IT and how they think about what their job is.

Basically, within the spectrum of things that are cloud computing, you have everything from infrastructure as a service … all the way up through virtualized infrastructure, a platform on top of that, an application on top of that, or perhaps a completely re-architected true cloud-computing offering.

As you move up that spectrum, I think the benefits increase, but in not all cases are the application domains available in all of those environments. ... What services are available through some cloud model, what model of availability, what are the characteristics of that model, what are the requirements for that particular service – and what are the security performance, continuity integration, and compliance requirements? Those all have to be taken in holistically and through a governance model to make the decision whether we are going to move from the traditional deployment model to a cloud-delivery model, and if so, which one.

In the process of getting to a service-centric IT governance model, they’re going to have to deal with the governance model for deploying new services. Again, I think risk is partly a function of benefit. So when there is a marginal benefit or when the stakes are very high, you would want to be very conservative in terms of your risk profile.

The tougher economic conditions would heighten the acceleration of cloud computing, and not just because of the opportunity to save cost. Reinforcing what we brought up earlier, there are some clear opportunities to bring value to your business.

Examples of that are things like being able to drive user communities, users and consumers of whatever it is your business produces, using techniques of social networking, and things like that.

There is the question of how to use the advantages you get from cloud computing to drive differentiation for your business versus your competitors, because they’re hesitating, or not using it, because they’re being risk-averse. In addition, that compliments the benefits you get from cost savings.

What I really meant is that, if you are an IT shop and you are trying to decide what to move to a cloud paradigm or a cloud model, you’re likely to really focus on the places where either you can get that big win -- because moving this particular service to a cloud paradigm is going to bring you some positive differentiation, some value to your company.

Or, you are going to get that big cost savings from the places where it's the most mission-critical -- the place where you have the least tolerance for downtime, and you have the greatest continuity requirements, or where the performance SLA has been most stringent. The thinking may be, “Well, we’ll tackle that later. We’re not going to take a risk on something like that right now.”

In the places where the risk is not as great -- and the reward either in terms of cost or value looks good -- the current economic conditions are just going to accelerate the adoption of cloud computing in enterprises for those areas. And they definitely do exist.

Read complete transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

For more information on HP Adaptive Infrastructure, go to: www.hp.com/go/ai/.