SaaS delivery of IT lifecycle and quality management functions evolves toward an IT service-delivery solutions approach

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When people think of Software as a Service (SaaS) and web services delivery, they often envision business applications like salesforce automation, email, and human resources management.

But Hewlett-Packard has been delivering quality assurance and applications performance management functions via SaaS for years. It's Business Technology Optimization (BTO) services, part of its Mercury acquisition, made the leap to SaaS delivery long before web-based business applications became popular. You could say SaaS for developers and testers -- code warriors -- paved the way for SaaS for salesmen -- road warriors.

Now, as interest in cloud computing ramps up, the ability to deliver more aspects of IT lifecycle and quality management, along with broader project and portfolio oversight values, is also ramping up. Yet a missing ingredient for IT innovators has been how to begin and how to organize these sourcing changes effectively.

Such a SaaS whole greater than the sum of its web services parts will better help IT managers do more with less, and provide better applications faster, as well.

To better understand the expanding role of SaaS within IT, and how professional services can newly help in the transition to holistic SaaS use by IT departments, I interviewed two executives last week at HP's Software Universe conference in Las Vegas: Scott Kupor, vice president and general manager of Software-as-a-Service, and Anand Eswaran, vice president of professional services, both in HP's Software and Solutions group.

Here are some excerpts:

Kupor: At HP for the last nine years, we've been selling IT management applications as a service delivery option. If you think about things like testing, performance management, or project and portfolio management (PPM), for example, those are traditional IT applications that we’ve been selling with this similar delivery model.

What we’ve been hearing from customers today at the conference are two key things. Number one, the cost benefits that initially drove them to SaaS are ever present and incredibly more important in this financial environment. The benefits are really coming to fruition. The second is that we’re starting to see a migration of SaaS from what was traditionally testing services toward other more complex and more customizable IT management applications.

We’re hearing a lot of interest from customers around IT service management (ITSM), service desk applications, and service management applications. These are things that have traditionally been the domain of inside-the-firewall deployments. Customers are now getting comfortable with the SaaS model so much so that they’re looking at those applications as well for deployment in a SaaS environment.

Eswaran: We’ve made a very conscious shift from what was inherently deployment of products. The approach right now is transformed into what business outcomes can we achieve for the customer, which is something which we would have been unable to do some time back.

We have changed focus now from deploying a single product set to achieving outcomes like reduction of outages by 40 percent, increasing quality, getting service-level agreements to a certain point, and guaranteeing that level of service. That’s been hugely helpful.

All of what we do at the back end, whether it’s how we leverage SaaS, what products we use, what software we use, what consulting and professional services we use, all of that is going to be transparent to the customer. What they care about is a service, which we will deliver to the customer. SaaS enables us to get to that service, get to that time-to-market, much faster.

This all gets us to the point of what customers refer to as "killing the game," getting to a point of being able to offer outcome-based pricing and guaranteeing that outcome, as opposed to the traditional consulting model of billing rates and hours.

Kupor: Remember, all these are complex IT management applications, they have third-party integrations.

That’s really what IT’s job is -- to help deploy business applications and govern the integrity, security, the authenticity, and the performance of those applications.

They have custom code that customers are building on top. Those are all areas of domains of expertise for the services organization. Through the work that [Anand's team] and we are doing together, we can together deliver a cost-effective delivery option for customers, but without having to sacrifice the complexity, integration, and customization opportunities that they demand for these applications.

We’ve heard this a lot from our customers today, that they’re actually interested in looking at how, as an IT department, they can deploy their own applications in a third-party cloud environment. You hear a lot of people talking about infrastructure on demand or computing power on demand.

People are looking toward these third-party products as a way to basically take an application they’ve built in-house and deploy them externally in, perhaps, an Amazon environment or a Microsoft environment. Where the interesting opportunity is for us, as a management vendor, is that customers will still need the same level of performance, availability, security, and data integrity, associated with applications that live in a cloud environment as they have come to expect for applications that live inside their corporate firewall.

We’ve been talking to customers a lot about something called Cloud Assure, which is the first service offering that HP has brought to market to help customers solve those management problems for applications they choose to deploy in a cloud-based environment.

That’s really what IT’s job is -- to help deploy business applications and govern the integrity, security, the authenticity, and the performance of those applications.

Eswaran: Everything is eventually going to get transformed into a service for the customer, so that they can actually focus on the core business they are in. When you have things transformed into a service, everything we do to offer that service should be transparent to the customer.

It becomes a services-led engagement, but that’s where we clearly differentiate "services" from "service," the singular, which is the eventual outcome the customer needs to create for themselves. That’s why we really partner well between SaaS and Professional Services. We believe that we are on a path of convergence to eventually get to offering business value and a service to a customer.

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Platform applies HPC lessons to 'private' cloud creation, operations, efficiency

More enterprises are looking to the cloud compute model -- both public and private -- to efficiently support myriad applications and data workloads. Platform Computing, a pioneer in high-performance computing (HPC), is now jumping into the fray with a private cloud management platform: Platform ISF.

Platform ISF, which becomes the centerpiece of the company's cloud computing strategy, creates a shared IT infrastructure from physical and virtual resource pools, to deliver application hosting environments, according to automated workload and resource scheduling policies. The Markham, Ont. company said its new offering will be released in beta this week, with general availability planned for the fall.

Platform ISF leverages Platform’s resource sharing technology, EGO, and its virtual machine orchestrator (VMO), combine to deliver an infrastructure-sharing platform. Platform has also built in additional capabilities for self-service, reporting and billing -- helping to make clouds a bill-as-you-go affair (a fringe benefit of IT shared services). This is also expected to drastically reduce the costs of IT, as resource utilization levels increase thanks to resource sharing.

Platform ISF is a technology-agnostic cloud computing management platform that supports any collection of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines, said Songnian Zhou, CEO, chairman and co-founder. This allows organizations to leverage existing resources and corporate standards, as they build and deploy private clouds.

Platform's private cloud software, the elevate of its grid capabilities, allows implementers to access IT infrastructure via portals using visual interfaces, or programmatically via Java, web services, .NET and other popular frameworks, Zhou told me last week in a briefing. Platform ISF offers a "meta template" of workload support environments, allowing for flexible requests for resources, all of which can be charged back in granular fashion to the actual consumers of the IT resource services.

While third-party "public" clouds can offer raw infrastructure and computer resources on a pay-per-use basis, most enterprises will probably use a combination, or hybrid, of both internal and public cloud resources. Platform ISF acts as the management layer for pulling such disparate resources into a unified environment and is independent of location or ownership of resources.

And, Platform ISF, is governance agnostic, allowing for third-party governance to additionally manage how such cloud services are used, provisioned and automated -- to an IT departments requirements.

While Platform has been around for a long time, they're hardly become a household word. This may not be a bad thing, according to Derrick Harris at GigaOm:

Of course, Platform is no IT behemoth, which also could work in its favor. While they might consist of useful pieces, cloud offerings from companies like IBM, Microsoft and HP can be difficult to grasp. They can involve an array of systems management tools, servers and other products that leave customers dizzy — and potentially locked in.

Jon Brodkin, writing at The Industry Standard, quotes Forrester analyst James Staten, who enumerates other players in the cloud management field -- 3tera, Elastra, Enomaly, and Zimory, and the open source Eucalyptus -- but says that all of them, unlike Platform lack at least one of the elements necessary to build a cloud.

I was impressed with Platform's heritage of providing HPC grid services for 15 years as a precursor to cloud street cred. Platform's approach can be used by enterprise IT departments to move to cloud benefits, on their terms, rather than the fantasy notion of cloud being best approached without IT.

As Zhou says, "Cloud is built, not bought." I couldn't agree more.

Expect Platform ISF to be used on business intelligence workloads early on, with J2EE, and PaaS to follow close on. Oh, and we ought to expect more HPC loads and requirements to be make via public-private tag-team clouds too.

Compuware spruces up IT portfolio management with Changepoint refresh

By David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton

This guest post comes courtesy of David A. Kelly, principal analyst and Heather Ashton, senior analyst, at Upside Research. You can reach them here.

It’s hard to improve if you don’t have a way to measure how you’re doing. That’s one of the reasons why IT portfolio management solutions have been started to generate a lot of interest over the past few years. IT portfolio management solutions help organizations manage IT costs, make better IT funding decisions and help align business and IT objectives.

At the Project Portfolio Management Summit in California on June 15, Compuware unveiled a juiced-up version of its IT portfolio management solution, Changepoint, identifying agile development and delivery as key components of increasing value to customers over the next 12 likely-recessionary months. [Disclosure: Compuware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

As a business-centric IT management solution, Changepoint (get a free Upside Research report) is designed to help IT and business managers gain better visibility into the enterprise IT environment. As most enterprise IT departments have experienced, the investment lifecycle decision-making process for IT has historically been a pain point. In most instances, IT departments have been plagued with either over-allocating or under-allocating their funds. Changepoint is designed to provide executive-level visibility into IT spending, building trust between IT and management. The reality of shrinking IT budgets makes this visibility a necessity as organizations seek to optimize operational demands for IT resources.

In the face of the “new economy,” IT portfolio management solutions are becoming a necessary tool for IT to meet today’s economic challenges. Compuware is hoping that the new features it has added to Changepoint will increase usability and end-user adoption. Among the deliverables that Compuware announced in its year-long-roadmap for Changepoint are added managed services to assist with optimizing Changepoint ROI; bundling in Vantage (Compuware’s IT service management solution) to monitor usage and ensure adoption of Changepoint; and leveraging industry-standard middleware to facilitate integration to financial, HR and help desk applications.

The first deliverable is the Agile Accelerator, designed to deliver best practices for managing agile software development projects. Compuware is tapping into the movement by IT departments to use agile development and delivery to improve responsiveness to the business.

Not to rock the boat too much, and to reassure those IT development groups that prefer to stick to more traditional waterfall type projects, Changepoint will continue to support

The end result is the ability for an IT department running some agile projects to manage those projects within the broader scope of the overall project portfolio.

existing methodologies while also encouraging new approaches such as agile delivery to speed time-to-market, a critical component of achieving ROI on IT projects.

The end result is the ability for an IT department running some agile projects to manage those projects within the broader scope of the overall project portfolio.

While recent economic conditions make it difficult for some IT organizations to invest in new technologies at this point, it’s always worth it to step back and evaluate the decision-making process around IT investments and the potential value that IT portfolio management solutions might bring.

Organizations with existing and effective application and IT metrics or a limited number of projects or applications may not find enough value to warrant IT portfolio management solutions. But any organization managing numerous projects, dynamic business environments, limited investment resources or the need for more effective and efficient decision-making processes may find significant value in portfolio management.

This guest post comes courtesy of David A. Kelly and Heather Ashton at Upside Research. You can reach them here.

Eclipse plug-in puts TOGAF 9 into IDE collaboration mode for architects

The Open Group, a technology-neutral consortium, today released an Eclipse plug-in that puts TOGAF 9 capabilities literally at your fingertips. The TOGAF Customizer was donated to The Open Group by Capgemini.

Based on the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF), an open-source project managed by the Eclipse Foundation, the TOGAF Customizer can be used to implement TOGAF 9 more easily. TOGAF is an industry-consensus framework and method for enterprise architecture (EA) developed by The Open Group, and released in February. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The new customizer contains all the content of TOGAF 9 in a structured and editable form, including guidelines, concepts, and checklists, as well as detailed work breakdown structures for the framework’s new and improved architecture development method (ADM).

In a nutshell, moving TOGAF into an industry-standard IDE brings a Web 2.0 flavor to the document, making it akin to a wiki. What's more, collaborating via an IDE's built-in communications and sharing attributes -- as well as version management -- can make TOGAF more into a "living" document, and eases innovation and ongoing improvement.

With the new tool, users can align their EA practices with TOGAF 9 and create organization-specific versions of the standard that represent the concerns of their unique business and technology environments. All goes into and out of a common repository. In addition, the new tool makes it much easier for enterprise architects to integrate TOGAF with other common EA frameworks, such as Zachman, FEAF and DoDAF.

Key features and benefits of the TOGAF Customizer include:

• Specific constructs for tasks and steps enable processes to be formally defined with related content, such as inputs, outputs, roles and responsibilities
  
  
• Supporting editor allows users to make changes to the standard TOGAF framework content and tailor it to their specific organizational context
  
  
• Underlying content management system supports group collaboration, editing and versioning
  
  
• Plug-in architecture allows new content packages, including document templates, to be created and linked to TOGAF

The new plug-in is available for download from: www.opengroup.org/togaf/.

Many architects are familar with the development lifecycle, and many developers have designs on becoming archiects, so the melding of two essential IT fucntions on a common pallette, so to speak, makes a great deal of sense.

I can hardly wait for what we've seen so far with Google Wave to come into prime time. Combining what Google Wave, the Eclipse IDE and TOGAF 9 does will make for a powerfully productive future.

And, of course, we should never under estimate the power of the community effect. I expect we'll see quite a bit of novel innovation from how users leverage and expand on what the framework in an IDE value only begins with.

HP's Andy Isherwood on running IT like a business, with an eye to transforming IT's role

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In many companies, IT departments remain in an isolated functional silo, often not reporting to the CEO, and often unfortunately disconnected from the main business imperatives.

Now, the combination the down economy, tight IT budgets, and the advent of more cloud sourcing and data center architecture options offer two paths to IT leaders: Remain on the alienated edge, or move to center-stage in how businesses adapt to their changing markets.

HP at its Software Universe conference last week offered a path that helps unify people, process and product into a roadmap for how to transform IT, and therefore to better help transform the business -- while keeping costs down.

To more deeply understand the transformative challenges facing IT and business leaders alike, I interviewed Andy Isherwood, vice president and general manager of HP Software and Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

All the conversations I've had with CIOs are that the capital expenditure is typically being reduced by anything between 0 and 40 percent, and operating expenditures being decreased by up to 10 percent. It's less, but still pretty significant.

So you’ve ended up with a significantly smaller budget to do stuff, which can cause big problems for organizations. They have a certain amount of infrastructure in day-to-day activities to maintain. This means that they have to spend all their budget on existing projects and keeping the lights on, rather than any innovation. If you can’t innovate, then you can’t deliver value back to the business and you become just an IT function delivering the core value.

So, how do we innovate and how do we use the budget more effectively than we do today to allow us not just to keep the lights on, but to do this huge amount of innovation?

If we don’t do it now, we won’t be able to do it in the future, because, as demand picks up, it’s just going to be "all hands to the pump" to be able to deliver just the demand that picks up, as we come out of the recession.

The financial situation at the moment is driving a more intense look at those sourcing options and what it does from a financial point of view for that particular organization. ... SaaS is a great offering. We’ve been in that business for nine years and we have 700 customers. So, we know that business well. We know that in times, in which capital expenditure is being restrained, they can move to a more operating expense-oriented budget, but still be able to innovate, which is a pretty compelling proposition. As we move through, and capital expenditure is freed up, that might change, but at least people have the option.

Whether it’s insourced, outsourced, a partner activity, whether it's on premise or off premise, all of these options give people choices. From an HP standpoint, we have the ability to give people the choice. Our recent acquisition of EDS clearly adds the last pillar of choice, given that we have now an outsourcing business, which is significant.

People have a lot of choice, but they quite often find it difficult to make a decision on the best choice. Other people feel that the choice gives them a lot more scope to do things differently, to manage budgets in a different way, and do things more effectively.

The management of all of these sourcing options is a key consideration. Take the example of an organization putting things onto a public cloud.

What I'm hearing from customers is that they want advice on what should they insource, what should they outsource, what should they put in the cloud, and what should they have as a SaaS offering.

They’re still going to have the same requirements from a governance and management standpoint, but it might be a lot harder than having it in-house.

Management requirements on governance around what data is out there, what performance is like, and what scalability is like, are all considerations and discussions that we help with. It can make the whole world a lot more complex for CIOs. Therefore, the management capability that we have around all of those options becomes even more important.

We’re finding that people want advice around the choices. ... What I'm hearing from customers is that they want advice on what should they insource, what should they outsource, what should they put in the cloud, and what should they have as a SaaS offering.

That’s a really important job and an important role for someone like an HP, which actually doesn’t have a bias, because we've got all the options. If we were only a cloud computing or any outsourcing company, we’d be giving customers one option. Our role as a consultant to not only evaluate what is best for those organizations, but what is good for them financially, is a very important part of the role HP can play and should play.

[The solution] becomes more of a management of the service, than management of the infrastructure that develops or delivers the service. So, our role is about, governance, management, and control of the services that are delivered to an organization, rather than the product, power, or the storage that’s delivered to a company.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

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EDS's David Gee on the spectrum of cloud and outsourcing options unfolding before IT architects

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HP's purchase last year of EDS came just as talk of cloud computing options ramped up. So how does long-time outsourcing pioneer EDS fit into a new cloud ecology?

Is EDS, in fact, a cloud provider? And how will IT departments properly factor their decisions on what to keep on-premises in data centers versus placing assets and workloads on someone else's cloud infrastructure?

We pose these and other "fluid sourcing" future questions to David Gee, Vice President of Marketing at EDS, in an interview by me, BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner. It comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas this week.

Here are some excerpts:

One of the fastest ways to ... free up more of your IT spend and spend less on maintenance to drive a transformation or innovation ... is to flip the knob between capital expenditure and operating expenditure and to look at a third party or an outsourcer for some help and guidance.

"[For IT spending] 'flat' is the new 'up,' in terms of what the opportunities are. We're also seeing a recognition that six months is the new 12. How do you get to a faster return on investment (ROI)? Don’t show up with a project that has a 12-, 24-, or 36-month timeframe.

One of the things we hear people at Software Universe talking about is performance and quality testing, and do you need all the resources in-house to be able to do that? Or, if you have peak load, why don’t you use a third party to help you do performance, quality, and security testing and, from a software standpoint, maybe even do that in the cloud. You can either use a third party or have it delivered as a service to you inside of your infrastructure.

In my mind we’re a cloud provider. EDS created the outsourcing industry over 40 years ago. Think about everything that we do today in delivering services to our client base. If you then extend that, those services are effectively cloud-based services, depending on what your definition is. In my mind, we’re absolutely a cloud company.

We’re at the forefront of delivering that in multiple countries, across multiple industries and in some cases, highly mission-critical services for airlines and financial institutions. Do they have a consumer orientation to them? Probably not. In fact, you may not even realize that we're doing that behind the scenes for some of the most well-known brands on the planet.

Cloud means a lot of things to different people. Right now, the objective, particularly for large enterprises, is to experiment to understand what the implications are.

Architecturally, it’s very different, particularly as enterprises want to offer services to their end customers. Equally, how does an enterprise deal with or adopt private cloud infrastructure to be able to offer Web services in an architecturally sound, distributed, and scalable way?

First, we can help in a number of different ways from a consulting standpoint, in terms of how to architect around those things. Second, we can build them for our clients and we do that already today in terms of private cloud infrastructure. And, third is to provide maybe just core infrastructure to third parties, and they then build their clouds to offer to the marketplace overall.

My experience thus far has been that clients are looking for leadership, some direction, and flexibility. Certain things I absolutely want to control and retain within my own firewall. Certain things I'm going to want EDS to help me manage, host, drive down operational cost, and provide some level of innovation -- and to deliver those services as effectively private cloud services to my client base and ultimately to their customers as well.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

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Winning the quality war: HP customers offer case studies on managing application performance

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Quality early in application development sounds nice, but actually making it happen brings significant cost savings, repeatable quality assurance processes, higher user satisfaction, and shorter development cycles. The results reward developers, end users, and IT operators alike.

To better understand the journey to quality assurance for new applications -- and the processes that work best -- BriefingsDirect interviewed IT executives at FICO, Gevity and JetBlue in a podcast discussion moderated by me, Dana Gardner. It comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas this week.

Listen as we hear from Matt Dixon, senior manager of tools and processes at FICO; Vito Melfi, vice president of IT operations at Gevity, a part of TriNet, and HP Award of Excellence winner Sagi Varghese, manger of quality assurance at JetBlue.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

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HP Software marketing head Anton Knolmar delves into creating new IT economies of performance

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IT departments are nowadays having to do more with less, gaining additional productivity while spending less money. It sounds simple, but making it happen is very complex.

How do IT departments and companies approach this problem? How will cloud computing and "fluid sourcing" options help or hinder the process? And how can IT budgets slide while expectations rise that new architectural approaches can be adopted with low risk?

To probe deeper into the harsh new IT economies of performance can be managed, BriefingsDirect sat down with Anton Knolmar, Vice President of Marketing for HP Software & Solutions, for a discussion moderated by me, Dana Gardner. It comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas this week.

Here are some excerpts:

We've just come out of an executive track. We had about 70 people gathered for the discussion. What is at the top of their minds is all about linking IT with the business. This is a story that we've been telling now for more than 10 or 15 years, and the storyline is not over.

They’re still trying to bridge the gap and talk business language, instead of IT language. One the other hand, they're trying as well to look at the emerging trends. What the heck does this cloud means for them? How can you do cloud computing here? Does this bring added value to them? What’s the business outcome they can drive out of those activities?

What companies are facing at the moment is that a lot of these activities that were going on in the past -- utility computing, Adaptive Enterprise, eServices -- failed because they couldn’t be managed, but it was out there on the Web, on the Internet.

Our offerings around the cloud at the moment are governance tools along with the cloud. You can really manage the cloud. You can really secure the cloud. And, you can get the right performance out of the cloud. That’s our offering at the moment to our customers. They can take the first step, get this one right, and move into the cloud environment.

Mitigation of risk will never go away. At the moment, everyone is talking about reduction of costs, but there is always a risk factor attached to it. Hopefully, the outcome will be that a lot of companies can talk about their revenue growth again, moving from 2009 into 2010.

We are ready to drive those three angles. How we can help customers drive revenue growth? How we can help them mitigate the risk? And, on the other side, how can we help them get their costs under control? These are the three angles will be on the table for quite some time.

The developer community, as you said, has different concerns in terms of developing the applications and developing things for the cloud as well. Our approach at this time is that we enable them to have the appropriate developing and testing tools in terms of quality, performance, and security. These are essentially for those people who have to develop applications well for the cloud. Those are blocked in immediately, are ready to go out there, and can be managed across the lifecycle.

Getting the right information at the right place and making the appropriate decisions are still on top of the agenda for lot of our customers at the moment. It’s been the number one issue for quite some time, and I think it will be the number one issue for quite some time.

We have an offering in these four lines of business in HP Software and Solutions. One is, you gather around the Business Intelligence piece. What we are investigating at the moment is really about how can we bring those offerings as more of a direct offering to our customers in terms of purchasing and licensing? How can you bring those offering into kind of a cloud offering?

But, that still needs some further negotiations inside the company, as well, about development products. But that’s definitely an interesting angle.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

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