Proliferating, outmoded applications and data explosion hamper enterprises in innovation, any quick move to cloud computing

A proliferation of on-premises applications, many of them outdated, and the ongoing data explosion are posing serious threats to businesses worldwide, according to a recent survey of companies in Europe and America by Capgemini.

The first annual Application Landscape report found that millions of applications are obsolete and no longer deliver full business value. The result, says Capgemini, is a need to rationalize and retire applications, freeing up valuable resources to drive innovation and future growth, rather than maintain outdated systems.

The sheer number of applications supported – up to 10,000 for global enterprises – combined with an estimated average data growth of five percent per month means applications management is on track to quickly become an issue of real significance. Moreover, as companies move toward the transfer of applications to the cloud, the need for systematic and well-managed application retirement will accelerate.

Outmoded applications

In in-depth interviews with CIOs and IT leaders in the US and Europe, Capgemini found that:

• Some 85 percent say their application portfolios are in need of rationalization
• Almost 60 percent of enterprise companies say they currently support "more" or "far more" applications than are necessary to run their business
  
• Only 4 percent say that every IT system they use is considered to be business critical
  
• Half agree that up to 50 percent of their application portfolio needs to be retired
  
• Another 61 percent say they keep all data beyond its expiration date "just in case"
  
• Also, 56 percent of large companies and enterprises say that half or more of their applications are custom-built, increasing the technical complexity of required platforms and technologies
  
• Only 13 percent say their application development and maintenance teams are aligned. And half (48 percent) say their teams are only in synch for 50 percent of the time or even less.

  Successful application management – achieved through a true lifecycle approach of 'build, deploy, maintain and retire' – can deliver tangible business benefits in tough economic times.

Ron Tolido, CTO at Capgemini for Application Services Continental Europe, said: “Our research reveals that key goals for CIOs are value creation, improving efficiencies and cutting costs. Despite the fact that data archiving and application retirement can result in significant cost savings, process efficiencies and increased agility, it still does not rank high enough on the agenda. This report shows that successful application management – achieved through a true lifecycle approach of 'build, deploy, maintain and retire' – can deliver tangible business benefits in tough economic times.”

In addition to acknowledging the growing importance of this issue, the report also reveals the numerous current barriers to effective application management including: the cost of retirement projects, the lack of immediate ROI, cultural resistance to change, regional differences, the lack of qualified developers to migrate retired application data, and most importantly that applications are not considered a key priority.

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HP updates Information Management Portfolio with holistic approach

Reducing risk. Increasing efficiency. Simplifying business information management. Those are the three goals of HP’s updated Information Management Portfolio -- and the updates are all based on consumer demands.

“Three trends are driving how information is managed,” says June Manley, worldwide product marketing director for HP Information Management. She noted those three trends as the information growth, a lack of ownership around information management, and diverse policies. The results of a March survey Coleman Parkes conducted for HP amplifies those trends. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

According to the survey, information management is at a breaking point for the enterprise:

• 68 percent of enterprises say the content explosion is adding greater complexity to an already complex world and causing significant storage issues and costs.
  
• 59 percent of companies say they are under pressure to cut costs on information-related processes and systems.
  
• 43 percent of enterprises leave it to IT to manage information, while 38 percent leave it to the CEO and board of directors.
  
• 70 percent of companies do not have a holistic approach to managing information.
  
• 73 percent of companies do not have a universal and strictly implemented formal information protection policy, and only 18 percent are planning to implement a policy.

Holistic information management

Updates to HP’s Information Management Portfolio work to address some of these pain points with a holistic approach. Essentially, HP is helping organizations break down information silos with a solution that crosses the information lifecycle, including capture, monitor, protect, retain, find, and implement.

“Rather than basing information management on people -- who are constantly changing -- or infrastructure -- which is increasingly complex and physically dispersed -- the most successful approach is managing the information itself,” Manley says.

You are ensuring the right information is saved and can be found when needed to meet both business and regulatory compliance needs.

“Enterprises need to manage the information throughout its life cycle based on its business value. When you do that, you can expect to increase business efficiency, flexibility and simplicity. You are ensuring the right information is saved and can be found when needed to meet both business and regulatory compliance needs.”

Here’s a brief look at HP’s Information Management portfolio:

• HP Information Management Services delivers an integrated solution for managing information in any phase of its life cycle. HP consulting services offer legal, IT, business and chief information security officers to help establish policies.

• HP Integrated Archive Platform scales to manage up to 1 petabyte of data, 300,000 users, and 20 million e-mail messages per day and supports VMware vSphere.
  
• HP TRIM Enterprise Records Management now offers multi-jurisdictional retention and a new bulk data loading capability. Localizing policies eliminates administrative overhead, reduces costs and simplifies compliance.
  
• HP Database Archiving is now integrated with HP TRIM.
  
• HP Data Protector software now provides Granular Recovery Extension for VMware vSphere, as well as snapshot support for 3PAR and non-HP arrays, at up to 70 percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO). HP Data Protector also adds down-to-the-second snapshot recovery to HP StorageWorks P4000.
  
• HP Data Protector Reporter improves insight into backup operations with enterprise-level, multisite global analysis and reporting. It also offers centralized, automated backup reporting.
  
• HP Storage Essentials software decreases costs for managing physical and virtual enterprise information infrastructure. HP Storage Essentials Backup Manager plug-in for HP Data Protector helps organizations monitor the entire backup process.

HP’s future information management vision

The next phase of HP’s information management vision is to break through dataset silos. Currently, there is information in a records management dataset, information in a backup dataset, and information in an archived dataset. HP is working to help enterprises break away from those dataset silos.

“Our vision is to make it possible to have a single policy to manage, whether it’s in a backup archive or in a records management dataset. You have a single copy that is stored. You have a single compliance retention policy,” Manley says.

“The future vision is a single viewpoint of all information and the ability to find that information. All of the lines disappear with this strategy to leave a single platform, a single viewpoint and a single policy. That’s how information management is going to look in the future.”

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

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Workday Integration Cloud debut raises bar on integration as service, deeply ingrains integration as apps function

Recognizing broad integration as an essential ingredient to modern business agility, Workday today delivered a set of cloud-based integration capabilities to its partner ecosystem and growing stable of software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP users.

The Workday Integration Cloud Platform is joined by a graphical tools suite designed to broaden the use of integration by more types of workers so they -- as well as IT -- can build and deploy the desired integrations that best support processes among and between businesses.

Workday is using its SaaS-based enterprise solutions for human resources, payroll, and financial management as a beachhead for popularizing integration platform as a service (iPaaS). The goal is to allow for complex, custom integrations to be built using Workday tools and then be deployed and managed in the Workday Cloud. [Disclosure: Workday is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Opening up integration functions to more users on the front lines of business-to-business requirements empowers those workers. But providing those integration capabilities on a common enterprise cloud environment -- one that exploits enterprise service bus (ESB) technology and SOA benefits -- gives the users freedom without risk of chaos or lack of control and management.

Incidentally, I'll be on a live webinar this Wednesday at 2 pm ET on the general topic of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and cloud-based computing approaches. Sign up to watch the panel discussion.

Early advocacy of iPaaS

An early advocate for the "integration as a service" concept, Workday is delivering on that vision in a way that could rapidly broaden its appeal beyond human resources management (HRM) and enterprise ERP and into more general cloud services. The strong integration capabilities bolsters the appeal of Workday's applications services, draws in more service partners, and sets the stage for providing wider integration capabilities.

While business-to-business integration is a key requirement for how companies support their employees -- with complex interactions across suppliers for payroll, benefits, and recruitment -- the data and access control in human resources systems proves an essential ingredient for making general integrations become more automated and safe. The new cloud integration services and tools allow customers and partners to build, deploy, run and manage custom integrations for the numerous systems and applications that connect to and from Workday.

The bottleneck of IT-administered integrations based on installed integration platforms does not seem up to this task.

But Workday executives say that "the sky is the limit" on where cloud-based integration -- that is part and parcel with applications services -- can go. And the timing is pretty hot. That's because we’re seeing that companies are focused on the business process level more, and that the resources, assets, participants and interfaces that support those processes are more varied and distributed than ever.

The challenge, then, is not just middleware integrations amid a more complex and dynamic environment, but of integrating more types of services and resources from more places by more people. The bottleneck of IT-administered integrations based on installed integration platforms does not seem up to this task. The integration requirements need to shift right along with the elements that support “boundaryless” processes.

Beat the complexity

Additionally, the historic separations of data integration, application integration and web services interoperability and access need to come together better. Those tasked with crafting and adapting business processes need to architect across the domains of integration, not be hobbled by the complexity and incompatibility among and between them. Logic and data need to play well together regardless of where they reside or how their underlying technology behaves.

In order to accomplish these new requirements, an uber integration capability that can be leveraged by various IT constituents amid an ecosystem – not installed by any or all those IT environments – appears the best and fastest approach. An integration platform in the cloud that can be leveraged and managed with enterprise-caliber security and access control at the process level can solve these vexing problems, for data, process, workflow, collaboration and traditional integration methods.

Cloud-based integration can turn IT into a rapid enabler of process innovation, rather than a costly bottleneck.

Embedding the integrations as core features of the common applications architecture also frees up the lock-in from the database integration hairball that often builds around on-premises n-tier architectures. The brittle nature of such custom integrations has also driven up the cost of computing significantly, while holding back companies from adopting new technology at a business pace, rather than an integrations pace.

That's why iPaaS and a multi-tenancy cloud environment can be a powerful productivity enhancer: businesses can far better create relationships between their organizations and pursue process innovations without the need to adjust a vast hairball of legacy software. Cloud-based integration can turn IT into a rapid enabler of process innovation, rather than a costly bottleneck.

Furthermore, the need to address people, process and technology concerns is cliche for all IT activities, but perhaps most important for how process integrations really work. Who gets to integrate what and how, and who can give permissions for cross-organizational interactions has been a thorny issue. Workday's approach to cloud integration building leverages permissions and policy-driven access and governance to make integration crafting a more mainstream corporate competency.

Benefits of multi-tenancy

Because Workday's SaaS offerings are architected on multi-tenancy operational model, whereby all users and partners to the Workday services and applications are in synch on versions and updates, integrations can be made and amended with far less complexity. A major deterrent for legacy-based EAI and middleware integrations is in the risk and complexity of making integrations that break when its time to upgrade apps or platforms.

And while APIs and lightweight connectors have been a huge benefit in recent years, the APIs interactions are not always enough for enterprise-level process integrations. There's also the problem of API sprawl, and the need to manage the interactions holistically and comprehensively.

It's the processes, after all, that count most and should be easy to safely make, remake and iterate on.

In a nutshell, Workday is working to break the integration-platform-database-applications vise that can hinder and bind enterprises and governments. The relations need to go deeper than APIs. Solving this is no small feat, but it may be one of the greatest long-term benefits of the cloud computing model, both in terms of cost and agility. It's the processes, after all, that count most and should be easy to safely make, remake and iterate on.

It's time that agile integration become a feature of more applications, rather than a hand-crafted after-market exercise at the complex database and middleware tiers. And if that can happen quicker and better as a cloud-based iPaaS model, I'm all for it.

Collaboration moves to services level

The need to effectively cobble together services, data, participants and logic and management in business processes needs to go beyond the over-burdened IT team. Social media trends show us that productivity comes from allowing individuals to reach out and craft new and better ways of doing things, of being collaborative wherever and however they can to support their goals.

Already we’re seeing self-motivated users integrate through outside entities, Facebook and Google apps being a prime examples. They are also accessing their own apps and data via web and mobile apps and via app stores. More data is being generated and stored in a variety of clouds and/or partners, and so the need to integrate the data from and amid third parties is an imperative, especially to gain comprehensive analytics. We need to both manage and examine Big Data as well as Far-Flung Data. Integration is a huge part of that.

As I mentioned, I'll be on a live webinar this Wednesday at 2 pm ET on the general topic of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and cloud-based computing approaches. Sign up to watch the panel discussion.

You may also be interested in:

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Enterprise architecture’s quest for its proper identity

This guest post comes courtesy of Len Fehskens, Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group.

By Len Fehskens

It is my impression, from what I read and hear in many enterprise and business architecture blogs and forums, that the enterprise architecture (EA) community comprises multiple factions, and which faction you are part of depends on how you answer two questions. These are fundamental questions that I suspect many in the EA community (present company excepted, of course) have not asked themselves explicitly, or, if they have, considered why they would answer them one way or the other.

I believe the answers to these questions color the way we talk and think about enterprise architecture, and until the EA community as a whole comes to a consensus regarding their answers, we risk talking past one another, using the same words but meaning significantly different things. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The two questions are:

• Is enterprise architecture primarily about IT or is it about the entire enterprise?
  
  
• Is enterprise architecture a “hard” discipline or a “soft” discipline?

My answers:

Enterprise architecture ought to be about the entire enterprise, because that’s what the name implies. If it’s really about IT, it ought to be called enterprise IT architecture. Whether or not you believe it’s possible or desirable to apply architectural thinking to the entire enterprise doesn’t change the fact that we ought to name things honestly. And when we name architectures, it seems reasonable to me to expect that if an architecture is implemented primarily in the [x] domain, it ought to be called an [x] architecture. Adding two more syllables (IT) to the seven (en-ter-prise ar-chi-tec-ture), or inserting two characters (IT) in the acronym (EA), isn’t an unbearable burden. Say it – “enterprise IT architecture.” Spell it – “EITA.”

Rarely has the cost of honesty been so modest. If you mean the architecture of an enterprise’s IT assets and capabilities, say EITA. Don’t say EA unless you really mean the architecture of the entire enterprise, not just its IT assets. Even if you consider the needs of the enterprise, or the structure of the enterprise’s processes, if the implementation of the architecture you’re developing will be mostly in the IT domain, it’s EITA, not EA. Even if you believe that architectural thinking can be meaningfully applied only to the IT function of an enterprise, it’s still EITA, not EA.

Soft discipline

My answer to the second question is that I believe enterprise architecture, as scoped above, is a “soft” discipline. I think talking about “manufacturing” or “engineering” enterprises is just silly; it’s another example of the kind of aggrandizement that misnaming enterprise IT architecture represents.

Even calling an enterprise a “system” is risky. We use the word system in two senses. One is a very broadly inclusive idea, often expressed as “everything is a system,” in that many things can be viewed as assemblies or aggregates of smaller components. This concept of system is useful because it encourages us to take a holistic, rather than reductionist, perspective, acknowledging that the relationships between the pieces are as important as the individual pieces themselves. The other sense of “system” is the one engineers use – a system is an artifact that has been methodically designed and built from interconnected components. Calling something a system in the first sense doesn’t make it a system in the second sense; it doesn’t make its behavior and performance analytically tractable or deterministic.

It is simply not possible to specify an enterprise as completely, and to the same level of detail, as it is to specify a building or a locomotive or an airplane. And, for the purpose of enterprise architecture, i.e., to ensure that an enterprise’s assets and capabilities are aligned with its vision, mission and strategy, it isn’t necessary to do so, even if we could.

It may be possible to do so for EITA, and maybe that’s where the idea that the same can be said of the enterprise as a whole comes from.

Calling something a system in the first sense doesn’t make it a system in the second sense; it doesn’t make its behavior and performance analytically tractable or deterministic.

If the enterprise as a whole is a system, it’s a people-intensive system, and as such one might as well talk about manufacturing or engineering people.

After all, why do we call them “enterprises”? Consider the first definition of the noun “enterprise” in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A design of which the execution is attempted; a piece of work taken in hand, an undertaking; chiefly, and now exclusively, a bold, arduous or momentous undertaking.” Clearly implicit in this definition is that this is something undertaken by people. There’s a nod to this reality when we refer to an enterprise as a “sociotechnical system”, but the “socio” too often gets short shrift while the “technical” gets the bulk of the attention.

Yes, people play a role in other “systems” – they live and work in buildings, they drive locomotives and pilot airplanes. But people don’t just interact with an enterprise; in a fundamental sense, they are the enterprise. And unlike buildings and locomotives and airplanes, enterprises are continually adapting themselves, in the homeostatic sense of maintaining their integrity and identity in the face of internal and external change, and in the sense of deliberately repurposing themselves in response to such change.

How would you answer these questions, and why would you answer them that way? Our answers strongly influence what we believe is within the purview of enterprise architecture, how we address that scope, and what we imagine we can accomplish by doing so.

This guest post comes courtesy of Len Fehskens, Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group.

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Mobile enablement presents challenges, opportunities as enterprises retool apps for the future now

This guest post comes courtesy of Stefan Andreasen, Founder/CTO, Kapow Software.

By Stefan Andreasen

Mobile adoption rates are on the rise and if market reports are any indication, growth rates aren’t slowing down anytime soon. Consumers and employees alike are the driving forces behind mobile adoption spurred by the evolution in mobile device capabilities along with the speed of mobile networks.

A recent Morgan Stanley research study predicts that sales of smartphones will overtake PC sales (including both desktops and notebooks) in the next two years, supporting the demands of our always-connected society. [Disclosure: Kapow Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The ubiquity of smartphones and more than 300,000 mobile apps available on Apple’s App Store, coupled with the ease and convenience of mobile computing is putting pressure on IT to mobile enable B2C and B2E applications to facilitate organizational efficiency and keep up with consumer and employee demand for mobile access to applications and content.

When it comes to enabling mobile access to mission-critical enterprise apps, companies have made far less progress.

It’s no surprise that millions of employees around the world are bringing their smartphones and mobile devices to work, resetting workplace expectations to have always-on access to the instantly available business apps that they’ve grown accustomed to from their personal lives.

According to a survey conducted by the Yankee Group, 90 percent of organizations surveyed have already enabled smartphone access to corporate email and PIM. Yet when it comes to enabling mobile access to mission-critical enterprise apps, companies have made far less progress, with only 30 percent of those surveyed providing smartphone access to customer relationship management (CRM), 20 percent to enterprise resource planning (ERP), and 18 percent to sales force automation (SFA).

CIOs scrambling

IT leaders and industry analysts are noticing CIOs scrambling to mobile-enable legacy applications to make them available on smartphones, tablets, and even GPS/navigation devices. And, IT departments are feeling the growing pressure to get this done in a matter of months -- to not only stay ahead of the competition, but in many cases, just to keep up.

One of the main challenges companies need to overcome when enabling mobile device access to existing data or legacy applications is the lack of “mobile ready” web service application programming interfaces (APIs) for existing applications.

Adding a service-level interface to a legacy application is a complex development project that typically involves a full or extensive rewrite of the existing legacy application. A common problem is that throughout the years an application has been written and modified by multiple developers, which are likely to have left the company, along with their institutional knowledge about the application. This situation had led many companies to basically re-write the application, which can take several years of coding and insurmountable resources and budget.

This situation had led many companies to basically re-write the application, which can take several years of coding and insurmountable resources and budget

It’s essential that organizations evaluate these important factors when embarking on a mobile enablement project:

• Do the applications you want to mobile-enable have documented APIs?
  
• What components and features of your business application do you want to mobile enable?
  
• How are you taking into account form factor?
  
• How will you deal with business logic and processes too complicated to be executed on a mobile device with a limited keyboard, where air time needs to be controlled, and server round trips need to be minimized?
  
• How will you deal with service interruptions requiring the ability to queue processes for later execution on the back end?
  
• Will you be combining data from multiple apps into one mobile application?
  
• What mobile platforms do you need to support?
  
• To what extent will you want to modify or extend your mobile application in the near future?

The best way to facilitate mobile enablement projects is with focused, goal oriented, up-front planning that doesn’t underestimate the complexity of the process, especially when dealing with traditional data integration techniques.

What many companies aren’t aware of is that there is an alternative approach to developing custom-built, native apps that doesn’t require dependency on pre-existing APIs.

Known as “browser-based data integration,” this emerging approach makes existing business applications and data “mobile ready” by allowing organizations to wrap their existing web application without changing the systems that are already there.

By creating a new web service interface “wrapper” without re-writing any of the existing code, mobile access to enterprise B2C and B2E applications can be possible in days or weeks, not months or years.

It’s no surprise that mobile initiatives are now a top priority for every enterprise. The challenge is to approach these projects as swiftly and efficiently as possible to stay relevant and productive. By combining the proper up-front planning process with browser-based mobile enablement technologies, companies can quickly provide their mobile users with the data and apps they so desperately want and need.

This guest post comes courtesy of Stefan Andreasen, Founder/CTO, Kapow Software.

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New HP Premier Services closes gap between single point of accountability and software-to-cloud sprawl

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

Welcome to a sponsored podcast discussion on how new models for IT support services are required to provide a single point of accountability when multiple and increasingly complex software implementations are involved.

Nowadays, the focal point for IT operational success lies not so much in just choosing the software and services mixture, but also in the management and support of these systems and implementations and the SLAs as an ecosystem -- and that ecosystem must be managed comprehensively with flexibility and for the long-term.

Long before cloud and hybrid computing models become a concern, the challenge before IT is how to straddle complexity and how to corral and manage -- as a lifecycle -- the vast software implementations already on-premises.

Of course, more of these workloads are supported these days by virtualized containers and often by a service-level commitment. IT needs to get a handle on supporting multiparty software and virtualized instances, along with the complex integrations and custom extensions across and between the applications.

Who are you going to call when things go wrong or when maintenance needs to affect one element of the stack without hosing the rest? How do you manage and broker at the service level agreement (SLA), or multiple SLA, level?

More than ever, finger pointing on who is accountable or responsible amid a diverse and fast-moving software environment cannot be allowed, not in an Instant-On Enterprise.

Not only does IT need a one-hand-to-shake value on comprehensive support more than ever, but IT departments may need to increasingly opt to outsource more of the routine operational tasks and software support to free up their IT knowledge resources and experts for transformation, security initiatives, and new business growth projects.

To learn how this can be better managed, we've tapped an executive from HP Software to examine an expanding set of new HP Premier Services designed to combine custom software support and consulting expertise to better deliver managed support outcomes across entire software implementations.

Anand Eswaran, Vice President, Global Professional Services at HP Software, is interviewed by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Eswaran: We're offering HP Premier Services across the entire portfolio for all solutions we put in front of customers. People may ask what's different. "Why are you able to do this today? The customer problem you are talking about sounds pretty native. Why haven’t you done this forever?"

If you look at a software organization, the segmentation between support and services is very discrete, whether inside the company or whether it is support working with services organization outside the company, and that’s the heart of the problem.

What we're doing here is a pretty big step. You hear about "services convergence" an awful lot in the industry. People think that’s the way to go. What they mean by services convergence is that all the services you need across the customer lifecycle merges to become one, and that’s what we are doing here.

We're merging what was customer support, which is a call center, and that’s why they can't take accountability for a solution. They are good at diagnostics, but they're not good at full-fledged solutions. They're merging that organization.

What that organization brings in is scale, infrastructure, and absolute global data center coverage. We're merging that with the Professional Services (PS) organization. When the rubber hits the road, PS is the organization, or the people, who deploy these solutions.

In my view, and in HP Software’s view, this is a fairly groundbreaking solution.

By merging those two, you get the best of both worlds, because you get scale, coverage, infrastructure, capability. And by virtue of a very, very extensive PS team within HP Software, we operate in 80 or 90 countries. We have coverage worldwide. That's how we're able to provide the service where we take accountability for this whole solution.

Converged IT support and professional services

What we're announcing and launching and what we're talking about is enhancing and elevating that support from just being a product to actually being the entire project and the solution for the customer. This is where, when we deploy a solution for a customer, which involves our technology, our software, for the most part, a service element to actually make it a reality, we will support the full solution.

That's the principal thing now that will allow us to not just talk about business outcomes when we go through the selling lifecycle, but it will also allow us to make those business outcomes a reality by taking full accountability for it. That is at the heart of what we are announcing -- extending customer support from a product to the project, and from a product to the full solution.

If I walk through what HP Premier Services is, that probably will shed more light on it. As I explain HP Premier Services, there are two dimensions to it.

The first dimension is the three choice points, and the first of those is what has classically been customer support. We just call it Foundation, where customer support supports the product. You have a phone line you can call. That doesn't change. That's always been there.

The second menu item in the first dimension is what we term as Premier Response, and this menu item is where we actually take that support for the product and extend it to the full project and the full solution. This is new and this is the first level of the extension we are going to offer to the customer.

The third menu item takes it even further. We call it Premier Advisory. In addition to just supporting the product, which has always been there, or just extending it to support a solution and the project -- both of those things are reactive -- we can engage with the customer to be proactive about support.

That's proactive as in not just reacting to an issue, but preempting problems and preempting issues, based on our knowledge of all the customers and how they have deployed the solution. We can advise the customer, whether it's patches, whether it's upgrades, whether it's other issues we see, or whether it's a best practice they need to implement. We can get proactive, so we preempt issues. Those are the three choice points on the first dimension.

We make anything and everything to do with the back end -- infrastructure, upgrades, and all of that -- completely transparent to the customer.

The second dimension is a different way to look at how we're extending Premier Services for the benefit of the customer. Again, the first choice point in the second dimension is called Premier Business. We have a named account manager who will work with the customer across the entire lifecycle. This is already there right now.

The second part of the second dimension is very new, and large enterprise customers will derive a lot of value from it. It's called Premier TeamExtend. Not only we will be do the first three choice points of foundation, support for the whole solution, and proactive support, we will extend and take control for the customer of the entire operation of that solution.

At that point, you almost mimic a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, but if there are reasons a customer wouldn't want to do SaaS and wouldn't want to do managed services, but want to host it on-site and have the full solution hosted in the customer premises, we will still deploy the solution, have them realize the full benefit of it, and run their solution and operate their solution.

Customer choice

We're not just giving them one thing, which they're pretty much forced to take, but if it's a very mature customer, with extensive capability on all the products and IT strategies that they're putting into place, they don’t need to go to TeamExtend. They can just maybe take a Foundation with just the first bit of HP Premier Services, which is Premier Response. That’s all they need to take.

Choice is a very big deal for us, so that customers can actually make the decision and we can recommend to them what they should be doing.

If there is an enterprise that is so focused on competitive differentiation in the marketplace and they don't want to worry about maintaining the solutions, then they could absolutely go to Premier TeamExtend, which offers them the best of all worlds.

By virtue of that, we make anything and everything to do with the back end -- infrastructure, upgrades, and all of that -- transparent to the customer. All they care about is the business outcome. If it's a solution we have deployed to cut outages by 3 percent and get service levels up-time up to 99.99 percent, that's what they get.

How we do it, the solutions involved, the service involved, and how we're managing it is completely transparent. The fundamental headline there is that it allows the customer to go back to 70 percent innovation and 30 percent maintenance, and completely flip the current ratio.

Impact of cloud solutions in the support mix

The reality is that cloud is still nebulous. Different companies have different interpretations of cloud. Customers are still a little nervous about going into the cloud, because we're still not completely sure about quality, security, and all of those things. So, this is the first or second step you take before you get comfortable to get to the cloud.

What we're able to do here is take complete control of that complexity and make it transparent to the customer -- and in a way -- to quasi-deliver the same outcomes which a cloud can deliver. Cloud is a trend, and we're making sure that we actually address it before we get there.

A lot of these services are also things we're providing to the cloud service providers. So, in a way, we're making sure that people who offer that cloud service are able to leverage our services to make sure that they can offer the same outcomes back to the customer. So, it’s a full lifecycle.

When we deploy a solution for a customer, which involves our technology, our software, for the most part, a service element to actually make it a reality, we will support the full solution.

In my view, and in HP Software’s view, this is a fairly groundbreaking solution. If I were to characterize everything we talked about in three words, the first would be simplify. The second would be proactive -- how can we be proactive, versus reacting to issues. And, how can we, still under the construct of the first two, offer the customers choice.

We've been in limited launch mode since June of last year. We wanted to make sure that we engage with a limited set of customers, make sure this really works, work out all the logistics, before we actually do a full public general availability launch. So, it is effective immediately.

We can also offer the same service to all the outsourcing providers or cloud service providers we work with. If you feel you're bouncing around between different organizations, as you try to get control of your IT infrastructure, whether if you work with an external SI and you do not feel that there is enough in sync happening between support and an external SI and you feel frustrated about it, this falls right in the sweet spot.

If you feel that you need to start moving away from just projects to business outcome based solutions you need to deploy in your IT organization, this falls right in the sweet spot for it.

If you feel that you want to spend less of your time maintaining solutions and more of your time thinking about the core business your company is in and making sure that your innovation is able to capture a bigger market share and bigger business benefits for the company you work for, and you want some organization to take accountability for the operations and maintenance of the stack you have, this falls right in the sweet spot for it.

Smaller companies

The last thing, interestingly enough, is that we see uptake from even smaller and medium-sized companies, where they do not have enough people, and they do not want to worry about maintenance of the stack based on the capability or the experience of the people they have on these different solutions -- whether it's operations, whether it's applications, whether it is security across the entire HP software stack. So, if you're on any of those four or five different use cases, this falls right in the sweet spot for all of them.

So, in summary, at the heart of it what we're trying to do is simplify the complexity of how a customer or an IT organization deals with the complexity of their stack.

The second thing is that an IT organization is always striving to flip the ratio of innovation and operations. As you look today, it is 70 percent operations and 30 percent innovation. If you get that single point of accountability, they can focus more on innovation and supporting the business needs, so that their company can take advantage of greater market share, versus operations and maintaining the stack they already have.

IT complexity is increasing by the day. Having multiple vendors accountable for different parts of the IT strategy and IT implementation is a huge problem. Because of the complexity of the solution and because multiple organizations are accountable for different discrete parts of the solution, the customer is left holding the bag on to figure out how to navigate the complexity of the software organization. How do you pinpoint exactly where the problem is and then engage the right party?

We actually start to engage with them in solving a business problem for them. We paint the ROI that we could get.

Find out more about the new HP Premier Services launch.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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Red Hat introduces JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1 with enterprise-class open source data virtualization

Red Hat today announced the availability of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1, which includes new extensions for data services integration.

JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.1, a superset of JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1, is an open source data virtualization and integration platform that includes tools to create data services out of multiple data stores with different formats, presenting information to applications and business processes in an easy-to-use service. 
These data services become reusable assets across the enterprise.

We're beginning to see a real marketplace for open source-based integration and middleware, and in many ways the open source versions are advancing the value and variety of these services beyond where the commercial products can quickly tread. The advantages of community development and open source sharing really shine when multiple and fast-adapting integrations are involved.

What's more, as cloud and SaaS services become more common, ways of integrating data and applications assets -- regardless or origins -- will need to keep pace. Standardization and inclusiveness of integration points and types may be much better served by a community approach, and open source licenses, than waiting for a commercial product upgrade, or costly custom integrations.

I also see enterprises, SMBs, ISVs and cloud providers working to elevate the concept of "applications" more to the business processes level. And that means that decomposing and re-composing and orchestrating of services -- dare I say via SOA principles -- becomes essential, again, regardless of services, data and assets origins.

Lastly, the interest and value in Big Data benefits is also roiling the landscape. The integration of data then becomes tactical, strategic, imperative and at the heart of what drives an agile and instant-on enterprise.

“Being able to integrate and synchronize useful information out of a wide range of disparate data sources remains a serious stumbling block to the enterprise,” said Craig Muzilla, vice president and general manager, Middleware BusinessUnit at Raleigh, N.C.-based Red Hat. “JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.1 is a flexible, standards-based integration and data virtualization solution built on JBossEnterprise SOA Platform that delivers more efficient and cost-effective application and data integration techniques, allowing enterprises to more fully realize the value of their data.”

All businesses draw upon many different data sources and formats to run their applications. In many cases these data sources are hardwired into applications through data access frameworks that reduce agility and make control and compliance difficult. This data architecture counters the agility and cost-savings benefits delivered by service-oriented architectures (SOA) by forcing redundant data silos for each application.

Multiple data stores

Data Services Platform 5.1 aims to address these problems by virtualizing multiple data stores simultaneously, delivering data services consumable by multiple applications and business processes. By leveraging the integrated JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1, the information delivered using data virtualization can more easily be integrated into the business via the enterprise service bus (ESB) included with the platform. 


JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1 includes:

• Apache CXF web services stack
  
• JBoss Developer Studio 4.0, which features updated SOA tooling for ESB and data virtualization
  
• A technology preview of WS-BPEL, which delivers service orchestration
  
• A technology preview of Apache Camel Gateway, which is a popular enterprise integration pattern framework that brings an expanded set of adapters to JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform
  
• Updated certifications -- Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6, Windows 2008, IBM, JDK, among others

  Being able to integrate and synchronize useful information out of a wide range of disparate data sources remains a serious stumbling block to the enterprise.

JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform follows the JBoss Open Choice strategy of offering a choice of integration architectures, messaging platforms, and deployment options. Also, both JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1 and JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform 5.1 are designed to leverage past and present solutions, such as SOA integration, through the ESB, event-driven architecture (EDA) and data virtualization, while building a foundation to support future integration paradigms, such as integrating cloud, hybrid, and on-premise data, services and applications.

Along with JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform 5.1, Red Hat is offering a new two-day training course, JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform – ESB Implementation, which is focused on developing and deploying ESB providers and services using JBoss Developer Studio and JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform.

For more information on JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform, visit http://www.jboss.com/products/platforms/soa/.

For more information on JBoss Enterprise Data Services Platform, visit http://www.jboss.com/products/platforms/dataservices/.

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GigaSpaces announces new product for enterprise PaaS and ISV SaaS enablement

GigaSpaces Technologies announced today the upcoming release of its second-generation cloud-enablement platform, which offers an architecture aimed specifically at enterprise platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and independent software vendor (ISV) software-as-a-service (SaaS) enablement.

The addition of the newest GigaSpaces cloud-enablement platform broadens a growing field of vendors that are bringing to market the picks and shovels of the cloud gold rush. Targeting SaaS ISVs and the PaaS value makes a lot of sense, as this is where the services are being forged that will need to find cloud homes, be them on-premises, public or hybrids.

In the history of IT, no one got fired for helping good apps get built quickly and well, and deployed widely and openly. That goes for both ISVs and for custom enterprise apps. You just don't get to see that value truly delivered too often. But perhaps the transition to cloud and the need for ISVs to be seduced with openness, what GigaSpaces calls "silo free", will allow for new round of choice and productivity.

Expanding on the current GigaSpaces' solutions, the new products are include private and hybrid cloud-based offerings:

• "Silo-free" architecture that is a converged for more application and data environments, enabling improved cross-stack elasticity, multi-tenancy, unified SLA-driven performance, central management and simplifying development and operational processes.
  
  
• User, data and application policy-driven multi-tenancy management from the web tier down to the customer and data object levels. This provides better monitoring through a console that includes views into control, security, and visibility over the multi-tenancy aspects of the application.
  
  
• Built-in DevOps support helps uniformly manage and automate the lifecycle of the application middleware and its resources, reducing operational and development complexity, says GigaSpaces.
  
  
• Out-of-the-box third-party middleware management (e.g. Tomcat, Cassandra, JMS) that helps automate and manage application middleware services during deployment and production.
  
  
• Portability, multi-language and multi-middleware support, along with integration with existing processes and systems for private, public, and hybrid clouds.

Silo-free architecture

The platform has already been integrated with major strategic partners in the cloud arena, says GigaSpaces, with enterprises and SaaS providers using GigaSpaces cloud enablement in such industries as financial services, e-commerce, online gaming, healthcare, business process management, analytics, and telecommunications.

This new product offers a field-proven technology, minimizing the risks associated with migrating to the cloud, making former ‘mission impossibles’ very possible indeed.

In addition, the solution has been integrated with leading cloud-focused technologies with such partners Cisco and Citrix.

The GigaSpaces ISV SaaS and enterprise PaaS enablement platform is scheduled to be released in Q2 2011. All the new cloud-enablement features will be available to existing customers already using GigaSpaces eXtreme Application Platform (XAP) solutions for enterprise scaling as easily integrated add-ons.

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