HP's IT Performance Suite empowers IT leaders with unified view into total operations, costs

The IT cobbler's kids finally have their own shoes.

Some 20 years into enterprise resource planning (ERP), whereby IT made business performance metrics and business intelligence (BI) a science for driving the modern corporation, ERP and BI for IT is finally at hand.

HP today unveiled a new suite of software designed to measure and improve IT performance at a comprehensive level via an IT system of record approach. The HP IT Performance Suite gives CIOs the ability to optimize application development, infrastructure and operations management, security, information management, financial planning, and overall IT administration.

The suite and its views into operations via accurate metrics, rather than a jumble of spreadsheets, also sets up the era of grasping true IT costs at the business process level, and therefore begins empirical costs-benefits analysis to properly evaluate hybrid computing models. Knowing your current costs -- in total and via discrete domains -- allows executives to pick the degree to which SaaS, cloud and outsourcing form the best bet for their company.

Included with the suite is an IT Executive Scorecard that provides visibility in critical performance indicators at cascading levels of IT leadership. It's founded on the open IT data model with built-in capabilities to integrate data from multiple sources, including third parties to deliver a single holistic view of ongoing IT metrics. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP has identified 150 standard, best-in-class key performance indicators (KPIs), 50 of which are included in the Executive Scorecard as a starting dashboard. KPIs are distributed in customizable dashboards that provide real-time, role-based performance insights to technology leadership, allowing alignment across common goals for an entire IT organization.

"With this we can leverage our human capital better," said Alexander Pasik, PhD, CIO at the IEEE, based in Piscataway, NJ. "The better automation you can apply to IT operations, the better. It frees us up to focus on the business drivers."

Lifecycle approach

The Performance Suite uses HP's lifecycle approach to software development and management and integrates industry standards such as ITIL.

The first solution to be offered in the suite is the CIO Standard Edition, which includes the Executive Scorecard, along with financial planning and analysis, project and portfolio management (PPM), and asset manager modules. This edition automatically integrates data from the modules to provide more than 20 best-practice KPIs covering financial and project health, enabling the optimization of IT performance from a business investment point of view.

"Our use of IT is about driving the actual business," said Pasik, who is adopting elements of the suite and looks forward to putting the scorecard to use soon. "We need to measure IT overall. We will have legitimate metrics on internal operations."

The scorecard can be very powerful at this time in computing, said Piet Loubser, HP senior director of product marketing, because the true capital expenses versus operations expenses for IT can be accurately identified. This, in turn, allows for better planning, budgeting and transitioning to IT shared services and cloud models. Such insight also allows IT to report to the larger organization with authority on its costs and value.

Using the scorecard, said Loubser, IT executives can quickly answer with authority two hitherto-fore vexing questions: Is IT on budget, and is IT on time?

What's especially intriguing for me is the advent of deeper BI for IT, whereby data warehouses of the vast store of IT data can be assembled and analyzed. There is a treasure trove of data and insights into how business operate inside of the IT complex.

Applying BI best practices, using pre-built data models, and developing ongoing reference metrics on business processes to the IT systems that increasingly reflect the business operations themselves portends great productivity and agility benefits. Furthermore, getting valid analysis on IT operations allows for far better planning on future data center needs, modernization efforts, applications lifecycle management, and comparing and contrasting for hybrid models adoption ... or not.

For more information, visit the suite's HP website, www.hp.com/go/itperform.

The announcement of the HP IT Performance Suite comes less than a week before HP's massive Discover conference in Las Vegas, where additional significant news is expected. I'll be doing a series of on-site podcasts from the conference on HP user case studies and on the implications and analysis of the news and trends. Look for them on this blog or BriefingsDirect partner site.

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Partnerpedia enables enterprise app stores to build better applications marketplace for ISVs, service providers, mobile business ecosystems

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Request an app marketplace demo. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

As enterprises and most business users rapidly adopt smartphones and make them mission-critical to their work and lives, tablets are fast on their heels as a similar major disruptor. These fast-moving mobile trends together are also escalating demand for enterprise app stores.

The App Store is rapidly gaining admiring adopters, pioneered by Apple, thanks to its promise of reducing cost of distribution and of updates -- and also of creating whole new revenue streams and even deeper user relationships. RIM, Apple’s iOS, and Google Android devices are rapidly changing the way the world does business ... and the app store model is changing the way the world does software.

App stores work well for both buyers and sellers. The users are really quite happy with paying for what they have on the spot, as long as that process is quick, seamless, and convenient. Vendors, service providers, and communication service providers should therefore explore how such stores can be created quickly and efficiently to strike, as it were, while the app store iron is hot.

So the onus is now on a variety of business service providers and enterprises to come up with some answers for app stores of their own and to serve their employees, customers, and partner ecosystems in new ways. This can't be done haphazardly. The new app stores also must stand up to the rigors of business-to-business (B2B) commerce requirements, not just consumer-driven games.

To learn more about how the enterprise app store market will shape up, BriefingsDirect assembled a panel to delve into the market and opportunity for enterprise app stores, and to find out how they could be created quickly and efficiently. [Disclosure: Partnerpedia is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The experts included Michele Pelino, a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research; Mark Sochan, the CEO of Partnerpedia, and Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. The panel was moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Maybe you could paint a picture of what's going on with business applications, now that we have seen the app store model really pick up and become attractive to consumers.

Pelino: Our surveys say that about 30 percent of enterprises -- that’s medium, large, as well as small enterprises -- are using app stores do deploy some of their applications at some level. It’s not that they're doing everything that way today. That’s the early stage of this, because this is an evolutionary path. It started on the consumer side and now it’s going into the enterprise.

... It’s really important to take a step back and recognize how important mobility has become to enterprises overall, as they are interacting with their employees and their customers and their partners and providers as well. ... We do surveys at Forrester of enterprises in both North America and Europe to better understand those priorities and how mobility fits into overall technology initiatives. We find that three of the top priorities that are being focused on by many enterprises are related to mobility.

Mobility includes many types of workers and applications that address not just the traditional email/calendaring applications, which are widely deployed by most companies, but is also pushing those applications down into line of business worker types of applications, which are tied to particular types of employees in an organization.

They're applications that may be designed for the sales team, customer service, support, or marketing. They also might be applications that are tied to the needs of particular vertical industry’s logistics or supply chain management or enterprise asset management types of applications.

The other thing that’s driving some of this momentum is that individuals, not just employees, are going out and buying lots of different smartphone devices and mobile devices. ... tablets, slates, and different types of smartphones. So, this momentum isn’t just happening within the corporation. It’s actually happening outside of that, and it's what we would call the consumerization of IT.

This means that many individuals, consumers, are driving requirements into the corporation and into the IT organization to get new types of applications on their devices, whether those devices are personally owned or ones that the corporation has as well.

App store momentum

One of the things to think about, when you are doing an app store, is to recognize that there's a lot of momentum around app stores in general. All the different device manufacturers have application stores tied initially to a consumer-oriented perspective.

The momentum around those app stores has driven corporations to start thinking about what they can do to more effectively and efficiently support their requirements around applications.

The thing with corporations is that IT organizations still want to control which version of the applications are in there and what types of apps an employee might have access to in a corporate environment, as opposed to what they might be doing in their personal world. Security is always a key issue here.

All of these things are really driving the need for these application stores -- but at an enterprise level. More and more applications are not just coming from what the IT organization wants to put out there, but also line-of-business workers.

By implementing these application stores, I, as an individual employee with a particular role will have access to certain applications. Another employee may have access to other applications that are tied to their role in the organization. And you could broaden that concept out to interacting with partners, suppliers, and customers as well.

The IT group is getting pushed by the end users and organizations that have become very comfortable with how they can search, browse, try, download, and purchase applications.

... More enterprises are dealing with that pain-point of the complexity of getting these applications out there, of having to have some control over which version, monitoring them, tracking what's going on with the apps, ensuring that everybody is getting the application that they should ... or not.

... What we're seeing now is that some of these key drivers are coming together for large, medium, small enterprises who must figure out how to expand their applications and capabilities.

Gardner: Is this a big opportunity for IT to do something differently and better than the way they have distributed software in the past?

Sochan: There is no doubt that the IT group is getting pushed by the end users who have become very comfortable with how they can search, browse, try, download, and purchase applications. As a result, that has raised the expectations of how those same workers would like to be able browse, search, and download applications that could help them in their business world and with their productivity.

But, there are some pretty big differences between the consumer world of buying a 99-cent Angry Birds game versus downloading business applications. So some of the things that IT groups are having to think about and sort out are security and data governance, and how data that is specific to the device can be managed and, if need be, removed.

There are also issues about how the IT group can enable worker productivity and increase the satisfaction of the user base.

Savings and efficiencies

Finally, there's a need to try and find cost savings and efficiencies. If you had everyone just buying individual applications, then you wouldn’t have the benefit of bulk license purchasing or the ability to purchase through normal corporate buying processes that result in larger scales of economy.

Gardner: How does an enterprise, a vendor, or a communication service provider start the process of thinking about architecting and providing such an app store?

Liu: We've talked to a number of different enterprises and various industries, and most of them are in the early stages of researching and trying to figure out what this means to them. They know that tablets are coming, but actually today’s problems have as much to do with just devices already in-house, such as smartphones.

What we're hearing in terms of platforms is that the top three platforms they're trying to figure out are iOS, Android, and the platform coming from RIM.

In that research phase, some of the issues that they're concerned about are more traditional IT policies and compliance issues. They understand the motivation from the user standpoint and the value of that, but they're really trying to understand the landscape in terms of those more traditional issues around IT control and compliance, such as security.

The other thing is that they're also more open to outsourced or cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solutions, as opposed to something that may be completely managed in-house via traditional software. The issue there is that they want to make sure that it actually can connect to the very secure session in the corporate environment, and that by outsourcing they are not giving that up in terms of the security and control.

So you might want to start with the current devices, such as phones and focus on maybe internal applications or select third-party applications. Deploy a project from that and then figure out how you want to evolve that towards other devices and other platforms. [Request an app marketplace demo.].

They're looking for some blended model between complete end-user autonomy and some better corporate control.

Sochan: At Partnerpedia we've been working with a number of the leading tablet vendors and some of the largest enterprise customers to understand what are the business problems and what are the priorities that need to be solved.

Overwhelmingly, what we're hearing is that most customers are not satisfied with just having an open marketplace that you might see from, say, the Google Apps Marketplace. They're looking for some blended model between complete end-user autonomy and some better corporate control. That’s the first piece of feedback we are hearing.

The second piece is that there is a need to have some sort of branding. Most enterprise companies want to have some branding, so that it’s very clear to their users that this is their marketplace, this is their store. And that store has a combination of third-party built applications, similar to what you might see if you went into an Apple App Store or into the Google Android marketplace.

Custom built

Depending on the type of application and the user, there's a need to have a lot of control and flexibility for the corporation to either pre-purchase those licenses and to manage those licenses effectively. Then, they can both purchase and manage the distribution of those license, and be able to reclaim them as employees leave the organization or devices are lost, as well as allowing, as appropriate flexibility for the end-users to actually make purchases directly based on their budget. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

... If you look at the core essence of an app store, there is a repository or catalog of information that makes it very easy for a company’s customers be able to find, browse, and look for products and services, not only from the vendor, but also related products and services that are of value from that vendor's ecosystem.

It almost doesn’t matter what kind of company it is. Most companies have some extended ecosystem of value-added partners. The ability to create a very rich catalog of information that your customers can browse and search and look for related products and services makes it much more compelling and gains a lot more commitment from your partners.

Because you're now providing them with of a go-to-market benefit directly to the customers, and from the customer’s perspective, they see tremendous value in your company’s products and services, because they see the richness of the ecosystem around it.

At the heart of it is this catalog that can be highly personalized. You can imagine that if you're now able to personalize this for your customers, where your customers are coming into this marketplace and they are not just seeing a generic marketplace, they are actually seeing a marketplace that’s been personalized to them.

Marketplace knows

This means that the marketplace already knows which products your customers have purchased from you and therefore is making a pre-selection or presenting them with information that’s very specific and related to the footprint that, that customer already has of your products.

In some cases, in a more consumer-oriented world, you may want to actually go to a transaction and actually enable purchasing. But our enterprise customers are telling us that, equally important, if not more important, in the first steps is to have a very sophisticated lead capture engine, so that you can capture that interest that your customer has expressed, and been browsing and expressed interest in a particular product.

Then, you can route that, as appropriate, into whatever customer relationship management (CRM) system is being used and more effectively follow up with that customer, either with your own direct sales force or with passing that lead to your partners for the appropriate follow up.

... The core of the Partnerpedia offering is a white label, cloud-based, branded app store, that allows very efficient discovery and delivery of applications. The internal benefits for the internal facing app store is the capability for IT members to be able to pre-purchase select applications that they want their users have available to them. And also providing the capability to brand that app store so that it follows the company’s logo and it has a very consistent corporate look and feel.

The internal benefits for the internal facing app store is the capability for IT members to be able to pre-purchase select applications that they want their users have available to them.

Then, giving a way for users to be able to very easily search, browse, and look for applications that are specific to their role in the organization.

Finally, the license management of that software, allowing the IT department to be able to track licenses that have been purchased and downloaded, as well as be able to reclaim those licenses as is appropriate, when an employee either no longer needs that license or has left the organization or has lost the device.

And looking more to the future, we are also working very closely with customers that are building a private branded marketplace. And I distinguish between an app store and a marketplace in that a marketplace is much broader than just applications. It can be hard goods, products, services, or offerings from partners and provides just a much richer way for customers to discover value-added offerings from a company. [Request an app marketplace demo.]

Gardner: Who are the folks who seem to be most interested in this? Is this something you're selling at multiple levels, or do you really have the ears yet of that business strategy?

Sochan: We're seeing it in a few different industries. Certainly high-tech is an area where this lends itself very well, because most companies are moving to a cloud services world and so they're looking for new and more innovative ways to combine and recombine multiple solution offerings to come up with more valuable offerings to their customers.

This is also driving opportunities for innovation and business models. how the customer pays for it. Having these bite-size pieces of innovation lends itself to new ideas and new business models in which there can be not only just actual new sources of revenue that can come out of this, because now it’s a channel to the market.

Gardner: Do have any thoughts about the IT efficiency aspects of an app store model, if we take it beyond smartphones and tablets to the entire spectrum of endpoints the users use?

Pelino: We've been starting on the mobile device side of the world -- smartphones and tablets, those types of devices. But, at a corporate level, there are other types of endpoints that you need to manage and deploy applications to, and you want the same kind of control. You also want to have a sense of how much you are spending.

As a service type of delivery model or a per user type of delivery model, you can use different kinds of models here to keep control of the cost and have efficiencies around cost that you might not have today, because there is lots of overlap happening.

There are benefits as well, when you're thinking about individual end users who might have devices that they use in certain situations. When they're at their desk, maybe they have their laptops or desktops there. So, ultimately, you could have the same environment to integrate what an individual end-user or an employee could get in terms of the apps that they're able to get and always have a consistent experience for that.

The other side of that is just having a recognition that at the IT level, as much as they would love to control this, there are lots of devices around the bend. So even in the mobile world the devices we see today are not the ones that are going to be here tomorrow and there is more and more, almost on a day-to-day basis, being announced and put out there for end-users, whether it be enterprises or consumers to use.

How do I keep that in line? This app-store model is certainly one way to do it. But, when you think about it at the IT organization level, it’s not just about mobility. They have to think about the endpoints across the organization and this could certainly be relevant in that case as well.

The ability to create a very rich catalog of information makes it much more compelling and gains a lot more commitment from your partners.

... You can imagine that now, with the capabilities that you have, you're going to be able to track and understand better what individuals are doing. Are they using certain applications? What they are doing? When they are doing it? As well as better understanding how you might be able to package and put together capabilities that might be more valuable to your customers in a manner that will be useful, in an individualized manner, not just basic bundles or combinations of services.

... For reference, there's a Forrester report that sets up the complexity that’s facing many organizations that I touched on very early on, called "Managing Mobile Complexity."

There's another report that’s coming out very soon around mobility in the cloud. We've been talking about these delivery mechanisms, cloud-based delivery mechanisms for applications and services, especially around mobile devices and applications and services. ...

A big BI benefit

From the business intelligence (BI) side of this, we've only started scraping the surface, because we are in the earlier stages. But as you have all of your customers, partners, and suppliers accessing these application stores, as well as your employees, you can then target those individuals with appropriate information. Not necessarily marketing all the time, but appropriate information, if it’s for employees and partners and suppliers, and for the customers, certainly marketing and promotional activities could be tied in here as well.

Sochan: As Michele motioned, there is a really exciting rich trove of data and BI that you get, because now you can see what users are interested in. You see what they are browsing.

All of us are very familiar with the Amazon-like model, where you rate products and services. The exact same thing is now enabled in these branded app stores, where the users are in real time rating the number of stars for that application. More importantly, they are giving their comments about what they found useful and areas that they would like to see improvements, which creates this very exciting innovation cycle.

Where previously you had very complex monolithic applications that got delivered and had a couple of year cycle, now you're seeing bite-size pieces of innovation that gets immediate feedback from the end-users. The developer sees that feedback almost instantly and is able to immediately respond with either bug fixes or feature enhancements.

What’s really exciting to me is just how fast the innovation and that feedback loop happens that just spurs more innovation.

We have some great white papers that people can access from our website at partnerpedia.com, that will give very useful insights into some of the best leading practices in this area.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Request an app marketplace demo. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

You may also interested in:

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Fujitsu and Citrix make it a good week for cloud maturity

A slew of announcements from Citrix Systems and a debut in North America for an aggressively priced Fujitsu public cloud IaaS set demonstrate that the post-PC cloud world is maturing rapidly.

Whereas the web took longer than many people 15 years ago though to impact the enterprise IT landscape, cloud computing may actually gain maturity and subsequent acceptance faster than the conventional wisdom holds.

Why did Citrix at its Citrix Synergy event move the needle forward on cloud maturity? They showed how an end-to-end, hybrid cloud model can readily work, one that addresses the network, user, enterprise, SaaS applications, and public cloud providers.

Citrix calls the hybrid cloud networking achievements a cloud "bridge" and "gateway." But in effect the architecture addresses how an individual user can be recognized and managed in the cloud from wherever and how ever they attach to the Internet, also know as the front door to the cloud.

At the other end of the equation (and with meta data and governance coordination to the front door) is the the way the user's enterprise also relates to the clouds, the back door. This allows a business function or process to proceed across multiple cloud and legacy domains and supported by multiple hybrid services. The apps and services can come from the cloud and SaaS providers, while the data and directory services emerge from within the enterprise, and the user gets to conduct business using a managed pallet of services from a variety of hosting models.

This same vision, of course, could apply to consumers and their needs as processes. It's as yet less clear who would pull all those elements together. But a mobile data services carrier would make a nice candidate.

In any event, the virtual computing vision will perhaps be best proven on the business side first, as a business process can be controlled, and its needed parts defined, better. Citrix explains it as managing among and between personal clouds, private clouds and public clouds. I recall having a chat with Citrix CTO Simon Crosby at the last Citrix analyst event I attended in Dallas. He was very engaging on the vision around this end-to-end capability. I have no reason to doubt Simon knows how to make this work.

Consider too that the managed hybrid cloud services would be inclusive of video, voice, compute power, data, SaaS apps, and full desktops as a service. Nice.

Cloud elephant

Managing this network hop, skip and jump with security, access control and governance -- a Service Delivery Fabric -- is the real cloud elephant in the room, and something that must be solved for cloud maturity to proceed. When solved satisfactorily, the inclusive clouds-to-IT at the individual user level process benefits will be simply ... huge. It will change how business and people operate in dramatic and unexpected ways. It's what makes the cloud-mobile-social mega trends disruption a once in a lifetime event.

Citrix is by no means alone in seeing the problem and working toward a solution set. An announcement of intention from a new Akamai and Riverbed partnership earlier this month is working to the same end-to-end synergy, although details remain sketchy on the how (and when). Expect more from the Akamai-Riverbed partnership later this year and into 2012. But I do know it seeks to make what Citrix callas the front door and back door to clouds of clouds operate in a coordinated fashion, too. [Disclosure: Akamai is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Citrix is racing to make cloud synergy hay in the market perhaps most quickly by leveraging the NetScaler technology and installed base (now there was a prescient acquisition). Citrix also had a slew of other announcements out of it Synergy event. They address a "personal cloud" value via IT remote management using iPads apps, advances in virtual desktops and applications delivery (including a VDI in a box maker acquisition), multimedia delivery that scales, and more on worker collaboration capabilities.

Lastly, Citrix is ramping up its OpenStack work as an early and aggressive participant to help define the right heterogenous data centers to apply those front and back doors to. The Citrix commercial offering for OpenStack provides an interesting model for making platform dependencies a thing of the past, while using Service Delivery Fabrics to build out the new value-creation areas for IT and Internet. Yes, this is a slap at VMware, and it is expected in the second half of 2011.

So keep an eye on Citrix for one of the best shots at nailing the end-to-end cloud equation. It's a game changer.

Fujitsu makes a good deal on public cloud

The other cloud news of the week that caught my fancy was Fujitsu bringing a public cloud IaaS offering to North America from a venerable data center site in Silicon Valley, Sunnyvale to be specific. Fujitsu, which has delivered a public cloud offering in Japan for two years, is using its own hardware, software and cloud stack and multi-tenancy special sauce, but the end-result offerings are good old IaaS elastic compute services featuring standard Windows and Linux runtime instances and standard three-tier storage.

What's not standard is the pricing, it's a try and buy model with very aggressive total costs for those needing basic cloud services but with support services included. Fujitsu says the pricing is about 10 percent higher than comparable Amazon Web Services offerings, but the support is included, which be a deal-maker for SMBs and ISVs. There's a pending PaaS marketplace to help ISVs make a global go at expanded markets but without the need to build or lease data centers. It becomes a pay-as-you go OpEx-only model to expand into regions and countries.

Fujitsu is not only making it nice on full-service price for SMBs, but for large enterprises that need to accommodate multi-national issues around physical location of servers and/or the desire to coordinate apps on like IaaS instances at multiple locations around the world, Fujitsu has an offer for them.

The Fujitsu North America cloud goes live on May 31, and more services will no be added over the coming quarters. A freemium trial of up to five VMs, a TB of storage and three Windows OSes will be available through the summer, with a seamless move to paid once the trial is over, said Fujitsu.

I like the fact that we're seeing competition on price, support, global reach and soon on how to best deliver II as a service for both enterprises and apps providers. Let the Darwinian phase of cloud maturity ramp up!

You may also be interested in:

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HP delivers NMC 9.1 as new demands on network management require secure, integrated, and automated response

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

The IT news headlines are full of incidents of major cloud instances brought down for days, and unfortunately often weeks, with some of the largest of these due to network issues in association with virtualization and storage sprawl. The price in the cloud era for such disruptions is very high and very public.

A big part of the solution to preventing such outages comes from comprehensive, automated, and increasingly integrated network management capabilities. The tasks before network managers have never been more daunting. There are far more devices, hybrid networks, hybrid compute resources, higher levels of virtualization, and there is a need to maintain security and compliance requirements throughout.

What’s more, the pressure to keep cost down and to seek lower cost alternatives for converged infrastructure remains a constant companion to business and IT architects, and therefore an ongoing network challenge.

Into this environment, HP this week delivered a wide-ranging update to its Network Management Center suite Version 9.1. The emphasis is on a comprehensive lifecycle approach to network management with deep data gathering, automated root cause analytics, and intelligent and proactive response features that enable consistently high performance and network reliability.

BriefingsDirect recently sat down with Ashish Kuthiala, Director of Product Marketing for HP Software’s Network Management Center, to dig into the new offerings and to better understand why previous fragmented approaches to network performance and stability just won’t hold up for most enterprises. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What it is about the new IT environment that is taxing the older ways of network management?

Kuthiala: When you're looking at the network today, it has become very complex and is increasingly becoming more complex. With new domains coming in, such as voice over IP (VOIP), webcasts, and video traffic, multiprotocol label switching (MPLS) services, unified communications, and cloud computing and virtualization, it just becomes a nightmare to manage your network for your business.

Then, you look at the volume of network devices coming online. Now, everyone wants to be in the instant-on enterprise mode. Everyone has to be connected. Everything has to be connected. Everyone expects immediate gratification and instant results. You have to respond to this opportunity continuously, and "any time, anywhere, any way" is the new tagline for anybody who is working.

Let’s look at the job of the director of network ops in a particular IT organization. Not only does he have to configure, manage, and standardize a network, he has to provision, he has to deliver, and he has to report on it. He has to do it very proactively and he has to do it very strategically at the lowest cost possible.

IT budgets are shrinking or remaining flat, whereas the demands on IT are really going up. It’s estimated that a customer can lose about $70,000 a minute during network outage, as I'm sure you’ve seen in the recent news. It's a big business inhibitor if the network goes down. It is what provides the experience to the end user for all the IT services that they experience.

Gardner: Why isn’t the previous mode of network management able to keep up?

Kuthiala: Today, if you were to look into a customer’s IT department managing a network environment, you would often see a war-room like approach to managing networks. ... They're very reactive. They have multiple tools, legacy approaches, and a lot of band-aids. The inability in tying together what used to be separate domains has become unacceptable.

If your shopping cart goes down doing the Christmas shopping season, and a customer tells you about it, that is just unacceptable.

The inability to cope up with the scale and complexity, the different teams hunched over their different monitors, is what I call the "swiveling chair syndrome." If there is a network outage, you have these 8 or 10 different operators looking at different aspects of the network. They are just swiveling in their chairs, talking to each other and looking for data that should really be on one screen for them to manage. The lack of scalability of such tools just adds to the problem.

Built-in intelligence

Gardner: How does an automated approach work better?

Kuthiala: To manage your network today, you really need to understand how your network is constructed from the bottom up, how it ties together, how it changes over time, and how it self-organizes. You need to build that kind of intelligence into your root-cause analysis.

The design of the tools has to be built ground up, based on these decisions. That’s how you need to construct the tools. That’s how they need to be integrated. For an operator, all these need to build upon each other.

It has to be in the right context. It cannot be siloed. It is a nightmare to manage. The desired nirvana for a network team is to reduce the numerous point tools to manage various aspects of network management. It has to be proactive, not reactive.

You have compliance management diagnostics and change issues that you need to take human error out of, and you need to automate that. You want to reduce the manual effort, the errors and increase control over your environment. You want to reduce the mean time to repair network outages, and maintain cost optimization as your network grows.

Today for customers, “performance is the new fault." So just because a network device is up and running, and you can ping it, doesn't mean it is providing the quality of service it should to the end user. It’s really the performance that the network is being measured against.

It’s all about efficiency, how you reduce your errors, and increase your speed through automation.

... Customers are looking for a solution that's efficient, automated, and secure for them. When they manage a network, they should be able to do things like fault, performance, change, configuration, compliance, trending and reporting, and this ties into their business services.

Long history

So, HP looked at this problem. As you know, we've had a long history of about 20 years with the HP OpenView product in network management. As we acquired other companies such as Opsware, they bought in additional tools with them. We looked at the tools and the evolving landscape of the network management domain and about five years ago, embarked on a re-architecture plan for these products from the ground up.

The approach wasn’t to make these products just work together by putting in connectors, but we wanted them to be integrated from bottom up, from the data level itself, where the data would build upon each other.

Now, as we look at the Network Management Center (NMC), it is a complete portfolio of solutions and tools that lets you do network management in an integrated and automated way.

This really builds upon the HP Network Node Manager i (NNMi), the related special plug-ins that handle complex services such as multicast traffic, VOIP, etc., as well as the network automation piece of it which really helps customers automate and manage their change, compliance, and configuration of network devices that they need to do on an ongoing basis.

The five-year journey of re-architecting our NMC portfolio completes with the 9.1 release that we are talking about today.

So, the earlier 9.0 release introduced a number of features including better user interfaces, the ability to scale to large environments, and tying our products together into better functioning solutions. With 9.1, we are building on that.

We've strengthened the ability of our customers to manage cloud services. The most critical capability that a customer must have is to manage the network the same way that they have managed traditional networks, and it doesn’t matter if they have to go across the cloud or are looking at private or public clouds.

Gaining visibility

Gaining visibility into the network elements, whether they are local, off-premise or the health and quality of the cloud services that's being delivered, is the most important step. Can I reach my device? Is it healthy? Is it performing to the expected levels of business needs?

And, of course, configuration compliance management of these devices across the cloud is very important, and corrective actions and rollbacks are very important. Our tools are able to do that across different environments.

The 9.1 release is also focused on the managed service provider’s (MSP's) market needs. There is a big trend of IT outsourcing to MSPs, and one of the things that customers want to outsource is network management services. So this is a big, growing market, and our MSPs need platforms to manage their customers' network environments in a way that that maximizes their profit.

They need to scale and grow with their customer in expanding network environments, reduce their hardware spend and their training costs, as well as grow their revenues and create new lines of business, as their own customers move to new and complex services.

For example, a customer might go from traditional phones to IP telephones, and at that point, the MSP has to manage that aspect of their customer’s environment as well, and they don’t want at this point to buy a new tool.

This helps them manage multiple customers, departments or sites per single software instance, driving down their cost and giving them a flexible architecture.

The size of the customer's network might increase, and you don’t want to buy another server, another set of tools and deploy another set of operators to manage that.

We have introduced multi-tenancy capability and security groups that allow our customers to separate their data and views into secure partitions. This helps them manage multiple customers, departments or sites per single software instance, driving down their cost and giving them a flexible architecture.

We’ve also done a lot of work on the performance-based, time-based thresholds for better alerting. What this means is that the performance data is in the context of the network topology providing a unique point of your fault monitoring. It helps them with proactive notification of performance degradation, fix it proactively and guarantee service delivery levels.

We've also increased the number of months that the data is retained. It's up to 13 months now which allows you to do forecasting and trending capabilities. This is a sufficient data retention period for compliance requirements for real-time and historical data, and allows a very efficient analysis.

Our user interface (UI) has been enhanced based on the feedback we’ve gotten from customers. The common look and feel UI across all the products and our solution set ensures lower training cost -- train once, leverage across all these tools.

Contextual information

The UIs show relevant contextual information on the nodes and incidents they're managing, giving them a lot of operational efficiency. The breadcrumb history and the easy navigation with right-click menus also allows the operators to get to the root cause more quickly, making them much more efficient and improving the time to resolution.

The analysis pane shows you a number of system component help enables you to get key information including availability and performance graph really quickly.

Gardner: In some of these high-profile outages that we've had recently, it seems that they were doing updates and that caused the cascading or spiraling effect and ultimately brought the network down. What is it about your suite and your comprehensive approach that could help ameliorate something like that?

Kuthiala: A network constantly needs updates, whether its configuration updates or being in compliance with a number of different policies -- Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) or the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and government regulations.

When something goes wrong, you don't know what has gone wrong, and you are scrambling to fix it. Think about doing this across 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 devices in your network.

Typically, customers have a set of people who use multiple tools or manually log into a number of these devices and do these configuration changes manually. This is very dangerous. One, there is human error involved. Second, when something goes wrong, you don't know what has gone wrong, and you are scrambling to fix it. Think about doing this across 50,000, 60,000, 70,000 devices in your network.

Our network automation capabilities allow customers to automatically make these changes through our tools. As they implement these changes, it's takes minutes and hours, versus days, to keep these devices configured to the latest and greatest configurations and in compliance.

Think about when you are on the 59,000th device that you are updating and you realize there is an error. This was not the right thing to do, and you need to roll back. If you're doing this manually, you're spending many hours fixing the error while your business is suffering during that time. Our automation capabilities help customers; with a few clicks of buttons they are able to automate all of this.

Today, customers might be looking at a number of incidents -- 10,000, to 15,000 incidents. For example, if somebody yanks a LAN cord out and puts it back in, what really has happened is the interface has gone down and come back up. And now that is flagged as an incident or an event that the operator has to pay attention to.

With our root cause analysis engine, and the ability to map the topology dynamically in a spiral discovery fashion, the network topology is always up-to-date. The root cause analysis engine helps figure out whether this is an incident that needs to be paid attention to or not, auto-resolving some of that.

Meaningful incidents

The incidents that boil up to the operators are meaningful, and therefore are reduced in number to those that are actionable. We have had customers whose incidents have been reduced from 10,000-12,000 down to 400, and only about 100 of those have to be acted upon and escalated to the next level of management.

Automation really takes a lot of the work out of your hands and enables you to fix errors very proactively, and if there is a mistake, fix it right away with a few clicks.

... I'm talking very specifically about the configuration of network devices. The software that your network device comes with is the key differentiator in how they act, and the intelligence that they provide. So this has to be not only managed really well, but there are patches and upgrades, just as you have software patches and upgrades on your servers. These have to be managed. Sometimes, there are government regulations or company regulations that you want to propagate across these devices.

It's essential to understand what type of traffic is flowing on your network. This gives you the ability to optimize your network performance and network resiliency.

But tying to the business service management set of tools or the suite stems from the fact that, when you look at it from a business service availability aspect, it’s not just about the network. There are servers, there are applications, and they are all tied together. For example, if application business service is not working, do you know if it’s the server? Do you know if it’s the application? Do you know if it is the network?

Our Business Service Management offering ties in these aspects through our runtime service model. This ties your network, to your application, to your server and is able to give your business a look into how your business service is going to be affected by the failure of any one of these infrastructure elements.

Automated capabilities

Gardner: Now Network Management Center is a fairly significant set of different products, but most people already have something in place. So this is not a matter of starting greenfield. This is a matter of coexistence, migration, and transformation. How do you get started?

Kuthiala: Most customers today have in place something to monitor their networks, but a lot of customers have not automated their configuration, compliance, and diagnostic capabilities that we talked about.

We've seen a trend in our customer base where they buy smaller node packs to manage a small number of devices with our automation capabilities. Once they have put that in place, they start to see other efficiency use cases that they can achieve using our network automation capabilities.

We observe that these customers come back and buy more licenses for managing a greater number of network devices. So, that’s almost like a greenfield opportunity here.

But, when we look at the most customers looking at managing their networks and doing performance and monitoring, for example, if they have an instance of our software, it’s an in-place upgrade. We offer a dual entitlement and run a parallel program that allows customers is to seamlessly set up another parallel environment and bring the network up there, start to manage it, and seamlessly shift.

We’ve had an instance of a customer in the EMEA region, where they were testing our latest software and running it in parallel to see how it was functionally different and what effect of productivity it would have on their operators. A couple of weeks went by and their senior management started getting escalations for network problems.

Once they have put that in place, they start to see other efficiency use cases that they can achieve using our network automation capabilities.

Now, when senior management turned to the network operations team and asked, "We have all these incidents showing up. What is going on? Is something wrong?"

Almost sheepishly, the network operator team had to acknowledge that they were testing the new platform and had completely forgotten about the old tool which they needed to shut down because the new platform ignored the incidents that were not meaningful. They had “accidentally” migrated to the new platform to managing the network much more efficiently.

A lot of our customers use this approach to migrate to the new platform, and of course, our approach is modular. Start with the core product and add the special plug-ins to manage your IP telephony MPLS or multicast capabilities.

To see the HP Automated Network Management (ANM) Solution in action, you can watch a short overview and the ANM 9.10 Video Demo. This recording will explain the NMC components that make up the ANM solution and walk you through a use case to demonstrate the automated capabilities of HP Automated Network Management 9.10.

We also have an hp.com page, which is www.hp.com/go/nmc for downloading trial software, reading whitepapers, customer case studies, product capabilities and features. That’s a good starting point. We also blog about customer experiences and the stories they share with us as well.

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

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• HP's Robin Purohit unpacks Business Service Management 9 as way to address complexity in hybrid data centers
  
• Tag-Team of HP Workshops Provides Essential Path to IT Maturity Assessment and a Data Center Transformation
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Survey says: Open-source software making broad strides across the IT landscape

Once viewed in some quarters as a fringe movement and unreliable, open-source software is now a dominant force in the IT industry. It has been embraced by both the public and the private sectors and is being implemented across a wide variety of markets and applications such as social publishing and big data.

These are among the results of the fifth annual Future of Open Source Survey conducted by North Bridge Venture Partners in partnership with The 451 Group. More than 450 IT professionals took part in the survey with end users making up 60 percent of the respondents, who were asked about a wide range of issues that affect the open-source landscape. Most of those responding see an ever brighter future for open source.

Among the other findings:

• The open source community is now more focused on maturing technology concerns, including improved operational excellence around areas such as support, product management, feature functionality and return on investment, as opposed to earlier concerns around the legal implications of licensing and conforming to internal policies.

  More than half -- 56 percent -- of respondents believe that more than half of software purchases made in the next five years will be open source.

  
  
• Respondents identified software as a service (SaaS), cloud and mobile computing as the main areas that can have a dramatic impact on open source and a virtually untapped opportunity for growth.
  
• More than half -- 56 percent -- of respondents believe that more than half of software purchases made in the next five years will be open source.
  
• An overwhelming 95 percent of respondents noted that a turbulent economy continues to be “good” for open source software, though for the first year ever, lower cost has been overtaken by freedom from vendor lock-in as what makes open-source software more attractive.
  
• When asked about revenue generating strategies likely to create value for vendors, 56 percent of the respondents said that an annual, repeatable support and service agreement was the most likely.



The survey results were released during the opening panel at Computerworld’s OSBC conference which featured open source industry leaders: Jim Whitehurst, President and CEO, Red Hat; Mike Olson, CEO, Cloudera; Adrian Kunzle, Managing Director, Head of Firmwide Engineering and Architecture, JPMorgan Chase; Tom Erickson, CEO, Acquia; and was chaired by Michael Skok, General Partner, North Bridge Venture Partners.

You may also be interested in:

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HP with FlexNetwork: You're going to have to update your network, so you might as well do it right

As HP unveils it's new FlexNetwork Architecture (stories on ZDNet, InformationWeek and Network World), they seem to be making a bold statement about the future of corporate networks. And that is that changing requirements are inevitable, so why not build out a network that can support all the new cloud and mobile tricks you know about ... and the ones you don't?

Aside from the HP versus Cisco narrative that the press loves, there is a major need for a convergence on networks, but it's not just a convergence with the networks themselves, it's a convergence with the rest of the enterprise and the rest of the cloud and mobile requirements bubbling up fast. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

A future-proof network is more about management and security than hardware and platforms. And it's also about ecosystems: HP is partnering extensively with Citrix, Microsoft and Riverbed. No one vendor can or should be the sole network IP supplier (just like there should no be one cloud provider).

What's more, the virtualization trend that begets the cloud trend that supports the mobile trend all require intelligent networks that have security ingrained -- not gained after the fact. As workers depend more on cloud and hybrid computing services, the network is the cloud.

When I hear people complain about the risks associated with cloud, I dare them to look closely at their own mission critical networks. Often what they find are existing, in-place risks that dwarf what they fear most about the cloud. The fears about security, reliability, control, data and privacy: These risks already live on their disjointed networks.

Those networks, incidentally, are the weak link between their nice, safe, controlled data centers on premises and all the people and partners that actually need to use them. The boundary is not the enterprise, it is the ways in which their networks can adapt.

Fear your old network first

So if you fear cloud, you should probably fear your current network, for all the same reasons.

And that's because in this day and age all large-scale IT for enterprises is supported by WANs and how they play with the global stew of network service providers. This is for apps, data, communications, VOIP, media, VPN, branch, mobile ... you name it.

My modern network needs to be comptaible and secure for data center, campus, branch and WAN activities. And I need to stream and move large objects more than ever. It doesn't make sense for the CFO to ask workers to use the cloud (because it saves data center resources) when the network can't support cloud workloads and requirements, does it?

Whether you have to revisit your network architecture because of performance, costs, compliance, security or just new payloads like mobile and media, you might as well do it right. The network really should not be the weak link in the enterprise. Not any more. Not for any longer.

You may also be interested in:

• HP's Instant-On Enterprise Initiative Takes Aim at Shifting Needs of Business and Government
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Talend delivers converged platform for better data services integration across multiple applications

Seeking to make it easier to synchronize data between applications and across enterprise boundaries, Talend on Monday delivered a unified platform for both data services and applications integration requirements.

The Talend ESB Standard Edition, built on an open source enterprise service bus (ESB), frees data services and data management processes from specific applications. By abstracting them as standards-based services that can be reused by other applications, the new Talend platform offers a common environment for users to manage an entire lifecycle of a data service, regardless of its origins.

Talend also announced the 4.2 version of its Data Integration, Data Quality and Master Data Management (MDM) solutions, which now work in combination with the new Talend ESB. [Disclosure: Talend is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Thanks to such trends as cloud, hybrid computing and massive data sets, the role and impact of integration has shifted. A more comprehensive and managed approach to integration is required -- one that spans data and applications services. Moreover, the tools that support enterprise integration need to useable by more types of workers, those that are involved at the business process and data analysis levels.

By seeking to reduce middleware complexity, Talend's combined offerings unify a platform with a common development, deployment and monitoring environment that spans both data management and application integration tasks and operations, said Pat Walsh, Vice President of Marketing for the Application Integration Division at Talend.

Many touch points

"There’s now the mandate that you can no longer isolate data from application, because the touch points are just so many. You now need to look at solutions that, from the get-go, consider both aspects of the integration problem -- the data aspect and the system and application integration aspect," said Walsh.

Talend ESB Standard Edition uses the Apache CXF services framework, Apache Camel integration framework and Apache ActiveMQ enterprise messaging capabilities. Talend's ESB Standard Edition also features Service Locator capabilities for automatic failover and load balancing through the Apache Zookeeper extension for dynamic endpoint registration and lookup. The Security Token Service (STS) framework supports SAML 2.0 (Security Assertion Markup Language 2.0), and Service Activity Monitoring fosters analysis of service activity.

"We've gone to great lengths to include security mechanisms into the solution," said Walsh, "so that we can have approaches whereby there are certain permissions for just individuals. Or, IT management can look at certain aspects while opening it up maybe to a broader audience, when it comes to development and use of the interfaces that are going to be developed on the data in application side."

Talend ESB Standard Edition source code is licensed under the Apache 2.0 License. A commercial edition is also available through the company.

You may also be interested in:

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Open Group cloud survey shows a lack of IT preparedness, especially on measuring cloud's true costs and benefits

While more than 90 percent of companies are using -- or plan to use -- cloud computing, the cloud model is raising some concerns, as well as some paradoxes.

Unsurprisingly, security is the leading concern, while integration and governance issues are close behind. The paradox arises because industry executives know that cloud computing will impact their business, but are not yet prepared to handle that impact and, in many cases, don't yet know how to measure it.

These are some of the results from a recent survey by The Open Group, which polled 307 IT professionals who had purchasing or decision-making influence over cloud computing. The study earlier this year found that cloud computing required C-level approval at 55 percent of the companies, while 22 percent left it to IT directors and 8 percent to enterprise architects. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Among the take-aways from the results: "You need to take the metrics and find out what your IT finances are to make a true business decision about cloud," said Dr. Chris Harding, Forum Director for The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group. "And you need to track that as your move forward."

Among other findings from the survey:

• An impressive 92 percent of respondents said they are either currently using some cloud (49 percent) or had it on their IT road map (43 percent). The remaining 8 percent said they had no cloud plans.
  
  
• Only 17 percent of those polled said they use or would use public cloud, while the remainder were divided between private (29 percent) and hybrid (45 percent). Another 9 percent were unsure what they would use.

  The paradox arises because industry executives know that cloud computing will impact their business, but are not yet prepared to handle that impact and, in many cases, don't know how to measure it.

  
  
  
• The main drivers behind cloud adoption were cost (21 percent), timeliness and agility (19 percent), and resource optimization (17 percent).
  
  
• Data security is the biggest concern for companies (18 percent), followed by integration issues (15 percent), and governance (14 percent).
  
  
• A majority of participants (55 percent) said that cloud return on investment (ROI) would be easy to justify. However, only 35 percent of respondents said they had mechanisms in place to effectively measure ROI.
  
  
• An overwhelming 82 percent said they expected cloud to significantly impact one or more business processes, but only 28 percent are actually prepared for these changes.
  
  
• When asked if they were satisfied with cloud education and training available, 51 percent percent said they were satisfied or very satisfied, 34 percent said they were somewhat satisfied, and 15 percent said they were dissatisfied.

This survey builds on the ongoing work being orchestrated by The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group, and the results will help guide its future development on the financial and business impact of cloud computing.

The results indicate that these enterprise architects and planners are primarily focused on private and hybrid computing, and not so much on so-called public cloud options, said Harding. The respondents expect that cloud will impact their business processes, but are not sure how.

Enterprises should start right away with measurement of shared services use and costs, said Harding. That will allow for any move to cloud with assurances that risks and rewards can be managed. Only by learning the internal costs can the right decision be made as to how external services affect the balance, he said.

If you are interested in getting involved with The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group, visit http://www.opengroup.org/cloudcomputing/. For Cloud Computing resources published by The Open Group, visit: http://www.opengroup.org/cloud/whitepapers/.

Due out in mid-2011, The Open Group currently writing a book tentatively titled Cloud Computing for Business: The Open Group Guide, which will demonstrate a model for measuring costs, and for how to begin managing governance around costs and service-level agreements, said Harding.

You may also be interested in:

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