HP helps fight poverty in tough economy with charitable CARE sweepstakes campaign

As charities continue to struggle in a down economy, HP recently introduced a new program that shows the tech giant also has a giant heart. HP has begun offering a vehicle to raise donations for CARE, a humanitarian organization that fights global poverty.

Charitable donations declined 11 percent in 2009, according to Corporate Philanthropy. That’s the largest dip in 20 years. Even some of the most well-recognized charities in the United States are suffering, as donors pull back and worldwide crises put new demands on already strained resources.

HP is looking to do its part with the HP Technology Services sweepstakes. Here’s how it works: HP will donate $10 to CARE every time a registered visitor votes for his or her favorite Technology Services Expert on the sweepstakes site. Visitors can vote up to seven times a day. [Disclosure: HP is s sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“HP is adding the human touch to technology, as well as partnering with CARE to turn our local action into global impact,” says Michelle Weiss, vice president of Marketing, Technology Services at HP. “The awareness generated through the sweepstakes will help to advance CARE’s humanitarian work to empower women and girls as change agents in fighting poverty and its impact around the world.”

Contribute to charity -- and win prizes

The sweepstakes is part of a new HP Technology Services program that showcases the HP team — from engineers to service professionals. IT professionals can register to vote and be entered to win an HP Envy laptop, an HP Photosmart e-All-in-One Printer, and other prizes. IT pros can choose from one of seven candidates: Kfir Godrich, Lee Kedrie, Bill Kosik, Donald Livengood, Patrick Lownds, Bradley Mearns and Chris and Greg Tinker. As of mid-October, HP had already logged 10,736 votes, driving more than $100,000 to the charity.

HP Cares

Founded in 1945, CARE places special focus on working alongside poor women because, equipped with the proper resources, women have the power to help whole families and entire communities escape poverty. Working in 72 countries around the world, women are at the heart of CARE’s community-based efforts to improve education, health and economic opportunity.

“HP has been an important and long-term partner for CARE, contributing both technology expertise and generous support to advance our mission,” says Radha Muthiah, vice president, Strategic Partnerships and Alliances, CARE. “We continue to applaud their commitment to connecting people to CARE’s work in innovative and meaningful ways.”

More information on the HP Technology Services Experts sweepstakes, including how to enter a vote to have HP donate to CARE, is available at www.hp.com/go/TSvote.

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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Millennials don’t want enterprise IT to party like it’s 1999

This guest post comes courtesy of Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at Zapthink.

There’s an invasion coming. In fact, it’s already under way, and you probably haven’t already realized that you’re about to be taken over.

That’s right – Generation Y has entered the workforce (as anemic as it currently is), and is bound to become the dominant part of your enterprise within the next 10-15 years. What does this mean for your organization? How are the needs of Gen Y different from that of existing markets? And why does this have anything to do with Enterprise IT?

The answers are below, but rest assured, the emergence of Millennials in the workforce is every bit a crisis point for your IT planning as dealing with the downfall of EA Frameworks and Cyberwarfare, albeit with most likely a positive ending.

What makes Gen Y different?

Wikipedia’s Generation Y entry provides some needed detail on what exactly we’re dealing with here:

Generation Y, also known as the Millennial Generation, Generation Next or Net Generation, describes the demographic cohort following Generation X. Its members are often referred to as Millennials or Echo Boomers … commentators have used birth dates ranging somewhere from the mid-1970s to the early 2000s, but most agree on birth dates between 1982 and 1995. Members of this generation are called Echo Boomers, due to the significant increase in birth rates between 1982–1995, and because most of them are children of baby boomers. The term Generation Y first appeared in an August 1993 Ad Age editorial to describe teenagers of the day

Okay, so they’re baby boomer spawn. Big deal? Well, not necessarily. Without exception, Gen Y’ers (let’s use the term Millennials from here on to simplify the writing) have grown up entirely in the information age. They don’t know a world without computers, cell phones, and MTV.

Steve Jobs and Bill Gates were already fighting by the time they were born, and the term minicomputer never even entered their lexicon. But what makes the Millennials most relevant for the enterprise is that their experience of IT is primarily with the vast rate of change happening on the consumer side, rather than in the enterprise.

It’s not just an inherent technical fluency that separates Millennials from their peers. Milennials emerged in a world where instant communication in the form of email, texting, instant messaging, social networks, online gaming, virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life, and online sharing platforms such as YouTube were the norm. Because much of their lives were conducted in the public sphere, the notion of personal privacy has eroded. Will Millennials have the same respect for corporate information as that of their less publicly verbose colleagues?

The far biggest impact on the emergence of Millennials in the workforce is that their expectations of what enterprise IT can do for them and the company is very different than their older peers.

Likewise, Millennials leverage the power of these mass communication and sharing platforms to revolutionize the way marketing and information sharing is done. Viral marketing, flash mobbing, internet memes, and spontaneous meetups are not only the new social cliques and in-culture of the generation, but the primary way trends are shaped.

This is all backed up by research. In a seminal report by Junco and Mastrodicasa, they cited the following results of a survey of the Millennial group:

College students ... used technology at higher rates than people from other generations. In their survey, they found that 97 percent of these students owned a computer, 94 percent owned a cell phone, and 56 percent owned a MP3 player. They also found that students spoke with their parents an average of 1.5 times a day about a wide range of topics. Other findings in the Junco and Mastrodicasa survey revealed 76 percent of students used instant messaging, and 92 percent of those reported multitasking while IMing.

But the far biggest impact on the emergence of Millennials in the workforce is that their expectations of what enterprise IT can do for them and the company is very different than their older peers. In the eyes of Millennials, they can get sophisticated IT stuff done without the IT department — in fact, many already have. So enterprise IT departments: Prepare to win the hearts and minds of the Millennials, lest they find competition for your services.

How will this impact Enterprise IT?

Millennials see IT as a tool to get things done. For them, however, they have a choice between using the tools of their daily lives (mobile devices, online applications, social networks) or the tools of their business lives (what we currently consider to be enterprise IT). As such, organizations need to understand the core needs of this critical user group:

• Physical boundaries no longer exist – The fact that enterprise systems and data are behind a firewall are of little concern to folks who are very used to cloud and SaaS-based system, mobile applications, and virtualization writ large. Location agnosticism is a must for future enterprise IT systems. This need is echoed in the Global Cubicle Supertrend, which forms a core part of ZapThink’s 2020 Vision of Enterprise IT. The Global Cubicle represents that realization that the enterprise is no longer confined to the physical boundaries of the office, and all the implications this has on IT and governance.
  
  
• Mobile as a first-class participant – The days of treating mobile apps as a red-headed stepchild or third-class citizen in the enterprise IT landscape are over. There are far more reasons to make enterprise capabilities available inherently on mobile apps than not. Especially when your users spend more time on mobile systems than they do on the ones the enterprise IT department creates.

  Most enterprise IT applications have utterly appalling user interfaces that are only modest improvements from the 1970s green screen era.

  
  
  
• The Need for Immediacy – The “now” generation wants instant access to data and functionality. And they want it in a consistent manner regardless of the device they use or location they are at.
  
  
• The Era of Function over Form is Over – The market has already proven that functionally equivalent (or even functionally poorer) applications with superior user experiences prevail over functionally superior, but user experience poor applications. Sound familiar? Well it should – most enterprise IT applications have utterly appalling user interfaces that are only modest improvements from the 1970s green screen era. Web based applications are 1990s hold-overs. It’s time to rethink the enterprise app.

How can enterprise IT address these needs? Fortunately, both the technology and know-how exist to solve these problems. As is often the case, the solution is most often design and architecture-centric and less-so technology centric. If someone sells you a Millennial Integration App, you should run quickly in the other direction. Instead, you should adjust your IT development and operations practices to meet the above needs:

• Provide Immediate Gratification – Provisioning of IT capability has to be as immediate and agile as possible. Data and functionality have to be available and immediate regardless of device or location. The enterprise IT organization has to realize that it is in competition for the hearts and minds of the business users.

  If you haven’t been paying attention to loose coupling for the last 10 years that we’ve been talking about it, you should start now.

  
  
  
• Design for Location and Device Agnosticism – Design for consistency of experience and action regardless of location and device. This emphasizes truly loosely-coupled services and SOA design principles. If you haven’t been paying attention to loose coupling for the last 10 years that we’ve been talking about it, you should start now. Designing for loose coupling significantly complicates testing, security, privacy, and governance, but we’ve drilled down on these topics many times before.
  
  
• Create a Compelling User Experience – User experience is no longer a luxury. You are competing with online, social, and mobile experiences. There is increasingly a fuzzy line between business & consumer IT. So, start learning from Apple, Amazon, Google, and Facebook’s examples and eliminate the digital divide.

This sounds like a tall order, but it shouldn’t be anything new for enterprise IT departments that are already looking ahead to the next generation of applications and value creation for the enterprise.

The ZapThink take

The impact of Millennials entering the workforce becomes a crisis point only if organizations turn a blind eye to the different experiences and needs of this age group. The days of enterprise IT departments having sole control of the pace and scope of IT innovation in the organization are long gone.

Millennials already know that they have sophisticated, highly usable, and instant IT capabilities available at their fingertips and online, so why should they be bothered when the comparatively slower and less-sophisticated enterprise IT department can’t get their needs met? A smart enterprise IT department will realize that internal as well as external market forces impact the scope of what they need to get done.

Those that ignore the changing internal dynamics of the workforce will face a crisis point when the new generation takes increasingly more senior management positions. Those that see the emergence of this savvy audience as a good excuse to increase the pace of innovation will not only save their own jobs, but continue to make the enterprise IT department a champion and engine for innovation in the enterprise.

This guest post comes courtesy of Ronald Schmelzer, senior analyst at Zapthink.

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Sensing shift in business priorities, HP targets Instant-On Enterprise as new tech-enabled competitive advantage

The rapidly evolving landscape for global business -- and the consequent need for IT to relate differently to businesses so they together serve their customers in innovative ways -- has to mean more than business as usual from technology suppliers.

While a majority of vendors seem to be hunkering down around an entrenched set of core products and aging IT approaches, HP this week shared a different vision, what it calls the “Instant-On Enterprise." [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The Instant-On Enterprise, as HP defines it, is a data-driven organization that leverages technology for everything — but specifically to better address the ever-evolving needs of end-users. As users' expectations and experience change, so too must the ways enterprises relate to them, are perceived by them.

The next several years will form a culmination of now-clear mega trends that have only just begun to roil conventional business practices. We're talking about pervasive mobile applications use, highly responsive cloud computing models, and knowledge-adept social collaboration. More than just these shifts, there also needs to be an increasingly automated, secure, and harmonizing management capability that combines and reinforces them.

It takes a special kind of enterprise to close the expectation gap between what customers and citizens expect and what the enterprise can deliver.

As these trends literally re-arrange business ecosystems and re-established the service delivery order, a gap will surely grow between the companies that master change and exploit enabling technologies -- and those that fall ever further behind.

With that in mind, HP has rolled out new solutions that aim to help both business and government create their own Instant-On Enterprise. Not surprisingly, the driver of the Instant-On Enterprise is everything becoming connected and immediate, people expect responses regardless of sourcing and/or partner ecosystems — and within seconds instead of days.

“It takes a special kind of enterprise to close the expectation gap between what customers and citizens expect and what the enterprise can deliver,” says Tom Hogan, executive vice president of Enterprise Sales, Marketing and Strategy at HP. “The Instant-On Enterprise delivers differentiated competitive advantage, serving customers, employees, partners and citizens with whatever they want and need, instantly…"

Embedding Tech

New HP research reveals that the role of IT is shifting from chiefly being the administrator of the enterprise to becoming one and the same with the enterprise. This means enabling rapid, recurring business process improvements to meet dynamic customer demands, as well as gaining near-instant insights into shifting markets.

Coleman Parkes research conducted for HP in October reveals that 86 percent of senior business and government executives believe they must rapidly adapt the enterprise to meet changes in consumer expectations. The research also indicates that 78 percent believe technology is the key to business and government innovation, and 85 percent indicated that in order to be successful, technology needs to be embedded in the business or government service.

HP’s new solutions work to help enterprises and government leverage technology in ways that will meet those goals. HP sees it as a reinvention of how technology is used to deliver innovation at every point in the value chain. That covers the services that are delivered, the mobile devices that provide the access, and the global data centers required to power the Instant-On Enterprise.

Instant-On Puzzle Pieces

There are several components to HP’s Instant-On Enterprise: HP Application Transformation, HP Converged Infrastructure, HP Enterprise Security, and HP Information Optimization:

• HP Application Transformation solutions work to help enterprises gain control over aging applications and inflexible processes that challenge innovation and agility by governing their responsiveness and pace of change.

• HP Converged Infrastructure solutions are engineered to drive out costs and provide the foundation for agile service delivery. HP promises this solution delivers the data center of the future.

• HP Enterprise Security solutions secures the IT infrastructure by people, processes, technology and content. These solutions aim to aligns security to meet business and government demands without losing flexibility.

• HP Information Optimization solutions deal with how information is gathered, stored and used. The idea is to harness the power of information and ensure its integrity and protection while delivering it in the context of the enterprise.

Realizing that there is no one single delivery model that meets every end-user need, HP also introduced two new Hybrid Delivery services. HP Hybrid Delivery Strategy Service offers a patent-pending, model-driven framework to introduce hybrid delivery concepts into their existing environments.

HP Hybrid Delivery Workload Analysis Service offers experts that gather service usage and demand profile data, and then develop a set of recommendations on how to best characterize and combine workloads in hybrid environments.

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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SpotCloud aims to create online spot market for buying and selling cloud capacity

What if you could buy and sell cloud-computing capacity the same way people book hotel rooms on Priceline or Hotwire? Startup SpotCloud, the brainchild of Toronto-based Enomaly, aims to find out.

Acting as an online clearing house, SpotCloud, will allow cloud providers to offer unused capacity to keep servers busy and will allow cloud users to buy spot cloud capacity at bargain prices.

SpotCloud treats providers as a nameless, faceless, and possibly unsecured group of providers of raw, localized computing capability.

SpotCloud uses the concept of Random Access Compute Capacity, similar to cloud bursting or the dynamic deployment of a software application that runs on internal organizational compute resources to a public cloud to address a spike in demand.

However, unlike cloud bursting, which refers strictly to expanding the application to an external cloud to handle spikes in demand, SpotCloud's cloud spanning includes scenarios in which an applications component are continuously distributed across multiple localized cloud providers.

The capacity itself is provided via a global pool of regional cloud providers. SpotCloud treats providers as a nameless, faceless, and possibly unsecured group of providers of raw, localized computing capability. While buyers can purchase capacity based on performance and price and the location of the provider, the name of the provider remains hidden until after the purchase is made. This is to prevent undercutting the provider's retail sales of capacity.

Wasted capacity

According to Reuven Cohen, founder the chief technologist of Enomaly, the idea came about because of numerous cloud providers whose companies -- often the first such enterprise in their respective countries -- weren't well known and had excess capacity. With no way to make themselves known to potential buyers on a broad scale, they were watching that capacity go to waste.

At the same time, cost-conscious buyers would benefit from being able to make quick purchases of capacity, as well as location, at favorable prices. Selecting a provider becomes easier with the clearing house, because potential buyers don't need to scour the Internet looking for potential providers. Also, buyers can continually monitor the site and determine the best price at which to buy computing resources.

The process becomes easier for both sides because SpotCloud will provide the invoicing and billing. Providers avoid the hassle of trying to bill customers for small spot jobs, and buyers who may spread their cloud use among several providers will have to deal with only one payment. SpotCloud will make it's money by charging a fee to the seller.

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New managed and automated paths to private clouds provide swifter adoption at lower risk for more enterprises

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

Businesses are looking to cloud-computing models to foster agility and improve time-to-market for new services. Yet attaining cloud benefits can founder without higher levels of unified server, data, network, storage, and applications management.

These typically disparate forms of management must now come together in new ways to mutually support a variety of different cloud approaches -- public, private, and hybrid. Without adoption of such Business Service Automation (BSA) capabilities, those deploying applications on private and hybrid clouds will almost certainly encounter increased complexity, higher risk, and stubborn cost structures.

This latest BriefingsDirect discussion therefore focuses on finding low-risk, high-reward paths to cloud computing by using increased automation and proven reference models for cloud management -- and by breaking down traditional IT management silos. In doing so, the progression toward cloud benefits will come more quickly, at lower total cost, and with an ability to rapidly scale to even more applications and data.

We're here with two executives from HP Software & Solutions to learn more about what BSA is and why it's proving essential to managed and productive cloud computing adoption: Mark Shoemaker, Executive Program Manager for Cloud Computing in the Software & Solutions Group at HP, and Venkat Devraj, Chief Technology Officer for Application Automation, also in HP’s Software & Solutions Group. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Shoemaker: There is hardly a place we go that we don’t end up talking to our customers about cloud. Most of the enterprise customers we talk to are looking at private cloud, the internal cloud solution that they own, that they then provide to their business partners, whether that’s the development teams or other elements in their business. Most of them are looking to build on the virtualization work that they've already done.

They want to improve their productivity, definitely get better utilization out of what they have already got. They want IT to be your better partner in the business. What that means is to shorten the time that the business has to wait for the services.

Devraj: There is also an interesting micro trend that’s occurring. A lot of the application teams, end-user business teams, are getting increasingly sophisticated. They're learning about private cloud implementations. Consequently, they're demanding levels of service from IT that are difficult to provide without a private cloud.

For example, because of things like agile development methodologies, application teams are doing a lot more application deployments and code releases than ever before. It's not uncommon to see dozens of application releases for different applications happening during the same day.

IT operations are just bombarded with these requirements, and requests, and they are just unable to keep up based on yesterday’s processes, which are relatively static. These application teams and business unit teams are quite influential.

They're even willing to fund specific initiatives to allow their teams to work in self-service mode, and IT ops are finding themselves in reactive mode. They have to support them, make their internal processes more fluid and dynamic, and leveraging technology that allows that kind of dynamism.

... The third-party companies, the cloud providers, the pure-play server enablers, have an unfair advantage. Because they were started relatively recently, in the last few years, they have the advantage of standardized platforms and delivery units.

A lot to deliver

They can say, "Okay, I'm going to deliver only Linux-based platforms, Windows-based platforms, or certain applications." When you look at the typical enterprise today, however, IT has a lot more to deliver.

There is a lot of prevailing heterogeneity in terms of multiple software platforms and versions. There is a lack of standardization. It's very difficult to talk about cloud and delivery within the enterprise in the same breath, when you look at these kinds of technical challenges.

As a result, IT is undergoing a lot of pressure -- but they have to deliver given the kind of challenges that they face. That’s going to require a lot of education and access to the right kind of technology, training, and guidance.

Shoemaker: Just to add to Venkat’s comment, we're seeing the business driving IT and demanding that agility and that flexibility. We talk to a lot of our customers, where their own coworkers have taken corporate credit cards and gone out into the public cloud, procured space, and have begun developing outside of them. IT really has to get in front of this. They have to manage all this.

... The one thing that’s different about cloud is that it really is a supply chain. It’s the supply chain of IT technology that the business consumes. If you think about what a supply chain is, it’s something that’s got to be repeatable. It has to be governed, and it provides a baseline or foundation and building blocks to build those services that you can then customize on top of the business.

The farther up that you can go with your standard building blocks, the less difficult it is to manage and focus on the custom business-facing functions.

So, the farther up that you can go with your standard building blocks, the less difficult it is to manage and focus on the custom business-facing functions on the front-end.

To do this, cloud has helped us out in a lot of ways. One of the challenges IT has always had is to get the business to consume standards. Because of a lot of hype in the market, the business absolutely is convinced that they get it, and they want the business benefits that cloud offers.

Even if the business decides to go to a public cloud, they still have to consume those elements in a standard fashion. There's no way out of that.

Devraj: And yet, the software used by these enterprises tends to be disparate, heterogeneous, and requires a lot of domain knowledge to be able to manage, resulting in significant delays and bottlenecks associated with service delivery. Those processes just don’t scale in the cloud.

Different platforms

At Stratavia we had built a patented technology to manage and control varied software stacks, such as databases, web servers, application servers, and even well-known packaged applications, including Microsoft Exchange, Oracle E-Business Suite, and SAP.

The content that I talk about becomes an abstraction layer, where the customer, the end user, the people who consume the services, see a very easy to understand service catalog. They can click on it. They can choose some menu options, some values from a drop-down box, and then specify exactly what they need, and have the response come back in minutes and in hours, rather than days and weeks, as is traditionally the case.

For example, just at the database layer, within the enterprise, it's very common to see four or five different platforms in use, such as DB2, SQL Server, Oracle, and so on. By automating the operations management lifecycle around these layers, Stratavia has made it possible for the enterprise to deliver and manage these assets as a service within the context of the cloud.

As more and more of HP’s and Stratavia’s joint customers started seeing value in that capability, HP brought Stratavia into its BSA/Business Technology Optimization umbrella.

There's a big gap in IT today, which is IT/Ops Engineering or IT/Ops Architecture. That’s a big missing silo within IT/Ops. And lot of the operators today that rely on scripts, command-line stuff, and point-and-click tools need to evolve themselves to more of an architect approach. They need more of taking stock of the big picture, and taking the tribal knowledge that they have in their heads and looking at the out-of-the-box content that HP provides and selecting the right content that corresponds to their tribal knowledge.

When they go into the cloud, the underlying management, things like compliance and governance, are not out of whack. They're able to successfully take that knowledge, put it in there, and then, in their new role as architects or engineering folks, they're able to watch, measure, and make modifications as appropriate.

So, the role that people play, that key subject matter experts play, is very crucial as part of walking before running with automation.

Gardner: Now that you have mentioned Stratavia, and for the benefit of our listeners and readers, HP has acquired Stratavia, and there was also quite a bit of related product and service news on Sept. 15 around BSA as the acquisition was unveiled.

Shoemaker: Obviously, the Stratavia acquisition was a huge, huge win for us, and puts us in a great position to help our customers transform their infrastructure. ... And several other things have happened in the last 60 days. We had VMworld, and we presented a cohesive strategy for infrastructure and even PaaS built on the BladeSystem Matrix hardware platform that we have, Converged Infrastructure. We've combined that with two other pieces and a piece of Cloud Service Automation (CSA) software.

CloudStart is a consulting and a professional services-led engagement capability where we come in and work with the customer to get that transformation process nailed, so we can quickly get them moving into the cloud benefits.

On the back end of that, there is another piece that we announced called Cloud Maps, which is really more knowledge, but in a different capacity, in that it offers downloadable templates, preconfigured applications, and best practices for sizing.

Cloud is a solution

We see the Stratavia acquisition fueling this fire, because in the end, cloud is a solution, and a solution needs content, and content wins. Content is what the customer is able to consume and use day one, when the solution is in. So it's important. And we've done a lot there.

We now have a best-in-class content provider in Stratavia that’s come on board to help round out the capabilities and add more into what the customer can get out of our solutions in very quick order.

All that sits on a recently refreshed BSA portfolio, with significant enhancements and new capabilities across network, automations, servers, and storage, that really makes all this happen.

... Let's face it, a lot of the CIOs are looking at a data center that’s packed full of applications that they probably don’t feel as if they have got a good handle on. Now, cloud is coming into the picture, and they've got two things to do here.

Number one, they need to start applying those new business methodologies to IT around providing cloud and the things that go with that, but also they have got a transformation piece to go along. And that can be very daunting.

What we've done is looked at the experience of helping previous customers do that work and we have applied that into the CloudStart and Cloud Maps, CloudStart being the planning and the upfront work that you need to get done.

So, we're right there with you. You don’t have to read chapter one of the book.

Then, as we put the infrastructure in with CSA for Matrix in the frame, we're embedding some of the CSA software inside of the Blade Matrix frame. So you have a way to build infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and manage it through the platform throughout the lifecycle.

Then, on the back end of that, we have the preconfigured application templates. If I need a SQL Server image to put into the system, I can pull that from Cloud Maps, build it into a framework and offer that very quickly. I don’t have to go and figure out how to size for this piece or what golden template looks like for this application.

It's really about obtaining a running start into the cloud, and one that’s not going to leave you wanting in a year or two. You have to be careful. Cloud is a great enablement technology and a lot of people are looking at IaaS, but that’s the starting point for it, and then you have to manage everything that you put inside of that as well.

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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FuseSource gains new autonomy to focus on OSS infrastructure model, Apache Community innovation, cloud opportunities

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

The FUSE family of software is now under the FuseSource name and has today gained new autonomy from Progress Software with its own corporate identity.

Part of the IONA Technologies acquisition by Progress Software in 2008, FuseSource has now become its own company, owned by Progress, but now more independent, to aggressively pursue its open source business model and to leverage the community development process strengths.

In anticipation of today's news, our discussion here targets the rapid growth, increased relevance, and new market direction for major open source middleware and integration software under the Apache license.

We'll also look at where FuseSource projects are headed in the near future. [NOTE: Larry Alston also recently joined FuseSource as president.]

Even as the IT mega vendors are consolidating more elements of IT infrastructure, and in some cases, buying up open-source projects and companies, the role and power of open source for enterprise and service providers alike has never been more popular or successful. Virtualization, cloud computing, mobile computing, and services orientation are all supporting more interest and increased mainstream use of open-source infrastructure.

Here now to discuss how FuseSource is therefore evolving we're joined by Debbie Moynihan, Director of Marketing for FuseSource, and Rob Davies, Director of Engineering for FuseSource. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Moynihan: Over the past couple of years, there has been a lot of focus on cost reduction, and that resulted in a lot of people looking at open source who maybe wouldn’t have looked at it in the past.

The other thing that’s really happened with open source is that some of the early adopters who started out with a single project have now standardized on FuseSource products across the entire organization. So there are many more proof-points of large global organizations rolling out open source in mission-critical production environments. Those two factors have driven a lot of people to think about open source, and to start adopting open source.

Then, the whole cloud trend came along. When you think about scaling in the cloud, open source is perfect for that. You don’t have to think about the licensing cost as you scale up. So, there are a lot of trends that have been happening and that have really been really helpful. We're very happy about them helping push open source into the mainstream.

From a FuseSource perspective, we've been seeing over 100 percent growth each year in our business, and that’s part of the reason for some of the things we're going to talk about today.

Davies: We've been around in this space for a while, but the earlier adopters who were just trying out in distinct groups are now rolling this out into broader production. Because of that, there is this snowball effect. People see that larger organizations are actually using open source for their infrastructure and their integration. That gives them more confidence to do the same.

I recently spoke to a large customer of ours in the telco space. They had this remit. Any open source that came in, they wouldn’t put into mission-critical situations, until they kicked the tires for a good while -- at least a couple of years.

But because there has been this push for more open source projects following open standards, people are now more willing to have a go using open source software.

Snowball effect

In fact, if you look at the numbers of some of our larger customers, they are using Apache ServiceMix and Apache ActiveMQ to support many thousands of business transactions, and this is business-critical stuff. That alone is enough to give people more confidence that open source is the right way to go.

... When you look at cloud, there are different issues you have to overcome. There is the issue about deploying into the cloud. How do you do that? If you're using a public cloud, there are different mechanisms for deploying stuff. And there are open source projects already in existence to make that easier to do.

This is something we have found internally as well. We deploy a lot of internal software, when we are doing our big scale testing. We make choices about which particular vendors we're going to use. So, we have to abstract the way we are doing things. We did that as an open source project, which we have been using internally.

You have to have choice. You can’t really dictate to use it this way or the other way. You've got to have a whole menu of different options for connecting.

When you get to the point of deploying, it’s how do you actually interface with these things? There is always going to be this continuing trend towards standards for integration. How are you going to integrate? Are you going to use SOAP? Are you going to use RESTful services? Would you like to use messaging, for example, to actually interface into an integration structure?

You have to have choice. You can’t really dictate to use it this way or the other way. You've got to have a whole menu of different options for connecting. This is what we try to provide in our software.

We always try to be agnostic to the technology, as much as how you connect to the infrastructure that we provide. But, we also tend to be as open as we can about the different ways of hooking these disparate systems together. That’s the only way you can really be successful in providing something like integration as a service and a cloud-like environment. You have to be completely open.

Best of both worlds

Moynihan: Progress is launching a new company called FuseSource that will be completely focused on the open source business model. We're really excited as a team. The FuseSource team has been an independent business unit, since IONA was acquired by Progress Software. We have been fairly independent within the company, but separated as our own company we'll be able to be completely independent in terms of how we do our marketing, sales, support, services, and engineering.

When you're part of a large organization, there are certain processes that everyone is supposed to follow. Within Progress, we are doing things slightly differently (or very differently depending on the area) because the needs of the open source market are different. So being our own company we'll have that independence to do everything that makes sense for the open-source users, and I'm pretty excited about that.

From a practical perspective, the business model is very different. In traditional enterprise software sales, there is a license fee which is typically a large upfront license cost relative to the entire cost over the lifetime of that software. Then, you have your annual maintenance charges and your services, training, and things like that.

From an open source perspective, typically upfront, there is no license cost. Our model is that there is no license cost. It’s a subscription support model, where there is a monthly fee, but the way that it is accounted for and the way that it works with the customer is very different. That's one of the reasons we split out our business. The way that we work with the customers and the way they consume the software are very different. It’s a month-to-month subscription support charge, but no license charge.

That’s also the reason people like cloud. You pay as you go. You scale as you go. And you don’t have that upfront capital expenditure cost. For new projects, it can be really hard to get money right now. All these benefits are why we're seeing so much growth in FuseSource.

While we do have some level of product management for open source, a lot of it is based around packaging, delivery, licensing, and these types of things, because our engineers are hearing directly from customers on a moment-by-moment basis. They're seeing the feedback in the community, getting out there, and partnering with our customers. So, from an economic perspective, the model is different.

Now, being backed by Progress Software provides us the benefit that customers can have that assurance that we're backed by a large organization. But, having FuseSource as standalone company, as you said, gives us that independence around decision making and really being like a startup.

We'll be able to have our own processes in any functional area that we need to best meet the needs of the open source users.

Davies: From a technical perspective, it’s really good for us. The shackles are off. There’s a lot of suddenly reinvigorating that seems to move forward. We've got a lot of really good ideas that we want to push out and roll out over the coming year, particularly enhancing of the products we already have, but also moving onto new areas.

There's a big excitement, like you would expect when you have got a startup. It just feels like a startup mentality. People are very passionate about what they're doing inside FuseSource.

Because those shackles have been taken away, it means that we can actually start innovating more in the direction we really want to drive our software too. It’s really good.

It's even more so, now that we have become autonomous of Progress. Not that working inside Progress was a bad thing, but we were constrained by some of the rigors and procedures that you have to go through when you are part of a larger organization. Because those shackles have been taken away, it means that we can actually start innovating more in the direction we really want to drive our software too. It’s really good.

Moynihan: From a customer perspective, this change will have a small but significant impact. We are continuing to do everything that we have been doing, but we will be able to have even more independence in the way that we do things. So it will all be beneficial to customers.

We have also launched a new community site at FuseSource.com, which we're pretty excited about. We were planning to do that and we've been working on that for several months. That just provides some additional usability and ability to find things on the site.

Overall, it will be really good for our customers. We've talked with them, and they're pretty excited about it.

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

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HP leverages converged infrastructure across IT spectrum to simplify branch offices and container-based data centers

The trend toward converged infrastructure -- a whole greater than sum of the traditional IT hardware, software, networking and storage parts -- is going both downstream and upstream.

HP today announced how combining and simplifying the parts of IT infrastructure makes the solution value far higher on either end of the applications distribution equation: At branch offices and the next-generation of compact and mobile all-in-one data center containers.

Called the HP Branch Office Networking Solution, the idea is that engineering the fuller IT and communications infrastructure solution, rather then leaving the IT staff and -- even worse -- the branch office managers to do the integrating, not only saves money, it allows the business to focus just on the applications and processes. This focus, by the way, on applications and processes -- not the systems integration, VOIP, updates and maintenance -- is driving the broad interest in cloud computing, SaaS and outsourcing. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP's announcements today in Barcelona are also marked by an emphasis on an ecosystem of partners approach, especially the branch office solution, which packages brand-name 14 apps, appliances and networking elements to make smaller sub-organizations an integrated part of the larger enterprise IT effort. The partner applications include WAN acceleration, security, unified communications
and service delivery management.

Appliances need integration too

You could think of it as a kitchen counter approach to appliances, which work well alone but don't exactly bake the whole cake. Organizing, attaching and managing the appliances -- with an emphasis on security and centralized control for the whole set-up -- has clearly been missing in branch offices. The E5400 series switch accomplishes the convergence of the discrete network appliances. The HP E5400 switch with new HP Advanced Services ZL module is available worldwide today with pricing starting at $8,294.

Today's HP news also follows a slew of product announcements last month that targeted the SMB market, and the "parts is parts" side of building out IT solutions.

To automate the branch office IT needs, HP is bringing together elements of the branch IT equation from the likes of Citrix, Avaya, Microsoft, and Riverbed. They match these up with routers, switches and management of the appliances into a solution. Security and access control across the branches and the integrated systems are being addressed via HP TippingPoint security services. These provide granular control of application access, with the ability to block access to entire websites – or features – across the enterprise and its branches.

Worried about too much Twitter usage at those branches? The new HP Application Digital Vaccine (AppDV) service delivers specifically designed filters to the HP TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), which easily control access to, or dictate usage of, non-business applications.

The branch automation approach also support a variety of network types, which opens the branch offices to a be able to exploit more types of applications delivery: from terminal serving apps, to desktop virtualization, to wireless and mobile. The all-WiFi office might soon only need a single, remotely and centrally managed locked-down rack in a lights-out closet, with untethered smartphones, tablets and notebooks as the worker nodes. Neat.

When you think of it, the new optimized branch office (say 25 seats and up) should be the leader in cloud adoption, not a laggard. The HP Branch Office Networking Solution -- with these market-leading technology partners -- might just allow the branches to demonstrate a few productivity tricks to the rest of the enterprise.

Indeed, we might just think of many more "branch offices" as myriad nodes within and across the global enterprises, where geography becomes essential irrelevant. Moreover, the branch office is the SMB, supported by any number and types of service providers, internal and external, public and private, SaaS and cloud.

Data centers get legs

Which brings us to the other end of the HP spectrum for today's news. The same "service providers" that must support these automated branch offices -- in all their flavors and across the org chart vagaries and far-flung global locations -- must also re-engineer their data centers for the new kinds of workloads, wavy demand curves, and energy- and cost-stingy operational requirements.

So HP has built a sprawling complex in Houston -- the POD Works -- to build an adaptable family of modular data centers -- the HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD) -- in the shape of 20- and 40-foot tractor-trailer-like containers. As we've seen from some other vendors, these mobile data centers in a box demand only that you drive the things up, lock the brake and hook up electricity, water and a high-speed network. I suppose you also drop them on the roof with a helicopter, but you get the point.

But in today's economy, the efficiency data rules the roost. The HP PODs deliver 37 percent more efficiency and cost 45 percent less than a traditional brick-and-mortar data centers, says HP.

Inside the custom-designed container is stuffed with highly engineered racks and the cooling, optimized networks and storage, as well as the server horsepower -- in this case HP ProLiant SL6500 Scalable Systems, from 1 to 1,000 nodes. While HP is targeting these at the high performance computing and service provider needs -- those that are delivering high-scale and/or high transactional power -- the adaptability and data center-level design may well become more the norm than the exception.

The PODs are flexible at supporting the converged infrastructure engines for energy efficiency, flexibility and serviceability, said HP. And the management is converged too, via Integrated Lights-Out Advanced (ILO 3), part of HP Insight Control.

The POD parts to be managed are essentially as many as eight servers, or up to four servers with 12 graphic processing units (GPU), in single four-rack unit enclosures. The solution further includes the HP ProLiant s6500 chassis, the HP ProLiant SL390s G7 server and the HP ProLiant SL170s G6 servers. These guts can be flexible upped to accommodate flexible POD designs, for a wide variety and scale of data-center-level performance and applications support requirements.

Built-in energy consciousness

You may not want to paint the containers green, but you might as well. The first release features optimized energy efficiency with HP ProLiant SL Advanced Power Manager and HP Intelligent Power Discovery to improve power management, as well as power supplies designed with 94 percent greater energy efficiently, said HP.

Start saving energy with delivering more than a teraFLOP per unit of rack space to increase compute power for scientific rendering and modeling applications. Other uses may well make themselves apparent.

Have data center POD, will travel? At least the wait for a POD is more reasonable. With HP POD-Works, PODs can be assembled, tested and shipped in as little as six weeks, compared with one year or longer, to build a traditional brick-and-mortar data center, said HP.

Hey, come to think of it, for those not blocking it with the TippingPoint IPS, I wish Twitter had a few of these on those PODs on the bird strings instead of that fail whale. Twitter should also know that multiple PODs or a POD farm can support large hosting operations and web-based or compute-intensive applications, in case they want to buy Google or Facebook.

Indeed, as could computing grains traction, data centers may be located (and co-located) based on more than whale tails. Compliance to local laws, for business continuity and to best serve all those thousands of automated branch offices might also spur demand for flexible and efficient mobile data centers.

Converged infrastructure may have found a converged IT market, even one that spans the globe.

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Leo Apotheker needs to target HP's forgotten businesses

This guest blog post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

By Tony Baer

Ever since its humble beginnings in the Palo Alto garage, HP has always been kind of a geeky company – in spite of Carly Fiorina’s superficial attempts to prod HP toward a vision thing during her aborted tenure. Yet HP keeps talking about getting back to that spiritual garage.

Software has long been the forgotten business of HP. Although – surprisingly – the software business was resuscitated under Mark Hurd’s reign (revenues have more than doubled as of a few years ago), software remains almost a rounding error in HP’s overall revenue pie.

Yes, Hurd gave the software business modest support. Mercury Interactive was acquired under his watch, giving the business a degree of critical mass when combined with the legacy OpenView business.

But during Hurd’s era, there were much bigger fish to fry beyond all the internal cost cutting for which Wall Street cheered, but insiders jeered. Converged Infrastructure has been the mantra, reminding us one and all that HP was still very much a hardware company. The message remains loud and clear with HP’s recent 3PAR acquisition at a heavily inflated $2.3 billion which was concluded in spite of the interim leadership vacuum.

The dilemma that HP faces is that, yes, it is the world’s largest hardware company (they call it technology), but the bulk of that is from personal systems. Ink, anybody?

Needs to compete

The converged infrastructure strategy was a play at the CTO’s office. Yet HP is a large enough company that it needs to compete in the leagues of IBM and Oracle, and for that it needs to get meetings with the CEO. Ergo, the rumors of feelers made to IBM Software’s Steve Mills, and the successful offer to Leo Apotheker, and agreement for Ray Lane as non-executive chairman.

Our initial reaction was one of disappointment; others have felt similarly. But Dennis Howlett feels that Apotheker is the right choice “to set a calm tone” that there won’t be a massive a debilitating reorg in the short term.

Under Apotheker’s watch, SAP stagnated, hit by the stillborn Business ByDesign and the hike in maintenance fees that, for the moment, made Oracle look warmer and fuzzier. Of course, you can’t blame all of SAP’s issues on Apotheker; the company was in a natural lull cycle as it was seeking a new direction in a mature ERP market.

The problem with SAP is that, defensive acquisition of Business Objects notwithstanding, the company has always been limited by a “not invented here” syndrome that has tended to blind the company to obvious opportunities – such as inexplicably letting strategic partner IDS Scheer slip away to Software AG. Apotheker’s shortcoming was not providing the strong leadership needed to jolt SAP out of its inertia.

So it’s not just a question of whether HP can digest another acquisition; it’s an issue of whether HP can strategically focus in two different directions that ultimately might come together, but not for a while.

Instead, Apotheker’s – and Ray Lane’s for that matter – value proposition is that they know the side of the enterprise business applications market that HP doesn’t. That’s the key to this transition.

The next question becomes acquisitions. HP has a lot on its plate already. It took at least 18 months for HP to digest the $14 billion acquisition of EDS, providing a critical mass IT services and data center outsourcing business. It is still digesting nearly $7 billion of subsequent acquisitions of 3Com, 3PAR, and Palm to make its converged infrastructure strategy real.

HP might be able to get backing to make new acquisitions, but the dilemma is that Converged Infrastructure is a stretch in the opposite direction from business software. So it’s not just a question of whether HP can digest another acquisition; it’s an issue of whether HP can strategically focus in two different directions that ultimately might come together, but not for a while.

So let’s speculate about software acquisitions.

SAP, the most logical candidate, is, in a narrow sense, relatively “affordable” given that its stock is roughly about 10 – 15 percent off its 2007 high. But SAP would be obviously the most challenging given the scale; it would be difficult enough for HP to digest SAP under normal circumstances, but with all the converged infrastructure stuff on its plate, it’s back to the question of how can you be in two places at once. Infor is a smaller company, but as it is also a polyglot of many smaller enterprise software firms, would present HP additional integration headaches that it doesn’t need.

Little choice

HP may have little choice but to make a play for SAP if IBM or Microsoft were unexpectedly to actively bid. Otherwise, its best bet is to revive the relationship, which would give both HP and SAP the time to acclimate. But in a rapidly consolidating technology market, who has the luxury of time these days?

Salesforce.com would make a logical stab as it would reinforce HP Enterprise Services’ (formerly EDS) outsourcing and BPO business. It would be far easier for HP to get its arms around this business. The drawback is that Salesforce.com would not be very extensible as an application set, as it uses a proprietary stored procedures database architecture. That would make it difficult to integrate with other prospective ERP SaaS acquisitions, which would otherwise be the next logical step to growing the business software footprint.

Can HP afford to converge itself in another direction? Can it afford not to?

Informatica is often brought up – if HP is to salvage its Neoview and Knightsbridge BI business, it would need a data integration engine to help bolster it. Better yet, buy Teradata, which is one of the biggest resellers of Informatica PowerCenter – that would give HP far more credible presence in the analytics space. Then it will have to ward off Oracle – which has an even more pressing need for Informatica to fill out the data integration piece in its Fusion middleware stack – for Informatica. But with Teradata, there would at least be a real anchor for the Informatica business.

HP has to decide what kind of company it needs to be, as Tom Kucharvy summarized well a few weeks back. Can HP afford to converge itself in another direction? Can it afford not to? Leo Apotheker has a heck of a listening tour ahead of him.

This guest blog post comes courtesy of Tony Baer’s OnStrategies blog. Tony is a senior analyst at Ovum.

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