Cloud services brokerages add needed elements of trust and oversight to complex cloud deals

Our BriefingsDirect discussion today focuses on an essential aspect of helping businesses make the best use of cloud computing.

We're examining the role and value of cloud services brokers with an emphasis on small to medium-sized businesses (SMBs), regional businesses, and government, and looking for attaining the best results from a specialist cloud service brokerage role within these different types of organizations.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

No two businesses have identical needs, and so specialized requirements need to be factored into the use of often commodity-type cloud services. An intermediary brokerage can help companies and government agencies make the best use of commodity and targeted IaaS clouds, and not fall prey to replacing an on-premises integration problem with a cloud complexity problem.

To learn more about the role and value of the specialist cloud services brokerage, we're joined by Todd Lyle, President of Duncan, LLC, a cloud services brokerage in Ohio, and Kevin Jackson, the Founder and CEO of GovCloud Network in Northern Virginia. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: How do we get regular companies to effectively start using these new cloud services?

Lyle: Through education. That’s our first step. The technology is clearly here, the three of us will agree. It's been here for quite some time now. The beauty of it is that we're able to extract bits and pieces for bundles, much like you get from your cell phone or your cable TV folks. You can pull those together through a cloud services brokerage.

Lyle

So brokerage firms will go out and deal with the cloud services providers like Amazon, Rackspace, Dell, and those types of organizations. They bring the strengths of each of those organizations together and bundle them. Then, the consumer gets that on a monthly basis. It's non-CAPEX, meaning there is no capital expenditure.

You're renting these services. So you can expand and contract as necessary. To liken this to a utility environment, utility organizations that do electric and do power, you flip the switch on or turn the faucet on and off. It’s a metered service.

Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org.

That's where you're going to get the largest return on your collective investment when you switch from a traditional IT environment on-premises, or even a private cloud, to the public cloud and the utility that this brings.

Government agencies

Gardner: Kevin you're involved more with government agencies. They've been using IT for an awfully long time. How is the adjustment to cloud models for them? Is it easier, is it better, or is it just a different type of approach, and therefore requires only adjustment?

Jackson: Thank you for bringing that up. Yes, I've been focused on providing advanced IT to the federal market and Fortune 500 businesses for quite a while. The advent of cloud computing and cloud services brokerages is a double-edged sword. At once, it provides a much greater agility with respect to the ability to leverage information technology.

Jackson

But, at the same time, it brings a much greater amount of responsibility, because cloud service providers have a broad range of capabilities. That broad range has to be matched against the range of requirements within an enterprise, and that drives a change in the management style of IT professionals.

You're going more from your implementation skills to a management of IT skills. This is a great transition across IT, and is something that cloud services brokerages can really aid. [See Jackson's recent blog on brokerages.]

Gardner: Todd, it sounds as if we're moving this from an implementation and a technology skill set into more of a procurement, governance, contracts, and creating the right service-level agreements (SLAs). These are, I think, new skills for many businesses. How is that coaching aspect of a cloud service’s brokerage coming out in the market? Is that something you are seeing a lot of demand for?

Lyle: It’s customer service, plain and simple. We hear about it all the time, but we also pass it off all the time. You have to be accessible. If you're a 69-year-old business owner and embracing a technology from that demographic, it’s going to be different than if you are 23 years old, different in the approach that you take with that person.

As we all get more tenured, we'll see more adaptability to new technologies in a workplace, but that’s a while out. That's the 35-and-younger crowd. If you go to 35-and-above, it's what Kevin mentioned -- changing the culture, changing the way things are procured within those cultures, and also centralizing command. That’s where the brokerage or the exchange comes into place for this. [See Lyle's video on cloud brokerages.]

Change management is a key aspect of being able to have an organization take on change as a normal aspect of their business.

Gardner: One of the things that’s interesting to me is that a lot of companies are now looking at this as not just as a way of switching from one type of IT, say a server under a desk, to another type of IT, a server in a cloud.

It’s forcing companies to reevaluate how they do business and think of themselves as a new process-management function, regardless of where the services reside. This also requires more than just how to write a contract. It's really how to do business transformation.

Does that play into the cloud services brokerage? Do you find yourselves coaching companies on business management?

Jackson: Absolutely. One of the things cloud services is bringing to the forefront is the rapidity of change. We're going from an environment where organizations expect a homogenous IT platform to where hybrid IT is really the norm. Change management is a key aspect of being able to have an organization take on change as a normal aspect of their business.

This is also driving business models. The more effective business models today are taking advantage of the parallel and global nature of cloud computing. This requires experience, and cloud services brokerages have the experience of dealing with different providers, different technologies, and different business models. This is where they provide a tremendous amount of value.

Different types of services

Gardner: Todd, this notion of being a change agent also raises the notion that we're not just talking about one type of cloud service. We're talking about software as a service (SaaS), bringing communications applications like e-mail and calendar into a web or mobile environment. We're talking about platform as a service (PaaS), if you're doing development and DevOps. We're talking about even some analytics nowadays, as people try to think about how to use big data and business intelligence (BI) in the cloud.

Tell me a bit more about why being a change agent across these different models -- and not just a cloud implementer or integrator -- raises the value of this cloud service brokerage role?

Lyle: It’s a holistic approach. I've been talking to my team lately about being the Dale Carnegie of the cloud, hence the specialist cloud services brokerage, because it really does come down to personalities.

In a book that I've recently written called Grounding the Cloud, Basics and Brokerages, I talk about the human element. That's the personalities, expectations, and abilities of your workforce, not only your present workforce but your future workforce, which we discussed just a moment ago, as far as demographics were concerned.

It's constant change. Kevin said it, using a different term, but that's the world we live in. Some schools are doing this, where they're adding this to their MBA programs. It is a common set of skills that you must have, and it's managing personalities more than you're managing technology, in my opinion.

It's about the human element, our personalities, and how to make these changes so that the companies actually can speed up.

Gardner: Tell me a bit more about this book, Todd, it’s called Grounding the Cloud. When is it available and how can people learn more about it?

Lyle: It’s available now on Amazon, and they can find out more at www.groundingthecloud.org. This is a layman’s introduction to cloud computing, and so it helps business men and women get a better understanding of the cloud -- and how they could best maximize their time and their money, as it associates to their IT needs.

Gardner: Does the book get into this concept of the specialist cloud services brokerage (SCSB), as opposed to just a general brokerage, and getting at what's the difference?

Lyle: That’s an excellent question, Dana. There are a lot of perceptions, you have one as well, of what a cloud services brokerage is. But, at the end of the day -- and we've been talking about this in the entire discussion -- it's about the human element, our personalities, and how to make these changes so that the companies actually can speed up.

We discuss it here in the "flyover country," in Ohio. We meet in the book with Cleveland State University. We meet with Allen Black Enterprises, and then even with a small landscaping company to demonstrate how the cloud is being applied from six and seven users, all the way up to 25,000 users. And we're doing it here in the Midwest, where things tend to take a couple of years to change.

User advocate

Gardner: How is a cloud services brokerage different from a systems integrator? It seems there's some commonality. But you are not just a channel, or reseller, you are really as much an advocate for the user.

Lyle: A specialist cloud services brokerage is going to be more like Underwriters Laboratories (UL). It’s going to go out, fielding all the different cloud flavors that are available, pick what they feel is best, and bring it together in a bundle. Then, the SCSB works with the entity to adapt to the culture and the change that's going to have to occur and the education within their particular businesses, as opposed to a very high-level vertical, where some things are just pushed out at an enterprise level.

Jackson: I see this cloud services brokerage and specialist cloud services brokerage as the new-age system integrator, because there are additional capabilities that are offered.

For example, you need a trusted third-party to monitor and report on adherence to SLAs. The provider is not going to do that. That’s a role for your cloud services brokerage. Also you need to maintain viable options for alternative cloud-service providers. The cloud services brokerage will identify your options and give you choices, should you need the change. A specialist cloud services brokerage also helps to ensure portability of your business process and data from one cloud service provider to another.

Management of change is more than a single aspect within the organization. It’s how to adapt with constant change and make sure that your enterprise has options and doesn't get locked into a single vendor.

Lyle: It comes to the point, Kevin, of building for constant change. You're exactly right.

Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org

Gardner: You raise an interesting point too, Kevin, that one shouldn’t get lulled into thinking that they can just make a move to the cloud, and it will all be done. This is going to be a constant set of moves, a journey, and you're going to want to avail yourself of the cloud services marketplace that’s emerging.

We're seeing prices driven down. We're seeing competition among commodity-level cloud services. I expect we'll see other kinds of market forces at work. You want to be agile and be able to take advantage of that in your total cost of computing.

Jackson: There's a broad range of providers in the marketplace, and that range expands daily. Similarly, there's a large range of requirements within any enterprise of any size. Brokers act as matchmakers, avoiding common mistakes, and also help the organizations, the SMBs in particular, implement best practices in their adoption of this new model.

Gardner: Also, when you have a brokerage as your advocate, they're keeping their eye on the cloud marketplace, so that you can keep your eye on your business and your vertical, too. Therefore, you're going to have somebody to tip you off when things change and they will be on the vanguard for deals. Is that something that comes up in your book, Todd, of the public service brokerage being an educated expert in a field where the business really wants to stick to its knitting?

Primary goal

Lyle: Absolutely. That’s the primary goal, both at a strategic level, when you're deciding what products to use -- the Rackspaces, the Microsofts, the RightSignatures, etc. -- all the way down to the tactical one of the daily operation. When I leave the company, how soon can we lock Todd out? How soon can we lock him down or lock him out? It becomes a security issue at a very granular level. Because it's metered, you turn it off, you turn Todd off, you save his data, and put it someplace else.

That’s a role that, requires command and control and oversight, and that's a responsibility. You're part butler. You're looking out for the day-to-day, the minute issues. Then you get up to a very high level. You're like UL. You're keeping an eye on everything that’s occurring. UL comes to mind because they do things that are tactile and those things that you can't touch, and definitely the cloud is something you can’t touch.

Jackson: Actually, I believe it represents the embracing of a cooperative model of my consumers of this information technology, but embracing with open eyes. This is particularly of interest within the federal marketplace, because federal procurement executives have to stop their adversarial attitude toward industry. Cloud services brokerages and specialist cloud services brokerages sit at the same the table with these consumers.

This is particularly of interest within the federal marketplace, because federal procurement executives have to stop their adversarial attitude towards industry.

Lyle: Kevin, your point is very well taken. I'll go one step further. We were talking up and down the scales, strategic down to the daily operations. One of the challenges that we have to overcome is the signatories, the senior executives, that make these decisions. They're in a different age group and they're used to doing things a certain way.

That being said, getting legislation to be changed at the federal level, directives being pushed down, will make the difference, because they do know how to take orders. I know I'm speaking frankly, but what's going to have to occur for us to see some significant change within the next five years is being told how the procurement process is going to happen.

You're taking the feather; I'm taking the stick, but it’s going to take both of those to accomplish that task at the federal level.

Gardner: We know that Duncan, LLC is a specialized cloud services brokerage. Kevin, tell us a little bit about the GovCloud Network. What is your organization, and how do you align with cloud brokerages?

Jackson: GovCloud Network is a specialty consultancy that helps organizations modify or change their mission and business processes in order to take advantage of this new style of system integrator.

Earlier, I said that the key to transition in a cloud is adopting and adapting to the parallel nature and a global nature of cloud computing. This requires a second look at your existing business processes and your existing mission processes to do things in different ways. That's what GovCloud Network allows. It helps you redesign your business and mission processes for this constant change and this new model.

Notion of governance

Gardner: I'd like to go back to this notion of governance. It seems to me, Todd, that when you have different parts of your company procuring cloud services, sometimes this is referred to as shadow IT. They're not doing it in concert, through a gatekeeper like a cloud broker. Not only is there a potential redundancy of efforts in labor and work in process, but there is this governance and security risk, because one hand doesn’t know what the other hand is doing.

Let's address this issue about better security from better governance by having a common brokerage gatekeeper, rather than having different aspects of your company out buying and using cloud services independently.

Lyle: We're your trusted adviser. We’re also very much a trusted member of your team when you bring us into the fold. We provide oversight. We're big brother, if you want to look at it that way, but big brother is important when you are dealing with your business and your business resources. You don’t want to leave a window open at night. You certainly don't want to leave your network open.

There's a lot going on in today's world, a lot of transition, the NSA and everything we worry about. It's important to have somebody providing command and control. We don’t sit there and stare at a monitor all day. We use systems that watch this, but we can tell when there's an increase or decrease out of the norm of activities within your organization.

We're big brother, if you want to look at it that way, but big brother is important when you are dealing with your business and your business resources.

It really doesn't matter how big or how small, there are systems that allow us to monitor this and give a heads up. If you're part of a leadership team, you’d be notified that again Todd Lyle has left an open window. But if you don't know that Todd even has the window, then that’s even a bigger concern. That comes down to the leadership again -- how you want to manage your entity.

We all want to feel free to make decisions, but there are too many benefits available to us, transparent benefits, as Kevin put it, to using the cloud and hiding in plain sight, maximizing e-mail at 100,000 plus users. Those are all good things but they require oversight.

It's almost like an aviation model, where you have your ground control and your flight crew. Everybody on that team is providing oversight to the other. Ultimately, you have your control tower that's watching that, and the control tower, both in the air and on the ground, is your cloud services brokerage.

Jackson: It’s important to understand that cloud computing is the industrialization of information technology. You're going from an age where the IT infrastructure is a hand-designed and built work of art to where your IT infrastructure is a highly automated assembly-line platform that requires real-time monitoring and metering. Your specialist cloud services brokerage actually helps you in that transition and operations within this highly automated environment.

Gardner: Todd, we spoke earlier about how we're moving from implementation to procurement. We've also talked about governance being important, SLAs, and managing a contract across variety of different organizations that are providing cloud type services. It seems to me that we're talking about financial types of relations.

So even the Federal Government can adopt cloud services brokerage and respond in a very quick and efficient and effective manner.

How does the cloud services brokerage help the financial people in a company. Maybe it's an individual who wears many hats, but you could think of them as akin to a chief financial officer, even though that might not be their title?

What is it that we are doing with the cloud services brokerage that is of a special interest and value to the financial people? Is it unified billing or is it one throat to choke? How does that work?

Lyle: Both, and then some. Ultimately it's unified billing and unified management from daily operations. It's helping people understand that we're moving from a capitalized expense, the server, the software, things that are tactile that we are used to touching. We're used to being able to count them and we like to see our stuff.

So it's transitioning and letting go, especially for the people who watch the money. We have a fiduciary responsibility to the organizations that we work for. Part of that is communicating, educating, and helping the CFO-type person understand the transition not only from the CAPEX to the OPEX, because they get that, but also how you're going to correlate it to productivity.

It's letting them know to be patient. It's going to take a couple months for your metering to level up. We have some statistics and we can read into that. It's holding their hand, helping them out. That's a very big deal as far as that's concerned.

Gardner: Let's start to think about how to get started. Obviously, every company is different. They're going to be at a different place in terms of maturity, in their own IT, never mind the transition to cloud types of activities. Would you recommend the book as a starting point? Do you have some other materials or references? How do you help that education process get going. I'm thinking about organizations that are really at the very beginning?

Gateway cloud

Lyle: We've created a gateway cloud in our book, not to confuse the cloud story. Ultimately, we have to take in consideration our economy, the world economy today. We're still very slow to move forward.

There are some activities occurring that are forcing us to make change. Our contracts may be running out. Software like XP is no longer supported. So we may be forced into making a change. That's when it's time to engage a cloud services brokerage or a specialist cloud services brokerage.

Go out and buy the book. It's available on Amazon. It gives you a breakdown, and you can do an assessment of your organization as it currently is and it will help you map your network. Then, it will help you reach out to a cloud services brokerage, if you are so inclined, through points of interest for request for proposal or request for information.

The fun part is, it gives you a recipe using Rackspace, Jungle Disk, and gotomeeting.com, where you get to build a baby cloud. Then, you can go out and play with it.

This is written for the layperson. I've been told it’s entertaining, which is the most important part, because you’re going to read it then.

You want to begin with three points: file sharing, remote access, and email. You can be the lighthouse or you can be a dry-cleaners, but every organization needs file sharing, remote access, and email. We open-sourced this recipe or what we call the industrial bundle for small businesses.

It's not daunting. We’ve got some time yet, but I would encourage you to get a handle on where your infrastructure is today, digest that information, go out and play with the gateway cloud that we've created, and reach out to us if you are so inclined.

Learn more about Todd D. Lyle's book, 
Grounding the Cloud: Basics and Brokerages, 
at groundingthecloud.org

We’d love for you to use one of our organizations, but ultimately know that there are people out there to help you. This book was written for us, not for the technical person. It is not in geek speak. This is written for the layperson. I've been told it’s entertaining, which is the most important part, because you’re going to read it then.

Jackson: I would urge SMBs to take the plunge. Cloud can be scary to some, but there is very little risk and there is much to gain for any SMB. The using, leveraging, taking advantage of the cloud gateway that Todd mentioned is a very good, low risk, and high reward path towards the cloud.

Gardner: I would agree with both of what you all said. The notion of a proof of concept and dipping your toe in. You don't have to buy it all at once, but find an area of your company where you’re going to be forced to make a change anyway and then to your point, Kevin, do it now. Take the plunge earlier rather than later.

Jackson: Before you're forced.

Large changes

Gardner: Before you’re forced, but you want to look at a tactical benefit and where to work toward strategic benefit, but there is going to be some really large changes happening in what these cloud providers can do in a fairly short amount of time.

We're moving from discrete apps into the entire desktop, so a full PC experience as a service. That’s going to be very attractive to people. They're going to need to make some changes to get there. But rather than thinking about services discreetly, more and more of what they're looking for is going to be coming as the entire IT services experience, and more analytics capabilities mixed into that. So I am glad to hear you both explaining how to do it, managed at a proof-of-concept level. But I would say do it sooner rather than later.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Duncan, LLC.

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University of New Mexico delivers efficient IT services by centralizing on secure, managed cloud automation

The latest BriefingsDirect discussion focuses on one of the toughest balancing acts in seeking the best of cloud computing benefits. This balance comes from obtaining the proper degree of centralization or "common good" for infrastructure efficiency, while preserving a sufficient culture of decentralization for agility, innovation, and departmental-level control.

The requirement for empowering centralization is no more evident than in a large university setting, where support and consensus must be preserved among such constituencies as faculty, staff, students, and researchers -- across an expansive educational community.

But the typical IT model does not support localized agility when it takes weeks to spin up a server, if online services lack automation, or if manual processes hold back efficient ongoing IT operations. Too much IT infrastructure redundancy also means weak security, high costs, lack of agility, and slow upgrades.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

We're joined by an IT executive from the University of New Mexico (UNM) to learn more about moving to a streamlined and automated private cloud model to gain a common good benefit, while maintaining a vibrant and reassured culture of innovation. We're also joined by a VMware executive to learn more about the latest ways to manage cloud architectures and processes to attain the best of cloud efficiencies, while empowering improved services delivery and process agility.

They are: Brian Pietrewicz, Director of Computing Platforms at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, and Kurt Milne, Director of Product Marketing in the Management Business Unit at VMware. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Tell us about your IT organization at the university and how you've been able to do change, but at the same time not alienate your users, who are, I imagine, used to having things their way.

Pietrewicz: At the University of New Mexico, it's a highly decentralized organization. In most cases, the departments are responsible for their own IT. In most cases, that means they don't have the resources to effectively run IT, in particular, things like data centers, servers, storage, disaster recovery (DR), and backups.

Pietrewicz

What we're doing to improve the process is providing infrastructure as a service (IaaS) to those groups so that they don’t have to worry about the heavy lifting of the infrastructure pieces that I mentioned before. They can stay focused on their core mission, whether that’s physics, or psychology, or who knows what.

So we offer IaaS. We're running a VMware stack, and we're also running vCloud Automation Center (vCAC). We've deployed the Self-Service Portal. We give departments, faculty members, or departmental IT folks the ability to go into the portal and deploy their own machines at will.

Then, they are administrators of that machine. They also have additional management features through the vCAC console so that they can effectively do whatever they need to do with the server, but not have to worry about any of the underlying infrastructure.

Gardner: That sounds like the best of both worlds. In a sense, you're a service provider in the organization, getting the benefits of centralization and efficiency, but allowing them to still have a lot of hands-on control, which I assume that they want.

Pietrewicz: Correct. The other part is the agility, the ability for them to be able to react quickly, to consume infrastructure on demand as they need it, and have the benefit of all the things that virtualization brings with redundant infrastructure, lower cost of ownership, and those sorts of things.

New expectations

Milne: It’s an interesting time to be in the IT space, because there's this new set of expectations being imposed on IT by the business to be strategic, to quickly adopt new technology, and boost innovation.

Milne

At the same time, IT still has the full set of responsibilities they've always had -- to stay secure, to avoid legacy debt, to drive operational excellence so they maintain uptime, security, and quality of service for transactional systems and business-critical systems.

It’s really an interesting paradox. How do you do these two things that are seemingly mutually exclusive -- go fast, but at the same time, stay in control?

Brian’s approach is what I call it "push button IT," where you give folks a button to push and they get what they need when they want it. But if IT controls the button and they control what happens when the user pushes the button, IT is able to maintain control. It’s really the best of both worlds.

Gardner: Brian, tell us a little bit about how long you have been there and what it was like before you began this journey?

Pietrewicz: I've been at UNM for about two-and-a-half years, and I can tell you the number one complaint. We suffer from a lot of the same problems that other large IT shops have, with funding and things like that. But the primary issue that we had when I walked in the door was customers being upset because we didn't have clearly-defined services, and we had sold these services to these customers.

We had sold virtual machines (VMs) with database backups, and all kinds of interesting things, with no service-level agreements (SLAs), no processes, nothing wrapped around it. The delivery of these services was completely inconsistent.

So I started out down the new path. The first thing that we did was to make the services more consistent. Just to give you an example, deploying a virtual machine for a customer. The way that it was when I got here was that a ticket came into the service desk. It went to a single technician, and then whichever technician got that ticket figured out their own way of getting that machine deployed.

At the same time, IT still has the full set of responsibilities they've always had -- to stay secure, to avoid legacy debt, to drive operational excellence.

As the next step in that process, we went through and, instead of just having it being done a different way by whoever received the ticket, we identified all the steps associated. In looking at all the steps associated, we identified over a 100 manual steps that went though six different completely separate groups inside of our organization.

Those included operating system, storage, virtualization, security, and networking for firewall changes. In all those various groups that deploy their individual piece of that puzzle, it was being done differently every time. Our deployment times were taking as long as three weeks. You can imagine how painful that is when it takes 20 minutes to spin up a VM -- but it was taking three weeks to deploy it to a customer.

We identified all the steps and defined the process very, very clearly; exactly what it takes to deploy a VM. The interesting thing that came out of that was that it gave us the content necessary to be able to start developing a true service description and an SLA.

Ticketing system

It also made it so that it was consistent. We did a few things after we did the process development. We generated workflows within our ticketing system, so that all that happened was a ticket was put in and then it auto-generated all the necessary tickets to deploy the VM, so it happened in a very consistent way.

That dropped the deployment time from three weeks down to about three days, because it still had to go through certain approval process and things like that with security.

For the next step we said, "Okay, how can we do this better?" We looked at all of those steps that we put in place and found that they were all repetitive, manual steps that could be easily automated. So enters VMware vCAC.

We took all the steps, after we had them clearly defined, and we automated all the steps that we could. We couldn’t automate all of them, for example, sending information to our billing system to bill the customer back. From vCAC we shoot an email over to our ticketing system, that generates a ticket. Then, the billing information is still entered manually, and we are working on an upgrade to that.

UNM is approximately 45,000 faculty, staff, and students. We have about 100 either departments or affiliates, and today, we're running about 660 VMs for our organization. For central IT, we're between 98 percent and 99 percent virtualized.

When I first got here, the services were not defined and the processes were not defined. Since then, we have clearly defined the processes, narrowed those down into the very specific processes and tasks that had to be done, and then we automated. We're going through the process of automating every step in that process.

ITIL is very challenging to implement, but it's extremely helpful, because it gives you a framework to work within.

Now, we have a thing we call Lobo Cloud -- our mascot is the Lobo. Customers can now go online and deploy a machine within 20 minutes. So basically everything has transformed from extremely inconsistent service and taking as long as three weeks to deploy, to now it being the equivalent going into McDonald’s and ordering a Big Mac. It’s extremely consistent and down from three weeks to 20 minutes.

Gardner: I assume Brian that you've adopted some industry-standard methods, perhaps a framework, that gave you some guidance on this. How does your service delivery policy adhere to an industry standard like ITIL?

Pietrewicz: That’s what we use. We follow ITIL and we're at varying levels of maturity with it. ITIL is very challenging to implement, but it's extremely helpful, because it gives you a framework to work within, to start narrowing down these process, defining services, setting SLAs. It gives you a good overarching framework to work within.

The absolute hardest part of all of this is implementing the ITIL framework, identifying your processes, identifying what your service is, and identifying your SLA. Walking through all of that is exponentially harder than putting the technology in place.

Gardner: It seems to me that not only are you going to get faster servers, response times, and automation, but there are some other significant benefits to this approach. I'm thinking about security, disaster recovery (DR), the ability to budget better through an OPEX model, and then ultimately reduce total costs.

Is it too soon or have some of these other benefits that I have heard about typically when people move to a more automated cloud approach? How is that working for you?

Less expensive

Pietrewicz: We don’t really have good statistics on it. For the folks that had machines sitting underneath their desks and in closets before, we don’t have a lot of the statistics to know exactly the cost and the time they were spending on that.

Anybody who works with virtualization quickly learns that once you hit a certain size, it becomes significantly less expensive. You become far more agile and you get a huge number of benefits. Some of them are things that you mentioned -- the deployment time, DR, the ability to automate, the taking advantage of economies of scale.

Instead of deploying one $10,000 server per application, you're now loading up 70 machines on a $15,000 server. All of those things come into play. But we really don’t have good statistics, because we didn’t really have any good processes before we started.

What’s interesting now is that our next step in the process is to automate our billing process. Once we do that, we're going to have everything from our virtual infrastructure deployed into our billing system and either a charge-back or a show-back methodology.

The same kind of tools and processes that can automate the delivery of those services can also automate tearing down those services when they're done.

So we'll have complete detailed costs of all of our infrastructure associated with every department and every application that is using our service. We'll be able to really show the total cost of ownership (TCO).

Milne: Brian, it sounds like you're on a path that a lot of our customers are on. What we see typically is that there is a change in consumption behavior when your customers know that they can get IaaS on demand. They stop hoarding resources. The same kind of tools and processes that can automate the delivery of those services can also automate tearing down those services when they're done.

Virtualization by itself increases capacity utilization quite a bit, but then going to this kind of services delivery, service consumption for infrastructure, actually further increases utilization and drives down over-provisioning.

Adding that cost transparency to that service will further change your consumers' behavior and the ability to get it when you need it and only pay for what you use drives down the amount of resources that you have to keep in your data center.

Pietrewicz: Absolutely. It’s amazing what happens when you have to pay for something and it’s very visible.

Milne: I always feel that if IT is free that really changes the supply and demand equation, if you study economics. People don’t know what to do with free. They typically take too much.

Economic behavior

Pietrewicz: Right. This really starts driving basic economic and social behavior into the equation in IT. It’s a difficult thing for organizations to get their head around, and they're sort of getting it here at the university. It’s not completely in place. The way that we look at it is as a, "We'll build it, and they'll come" kind of thing.

Most folks have figured out that they can really save that money. Instead of going out and buying a $10,000 server, they can buy a $1,000 VM from us that does the exact same thing. If they don’t want it any more, they can turn it off and not pay any more. All of those things come into play.

Another piece on that is the university was experimenting with a thing called reliability centered maintenance (RCM), which is a budgeting process that works toward the bottom line of a particular organization. That means that people have to be transparent and make clear decisions about where they're spending their money. That's also starting to drive adoption.

Ancillary benefits

Gardner: We talked about some of the ancillary benefits of your approach, but there are some direct benefits when you go to a cloud model, which gives you more options. You can have your private cloud. You can look to public cloud and other hosting models, and then you can start to see a path or a vision towards a hybrid cloud environment, where you might actually move workloads around based on the right infrastructure approach for the right job at the right time. Any thoughts about where your clouds goals are vis-à-vis the hybrid potential?

Pietrewicz: We have a few things in play that we're actively working. Today, we have people using various cloud providers. The interesting part about that they're just paying for it with a credit card out of their department, and the university doesn’t have any clear way of knowing exactly what’s out there. We don’t really have any good security mechanisms in place for determining whether there's any sensitive data being stored out there inadvertently.

We're working with a lot of the cloud providers that we are already spending money with and we are already working with to develop consolidated accounts. One, we can save money through economies of scale. And two, we can get some visibility into what folks are actually using the cloud for. And then three, IT would like to act as an adviser to be able to point out for the various cloud providers that are out there -- this particular provider is good at functionality or this particular provider is good at security.

We envision setting up hybrid cloud services with those public cloud providers to be able to move the workloads back and forth when necessary.

The first step is to corral the use of public cloud for UNM and create an escorting process to the cloud. The second step is going to be a hybrid cloud that we'll set up from our private cloud here on site. We envision setting up hybrid cloud services with those public cloud providers to be able to move the workloads back and forth when necessary.

The other major benefit that we very much look forward to is being able to do DR in the cloud and taking advantage of the ability to replicate data and then spin up systems as you need them, rather than having a couple of million dollars in equipment sitting, waiting, and hoping you never use it. Things that you have to refresh every four years so that you have a viable DR plan.

Gardner: Is vCloud Automation Center something that will be useful in moving to this hybrid model? The one button to push, as it were, on the private cloud, will that become a one button to push in the hybrid model as well?

Pietrewicz: It will. I mentioned those various cloud service providers. Most of them are compatible with the vCloud Connector, so that you can simply just connect up that hybrid cloud service and with a little bit of work, be able to massage your portal.

We can have a menu option of public cloud providers through our portal that they could just select and say that they want to get a vCHS, Amazon, or Terremark, and then potentially move workloads back and forth. So vCAC and vCloud Connector are all at the center of it.

The other interesting piece that we're working on and going to try to figure out as part of this is that we really want to start looking into NSX and/or VIX to be able to provide very clear security boundaries, basically multi-tenancy, and then potentially be able to move those multi-tenant environments back and forth in the cloud or extend them from public to private cloud as well.

Software-defined networking

Gardner: Brian, you mentioned multi-tenancy earlier, and of course, there is a lot going on with software-defined data center, networking, and storage. What is it about it that’s interesting to you and why is this a priority for you, software-defined networking (SDN), for example?

Pietrewicz: SDN is the next sort of step in being able to truly automate your IaaS and your virtual environment. If you want to be able to dynamically deploy systems and have them be in a SAN box that is multi-tenant by customer, you really need to have an SDN-type solution, or at least that’s extremely helpful to do that.

One of the things that we are looking at next is to be able to implement something like NSX, so that we can deploy the equivalent of what’s a virtual wire, a multi-tenant environment, to individual customers, so that they can only see their stuff and can’t see their neighbors and vice versa.

The key is the ability to orchestrate that on demand and not have to deal with the legacy VLAN and firewall kind of issues that you have with the legacy environment.

Gardner: It’s interesting how a lot of these major trends -- service delivery, cloud, private cloud, DR, and SDN -- are interrelated. It’s a complex bundle, but the payoffs, when you do this inclusively, are pretty impressive.

From VMware’s perspective, that kind of network virtualization capability is critical for our hybrid cloud service.

Pietrewicz: Whenever you get to the point of abstracting things to the software level, you provide the ability to automate. When you have the ability to automate, you get tremendous flexibility. That sometimes can be an issue in and of itself, just making decisions on how you want to do something. But along with that flexibility, you get the ability to automate just about anything that you want or need to be able to do.

The second piece to that is that we're really excited about figuring out, when we build the hybrid cloud model, how we might be able to extend those tenants into the cloud, either as active running workloads or in a DR model, so that the multi-tenancy is retained.

Milne: From VMware’s perspective, that kind of network virtualization capability is critical for our hybrid cloud service. It’s that capability that NSX provides that creates that seamless experience from your data center out to the hybrid cloud.

As you said, Brian, that kind of network configuration, allocation, and reallocation of IP addresses, when you are moving things from one data center to another, is not something you want to do on a manual basis. So NSX is a key component of our hybrid cloud vision. It’s something that lot of the other cloud providers just don’t have.

Pietrewicz: I see it as the next frontier in IT. I think that when SDN starts taking off, it’s going to be a game changer in ways that we are not even recognizing yet, and that’s one example. Moving a workload from one network to another network is extremely powerful.

Cloud broker

Gardner: Kurt, this sounds as if not only is Brian transitioning into being a service provider to his constituencies, but now he's also becoming a cloud broker. Is this typical of what you're seeing in the market as well?

Milne: It is. Some of our customers will take a step to try to get their arms around shadow IT, users going around IT, to just offer that provisioning option through the IT portal. So it’s like, "You're using Amazon? That’s fine. We can help you do that." So putting a button in the service catalog deploys the kind of work that they've been doing in a public cloud like Amazon, but it has to come through IT. Then, IT is aware of it.

There's a saying I like. It’s called the "cloud boomerang." A lot of times, the IT customers will put thing out in the public cloud, but like a boomerang, it seems to always come back. The customer wants to integrate it with an existing system or they realize that they have to support it up in the cloud. A lot of times, those rogue deployments make their way back to the IT organization. So putting an Amazon service in the vCAC portal and not changing anything else is a nice first step in corralling that.

Now, we're taking that next step and combining a lot of those capabilities into a single platform.

Pietrewicz: That is exactly what we're seeing. At a university, because there isn’t really governance, it’s more like build a good service and hope they come. We take the approach of trying to enable it. We want to make it very transparent and say that they can use Amazon or vCHS, but there's a better way to do it. If you do it through the portal, you may be able to move those workloads back and forth.

We are actually seeing exactly what you mentioned, Kurt. Folks are reaching the limitations of using some of the cloud providers, because they need to get access to data back here at UNM and are actually doing the boomerang approach. They started out there and now they're migrating their machines into our IaaS so that they can get access to the data that they need.

Gardner: Kurt, we heard some very interesting things at VMworld recently around the cloud-management platform. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about that and how that fits into what we've been discussing in terms of this ongoing maturity and evolution that a large organization like the University of New Mexico is well into?

Milne: We recently announced the vRealizeSuite, which is a cloud management platform. So we're moving our product management strategy to a common platform.

Over the years, VMware has either built or acquired quite a few different management products. We've combined those products into a number of suites, like our automation, operations, and our business management suites. Now, we're taking that next step and combining a lot of those capabilities into a single platform.

There are a couple of guiding ideas there. We see in organizations like Brian’s is that the lines between the automated provisioning of those workloads automation, provisioning those workloads, and the ongoing operations and maintenance and support of those workloads, is really starting to blur.

So you have automation tasks that might happen when you're doing a support call. Maybe you want to provision some more resources, and there are operations tasks like checking system health that you might want to do as a step in an automation routine.

Shared services

Our product strategy change is to move toward a shared-services model, similar to a service-oriented architecture. The different services that are underlying our management products would be executable through a tool like vCAC, through a command line interface, or through like a REST API. There's kind of a mix-and-match opportunity to execute those services in different ways.

To build that platform with the shared service model on top, we need to start re-architecting some of our products in the back-end, so that we have a common orchestration engine, a common DR backup and a common policy engine. You don’t want one tool to undo the work that another tool did yesterday. You can’t have conflicting robots going out and doing automated tasks.

The general idea is to try to further consolidate these different management functions into a single platform. The overall goal is to try to help organizations maintain control, but then also increase flexibility and speed for their business users.

Gardner: Brian, is that something that you think is going to be on your radar? Is management so distributed now that you're looking for a more consolidated approach that’s inclusive?

The overall goal is to try to help organizations maintain control, but then also increase flexibility and speed for their business users.

Pietrewicz: That would be wonderful. We're doing things many different ways. If you take the example of orchestration, we are using Orchestrator, PowerShell, Perl, and starting to experiment with Puppet.

It would be really good if you could have one standardized way that you approach orchestration, as an example, and how that might tie into all the other pieces for back-end management, rather than handling it several different ways. As Kurt was mentioning, one part starts to step on another part. Having that be consolidated and consistent would be a huge value.

Milne: The other part of the strategy is also to make that work across environments. So the same tools and services would be available if you are provisioning up to Amazon or to your private cloud or hybrid cloud service, and even different hypervisors.

We're fully aware of the heterogeneous nature of the modern data center. So we're shifting to try to create that kind of powerful common management stack with that unified management experience across all of the environment. It’s kind of a nirvana. When we talk to people, they say that’s exactly what they want. So our vision is to kind of march towards delivering on that.

Gardner: Kurt, I am trying to recall from VMworld whether this was offered on-premises, as a service from a cloud, or some combination?

Service offerings

Milne: That’s the other interesting part of this. We're starting to go down the path of offering a number of our management products as a service. For example, at VMworld, we announced the availability of a beta for our vCAC product as a software as a service (SaaS), so you can without installing any software get a service portal, get that workflow and policy engine, and deploy infrastructure services across different environments.

We'll be rolling out betas for our other products in subsequent quarters over the next year or so. Then potentially we could have the SaaS services interact with and combine with the services that are available through the products that are installed on-premise. Our goal is to get these out there and then understand what the best use cases are, but that kind of mix and match is part of the vision.

Gardner: It’s interesting. We might have a reverse boomerang when it comes to the management of all of this. Does that sound appealing Brian? Is that something you would look to as a cloud service, comprehensive management?

Our goal is to get these out there and then understand what the best use cases are, but that kind of mix and match is part of the vision.

Pietrewicz: Absolutely, but it’s largely dependent on return on investment (ROI). It’s that balance of, when you get to a certain level in an IT shop, it’s sometimes cheaper to do things in-house than it is to outsource it, and sometimes not. You have to do the analysis on the ROI on what makes more sense to bring it in or to use a SaaS.

As an example, we completely outsourced all of our email, because it’s a lot of work. It's very simple and easy to do as a SaaS solution, but it’s a lot more work to do in-house. It’s definitely something that we would look into.

Milne: In a mid-sized organization that might have 300 different applications that the IT organization supports, maybe 50 of those are IT tools. Already we've seen progress with companies like ServiceNow that have a SaaS-based service desk. It makes sense to start to turn more of those management products into a SaaS delivery model.

Gardner: Brian, any thoughts about others who are starting to move in your direction, perhaps their own Lobo Cloud, their own portal rationalizing these services, being able to measure them better. What in 20/20 hindsight do you have that you could recommend for them as they go about this? Any learned lessons you could share?

Process orientation

Pietrewicz: The biggest lesson learned, without a doubt, is the focus on the process orientation, the ITIL model. The technology is really not that hard. It’s determining what your service is, what are you trying to deliver, and then how do you build that into a consistently delivered service, complete with SLAs and service descriptions that meet the customer needs. That's the most difficult part.

The technical folks can definitely sling the technology. That doesn’t seem to be that big of a deal. The partners and providers do a very good job of putting together products that make it happen, but the hard part is defining the processes and defining the services and making sure that they are meeting the customer needs.

Gardner: Kurt, any thoughts in reaction to what Brian said in terms of getting started on the right path around cloud rationalization of your IT organization?

Milne: One of the things that I've seen is a lot of organizations go through this process that Brian has described, trying to clearly define their services and figure out which parts of those services they're going to automate.

The hard part is defining the processes and defining the services and making sure that they are meeting the customer needs.

A lot of organizations start that service definition effort from an inside-out perspective, get a bunch of IT guys together, and try to define what you do on a daily basis in a service. That's hard.

The easier approach is just to go talk to your customers and users and ask, "If I were going to give you a button you could click to get what you need, what would you put behind the button?" Then, you define your services more from an outside-in perspective. It seems to be where companies get anyway and you just shortcut a lot of teeth gnashing and internal meetings when you do it that way.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: VMware.

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The Open Group panel: Internet of things poses massive opportunities and obstacles

What The Open Group refers to as Open Platform 3.0 encompasses the combined impacts of cloud, big data, mobile, and social. But to each of these now we can add a new cresting wave of complexity and scale as we consider the rapid explosion of new devices, sensors, and myriad endpoints that will be connected using internet protocols, standards and architectural frameworks.

This so-called Internet of Things means more data, more cloud connectivity and management, and an additional tier of “things” that are going to be part of the mobile edge -- and extending that mobile edge ever deeper into even our own bodies.

Yet the Internet of Things is more than the “things” – it means a higher order of software platforms. For example, if we are going to operate data centers with new dexterity thanks to software-defined networking (SDN) and storage (SDS) -- indeed the entire data center being software-defined (SDDC) -- then why not a software-defined automobile, or factory floor, or hospital operating room -- or even a software-defined city block or neighborhood?

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

And so how does this all actually work? Does it easily spin out of control? Or does it remain under proper management and governance? Do we have unknown unknowns about what to expect with this new level of complexity, scale, and volume of input devices?

To help answer these questions, The Open Group and BriefingsDirect recently assembled a distinguished panel at The Open Group Boston Conference 2014 to explore the practical implications and limits of the Internet of Things.

The panelist are: Said Tabet, Chief Technology Officer for Governance, Risk and Compliance Strategy at EMC, and a primary representative to the Industrial Internet Consortium; Penelope Gordon, Emerging Technology Strategist at 1Plug Corporation; Jean-Francois Barsoum, Senior Managing Consultant for Smarter Cities, Water and Transportation at IBM, and Dave Lounsbury, Chief Technical Officer at The Open Group. The discussion is moderated by me, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Jean-Francois, we have heard about this notion of "cities as platforms," and I think the public sector might offer us some opportunity to look at what is going to happen with the Internet of Things, and then extrapolate from that to understand what might happen in the private sector.

Hypothetically, the public sector has a lot to gain. It doesn't have to go through the same confines of a commercial market development, profit motive, and that sort of thing. Tell us a little bit about what the opportunity is in the public sector for smart cities.

Barsoum: It's immense. The first thing I want to do is link to something that Marshall Van Alstyne (Professor at Boston University and Researcher at MIT) had talked about, because I was thinking about his way of approaching platforms and thinking about how cities represent an example of that.

Barsoum

You don't have customers; you have citizens. Cities are starting to see themselves as platforms, as ways to communicate with their customers, their citizens, to get information from them and to communicate back to them. But the complexity with cities is that as a good a platform as they could be, they're relatively rigid. They're legislated into existence and what they're responsible for is written into law. It's not really a market.

Chris Harding (Forum Director of The Open Group Open Platform 3.0) earlier mentioned, for example, water and traffic management. Cities could benefit greatly by managing traffic a lot better.

Part of the issue is that you might have a state or provincial government that looks after highways. You might have the central part of the city that looks after arterial networks. You might have a borough that would look after residential streets, and these different platforms end up not talking to each other.

They gather their own data. They put in their own widgets to collect information that concerns them, but do not necessarily share with their neighbor. One of the conditions that Marshall said would favor the emergence of a platform had to do with how much overlap there would be in your constituents and your customers. In this case, there's perfect overlap. It's the same citizen, but they have to carry an Android and an iPhone, despite the fact it is not the best way of dealing with the situation.

The complexities are proportional to the amount of benefit you could get if you could solve them.

More hurdles

Gardner: More hurdles, more interoperability issues, and when you say commensurate, you're saying that the opportunity is huge, but the hurdles are huge and we're not quite sure how this is going to unfold.

Barsoum: That's right.

Gardner: Let's go to an area where the opportunity outstrips the challenge, manufacturing. Said, what is the opportunity for the software-defined factory floor for recognizing huge efficiencies and applying algorithmic benefits to how management occurs across domains of supply-chain, distribution, and logistics. It seems to me that this is a no-brainer. It's such an opportunity that the solution must be found.

Tabet: When it comes to manufacturing, the opportunities are probably much bigger. It's where we can see a lot of progress that has already been done and still work is going on. There are two ways to look at it.

Tabet

One is the internal side of it, where you have improvements of business processes. For example, similar to what Jean-Francois said, in a lot of the larger companies that have factories all around the world, you'll see such improvements on a factory base level. You still have those silos at that level.

Now with this new technology, with this connectedness, those improvements are going to be made across factories, and there's a learning aspect to it in terms of trying to manage that data. In fact, they do a better job. We still have to deal with interoperability, of course, and additional issues that could be jurisdictional, etc.

However, there is that learning that allows them to improve their processes across factories. Maintenance is one of them, as well as creating new products, and connecting better with their customers. We can see a lot of examples in the marketplace. I won't mention names, but there are lots of them out there with the large manufacturers.

Gardner: We've had just-in-time manufacturing and lean processes for quite some time, trying to compress the supply chain and distribution networks, but these haven't necessarily been done through public networks, the internet, or standardized approaches.

But if we're to benefit, we're going to need to be able to be platform companies, not just product companies. How do you go from being a proprietary set of manufacturing protocols and approaches to this wider, standardized interoperability architecture?

Tabet: That's a very good question, because now we're talking about that connection to the customer. With the airline and the jet engine manufacturer, for example, when the plane lands and there has been some monitoring of the activity during the whole flight, at that moment, they'll get that data made available. There could be improvements and maybe solutions available as soon as the plane lands.

Interoperability

That requires interoperability. It requires Platform 3.0 for example. If you don't have open platforms, then you'll deal with the same hurdles in terms of proprietary technologies and integration in a silo-based manner.

Gardner: Penelope, you've been writing about the obstacles to decision-making that might become apparent as big data becomes more prolific and people try to capture all the data about all the processes and analyze it. That's a little bit of a departure from the way we've made decisions in organizations, public and private, in the past.

Of course, one of the bigger tenets of Internet of Things is all this great data that will be available to us from so many different points. Is there a conundrum of some sort? Is there an unknown obstacle for how we, as organizations and individuals, can deal with that data? Is this going to be chaos, or is this going to be all the promises many organizations have led us to believe around big data in the Internet of Things?

Gordon: It's something that has just been accelerated. This is not a new problem in terms of the decision-making styles not matching the inputs that are being provided into the decision-making process.

Gordon

Former US President Bill Clinton was known for delaying making decisions. He's a head-type decision-maker and so he would always want more data and more data. That just gets into a never-ending loop, because as people collect data for him, there is always more data that you can collect, particularly on the quantitative side. Whereas, if it is distilled down and presented very succinctly and then balanced with the qualitative, that allows intuition to come to fore, and you can make optimal decisions in that fashion.

Conversely, if you have someone who is a heart-type or gut-type decision-maker and you present them with a lot of data, their first response is to ignore the data. It's just too much for them to take in. Then you end up completely going with whatever you feel is correct or whatever you have that instinct that it's the correct decision. If you're talking about strategic decisions, where you're making a decision that's going to influence your direction five years down the road, that could be a very wrong decision to make, a very expensive decision, and as you said, it could be chaos.

It just brings to mind to me Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat with Thing One and Thing Two. So, as we talk about the Internet of Things, we need to keep in mind that we need to have some sort of structure that we are tying this back to and understanding what are we trying to do with these things.

If you have someone who is a heart-type or gut-type decision-maker and you present them with a lot of data, their first response is to ignore the data.

Gardner: Openness is important, and governance is essential. Then, we can start moving toward higher-order business platform benefits. But, so far, our panel has been a little bit cynical. We've heard that the opportunity and the challenges are commensurate in the public sector and that in manufacturing we're moving into a whole new area of interoperability, when we think about reaching out to customers and having a boundary that is managed between internal processes and external communications.

And we've heard that an overload of data could become a very serious problem and that we might not get benefits from big data through the Internet of Things, but perhaps even stumble and have less quality of decisions.

So Dave Lounsbury of The Open Group, will the same level of standardization work? Do we need a new type of standards approach, a different type of framework, or is this a natural path and course what we have done in the past?

Different level

Lounsbury: We need to look at the problem at a different level than we institutionally think about an interoperability problem. Internet of Things is riding two very powerful waves, one of which is Moore's Law, that these sensors, actuators, and network get smaller and smaller. Now we can put Ethernet in a light switch right, a tag, or something like that.

Lounsbury

Also, Metcalfe's Law that says that the value of all this connectivity goes up with the square of the number of connected points, and that applies to both the connection of the things but more importantly the connection of the data.

The trouble is, as we have said, that there's so much data here. The question is how do you manage it and how do you keep control over it so that you actually get business value from it. That's going to require us to have this new concept of a platform to not only to aggregate, but to just connect the data, aggregate it, correlate it as you said, and present it in ways that people can make decisions however they want.

Also, because of the raw volume, we have to start thinking about machine agency. We have to think about the system actually making the routine decisions or giving advice to the humans who are actually doing it. Those are important parts of the solution beyond just a simple "How do we connect all the stuff together?"

Gardner: We might need a higher order of intelligence, now that we have reached this border of what we can do with our conventional approaches to data, information, and process.

Thinking about where this works best first in order to then understand where it might end up later, I was intrigued again this morning by Professor Van Alstyne. He mentioned that in healthcare, we should expect major battles, that there is a turf element to this, that the organization, entity or even commercial corporation that controls and manages certain types of information and access to that information might have some very serious platform benefits.

The question is how do you manage it and how do you keep control over it so that you actually get business value from it.

The openness element now is something to look at, and I'll come back to the public sector. Is there a degree of openness that we could legislate or regulate to require enough control to prevent the next generation of lock-in, which might not be to a platform to access to data information and endpoints? Where is it in the public sector that we might look to a leadership position to establish needed openness and not just interoperability.

Barsoum: I'm not even sure where to start answering that question. To take healthcare as an example, I certainly didn't write the bible on healthcare IT systems and if someone did write that, I think they really need to publish it quickly.

We have a single-payer system in Canada, and you would think that would be relatively easy to manage. There is one entity that manages paying the doctors, and everybody gets covered the same way. Therefore, the data should be easily shared among all the players and it should be easy for you to go from your doctor, to your oncologist, to whomever, and maybe to your pharmacy, so that everybody has access to this same information.

We don't have that and we're nowhere near having that. If I look to other areas in the public sector, areas where we're beginning to solve the problem are ones where we face a crisis, and so we need to address that crisis rapidly.

Possibility of improvement

In the transportation infrastructure, we're getting to that point where the infrastructure we have just doesn't meet the needs. There's a constraint in terms of money, and we can't put much more money into the structure. Then, there are new technologies that are coming in. Chris had talked about driverless cars earlier. They're essentially throwing a wrench into the works or may be offering the possibility of improvement.

On any given piece of infrastructure, you could fit twice as many driverless cars as cars with human drivers in them. Given that set of circumstances, the governments are going to find they have no choice but to share data in order to be able to manage those. Are there cases where we could go ahead of a crisis in order to manage it? I certainly hope so.

Gardner: How about allowing some of the natural forces of marketplaces, behavior, groups, maybe even chaos theory, where if sufficient openness is maintained there will be some kind of a pattern that will emerge? We need to let this go through its paces, but if we have artificial barriers, that might be thwarted or power could go to places that we would regret later.

Barsoum: I agree. People often focus on structure. So the governance doesn't work. We should find some way to change the governance of transportation. London has done a very good job of that. They've created something called Transport for London that manages everything related to transportation. It doesn't matter if it's taxis, bicycles, pedestrians, boats, cargo trains, or whatever, they manage it.

In the transportation infrastructure, we're getting to that point where the infrastructure we have just doesn't meet the needs.

You could do that, but it requires a lot of political effort. The other way to go about doing it is saying, "I'm not going to mess with the structures. I'm just going to require you to open and share all your data." So, you're creating a new environment where the governance, the structures, don't really matter so much anymore. Everybody shares the same data.

Gardner: Said, to the private sector example of manufacturing, you still want to have a global fabric of manufacturing capabilities. This is requiring many partners to work in concert, but with a vast new amount of data and new potential for efficiency.

How do you expect that openness will emerge in the manufacturing sector? How will interoperability play when you don't have to wait for legislation, but you do need to have cooperation and openness nonetheless?

Tabet: It comes back to the question you asked Dave about standards. I'll just give you some examples. For example, in the automotive industry, there have been some activities in Europe around specific standards for communication.

The Europeans came to the US and started to have discussions, and the Japanese have interest, as well as the Chinese. That shows, because there is a common interest in creating these new models from a business standpoint, that these challenges they have to be dealt with together.

Managing complexity

When we talk about the amounts of data, what we call now big data, and what we are going to see in about five years or so, you can't even imagine. How do we manage that complexity, which is multidimensional? We talked about this sort of platform and then further, that capability and the data that will be there. From that point of view, openness is the only way to go.

There's no way that we can stay away from it and still be able to work in silos in that new environment. There are lots of things that we take for granted today. I invite some of you to go back and read articles from 10 years ago that try to predict the future in technology in the 21st century. Look at your smart phones. Adoption is there, because the business models are there, and we can see that progress moving forward.

Collaboration is a must, because it is a multidimensional level. It's not just manufacturing like jet engines, car manufacturers, or agriculture, where you have very specific areas. They really they have to work with their customers and the customers of their customers.

Adoption is there, because the business models are there, and we can see that progress moving forward.

Gardner: Dave, I have a question for both you and Penelope. I've seen some instances where there has been a cooperative endeavor for accessing data, but then making it available as a service, whether it's an API, a data set, access to a data library, or even analytics applications set. The Ocean Observatories Initiative is one example, where it has created a sensor network across the oceans and have created data that then they make available.

Do you think we expect to see an intermediary organization level that gets between the sensors and the consumers or even controllers of the processes? Is there's a model inherent in that that we might look to -- something like that cooperative data structure that in some ways creates structure and governance, but also allows for freedom? It's sort of an entity that we don't have yet in many organizations or many ecosystems and that needs to evolve.

Lounsbury: We're already seeing that in the marketplace. If you look at the commercial and social Internet of Things area, we're starting to see intermediaries or brokers cropping up that will connect the silo of my android ecosystem to the ecosystem of package tracking or something like that. There are dozens and dozens of these cropping up.

In fact, you now see APIs even into a silo of what you might consider a proprietary system and what people are doing is to to build a layer on top of those APIs that intermediate the data.

This is happening on a point-to-point basis now, but you can easily see the path forward. That's going to expand to large amounts of data that people will share through a third party. I can see this being a whole new emerging market much as what Google did for search. You could see that happening for the Internet of Things.

Gardner: Penelope, do you have any thoughts about how that would work? Is there a mutually assured benefit that would allow people to want to participate and cooperate with that third entity? Should they have governance and rules about good practices, best practices for that intermediary organization? Any thoughts about how data can be managed in this sort of hierarchical model?

Nothing new

Gordon: First, I'll contradict it a little bit. To me, a lot of this is nothing new, particularly coming from a marketing strategy perspective, with business intelligence (BI). Having various types of intermediaries, who are not only collecting the data, but then doing what we call data hygiene, synthesis, and even correlation of the data has been around for a long time.

It was an interesting, when I looked at recent listing of the big-data companies, that some notable companies were excluded from that list -- companies like Nielsen. Nielsen's been collecting data for a long time. Harte-Hanks is another one that collects a tremendous amount of information and sells that to companies.

That leads into the another part of it that I think there's going to be. We're seeing an increasing amount of opportunity that involves taking public sources of data and then providing synthesis on it. What remains to be seen is how much of the output of that is going to be provided for “free”, as opposed to “fee”. We're going to see a lot more companies figuring out creative ways of extracting more value out of data and then charging directly for that, rather than using that as an indirect way of generating traffic.

Gardner: We've seen examples of how this has been in place. Does it scale and does the governance or lack of governance that might be in the market now sustain us through the transition into Platform 3.0 and the Internet of Things.

Having standards is going to increasingly become important, unless we really address a lot of the data illiteracy that we have.

Gordon: That aspect is the lead-on part of “you get what you pay for”. If you're using a free source of data, you don't have any guarantee that it is from authoritative sources of data. Often, what we're getting now is something somebody put it in a blog post, and then that will get referenced elsewhere, but there was nothing to go back to. It's the shaky supply chain for data.

You need to think about the data supply and that is where the governance comes in. Having standards is going to increasingly become important, unless we really address a lot of the data illiteracy that we have. A lot of people do not understand how to analyze data.

One aspect of that is a lot of people expect that we have to do full population surveys, as opposed representative sampling to get much more accurate and much more cost-effective collection of data. That's just one example, and we do need a lot more in governance and standards.

Gardner: What would you like to see changed most in order for the benefits and rewards of the Internet of Things to develop and overcome the drawbacks, the risks, the downside? What, in your opinion, would you like to see happen to make this a positive, rapid outcome? Let's start with you Jean-Francois.

Barsoum: There are things that I have seen cities start to do now. There are couple of examples: Philadelphia is one and Barcelona does this too. Rather than do the typical request for proposal (RFP), where they say, "This is the kind of solution we're looking for, and here are our parameters. Can l you tell us how much it is going to cost to build," they come to you with the problem and they say, "Here is the problem I want to fix. Here are my priorities, and you're at liberty to decide how best to fix the problem, but tell us how much that would cost."

If you do that and you combine it with access to the public data that is available -- if public sector opens up its data -- you end up with a very powerful combination that liberates a lot of creativity. You can create a lot of new business models. We need to see much more of that. That's where I would start.

More education

Tabet: I agree with Jean-Francois on that. What I'd like to add is that I think we need to push the relation a little further. We need more education, to your point earlier, around the data and the capabilities.

We need these platforms that we can leverage a little bit further with the analytics, with machine learning, and with all of these capabilities that are out there. We have to also remember, when we talk about the Internet of Things, it is things talking to each other.

So it is not human-machine communication. Machine-to-machine automation will be further than that, and we need more innovation and more work in this area, particularly more activity from the governments. We've seen that, but it is a little bit frail from that point of view right now.

Gardner: Dave Lounsbury, thoughts about what need to happen in order to keep this on the tracks?

Thank you for mentioning the machine-to-machine part, because there are plenty of projections that show that it's going to be the dominant form of Internet communication, probably within the next four years.

Lounsbury: We've touched on lot of them already. Thank you for mentioning the machine-to-machine part, because there are plenty of projections that show that it's going to be the dominant form of Internet communication, probably within the next four years.

So we need to start thinking of that and moving beyond our traditional models of humans talking through interfaces to set of services. We need to identify the building blocks of capability that you need to manage, not only the information flow and the skilled person that is going to produce it, but also how you manage the machine-to-machine interactions.

Gordon: I'd like to see not so much focus on data management, but focus on what is the data managing and helping us to do. Focusing on the machine-to-machine and the devices is great, but it should be not on the devices or on the machines… it should be on what can they accomplish by communicating; what can you accomplish with the devices and then have a reverse engineer from that.

Gardner: Let's go to some questions from the audience. The first one asks about a high order of intelligence which we mentioned earlier. It could be artificial intelligence, perhaps, but they ask whether that's really the issue. Is the nature of the data substantially different, or we are just creating more of the same, so that it is a storage, plumbing, and processing problem? What, if anything, are we lacking in our current analytics capabilities that are holding us back from exploiting the Internet of Things?

Gordon: I've definitely seen that. That has a lot to do with not setting your decision objectives and your decision criteria ahead of time so that you end up collecting a whole bunch of data, and the important data gets lost in the mix. There is a term "data smog."

Most important

The solution is to figure out, before you go collecting data, what data is most important to you. If you can't collect certain kinds of data that are important to you directly, then think about how to indirectly collect that data and how to get proxies. But don't try to go and collect all the data for that. Narrow in on what is going to be most important and most representative of what you're trying to accomplish.

Gardner: Does anyone want to add to this idea of understanding what current analytics capabilities are lacking, if we have to adopt and absorb the Internet of Things?

Barsoum: There is one element around projection into the future. We've been very good at analyzing historical information to understand what's been happening in the past. We need to become better at projecting into the future, and obviously we've been doing that for some time already.

But so many variables are changing. Just to take the driverless car as an example. We've been collecting data from loop detectors, radar detectors, and even Bluetooth antennas to understand how traffic moves in the city. But we need to think harder about what that means and how we understand the city of tomorrow is going to work. That requires more thinking about the data, a little bit like what Penelope mentioned, how we interpret that, and how we push that out into the future.

Lounsbury: I have to agree with both. It's not about statistics. We can use historical data. It helps with lot of things, but one of the major issues we still deal with today is the question of semantics, the meaning of the data. This goes back to your point, Penelope, around the relevance and the context of that information – how you get what you need when you need it, so you can make the right decisions.

As soon as you talk about interoperability in the health sector, people start wondering where is their data going to go.

Gardner: Our last question from the audience goes back to Jean-Francois’s comments about the Canadian healthcare system. I imagine it applies to almost any healthcare system around the world. But it asks why interoperability is so difficult to achieve, when we have the power of the purse, that is the market. We also supposedly have the power of the legislation and regulation. You would think between one or the other or both that interoperability, because the stakes are so high, would happen. What's holding it up?

Barsoum: There are a couple of reasons. One, in the particular case of healthcare, is privacy, but that is one that you could see going elsewhere. As soon as you talk about interoperability in the health sector, people start wondering where is their data going to go and how accessible is it going to be and to whom.

You need to put a certain number of controls over top of that. What is happening in parallel is that you have people who own some data, who believe they have some power from owning that data, and that they will lose that power if they share it. That can come from doctors, hospitals, anywhere.

So there's a certain amount of change management you have to get beyond. Everybody has to focus on the welfare of the patient. They have to understand that there has to be a priority, but you also have to understand the welfare of the different stakeholders in the system and make sure that you do not forget about them, because if you forget about them they will find some way to slow you down.

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