Vail Resorts' EpicMix shows the right CIO *can* help deliver business innovation

Today I published a new blog post on CA.com in the ‘Perspectives’ section of our community site – you can see the whole blog here.

In this post, I discuss whether the CIO role is dead – and if it isn’t what you can do to make sure it not only survives, but drives business value …

I keep hearing how cloud computing will kill the CIO. Articles, posts, and tweets claim “the CIO is dead,” done in by SaaS, IaaS, PaaS, virtualization, and the increasing commoditization of IT resources. IT budgets are being cut (again!), but IT spending overall is going up, according to both IDC and Gartner. So some organizations are now wondering whether they even need a CIO.

Please click here to read the whole blog in the ‘Perspectives’ section of the CA Technologies community site.

Conducting an orchestra is easy; delivering a new CRM service is hard!

A long time ago, someone asked me on Twitter what is the difference between automation and orchestration. It really got me thinking, and eventually I think I answered by using an actual musical orchestra as a metaphor.

In this metaphor, having an autonomous musician play the entire violin part of a symphony is somewhat akin to typical automation – lots of activity and complex interactions all handled without external intervention, but all within a reasonably tight sphere of influence, in large part unconnected with the rest of the orchestra.

In this case, as long as all your automation is well synchronized, then the symphony sounds at least listenable. However, whenever anything goes awry – a string breaks, a bow is dropped – then all of a sudden that instrument is out of time, and the symphony turns into cacophony.

Then there is orchestration, where the complex parts for all the individual instruments are all played individually, but they are further connected to a whole orchestra of other instruments to create a more complete experience. Orchestration can handle greater volume and scale, it is more informed about the musical piece as a whole, rather than just each individual part.

In this case, when something goes wrong, a well-conducted orchestra understands what it means to the larger composition, and can perhaps make adjustments in real time to smooth out any issues (get the other strings to play more forte to compensate for the missing violin, for example).

Yes, it is far from a perfect metaphor, but it still works for me, more or less.

Reading a recent article by Mark Chillingworth (@mchillingworth) in CIO magazine UK, titled Private cloud computing is just a component CIOs say, got me thinking about this metaphor some more. I found the following comment particularly interesting:

A CIO used the example of a customer following an ecommerce transaction with a retailer. The customer will, during the process, actually move across different applications, secure hosted transaction services, logistics, catalogue sites and search engines. The user is rarely aware or cares that they are shifting from application to application, hosted or non-hosted; the experience always feels the same.

This CIO believes that the principals of private cloud computing will be integrated into complex business processes in much the same way to increase organisational efficiency, reduce the number of applications organisations support and improve user experience.

He described the CIO’s role in this new model as that of orchestration of services.

This is a fascinating analogy, and one well worth considering. In most places there is way too much focus from the IT department and its leaders on the technologies, and not nearly enough on the outcomes. From this customer perspective, they really do not care where or how the service they need is delivered; they only care that they get want they want.

In the symphonic metaphor, the customer is the audience, listening to the symphony, occasionally aware but not overly concerned about what player is playing what line, but mainly concerned with hearing the whole composition. Of course, if any one member of the orchestra has problems – a broken bow, a detuned string – then the customer becomes acutely aware – and dissatisfied.

The article also put forward the following comment, which keeps aligning to my theme:

More than one attendee saw the CIO … reflect the same business model as an HR department. Just as HR no longer carries out the provision of staff, but does provide the governance, CIOs will follow the same course, allowing self-provision of technology, but ensuring corporate governance.

I think this is a superb analogy, and have used it myself before. I especially like that it allows me to torture my automation/orchestration-symphony metaphor just a little more . Because in my metaphor, this demonstrates the role of the CIO as a conductor.

Consider the role of the conductor. Conductors do not ever actually pick up an instrument. They do not write the music, or build the instruments, or play the instruments. They are given new compositions from time to time – some known, some unknown – which they must review and interpret, to figure out how to bring them to life. For any given performance, some of the orchestra may be permanent members, some may be casual, and the conductor must arrange temporary players to sit in, get them to play seamlessly with the rest of the orchestra. In some cases they need to work with special guest performers to bring something extra special to the audience.

When it comes time to play the symphony, the conductor brings it all together, gets the individual performers to play at the right time, with the right tempo and intensity, adjusting to the piece and to the players to present to the audience a single, seamless, and comprehensive piece of music – despite the incredible complexity that underlies the performance. In the end, the audience recognizes the importance of the players, but focuses on the expertise of the conductor to bring them together, and most importantly on how pleasing (or otherwise) the whole performance sounded to their ears.

And so it is with the modern CIO. In this case the instruments and players are the individual IT components and service owners (whether on-staff or externally sourced, delivered on-premise or off-premise); the symphony is the complete end-to-end business service; the audience is the end user of the business service (an internal end-user, or an external customer).

Here the CIO is the conductor, with a deep understanding of the composition, bringing together all the stakeholders, skills, and capabilities, while detecting and compensating for any real-time problems, in order to deliver a seamless service performance, regardless of the complexity of requirement or the underlying components. In the end, the users an customers realize there are many components that make up a service, but they don’t really care – they judge the outcome based on the service they receive, and will focus their praise and complaints on the CIO as the conductor.We have toyed with the metaphor of the CIO as a factory manager in the time of the industrial revolution, casting the CIO as a new-styled  ‘supply chain manager’. In this metaphor, the factory (i.e. the IT department) is changing from an artisanal model where everything is produced in-house, to a supply-chain model where some capabilities are produced in-house, some are sourced externally, and the CIO’s job is to bring them all together on the production line.

The problem I always have with this ‘CIO as Supply Chain Manager’ metaphor is the industrial nature to it. It implies a certain strict and simple assembly process, executed with a predictably mechanized approach. I think this belies the nature of a modern IT department, where delivering a complex business service is often more an art than a science. Rather than simply setting a service in motion and watching the factory produce, a modern CIO must constantly adjust to the ‘feel’ of business and market requirements, constantly managing many moving  and changing elements to bring together a service in real time.

I think this is a much better way to describe the constant real-time orchestration that the CIO has to accomplish, and much more appropriate to the modern innovative CIO, who is as far removed from the role of factory manager as a modern 8-way quad-core server is removed from a Whitney cotton gin.

What do you think? Does this metaphor ‘play’ for you? Is it ‘music to your ears’?

The 'new normal' makes cloud mandatory, not optional.

Today I was published in one of the top cloud computing journals. In fact, it is the Cloud Computing Journal, part of the SYS-CON stable and the same organization that runs the excellent Cloud Expo events. The article is called “Eleven Tips for Successful Cloud Computing Adoption“:

Key issues can make or break an organization’s strategic cloud adoption. The intersection of cloud computing with business strategy, Big Data, vendor lock-in, globalization, collaboration, security, licensing, virtualization, confidence, and the ‘new normal’ can act as huge points of concern. So I put down some thoughts on this, and ended up – in no particular order – with the following 11 tips for the successful adoption of cloud computing:

Please read the whole article at the Cloud Computing Journal.

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So what do you reckon? Are these tips useful for you? What tips did I miss? I would love to see your comments at Cloud Computing Jounal, in my comments section below, or as always on Twitter.

The only Eucalyptus I see in my travels

I saw a fantastic article from Nancy Gohring of InfoWorld yesterday, on how “Amazon said that it would back Eucalyptus’ efforts to support Amazon Web Services’ APIs”. Great article, well worth reading in full.

For me, however, it was the a priori assumption in the first paragraph (and the headline) that really stood out:

Eucalyptus has become far more attractive to enterprises wishing to build private clouds, now that the No. 1 cloud provider — Amazon Web Services — has thrown its weight behind the software company.

I am not buying this at all.

In my experience with many enterprises actively moving to the cloud, most every large organization sees Amazon Web Services (AWS) as an aspiration, but not a preference. They tell me that they want to be like AWS, but typically only use AWS for edge cases and new developments – and typically non-mission critical applications, rather than mainstream production. At least for now. (I cannot comment on attitudes to Eucalyptus – I do not know any enterprise that is considering it.)

What’s more, in a separate (and also excellent) article on GigaOm, comments from a Public Relations Manager for Amazon suggest to me that the world’s largest cloud provider still doesn’t really ‘get’ the reality of enterprise computing:

“Many enterprises today have legacy applications and a good deal of investment in those legacy applications. This type of arrangement provides the added flexibility to more freely move workloads between those existing IT environments and AWS … [O]ver time, most enterprises will not run their own data centers.”

This thinking sounds great as a PR statement, but in the real world it discounts the clear intentions of almost every large enterprise, and contradicts almost all research data. Unless “over time” means on a geological scale, the opposite is actually true.

Amazon simply does not support the multitude of platforms, systems, and vendors that are typical of “legacy applications” in large enterprises. For many, it does not accommodate a lot of mandatory requirements for management, security, compliance, etc.

In a new article published yesterday in CIO.com, the inestimable Bernard Golden notes that for many enterprises, moving ‘legacy applications’ to a cloud environment is not practically possibly:

Cloud computing is not going to solve legacy application challenges and costs. I recently talked with the CIO of a large media company who commissioned a study of his legacy apps to determine how many could operate in a cloud environment. The results: 10 percent.

At very least, Bernard continues, IT would need to completely re-engineer most legacy applications for AWS. However, in my experience very few enterprises see a compelling need to re-engineer millions of lines of legacy code that still does what it needs to. The other realistic option for legacy applications, Bernard points out, is “shifting to on-demand SaaS applications”, not migrating to an IaaS provider.

Which leaves AWS out in the cold when it comes to this supposed movement of legacy applications.

Meanwhile, even the poster child for AWS migration, Netflix, still has a significant legacy IT environment; and cloud-native developer Zynga is actually moving non-legacy applications off AWS.

So then, how then does “this type of arrangement” allow a large global bank to “more freely move” its SWIFT processing onto an AWS cloud? How can a mineral exploration company “more freely move” to AWS for geological data processing from a remote oil field in Azerbaijan? How can a research institute “more freely move” to a hybrid AWS cloud to run trillions of calculations a second to model 100 years of global climate change? Or any of the other thousands (millions?) of legitimate, actual, legacy (and current) enterprise use cases for non-commodity environments?

I don’t think it does.

Even for new applications, most enterprises are not showing a preference for actually using AWS; and Eucalyptus is still being roundly trounced in the market for enterprise private cloud.

This is not to say that AWS is not a viable choice for enterprise adoption. It certainly is capable of running large-scale enterprise applications in production, so long as they are engineered for the environment, and supported by capable third-party tools for security, orchestration, assurance, service levels, and so on. At CA Technologies I am working every day with our enterprise customers, encouraging them and helping them with public cloud (including AWS) adoption.

However, I do not believe that Amazon’s new alliance with Eucalyptus clears any significant barriers for enterprise adoption of public or private cloud. Enterprises that were adopting AWS for certain use cases will continue to do so; presumably any enterprise that is building a Eucalyptus private cloud will continue to do so.

But neither makes the other any more ‘enterprise-ready’ than it already was.

*btw, bad Australian joke for you: What does a Koala do at a party? Eats roots and leaves! Yeah, the Aussies Antipodeans will get it.

I have a new blog post up now at The CA Cloud Storm Chasers – CA Technologies on the 6 Core Competencies to Use and Provide Enterprise Cloud Service …

There is a persistent (mainly vendor-driven) meme going around the world of IT that building and running a responsible, secure, available, enterprise-quality cloud is simple. The theory seems to be that it just needs some server virtualization, adding automation, maybe dropping in some change control, and calling it done. Or that all you need to do is to log on to a public cloud provider, give them a credit card number, then click a button to migrate your workloads to the cloud.

(read the whole blog – 6 Core Competencies to Use and Provide Enterprise Cloud Services at The CA Cloud Storm Chasers – CA Technologies)

10 Principles of Good Design - click for full-size (400x3000, 4Mb)

With VMworld EMEA coming up next week, I am reminded of an evening at VMworld last year, and a stimulating discussion about good product design with Prabhakar Gopalan (@PGopalan), a former colleague at CA Technologies who is now with Dell.

Prabhakar is insightful to a depth few people reach, and passionate about innovative thinking. In Copenhagen he talked excitedly about a small museum he had visited called the Danish Design Centre (and yes, that is the correct spelling ), and what Danish design could teach us about building better software.

I visited it a couple of days later*, and one exhibit really caught my eye, with 10 ‘preconditions for good design‘ laid out in stylized writing on a plain brick wall (see photo top left). It was interesting to think about how these provided 1o principles for CIOs in designing better IT solutions.

Notwithstanding the potential value of ‘blue sky’ research and ‘skunkworks’ projects, IT could do a lot worse than designing solutions that are:

1. Innovative

Good Design is ... Innovative

An innovative design can be a ‘break-through’ product or service, but it can also be a re-design of an existing product or service. A ‘break-through’ product offers the market and the user a new and previously unseen function and added value, while a re-design improves on an existing product.

An evolutionary solution (re-)design – e.g. migrating existing applications to the cloud – can deliver substantial incremental business benefits. However,  revolutionary ‘break-through’ innovation – e.g. new cloud-native applications to leverage social and mobile – can drive exponential value.

2. Functional

Good Design is ... Functional

Functional design is intended to serve a function – preferably a primary and a supplemental function. A functional design solves a problem, and in its design it optimises a given function.

Functionality is critical as IT exists to solve real business problems. We love technology, and non-directed research can deliver great innovation, but IT must focus on functionality that reduces costs, drives revenue, or increases shareholder value. Form is important, but form follows function.

3. Aesthetic

Good Design is ... Aesthetic

An aesthetic product has an inherent power of fascination and an immediately accessible sensuous quality.

Even so, form is still important. Better interfaces increase productivity, just as aesthetic appeal underpins many successful consumer applications. All else being equal, a good-looking solution will be easier to promote, faster to adopt, and more enjoyable to use, driving better faster time to value.

4. Intuitive

Good Design is ... Intuitive

Intuitive design is self-explanatory and thus often negates the need for a user manual. It is obvious how the design should be used, perceived and understood. The design explains the function.

Watching business users test a new IT solution can be a real eye-opener! Intuitive design means solutions ‘just work’, reducing training costs, improving cycle times, and simplifying resourcing. It is also becoming a fundamental requirement as consumer-driven IT makes this a baseline user expectation.

5. Good Business

Good Design is ... Good Business

Good design is competitive and stands out in a competitive market. Good business means a healthy bottom line – hence, good design is also a product or a service that sells well.

It should not even need stating that business solutions only exist to solve business problems. Even open source software can stand out in a competitive market; even non-profits need healthy bottom lines. IT solutions must drive competition, expansion, productivity, revenue, or some other business value.

6. Honest

Good Design is ... Honest

An honest design only communicates the functions and values it actually offers. It should not manipulate buyers or users into thinking that it offers more than it does.

This should be obvious too. The “Save” button should save; the “Help” menu should help. IT solutions should live up to expectations and deliver on their promise to the business, whether they are in-house applications or commercial solutions. Sales and marketing please note – this applies to you too!

7. Durable

Good Design is ... Durable

In a society characterised by excessive consumption, good design serves an important purpose. It is based on durability in the sense that the design and the materials have staying power rather than just representing a fad. Waste and excessive consumption are not aspects of good design.

The best business solutions don’t just have immediate value, they have long-term value. Mainframe job schedulers are over 20 years old, but continue to provide mission-critical value, as do web browsers, email clients, and more. Good IT solutions provide value year after year, even with little enhancement.

8. Responsible

Good Design is ... Responsible

Good design is responsible, among other things by considering environmental concerns. For example, it may contribute to a cleaner and more sustainable world, where materials have high durability and may even be recycled in new contexts.

‘Responsible’ for IT solutions could mean energy-efficient CPUs or cloud solutions to directly reduce environmental impact. It could mean designing to prevent data loss or privacy violations. Or it could mean an open source community solving problems that commercial developers don’t – or vice-versa.

9. Shaped and Styled

Good Design is ... Shaped and Styled

Shape and appearance are essential aspects of good design. They are the basis for creating and designing. Shaping and styling ensure an attractive sensuous quality and an added value.

More than just aesthetics, the ‘shape and style’ of a solution correlates to ‘look and feel’ – the workflow, functional processes, the appearance, completeness, ease of use. This is difficult to measure objectively, but alongside ease of deployment, typically rates at the top of business requirements.

10. User Oriented

Good Design is ... User Oriented

Good design focuses on the user and aims to improve a given situation for the user. User-oriented design provides an added value, whether material or immaterial, and thus increases the user’s satisfaction and life situation.

IT should always design solutions to improve business user ‘situations’. Well-designed solutions that are user-oriented make user activity faster, easier, and less complex. Ultimately this delivers solutions that are more important and more profitable for the business.

One More Rule

There is just one more rule I would add to this list …

Great design breaks rules.

I think these rules are excellent principles, but should not be absolute restrictions. True innovation can and perhaps should work outside of traditional rules, no matter how sensible, universal, and flexible those rules may be. These Danish Design Centre rules may prescribe good design, but innovators must be prepared to break rules like these in the service of great design.

 

Education labs and classrooms are excellent use cases for private cloud

Not surprisingly, since the release of my new book, Visible Ops – Private Cloud, I have been talking with a lot of people about how to deploy private cloud, where to start, what to avoid, etc. So far, the most common question has been, “What type of existing workloads are organizations putting into private cloud environments today – and what are they avoiding?”

So I thought I would jot down some of my answers, specifically related to ‘cloud-migrant’ services, as opposed to ‘cloud-native’ services – and without getting too hung up on whether the use cases are 100% cloud or not!

One recurrent use case is to provide dynamic desktop allocation, especially for education and projects use cases. A number of schools, universities, training centers, and even some larger enterprises, have adopted private cloud to allocate servers, clients, applications and data for reusable desktop systems.

This seems especially prevalent for short-term learning facilities, repeatable one-off classroom systems, training/demo labs at conventions (or user groups), and contractor setup. It is also similar to the executive briefing centers and ‘demos on demand’ that many software sales organizations (like CA Technologies) use.

Another service-based use case I have seen in several universities is self-service access for students and faculty, using pooled resources, not only for application services but also for full VDI desktop allocation.

I have seen this in other enterprises too – most notably for home-source process workers (e.g. call center, data entry) – but mostly as a proof-of-concept, not a large-scale production deployment.

However, most cloud-migrant workloads I see deployed to private clouds today still tend to be server-based. Most of these are at ‘Phase 1′ in the Visible Ops Private Cloud – a reorientation of virtualization deployments to pilot a private cloud that works, proving results, gaining skills, and hopefully measuring opportunities. It is still focused on servers, not services, but provides a vital part of the learning curve toward private cloud.

For example:

• Dev/test/QA servers – 3-tier LAMP stacks (app/Db/WS), but also LAMP components, IDEs, source code management tools, etc. (which often results in applications that run on a private cloud in production)
• Collaboration servers – especially SharePoint, but also Web-based collaboration services like team chat servers, content repositories, blogs, wikis, and project management tools
• Engineering servers – I have seen a number of engineering firms move their design project systems (especially CAD tools) into private clouds so engineers can fire up new design projects on-demand
• Web servers – popular for marketing teams who can fire up their own Web servers, especially for short-term and/or localized promotions & campaigns
• Analytics servers – short-term number crunching of ‘big data’ (including BI applications) in medical research, social marketing, pharmaceutical research, higher education, financial, logistics, etc

The workloads that are less suited to private cloud deployment are harder to identify, because it requires positive evidence of absence, so my thoughts here are much more anecdotal. I do see CIOs push back on migrating ‘core’ applications, even to private clouds, citing lack of confidence, performance concerns, potential security and compliance issues, and lack of ROI. I would not agree these are always good reasons, but they can be, and are certainly understandable.

In my opinion, private cloud is not ideally suited to relatively large, static, predictable, and resource-saturating workloads – think ERP or Data Warehouse. After all, used internally such applications are almost never deployed ‘on demand’; they are rarely if ever ‘multi-tenant’; they have no real benefit from an ‘infinitely scalable’ infrastructure; and are mostly viewed as a cost of doing business, without any ‘resource measurement’ or chargeback.

(btw, there are certainly good arguments to deploy these applications on a public cloud, as ‘cloud-native’ services using SaaS, to outsource them to a non-cloud third-party, or to just virtualize them – even with 1:1 virtualization – without the other trappings of cloud. Such alternatives could deliver better cost savings, higher up-time, faster DR, and other benefits. However, I think the upside of putting such applications in a private cloud is less apparent.)

That said, I do think that we will see more and more strategic services – as opposed to project servers – deployed in both private and public cloud as it matures. In fact, recent IDC data suggests CIOs that are adopting private cloud will migrate many core applications in the coming years. Moreover, some of the more advanced customers I talk with are already doing this, although they are by far in the minority.

Either way, I will be very interested to see how this all pans out.

What do you think? What have I missed? What types of workloads do you see being deployed in a private cloud? What are CIOs passing over in their evaluations? Are they right, or wrong? What criteria should they use?

Please feel free to continue the discussion in the comments below, or hit me up on Twitter with your ideas.

This post was originally published on the CA Communities website.

Banal banter or commercial asset? You decide.

I was amused the other day by a line I saw on Twitter from Wall Street Journal columnist, Jason Gay (@jasonWSJ – see image at left):

“If Twitter didn’t exist, you’d have no idea what airlines your friends are currently furious at”

The humour in this pivots on the very real fact that a lot of social media and mobile technology is really quite banal. Like millions of others, I have been guilty of whining on Twitter or SMS or forums about bad experiences with airlines and grocery stores and crowds and restaurants.

Yet, the humour also pivots on the very real fact that Twitter – as with other social and mobile media – is much more than just an outlet for venting. It has literally launched revolutions and saved lives, and demonstrably improved opportunities for thousands of businesses.

So the question is – is your business taking advantage of social media and using mobile technology? If not, why not? And if not you, then who?

Yes, social media can be banal, but these are serious questions. You have to be reasonably certain that your competitors are already using social media, so if you are not using social or mobile technology, then you are out of the game; but if they are not using social and mobile, you have a chance to put them out of the game.

As I wrote recently on a CA Community blog on Consumer-Driven IT:

Leading businesses (including your competitors) are already forging ahead with social, mobile, and cloud computing initiatives, and proactive IT organizations are already gaining significant customer value from them (PDF). They are communicating with customers on their terms, on their websites, on their applications. They are providing iPad applications and SaaS options, and running social media campaigns to improve brand recognition and customer attraction. They are launching online loyalty programs that improve customer retention and drive word of mouth, and increasing their revenue as a result.

Think about it:

• If I cannot tweet you with a question about your product – or even worse, my tweet never gets answered – but your competitor tweets back with the answer, guess who I will buy from?
• If I cannot ‘like’ your business or product on Facebook, ‘+1’ you on Google+, or ‘@’ mention you on Twitter, then my modest social network will never hear about you from me.
• If I cannot get a discount from you on Groupon or a special deal on 4Square, but I can get one from your rival instead, I will probably visit their store, not yours.
• If I am on the go when I need your service, but your website does not support my smartphone, then I will probably log into your competitor’s mobile site instead.
• If I cannot buy from you online, then I probably will not buy from you at all.

Sure, social and mobile can be pointless and banal. They can also be revolutionary and world-changing. One thing they are not, is going away. You have a chance to capitalize on them, or let them pass you by.

Which will you choose?

And if not you, then who?

I have been talking with many CIOs for some time about strategic adoption of cloud solutions. A key step in these conversations is always the review of the portfolio of services they provide to business users, so they can choose which clouds to adopt and why.

This has led me to describe a high-level taxonomy that segments the service portfolio according to the different cloud requirements, capabilities, and approaches in different types of applications and services.

Essentially, this work has segmented most (all?) service portfolios into four areas, which (roughly) follow the adoption curve of cloud computing

Cloud Service Taxonomy - Cloud-Free, Cloud-Migrant, Cloud-Native, and Rogue Cloud

Cloud-Free Services

For most of the large enterprises I talk to, some services will not be part of any cloud. These ‘cloud-free’ services may migrate from physical to virtual, but do not need elastic scalability and self-service, are too impractical or incomprehensible, are too locked into non-commodity (e.g. z-Series) hardware, or are too sensitive or mission-critical to migrate to (especially public) cloud environments. With apologies to the ‘pure cloud’ fantasists, it is a reality for many organizations, especially larger enterprises, many services will not be part of their cloud adoption plans – at least not soon, perhaps not ever. It is important to identify these ‘cloud-free’ services.

Cloud Migrant Services

As CIOs get a handle on cloud, they start proactively evaluating their service portfolio and migrating selected existing workloads – from the OS up – initially from physical to virtual, then to appropriate public or private cloud choices. These ‘cloud migrant’ services are not fundamentally changed, as they simply ‘lift and shift’ the same code, requirements, interconnections, users, data sources, etc. from traditional environments to (typically IaaS) clouds. Many benefits can accrue from running these services in a cloud – agility, flexibility, efficiency, cost reduction – but the services themselves are not specifically built in or for the cloud.

Cloud Native Services

As organizations embrace cloud computing, they start developing and using new ‘cloud-native’ services built in the cloud and for the cloud. Mobile and social services, for example, really blossom when built on cloud-native characteristics like self-service, mobility, scalability, and ‘big data’, while cloud-native development also allows business ideas to ‘fail fast’ or prove success with minimal upfront investment. Of course, rogue-cloud services (see below) can become cloud-native services when they move to ‘official’ production status; and SaaS applications are also cloud-native services, just delivered out-of-the-box by public providers.

Rogue Cloud Services

In many organizations, business users or developers have adopted cloud already, outside of the normal IT procurement process. The term ‘rogue’ may seem pejorative, but is not intended to be – I simply described a process that is outside of IT’s knowledge or control. As I wrote back in 2009, rogue cloud can be very positive, and there is no per se reason for IT should to shut it down. However, IT does need to establish visibility into rogue cloud to ensure security or compliance, avoid cost overruns, drive broader adoption of good cloud choices, or even to promote better cloud choices.

Why Does This Matter?

This segmentation came about not as an academic exercise, but to help CIOs with a taxonomy for service portfolio analysis and cloud choice. Each of these cloud service types has different needs, from both platform and management perspectives. By identifying cloud service types, a CIO can better adopt their choice of cloud as appropriate for different services at different times.

For example,

• A cloud-native service can be ‘designed to fail’, whereas a cloud-migrant service needs additional management (e.g. real-time replication) to maintain the same level of continuity.
• A cloud-migrant application that has been QA’d on a closed and proprietary hypervisor may need additional testing and QA before it can be moved to a different (or unspecified) hypervisor.
• A rogue cloud service must be discovered before it can be managed as part of a whole portfolio, whereas a cloud-native or cloud-migrant service will be catalogued as it is deployed.
• A cloud-free service needs none of the above, and specifically can fall outside the cloud portfolio and be exempt from new policies specifically designed to enable cloud services.

This segmentation is not meant to replace a thorough service portfolio analysis in making good cloud choices. In my session at VMworld 2011 in Las Vegas, for example, I presented analysis models from Visible Ops – Private Cloud, a CA Technologies quadrant framework, Forrester Research’s Evaluating Application Fit With Cloud model, and Freeform Dynamics’ model from Applied Cloud Computing: A practical guide to identifying the potential in your environment.

However, I do think it is a useful taxonomy to start making sense of your own service portfolio as you start to take stock of where you are in your cloud strategy, and where you want to go. So far, the CIOs I have worked with on this have agreed.

What do you think?

I had a great time at VMworld 2011 Las Vegas this year. As I predicted in my last blog post, I met with loads of amazing people – too many to list out here, let alone in 140 on Twitter! I also saw some great technology in the solutions exchange, dropped in on some fascinating sessions, and of course enjoyed some excellent meals, drinks, and parties!

I was also very pleased to present on Extending the Value of Your VMware Solutions to Design, Deliver and Maintain Reliable, Mission-critical Virtualization and Cloud Services. I certainly was not there to ‘pitch’ any CA Technologies products or solutions (after all, I know that no one wants a sales pitch at a tradeshow like VMworld). Instead, I tried to provide strategic advice to the audience on how to look at their migration to cloud, and especially how to extend VMware’s excellent virtualization and cloud technologies.

My VMworld 2011 Las Vegas Presentation Agenda

With a smattering of additional tips and content from ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps’, I talked about:

• how to match services with the right cloud using project and portfolio analysis based on models from Visible Ops – Private Cloud, a CA Technologies quadrant framework, Forrester Research’s Evaluating Application Fit With Cloud model, and Freeform Dynamics’ model from Applied Cloud Computing: A practical guide to identifying the potential in your environment
• how to think about your service portfolio, whether considering migrating existing services to a private VMware cloud, building new services on a public VMware cloud, dealing with business users who buy into 3^rd-party cloud themselves, or even services that you may never migrate to the cloud
• how to leverage VMware to deliver both evolutionary cloud models built with virtualization, optimization, automation, orchestration, and dynamic IT; and with revolutionary models that deliver exponential benefits with a virtual business service, built on a virtual service fabric
• how to integrate complex service workflows, skillsets, and technologies, as well as incorporating NIST best practices including cloud service management and service-aware end-to-end application assurance to continually improve service quality, predictability, and costs
• how to apply critical security disciplines including Identity Management & Provisioning, Identity Federation & Single Sign-On, Web Access Management, Privileged User Management, Identity Compliance, and User activity reporting, whether to, from or for the cloud
• how to approach cloud as a transformation opportunity, so you don’t just do the same things in different ways, but fundamentally transform business and IT, delivering a ‘cloud of clouds’ with a broad technology ecosystem stocked with key VMware partners (like CA Technologies!)

You can check out my slides at the CA.com communities site, or over at SlideShare.

Overall, my session seemed to be very well received. A lot of people came up to me there and afterwards and told me how much they enjoyed my presentation, and how useful it was for them. I also enjoyed a great set of questions from the attendees immediately after the session. In fact, we were chatting so much we had to be ushered out so the next session could start.

Immediately afterwards I headed down to the CA Technologies booth, and really enjoyed talking with various practitioners and others at the book signing for ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps‘ afterwards (with co-authors Jeanne Morain and Kurt Milne). I even had a professor in IT from NYU ask for a copy of my book! Cool!

All in all, I had a great time, made new friends, enjoyed great food, and even managed to avoid the possible downsides of VMworld!

I hope VMware Europe Copenhagen will be just as good – and I hope to see you there!

Is your IT as easy as a smartphone?

Consumerization of IT is not a really new concept. Consumers (as employees) have been bringing their technology to the workplace for decades, like the pre-HP Palm Pilots and the pre-Google Motorola ‘mobile’ phones. However, we are now facing a new wave of consumerization, and it changing the way business operates as consumers start to drive a new approach to using and providing information technology.

Please check the entire post over at the CA Community website – ‘Enter the World of Consumer-Driven IT‘