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)

Are you preparing your teenage cloud for the real world?

James Staten at Forrester recently published his Top 10 Cloud Predictions for 2012. In it, James talks about how cloud is maturing, and warns of the challenges as cloud enters, as he describes it, “the awkward teenage years” …

“Cloud technologies matured nearly across the board … but there’s much more growth ahead as the cloud is no longer a toddler but has entered the awkward teenage years.”

It is a great piece, and I really love this analogy. I have been using it myself recently, as it fits and resonates so well. It also perfectly highlights the growing need for ‘adult supervision’ in cloud computing.

As a toddler, cloud was not expected to have any maturity, discipline, self-control, or to understand the real world. So we all just did our best to help it grow, resigned in the process to just clean up after it and at least to prevent any life-threatening injuries.

However, as cloud becomes a teenager, I think a key to building real maturity (as in real life) is in giving our budding teen the benefit of adult experience and supervision, while expecting it to show a growing level of responsibility. We need to give our teens the benefit of our ‘grown-up’ experience in the real world, provide them with a positive role model, be a ‘responsible adult’ for them, and expect them to show an increasing degree of self-discipline.

In this analogy, the adult supervision is the discipline of management and security that we know so well at CA Technologies – discipline that we know works, and that we know is necessary, even if our rebellious teen doesn’t think so (yet!):

• It means providing discovery to find out about our teen’s ‘rogue’ activities – not to shut them down (though sometimes that may be necessary), but to be ready to support them when they come to us for help.
• It means providing security and compliance to help our teen stay out of trouble with the law, and (heaven forbid) to bail them out if they do get into mischief.
• It means giving them modelling and simulation capabilities, to help them learn how to drive in a safe environment, so they know exactly what to expect once they finally hit real streets, with real applications.
• It means providing automation and assurance so they stay focused on what is important and don’t get distracted – and if (or as James notes, when) they do crash, they don’t just stay alive but they recover quickly.
• It means helping to assemble credible capabilities to showcase their talent and advance their best abilities, not just grabbing the first ‘uncool attempting to be cool’ thing that comes along.
• And it means providing ‘grown-up’ financial management tools, so they learn how to fit their lofty goals within a real-world budget – and so they can learn to pay their own way when they leave home too!

We all want to help our teenagers become responsible adults. That means for our teenage cloud, it is rapidly approaching the time ‘to put away childish things’ and grow up. For better or worse, that means more responsibility, more maturity, more discipline, and more self-control.

Of course, we cannot expect our teen to do it all themselves, just as we cannot expect to do it all for them. But the grown-ups among us who have IT maturity need to at least provide the adult supervision to help them grow responsibly.

They may not do it exactly the same as we did (with mainframe, distributed, desktop) – but those of us with experience in the real world of IT need to give cloud some basic principles by which to find its own way. Like any teen, they may make mistakes despite our best guidance (and that is okay because that is how teenagers learn) – but those of us who have made the mistakes before need to be there to help pick them up when they fall over.

Bottom line – cloud is growing up, running mission-critical workloads, taking care of others, and soon enough will be driving itself to school. But if we want it to become a productive member of society, we need to provide adult supervision and be a positive role model. And that means it is time to provide ‘grown-up’ management and security, with the time-honored disciplines that we all know are needed.

Because without adult supervision, the teenage cloud may turn into a juvenile delinquent.

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Want to know more about a responsible ‘grown-up’ approach to managing and securing the cloud? Check out ca.com/cloud for more.

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This blog was originally published on the ca.com Cloud Chasers blog.

Logicalis Cloud In a Box!

While travelling back from VMworld EMEA last week, I stopped at London and visited with a fantastic CA Technologies customer and partner, Logicalis UK. Logicalis UK is an international provider of integrated information and communications technology (ICT) solutions and services, part of a group that employs over 2,000 people worldwide, with annualized revenues in excess of $1 billion.

Logicalis is doing some amazing things to deliver both public and private hosted cloud using CA Technologies, alongside key strategic partners Cisco and NetApp. While visiting their site in the UK – just outside of London, I learned a lot about the real world of cloud service providers.

The top 10 things I learned about cloud from my visit to Logicalis UK were:

1. Cloudbursting is real & it is happening today

There is a lot of hubbub over whether or not cloudbursting – “the ability to shift an application from a private cloud into a public cloud when the demand for computing capacity spikes” – is actually achievable in the real world. Well, I have seen it, and it is real. Logicalis does it today with incredible efficiency, as close to real-time as most mission-critical enterprise applications would realistically need.

2. Cloud in a box is real & exists today – literally

With the unique capabilities of Cisco UCS and NetApp storage, alongside CA Technologies automation and a lot of their own special sauce, Logicalis has literally put a cloud in a box. Wanna see it? Here it is! They have also solved a range of portability and security issues with some very clever solutions, even including the perennial “but what about administrators’ physical access in a public cloud?” dilemma. And they make it look sexy as hell!

3. Expert partners make CA Automation Suite amazing

CA Technologies alone could not have made this unique solution happen without Logicalis – or vice-versa. Nor could we have made this solution work without other great partners, like Cisco and NetApp. Great partnerships like this bring people, process, and technology together to create unique and valuable solutions that are more than the sum of their parts – which is exactly what Logicalis delivers to its customers.

4. Cost savings from cloud can get real, fast

How about two and a half million pounds (~= $3.8m USD) in savings? Is that real enough for you? Logicalis has the numbers, but bottom line: if you avoid building a new data center, or reuse existing office (or classroom, warehouse, cupboard) space instead of dedicated conditioned raised floor space, then the savings can be – and for Logicalis’ customers, are – substantial.

5. You don’t need server virtualization to do cloud

In the aftermath of the VMworld hype a lot of people are equating virtualization with cloud. VMware has a great cloud platform, which Logicalis and CA both support, but Logicalis and CA also deliver cloud services on a range of alternative virtual platforms (including Hyper-V and Xen), and even on bare metal x86 servers (as CA Labs on Demand has been doing in our own private cloud for years). And not just x86, because, as I have learned …

6. You can find public cloud providers that go beyond commodity x86

It is easy to find a public x86 cloud for Linux/Windows workloads; but the options for mission-critical UNIX servers are few and far between. CA’s Labs on Demand provided automated self-service for UNIX for private cloud, and soon Logicalis will be providing UNIX support in their public and on-premise hosted private cloud too, using the UNIX support in CA Automation Suite. There is more special sauce here, but UNIX support is no longer the roadblock to cloud it has been in the past.

7. You can run restrictively licensed apps in the cloud

Again, Logicalis brings some special sauce to migrate even software from large, intractable OS and application vendors from server to server, and even site to site, without license issues or roadblocks. If you have license issues today with cloud, you should talk to Logicalis about how they solved them. Crazy cool!

8. Great things happen when you combine great solutions

Logicalis is not just a CA automation customer, but combines the power of integrating CA Automation Suite for Clouds with CA Spectrum, CA eHealth, and CA ecoSoftware to deliver an incredible solution that is more than the sum of its parts. Alongside Cisco UCS  and NetApp storage, this adds up to a mission-critical, enterprise-grade cloud solution that is unique, differentiated, and truly remarkable.

9. Cloud does indeed make for amazing Disaster Recovery

Logicalis is providing site-to-site replication that automatically detects system failures and replicates the failing environment to a public cloud infrastructure, though not instantaneous, certainly faster than it takes to go grab a coffee. The demonstration of this is amazingly powerful, which leads me to my last learning…

10. Hitting a big red ‘power-kill’ switch still freaks me out a little

Part of the DR demo the Logicalis crew gave me simulated an emergency outage by inviting me to hit this big red kill switch – as seen in data centers everywhere. When I did, I immediately heard the sickening (lack of) sound as the cloud-in-a-box died mid-process. After working in data centers for over 10 years, that sudden silence still gives me a visceral reaction. Much credit to the Cisco and NetApp hardware though – Logicalis has done this hundreds of times, and the box is still running smoothly.

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Overall, it was a fantastic site visit for me. Logicalis UK is doing amazing things with CA Technologies and great partners like Cisco and NetApp. Their people were friendly, smart, and highly qualified. Their processes are sophisticated, proven, and automated.

The way they combine these critical elements of people, process, and technology to deliver unique and valuable solutions is an incredible revelation. Make sure to check them out.

This blog was originally published at the CA Technologies Cloud Storm Chasers blog.

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!

BSMdigest

I have just started posting on BSM Digest on behalf of CA Technologies. You can read my first post there, Beyond BSM – Cloud Computing and the Next Generation of Service Management! In it, I talk about how cloud drives an urgent need for a more flexible and dynamic management practice based on automated service operations management.

Rather than adding yet more manual labor, or continuing to focus on low-level change and configuration management, cloud drives an urgent need for a more flexible and dynamic management practice based on automated service operations management. This is driving a new generation of service management that can assure quality business service in real-time, even as infrastructure and applications rapidly change, and which can trigger workflows across data center and cloud resources to rapidly remediate service quality and availability problems.

Read the full article: Beyond BSM – Cloud Computing and the Next Generation of Service Management at BSMdigest.

eWeek

I was quoted in eWeek this week, commenting on the Microsoft Office 365 outages:

Even such incidents, though, don’t seem to be dissuading businesses from believing in the ultimate benefits of the cloud. “Clouds will have downtime—it’s a fundamental issue,” Andi Mann, chief cloud strategy guru at CA Technologies, told eWEEK. “But you need to be ready for downtime, whether it’s your own infrastructure or cloud infrastructure. You need to understand what the risk is. It’s all just about risk management.”

In other news, I am considering getting new business cards listing my title as “Chief Cloud Strategy Guru”. What do you think?

Check the whole article here – Microsoft’s Office 365 Hit By Outages – eWeek.com

Coming to VMworld 2011? Let me know so we can connect!

In my last post, I asked why you love going to VMworld, and gave you a few of my reasons – like the people, the technology, the announcements, the sessions, the labs, and the parties.

But like any business trip, it is not all fun and games, beer and skittles, rainbows and unicorns.

So why do you *not* like going to VMworld?

Like my last post, I’ll go first. Here are some things I really do *not* love about going to VMworld – as well as some upsides to take the sting off :

• Las Vegas – Moscone at San Francisco was great, but I have been to Vegas so much now that I am getting tired of it.
  • Upside: if it has to be in Vegas, I think the Venetian is the best venue in town, with the best casual dining on the strip.

• Copenhagen – Copenhagen is really expensive and hard to get to from the US, and the Bella Center is so far out of town, away from most hotels, with barely anything nearby.
  • Upside: Copenhagen really is a beautiful city, and if you have a spare day you can visit the fabulous Louisiana nearby.

• The internet access – WiFi (and 3G) at VMworld is always over-subscribed and under-provisioned, though this is not surprising for such a large event. Especially in Vegas, where the casinos don’t want you to do anything except eat, drink, and gamble, I don’t expect the Venetian to be any better than Moscone last year.
  • Upside: it is a great excuse not to answer that email/IM/DM from your boss!
• The conference food – let’s face it, conference food is rarely gourmet, and VMworld is no different. In their defense, when you are serving 15,000+ people you will never get Tetsuya’s, Moto, or Le Gavroche.
  • Upside: both Vegas and Copenhagen have some great food – albeit outside the conference – including what is currently considered the best restaurant in the world.
• The VMworld website – well, the less said about that the better. Suffice to say, it frustrated me so much this year that I spent an afternoon redoing the EMEA hotel listings in a usable format.
  • Upside: once you have registered and scheduled your sessions, you really don’t need the website anymore.
• The hangover(s) – I love the parties, but not the hangovers. So be careful what, how much, how early, and how late you drink. I try to alternate hard drinks with soft drinks  so I can stay longer and suffer less (my regular is vodka & lime; my change-up is lime and soda) . It keeps me hydrated and  you can’t even tell it is non-alcoholic.
  • Upside: a hangover means you probably had a great night at a great party with some great people.
• The main party – I know loads of people loved them, but aged rockers Foreigner (with just one original member) were not my bag. And having seen INXS live at Sydney pubs (like the famous Manly Vale) in the 80s, why would I want to see them old and busted with no Michael Hutchence?
  • Upside: This year The Killers are playing the party – at least they have had a chart hit this millennium!

But really, while I can complain about all these little things, in the end they do not really matter. I still love going to VMworld

That said – what do you *not* love about going to VMworld?