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.

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.

Thanks to CRN for the chance to speak with you!

I was interviewed for a great article published today in CRN titled, “CA Putting Cloud Pieces Together”. In it, Jack McCarthy writes:

CA Technologies has turned heads in the last two years with acquisitions of a string of cloud-based companies, marking its intention to be a major cloud player and cloud partner. Now CA is leveraging those deals to step up as a full-fledged cloud services provider, offering products, services and partnerships to help business move to the cloud through a variety of software lifecycle management and automation services.

Some partners are impressed, but say it may take CA a while longer to fully integrate its cloud services plan.

But CA nonetheless is confident it’s on the right track. “The core of our strategy is to help customers use the cloud to build a public or private or hybrid cloud, whether using our services or providing their own services,” Andi Mann, CA’s vice president of Strategic Solutions, said in an interview Monday.

Please read the whole article online here.

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.

Last week I had a great time in an interview on The Buzz with Scott Carty, on Seattle radio station Smart Talk 570 KVI, talking about the upcoming Cloud Fair 2012 in Seattle. I was joined by Cloud Fair organizer Rick Klimanowski and fellow speaker, Margaret Dawson of Symform.

Scott had some pretty good questions for Margaret, Rick and I from ‘outside the cloud bubble’ – like how many clouds can I have, is cloud computing secure, is it all hype, how can a company know when to start using cloud?

So please listen in below – it is only 8 minutes. I don’t talk a lot, jumping in at around the 5 minute mark,  if that makes it more palatable.

Oh, btw, as I mention in the interview, I am speaking at Cloud Fair Seattle on one of my favorite topics, Delivering Strategic Business Goals with Cloud Computing. If you are in town (it is at the Sheraton Seattle on April 17-19, 2012), please come along and say hi! The full agenda is online here.

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)

You may as well look in a crystal ball!

Welcome to IT prediction season! Again, I am inspired to throw my exceedingly fallible hat into the ring with my predictions, specifically for virtualization and cloud. I seem to have had a decent run of predictions last year, but I claim more luck than credit. I still think predictions are a mug’s game, and continue to eschew both the importance and reliability of predictions.

That said, here are my predictions for 2012:

1. Brands May Come and Go – But No Technology Will Die

Not only are we not living in a ‘post-PC’ world, we are not even living in a ‘post-mainframe’ world! Cloud will not kill data centers, virtual will not kill physical, tablets will not kill PCs, Mac will not kill Windows, Android will not kill iOS, streaming will not kill DVDs. The technology pie is growing, our choices are expanding, and almost every slice is getting bigger. So be prepared to manage an ever-increasing selection of technologies across public and private boundaries.

2. Hybrid IT Will Be ‘The Next Big Thing’

‘Hybrid cloud’ was soooo 2011! In this new world of choices, business will expect hybrid IT: a combination of on-site and off-site; cloud and legacy; private and public; physical and virtual; social and secure; enterprise and consumer; desktop and server; mobile and static. Business will also expect IT to make them work together, whether IT owns the service or not. IT must act as a trusted advisor, as a service broker, and as quality assurance for this brave new world of complex Hybrid IT.

3. Service Quality Will Be IT’s Responsibility Again

As hybrid IT proliferates, business owners will (again) realize they do not want to manage technology; they just want it to work. In 2012, end users will increasingly expect IT to take responsibility for service quality, regardless of who is buying, selling, or delivering that service. IT will need to eliminate the blind spots in hybrid IT, actively support an explosion of devices, deal with complex cross-boundary services, and find a way to deliver a 360-degree service assurance across all facets of end-user experience.

4. Public Cloud Adoption Will Slow

Given the results of this year’s Longhaus research from Australia – an early adopter market and a bellwether for business technology – I suspect the rest of the world is in for a slowdown of public cloud adoption. Issues (perceived or real) with security, compliance, service quality, skills, staffing, complexity, and good old politics will all put the brakes on. Whether ‘cloud stall’ will be as pronounced as ‘virtual stall’ is unsure, but 2012 will see a marked slowdown in public cloud adoption.

5. Public Cloud ‘Gets’ Security

Sad but true – many (most?) enterprise decision-makers still do not trust public cloud. In 2012, IT must do a better job of deploying and explaining cloud security – and I believe we will! In 2012, CIOs will see security as less of a barrier to cloud adoption as organizations adopt more and better cloud-oriented security solutions – including solutions designed for complex hybrid cloud services, as well as solutions that are delivered through the cloud with easily-consumed Security SaaS options.

6. Big Iron is Back – Part I

No, mainframe is still not dead. On the contrary, 2012 will see the rise of the mainframe as a *gasp* cloud platform. Massively scalable, hosting critical (and underutilized) ‘big data’, capable of running complex cloud workloads on a variety of architectures (z/OS, Linux, UNIX, Windows), mainframe is really an obvious cloud platform. It will not replace commodity clouds, but large enterprises and governments especially will leverage their investments and bring big iron into their cloud mix.

7. Cloud Gets Heterogeneous

Not only will mainframe become part of the cloud landscape, but public cloud providers will also start to offer UNIX and maybe even other non-x86 platforms. I have recently seen this in action (CA did it internally years ago), and most large enterprises are heavily dependent on heterogeneous systems for their mission-critical applications. Despite the common myth that cloud == commodity servers, heterogeneous servers will start to become more available for large enterprise deployments.

8. Big Iron is Back – Part II

Big iron concepts of integrated compute, network, and storage are resurgent – but this is not your grandpa’s mainframe. Deployment of integrated fabrics like Cisco UCS and VCE Vblock will accelerate rapidly in 2012 as IT changes the way it thinks about integrated infrastructure for virtualization and cloud – and realizes how amazing these integrated boxes are for diverse, dynamic, high-volume workloads like desktop virtualization, pop-up data centers, and cloudbursting.

 9. ‘Grown-up’ Cloud Service Management Comes To The Forefront

In 2011, the NIST Cloud Reference Architecture devoted a whole section to ‘Cloud Service Management’, and IT started to talk about ‘grown-up’ disciplines – planning, budgeting, performance, asset, inventory, service levels, audit, etc. In 2012, even ‘commodity’ cloud vendors will finally take cloud management seriously, as enterprises and governments demand these disciplines – and smaller providers differentiate on service and security, not just price.

10. Virtualization Management Becomes Irrelevant

In January 2009 I predicted, “in 3-5 years … niche [Virtual System Management] vendors will no longer survive, as virtualization becomes a core part of the enterprise compute fabric.” Three years later this trend has definitely started, and will accelerate in 2012 as IT turns instead to hybrid IT management, recognizing that silos of standalone virtualization management is a costly and inefficient burden. Maybe 2012 is not the end of Virtualization Management, but it is going to be the start of the demise.

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So that is my punt on 2012. I have no idea whether they will come true, but they seem to make sense to me. Again, if you are reading this in December 2012, please feel free to e-mail me and let me know how I went. I won’t be surprised either way.

[this post was originally published at VMblog.com]

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.

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!