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.

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.

What do you see - a cloud of crisis or a cloud of opportunity?

I saw an interesting post at Forbes.com last week titled ‘The Coming Crisis of IT Management,’ lamenting that “consumerization, virtualization, cloud computing, software as a service, mobility [sic] are all increasing the complexity of the job of managing IT by orders of magnitude.”

I certainly cannot disagree with that. I have written about these topics extensively, most recently tackling the impact of consumerization of IT.

By looking at the problem through the lens of the (perhaps less than) average CIO — the follower, the ‘lights-on’ manager, the order taker – Forbes.com contributor Dan Woods is painting doom and gloom instead of highlighting the potential for the innovative CIO to embrace and extend these trends to drive business advantage.

To me, this is missing the real story — that these changes are more opportunity than challenge.

Consumerization of IT

“End-users and departments are choosing their own devices, selecting and using Software as a Service applications and other cloud resources, and generally doing end-arounds [sic] to bypass the IT function whenever they feel like it.”

CA-sponsored research from IDC has shown this is true, yet it also shows how the innovative CIO uses this to their advantage. Embracing consumerization drives measurable benefits in customer attraction and retention, agility, cost, competitive advantage, satisfaction, loyalty, brand awareness, and more.

Software as a Service

“End-users just sign up for SaaS applications and starting using them without consulting IT. This leaves unaddressed the issues of security, reliability, compliance, and integration.”

Far from cringing at this, the innovative CIO will embrace and leverage so-called ‘rogue cloud.’ The rogue cloud exists for a reason, and the innovative CIO will leverage the learnings from rogue cloud to deliver what their users need (which IT had not been giving them before – and why they went around IT in the first place), faster and at lower costs, while still ensuring security, reliability, compliance, and integration.

Supporting Mobile Workers

“Which applications should be supported on mobile devices? How much of each application should be available? When does it make sense to craft custom mobile solutions? How can consumer apps become part of the picture? What is ROI for mobility? How much should be invested. [sic]“

Again the innovative CIO can embrace and leverage mobile to make their business more agile, flexible, and (obviously) mobile, so users can do business wherever their clients are, quickly, easily and profitably. As noted in the Forbes.com post, it is not necessarily easy, but solutions exist that can be applied today – so there is no excuse to hide behind fear and FUD instead of embracing the opportunity of mobile.

Virtualization and Cloud

“Virtualization and the cloud had [sic] caused an explosion in the number of assets that are being created. For the most part most data centers are operating in the pre-virtual world.”

For years I have dealt with the topic of how virtualization adds complexity (PDF). With most enterprises committed to hybrid models, cloud will also add to (rather than replace) existing complexity. I’ve also blogged about virtual stall for a long time. However, I have also spoken (as have other experts (PDF)) about how an innovative CIO can solve these issues, embrace virtualization and cloud, and deliver significant business benefits from truly agile, flexible, and dynamic IT.

Focus on Business Brings Management and Security to the Forefront

Forbes is certainly not wrong in its analysis. CIOs are facing an increased pace of change; they are losing control.

However, this is an opportunity for the innovative CIO to embrace change, allow complexity, give users more control, and move away from being the “Office of the C-I-No,” away from being a tactical cost center, and toward being the strategic asset that their business needs.

This means understanding the fundamental importance of management and security. Cloud computing and its many drivers — including social, mobile, virtualization, SaaS, and more — put management and security at the forefront, as they allow the innovative CIO to adopt, embrace, and extend these technologies, to drive incredible business benefits.

Without management and security at the forefront of planning, designing, and delivering services, IT may indeed be lost in “a state of worry” that will “keep CEOs up at night.”

However, with management and security at the forefront, the innovative CIO can rest easy, knowing they are delivering what their business needs.

They can move ahead of the curve, use public and private cloud with confidence, provide reliable and agile IT internally, and help their business to transform to take advantage of these new capabilities.

And as they “stop focusing on technology and start understanding the business they serve,” this will allow them to win new business, beat their competitors, keep their costs down, and delight their customers as IT becomes the strategic asset the business needs it to be.

Great Journal, The Register.

I had the great pleasure of talking with The Register’s Nathan Coates about my experience in what applications makes are a good fit for private cloud deployments. Nathan actually ended up quoting me in his article, which is excellent reading!

“The key environments for private cloud we are seeing now tend to be project-based,” says Andi Mann, vice-president of virtualisation product marketing at CA Technologies. There’s plenty that fits into this category, of course, from engineering systems and one-off analytics jobs through test environments to web and collaboration services.

You can read all of Nathan’s article here – El Reg guide to the Private Cloud.

Asia Cloud Forum

I did a great interview recently with Carol Ko of Asia Cloud Forum about the release of my new book, ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud‘. We had a great Q&A on why the book matters, how it came about, key competencies for success, critical challenges, and a whole lot more:

Written for enterprise IT executives and data center managers, the book, which forms part of the Visible Ops series, studies the experience of enterprise IT organizations that have implemented private cloud solutions, and develops a four-phased approach for managing the development and rollout of a private cloud.

You can read the whole interview here – CIOs’ new handy guide to sell private cloud to CEO/CFOs.

Which is the bigger myth - public cloud cost savings or Lewis Carroll's Jabberwock?

There is a lot of hype around how much money you can save with public cloud.

Public cloud can be cheaper than on-premise IT or private cloud, especially for selected services and SMBs. However for large enterprises, while there are plenty of reasons to use public cloud, cost reduction is not always one of them.

Public cloud certainly has a low startup cost, but also a long ongoing cost. For all practical purposes, the ongoing cost is never-ending too. As long as you need it, you keep paying as much as you did on day one, without adding an asset to your books or depreciating your facilities investments.

Public cloud also rarely (ever?) provides the management, security, governance, or lifecycle solutions that add cost to internal IT either – not because public cloud does not need them, but because it eats into cloud providers’ profit margins. Indeed, the myth of low cost cloud is built directly on the equally false myth that public cloud doesn’t need management or discipline.

Better economies of scale are not assured either. Many large IT organizations have more and larger data centers than most, though perhaps not all, public cloud providers. Enterprise IT can be strikingly massive, with economies of scale that match or exceed even the largest public cloud providers.

Public cloud does not always lead to a substantial reduction in staff costs either. Simply sourcing infrastructure or software as a service does not let you disband your IT department entirely. After all, your databases still need DBAs; your applications still need performance monitoring; your users still need a Help Desk; regardless of where the services or systems are running.

This last issue was partly the basis for an early debunking of the ‘public cloud is cheaper’ myth in a McKinsey report titled ‘Clearing the Air on Cloud Computing’ (PDF) back in 2009. McKinsey found that IT labor cost savings with public cloud (IaaS in particular) are minimal, around 15% mainly in sysadmins. However, non-labor costs were actually much higher for public cloud. Overall, it showed a 144% higher cost of public cloud over internal IT, and concluded that, with the majority of cloud savings achievable in-house with virtualization, an investment in private infrastructure makes sense for larger organizations.

A lot has changed since 2009, and both platform and software clouds offer different benefits to infrastructure clouds. Still, many of the CIOs that my co-authors and I interviewed for our recent book ‘Visible Ops – Private Cloud: From Virtualization to Private Cloud in 4 Practical Steps‘ confirmed this from their own experience. These practitioners have done the calculations on their own real world IT budgets, and told us how they can deliver the same (or better) service internally at a 30% discount to public alternatives – in accordance with the Visible Ops – Private Cloud mantra of ‘faster, better, cheaper’:

For example, the larger organizations we interviewed are confident that they can offer their own public cloud-like services cheaper, better, and more securely than external service providers. As a result, many are working to create a self-service, low-touch model that can be used to spin up new computing resources.

In Visible Ops – Private Cloud, we also cited primary research conducted and published by Wikibon on the comparative cost of public cloud for large enterprises. It has a more detailed analysis of economies of scale, and found that only for low-priority applications in SMB environments will public cloud be more cost-effective than private cloud, and then by only 14%. By contrast, private cloud is more cost-effective for all large enterprise use cases, and for all mission-critical applications (even in SMBs), by up to 41% annually, primarily because:

1) The applications running in larger organizations demand more resilience, governance and control;

2) While small businesses will find public clouds attractive, large organizations will be able to create a private internal cloud that has many of the same business characteristics as a public cloud, but with much higher levels of control, security and availability; and

3) Achieving the same levels of resilience with public cloud infrastructure would be prohibitively expensive for larger organizations.

ASG has also published a short analysis of the comparative TCO of private and public clouds on their blog. This analysis has many built-in assumptions, but it does show a reasonable and defensible interpretation of costs in both environments. According to this analysis, over a 3-year period, private cloud operation (whether on owned or leased equipment) is around half the cost of public cloud:

This analysis shows a $513,295 cumulative cost savings over three years for the private cloud purchase versus the public cloud option [$1,092,188]. The private cloud lease saved $489,874 versus the public cloud option over the same three years.

Then there is James Staten of Forrester research, and a great report titled ‘The 3 Stages of Cloud Economics’. Unfortunately for many, the full report is subscriber-only, so I cannot extract it, but it is a great read (you can get a free taste over at James’ blog at Forrester.com on the stages of cloud economics). Suffice to say that the report starts out front and center with a whole section titled ‘BUSTING THE MYTH — CLOUD COMPUTING ALWAYS SAVES YOU MONEY’ [sic].

Of course, a realistic cost analysis depends on too many organization-specific factors to draw firm conclusions for any but specific use cases. However, for most enterprises evaluating cloud (public or private), an overly tight focus on cost reduction is misplaced at best. Given all the experience and data at hand, cost reduction is at best a possible outcome from public cloud, and even then only for some workloads, and only for some organizations.

Yet all of this ultimately misses the point. As James Staten says in his blog:

But this isn’t a debate worth having because it’s the exploration of the use cases where it does save you money that bares the real fruit. And it’s through this experience that you can start shifting your thinking from cost savings to revenue opportunities.

Clearly cost reduction is important when you can achieve it. Indeed, judicious use of cloud computing, public and private, for the right services, the right users, at the right time, certainly does deliver cost reductions. However, while cloud in general and public cloud in particular can save money, cost reduction is certainly not the only reason to use cloud, public or private; in my opinion, it is probably not even the best reason to use cloud.

The potential that cloud computing creates to drive technology flexibility, business agility, quality of experience, and service continuity (even despite multiple high-profile public cloud outages) far exceed the returns to large enterprises of hardware cost reduction. The real benefit is found in business gains like greater competitive advantage, faster time to market, and higher customer retention.

It is through these business factors – not mundane IT line items such as server purchase prices and administrator salaries – that cloud computing, both public and private, will drive the most significant and fundamental changes to the bottom line for most large enterprises.