I have been listening to the announcements from different vendors about how they “get” cloud computing and how each is the best vendor to drive it. It’s interesting to see how many of those messages are rich in “benefits” and claims about each vendor’s magnificent management tools. Yet there is little substance on why (not how) to use cloud offerings, nor on the processes you need to enable the transition from decentralized operations to a centralized, off-premises, or hybrid, model for cloud computing. However, there is already a model that has been around a long time: Despite its flaws, the IBM Systems Network Architecture (SNA) may be one of the best examples of a managed end-to-end architecture for distributed, cloud and on-premise solutions.

With SNA, everything, from the communication paths to inter-process communication, was defined and monitored in a hierarchy of physical and logical units. When something failed, it was possible to follow the track along the different components to know where the problem was. This was not an automatic process. But IBM created a resilient system and paired it with a quite extensive library that explained how to operate and keep the behemoth alive and well.

Then came the first economic shift, mini computers (DEC VAX, HP 1000 and 3000 series, IBM AS/400, for example) came to life and started to break the tyranny of the datacenter, not only by providing cheaper and simpler systems, but also by unlocking the communication paths for new and more flexible protocols.

Finally, the big revolution happened. Computing power entered the free market, running on top of a socialized network (thank you, DARPA). This revolution produced the personal computing world, with its easy-to-access resources, but also a communications model that was open to everybody.

The bad side of this accelerated change was the decline of the well-managed datacenter philosophy. The decline in itself was not a big problem. The horizontal scalability at the core, coupled with the decentralization of the middle- and lower-tier components of the architecture ina distributed network made failures on one side less costly or too far removed to justify fixing them in person. Problems were solved either by adding more hardware or applying a patch or service pack.

As more layers of the application moved to the end points, and these grew in numbers, remote management tools appeared. Their goal was mostly to continue the patching process, not to solve core issues.

Soon the problems with this approach started showing up in the form of cyber-attacks: An unmanaged system is the door to your or your company’s bank account. I should point out that social engineering attacks (like knowing a friendly and trustworthy Minister in Nigeria) are a separate issue.

In response, today, we are moving toward a regulated computing model. Resources arebeing  brought back into a managed datacenter environment, taking advantage of low cost (as compared to mainframes) hardware, an open set of communications protocols, and access interfaces between services, processes, and end users ona myriad of devices.

In other words: Welcome to the Cloud.

One attractive promise of the cloud environment is the return of the hierarchical model, which brings back end-to-end monitoring. The error is to rely on technology to make it happen, following the bad habits of the old free-for-all model.

Back in the ancient times of computing, mainframes were great, and the processes around them were even better. I suggest that we need to look back at the way we did things in those old days and adapt them to today’s needs. So the first step an organization needs to take in embracing cloud computing is simple: You need to review your existing operational procedures, policies, and regulations. Look for gaps and start building a catalog of services and processes.

A good place to start is looking into existing information—frameworks like the Control Objectives for Information and Related Technology (COBIT) or the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and the IBM Redbooks library. There is no need to apply the new operations procedures to the old architecture, but knowing the need and planning for it in preparation for the move to the cloud will result in more efficient cloud environment.

For more information, here are some links (thank you Wikipedia):

IBM Redbooks library: http://www.redbooks.ibm.com/

IBM SNA: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Systems_Network_Architecture

COBIT: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COBIT

ITIL: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ITIL

When is it time to change your IT platform? How do you decide if a point solution in your architecture should follow your current vendor offerings or that it’s time to add something new? Let me give you my perspective on this important question.

I recently worked on a project for a large company that was considering upgrading components and services in its infrastructure portfolio. The issue was whether to expand the footprint of the existing vendor’s solutions or replace some technology with a third-party solution that would eventually replace large portions of the infrastructure.

From the technical point of view, both possibilities satisfied the need. So that area was irrelevant in the discussion.

Investing more in a particular platform would increase the size of the company’s datacenter and consequently increase the desktop footprint. This translates to a higher cost of moving away from that platform. 

The cost comes in two areas. One of them is operations expertise and training: The more I have of one vender, the less I will know about the intricacies of another solution. In addition, if this is a solution that involves desktops, the cost of training end users on new systems will also grow.

Another cost comes from implementation when you’re replacing an existing solution (the cost of implementation for both solutions per se is a given). Replacing a datacenter solution tends to be simple, particularly in a cloud computing environment (for example with a hosted services provider), where little or no touch to the end users’ environment may be required.  When it comes to the desktop, even with centralized configuration management tools, the cost can quickly add up.

Therefore, at this point, keeping the current vendor and expanding the footprint seems like it may be the right direction. Of course, there is the long-term penalty of being tied to the platform, but in the short term, it makes sense as a cost-conscious solution.

So what other factors can aid in the decision? Use the value equation, where value equals the benefit of the platform divided by the total cost of ownership (TCO). In this case, the analysis differs from a traditional value case in the sense that we want to understand the benefits of replacing a dominant infrastructure vendor on our platform.

TCO is an overused term. Every single vendor claims its platform does better than anybody else’s. Here, it simply means “my cost of operations in the current environment.” If that cost constantly crosses above my replacement cost (as described above), the time has come to replace the platform.

Now, it’s obvious to say that, in a perfect world, the new solution would have an equal or better TCO. However, the cost of adding more to the existing platform and therefore creating a deeper dependency on a single vendor may offset a less-than-desirable initial TCO with the new solution. 

Benefit is more elusive, since as I mentioned before, both solutions were technically speaking equal and both satisfied the business needs IT asked for.  This is where you need to do a business analysis of the vendors that are looking to provide the solution. You need to get answers to questions like the following:

 ·         Where do I go for additional technology components?

·         Who provides support or licensing terms or models?

·         What is the supplier’s business viability?

You need to think about such considerations from a long-term point of view. Thinking this way provides reassurance that whatever your decision is, especially if you’re switching, you will not create a problem when you expand the new platform.

In summary, as indicated, pure datacenter decisions are easier. You may already have an unequal mix of vendors in place, and in that case, the effects of migration can be limited to the IT organization.  It is in the best interest of the vendor—and not yours—to expand the footprint, increasing the cost of replacement and locking all other solutions out. Multiple platforms imply a more educated (and expensive) IT staff, but this cost can be offset by having a broader set of technology options to choose from (and more negotiation power). On the other hand, when end users are involved, the cost of training them may surpass any benefit. This can be an argument, then, in favor of private cloud computing, centralizing services and applications into the datacenter while standardizing the user interface into a browser.

What are leading IT professionals doing to ensure success in their careers, and what advice do they have for you in the wake of the economic downturn? Those are the questions I've been asking in my new series of 6 podcasts for the Microsoft Thrive site (http://technetevents.com/click/thrive/Default.aspx?p=Community).

The first podcast is now live, and it was fascinating to talk with Patrick McDermott, the IT Director for a school district in Utah. His situation is uniquely challenging. Half of the school district lies within the Navajo Nation, and two-thirds of the students qulaify for free or reduced lunch programs. The district is by far the largest employer in the county. It has 12 small schools with a total student population of 3,000. It's a 5-hour drive to travel from the northern-most school to the southern-most.

Addressing the IT situation since the economic downturn, Patrick told me, "I am very familiar with operating in an environment that continually demands more from less. From my perspective, that's what operating in the real world is all about. I don't have a team of scores of developers awaiting their next instructions. I don't have unlimited budgets. I don't operate in a sterile environment where all of our data comes from the Northwind database. Instead, I have to use IT to help improve the education of students in ways that maximize our limited resources."

And Patrick is doing some amazing things with technology on a small budget. Download the podcast and find out about his innovations.

Here's a sneak peek at upcoming topics and IT pros I'll be talking to for this series of podcasts.

Michael Dragone, an IT manager for a title insurance company discusses how the economic situation affected his company and his IT department and how he and his team have found ways to raise the value of IT's contribution to the business, keep up their own skills, and find ways to grow as the economy starts to improve.

Sean Deuby, senior analyst for Platform Vision, talks about maintaining your personal "brand" and taking advantage of opportunities to network with your peers and IT experts to keep yourself marketable and valuable to your company.

Orin Thomas, a well-know book author, trainer, and author of numerous Microsoft certifications exams, talks about the role of training and certification, and well as the importance of being open to new skills and technology trends.

Dan Holme discusses how his consulting clients from very large, multinational corporations are evolving their approach to technology and the importance of cloud solutions such as Microsoft's Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS). But the most timely aspect of the conversation with Dan involves the sporting festivities in Vancouver and his role as Microsoft Technology Consultant for that event and the major television network that is broadcasting the competitions.

Just in time to get ready for the release of SQL Server 2010, Brian Lawton will discuss the database market, Business Intelligence (BI), and the value of database skills.

Please join me for all of this series. And let me know about your thoughts on how to Thrive in your career.

I am, therefore I travel.  I travel across the country and around the world working with large enterprise customers and looking at the business value of various IT strategies.  Of late my focus has been on Unified Communications (UC) and its potential for improved collaboration and cost savings and as a platform for innovation and competitive advantage. 

UC has been discussed for many years, but it has now finally evolved to real solutions with demonstrable cost-savings and productivity improvements.  In this era of decreasing budgets and increased competition no one can afford to ignore these benefits, therefore most organizations (probably yours) are either developing their UC strategy or are well along the way to UC implementation.  And, they are all recognizing that UC means a lot more than just throwing some voice over IP.  Thus, it requires a well thought-out road map to ensure maximum benefit across all aspects of their business.

In this environment, it is critical to ensure that you are taking full advantage of all the resources available to you to maximize the benefits of this planning/implementation process.  Microsoft has a well thought-out UC strategy that combines multiple communications platforms into a single end-user experience, building from the familiar installed base of Microsoft applications already running at most enterprise organizations. 

Whether you ultimately decide to use Microsoft for some or all of your UC strategy, it makes sense to take advantage of the company’s resources to build a comprehensive UC roadmap for the future.  Yes, I know they are a “Vendor” with capital V, but I have seen a lot of companies leave money on the table (sometimes a lot of money) because they haven’t leveraged their existing Microsoft relationship as a tool to help in this UC evaluation process.  With this in mind, here are 5 steps you can take to improve your Microsoft interaction and take advantage of available resources.

1. Obviously, the first step is to consider Microsoft as a key player in the UC arena.  You probably already have Exchange/Outlook for messaging and perhaps OCS for IM/Presence.  Why not build from this familiar base to develop a UC strategy?  While you may not have thought of Microsoft as a voice provider in the past, the company has an interesting approach to PBX integration and migration that makes excellent sense in an era of decreased capital budgets and helps reduce hardware obsolescence issues.

2. Talk to your Microsoft account team.   Make sure your Infrastructure Optimization (IO) Mapping is up to date and then and ask for their support in building a UC roadmap.  With an up-to-date IO Map and your account team’s knowledge of your business and culture, they can navigate the wealth of information available at Microsoft to bring the right tools and information for your evaluation.

3. Also, work with your account team to leverage interaction with the Microsoft partner ecosystem and even other customers to gain further insight into the UC evaluation/implementation process.  These introductions will help you gain valuable third-party information in support of your UC efforts.

4. Make sure you're using all the benefits of your SA or EA agreement. Are you using the free support calls that your agreement provides? If not, you should be.  Don’t be afraid to request UC information and white papers.  Ask how your current implementation could be enhanced and migrated to take advantage of new UC capabilities.

5. Finally, do you have Exchange Deployment Planning Services (EDPS) funds left for this year?  You can now use this resource for UC strategy development and have access to both Microsoft and third-party consultants for the process.  Many of the engagements I’ve had over the past year have been paid for in this manner.

Since you’re already looking at your UC strategy, why not take these simple steps to improve your Microsoft relationship, garner additional support for the development of your UC strategy, and save money?  When you do, please keep an open mind to the new avenues that UC will open up for your business.  For example, the ability to save time, travel, and facilities costs by empowering your people to work anywhere. 

During one of my recent engagements, I asked the CIO for his input regarding working from home.  His response was, “I absolutely support my people working from home – after they’ve spent 8 hours in the office.”  Obviously corporate culture plays a role, but UC will be a powerful tool for your organization and a platform for innovation going forward.

Have you ever stepped back, looked at your current IT infrastructure, and thought, "No human in their right mind would ever design a datacenter like this!"? If you’re like most IT professionals, you’ve either inherited a jumble of technology patched together over the years, or you’ve had to throw together quick solutions to meet business demands. Most of us don’t have the luxury of building a datacenter from scratch—and even if we did, we’d likely end up adding features, functionality, hardware, and software on as-needed basis. It’s nearly impossible to find the time for planning when you’re just trying to keep up with day-to-day needs.  

Datacenters are usually built in a reactive manner--Oh! I need more capacity. Oh! That server is down and I have to get it up. You need what capability by when? Are you out of your mind?! It will take months just to figure out how to do it.  

The reason why IT infrastructure gets so messy is that IT and business are not in sync. IT enables and empowers the business. But business is focused on earning more revenue, creating new product lines, and finding opportunities to generate new cash. Business managers often consider IT as a support department that is responsible for capital expenditure.   

However, you can change this situation. When IT and business have a common way of looking at IT infrastructure and can see how technology expenses can be lowered, then IT can be transformed from a cost center to business enabler. By supporting business proactively and in a reliable manner, IT can have a direct impact on business success. This transformation comes with standardization in the delivery of datacenter services through end-to-end management of physical and virtual environments. You can reduce operational costs and get optimum utilization of data center resources by considering your entire IT platform in every decision you make.  

The Platform Vision architectural model provides that common perspective on IT as a whole. The Infrastructure solution pattern represents the foundation for any IT platform and encompasses datacenter management, client devices, identity, networking, and security. By understanding the elements that make up the Infrastructure solution pattern, and by considering the dependencies and relationships that exist throughout the IT platform, you can give business management a way of seeing the cost and Return on Investment (ROI) implications of introducing any technology into your infrastructure. And you can look at your datacenter and see it as something that is evolving and growing in a sensible, planned way.  

This quick overview of the rational for and benefits of the Platform Vision model is just a starting point. To provide an in-depth explanation of the model, describe the components of each layer, and explain the dependencies and relationships among the components and layers, the Platform Vision team will create a white paper drilling down into each layer of the model. Stay tuned for the first of these white papers, which will focus on the Infrastructure layer.  

We invite your input into the model. Help us grow the Platform Vision model and make it more useful. Let us know about your experiences, as well as your needs. Email at Vikram.Jain@Advaiya.com

Consolidation of a datacenter should not be left to chance.  As datacenters have evolved and expanded, it hasbecome increasingly important to take a different view of projects involvingchanges to these environments, and the infrastructure within.

These aremajor undertakings, involving mission critical infrastructure, as such it’s importantto think in terms of “Transformation” versus simply “Migration”

Datacentertransformation can take many forms.  Changingthe landscape of a datacenter is driven by this ever growing need to reducecost, and increase performance. 

Some commonexamples of datacenter transformations are:

o   Hardware migration (moving from old infrastructureon to new higher performance, higher efficiency infrastructure) 

o   Server consolidation (leveraging virtualizationtechnology, blade infrastructure, or both to save on physical space, and save onoperational costs such as power/heating/cooling)

o   Data center relocation or site move (Consolidatedatacenter sites, to take advantage of cost savings from centralization, and regionalcost savings)

Planning andpreparation is often the easiest way to mitigate the risks associated withtransformation projects.  These projectscan be quite complex; only thorough and intelligent planning can ensure a clearpath to success, as well as identify any potential pitfalls beforehand.

PlateSpinRecon from Novell ensures that organizations will not go in blindly in to these initiatives.  The integration of PlateSpin Recon from Novell and PlateSpin MIgrate from Novell offers organizations the only end to end workload management solution,which in turn not only reduces risk, but reduces their overall cost.

Testing andplanning are critical to ensure success.

Testing isoften an overlooked aspect of these initiatives.  These projects are expected to move at thespeed of business, and as such, cutting out testing to reduce downtime is adangerous decision that is often made. Again, it is important to build transformation projects around solutionsthat recognize this and integrate testing into the project.  With mature features such as “Server Synch”only the PlateSpin workload management solution, recognizes the need for testing as an integralstep.

Testing isnot only critical from a point in time standpoint, but should also be done atmany levels, and stages.

A datacenteris more than the sum of its parts, and there can be complex interdependencies, frommulti-tier applications to dependencies from application to application.

The businesslevel components of the datacenter really can be looked at from threeperspectives: 

o   individual server workload (theoperating system, application, and data stack residing within the serverinfrastructure)

o   application cluster (most applicationsare in fact multi-tier, running across multiple server workloads)

o   full datacenter (dependencies acrossapplications, relied on for business services)

A multi-phase testing approach should be adopted to ensure that everything is running correctlyat each of these layers of abstraction. Testing the individual server workload components through to testing ofthe applications and entire datacenter as a whole, gives a “big picture” view,and will ensure the highest degree of risk reduction.

The only wayto confirm a project’s success is through post transformation analysis and validation.

Organizations canforget that solutions that provide integrated planning and modeling at thefront end of projects can be re-used for post completion validation.

Complexprojects such as datacenter transformations are rarely completely successfulinitially.  Validation testing and theability to take an iterative and ongoing approach to datacenter transformation,can assure not only the success of the initial project, but leads to theconcept of ongoing optimization. Ensuring not only a one time cost savings, but cost savings andperformance improvement perpetually.

Thoroughplanning, combined with thorough testing both before and after transformation, is the only way to ensure a successful project

PlateSpin workload management allows organizations look at datacenter transformation from a holistic “bigpicture” view, and can enable organizations to ensure ongoing datacenteroptimization.

By looking atthings from this view, we are transforming or moving a datacenter,rather than simply moving a number of individual workloads that make upthe datacenter.  The PlateSpin workload management solution not only ensures success with the project at hand, but can becontinually leveraged to ensure a fully optimized datacenter moving forward.

Business Benefits of BPM

IDG Research Services recently surveyed 400 IT executives: 100 in the U.S., 100 in Europe, and 200 in Asia-Pacific. Interestingly, when asked, 'Which business benefits did you derive by using BPM software in your past and current BPM initiatives,' most world wide respondents ranked reduced operating costs and improved productivity as their top responses and 26% of the global sample also reported a higher innovation rate.

Click here to read more.

Updates from the Gartner BPM conference

The power of advanced decisioning to make processes simpler, more agile and smarter came up again and again. The effective application of business rules and advanced analytics, and the management of decisions in concert with processes ensure a separation of concerns and a more effective process.

Click here to read more.

Those of us that are part of SOA-related projects where traditional business analysts (BA) are involved often find ourselves frustrated by the incongruence between the analyst’s approach to requirements gathering and the SOA design.  The problem arises because SOA models functionality of a business across multiple boundaries, whereas the business analyst wants to focus on a user’s needs.  One focus is tactical and the other is strategic.

Click here to read more.

Enterprises need prepare for cloud with more SOA

Enterprise IT shops need to continue investing in service-oriented architecture skills and initiatives if they are to be able to take full advantage of the emergence of the cloud infrastructure, a top Gartner analyst has advised.

Click here to read more.