Cloud : Vision & Tactful Deployment

I was moderating an informal discussion amongst decision makers on how much resources to allocate to cloud computing efforts inside their respective enterprises. Someone wanted to know if there is a benchmark available as to how much individual enterprises spend on cloud efforts to stay ahead of the curve. I murmured that this may not be so relevant as a factor for taking decisions inside their respective enterprise but at best can act as an aide – either to reinforce that we are doing what everyone else is doing – little or more as the case may be, but can’t become a guiding mantra. Remember best practice vs next practice dilemma. Cloud actually provides an opportunity to create transformational change inside IT and enterprise. I told myself that the key remains evolving a vision for cloud inside every enterprise.

Cloud is a truly disruptive use of technology and many of the traditional principles such as vision, strategy and trusted execution partners are highly relevant in assessing and managing cloud adoption progress inside enterprises.What I see all around is the fact that, many enterprises are not developing a full vision for their cloud computing efforts. I see that in a number of cases, cloud efforts are pilot efforts, departmental efforts, proof of concepts etc. Seldom does one get to see a full blown real time cloud efforts inside enterprises. Why these half steps – while testing the water is per se not bad, winners need to learn to swim –fast and in an easy manner. Enter cloud computing vision – connected dots, big picture ….

Since it is the early days of the cloud, it is understandable that people take baby steps on an experimental basis as a start point , but the rate of adoption of the technology is getting faster and faster. This is irrespective of the nature of the cloud – private, hybrid, public – all are seeing faster rates of adoption and enterprises are sooner than later going to be confronted with the question – how fast are we moving on their cloud initiatives.

The early initiatives of virtualzation hold an ominous parallel here. When server virtualization fever began to grip enterprises, we saw that everyone wanted to rush into that, so much so that many parallel initiatives were happening inside enterprises - so much so no one owned these at a central level and mostly many purused them as independent efforts – the result, enterprises began to face the rising prospect of VM sprawl. This created opportunities for vendors to sell new services around managing VM sprawl. The point here is – without an overaching vision, efforts which look successful in the short term but may create a formdable set of problems to manage – medium to long term!

Simple questions like who manages the process inside to manage these deployments – whats the overall security compliance etc.. In many organizations, individual efforts begin to bubble up at a central level only when security, risk , compliance efforts get pushed from the CFO/CIO organizations, That’s when most of the so called local efforts come together to show a gargantuan picture of the number of moving parts so to say that need to be shephered together..

When enterprises focus on shepherding and untangling the messy knots – already time has passed to examine the business value such efforts could bring in. The shift to cloud does not bestow long lasting benefits by just doing all over - rather I argue , it is going to come out of having a lasting vision, with a well detailed out program plan and aided by flawless execution. A strategy that speaks for itself and a concerted plan of action communicated well enough inside enterprises would go a long way in realizing benefits out of cloud efforts.

Cloud computing is all about driving holistic change in IT, but comes with the flexibility to start locally – this is a double edged sword – you can move fast locally thinking that bottoms up could work but harldly true based on real life experiences. What helps is having an overarching vision and tactically executing smaller programs locally in alignment with the overall vision.Such vision/strategy ought to illustrate how cloud facilitates pursuit and accomplishment of a set of goals articulated at the enterprise level. The plan should espouse the plan of adoption and address issues like compliance, security, governance, change management, partnership plans, auditing, provisioning , chargeback, exit strategies etc. Departmental efforts can draw from this plan the appropriate linkages and drive towards achieving the stated goals through their efforts. Think about this : such effors would help drive business value by bringing alignment across all internal initiatives, bringing cohesion across all efforts and help achieve larger goals such as capex to opex centric spending models, compliance, security etc. Such efforts would truly provide the basis of creating a platform centric IT infrastructure for enterprises to enable IT leverage for lot more benefits.

For cloud initiatives to be successful, enterprises need to focus on the larger end goal and have a game plan to achieve them in a truly centrally driven but localy executed model of execution. Success in large enterprise initiatives are always predicated upon their vision and execution – cloud adoption fits into this model very well. Is the partner system ready for this? The answer is Yes. The benefits of what is available today to service providers in the Cloud ecosystem provides more than ever the promise that they can focus on the business goals of the organizations they seek to support.

Typically larger enterprises need to focus on an array of things centrally to make progress on cloud adoption. Enterprises need to worry about new scale, different levels of security, reliability to support the new order of things. This means putting in place a new model of information and infrastructure governance, deployment, training, support - needless to say all these need to be reframed inside the enterprise. The IT environments need to be upgraded to provide for very high transaction workloads, security infrastructure needs to be retuned and app experiences need to be completely rehauled to provide a consumer feel for look and usage.

We have been waiting for the moment when transformative disruptions of this nature and scale happen. Learning organizations always had a charter to capture the latent knowledge that reside within people, process and systems, Existing technologies and methods could provide a lending hand to capture that vision in a limited way. People across the ranks inside organization can now participate in such transformation efforts quite easily and this could become the bedrock of new forms of collaboration leading to innovation and productivity improvements. Ironically this is mostly facilitated by advances in technology and communications and those responsible for technology management need to be ready to make this transformation possible inside their enterprises.

As I wrote elsewhere earlier, too often, inside enterprises, IT today is seen as the dampener towards embracing change at a mega-scale. IT organizations have an urgent need to transform themselves to keep pace with the change and become more relevant and stay aligned with business to leverage the opportunities that revolve around improving productivity, improving the efficiencies of operation, making organizations more innovative etc.. This also becomes a major force towards attracting talent. The clarion call here is for the enterprises to adopt to this change and create a new basis of competing – to distinguish from competition and create a leading distance from others through good plans, design and practice.

Oracle : Racing Ahead

This note follows the post on Fusion Apps Launch announcement. There were a slew of announcements from Oracle this Open World 2010 and Larry said few times that Oracle has launched so much this week like never before in the history of the company. I spent time at the Oracle Open World conference talking to partners, customers, oracle teams and fellow influencers and found that in general the mood was positive and Oracle was trying to move things forward. The tagline hardware and software engineered together was resonating quite a bit in the variety of announcements made in the meet . Oracle’s integrated hardware and software systems approach is a major step forward and brings an element of twist to the data center game. I want to quickly look at the core ideas, rationale and benefit of the integrated appliance model, the impact of Exadata and Exalogic, the new Fusion suite, and an early view of what could be coming next.

Oracle Fusion Apps – Giant Leap? : Integration, Simpicity, Ease of Use, Flexibility are the key advantages touted by Oracle. The first set of apps encompass 7 big modules of fusion apps – Financial Management, HCM, Sales and Marketing, Project Portfolio management, SCM, PROCUREMENT & GRC . A good spread so to say, Oracle claims that these modules have within themselves, 5000 TABLES, 20000 VIEW OBJECTS, 10000 BUSINESS PROCESSES , 2500 APP MODULES – no doubt a mammoth effort. An Oracle engineer told me 8000 plus engineers worked for several years to get this out – truly a massive engineering effort. Oracle showed a good demo of Fusion Apps in action integrating a variety of business processes. The demo showed Fusion Apps having good clean UI with modern look and feel with lots of embedded activity stream.


Apparently, these modules were simultaneously tested with select customers while getting developed and Oracle says extensive efforts went behind optimizing the screens, workflows and functionalities. The key thing here is that the Fusion Apps platform leverages standard middleware and oracle says no proprietary language is involved. By using Java as the development standard, Oracle seems to have pushed the platform become lot more easy to adopt and Oracle highlighted that competition ranging from SAP to Salesforce.com insists on using proprietary languages to develop on their respective platforms. Such a middleware support makes it possible to connect easily with SAP and any other enterprise system and the emphasis here is that the ease come from the fact that everything is web service enabled. All these confirm the fact that Oracle is one of the few vendors to completely rebuild its apps, BI, and middleware from scratch though their stand on multitenancy is not clear as of today. It’s a major step forward to see that all models of cloud - Public, private, hybrid, on premise are fully supported with facilitated help to move easily across these clouds. Fusion Apps, the long-awaited next iteration of the company’s application suite, will begin shipping to customers in CY1Q11, but the full vision is likely still a couple of years from reality( as in fully blown implementations)


I did spend a lot of time looking at the new set of fusion apps - HCM to CRM to SCM etc.. Oracle is claiming embedded collaboration inside Fusion apps and what I saw therein was an integrated social layer built inside, engineered to share and use the profile information tied to identity management and leading onto analytics. The standard features that we see in terms of begin able to synthesise information based on social profiles, initiate loose form of collaboration like chat, VoIP are now integral inside Fusion Apps. The in-speak, in-context enablement was certainly there inside the apps. This may run contrary to purist form of social collaboration but context is a powerful element in the collaboration mix and coupled with enterprise objectives of easing communications amongst stakeholders make this a powerful enterprise collaboration enabler. The product has good social networking inside the ECM product with support for activity streams and features like integration with Microsoft Outlook to support threaded conversations, document level collaborations etc, ability to have linkages with non Oracle apps through social networks signify important advancements therein. Fusion apps is stepping up to behave and act like an enterprise collaboration infrastructure for Apps users and this is SIGNIFICANT advancement in and of itself.

Collaboration inside Fusion apps looks very powerful – mirroring SAP’s streamworks, it provides context based social conversation possible. The real-time and intelligent collaboration inise Fusion Apps is designed to operate around ‘conversations’ as the primary social object, it works as a central engagement utility in the enterprise that can be triggered from anywhere – natively or (soon) from other applications. Oracle executives told me that this extends to provide a lightweight collaboration feature such as tagging and annotating digital assets , analytics integration With light collaboration features such as annotation on digital assets, multimedia support (like video, voice), this will prove to be very useful inside enterprises. It appears to me that Oracle’s goal was to be best amongst the enterprise players in the social and collaborative space (ignoring the stand alone best of breed players) and they seem to have achieved their objectives here. If these go into their customer’s enterprise, we will see significant usage and extensions

With the launch of Exalogic Elastic Cloud, Oracle now has an integrated, purpose-built machine for data warehousing, OLTP, (Exadata) and application server middleware workloads. The key things to note is that when Fusion Apps rolls out early year, they will also run on Exalogic. Potential Impact : Significant – Oracle gets a differentiated position to balance and consolidate workloads and given its significant marketshare, gets to become a big force in the data center.


Exalogic- Optimizing (Redefining?) Java Workloads

The launch of Exalogic is a real milestone for Oracle and for the enterprise users. An integrated Java middleware aimed at balancing and consolidating workloads and potentially drive costs down for the enterprise. We now see Oracle making full use of the BEA acquisition here – the complete WebLogic stack is made to run on an optimized Linxu Kernel delivers can deliver very high reliability and a mindblowing performance. Add the Tuxedo piece here (forthcoming according to Oracle) – this makes the combo more powerful and can potentially run as a credible candidate in some cases for mainframe replacements. Tuxedo already has offerings that can enable enterprises migrate OLTP apps to run on Oracle platforms without any code change. Today Tuxedo can run on Exalogic but a fully optimized Tuxedo on Exalogic is rolling out shortly.

I could not attend the Java one conference but would expect Oracle to make Java programming easier to compete with easy to use newer cousins like VMWare’s spring source framework. Such a move would add more possibilities for growth herein.

Consolidating Customer Spend

Together with Exadata and Exalogic, Oracle’s positioning would be that they are giving their customers the real opportunity to reduce TCO. With more than 2/3rd of the IT budget goes towards sustenance leaving less than a third for new programs and innovation, Exalogic is engineered to enable customers to provision, monitor and manage the infrastructure stake end-to-end. This obliviates the need for enterprises to invest in separate storage and management mechanism for enterprises. If Oracle muscles into enterprise and help them lower costs by having an integrated, simpler to use and easy to maintain well engineered systems, By optimizing across the stack including middleware and database, Oracle can optimize so much that queries can run faster and performance can get a real push. Exalogic obviates the need to purchase SAN storage, by integrating disk storage, compute and middleware into Exalogic. Not only would it impact high end sales but Oracle also integrated several backup features including replication, snapshots, and disk to disk to tape backup, Enterprises will begin to see opportunities around consolidation od their assets and leverage their internal talent to reduce maintenance overheads – resulting in a potentially big savings, if thought through and executed well. For enterprises, such a strategy could unlock more dollars from sustanence activities to be redeployed to new programs and innovation. Belief in such a philosophy could force enterprise customers to consolidate more and more around the oracle stack.


Its undeniable that the “feel on the street” at Oracle OpenWorld this year was that it was “full speed ahead” at Oracle. Its clear that Oracle has attempted to create an entirely new architecture here and amongst the key differences include building business intelligence and analytics directly into the applications, This move also in a way gives an upgrade path to users of add –on enterprise apps like JDE, Peoplesoft etc that Oracle over a period acquired, This increases the stickiness for Oracle customers and potentially make competition look that much more distant. Oracle has been able to demonstrate its ability to integrate wide ranging technology players and show a decent financial performance and their streak seems to continue here with hardware and software engineered together to deliver successful performance, Oracle blue stack is now well ahead of the pack in terms of owning key technologies in every layer of the stack from the chip through the application. If all these reach the customer in exactly the same way Oracle demonstrated, it will be a huge success story for Oracle and the enterprise software industry,

Oracle is moving very fast here –considering its size and reach. They are now rightfully setting the pace for its ecosystem partners to keep in step and deliver value to its customers . In fact Oracle seems to be getting closer to be the leader in the enterprise technology space –putting competition on alert and forcing them to collaborate with them as well as race fast where they want to play and lead.

Fusion Apps Launch Announced

What’s the key difference between SaaS VS On Premise. According to Larry Ellison, with SaaS – everything is designed around the plan that everything related to software needs to be managed by business whereas in an on-premise model, technical teams have the charter to initiate, manage the applications both on premise ranging from data center management to app management. With this in mind, if we ask what is Fusion upto? The Answer : With Fusion, all interfaces shall be used by business teams. Larry first brought out two definitions of cloud computing:
1. Virtualized cloud computing infrastructure services, as offered by Amazon.com's Elastic Cloud Computing services, and
2. Software applications that are offered as a service over the Internet, as typified by Salesforce.com.

Oracle's view of cloud computing seems to match that of Amazon.com and not Salesforce.com's.This note follows Larry Ellison's sunday night keynote address and should be read along this earlier note

As I watched the live webcast of the Keynote tonight at the Oracle Openworld 2010, Larry finally announced the launch of Fusion Apps. He recalled the major acquisitions that Oracle made starting with PeopleSoft, Siebel, J.D.Edwards etc and how this forced Oracle’s hand to come with a homogenized service enabled enterprise system. Well , tonight a beaming Larry announces the limited customer launch of Fusion apps – a culmination of 5+ years of effort and Larry called this a monumental effort resulting in the announcement of launch of 100+ fusion app modules. Some customer may begin trying the product from the the fourth quarter of this year while the general availability to public is expected to be first quarter of 2011. What are Fusion Application design principles? BI driven, Standards-based, Modern, Service Oriented. and SaaS ready. Process automation is no more the focus of today's enterprise system but business intelligence driven apps are the focus of enterprise systems - this is the progression dictated by current needs of business and achievable given the maturity of technology.

In making these launch announcements, Larry pointed out that Fusion apps are being built on the same middleware that oracle sells to customers and confirmed that Fusion apps runs on top of Fusion middleware , Oracle claims that with Fusion apps, it becomes easy for customers to take oracle apps and integrate with SAP . The promise here : No rip and replace involved. This is made entirely possible as the whole app stack is said to have been using standard SOA models. The additional announcement was that the interfaces would look lot like Facebook ,very different look from ebusiness suite. Larry said that social features , activity streams and collaboration are built-in as integral to the fusion apps modules.
One of the key announcements that I was waiting to hear about was regarding the mode of availability : The answer - Al l fusion apps are available both on-premise or over the cloud and Larry claimed that no one else has done this) . Larry contrasted this with SAP experience : SAP business by design cant run in an on premise mode while traditional SAP modules are not yet cloud/SaaS enabled. The highlight here : since Fusion Apps can support multiple delivery models, Oracle claims that intermobility across clouds is assured and easy movement across clouds remain enabled. One can start with on-premise models and move it to private clouds onto hybrid and public clouds. I was not sure from the announcement about three things:
A. If the Public cloud support that Oracle announced related to Fusion Apps is a private cloud managed by Oracle accessible in a public way or if it meant support across public service providers.

B. What about multitenancy? Is it supported in the Fusion Apps architecture?

C. Would all standard databases get supported - in this vertically integrated model would the stack be optimized just to support Oracle products

Oracle pointed to the fact that the current ERP system s use 25 years old technology and even products like Salesforce.com, Taleo are also relatively old ( say 10 years or so!)
Now, back to Fusion Apps . The first set of apps encompass 7 big modules of fusion apps – Financial Management, HCM, Sales and Marketing, Project Portfolio management, SCM, PROCUREMENT & GRC . A good spread so to say, Oracle claims that these modules have within themselves, 5000 TABLES, 20000 VIEW OBJECTS, 10000 BUSINESS PROCESSES , 2500 APP MODULES – no doubt a mammoth effort. Oracle showed a teaser demo – there’s another session later in the event that will get a full blown view of Fusion Apps. Fusion Apps demo showed good clean UI with modern look and feel with lots of embedded activity stream.

Apparently , these modules were simultaneously tested with select customers while getting developed and Oracle says extensive efforts went behind optimizing the screens, workflows and functionalities. The key thing here is that the Fusion Apps platform leverages standard middleware and oracle says no proprietary language is involved. By using Java as the development standard, Oracle seems to have pushed the platform become lot more easy to adopt and Oracle highlighted that competition ranging from SAP to Salesforce.com insists on using proprietary languages to develop on their respective platforms. Such a middleware support makes it possible to connect easily with SAP and any other enterprise system and the emphasis here is that the ease come from the fact that everything is web service enabled

All these confirm the fact that Oracle is one of the few vendors to completely rebuild its apps, BI, and middleware from scratch though their stand on multitenancy is not clear as of today. It’s a major step forward to see that all models of cloud - Public, private, hybrid, on premise are fully supported with facilitated help to move easily across these clouds.

Hopefully more details about the products would be available in the Fusion Apps exclusive sessions later this week.

What’s the adoption strategy? Oracle recommends its customers to continue on your current path and they are very clearly not asking all customers to migrate to Fusion immediately. In fact Oracle did not appear to be aggressive in nudging its customers to move into this platform at the earliest. Oracle further advises that enterprises wanting to explore Fusion need to adopt a co-existence strategy ( EXPECTING 50-100 CUSTOMERS EARLY NEXT YEAR) Larry is cautious and says not all need to move into fusion apps immediately but plan moving into Fusion Apps over time. Oracle confirms on support for current ebiz suite will continue to be supported for a long time. New modules like talent management in fusion( not available in on-premise) is an ideal way to start using Fusion Apps.

Exalogic – Cloud In A Box : Another important thing that came out today is the fact that Oracle is working really hard to integrate its software and hardware capabilities. Earlier with Exadata, Oracle integrated its database prowess with hardware prowess. Now Exalogic joins Exadata in Oracle's appliance family – here Oracle is integrating its hardware with application server. Whats the objective here? With Exalogic, Oracle claims that its customers can build Amazon-like and Amazon-scale (almost) datacenter infrastructure. Exalogic is targeted at customers that are looking to deploy Java applications (custom or packaged) in large scale.Exalogic Elastic Cloud packages server, storage, network, virtual machine, operating system and application middleware in one box, which provides an environment for building and running Java applications. Exalogic touts good support for virtualization and elasticity. Exalogic is designed to work together with Exadata Database Machine. Some of the numbers that Oracle showcased were mightily impressive : Exalogic is capable of performing at 1 million HTTP requests per second and comes at a very attractive $1.075mn. Oracel claims that this is a quarter of the cost for comparable IBM machines. Exalogic customers will be running a consistent configuration, which significantly reduces pain in testing, configuration and maintenance – another significant source of cost savings for customers, while achieving order of magnitude results..

(Image Courtesy : Oracle)

VMworld: Private Cloud & Random Musings

I went to catch up with my friends coming to VMworld 2010 at San Francisco from around the world and ended up meeting some upcoming technology players as well. In the course of my discussions, I recognized the existence of a lot more energy in the cloud ecosystem – big and small, private and public cloud service providers and enterprises seriously exploring adoption opportunities.

First on VMware : The most important message that is coming across clearly is the ambition of VMware in becoming a key player across the stack - covering server and desktop virtualization and application platforms. This comes at a time when the number of virtualized servers set up this year exceeded the number of actual physical servers set up and this is expected to grow further – we have seen projections that show that the installed base of virtual machines will grow 5Xin three years. One can see in VMware’s strategy a broadly outlined roadmap for internal clouds built on the server virtualization hypervisor layer with an integrated management (including security) backplane directly as part of the platform. Clearly, it is time for more established infrastructure players like BMC, CA, HP to be concerned about. I liked their announcement to provide more robust support and agility to port between internal and external Clouds – this move makes VMware a more strong player in the cloud ecosystem. VMware’s ambition does not end with being just the operating system for the data center, but wants to be a big player with the means of assuring the flow of enterprise bits between data centers —a synonym for cloud to many. VMware knows the cloud is nebulous in terms of where information can travel, but it also knows that enterprises are uncomfortable with the nebulous and uncontrolled flow of bits, so it’s acquiring companies and offering products that will help it create the logical boundaries in an IT atmosphere veering toward abstraction. VMware is building a new application platform for next generation cloud applications leveraging SpringSource and partnering with Salesforce.com through vmforce.

Since it is VMworld, it always begs the question what next for their customers. After all, the percentage of new servers running virtualization as the primary boot option will approach 90 percent by 2012, according to analysts. For many moving apps into cloud becomes a next logical step. Afterall, the movement toward private clouds started, with the virtualized data center and virtualized desktops. The movement toward broader cloud computing began for the enterprise with data center virtualization and consolidation of server, storage, and network resources to reduce redundancy and wasted space and equipment with measured planning of both architecture (including facilities allocation and design) and process. Depending on the maturity of their adoption cycle, enterprises end up adopting different flavors of the cloud.I always maintain that business would embrace the right cloud at the right time – be it private, hybrid or public but the eventual goal would be to move everything into the public cloud to leverage true cloud benefits. While this may look logical, the path was not always a direct one for all embracing such a journey. Many approaches are being tried – the most ambitious one the introduction of publicly shared core services—much like domain name system (DNS) and peering services—into carrier and service provider networks will enable a more loosely coupled relationship between the customer and the cloud provider. With such infrastructure and services enables, enterprises will be able to choose among service providers, and federated service providers will be able to share service loads. Implication: Such a looser relationship will increase the elasticity of the cloud market and create a single, public, open cloud internetwork: the intercloud. Now, with federation and application portability as the cornerstones of the intercloud, businesses will be able to achieve business process freedom and innovate, and users will experience choice and faster, better services. Obviously a journey like this involves careful planning, co-ordination and provides leverageable opportunities across the board. Consulting majors have defined approaches to help business move along this path as painlessly as could be possible.It is actually a good thing that VMware has realized that virtualisation is a commodity now and management of virtual solutions is the key
Lets begin at the beginning to re-emphasize the perspective on cloud computing. Cloud computing model ought to provide resources and services , abstracted from the underlying infrastructure and provided on demand and at scale in a multi-tenant environment. In addition to its on-demand quality and its scalability, cloud computing can provide the enterprise with some key advantages like :

- Global deployment & support capabilities, with policy-based control by geography and other factors
- Operational efficiency from consistent infrastructure, policy-based automation, and trusted multi-tenant operations
- Integrated service management interfaces ( catalog management, provisioning etc.)native to the cloud
- Regulatory compliance ( both global and local) through automated data policies
- Better TCO and increased ease of operations

If we examine cloud computing particularly private clouds through this prism , it throws up some interesting insights. Different enterprises are getting ready to embrace the cloud but have different starting points and not without much trade-off analysis as to the best direction or computing model. To add to the confusion, I saw in the VMWorld meet, a number of players (some promising, I should say), talk about helping in setting private clouds in a manner suggesting a simplistic switch to the clouds. I also know that there are some cloud service players offering to provide readymade solutions to make business embrace private clouds faster and easier to adopt. This is startling so to say – a readymade solution may be farfetched ( clear analogy : a decade back some were promising to make enterprises web ready easily – we all know how different it is to enable business to be web enabled – certainly no readymade solutions nor shortcuts could have worked there). Migration, workload balancing, and integration – all are overbearing issues to be resolved and certainly not minor things to be glossed over. The problem is that transitioning to a cloud-enabled environment can involve large degrees of technical, cultural and budgetary evolution, and it is of utmost importance that organizations deploy the right solution. Private clouds should be differentiated with hybrid clouds. (Note :A hybrid cloud uses both external (under the control of a vendor) and internal (under the control of the enterprise) cloud capabilities to meet the needs of an application system. A private cloud lets the enterprise choose, and control the use of, both types of resources).

Evidently, cloud shift is not an easy journey. The greatest barrier to cloud adoption would be for enterprises to make that switch – that would mean crossing so many issues centered on excitement to fear and uncertainty. This is a paradigm shift and not just an incremental change and as such would require planning, co-ordination and leadership to traverse the path. Initially, the administrative change would be far more pronounced as the shift happens and if this is entrusted to an external vendor – it would call for serious planning and training as the new environment would be dramatically different from what existed in the past.

Business need to be wary of so called cloud solutions that are made to look like off-the-shelf cloud solutions given that there is a frenzied interest in business circles to adopt cloud in some form. Genuinely some would go for the most ell thought out, most rigorous approach and at the other end there would be some wanting to embrace cloud in a tentative, easy to slip-in manner. The level of confusion in how to adopt from business side seems to be in lock with the high decibel, cloud - easy to embrace target marketing. This state of affairs may tempt business to look for solutions that stretches their infrastructure a bit but leverages more of what they have – a combination clearly far from ideal.

New partnership and alliances between cloud service providers and consulting firms are providing a good onramp towards private, hybrid and public clouds. This should reassure business for a variety of reasons – choice, balance in terms of solution and broad body of expertise that comes together. Initiatives like this could slowly begin to bring an orderly discipline towards cloudswitch by enterprises. This should also facilitate adding flexibility to selectively opt –out part of services in their portfolio be it towards migrating to other clouds, or integrating with other clouds etc. With a robust ecosystem like this, solidified solutions specific to each and every business needs (emphasis is on distinct customized solutions) with multitenant architectures measurable on multiple factors like scalability, agility, access, flexibility etc should begin to provide a reasonably firm cloud foundation for business. The message is watch not only for the right cloud but also look for the right ecosystem and right consulting methodology to get enduring benefits.

The Transient Nature Of Private Clouds

An interesting thread is now on within the enterprise irregulars group on what constitutes private clouds –as again very enlightened discussion therein. The issue that I want to talk about is if private cloud do indeed exist, then what is their adoption path ? Lets start from the beginning : the issue is can we can use the term ”cloud” for describing the changes that happen inside IT architectures within enterprise? Thought there can be no definitive answer – a series of transition to a new order of things, will in my opinion, become imminent.

The pressures on IT & the engulfing sense of change in the IT landscape are hard to overlook. The pressures would mean more business begin to seriously look at SaaS, re-negotiating license terms, focusing on rapid adoption of virtualization etc. As part of this and beyond, internal IT would be forced more and more to show more bang for the buck and it is my view that organizations would begin to look more and more to question committed costs and begin to aggressively look at attacking them more systematically – earlier sporadic efforts marked their endeavors. This could also unlock additional resources that could potentially go towards funding new initiatives. There are enough number of enterprises going this route and their service partners are also in some cases prodding them to go this way.

The change in many senses may make IT inside enterprises to look , behave and perform like cloud computing providers – though there would be limitations( in most places serious) on scale, usage assessments , security and the like. There are strong incentives propelling enterprises to channel their efforts and investments over the next few years in mimicking a private cloud service architecture that gets managed by them internally. This could well become their approach of staging towards finally embracing the cloud(public) over a period of time . These baby steps to nearly full blown efforts are needed in preparing organizations to embrace clouds and it may not be feasible at all to make the shift from on-premise to cloud like flip switch. Serious licensing issues, maturity, lack of readiness, integration concerns, security all come in the way of enterprises looking at public cloud in a holistic way. These steps need not be looked down – they would very well become the foundation to move into public clouds in a big way.

Let’s for a moment assess this theme from a security perspective - a dominant concern business expresses when it comes to clouds. While assessing security requirements in public clouds,we see the recognition that a whole host of chnages need to be done at application architecture levels, the need to accomodate specific compliance requirements, privacy provisions in the public cloud etc.

Lets think through this : setting up private cloud is a motherhood statement at best( in many organizational surveys, one can find setting private clouds is not in the CIO’s top three priorities – if anything virtualization finds a place-) to make this happen in a credible way means re-examining most parts of IT functioning and business –IT relationship inside enterprises. IT teams while conceptualizing private clouds are happy to retain existing architectural designs, happily propose a clasical DMZ/Perimeterized model for providing security and enabling access, too often leveraging a highly virtualized infrastructure. More often than not, it’s enabling virtualization, automation and self service and color it as private cloud. Do recognize the implicit differences in constructing a private cloud and a public cloud. Comfort with the status quo with some adjustments versus an opportunity to rethink architecture, security, privacy,compliance needs in a way summarizes the nature of thought process and expected results between the private and public clouds. Speaking more directly, public clouds present the opportunity for enterprises to review and achieve specific requirements in the areas like agility, flexibility and efficiency at optimal effort Versus a skewed , boxed implementation of private cloud setup. Taking advantage of the public cloud benefits would far outweigh the advantages of getting boxed inside with private clouds.

Most elements of the bedrock gets affected – the processes, culture, metrics, performance, funding, service levels etc. Well thought out frameworks, roadmaps need to be put in place to make this transition successful. These frameworks need to cater not only to setting up internal cloud but eventually help in embracing the public cloud over the years- not an easy task as it appears. A few of those organizations that master this transition may also look at making business out of these – so it’s a journey – that needs to be travelled onto embracing public clouds. Some business may take a staged approach and call it by private cloud, internal cloud or whatever but eventually the road may lead into public clouds!

Change As The Constant, Reflex As The Saviour

Just finished some random reading. Started with Jeane Bliss on customer loyalty and Zappos is profiled therein in detail. Zappos decision making paradigm seems to be centered around making far reaching changes happen as part of their DNA. As Tony Hseih says in his afterword of Jeane Bliss book on customer loyalty –“Decision making not purposefully directed can lead your company down a path and to an unintended conclusion. Products, Services, Companies can be taken down the wrong direction whereas well thought out , purposeful decision making centered around customer needs can make a huge difference to business growth !

The more and more I think of it , decision making gets more impactful when it meets the trajectory of change. Look at Seth Godin’s post on the calculus of change. Seth outlines how how a change in operating systems (from DOS to Windows) made people look at different things – in this case, people began to rethink about choice in word processors. The leader at that time was Word Perfect but when Windows began to take centerstage, World also grew along with it -all this while Word Perfect was not ready on the Windows platform. The closest analogy is in Smartphones and where Android is set to get to the top of the heap, many business are having just an iPhone app and not investing in getting an Android App out fast. The point of maximum disruptive timing is the point where people have to make something new or different to happen, got to make a change and can't be avoided.

Extend this logic. When is the last time when the sales , marketing & customer service function of our business got a refresh – no am not taking about just changing people but the process, measures, response etc. Extend this a litte further – when did the core technologies that run our business enterprise get a meaningful refresh – Am talking about Enterprise Software here. Today emerging technologies revolve around Java, MySQL, Open Source, Cloud Computing, and Web 2.0 Social Media. Clearly, these did not exist in full form when the current enterprise software leaders began to dominate the space. Each one of these forces are powerful forces of disruption .

As the beneficiaries and victims of the technology gap phenomenon can testify. For people in both the camps, everything in their digital lives have changed so much. Today, more than 4 billion people around the world now use cell phones, and for 450 million of those people the Web is a fully mobile experience.Alas the big fat guys of the technology world are so slow to embrace and make them as part of their core offerings. We all know the lessons of history.

Look at what change can do to the employed. The evolution of the role of the employed is indeed remarkable. Thomas Malone believes that we're headed for equilibrium in the global wage market.It may take a decade or two, but at some point, people capable of doing work will get paid roughly the same amount wherever they are. It will happen a lot faster than people think," Malone said. He earlier wrote,"Four decentralized organizational structures—loose hierarchies, democracies, external markets, and internal markets—that will be enabled by technology but centered around enduring human values shall be the dominant model. The shift from "command-and-control" management to "coordinate-and-cultivate," and the new skills that will be required to succeed would become critical to succeed. A framework for determining if a company’s situation is ripe for decentralizing and which organizational structure would be most effective would evolve".

Mckinsey identifies ten important tech-enabled business trends to watch out- Its an important read. For the first six trends, which can be applied across an enterprise, it will be important to assign the responsibility for identifying the specific implications of each issue to functional groups and business units. The impact of these six trends—distributed cocreation, networks as organizations, deeper collaboration, the Internet of Things, experimentation with big data, and wiring for a sustainable world—often will vary considerably in different parts of the organization and should be managed accordingly. Three of the trends—anything-as-a-service, multisided business models, and innovation from the bottom of the pyramid—augur far-reaching changes in the business environment that could require radical shifts in strategy. CEOs and their immediate senior teams need to grapple with these issues; otherwise it will be too difficult to generate the interdisciplinary, enterprise-wide insights needed to exploit these trends fully.

Mckinsey rightly observes, the pace of technology and business change will only accelerate, and the impact of the trends above will broaden and deepen. For some organizations, they will unlock significant competitive advantages; for others, dealing with the disruption they bring will be a major challenge. It’s clear that organizations should incorporate an understanding of the trends into their strategic thinking to help identify new market opportunities, invent new ways of doing business, and compete with an ever-growing number of innovative rivals. Embracing change in every major twist and turn is an absolute must and decision making process that can force technology companies to respond in a timely and efficient manner would bring huge rewards to the stakeholders of the business. To keep trying to change regularly needs to be in the decision framework and DNA of sustainable growth focused business . Watch out for the alternative : Standing still is the kiss of the death and those standing with deep roots would not see such waves of change but when they get affected, it would be a massive hit for them.

Smart Techology For The Smart Enterprise

The web is abuzz with analyses on Google’s real time search effectiveness assessed in the context of the death of an Hollywood actress today. The question there is how real time is realtime? Google has demonstrated through algorithmic means(without human intervention), the capability to report results in a search query in less than 3 mts(Read Google’s Matt Cutt’s comments therein!) after the reporting of the event! What an amazing progress shown by Google here!

Recently, Morgan Stanley brought out the fact that the mobile Internet is ramping faster than desktop Internet did, and believes more users may connect to the Internet via mobile devices than desktop PCs within 5 years – this is pushing things hard for service providers. Massive mobile data growth is driving transitions for carriers and equipment providers. This is slated to increase over time with emerging markets embracing mobile technologies much faster and pushes the material potential for mobile Internet user growth. Low penetration of fixed-line telephone and already vibrant mobile value-added services mean that for many EM users and SMEs, the Internet will be mobile.
As the MIT journal notes it, both Google and Microsoft are racing to add more real-time information to their search results, and a slew of startups are developing technology to collect and deliver the freshest information from around the Web. But there's more to the real-time Web than just microblogging posts, social network updates, and up-to-the-minute news stories. Huge volumes of data are generated, behind the scenes, every time a person watches a video, clicks on an ad, or performs just about any other action online. And if this user-generated data can be processed rapidly, it could provide new ways to tailor the content on a website, in close to real time.
Many different approaches are possible here to realize this opportunity – currently many web companies already use analytics to optimize their content throughout the course of a day. The aggregation sites , for example, tweak the layout on their home page by monitoring the popularity of different articles. But traditionally, information has been collected, stored, and then analyzed afterward. The MIT journal article correctly highlights that using seconds-old data to tailor content automatically is the next step. In particular, a lot of the information generated in real-time relates to advertising. Real-time applications, whether using traditional database technology or Hadoop, stand to become much more sophisticated going forward. "When people say real-time Web today, they have a narrow view of it--consumer applications like Twitter, Facebook, and a little bit of search," Startups are also beginning to look at different technologies to capture and everage on current data and patterns therein.
Last month, in a very nice article, The Economist highlights, thanks to Moore’s law (a doubling of capacity every 18 months or so), chips, sensors and radio devices have become so small and cheap that they can be embedded virtually anywhere.

Today, two-thirds of new products already come with some electronics built in. By 2017 there could be 7 trillion wirelessly connected devices and objects—about 1,000 per person. Sensors and chips will produce huge amounts of data. And IT systems are becoming powerful enough to analyse them in real time and predict how things will evolve.
Building on the smart grids space – wherein colossal waste in transmission , distribution and consumption could get positively reduced, the Economist notes that it is in big cities that “smartification” will have the most impact. A plethora of systems can be made more intelligent and then combined into a “system of systems”: not just transport and the power grid, but public safety, water supply and even health care (think remote monitoring of patients). With the help of Cisco, another big IT firm, the South Korean city of Incheon aims to become a “Smart+Connected” community, with virtual government services, green energy services and intelligent buildings.

If one were to look at a different place –inside the enterprises, collaboration is enabling people coming together more easily and readily than before – but the upside potential there is very high with possibilities like workflow getting baked natively into documents enabling real time communication amongst the stakeholders.

What is that technology which would enable all this to happen covering data, transaction, content, collaboration, streaming etc inside smart enterprises? It is Complex Event Processing or CEP, a technology in transition- hallmark of any maturing technology and more importantly its potential – as a precursor to enabling enterprises to get ready for more sophistication in autonomous realtime decision making..


At its elements – CEP collects data from various sources and prime raw events & then applies smart algorithms(this learns with time) and invokes right set of rules to decipher patterns in real time – complex scenarios and distills trends therein and churns out results enabling real time decision making. Smart enterprises can ill afford not having such technologies deployed internally. IBM calls this smart planet revolution- all tech majors ranging from software players to infrastructure players want to have a decisive play herein. Every utility service, all competitive sectors like transport and retails etc are looking at adopting this technology aggressively in areas like supply chain management, finance optimization etc.
But smart infrastructure alone won’t be sufficient to make organizations leverage this – it calls for smart thinking at process levels and at decision making rooms. Today information overload is almost choking enterprises and to an extent individuals.

Existing architectures centered around RDBMS and modern web services/SOA are not equipped to handle this nature of data, range, volume and complexity. While processing data from very diverse sources, CEP’s can model data, have native AI capabilities that can be applied while processing event streams. With the right executive interventions and decision makings, smart enterprises of the future may have the wherewithal and power to divide and conquer where needed and synthesise various streams of info in real time in the right way. Such a process would unlock the proverbial hold of central decision making within enterprises and allow decentralized autonomous decision making at real time to maintain competitive edge in the marketplace.
This would lead to more and more of adoption and the resultant complexity would force technology to improve more rapidly –the ideal scenario is that the complex mesh that an enterprise is would get more and more opportunity to respond with real time data at all its nodes making a smart enterprise implementing armed with such solutions to be a veritable force in the marketplace. There is no more the luxury of building cubes and waiting for analyses when real time forces can torpedo any strategic plan with rapid killer response from market forces – that’s where CEP fits in very well – providing real time digitally unified view of various scenarios and their overall effects – enabling much more rapid response in real time. Remember the saying –“the CEO can’t even blink for a moment”
When you look at the key google labs projects (courtesy – CIO magazine) – you cant ignore the Google Goggles project or for that matter, Google’s voice to message to voice translation network -these are all precursors of complex things processed in CEP world –took google as an example as this company wants to solve really big and complex problems as part of its charter!
Real business problems seeking new technology solutions and emerging technology solutions maturing to serve increasingly complex business problems are the perfect way to catalyze growth in new/emerging areas and here we see that playing together well. Forward looking plans, simulation, optimization are all a direct derivatives of good CEP solutions and with such solutions deployed well – we can see the emergence of new digital nervous system inside enterprises and in some cases can trigger creation of new business models itself.

Private Clouds : Real & Relevant?

An interesting thread is now on within the enterprise irregulars group on what constitutes private clouds –as again very enlightened discussion therein. The issue that I want to talk about is if private cloud do indeed exist, then what is their adoption path ? Lets start from the beginning : the issue is can we can use the term ”cloud” for describing the changes that happen inside IT architectures within enterprise? Thought there can be no definitive answer – a series of transition to a new order of things, will in my opinion, become imminent.

The pressures on IT & the engulfing sense of change in the IT landscape are hard to overlook. The The pressures would mean more begin to seriously look at SaaS, re-negotiating license terms, rapid adoption of virtualization etc. As part of this and beyond, internal IT would be forced more and more to show more bang for the buck and it is my view that organizations would begin to look more and more to question committed costs and begin to aggressively look at attacking them more systematically – earlier sporadic efforts marked their endeavors. This could also unlock additional resources that could potentially go towards funding new initiatives. There are enough number of enterprises going this route and their service partners are also in some cases prodding them to go this way.

The change in many senses may make IT inside enterprises to look , behave and perform like cloud computing providers – though there would be limitations( in most places serious) on scale, usage assessments , security and the like. There are strong incentives propelling enterprises to channel their efforts and investments over the next few years in mimicking a private cloud service architecture that gets managed by them internally. This could well become their approach of staging towards finally embracing the cloud(public) over a period of time . These baby steps to nearly full blown efforts are needed in preparing organizations to embrace clouds and it may not be feasible at all to make the shift from on-premise to cloud like flip switch. Serious licensing issues, maturity, lack of readiness, integration concerns, security all come in the way of enterprises looking at public cloud in a holistic way. These steps need not be looked down – they would very well become the foundation to move into public clouds in a big way.

Lets think through this : setting up private cloud is a motherhood statement at best( in many organizational surveys, one can find setting private clouds is not in the CIO’s top three priorities – if anything virtualization finds a place-) to make this happen in a credible way means re-examining most parts of IT functioning and business –IT relationship inside enterprises. Most elements of the bedrock gets affected – the processes, culture, metrics, performance, funding, service levels etc. Well thought out frameworks, roadmaps need to be put in place to make this transition successful. These frameworks need to cater not only to setting up internal cloud but eventually help in embracing the public cloud over the years- not an easy task as it appears. A few of those organizations that master this transition may also look at making business out of these – so it’s a journey – that needs to be travelled onto embracing public clouds. Some business may take a staged approach and call it by private cloud, internal cloud or whatever but eventually the road may lead into public clouds!

The Cloud Monetization Paradigm.

Too often when large enterprises begin to look at number justification to move onto the cloud, many seasoned executives are struck by the limited enterprise class billing choices that the model is able to provide – Granted this is an evolving space, the urgency in getting this done can’t be understated.

Let’s look at the basics :

The Advantages of cloud are far too well known :

-Pay subscription on usage
-Enables usage of the current version and focus is on continuous service
-Economies of scale and anytime, anywhere, ubiquitous use

There are clear upside to the whole cloud horizon when we are able to make determinations on issues around providing options to customer /providers in terms of

-Flexible pricing – spectrum from subscriptions to pay-per-use
-High Volume – Low touch sales model
-Elastic scaling – ability to scale up and down

When existing business computing models gets disrupted and order of magnitude business performance improvements are looked at, paradoxically the cloud paradigm offers both unmatched opportunity and competitive challenges for software and services providers. But seen from a customer perspective, too often the thought chain gets dimmed when the actual issue of metering and billing gets reviewed by customers. It transpires that as the mindshare of cloud picks up among the IT buyers and the various players begin to align we see that too often the locus of value creation is shifting within the Cloud ecosystem and with it the balance of power between service providers and channel partners. This is huge change in the ecosystem. The reality is that successfully transition to SaaS will affect every aspect of the company, including key operational systems such as billing and payments. 

The complexity in providing multiple levels of flexibility to customers in metering and billing are far too complex in real life and warrants careful determination of choices. Billing, administration and related marketing capabilities are essential in meeting the new operational challenges of a Software-as-a-Service business. More often than not the new models inject potential conflicts/role clarity amongst service providers, channel partners and in the process as Saugatuck brings out raises very fundamental questions like :

-Who owns the customer?
- What is the best way to compensate channel partners?
- Is the partner paid a commission for managing a customer that the vendor owns?
- Or does the partner own the customer and pay a revenue share?
- Can the partner up sell its own offerings and keep it all?

Obviously there are many possible answers to these questions and some answers are beginning to appear and in this direction the landmark study helps finds answers by taking a detail oriented view to evaluation options. Emergence of cloud based billing solutions reflects the fast pace at which things are evolving and the report notes that Cloud billing solutions have targeted Web providers of content, online gaming, virtual worlds, media and entertainment – primarily consumer offerings – as well as SaaS, SaaS enablement, PaaS, business media, business content and other online business solutions. On-premise solutions have moved into a variety of other verticals and segments, such as media and entertainment, financial services, transportation, SaaS, SaaS enablement and Cloud Infrastructure.

I think we will get an ideal monetization view across the cloud ecosystem in a few years from now but for early adopters we need more choices and more analyses and here’s one helping the progress.