Tuesday, May 25, 2010

Thinking about IT as a supply chain creates new management challenges

CA World has wrapped up, finally giving me time to post a few comments about the major product news of the week from the CA Cloud Products & Solutions Business Line: the announcement of the CA Cloud-Connected Management Suite. (You can catch up on the other supporting announcements, the launch of Cloud Commons and the formation of a consortium to create and drive the Service Measurement Index, in my previous post.)

I heard a lot of very positive feedback about CA Technologies’ plans, many from customers, partners, and industry watchers & experts that we’ve been talking to quite a lot for advice and feedback.

However, I think it’s always a good idea to start from the beginning, especially for those who didn’t make it to Vegas to hear the CA execs (or comedian Jake Johannsen, Maroon 5, or James Cameron, for that matter) in person. I think the premise behind this forthcoming product suite warrants a bit of color and background, especially since the implications for IT are pretty significant, if all goes as described.


Cloud computing means IT loses its monopoly


The premise is this: cloud computing enables you to run IT differently than before. IT has had a type of monopoly. It has, for the most part, been a monolithic provider of IT service to support an organization.

Enter cloud computing. As cloud computing matures, it breaks IT’s monopoly. Business users now have a choice: they can certainly go to their IT teams for support with new initiatives as they have been doing. But, they can also investigate SaaS or many different types of cloud services directly.
As in, without IT’s involvement.

I’ve talked about business users “going rogue” in a couple previous posts. Business users are investigating cloud services on their own more and more frequently given the increasing ubiquity of cloud capabilities, their pay-as-you-go models, and the speed you can get something up and running.

As Chris O’Malley, CA’s EVP for Cloud Products & Solutions, said in his CA World cloud track opening session last week (video replay here), “IT faces a rather stark choice: either add value to the acquisition of cloud services by business users, or risk becoming increasingly less relevant.”

Ouch.
Instead, IT can be the manager of a supply chain of services

So what things would IT need to be able to do in order to help business users make the best IT sourcing choices, regardless of what the final answer is? They’d need to do less of what they’ve typically done – manually making sure the low-level components are working the way that are supposed to – and become more of a trusted adviser to the business.

The big shift here is how the business is getting its services: those services are now potentially coming from many disparate sources. And the source of a particular IT service can (and should) change over time.

The result? IT needs to manage – and constantly improve – a changing IT service supply chain. Gartner analysts Ben Pring and Allie Young published a paper last May about these "service value chains," saying they "will be at the heart of cloud services." Their research updated Gartner's model for "understanding the ways in which multiple components sourced from multiple suppliers will come together in the new service delivery models loosely defined as 'cloud computing.'"
"Cloud computing isn't your future," said Forrester analyst James Staten in his more recent post, "it's a new part of your overall IT portfolio." IT will use internal capabilities, external ones, or a smart mix of both. And that is something it can’t manage with existing tools.

To be clear, things like security, service assurance, virtualization management, automation, and other similar capabilities that are extended to take into account cloud-connected environments are still critical (CA Technologies provides a portfolio of solutions for this, as do other big & small vendors). However, they don’t help you understand, control, and constantly improve this new IT supply chain.

Delivering on the new IT supply chain requirements

We decided to do something about this. We started by figuring out what pieces would be needed to make this possible. In other words, what are the new requirements if IT is to take on this role?

O’Malley rattled them off in his CA World presentation. We think the list includes these things:

· Gain insight to compare. First, you need insight into your IT services – both internal and external. You need to discover who is using what, and you need a standard way to describe and evaluate those services, based on important business-related metrics – something that could be used for apples-to-apples comparisons.

· Connect to expert knowledge. Second, you need access to relevant data about cloud services, feedback about those services, and best practices from a community of both peers and experts. This helps you decide if, when, and how you should use cloud computing for a particular application or capability. Customers told us that they need and want a place to share experiences with likeminded people on many, many cloud topics to overcome the huge information gap -- a gap that comes from the rapid changes driven by innovation itself.

· Cloud-enable applications. Third, you need an environment where you can make changes and act on this information. You need to enable both existing and new applications and IT infrastructure to be more flexible by abstracting them from current physical dependencies. This will make it easy to move workloads to an internal or external cloud environment and back again, if you decide that is the right thing to do.

· Challenge your choices. You also need to optimize the choices you’ve made while selecting and implementing available options. You need to constantly challenge and reassess those choices to take into account both new information and changing business goals.

· Deploy, manage, & secure those decisions. Finally, you need to be able to deploy, manage and secure services that leverage the choices you’ve made to meet enterprise-grade, industrial-strength requirements.

Once you have these core capabilities, you need to use them over and over again, making sure you are constantly improving over time. Because in this scenario, the right answer is going to change as time goes on.

As you might guess, we took this list as a good starting point for the capabilities of our new CA Cloud-Connected Management Suite. The suite will have 4 components: CA Cloud Insight, CA Cloud Compose, CA Cloud Optimize, and CA Cloud Orchestrate. For a summary of what each of these will be, you can look at this short paper or the press release. But you’ll notice they follow this list pretty closely.

How do you turn ideas for cloud management into reality?
CA Technologies is now in the midst of making the concept I just described real. We’ve been focused on organic development efforts, and have also found a number of innovative companies in the market with some core technologies to help deliver on this.

For those of you who have been following the string of acquisitions that CA has made in the cloud computing space in the past 11 months, you can probably see how this suite weaves together technology from the acquired companies. You’ll recognize core capabilities of Oblicore Guarantee as part of CA Cloud Insight, 3Tera AppLogic at the heart of CA Cloud Compose, and Cassatt in CA Cloud Optimize.

But, these technologies alone don’t fully flesh out the requirements I listed. Nothing in the industry does yet. That’s why, even after the acquisitions, there’s a bunch of development that’s on-going to deliver what customers need.

Understanding the IT supply chain: using Cloud Commons and the Service Measurement Index

To help get a handle on the components and management of this IT supply chain idea, we believe that IT needs not only a new set of product capabilities, but also a place to do research on the many cloud services and capabilities – and a way to measure them. Thinking it through, in order for customers to get what they need out of those functions, it seemed much smarter to have them exist separate from CA.

So, we set up Cloud Commons as an independent community and website. And we collaborated with Carnegie Mellon University to get the Service Measurement Index (SMI) started, and then placed SMI in the stewardship of their consortium, so it wouldn’t be tied to CA alone. These moves hopefully get the ball rolling, helping make both useful to the industry as a whole, regardless of whether someone is a CA Technologies customer or not.

But, put all these pieces together – a community of expert information, a standard way to evaluate cloud services, and this new suite of products – and you have the beginnings of a new set of tools and capabilities to help IT manage this new supply chain. And, in fact, a new, expanded role for IT.

Where are we now? Both potential and pitfalls

CA World was our first stake in the ground. The industry has been wondering how we were piecing all of our acquisitions and other work together. We intended the announcements and various sessions at CA World to at least provide the strategic framework for what we’re doing.

Now comes the hard part: delivery. We’re back in our offices, hard at work on that, only a little sad not to still be in Vegas (a week there is quite enough, though, I have to tell you).

Meanwhile, customers can get started with things like the Oblicore and 3Tera products now, giving them a taste of what’s to come, with a convenient upgrade path to the new suite later.

The first deliverables (CA Cloud Insight & CA Cloud Compose) are due by the final quarter of the calendar year. You can be sure we (and I) will keep you posted on our progress.

Until then, we want, expect, and welcome lots of feedback on every piece of this. It’s probably not what people were expecting from CA, but that’s just fine with me. Please feel free to chime in.

Monday, May 17, 2010

A new way to compare your cloud computing options

If cloud computing does what everyone is saying it’s going to do, organizations are going to end up with many, many ways to get the IT service they need to support their business. And choice is good.

But having thousands of choices with no clear way to decide (or even prioritize) is not a recipe for success. Three of the announcements I’m helping with at CA World in Las Vegas this week (#caworld on Twitter) are aimed at addressing that problem: finding smart ways for companies to make those choices – and ways to constantly challenge those choices. Read on for a bit of detail and commentary on the first two; I’ll post another blog after Chris O’Malley’s Cloud & SaaS Focus Area Opening to cover the third.

Answering the bigger questions
These announcements are the result of quite a bit of soul searching at CA (now called CA Technologies, a hint that significant change is afoot) about how the company could and should help fill in some key missing pieces for really getting utility out of cloud computing.

What we saw and heard from customer after customer was that there are a number of very important issues around the cloud, issues that everyone’s been talking about: security, assuring performance and availability, managing and automating underlying technologies like physical and virtual servers. And, to be sure, we (and others) have answers to a lot of those that are getting better and better all the time (including some announcements from us coming this week).

However, there was a bigger problem not getting answered.
Business users are realizing that the IT department is no longer the single source for delivering the IT service they need. They can go around IT. Or at least use cloud services, SaaS offerings, and the like as pretty strong bargaining chips in the negotiations with IT.
And IT has had a pretty difficult time putting what they can deliver side by side with what can be sourced from the cloud and doing a fact-based comparison so the business can make the right decision.

We also realized that there are things that CA Technologies could and should deliver to help answer some of these questions, and things that are better driven by others with relevant expertise and experience. So we are doing a mix of both.

First, a standard way to measure IT service in business terms

Sunday afternoon, Jeff Perdue, a senior researcher at Carnegie Mellon University, and CA Technologies’ David Hodgson announced an effort to provide the industry a standard way to do these kinds of IT service comparisons. The result is the beginnings of the Service Measurement Index and a consortium to support it.

The Service Measurement Index (SMI) is the first of its kind – a relative index focused on describing IT services in business terms. Instead of looking just at cost, SMI provides a way to balance between six important characteristics: quality, agility, risk, cost, capability, and security.

CMU and CA Technologies got this started, but CMU will take the lead from here on out, pulling in educational institutions, global end user organizations (both commercial and public sector), and technology vendors. There’s no way this is something a single vendor could pull off, and CMU has the chops to help make this consortium -- and its work -- real.

And, even if you’re not a big user of cloud computing services now, SMI can be used to rate your existing internal services. Given that ways to do apples-to-apples comparisons are hard to come by, that should be good news.

There is a panel this week at CA World with lots more information about SMI and the consortium; I’ll forward (and tweet) more details as the week progresses.

Second, a community and website for qualitative & quantitative feedback on cloud services

Hodgson also announced Cloud Commons on Sunday (I need to have a word with whoever’s doing this wacky announcement scheduling). Cloud Commons (http://www.cloudcommons.com/) is an independent community that CA Technologies is launching and supporting, again with the help of a lot of partners, that is now open and available for use. It’s intended as a place for cloud fans and skeptics alike. It’s for end users, technology providers, industry experts, and others to share experiences, best practices, and qualitative & quantitative information about the many types of cloud services available.

Cloud Commons will use the Service Measurement Index as one way for people to describe their experiences with cloud services and compare them to others. There will also be ways to add commentary and to interact with others in the community. Think of it as a Consumer Reports for cloud services, except you and your peers are the experts providing input.

Since this is going to be a living, breathing community, much of the content that will make Cloud Commons useful will come directly from the specific input of many, many IT folks. Knowing that we have to start somewhere, we got the ball rolling with a broad range of current and historical data gathered for major cloud sites and starting-point SMI data from an extensive research project with a leading analyst firm on the characteristics of particular cloud services (including e-mail, e-commerce, and a few other common examples).

But frankly, what you’ll see up there today are the bare bones. I’m expecting that the most interesting content started trickling in tonight when customers on the CA World show floor started registering and filling in survey data about what they are doing with cloud services – and their opinions on those services, good or bad.

In the press conference today, Hodgson was asked how Cloud Commons could possibly provide all the right information. “This isn’t CA doing this, this is the community,” said Hodgson. The site isn’t going to be perfect right out of the gate, but it will morph and grow with feedback, he believed. And that’s actually a strength. “Some of the answers will come from the community – what do people want to see? Just the fact that it’s going to exist as a concept will start the conversation that the industry needs.”

Next up: new CA Technologies cloud management solutions

The third cloud-related announcement is about a set of products that we have up our sleeves that Chris O’Malley will announce from stage on Monday. I’ll post on that after it happens.

Until then, take a look at Cloud Commons, dig into SMI, and give feedback both on cloud services and on the concepts I’ve been talking about here in general. That’s what will make all of this useful, after all.

Also of note: if you are interested in being a regular, more official contributor to Cloud Commons or would like to make sure your cloud services appear in the Cloud Commons marketplace, drop me a line. And to reiterate, we’re very serious about everyone being welcome: partners, customers, competitors, industry analysts, pundits of all types. Definitely take us up on the offer.

Friday, May 14, 2010

As CA World approaches: a quick guide to CA's cloud acquisitions and some session suggestions

If you’re having trouble sorting through all of CA’s recent moves, I don’t blame you. It’s sort of ironic timing that key components of what we’ve been working on since last summer have been coming together in such a compressed timeframe. The good news is it means that when we get to CA World in a few days, we should have lots of good stuff to show folks, both from the recent acquisitions and from the organic development underway.

I thought I’d highlight the recent activity and point you to a couple good summaries of what CA’s up to so far. And hold on, because there are a few more (OK, lots) interesting things being announced at the conference next week. (No beans are spilled in this post, if that's what you're hoping for.) For those of you who will be in Vegas for CA World, I’ll give you a couple suggestions for presentations you’ll definitely want to hit, from among the 62 cloud-related sessions. (And for the impatient ones in the crowd, the overall cloud and SaaS session guide is here).

Recent cloud-related acquisitions (in chronological order)

They say you can’t tell the players without a program, so here’s a bit of a recap. I’ve linked to my blogs on each of these acquisitions if you want to dig into any one of these in more detail.

· Cassatt (my alma mater) focused on helping enterprises create policy-based private clouds, enabling you to constantly optimize the computing resources you are using based on service levels for a given application. The team joined CA back in June 2009 – and I think nearly all of us are still here.

· Oblicore, acquired in January 2010, is about service level management, with contract management at its center. In the a world in which cloud computing is more and more common as an option, being able to interpret technical data into business metrics is key. Being able to compare those metrics to your actual service level contracts is even more key. Customers of Oblicore include both enterprises and service providers.

· 3Tera gives you a really interesting approach to getting an application to run in a cloud. It encapsulates an app and its supporting infrastructure and lets you move it, scale it, and deploy it as needed. All those things you had to do manually and with physical hardware before (setting up servers, load balancers, firewalls, etc.), you can now connect, add, or remove, but in software form, with a slick GUI. Right now this is interesting for enterprises and very interesting for cloud service providers.

· Nimsoft provides performance and availability monitoring “from the data center to the cloud,” as they say. Rackspace just standardized on it, and the Nimsoft folks, now a stand-alone business unit of CA, just delivered an on-demand version. Their target (unlike the other technologies above) is primarily smaller, emerging enterprises and cloud service providers. Take a look at http://www.unifiedmonitoring.com/ for an idea of how easy it is to get started with this stuff.

More than just putting the pieces together

For a feel for how we are looking to help customers, there are a couple of good, recent write-ups that help explain the way we’re looking at the world. Several folks in the industry press have written up some useful background.

Derrick Harris’s piece for GigaOM put a lot of the pieces together, even though it pre-dated even the 3Tera announcement. Second, Charlie Babcock from InformationWeek did a piece for Plug Into the Cloud following an interview with Chris O’Malley, who is leading the Cloud Business Line at CA. InformationWeek did another piece this week, this time after talking to CEO Bill McCracken that’s also a good summary. It even has a few teasers about next week’s event. Denise Dubie also has been following us pretty closely, too, for Network World and she did a good analysis of CA’s moves. Little did I know she was following us *so* closely that she decided to hop on board here at CA (a pleasant surprise; welcome, Denise!).

The business press also has been reporting on CA’s moves, especially after McCracken talked about the pot of money he was planning to apply to cloud computing acquisitions. Investors Business Daily did a Q&A with O’Malley, outlining the broad issues he sees customers having as they try to move toward running IT more like a supply chain, a metaphor taken from the manufacturing world. Bloomberg drew parallels between what CA's trying to do and what our CA World keynoter James Cameron did with "Avatar" -- to change the game. I don't think we have anything cooking that involves very tall blue aliens. As far as I know, anyway.

CA World suggested sessions

If you’ll be in Vegas and you’re interested in cloud computing and software as a service issues, definitely look at the session listings on the CA World site. Here are some sessions I’m betting will be worth your time:

· CEO Bill McCracken’s keynote on Sunday night and Ajei Gopal’s technology keynote on Monday morning. Those will provide great context for everything else. They should also put CA's cloud computing efforts in context of everything else the company is working on (I’ve heard we do stuff around the mainframe, too).

· “Making the Cloud-Connected Enterprise Real,” Chris O’Malley on Monday at 11 a.m. This is the cloud and SaaS keynote session. I have it on good authority that there will be product news and some cool new technology previewed.

· There are drill-downs on cloud management by David Hodgson and Vince Re, and on IT management from the cloud by Jules Ehrlich on Monday afternoon. Great summaries of the breadth of activity in these areas.

· On Tuesday morning Chris O’Malley is emceeing a Cloud Power Session panel about what computing will look like in 2020 (cloud-based or otherwise, if the cloud term is even still in use then). It features experts from salesforce.com, Microsoft, CSC, Rackspace, and Logicalis. Should be really interesting. So should the virtualization power session Wednesday morning with VMware, Citrix, Microsoft, RedHat, and Cisco. Glenn O’Donnell of Forrester will be in charge of keeping that session under control. Good luck.

· There are a couple Amazon Web Services-related sessions worth noting, including Adam Silipsky’s session on Tuesday morning as part of a special business-themed track and one by Jeff Barr of AWS (along with CA’s Walter Guerrero) about service assurance and EC2.

· Sudhrity Mondal (another former Cassatt guy) is bringing his experience helping customers on cloud implementations both at Cassatt and CA to a session called, “The Process and Pitfalls of Moving to the Cloud: Lessons Learned from Actual Cloud Implementations.” That’s Tuesday afternoon.

I could go on, especially since I helped design the cloud and SaaS tracks...but I won’t. I’ll also restrain myself from highlighting my own Cloud 101 session. After all, if you read this blog, you can probably can skip it. Or even give it.

Some other random items of interest:

· James Cameron’s keynote Monday: that’ll be fun. Oh, and Maroon 5 on Wednesday. They’re no Foreigner, but, hey…

· Meeting a bunch of you in person that I normally only talk to via Twitter. As always, I’m looking forward to that as much as the customer meetings I'm attending. Should be interesting all the way around.

And, yes, there will be sessions focused on the items being announced during the week (at least the cloud-related ones). But, no, I can’t tell you what they are yet. So don’t ask. Besides, Monday’s not that far away.

Monday, May 10, 2010

Too big to innovate? Can big vendors make big technology leaps?

In the past few months, as I’ve been helping with CA’s recent set of M&A activity around cloud computing and beyond (Cassatt, Oblicore, 3Tera, and Nimsoft), I’ve come face-to-face with an assumption about innovation that I’ve held onto for a while: large IT vendors are lethargic laggards that aren’t very good at coming up with technological leaps on their own. IT innovation in cloud computing and other cutting-edge areas, I’ve thought, is the realm of start-ups and entrepreneurs out there doing there own thing.

I’m not alone in these assumptions, especially among those watching cloud computing these days. Krishnan Subrmanian wrote on the Cloud Avenue blog after we announced the 3Tera acquisition that “we cannot consider CA to be an innovator like other cloud startups in the market.” The only way for a “titan from the old world to get into the mix of the new generation is by acquiring a hot company like 3Tera,” he said.

However, I’m starting to see how I (and the others) might be wrong. Or at least need to consider that there are some other options.

Too Big to Innovate?

When I joined CA last summer as part of the Cassatt acquisition, I was skeptical that I’d stick around the organization very long. I didn’t know much about CA except its checkered past that included jail time for their CEO and a history of being the industry’s bottom-feeders – looking for revenue streams to milk, not markets to build.

Added to that, I’m a start-up guy at heart. I had just come off three start-up experiences that made me believe that technology change is pushed by the small guys.

· It started with EcoSystems Software, a client/server systems management innovator the competed head-to-head with pre-BMC Patrol. Datamation (remember them?) put us on their cover in 1992, saying “Client/Server Systems Management Arrives.” We were snapped up by Compuware in ’93 to add these new capabilities.

· Then, I was in very early at BEA, and rode that company’s “Better Engineering through Acquisition” wave for 10 years, from zero to a billion dollars in annual revenue. OK, that wasn’t *really* what the letters in the logo stood for, but much of the industry thought so. The success we had following the acquisition of WebLogic changed the way middleware (and even our older TUXEDO product) was thought of; application servers went from interesting to must-haves as the Web and e-commerce took off.

· Finally, I helped Cassatt push the boundaries of how data centers themselves should be run, taking a proto-cloud computing idea to the cover of Forbes and as far as the VC money would allow.

In all cases, it was the small, nimble company that came up with the ideas, was able to get the attention of customers and industry watchers, and suggest a new way to do things. The big companies with the cash were the ones that found things that looked interesting – things that someone else had spent time creating.

Since joining CA, however, I think I’m seeing another way this story can unfold.

After participating in a thorough strategy process last summer to find ways to shift CA from a value company to a growth company, I heard rumblings that the strategic suggestions were actually getting an enthusiastic reception from the board and senior management. I thought that was pretty surprising, considering the aggressive suggestions that I knew were being made.

You’ve seen the early results already: Bill McCracken’s first quotes after becoming CEO were to talk about the war chest CA had to make moves in the cloud computing space. Not surprisingly, we followed that up with a series of acquisitions, taking CA into areas it hadn’t entered before.

Good things about being large

Having been on both sides of the fence (start-up and large vendor), I’ve gotten a good view of the pros/cons of each. On the plus side, a company the size of CA has the resources to do a patient, thoughtful analysis of what customers want now, what customers will likely want in the future, and to sketch out a map to get from here to there.

In other words...
· Big companies have good sources to discover customer needs/wants.
· They have resources and assets to build upon
· They have the resources to invest
· They have revenue streams to support new ideas. Even ideas that will take a while. (And many of the cloud computing ideas, I might add, have been a long time in the making.)

Of course, big can be bad

Downsides? Oh, there are plenty. Some that I’ve run across in my career include:

· The market research treasure trove I mentioned above (a large supplier’s customer base) comes with a downside: big companies’ customers skew the information they provide by looking at everything through the lens of what they already have done with that vendor
· The new ideas may undercut or threaten some of the internal, existing ideas. Including ones that are pretty important from a revenue standpoint to the large vendor
· A truly new idea is hard to come by. While the big companies have the resources to be patient and analyze the market, they may lack expertise & vision in the space that matters. They may not know what they are looking for
· The sense of urgency to deliver may not be there
· When you do bring a new asset/company into the organization, integrating that to make it useful can be pretty tricky.

From CA, I’m seeing an interesting model for a hybrid: an innovative/big vendor (if all goes well)

My main point of this post is not what my current company is up to, but rather its implications for how the market evolves. Having said that, though, many of the points above are valid pros & cons to CA’s current approach.

The difference that has been interesting to me is the rate and pace of CA’s moves – and the magnitude of those moves. Start-ups certainly couldn’t do it. From my own past, BEA pulled off some similar things, but was a much smaller company and the magnitude of acquisition and investments – and the effort needed to turn the ship – were much narrower.

It's even difficult for larger companies, too. VMware/EMC may have shown itself to be an exception, both in the original VMware purchase and in some of VMware/SpringSource’s recent buys. They are certainly looking forward. Cisco, IBM, HP, Oracle, and others have all done their share of acquisitions, including several this year. Rarely, however, are they focused exclusively on the cutting edge of the market, in an attempt to deliver innovation.

Now, I certainly won't deny that start-ups remain a primary source of IT innovation -- maybe even the primary source. In fact, I still get surprised almost daily by the raft of interesting ideas and approaches that people build companies around, especially in the cloud computing space. I mention them here and on Twitter quite a lot.

Nor am I going to guarantee that CA is going to be successful in all that we’re trying to do. We’ve found some intriguing technologies and businesses to bring into the CA fold over the past year, and we’re building some pretty cool stuff in-house. We’ve built a start-up-inspired organization inside the company called the Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line. But lots of work remains in order for us to deliver on everything we’re hoping to do. Of course, that’s part of the fun in my book. Watch the news coming out of next week's CA World for more details on all of this.

The dilemma of innovators

Back when Oracle received approval to acquire Sun, they spent a full day going through their plans. James Watters of VMware (@wattersjames) wondered via Twitter if their move now turned Oracle from a cloud computing skeptic to a cloud computing innovator. Some pundits fired back that Oracle was now too big to innovate. But when asked, Larry handled the question like this, according to tweets from Chris Preimesberger (@editingwhiz from eWeek): "AT&T was supposedly too big to innovate. They came up with the transistor. Not bad."

So what is an entrepreneur to do, then? I’m not sure AT&T is the model I’m looking for, but it makes the point that there’s more than one way to innovate; there is more than one way to move technology forward. Start-ups are one, but certainly aren’t the only. Big companies trying to fit new technology and businesses into existing approaches is another, but this approach is faced with difficult hurdles, often of its own making.

But, if you can split the difference, marrying a start-up-style approach with the resources of a big company, you open up some cool, new opportunities.

For CA, we'll all have to wait and see what we can pull off. I'll keep you posted. Of course, the results will always speak for themselves.