Cloud conjures up new IT roles; apps & business issues are front & center

So you’ve managed to avoid going the way of the dodo, and dodged the IT job “endangered species list” I talked about in my last post (and at Cloud Expo). Great. Now the question is, what are some of the roles within IT that cloud computing is putting front & center?

I listed a few of my ideas during my Cloud Expo presentation a few weeks back. My thoughts are based on what I’ve heard and discussed with IT folks, analysts, and other vendors recently. Many of those thoughts even resonated well with what I’ve heard this week here at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas.

IT organizations will shift how they are, well, organized

James Urquhart from Cisco put forth an interesting hypothesis a while back on his “Wisdom of Clouds” blog at CNET that identified 3 areas he thought will be (and should be) key for dividing up the jobs when IT operations enters “a cloudy world,” as he put it.

First, there’s a group that James called InfraOps. That’s the team focused on the server, network, and storage hardware (and often virtual versions of those). Those selling equipment (like Cisco) posit that this area will become more homogenous, but I’m not sold on that. James followed that with ServiceOps, the folks managing a service catalog and a service portal, and finally AppOps. AppOps is the group manages the applications themselves. It executes and operates them, makes sure they are deployed correctly, watches the SLAs, and the like.

I thought these were pretty useful starting points. I agree whole-heartedly with the application-centric view he highlights. In fact, in describing the world in which IT is the manager of an IT service supply chain, that application-first approach seems paramount. The role of the person we talk to about CA 3Tera AppLogic, for example, is best described as “applications operations.”

Equally important as an application-centric approach are the skills to translate business needs into technical delivery, even if you don’t handle the details yourself. More on that below.

Some interesting new business cards

I can already see some interesting new titles on IT peoples’ business cards in the very near future thanks to the cloud. Here are some of those that I listed in my presentation, several of which were inspired by the research that Cameron Haight and Milind Govekar have been publishing at Gartner. (If you’re a Gartner client, their write-up on “I&O Roles for Private Cloud-Computing Environments” is a good one to start with.):

· “The Weaver” (aka Cloud Service Architect) – piecing together the plan for delivering business services
· “The Conductor” (aka Cloud Orchestration Specialist) – directing how things actually end up happening inside and outside your IT environment
· “The Decider” (aka Cloud Service Manager) – more of a vendor evaluator and the person who sets up and eliminates relationships for pieces of your business service
· “The Operator…with New Tools” (aka Cloud Infrastructure Administrator) – this may sound like a glorified version of an old network or system administrator, but there’s no way this guy’s going to use the same tools to figure all this out that he has in the past.

In Donna Scott’s presentation at the Gartner Data Center Conference called “Bringing Cloud to Earth for Infrastructure & Operations: Practical Advice and Implementations,” she hit upon these same themes. Some of the new roles needed that she listed included solution architects, the automation specialist, the service owner, cloud capacity manager, and IT financial/costing analyst. Note the focus on business-level issues – both the service and the cost.

Blending

Or maybe the truth is that these roles blend together a bit more. I could see the IT organization evolving to perform three core functions in support of application delivery:

— Source & Operate Resource Pools This person would be someone who would maintain efficient data center resources, including the management of automation and hypervisors. The first is the ability to more effectively manage resources—to determine how much memory and CPU is available at any given time, to scale up and down capacity in response to demand (and have the ability to pay only for what you use). These resources might eventually be sourced either internally or externally, and will most often be a combination of the two. This function will be responsible for making sure the right resources are available at the right time and that the cost of those resources is optimized.

— The second function is Application Delivery, focused on building application infrastructure proactively, so that when the next idea comes down the pike, you can be ready. You can proactively build an appropriately flexible application infrastructure. You can provide the business with a series of different, ready-made configurations from which to choose, and you would have the ability (when they are needed) to quickly get these pre-configured solutions up and running quickly.

— The last, higher-level function is the process of engaging with the business closely. Your job is to Assemble Service. You’ll be able to say to the business ‘bring me your best ideas’ and you’ll be able to turn those concepts into real, working systems quickly, without having to dive into lower-level technical bits & bytes that some of the previously mentioned folks would.

In all cases, I’m talking about ways to deliver your application or business service, and the technical underpinnings are fading into the background a bit. “Instead of being builders of systems,” said Mike Vizard in a recent IT Business Edge article, “most IT organizations will soon find themselves orchestrating IT services.”

James Urquhart talks about this as an important tenant of the DevOps approach: The drive to make the application the unit of administration, not the infrastructure. James had another post more recently that underscored his disappointment that shows like Cloud Expo are focusing more on the infrastructure guys still, not the ones thinking about the applications. I’m all in favor. I heard Gartner’s Cameron Haight suggest why this might be true in most IT shops: while development has spent a lot of time working toward things like agile development, IT ops has not. There’s a mismatch, and work is starting on the infrastructure side of things to address it.

Still, how do you get there from here?

So the premise here is that cloud will change the role of IT as a whole, as well as particular IT jobs. So what should you do? How do you know how to ease people into these roles, how to build these roles, or even how to try to make these role transitions yourself?

I’ll repeat the advice I’ve been giving pretty consistently: try it.

— Figure out what risks you and your organization want to take. Understand if a given project or application is more suited to a greenfield, “clean break” kind of approach or to a more gradual (though drawn-out) shift.
— Set up a “clean room” for experimentation. Create the “desired state” (Forrester’s James Staten advocated that on a recent webcast we did with him). Then use this new approach to learn from.
— Arm yourself with the tools and the people to do it right. Experience counts.
— Work on the connection between IT & business aggressively
— Measure & compare (with yourself and others trying similar things)
— Fail fast, then try again. It’s all about using your experience to get to a better and better approach.

There was one thing that I heard this week at the Gartner show from Tom Bittman that sums up the situation nicely. IT, Tom said, has the opportunity to “become the trusted arbiter and broker [of cloud computing] in your organization.” Now that definitely puts IT in a good place, even a place of strength. However, there’s no denying that many, many folks in IT are going to have to get comfortable with roles that are very different from the roles they have today.

(If you would like a copy of the presentation that I gave at Cloud Expo, email me at jay.fry@ca.com.)

As cloud computing changes IT roles, which IT jobs are on the ‘endangered species list’?

A funny thing happened during my Cloud Expo presentation in Santa Clara recently that I wasn’t expecting. I was trying to come up with a few points in the session where I could get a read on whether the audience was following me or not. And since my topic was “How Cloud Computing is Changing the Role of IT…and What You Can Do About it,” I figured at least someone would have an opinion. So I asked a few questions of the audience.

And (you guessed it), there was no shortage of opinions. In fact, I found myself in the middle of a full-fledged discussion. Especially when we started talking about which IT job titles were or were not going to exist any longer as a result of cloud computing. Interesting stuff. Here’s a summary of the presentation I gave, plus a few comments from the audience thrown in for color:

Cloud computing is causing two big IT-related role shifts. Cloud computing has given business users choices it didn’t have before; it’s breaking the monopoly that IT has had on the sourcing of IT service. It means business can go around IT, can “go rogue” and find the services they think best suit themselves. The doom & gloom scenario for IT is that it’s time to pack up and go do something else.

Will IT go away because of cloud computing? Half of my session attendees (which was two-thirds end users) thought that cloud computing will at least cause IT to lose jobs. However, I’m not nearly that negative; I tend to agree with our own Bert Armijo who likes to say that IT jobs don’t go away when faced with the Next Big Thing. They just reshuffle. So the real question, then, is what does the deck look like after all the shuffling is done? More on that in a moment.

First: IT is becoming an orchestrator of a new IT service supply chain

What I told folks at Cloud Expo is that from what I see, cloud computing and its focus on business services, rather than the underlying technology, are altering the broad responsibilities and the approach of IT. Cloud is changing IT’s role inside an organization. It opens up the possibility of getting IT service from many different sources and the corresponding need to orchestrate those many sources. Mike Vizard talked about this in a recent IT Business Edge article: “Senior IT leaders,” he said, “will soon find themselves managing a supply chain of IT services.”

This role as orchestrator of things you don’t own is a new one in some ways, though many folks have been managing outsourcing (similar in some ways) for a while now. Shifting all of IT to have this mindset is very significant; it means adjusting to a role as a service provider, selecting the best of both internal and external services as appropriate.

And that’s where things get interesting for the actual jobs inside the IT department. Some of those are going to have to change.

Second: how IT jobs themselves are changing

One of my points was that this IT supply chain concept creates a whole new set of questions, opportunities, and requirements to make things work. (Here’s an earlier post of mine describing some of those new requirements.) IT will certainly be more business-oriented and less focused on the underlying infrastructure components as layers of abstraction help make it smarter -- and possible -- to think beyond the nitty gritty.

So how is cloud changing the individual roles and jobs within the IT department? I identified 3 important influencers:

· Automation – fewer manual tasks means less demand for the people who do them today
· Abstraction – technical minutiae are less important to focus on, while the business service itself takes on a much more primary role
· Sourcing – vendor management and comparison (and some way to make choices) move to the forefront

Products (like several of ours) can help take these new approaches in what are often very fast, effective steps. But the IT folks themselves need to realize that they really need a new way of looking at their jobs, and, in fact, some of their jobs may end up very different from where they are today. That’s not a quick problem to solve. I remember this issue being a weighty problem back in my Cassatt days, too.

So what IT jobs are on the endangered species list?

At Cloud Expo, I listed off a bunch of titles to see what the audience thought were the soon-to-be-extinct IT jobs. I let people categorize the jobs as either Cockroaches (as in, “will always have a job,” you can’t get rid of them), Chimps (“need to adapt to survive”), or Dodos (“buh-bye”). OK, so the categories weren’t necessarily flattering, but it added a touch of levity to what can be a somber topic for IT.

My in-room responses had some dissenting opinions, obviously, but they were, in fact, surprisingly uniform. Here's where people more or less categorized a few different IT jobs:

Cockroaches: service provider vendor manager, SLA manager
Chimps: software/apps deployment person, network administrator, server monitoring/ “Mr. Fix-it”
Dodos: capacity planning, CIO

Yes, you just read that my audience thought CIOs were going to go extinct.

I sensed a bit of dramatic license was being taken for impact in the room, but the discussion was definitely interesting. There is certainly a case to be made that the tools, approaches, and processes that the CIO relies on today, for example, need to get a major revamp, or things will look pretty bleak for the folks in those jobs.

There was agreement that the business-level capabilities of the IT people who look at service levels and manage service providers matches up well with the shift that seems to be going on toward business-level conversations.

And, the realization that even the most core of administrator roles (network, server) and the break-fix mentality currently in place in a huge majority of IT shops just doesn’t seem as relevant in a world seriously involved with cloud computing. Or, at least, it makes sense that there will need to be an important set of adaptations. In the world of cloud computing, you don’t fix the malfunctioning commodity server. Instead, you ensure that your systems route around it (through internal or external sources) and continue to deliver the service.

It’s time for quite a lot of staff evolution, from the sounds of it. At least, that’s what my Cloud Expo audience thought. My next post will cover exactly that: I’ll build on these comments and look at the approaches, roles, and solutions that I highlighted to help IT leverage the cloud computing trend.

And for the squeamish, I'll try not to mention cockroaches again.

(If you'd like a copy of my Cloud Expo presentation, e-mail me at jay.fry@ca.com.)

VMworld 2010: Cloud "in excess"? Some thoughts on "What You Need"

VMware threw another great VMworld event this year. If you didn’t attend, you missed another step in VMware’s evolution toward being a very mainstream, enterprise-focused software vendor. They are at that stage as a vendor where they are reaching out beyond what they grew up doing and are trying to expand into something broader and different.

Last year, in my book, was a bit light on news (aside from explaining their early plans for SpringSource) and more about describing these big ambitions. This year, however, was about trying to look the part and making sure they had credible solutions and stories to tell their enterprise customers, thanks to a few well-timed acquisitions.

Oh, and I guess I should mention the cloud. VMware certainly did.

Ironically, VMware had INXS play their big party – who ended their show that night with their song “Don’t Change.” Fellow punster Greg Schulz pointed out on his StorageIO blog that the song title may have felt diametrically opposed to the message that VMware was trying to tell everyone all week. Maybe the title should have been “It’s Time for a Change and We Call It the Cloud.”

But, actually, I think INXS had it right. For more details on why, I put together an INXS-themed list of my take-aways for customers now that they’ve left Moscone and are finding themselves back from VMworld 2010, staring at their day jobs.

Here’s some help figuring out What You Need:

New Sensation: All the talk of cloud certainly came to a head. VMware definitely talked about it “in excess” at the event. Paul Maritz had lots to say both in his keynote and in his panel of service providers about their announcements, including the much-leaked and much-anticipated vCloud Director product (formerly known as Project Redwood). Industry-watcher Bernard Golden said he saw the cloud discussion accelerate very seriously in his CIO.com blog about the show, noting that not only were VMware and its partners taking the next steps to make cloud “more consumable in real-world environments,” but also that at the show there was a “palpable feeling that cloud computing represents the next platform shift in computing…but on a different software construct that abstracts and makes agile the previous generation of hardware.”

Things to watch out for? Bernard mentioned a favorite of mine that I bring up in any Cloud 101 discussion I have: the “one thing that wasn’t discussed much was the process and organizational challenge caused by implementing a cloud computing environment.” It’s a good thing to have help with (and, yes, that reminds me that I did get a chance to meet up with several of our just-joined 4Base consulting folks during the week).

Listen Like Thieves: Or, maybe: here are some suggestions on how to foil those thieves, especially when it comes to your IT environment. VMware acknowledged an important angle that customers have been talking about for a long time: security is a big issue for both virtualization and cloud computing. They bought TriCipher and announced vShield offerings, showing their interest in delivering solutions in this space. In fact, it was an action-packed week on the security front: CA Technologies also acquired Arcot Monday as the show was getting started.

Don’t Change: Back to my comment about how much change should be a part of your IT operations theme song. Look at it this way: before heading to San Francisco last week, those of you in IT had been worried about a big, complex set of management and operations issues. Spending a week hearing about the newest virtualization and cloud deliverables doesn’t change the reality of what you go back to. Don’t toss out your view of what’s important; instead, use those requirements to evaluate everything you heard last week.

Never Tear Us Apart: There is a virtualized world of IT, but there continues to be a physical world as well. Andi Mann (from CA Technologies) commented in IT World Canada that even though IT is now deploying more new virtual servers than physical ones, companies' infrastructures are still only about 30% virtualized.

Meaning, of course, that you still need to manage and optimize both parts -- the virtual and the physical. Together. The virtual world that VMware had you looking at closely for 4 days is not the sum total of your environment, so don’t forget to consider management, automation, and control capabilities that understand that, too.

Devil Inside: VMworld continues to serve as an industry gathering about virtualization – and now cloud. That’s very much to their benefit. It does provide an excellent meeting place for customers and vendors, but one in which VMware is very much in control of the discussion and topics. My suggestion: push back. I made some suggestions before the event about how to sort through the flood of announcements coming. Now’s the time to figure out what’s real from VMware and the other vendors. Make sure you have real opportunities to get hands-on. It’s the only way you’re going to find out what’s ready for prime time. It's the only way to find out what makes good economic sense for your business model as an enterprise or a service provider. It's also the only way to find out what does and doesn’t work at this point.

No matter how you look at it, the event was a Kick. (For a good summary of the event in addition to Bernard Golden's, take a look at this Network World article from Jon Brodkin and this blog post from CA's Stephen Elliot. For a take on "Why VMworld was Underwhelming," read Derrick Harris's GigaOM Pro write up [subscription required].) I’m glad to have used the event to meet up with the San Francisco Cloud Club folks once again. It’s a very cloud-savvy and interesting crew.

And, before this year’s VMworld begins to Disappear from the view, I’ll offer a tip of the hat and add my thanks to the folks at VMworld for hosting us all. It was certainly in their best interest to put on the show, and now it’s up to the rest of us to make sure it was in ours as well.

Connecting some dots from Cloud Connect: everyone was "all in"

Several folks have asked me what I thought about the Cloud Connect conference (#ccevent on Twitter) in Santa Clara. Even though I was geographically challenged for the first part of the conference because of an East Coast business trip, I made it back in time for some really good content. And judging from the buzz, the part I saw was not the exception. Kudos to Alistair Croll and team.

Here are some impressions I had about the event:

· There weren’t a lot of end users. This wasn’t surprising; there haven’t been many end users at any of the cloud events I’ve been to recently. I don’t take that as damning feedback. It’s where the industry is at this point. Customers are in the early stages. And, as Brenda Michelson has pointed out on Twitter, it’s probably a good thing that customers are too busy to come to something like this right now. It might mean they're busy doing real cloud implementations. But the customer attendance issue is certainly an angle to watch; it has to change this year (and I expect it will).

· The presenters were cloud experts, serious, and focused. The people presenting were experts who knew their topic areas cold. The panels were stacked with the right experts. And, from the company names represented onstage and in the audience, the cloud computing market and the people backing it are very serious. Anyone having any doubts about whether things in the cloud space are going to take off should take note of what vendors were present and their focus. It was the big guys. It was the small guys. To borrow a phrase, it seems everyone is “all in” when it comes to cloud computing.

· The more basic sessions were solid and didn’t waste time on too much definitional hand-wringing. Presentations like John Treadway and Killian Murphy’s session on private clouds were very well thought through and articulated. This was Cloud 101, with all of the back-up of a graduate level course right behind it.

· What’s old is new again. The cloud adoption panel included ING US and Boeing, who commented on just how important some of the older IT disciplines actually are, even though a lot of the force driving adoption of cloudy ways is coming from a younger generation of IT professionals. Just because cloud computing is in the mix, you don't have the right to forget about some of the basic, smart processes and concerns (oh, like, say management) that IT has always had to have in place.

· Other interesting topics that had good content: the reasons behind application mobility and implications to think about (thanks, Rich Miller), thoughts on drivers of enterprise cloud adoption, the legal ramifications of cloud computing and how things could play out ("get your general counsel involved"), and some end-of-the-day brain bending on the implications for human beings if this whole cloud thing means computing becomes ubiquitous.

· Of course, nothing really got solved. But whatever does at a conference? The sticky problems are still the sticky problems. There was a great deal of unhappiness about standards (which resulted in a bit of animosity in the room during the panel on that topic), for example. On the other hand, tracks like Joe Weinman’s on Cloudonomics had some good, meaty content in them and no actual hand-to-hand combat broke out. (CA Distinguished Engineer Steve Oberlin’s posted his comments from the ROI panel here, pointing out that IT often forgets to look past cost savings to the “priceless” importance of cloud computing’s agility benefits.) The cloud networking panel James Urquhart moderated dealt with the realities, the issues, and the promise of that topic – which seemed to provide a good balance.

· The cloud market is a little bit “clubby” still. The people presenting seemed to know about 50% of the people in each of the sessions. That’s good, in that the people who are moving this industry forward are also the ones attending. That’s bad because people often spoke in 140-character code or inside jokes, occasionally had side conversations during their presentations with particular individuals in the audience, and sometimes left some of the customer benefits of cloud computing unsaid. It’s good to be well-connected, but don’t forget to explain the basics at the right times. Especially if we want actual users to attend – and get something out of it.

· Live events like this are all about networking – and Tweeting. This is certainly related to my previous point. In fact, I noticed two healthy Twitter backchannels. The first was commenting on and reacting to the content being discussed onstage. The second was all about putting real faces to the Twitter avatars of folks that many of the industry insiders regularly communicate with on-line. This was a great chance to make real, live cloud connections.

Having said all that, I noticed that Clay Rider posted a bit of an opposing view on the conference. He was looking for insights into a monolithic and (to hear him tell it) elusive “cloud market,” to understand why the vendor focus and VC investment is at such a fever pitch. I’m not one of those strict definition kinds of people, but would rather make sure that we’re simply focusing on what customers want and answering their needs with real solutions. Despite his more negative assessment, I like his conclusion:

“Ultimately, the right answer may be to stop looking for the Cloud market altogether. Perhaps Cloud is really just an intelligent delivery model that addresses the state of art in IT. Maybe Cloud is a process, not a product. As such, things would make a whole lot more sense than the confusing overlap of jargon and techno-obfuscation that so many undertake in the name of the Cloud. This would be a welcome improvement not only in nomenclature, but perhaps in market clarity, which would then help drive market adoption. Money tends to follow well defined paths to ROI. Why should Clouds be any different?”

My biggest regret about Cloud Connect, aside from missing several of the key panels, though, was not being around for the San Francisco Cloud Club’s extended after-hours get-together, focused this time on PaaS. The two previous Cloud Club events I’ve been to were really interesting opportunities to dig into cloud computing issues with a bunch of people who think about this day in and day out.

So, if the Cloud Connect folks could just work around my schedule for next year’s event, that’d be greatly appreciated. Except for the standards panel; I can miss that next time around. Unless, of course, someone follows through on Lori MacVittie’s idea and stages it as a boxing match. That’d be worth changing my flights for.

CA and Nimsoft: Because smaller companies have different IT management requirements, but seem eager for cloud

If you’ve been watching CA, you’ve noticed some recently announced acquisitions that, when they close, will help us enable customers to make a transition to a cloud-connected enterprise, notably 3Tera, Oblicore, and Cassatt. And while the 3Tera and Oblicore deals in particular have a strong focus on managed service providers (MSPs) as customers, much of the end user interest in these solutions comes pretty exclusively from the largest enterprises.

Which begs the question, what about the slightly smaller companies? How are they looking to navigate the clouds and approach IT management in general?

Funny you should ask…

Today’s announcement that CA has signed a definitive agreement to acquire Nimsoft is an acknowledgement by CA that the group of companies a bit below the world’s biggest ones has a very particular set of requirements that, up until now, we have not really addressed. Nimsoft, however, as a provider of IT performance and availability software, has done a very good job of tailoring both its product (you can see a 13-minute demo here) and its way of working with customers to their specific needs.

With Nimsoft, CA can bring a tailored IT management solution to a new set of customers -- emerging enterprises, emerging national markets, and the MPSs and cloud service providers that serve those markets.

Who are the “emerging enterprises”?

To be clear, we’re still talking about some pretty large companies. Our internal categorization calls the group the “emerging enterprises” (of course, everyone has a different label). To CA, these emerging enterprises are the companies with annual revenues of less than $2 billion, but more than about $300 million. While the world’s mega-corporations may be a bit sluggish about adopting cloud computing, many signs point to the fact these emerging enterprises are also the ones that are experimenting with cloud computing in a much more significant way.

In addition, the MSPs and cloud service providers that serve these organizations are also some of the entities making the biggest strides when it comes to cloud computing.

But to serve these emerging enterprises, you have to do things differently

As Nimsoft knows firsthand, the emerging enterprises and these MSPs and cloud service providers require you to do things differently. How?

First, the software needs to be straightforward (and even easy) to install, use, and maintain. It needs to have a very broad but focused set of functional capabilities, stretching across a significant amount of the environments, components, and devices that an organization will want to manage, inside and outside its four walls.

Nimsoft fits that bill nicely. In fact, Nimsoft has been doing that so well, that many have called it (rightly or wrongly) an alternative to solutions from the Big Four management vendors. More about that in a moment.

The second requirement that’s pretty drastically different for smaller enterprises is that they are actually much more likely to buy their IT management capabilities from MSPs. 300 of Nimsoft’s 800 customers are MSPs today, often providing IT management services via the cloud to their end users.

When you start thinking about markets that are served via MSPs, there’s another whole set of customers that can be addressed – emerging national geographies. In the same way that some developing countries skipped the land-line phone infrastructure and went straight to wireless, many end user organizations outside of the more IT-mature geographies are thinking about avoiding data center build-outs altogether, and going to cloud computing. Or, if they are doing their own data center, then they are considering managing their environment by an MSP’s remote monitoring capabilities. Either way, IT management provided as a service is front and center.

So why is this customer segment (and therefore Nimsoft itself) interesting to CA?

CA has long been in the IT management software space. However, what I’ve seen in the past 6 months since I came aboard is a very serious focus on making changes to move CA from the slow, steady, “value” company it has been to one focused on growth. You can see the big bets that CA is placing to make this transition: we’re making significant invesments (through acquisition and internal development) on the software that large customers will need to be successful transitioning to and managing cloud computing. With Nimsoft, we’re also expanding the set of customers that we serve.

Why? That is where the new growth is. While the largest of the large companies do account for a big chunk of the IT management spending now and over the next few years, you may be surprised at how significant the emerging enterprises will be. Our numbers find them making up approximately 25% of the software spending in the market CA addresses (parts of the IT management software market, plus a few other areas) by 2013. That’s big, and something that CA hasn’t really touched before now.

If the product is that cool, what’s kept Nimsoft from having luck selling to larger companies?

Nimsoft has had great success. They fill the gap in the market above open source and low-end solutions, but below things like what CA’s Service Assurance products (Spectrum, eHealth, NetQoS, and Wily) provide. The truth is that Nimsoft has also had luck with some very large companies who, at first blush, you’d expect to buy a more global-style solution. However, what we mostly heard when we talked to their customers was that where large customers had bought Nimsoft, they use it for specific, departmental needs, while making use of another tool from CA or others for the enterprise-wide or more in-depth tasks or analysis. This is the reason CA is saying it plans to invest in both its current Service Assurance product line and Nimsoft – these products address different markets with different customer requirements. There will always be some gray area, but we’ll work through that as the companies come together.

Nimsoft fits into the CA Cloud Products & Solutions Business Line

To bring Nimsoft onboard, CA seems to have learned a lot from its Wily acquisition a number of years back. Like Wily, Nimsoft will be kept intact as a stand-alone business unit. It will become major new piece of Chris O'Malley's new Cloud Products and Solutions Business Line. CA plans to build on what Nimsoft has done and the success they’ve had with MSPs and emerging enterprises. This should also enable us to tap into those emerging geographic markets I mentioned earlier.

Nimsoft should fit nicely into the Cloud organization at CA – they’ve been thinking about their tool as something that helps monitor both internal and cloud environments. Check out their Unified Monitoring site for a peek at some of the cool things they can do. It’s a bit of a high-level weather report for the cloud. It monitors up/down status for popular public cloud offerings from the likes of Amazon Web Services, Google App Engine, salesforce.com, Rackspace, and others.

This acquisition is not about technology, it’s about the market

The bottom line for this announcement is that it’s very different from the others recently announced by CA. The Nimsoft deal is less about the technology (though their technology is pretty interesting on its own) and more about the market.

By acquiring Nimsoft, CA gets a solution for customer segments that it has not typically had offerings for. These markets become one of the key places CA is going to focus for growth going forward.

And, Nimsoft will (after the close) provide CA with a really good example of what happens when you listen to your customers’ needs very precisely. Here’s to more of the same.

IT management nirvana? Smells like virtual and physical control

I was very amused by the headline on Denise Dubie's Network World article this week about CA's big multi-product announcement. It noted that CA and other management vendors were working toward IT management "nirvana" -- a state that IT has been pretty far away from. Especially when virtualization gets involved.

So, what's the main difference between where we are now and what she described? "Now" might be described (with a little help from a certain '90s grunge band of the same name) as "Come As You Are," "Nevermind," or something equally dire.

"IT management nirvana," on the other hand, requires a coherent way to control your IT environment, regardless of whether you're talking about physical or virtual components. The good news: I think CA is addressing that combined requirement pretty well, and this week's announcements help.

One of the things I've liked about the CA story that I've heard since I joined is the way in which the company directly addresses the day-to-day, pragmatic interests of users. Breaking down management silos is one of the keys to that. It's also worth noting that a bunch of other aspects of IT control -- big, grown-up, important concepts -- are front and center. Management, governance, automation, and security are all in the first paragraph of CA's press release regarding virtualization management -- topics that were certainly not highlighted nor addressed by many industry players even just six months ago.

Getting to "IT management nirvana" may not be exactly only about pragmatism, but nevertheless, I think it's some of the practical parts of this week's announcements that are worth noting. In particular:

· Single pane of glass for physical & virtual management. The root-cause analysis capabilities of the new CA Spectrum Service Assurance product take both the physical & virtual into account. It's designed to offer one place to display the impact of the physical & virtual IT infrastructure on the services it supports. Mike Vizard's CTO Edge write-up about this announcement gives you a peek into what the product's interface looks like, in case you're curious.

· Provisioning across physical & virtual infrastructures. Enabling application configuration management and dynamic resource provisioning is hard. Being able to do that across internal physical, virtual, and even external cloud environments is really hard. CA Spectrum Automation Manager has now added this, plus another neat little trick: rapid physical-to-virtual and virtual-to-virtual server provisioning.

· Cross-virtualization management. Add to the things mentioned above broad support for virtualization technologies like VMware vSphere, Citrix Xen, IBM LPAR, and Sun Solaris, and it's another reason it's worth noting. There are a few more holes to fill (Microsoft Hyper-V comes to mind), but it makes a great cross-VM story. What CA Spectrum Automation Manager now has in its cross-virtualization support is beyond what we were doing at Cassatt. You can see some earlier discussion of across-multiple-hypervisor management in this post.

· For VMware lovers out there, there's even more. A couple of the other products (you can find details about which ones in the CA press release) help discover more about VMware and performance issues, including database performance before, during, and after VMware VMotion migrations. In fact, there are a bunch more virtualization features scattered across many product lines that work in conjunction with your VMware technology. (Again, it's kind of nice to have answers to a lot of the broad management questions that customers are asking by virtue of an extensive product portfolio.)

Making a bet that integrated management is better

You'll notice that CA is putting its weight behind the concept that having a unified management capability is more efficient and more powerful for an IT organization. That's not unexpected given the breadth of management capabilities that CA can offer a customer. But, it's also in line with the complex environments that large customers actually have. But is it how they want to manage things?

Mike Vizard, again in his CTO Edge article, weighed in with one view: "At the moment," said Vizard, "customers seem to be favoring [an] integration strategy between existing systems management tools and providers of dedicated virtual machine management tools. Over the long haul, odds are good that customers will ultimately want to see more convergence of these tools rather than continuing to pay separate licensing fees for both," wrote Vizard.

Delivering tools that can provide this convergence, and seeing customers have great success with them, is the thing that will tip the balance. And in the end, that's probably a balance that will favor the customer. Vizard said something similar back in September when CA announced the deal to acquire NetQoS, postulating that "it will also ultimately prove a lot less expensive [to have unified management tools] than managing a whole slew of point products."

All that certainly sounds more like IT management nirvana (and certainly more harmonious and under control than the aforementioned namesake band from Seattle often was). Hopefully, these tools and others it inspires in the marketplace will gets us a step closer.

And, if any of my Nirvana references don't quite hit the mark: All Apologies. Blame Denise. Or her headline writer.