Bi-Modal IT: Gartner Endorses Both Disruptive and Conservative Approaches to Technology

Who doesn’t want to have their cake and eat it too? Last week, attendees of Gartner’s IT Infrastructure and Operations Management (IOM) Summit got the recipe in regard to managing their IT systems.

Analysts Debra Curtis and Ronni Colville introduced the theme of “bi-modal IT” in their keynote and it popped up over and over again at the conference. Put simply, I took “bi-modal IT” to be a directive from a top-flight IT analyst firm for organizations to try some of the more dynamic, agile approaches to running their IT systems while not completely abandoning more conservative, waterfall-oriented methods for more traditional portions of their environment.

 

By acknowledging both parts of IT—“the fast part and the slow part,” as they called it onstage—Gartner is walking a fine line and encouraging big companies to do the same. But make no mistake, change is in the air.

Easing into disruptive change

Gartner certainly did give a stamp of approval to the more conservative elements of an organization and the “we’ve always done it this way” approach. That sounds like something that would enable IT operations teams at big companies to sigh with relief as they go back to business as usual, but I also heard a call for change.

Gartner made the case, too: For example, a huge 42% chunk of respondents to its CIO survey (2,339 CIOs from 77 countries representing $300 billion in IT spend) said they disagreed with this statement: “The IT org has the right skills and capabilities in place to meet upcoming challenges.” Uh oh.

Gartner highlights DevOps as a smart direction

So what should companies do to get their IT operations up to speed? Much of the content at the IOM Summit pointedly encouraged a non-traditional and often disruptive approach, specifically talking about DevOps:

• DevOps dos & don’ts: DevOps was front and center, including a session from Cameron Haight talking about how to go from theory to practice, with cautionary tales of what not to do (what Cameron called “anti-patterns”). “The goal of DevOps is not to create a new set of elite ninjas,” he said, but to change the culture of an organization. Sometimes that requires setting up a new, DevOps-specific organization as a starting point.
• Manage core IT org conflicts: George Spafford recounted learnings from his Phoenix Project book (co-written with Gene Kim and Kevin Behr) and hit upon the core conflict of IT organizations. Folks who are aligned closely with the business, said George, push to move faster to enable the business. Folks aligned with IT operations want to protect the business, and push to move slower. I don’t think anyone in the midst of rolling out an application would disagree, but how an organization resolves this conflict will determine how much of the new IT approaches it will tolerate.
• Highlight accountability: Jim O’Neill, CIO of HubSpot, led a great session recounting his company’s success with DevOps, which he said enabled IT to help the firm grow from 1,150 customers to more than 12,000 customers over the past eight years. He advised the audience not to be afraid to “let go” of the old way of doing things, but to be careful not to “separate accountability from responsibility.”

IT operations is, more than ever, about teamwork

Surprisingly, many of the most prominent sessions at Gartner IOM weren’t about technology. Nor were they about different approaches to development or operations. Instead, they addressed how to work with people and how to drive change in an organization.

Professor Eddie Obeng’s frenetic (and most amusing) keynote walked the whole room through the emotions of getting people to accept change (Hint: make them believe it’s their idea). Analyst Ed Holub brought that home in his session about IT operations teamwork. “Every part of infrastructure & operations is becoming a team sport,” said Holub. “There is very little you can do effectively by yourself. Teamwork is the key ingredient to infrastructure & operations’ success.”

All in all, the Gartner IOM Summit mixed these organizational basics with strong forward-thinking vision. And, while Gartner did leave conservative organizations an out, many of the sessions seemed to be clearly telegraphing that change needs to come to IT organizations that want to help drive their business forward.

“Bi-modal IT” sounds like a strategy for easing into that change without abandoning everything that came before. Even conservative companies should jump at the chance, even if only in a limited way. Next time around Gartner may not be so subtle.

Cake image courtesy of Shutterstock.com.

This post also appears on the New Relic blog.

One initial reaction to Microsoft Surface: it’s not what consumers (or the enterprise) want

Our CEO Peter Badger was on the road in New York during the recent new tablet announcementpalooza.  On Tuesday of that week came the iPad Mini and a fourth-generation regular-sized iPad (though a lot of people missed that second one entirely). Then on Friday of that same week, to much/some/a bit of fanfare, the Microsoft Surface arrived on the scene.

At Framehawk, we’re definitely gadget freaks.  If there’s a new mobile device, someone in the office has it on Day One.  For example, Peter unboxed his just-released iPad 3 during one of our staff meetings a few months back.

So, we’re certainly not going to let that week’s gadgetfest go by unnoticed.  We haven’t gotten our hands on an iPad Mini yet, but Peter had a chance to try out the Surface.  And, well, let’s just say the review wasn’t glowing.  His comments:

"I played with the Microsoft Surface tablet today and it is seriously lacking.  Usability was terrible. I couldn't navigate to the home page, to apps, or within apps. Crazy side menu pop-ups appeared in random ways.”

Those who know Peter know that he is a big proponent of Apple, but his disappointment with the new Microsoft tablet was more about how he thought the average person would react.  And the impact that would have on the enterprise:

“Yes, I am an Apple fanboy, but I've got to tell you, this thing is in for a rough ride with consumers.  And without that consumer interest, the Surface won't be the challenge to iPad and Android in the enterprise that Microsoft wants it to be.”

According to Peter, though, Apple didn’t hit it out of the park that week either (unlike a certain Panda).

“Of course, Apple's not perfect:  WiFi only for now for the iPad Mini?  I haven't seen it yet, but come on.  That's a bit of a let-down."

The market will decide, of course, what the right form-factor and feature choices are.  IDC analyst Bob O’Donnell predicted “huge sales and lots of confusion” for tablets over the next few months, with a chance for Amazon Kindle Fire HD and Google’s Nexus 7 to make some inroads, but Apple to maintain the lionshare of the market.

Mike Elgan’s Datamation article last week also sided with the iPad Mini over the Surface.  Elgan said that while the Surface is cool and has Microsoft on the right track, the iPad Mini should outsell it 10:1 in the next 6 months based on the price, the keyboard, apps, maturity, and a bad consumer reputation for Microsoft.

As you try out these devices yourself, let us know what you think.  We’ll keep doing the same.

This post also appears on the Framehawk blog.

HTML 5 takes a beating from Facebook, boost from salesforce.com

And you thought it had been a rough few months for Facebook.  The past few weeks have been HTML 5’s turn.

As you probably heard, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took a few minutes out from his newly public company’s on-going Wall Street woes to take a few potshots at HTML 5 at the TechCrunch Disrupt conference.

‘Biggest mistake’

"I think the biggest mistake we made as a company was betting too much on HTML 5 as opposed to native," said Zuckerberg about their approach to developing the mobile Facebook app.  “We burned through two years on that.  It probably was the biggest strategic mistake we made."

Then, less than 2 weeks later, one of the Facebook engineers followed up with a post detailing the shortcomings of HTML 5, especially around performance, adding fuel to the fire.

But Benioff is betting the farm on HTML 5

In the other corner, however, salesforce.com made a very public showing of support for HTML 5 at Dreamforce.  CEO and pitchman extraordinaire Marc Benioff launched salesforce.com’s new Touch capability to great fanfare.  I sat in on a couple sessions to see Touch demoed (minus a crash or two) and hear how they built it.  Benioff and company bet their farm on HTML 5 to create Touch.

The diametrically opposed feelings about HTML 5 weren’t lost on Jeff Hammond of Forrester or James Governor of Red Monk.

So why the mixed signals about HTML 5?  And what can an enterprise can learn from it?  Both data points actually lead to a similar conclusion:  you better know your use case.

What Facebook learned about HTML 5

HTML 5 has been touted as a panacea for mobile application development.  Write once, run anywhere -- on the Web and on your mobile device.  The problem, as Facebook found out, is that things are different across different environments.  You certainly get to leverage the development skills you already have, which is a great financial benefit, creating one environment for both Web and mobile platforms.

However, the user interface you end up with is lowest-common denominator in many respects.  And HTML 5 has been shown to perform differently across different platforms, so if it’s speed you’re looking for, you’re not guaranteed to get it.  In case you missed it, there’s been lots of grousing about Facebook’s mobile app performance (I admit I'm one of those).  And even the salesforce.com Touch demos last week showed sluggishness and clocking here and there.

One more thing that Facebook and salesforce.com may or may not have figured out:  many security questions don’t get solved by HTML 5.  This is another potential gotcha for enterprises.  (You’d hope this would be a big issue for salesforce and Facebook, too, though Facebook doesn’t seem too bothered by privacy concerns in general, frankly.)

Overhyped

Over the past year, HTML 5 has been the darling of the industry, getting the hype I remember being reserved for things like server virtualization and web app servers.  Analysts at Gartner and other firms have been pronouncing HTML 5 the Next Big Thing.

Of course, when you are at the top of the hype curve, the trough of disillusionment beckons.

In fact, Facebook’s very public comments aren’t the first beating that HTML 5 has gotten recently.  There was a bit of public discomfort about a split in the HTML 5 standard.  If something is supposed to be a standard you can use across all environments, the industry at least needs to agree about what it is.  Otherwise, you’ll have to start asking “Which HTML 5?”

SFDC: happy on the surface, but some worries, too

At Dreamforce, salesforce.com was very excited about Touch.  Of course, is Benioff ever not excited about something he’s selling?  However, two things raised a few red flags.

First, performance.  In their session on how they built Touch, the development team acknowledged it as one of the biggest issues they had been grappling with.

Second, keeping up with the functionality that people need.  In the mobile roadmap session, Clarence So talked about delivering part of their functionality now via Touch, and progressively more and more as time goes on.  They gave no specific dates for the mobile versions of their apps being fully capable.  Unfortunately, this approach means the salesforce mobile solutions might be second-class citizens for quite a while.

What should an enterprise do?  Know your use cases

So what are the alternatives to HTML 5?  And should Facebook, salesforce.com, or the average enterprise choose differently?

The traditional thought is that there are 3 alternatives: HTML 5, native, or some hybrid.  At Disrupt, Zuckerberg said he regretted using HTML 5 and not doing device-native rewrites of their application (which they have since done and seem to be getting improved performance).

Enterprises listening to that should be wary:  Zuck has a different use case from many.

Facebook’s needs are for a single consumer app, big on user interface and local performance.  Many software companies that have one main application that they are selling are in a similar boat.

So, should you side with salesforce.com instead?  Not necessarily.  Their use case is also very specific.  In the “How We Built Touch” session at Dreamforce, they outlined their reasoning for using HTML 5: many of their customers had spent a great deal of time and effort customizing their solution.  Writing a new, native mobile version of their app would require reimplementation of everything that salesforce had already done on the Web version of their products PLUS would require customers to re-implement all those customizations.  Ouch.

Enterprises may need something different

So end user enterprises may not be in the same boat as either of these vendors.  We at Framehawk have been talking with folks about use cases around mobile access to multiple applications, with a big requirement for security and performance, and an interest in a branded workspace with a unified way to get to multiple apps.

In those cases, something like what we’re providing gives all of those benefits, without regrets over cost, performance, or time to market.  Our approach is to let organizations keep their apps as they are and send only the screen images down to the mobile devices.  Our protocol lets you do that at very high speeds without putting data on the device, and still use native, touch-based interaction methods with the tablets.

So, what’s the right lesson for an enterprise to take away from all this?

Evaluate any “silver bullet” answer like HTML 5 very closely.  Make sure it matches the requirements you and your organization actually have before assuming it has all the answers.

Oh, and think very carefully before buying Facebook stock.

This post also appears on the Framehawk blog.

iPhone 5 and the era of incremental innovation for mobile devices

The iPhone 5 arrived at last yesterday, with both a bang and a whimper.

There will absolutely be lines of expectant buyers streaming into Apple Stores come September 21.  The Apple fan boys will certainly be there.  As will those with older iPhones that are just barely hanging on.   In fact, I think I heard the phrase “my iPhone is on its last legs, but I’m holding out until the iPhone 5 comes out” freakishly often over the summer (second only to the lyrics of “Call Me Maybe”).

So, Apple’s sales will very likely be huge, even if it might be overstating things to say it will move the U.S. GDP by half a point.

But has the old Apple spoiled us?  Does the newest phone live up to their sky-high expectations?  In some quarters, including here at Framehawk, the answer seems to be no.

The screen is slightly bigger. The phone’s slightly thinner and lighter.  Siri’s smarter.  But there was no “one more thing” to blow the socks off the industry.  The big moves – the initial iPhone, the initial iPad – have been made.

Peter Badger, our CEO here at Framehawk (and author of the comments on the photo posted here), felt the iPhone 5 was a little bit of a let down.  After looking at the screen size change, his first comment was, “That’s it?”

Matt Eastwood, analyst at IDC, tapped into that feeling on Twitter: “I read more than a few live event blogs that were openly bored by today’s Apple announcement. Guess smartphones aren’t new and cool anymore.” Or maybe the problem was what he wrote later: “the bar has been set pretty high.”

Eastwood had an interesting insight in a Twitter conversation with me and Gordon Haff: “The good enough days for smartphones and tablets aren’t too far ahead of where we are now.”

To me, it feels like the iPhone 5 launch is telling us that we’ve left the realm of disruptive innovation for mobile devices.  Now it’s about smaller modifications to the form factors.  It’s about incremental innovation.

That doesn’t mean that these devices won’t continue to have profound effects on the IT market.  Tablets, driven by the iPad, are changing the way laptop makers are thinking about what goes into a laptop.  And, they are changing the way employees and IT are thinking about application access and daily productivity.

So, the iPhone 5 made a splash, but it might only represent a ripple in the grand scheme of things.  Of course, maybe this is what mainstream adoption feels like.

This post also appears on the Framehawk blog.

Taking some steps out of stealth

I’ve been doing a lot of behind-the-scenes work over the past few months as my new company Framehawk has been preparing to come out of stealth.  That has meant the volume of posts here at Data Center Dialog has dropped off a bit, but that’s all about to change if things go as planned.

Last week’s Under the Radar conference was our first official Framehawk public event.  Our CEO, Peter Badger, was onstage for 6 minutes (14 minutes, if you include the Q&A) to explain who we are and what we do.  And the outcome was pretty encouraging:  we won the Audience Choice Award for the Mobile Access category.  (You can see video of his award-winning presentation -- and live demo -- here.)

That event also served as a bit of a milestone for us, marking our emergence from stealth.  We’ll still be very focused on the success of our early customers (like UBS), but we won’t be quite so secretive going forward. 

As a result, we’ve spiffed up our website a bit and even started our official company blog. Surprise, surprise: I’ll be one of the consistent contributors there.  I’ll be cross-posting appropriate content both there and here.

The first couple posts are already up over there:  one saying “hello world,” one talking about the Under the Radar conference itself, and another two (one by me, one by our CTO Stephen Vilke) starting to scratch the surface on the BYOD topic.  I’ll also continue to blog here on other cloud, IT ops, and data center topics not necessarily connected to Framehawk as appropriate (but isn’t all about mobility and cloud computing these days?).

Check us out over there, keep reading here, and let me know if you want to know more about what we’re doing at Framehawk.

In honor of Cloud Expo, 5 cloud computing predictions for 2012

Jeremy Geelan of Sys-Con asked me to pull out my cloud computing crystal ball a few months early this year. He had me join a bunch of other folks working in the cloud space to look ahead at what 2012 has in store.

Jeremy posted the 2012 cloud predictions article in the lead-up to Cloud Expo in Santa Clara (flashback: here’s my take on last year’s Silicon Valley event, timed well with a certain Bay Area baseball team's World Series victory). The cloud prognostication post featured thoughts from people like Peter Coffee of salesforce.com, Christian Reilly of Bechtel (yes, he’s back there by way of Cloud.com and Citrix), Krishnan Subramanian of Cloud Ave, Brian Gracely of Cisco, Ellen Rubin of CloudSwitch (now Verizon), and Randy Bias of Cloudscaling, many of whom are past or current speakers at the Cloud Expo event.

As for my portion of the list, it’s an amalgamation of what I’ve seen maturing in this space from my years at private cloud pioneer Cassatt Corp., the work I did building the cloud business at CA Technologies, plus new perspectives from my first few months at my still-stealthy New Thing. On that last front, you’ll notice the word “mobility” makes it into my list a lot more often than it might have a few months ago.

Here are my 2012 cloud computing predictions, excerpted from the longer list:

The consumer convinces the enterprise that cloud is cool. Things like iCloud and Amazon’s Cloud Drive help get your average consumer comfortable with cloud. Consumer acceptance goes a long way to convincing the enterprise that this model is worth investigating – and deploying to. “There might be something to this cloud thing after all….” This, of course, accelerates the adoption of cloud and causes a bunch of changes in the role of IT. It’s all about orchestrating services – and IT’s business cards, mission statements, and org charts change accordingly.

Enterprises start to think about “split processing” – doing your computing where you are and in the cloud. Pressure from mobile devices and the “split browser” idea from things like Amazon Silk lead people to consider doing heavyweight processing in locations other than where the user is interacting. It’s a great model for working with that myriad of mobile devices that have limited processing power (and battery life) that IT is working feverishly to figure out how to support. Somehow.

Using Big Data in the cloud becomes as common as, well, data. Given the rise of NoSQL databases and the ecosystem around Hadoop and related approaches, companies begin to understand that collecting and using massive amounts of data isn’t so hard any more. The cloud makes processing all this information possible without having to build the infrastructure permanently in your data center. And it’s pretty useful in making smart business choices.

The industry moves on from the “how is the infrastructure built and operated?” conversation and thinks instead about what you can do with cloud. This may sound like wishful thinking, but the nuts and bolts of how to use cloud computing are starting to coalesce sufficiently that fewer discussions need to pick apart the ways to deliver IaaS and the like. The small, smart service providers move up the stack and leave the commodity stuff to Amazon and Rackspace, finding niches for themselves in delivering new service capabilities. (Read profiles of some service providers doing this kind of thing in my most recent "interview" posts.) Finally, enterprises can have a more useful conversation -- not about how do we make this work, but about how our business can benefit. The question now becomes: what new business can come from the cloud model?

Applications become disposable. Enterprises will start to leverage the on-demand nature of cloud computing and take a page from the user experience of tablet and smartphone apps. The result: thinking about applications and their deployment less monolithically. The cloud will help enterprises make smarter decisions about how to handle their processing needs, and give them a way to do on-demand app distribution to both customers and employees. This will open up new options for access, even to older legacy applications. Enterprises will also start to evolve applications into smaller functional chunks -- like iPad or iPhone apps.

Topics worth watching

So, those are some things I think are worth watching for in 2012. Feel free to clip this list and save it on your fridge for a comparison at the end of next year. I’d also advise taking a look at what the other cloud folks that Jeremy rounded up thought were in need of a mention, too.

Even if any one of us is way off on what is actually going to happen in 2012, the overall list is a good guide to some really key issues for the next 12 months. And it will be a pretty good list of cloud computing buzz topics both onstage and on the floor at Cloud Expo. And, I'd bet, for several cloud events to come.

The cloud is falling, says Gartner: tablets and mobility should top IT's list instead

Just when you thought cloud computing was receiving an unending supply of positive hype, the Gartner Group pulls a fast one on us.

Gartner rolled out their list of strategic technology trends for IT to pay attention to for 2012 at their annual Symposium this week in Orlando. And, instead of Gartner piling on with more publicity for cloud, it seems they pulled a bit of a switcheroo.

Cloud computing, which reigned supreme atop their 2011 list, dropped all the way down to No. 10 this time around. Which might cause a cloudwashing vendor or two to worry that the sky (or at least the fluffy white parts of it) is falling.

Cloud drops

David Cearly, the analyst who presented the list in Orlando, gave a number of reasons for cloud coming down to earth this time around. “We could see the failure of the cloud to live up to the hype…The luster could wear off.”

But that’s been a distinct possibility for a few years now. In fact, most of us expect it. Gartner themselves placed cloud just over the peak of inflated expectations and starting to slide into the trough of disillusionment on their hype curve released earlier this year.

However, according to Jason Hiner of Tech Republic, Cearly also noted that cloud is not necessarily seeing a big drop in interest; in fact, it’s actually getting incorporated into lots of other various IT operational areas.

That leads to two potentially opposing conclusions. Either cloud computing is on its way to disappointing its many ardent (and often fanatic) supporters…or it’s gathering sufficient understanding and adoption, that it’s becoming a de facto part of the way IT runs itself in multiple areas.

I think I agree with Hiner’s assessment: neither of those diametrically opposed reasons is likely to be the true reason that Gartner knocked cloud computing down a few pegs. Hiner suggests that they might actually have done it for the shock value. Sounds entirely plausible to me. And if that was the reason, it worked. It got me (and many other more reputable writers) to write a post on the topic, didn’t it?

The new champs: tablets & mobile apps

So cloud is down and out…what took its place?

The new leaders at the top of the list are two topics that are the subject of a bit of a frenzy by enterprises – at least in the enterprises that I’ve been watching as part of my New Thing: tablets & mobile.

In fact, Larry Dignan of ZDNet wrote that “simply put, the analysts and the CIOs in attendance [at the Gartner Symposium] are a bit tablet happy.” Gartner analyst Nick Jones even started his early morning mobility-themed session on Tuesday welcoming the “smart people that realize mobile is more important than breakfast” [thanks, @mattfusf].

For “media tablets and beyond,” as Cearly put it, “the implications for IT is that the era of PC dominance with Windows as the single platform will be replaced with a post-PC era where Windows is one of a variety of environments IT will need to support.”

And as I’ve noted a couple times recently, tablets open up all sorts of interesting possibilities, alongside some pretty strategic development, support, and operations choices. The native interface for tablets like the iPad is very compelling and enterprises want to make use of it. Somehow.

The No. 2 item that Hiner reported Cearly mentioning onstage was “mobile-centric applications and interfaces.” If an enterprise is going to play in the mobile space, new types of tools are needed to take the data feeds from applications and transform them so they are usable on the target device.” This, Cearly notes, takes legitimate “engineering skills,” given all the screen sizes, operating systems, and applications themselves.

Mobility projects will have many follow-on effects, too

The mobility efforts that enterprises have underway or are considering will also likely have much broader and more profound effects, cascading into some of the other items mentioned on Gartner’s list, like context-aware computing and the rise of app stores and marketplaces.

In fact, once enterprises get past the initial roll-out efforts of mobile-enabling their applications and working on tablet support, that’s when a whole set of second-order effects would start to get attention. What will all this mean to application design? "Big" and "monolithic" are not ideal for small and frequently disconnected devices. There’s an opportunity to look at things differently, to re-evaluate how capabilities and services are surfaced to a user.

So, as Dignan noted, much of Gartner’s list comes down to the single concept of mobility. “The list makes distinctions between technologies, but in a nutshell you have mobility on the front end and back end that will keep companies busy for the next two years,” Dignan writes.

Quibbling over the order

The order of Gartner’s 10 strategic technologies for 2012 may seem like it had a bit of meddling from the PR department, but, in the end, I think the list feels about right.

Why? Cloud computing has users and providers that are working to make it standard operating procedure in many situations. It’s on its way. Meanwhile, tablets and other mobile devices have jumped into such prominence and have such sway over our personal life that making them enterprise-connected seems like a no-brainer. And something that needs immediate attention.

Besides, if you don’t like the order of Gartner’s list, just wait until next year.

Nagging questions from VMworld 2011: balancing bias versus cloud vision

For those of us who attend VMworld each year that don’t work for VMware, it’s always a bit of a spectator sport. What will they announce, what will they say-but-not-really-say, what ends up being the synthesis that the audience (and the pundits) take away at the end of the whole thing?

VMworld 2011 was no exception. Now that it has been a couple weeks and the news has sunken in a bit, there are still a few things that are nagging me, mainly from the keynotes that VMware CEO Paul Maritz and CTO Steve Herrod gave. The primary question? How does an IT shop carefully balance the various pieces of visionary cloud computing direction that VMware laid out with the inherent bias that comes with any vendor show of this nature.

Any tightrope walkers out there? I ask because there was certainly a lot of both from what I picked up.

Somebody Told Me VMware has cloud fever

There were a bunch of comments, especially from the keynotes, that I thought were spot on at VMworld. First and foremost, Maritz acknowledged that VMware isn’t immune to “cloud fever.” In fact, he admitted that they “tend to use this word a lot.” An understatement, for sure, for VMware and nearly everyone else for that matter. In Maritz’s estimation, cloud computing “will re-define IT over the coming decade.” Given the possibilities that cloud opens up, and many of the topics I’ve written about here before, I heartily agree.

However, for someone who grew up debugging the print controller for some of the first ATMs, Maritz has a pretty negative view of some technologies that actually make up the IT infrastructure for many of today’s big enterprises. And most of the biases I heard during his keynote ignored many of the issues IT has to deal with to the benefit of Maritz’s current employer (no surprise there).

Out with the old?

Maritz described a future in which the recommended path forward is to “ring-fence” (and eventually replace) the mainframe and mini-computer legacy environments. He then talked about the “client-server legacy” environment as one that was “too big to walk away from.” I’m betting folks from the biggest IT shops globally that heard that chuckled a bit. Many of their pre-client-server systems certainly qualify as “too big to walk away from,” too. (I know my former employer, CA Technologies, would certainly agree with that.)

Instead, Maritz’s guidance focused on ways to modernize client/server infrastructure and operations to help figure out how to bring those newer apps forward. And he suggested investing in cloud-based environments for those new and renewed apps.

I think this approach pretty obviously spins the focus onto the pieces of the IT environment that VMware can deal with most effectively at the moment. It calls those out as most important and actionable and gives short shrift to things VMware’s not good at. Unfortunately, this spin sacrifices the way a customer would realistically evaluate their heterogeneous IT environments. I believe there’s much more of a balance in value among the apps and infrastructures from different computing eras in large organizations than VMware leads you to believe. Sure, many shops would love to dump some of their old stuff and trade it in for something new and with fewer strings attached, but there are some golden rules of IT that really recommend you not do that. At least not all at once.

Cloud enables IT consumers into the driver’s seat

While I may argue with Maritz’s views in some areas, there are other areas where he is dead on. I think he is right to point out the impact of the IT consumers on everything that IT ops is doing. The cloud, he said, “represents the next major interaction between enterprise IT and consumer-driven change.”

One of the biggest stats Martiz dropped on us underscored the staggering impact of the mobility that IT consumers are demanding in particular. Three years ago, 95% of the devices connected to the Internet were PCs. Three years from now Maritz expected that number to drop to just 20%. That’s a big endorsement of the “post-PC world” that Steve Jobs has been evangelizing.

Herrod’s technology keynote was very focused on ways to enable IT to deal with increasing demands for mobility and a new set of devices, like my iPad and other tablets and smart phones. Herrod and Vittorio Viarengo did a great job of showing a few scenarios in a way that was direct, easy to understand, and got the audience laughing a bit (Herrod knows his somewhat-quirky audience very well). The fact that the demos showed some of VMware’s cooler end user computing initiatives like Horizon, Project Octopus, AppBlast and a few others, didn’t hurt.

But, this, too, was presented through the lens of VMware’s take on the world. Not everyone was convinced, of course. Kurt Marko called the mobile efforts “theoretically promising, but realistically perplexing” in his Information Week article. GigaOm's Derrick Harris wondered in a post why consumers wouldn't just, in the end, prefer the consumer brand versions of everything that they already know from their personal lives for things like DropBox instead of a VMware-flavored version.

Filling in the pieces

Finally, the other thing that VMware accomplished at VMworld this year was to make it clear that in order to help customers pursue application renewal efforts and support the trends toward mobility and IT consumerization, they are working hard to fill in all the gaps. Themselves. Or at least, that’s the impression they are giving.

I found it sort of fitting that they had the Killers playing their party this year. Many of the messages that they seemed to be giving off (consciously or unconsciously) were that they were working to be killers themselves – of much of their own ecosystem.

How? They announced (or had previously announced) that they were:

• Going directly at the management and operations space
• Going after databases
• Aiming at the storage space (a logical fit, given their EMC ownership), building a sort of Dropbox for the enterprise.
• Providing a platform (Cloud Foundry) for developers to easily get started
• Going after the virtual desktop
• Going after mobility and a common experience that is not device-based
• Continuing to work on security, e-mail, collaboration, social media efforts

And even if this isn’t an exhaustive (or sufficiently precise) list, you get my drift. The other thing that struck me: they mentioned very few of their partners in their main keynotes.

A new Day and Age?

In the end, in addition to realizing their view of what’s possible for customers with virtualization and cloud, VMware has a very specific goal. VMware is hoping for a world in which IT doesn't need to go anywhere else. Or at least not many other places. Of course, what big vendor doesn't, especially as the cloud threatens to be disruptive to the business they currently have going?

But not many IT orgs want to give VMware permission to take a Joy Ride through their procurement department, saying “trust me, Everything Will Be Alright.”

Mr. Brightside...or Losing Touch?

So, this brought up a few nagging questions for me. Are they trying to do too much themselves, threatening to push their customers to be much more adversarial? And, in taking on all of these things themselves at the expense of some of their partners, are they creating a Hot Fuss and turning friends into enemies unnecessarily? There's a lot of data and market reality that make it very hard to fault how they are acting. A Sand Hill Research report I saw on Cloud Commons cites VMware as the most likely “go to” vendor for private cloud projects. By a long shot.

So why not? There’s no reason VMware shouldn't head down the path they are on (in fact, there a lot of strategic reasons why the definitely should). But customers need to be careful. They need to make sure they understand the preconceptions that VMware buries in their vision for IT’s future. It doesn’t always match the way a big customer views IT. Sometimes that’s because they are looking into a future that the customers can’t see yet. And sometimes that’s because they are coloring the future in a shade that best suits them.

One place we tried to have a reality-based discussion at VMworld was in the “Cloud Computing Realities” panel that Brian Gracely of Cisco, Mathew Lodge of VMware, and I (then with CA Technologies) did with Stu Miniman of Wikibon. Here are 3 other good VMworld write-ups that I can recommend if you want a dose of the real world: Andi Mann’s, Bruce Milne's (both from CA), and Chris Wolf’s (from Gartner). And for a dose of humor, check out Microsoft's humorous poke at VMware for being "stuck in the IT past."

And get ready…this happens all over again in mid-October in Copenhagen. Though, I’ll be watching VMworld Europe 2011 from the comfort of my new desk and the usually-reliable-and-often-amusing #vmworld Twitter feed.

Extra credit goes to those who found all the Killers song and album titles buried in this post (though I made it pretty easy). It's getting to be a little tradition around here. Check out my VMworld 2009 and 2010 wrap-ups -- you'll see I'm no Foreigner to these sort of (in)Excess puns.

Uptime: Eeyore forever, or can cloud computing help the facilities-IT gap?

I dropped by the Uptime Institute Symposium in Santa Clara last week. It was a chance to step outside of my IT-focused world for a moment and hear the discussions from the other side of the fence: the facilities folks. And, I have to say, the view was a bit different.

In general, I think it's safe to say that facilities is not yet comfortable with where the cloud computing conversation is taking them.

Cloud computing is a part of the conversation on both sides of the fence, but people are looking at the cloud from very different angles. IT, despite having its own running battle with business users about cloud, can at least see cloud as an opportunity. Facilities in many cases views it as a direct, job-endangering threat. And, while there were hints at alignment, there are definitely some ruffled feathers.

A history of disconnects: IT & facilities

But this shouldn't be a surprise. A few years back, before Cassatt Corp. was acquired by CA Technologies, those of us at Cassatt spent quite a bit of time and effort understanding the facilities world and working to connect what the IT guys were doing with what was going on in the facilities realm. At that point, cloud computing was barely even called that. But the beginnings were there. The prototype ideas that would become cloud computing were starting to find their way into the IT and data center efficiency conversations in some of the more forward-looking companies. (If you want some historical snapshots, check out the work of the Silicon Valley Leadership Group in this area, plus the early entries from this blog and those by Ken Oestreich, now cloud marketing guy at EMC).

One of the biggest issues we ran into again and again was a disconnect between IT and facilities. And, after a few days at the most recent Uptime Institute event, I think it’s safe to say that the rift is still there.

IT (at the urging of the business) is leading the cloud charge

To show how the two groups are still pretty far apart, I’ll highlight a couple of the presentations I heard at the event. Several 451 Group analysts had presentations throughout the week, providing the IT perspective. One was William Fellows’ rapid-fire survey of where things are with cloud today. His premise was that cloud is moving from the playground to production in both public and private cloud incarnations.

Fellows pointed out that providing cloud-enabling technologies for service providers was one of the hottest spaces at the moment – he’s tracking a list of some 80 vendors at this point. Demand is moving cloud from an “ad hoc developer activity to become a first-class citizen.” Production business applications are “creeping up in public cloud” because of the ability to flexibly scale.

Enterprise IT, said Fellows, “wants to unlock their inner service-provider selves. They want to use cloud as just another node in the system.” In other words, the IT guys are starting to make leaps forward in how they are sourcing IT service, and even in how they are thinking about the IT role.

But from the other Uptime sessions and discussions, these forwarding-looking glimpses seemed to be the exception, rather than the rule.

Facilities is grappling with cloud’s implications and feeling uneasy

Contrast this with the keynote from AOL’s Mike Manos. Mike spent a chunk of his stage time on a self-described rant about how facilities people were feeling left out – “a bit gloomy” even – when it comes to the cloud computing discussion.

Manos compared facilities folks to Eeyore, the mopey character from the Winnie the Pooh children’s books. That prompted a few knowing chuckles in the crowd. But despite a predisposition to getting bummed out when the topic comes up, “you can’t duck your head,” said Manos, when the discussion turns to cloud computing.

He pointed out that the things that a Google keynoter from earlier in the conference had mentioned were not revolutionary, despite all they have accomplished. In fact, “Google is asking us to do the things we’ve been talking about [at Uptime conferences] for the past 10 years.”

The advice from Manos was good – and assertive. Facilities should step aggressively into the conversation about cloud computing. Don’t be worried that cloud might suddenly mean that data centers are suddenly going to disappear and you might lose your job. It won’t mean that, and especially not if you play your cards right. Instead of dreading cloud, figure out how to be part of (or even lead) the business decisions.

“No matter what, you’re going to have a hybrid model” in which data centers from external cloud providers will provide some of your IT service, and your own data centers will provide some as well. And, once you’re in that situation, “you’re going to have to manage it,” Manos said.

Now, there is a big list of things the facilities guys will need to get going on before they can take this head-on. Manos listed things as basic as “knowing what you have” in your data center and what it’s doing, as well as things that aren’t normally taken into account, including “soft costs you hardly ever capture.”

The cloud computing challenge for facilities

The ironic thing in all this is that the big cloud providers are given lots of kudos for their IT operations and their ability to enable IT service to aggressively support their business. One of the reasons that Google, Amazon, and others have gotten good at IT service delivery is, in fact, that they are good at the facilities side of things, too. Their facilities teams are integral to their success. So, folks, it’s possible.

Manos left his audience with a challenge – a challenge to jump into the cloud computing conversation with both feet. It means an investment to get applications ready for what happens when infrastructure fails (which it does) and to understand the operational impact of moving to the cloud (which is too often overlooked). It means an acknowledgement that a move to the cloud means a clearer understanding between how applications are architected and how data center facilities are run. Or at least an understanding of what you need to know when computing begins to happen both inside and outside your physical premises.

So, maybe cloud can actually help bridge the IT world and the facilities world. To some of us who have watched these two worlds dance around each other for a while, it’s been a long time coming. And, for sure, it’s not here yet. But Manos and others, in conjunction with the pressures facilities people are feeling from their business discussions about cloud comptuing, might just be providing the nudge they need.

Or, at the very least, a great nickname.

Is a revolutionary, greenfield approach to cloud The Ultimate Answer? (Or is it still 42?)

If you were looking for the Ultimate Answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything, chances are cloud computing is not high on your list of things to worry about. You’re probably more interested in downing your Pan-Galactic Gargleblaster and getting on with things.

However, my CA Technologies colleague Andi Mann (@AndiMann on Twitter) and I used our recent Cloud Slam presentation to try to provide some straightforward advice on different approaches enterprises and service providers can take to move to a cloud-based infrastructure – while paying tribute to Douglas Adams and his Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy series in the process. The result? "The Hitchhiker's Guide to Cloud Computing: Tips for Navigating the Evolutionary and Revolutionary Paths to Cloud."


Folks willing to wade through the egregious puns and overstretched sci fi references got a view of 2 different cloud computing approaches – one more evolutionary and one quite revolutionary – that customers are taking. (I touched on this topic in a previous blog myself a few months back.) For those that missed Cloud Slam, Andi posted his portion of the presentation – pros and cons of the more evolutionary approach – at his blog. I’m doing the same here, using this post to highlight what the revolutionary approach should get you thinking about.

Sometimes Marvin’s right and it’s easier to just start over

In looking at the pile of technology and processes that most IT shops are dealing with on a daily basis, the idea of building on top of what exists to slowly evolve your way to a more cloud-like environment sounds like a lot of work and a lot of complexity. Why?

• Your existing IT investments bog down new things
• New technologies don’t always fit easily in existing orgs
• Those existing IT processes can restrict your range of innovation
• IT organization politics & culture can put up some impressive resistance

Yes, the roadblocks seem big enough to depress even Marvin the Paranoid Android.

A ‘probable’ option: a turnkey cloud platform


One way of getting to the cloud through the logjam is to kick your Infinite Improbability Drive into high gear. A more probable way? Use a turnkey cloud platform that picks up where server virtualization leaves off.


Virtualization breaks the chains between the hardware resources and the applications, but is still weighed down by networking and storage concerns. A more revolutionary approach is to set up a pool of computing resources and then create a virtual business service to run on top of that. A virtual business service is a multi-tier application and its infrastructure packaged together as a single object that can be moved, scaled, and replicated as needed. This approach allows you to skip right past a lot of the drawbacks of virtualization and evolving your existing systems toward a cloud architecture. For example, load balancers, SANs, and switches become virtual, programmable items.

Why use a revolutionary approach?


This revolutionary approach to cloud is an economic and agility game-changer for IT, enabling you to go far beyond what is enabled by simple server virtualization. It sets up huge potential improvements in the speed and operational expense of managing your applications and infrastructure – I can point you to at least one product in this space where you can literally draw what you need. This approach lets IT enter into conversations about your org’s business needs – conversation it wouldn’t have been in before. Service providers can use this approach to deliver cloud offerings faster, while building margin at the same time. Enterprises can make themselves ready to move apps to and from multiple different service providers.

In a world which IT has been a bit timid at taking a stand on cloud, this approach gives IT a position of strength to deliver what the business is asking for. It’s not a bad way to come out looking like a hyper-intelligent, pan-dimensional being.

What the revolutionary approach looks like in the real world

At Cloud Slam, I talked about two customers taking this approach today that I know about from our work here at CA Technologies.

PGi: PGi turned to the cloud to help it quickly roll out new advanced meeting, conferencing and collaboration solutions services worldwide at a much faster pace and, as it turned out, a far lower price point than they could otherwise. As PGi enters new markets, it needs to quickly secure scalable data center resources near the new markets it will be serving to ensure the best service for its new customers. Building a new data center is extremely expensive and time-consuming; it can typically take about 18 months to create a new data center. Instead, PGi subscribes to data center capacity from a set of different service providers.

PGi uses CA 3Tera AppLogic to create a movable “infrastructure stack” supporting the services it creates. This infrastructure stack consists of all of the servers, firewalls, storage and other components uniquely configured to support a given service, and can be moved with the click of a button from one service providers’ network to another. This way, PGi can choose the provider with the right price points and geographic coverage for each new market it enters. It can even easily move workloads between its own data centers and service providers’ networks.

PGi’s Chief Technology Officer David Guthrie (who has a video clip up on CA.com talking about all this) says that “using 3Tera, we’ve been able to spin-up new virtual data centers to support 5 new locations for what it would have cost us to build one physical data center.”PGi’s time-to-market with new services has improved significantly. Previously, it would take up to 6 months to purchase new hardware resources and 4-6 weeks to deploy a new software application. Today, it takes between 2-5 days to complete these processes from start to finish.

ScaleMatrix: My second example was a new service provider customer of ours that I profiled in a recent interview. ScaleMatrix is a brand-new business that started from scratch last year. And, they’re already selling cloud services to their clients. By definition, that means no legacy systems. Instead they have taken this revolutionary approach to heart. They used the CA 3Tera AppLogic software and custom-designed hardware to get their offerings off the ground. Fast. If you want more details about what ScaleMatrix has been able to do, check out their profile here.

What are the challenges to taking this revolutionary path?

All is not simple with this revolutionary path to cloud, though.

You’ll break a lot of glass. You’re going to have to be ready to do a lot of learning about both the approach and a new use of technology. “Antibodies” from inside and outside IT will appear to resist this, often because this is such a different way to look at things. If you do take advantage of being able to move virtual business services among different providers, vendor management will take more of your time than it has.

And, of course, fewer people have taken this path. The risks are certainly higher, but so are the rewards. Picture yourself as Arthur Dent, complete with his hitchhiking towel, his guidebook, and hopefully a whole lot more luck.

The good news…getting your organization to cloud fast

This revolutionary approach means you won’t have to wait around for generations for the Ultimate Answer, or even to see the initial benefits of the move to cloud. You jump right to the end state. You get application portability, mobility, and replication as part of the deal, plus some other very useful things for free, like standard application images, DR, and security.

A word of warning, however: to hear some people tell it, you’re not going to want to go back to doing things the old way.



Which path should I choose?

How do you translate all of this commentary (and the ones Andi gave) into real action? We provided a bit of a virtual Babel Fish at the end of our Cloud Slam presentation, to help you figure out whether to take Andi’s more evolutionary approach, or the revolutionary one I described here.

Here are a couple situations where you’d rather take the more revolutionary approach:

You could be a service provider that needs:
• To deliver a cloud offering now
• To get to market with new offerings
• To deliver multiple offerings (like IaaS and SaaS) while maintaining margin

Or, you could be an enterprise that:

• Wants an Amazon EC2-like infrastructure internally and can build up a greenfield infrastructure. To get the benefits, you need to control the components, have standardized (x86) hardware, a spikey usage profile, and be ready for a new development model
• Is out of time. Maybe a competitor has made a move you must counter, or maybe you’re just trying to deliver something to respond quickly to a new business initiative. Either way, you’ve figured out that the old way won’t work.

Either way – evolutionary or revolutionary – the answer that Andi and I gave in our 42-slide deck (and no, Douglas Adams fans, that wasn’t a coincidence) is “Don’t Panic.” Both are appropriate approaches in particular situations. In fact, most organizations will probably end up pursuing both. You’ll notice that the use cases that both of us gave are not mutually exclusive. Spend the time to think it through.

Hopefully this recap, alongside Andi’s, gives you some useful advice to having those Deep Thoughts. And, you’ll be happy to hear that gratuitous Hitchhiker’s Guide references are, well, “mostly harmless.”

Unlike Vogon poetry.