Confessions of a CTO: focus can be the biggest enemy of enterprise mobility

As tablets appear in the enterprise, the pressure is on IT. 

Sure, there are a bunch of clear and compelling reasons to officially bring tablets into the enterprise application environment (like, say, because your employees love to use them enough to buy iPads themselves).

However, employee interest and the resulting “bring your own device” (BYOD) phenomenon are putting increasing pressure on IT managers to reel in these new mobile devices and make them official clients of enterprise applications.

But saying “yes” to enterprise tablet usage is not simple for IT. 

There is a lot to consider:  effort and speed of application deployment, managing data access, support, security, network complexity, device management, operating system diversity, and the cost of all this, just to mention a few.  Even business-level decision makers – gung-ho about the iPad and other tablets – have to take a hard look at what needs to be in place before this is going to work flawlessly.

All in all, it seems pretty daunting.  Yet, enterprise mobility is something that IT has to be working on right now – no excuses.  Users – and the upper execs – are demanding it.

Amid all of this uncertainty, we thought IT teams could use some pragmatic advice from one of their own – from someone who has been there and done that.  In that spirit, Framehawk’s CTO and co-founder Stephen Vilke let us pick his brain for his suggested dos and don’ts for those taking the leap and enabling the use of enterprise applications on tablets.

In case you don’t know Stephen, he has spent most of his working life in IT, tackling security, application development, and mobility challenges.  In addition, he spent the early part of his career at NASA, working on communication with distant spacecraft – a really intriguing bit of personal experience that turns out to have some great parallels with the challenges that enterprises currently have using their existing applications from mobile devices.

The result of our brainstorm with Stephen?  Some no-holds-barred commentary from a veteran IT guy and former CIO on the ins and outs of enterprise mobility. 

We’ll publish some of the highlights from Stephen’s suggestions here on the blog, including word-for-word commentary where relevant.  Think of these posts as a launching point for a critical area of discussion around mobility for IT.  Feel free to chime in with comments, questions, disagreements, or other suggestions in the comments section.

To get things started, one of the most important things I’ve heard Stephen talk about is not really even related to mobile application access, BYOD, or technology at all.  Instead, it’s about one of the crucial pieces for any IT project, and something that’s especially important in high-profile projects (like those with the iPad always seem to be).  It’s about focus.

Dos & Don’ts for Bringing Existing Enterprise Applications to the iPad:

DO be very careful about your focus. It will be one of your biggest challenges.

Regardless of what advice you take, notes Stephen, focus is really at the core of any successful IT project.  Are you trying to deliver mobile access for one application – or many? Bringing tablets into the enterprise environment is no exception:

“In my IT career, I’ve found that one of the first things to figure out is what your focus should be. Scoping is one of the biggest challenges. What are the handful of items that are going to make or break our project?  How do we attack them? What is the timeline?”

According to Stephen, focus is also where many IT organizations get themselves into trouble.

“If your goal is to deliver one and only one application via mobile devices – and it’s your flagship application – you’re going to probably focus a lot of your money, effort, and time on that one.  However, if you’re like most organizations, you will have several dozen applications that employees want to access from their mobile devices immediately.  And you probably have a long list of other applications vying to get attention.
“So, to get as many of those applications accessible from employees’ mobile devices as possible, as quickly as possible, be sure to be ruthless about what you will focus on.”

Check back here on the blog regularly for the next few weeks for specific enterprise mobility dos & don’ts from Stephen.  In addition, he’ll be presenting a live InformationWeek webcast on this topic on Oct. 24.  Go here to register.

This post also appears on the Framehawk blog.

Wallace and Bird Hosting soar: how they save on hardware while delivering more complex apps

Many of the cloud service providers that we are working with here at CA Technologies are small, but aggressive. These are the guys that know their business really, really well and are the ones who are targeting their niches pretty successfully. The ability to focus and be nimble are some of the key indicators of success in the service provider space.

We’ve been calling folks like these “Cloud Accelerators” – given how instrumental these service providers are being in the adoption of cloud computing -- and we have been profiling some of the more interesting ones.

Bird Hosting strikes me as a great example of one of these “accelerators.” They may not be on your radar screen yet, but Bird Hosting is a cloud service provider that’s nimble and all about the personal touch. They not only deliver cloud hosting and other key services to customers, you can find them answering questions on WebHostingTalk.com. They post reviews talking through the pros and cons of the newest rev of their cloud platform. They even run a hardware review site. (After all, there are benefits for a service provider to know this stuff.)

They do all this with 10 employees, 3 locations…and they have 3,600 customers.

Bird Hosting’s CEO, Michael Wallace, answered a few questions about their operations, what’s key for a service provider’s cloud platform, and even what’s up with their name. Read on:

Jay Fry, Data Center Dialog: You’re a relatively small service provider. How many data centers do you need to effectively serve a nationwide customer base? What else is important?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: We started in Seattle. When you have a data center in Seattle and customers in New York, the content isn’t delivered as quickly as you’d like – content delivery speed is important. We saw a need for something more central in the U.S., and so we went to Dallas. We now have 3 data centers (Seattle, Dallas, Washington, D.C.) and can cover the whole United States effectively.

In fact, we have customers across the world. We have customers that range from small shared-hosting accounts to large corporations. For example, we support a travel organization in New York, a food chain also in New York, as well as Costco. We host and produce videos that have 360-degree views of sheds and playgrounds that Costco sells.

DCD: How did you get started in the service provider business?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: We originally started in 2005. My father was one of the pioneers of the Internet; he started an ISP in 1991. I started out doing web hosting with some big corporate website hosters. I found that they were subpar, both from how they presented themselves to the services they offered. So I decided to do my own. I had the knowledge to do it. And I had just returned from a lengthy tour of duty with the U.S. Air Force in Iraq and was ready to take a bold move and launch my own business.

DCD: A recent article in SearchITChannel by Carl Brooks talked about the fact that the market is starting to realize that enterprises who are building private clouds and service providers that are selling public cloud services have some very different needs. Can you talk a bit about what you think is important to have in a cloud platform for service providers like yourself?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: Two things that are very important are cost savings and flexibility. With CA AppLogic [what Bird Hosting uses], I’m not limited. It’s a platform that allows me to offer a full range of services. Before I had to have separate machines for each individual task. We had to have a box for Windows, a box for Linux, and when we added customers, we had to add more dedicated boxes. With AppLogic, you don’t have to be limited to a certain OS. You have a cluster of servers and it allows us to run all of our applications on top; it’s neutral. So that helps us save money – we are able to standardize hardware and we can even save power.

DCD: Speaking of saving power, I’ve heard you talk about how much you’ve reduced your environmental impact. Can you quantify what you’ve been able to do?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: When we first started our business, we sold a lot of dedicated servers. Each would have a power draw even when idle. CA AppLogic allowed us to take those boxes and cram them into a virtual environment. Customers on dedicated servers were able to run as virtual dedicated servers instead. Customers were paying for a given amount of resources; we would give them the resources and they would run their environment. We cut back from 6 full cabinets to just one cabinet in one data center.

We were able to take 200 boxes and put that into 10 boxes. In our Dallas facility, for each of our cabinets we have two power drops, which costs $960 per cabinet – just for power. We were able to cut back 10 power drops, saving us about $10,000 per month.

DCD: Service providers are all looking for ways to define a niche that they can own, build up new revenue opportunities, and grow their margins. What has your cloud platform decision and approach meant competitively?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: It allowed us to broaden our market. We could have stayed where we were and offered shared hosting and dedicated servers. But using AppLogic has allowed us to venture into more complex application hosting. It allows us to create more complex environments with ease. Those environments usually would have taken us a long time to set up if we were going to do it in a physical environment—running cables from an end gateway or a firewall to a hardware load balancer to machines. That’s what AppLogic does in software.

We can support more complex applications. We wouldn’t be able to offer as many value-added services without AppLogic. We can do so quickly and efficiently, scaling things up or down as much as they need. And then we can charge per resource.

DCD: Do you see IaaS providers like Amazon as competitors?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: I don’t consider Amazon a direct competitor – they can’t do what we can do. We have a running joke – customers come in and say “our uptime is 70% with Amazon Web Services.” We can give them close to 100%.

DCD: You also do a lot of stress testing with your hardware. What has that meant for customers? What have you found?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: CA AppLogic is designed to take a bunch of small systems and merge them into a cloud. With more cores and more memory on each machine, you can get more out of each machine without adding more hardware footprint. We decided to start a little testing to find out what are our limits, what can we do? We tested different types of hard drives and configurations, different controllers, to see what worked best.

Testing the efficiency of servers brought me into a whole new area. I now run a hardware review site on the side. The stress-test work helps us figure out what machines can handle without impacting performance.

[Note: you can contact Michael directly to talk about any of his results if you’re interested in more details.]

DCD: Do your customers know anything about cloud computing? Does it matter to them?

Michael Wallace, Bird Hosting: There has been a lot of confusion and debate with the cloud. When I started out, we heard concerns about sharing data. We see less concern about that now. They do see the power of cloud computing and interact with it if they are using our virtual private data center offering. We dedicate a given group of machines to a customer and they get access to the CA AppLogic portal so they can build applications the way they see fit. They use CA AppLogic to virtually build their infrastructure.

…

Thanks for the time, Michael.

Oh, and in case you were wondering about the name, you’ll be happy to hear that I (of course) didn’t let that go. Here’s what Michael said about the name: “When we started looking for names, I was also looking for a mascot. That’s where Bird Hosting came from.” Did he try other more, er, ferocious names? “HostGator was taken,” said Michael. “And Dog Hosting was too gangster for me.”

The resulting mascot has an uncanny resemblance to Twitter’s feathered friend, if I do say so myself. Or the stars of a certain iPad game I’ve gotten myself hooked on.

But no Angry Birds here. Just a set of happy customers benefiting from Bird Hosting’s personal focus on delivering what experience dictates is required for service providers to soar: performance, reliability, and value.

You can read the Cloud Accelerator profile of Michael and Bird Hosting on the CA Technologies site. The site also features other luminaries who are setting the pace for cloud computing.

Hurford of DNS Europe: service providers and SaaS developers are showing enterprises how cloud is done

The antidote to cloud computing hype is, well, reality. For example: talking to people who are in the middle of working on cloud computing right now. We’ve started a whole new section of the ca.com website that provide profiles, videos, and other details of people doing exactly that.

One of the people highlighted on this list of Cloud Luminaries and Cloud Accelerators is Stephen Hurford of DNS Europe. DNS Europe is a London-based cloud hosting business with over 500 customers across the region. They have been taking the cloud-based business opportunities very seriously for several years now, and provide cloud application hosting and development, hybrid cloud integration services, plus consulting to help customers make the move to cloud.

I convinced Hurford, who serves as the cloud services director for DNS Europe, to share a few thoughts about what customers and service providers are – and should be – doing right now and some smart strategies he’d suggest.

Jay Fry, Data Center Dialog: From your experiences, Stephen, how should companies think about and prepare for cloud computing? Is there something enterprises can learn from service providers like yourself?

Stephen Hurford, DNS Europe: Picking the right project for cloud is very important. Launching into this saying “we’re going to convert everything” to the cloud in this short period of time is almost doomed. There is a relatively steep learning curve with it all.

But this is an area of opportunity for all of the service providers that have been using CA 3Tera AppLogic [like DNS Europe] for the last three years. We’re in a unique position to be able to help enterprises bypass the pitfalls that we had to climb out of.

Because the hosting model has become a much more accepted approach in general, enterprises are starting to look much more to service providers. They’re not necessarily looking to service providers to host their stuff for them, but to teach them about hosting, because that’s what their internal IT departments are becoming – hosting companies.

DCD: What is the physical infrastructure you use to deliver your services?

Stephen Hurford: We don’t have any data centers at all. We are a CSP that doesn’t believe in owning physical infrastructure apart from the rack inwards. We host with reputable Tier 3 partners like Level3, Telenor, and Interxion, but it means that we don’t care where the facility is. We can deploy a private cloud for a customer of ours within a data center anywhere in the world and with any provider.

DCD: When people talk about cloud, the public cloud is usually their first thought. There are some big providers in this market. How does the public cloud market look from your perspective as a smaller service provider? Is there a way for you to differentiate what you can do for a customer?

Stephen Hurford: The public cloud space is highly competitive – if you look at Amazon.com, GoGrid, Rackspace, the question is how can you compete in that market space as a small service provider? It’s almost impossible to compete on price, so don’t even try.

But, one thing that we have that Amazon and Rackspace and GoGrid do not have is they do not have is an up-sell product – they cannot take their customers from a public cloud to a private cloud product. So when their customers reach a point where they say, “Well, hang on, I want control of the infrastructure,” that’s not what you get from Amazon, Rackspace and GoGrid. From those guys you get an infrastructure that’s controlled by the provider. Because we use CA 3Tera AppLogic, the customer gets control, whether hosted by a service provider or by themselves internally.

DCD: My CA Technologies colleague Matt Richards has been blogging a bit about smart ways for MSPs to compete and win with so much disruption going on. Where do you recommend a service provider start if they want to get into the cloud services business today?

Stephen Hurford: My advice to service providers who are starting up is to begin with niche market targeting. Pick a specific service or an application or a target market and become very good at offering and supporting that.

We recommend starting at the top, by providing SaaS. SaaS is relatively straightforward to get up and running on AppLogic if you choose the right software. The templates already exist – they are in the catalog, they are available from other service providers, and soon will be available in a marketplace of applications. Delivering SaaS offerings is the easiest technical and learning overhead approach and that’s why we recommend it.

DCD: Looking at your customer base, who is taking the best advantage of cloud platform capabilities right now? Is the area you just mentioned – SaaS – where you are seeing a lot of movement?

Stephen Hurford: Yes. The people who have found us and who “get it” are the SaaS developers. In fact, 90% of our customers are small- to medium-sized customers who are providing SaaS to enterprises and government sectors. It’s starting to be an interesting twist in the tale: these SaaS providers are starting to show enterprises how it’s done. They are the ones figuring out how to offer services. The enterprises are starting to think, “Well, if these SaaS providers can offer services based on AppLogic, why can’t I build my own AppLogic cloud?” That’s become our lead channel into the enterprise market.

DCD: How do service providers deal with disruptive technologies like cloud computing?

Stephen Hurford: From a service provider perspective, it’s simple: first, understand the future before it gets here. Next, push to the front if you can. Then work like crazy to drive it forward.

Cloud is a hugely disruptive technology, but without our low-cost resources we could not be as far forward as we are.

One of the fundamentally revolutionary sides of AppLogic is that I only need thousand-dollar boxes to run this stuff on. And if I need more, I don’t need to buy a $10,000 box. I only need to buy 4 $1,000 boxes. I have a grid and it’s on commodity servers. That is where AppLogic stood out from everything else.

DCD: Can you explain a bit more about the economics of this and your approach to keeping your costs very low? It sounds like a big competitive weapon for you.

Stephen Hurford: One of the big advantages of AppLogic is that it has reduced our hardware stock levels by 75%. That’s because all cloud server nodes are more or less the same, so we can easily reuse a server from one customer to another, simply by reprovisioning it in a new cloud.

One of the key advantages we’ve found is that once hardware has reached the end of its workable life in terms of an enterprise’s standard private cloud, it can very easily be repurposed into our public cloud where there is less question of “well, exactly what hardware is it?” So we’ve found we can extend the workable lifespan of our hardware by 40-50%.

DCD: What types of applications do you see customers bringing to the cloud now? Are they starting with greenfield apps, since this would give them a clean slate? The decision enterprises make will certainly have an impact for service providers.
Stephen Hurford: Some enterprises are taking the approach to ask “OK, how can I do my old stuff on a cloud? How do I do old stuff in a new way?” That’s one option for service providers – can I use the benefits of simplifying and reducing my stock levels, reducing my management overhead from my entire system by moving to AppLogic and then I won’t have 15 different types of servers and 15 different types of management teams. I can centralize it and get immediate benefits from that.

The other approach is to understand that this is a new platform with new capabilities, so I should look at what new stuff can I do with this platform. For service providers, it’s about finding a niche – being able to do something that works for a large proportion of your existing customers. Start there because those are the folks that know you and they know your brand. Think about what they are currently using in the cloud and whether they would rather do that with you.

DCD: Some believe that there is (or will soon be) a mad rush to switch all of IT to cloud computing; others (and I’m one of those) see a much more targeted shift. How do you see the adoption of cloud computing happening?

Stephen Hurford: There will always be customers who need dedicated servers. But those are customers who don’t have unpredictable growth. And need maximum performance. Those customers will get a much lower cost benefit from moving to the cloud.

For example, we were dealing with a company in Texas that wanted to move a gaming platform to the cloud. These are multi-player, shoot-‘em-up games. You host a game server that tracks all the coordinates of every object in space in real-time between 20 and 30 players and sends that data to the Xbox or PlayStation that renders it so they can play in the same gamespace. If you tried to do that with standard commodity hardware, you’re not getting the needed performance on the disk I/O.

The question to that customer was, “Do you have a fixed requirement? If you need 10 servers for a year and you’re not going to need to grow or shrink, don’t move to the cloud.” Dedicated hardware, however, is expensive. They said, “We don’t know what our requirements are and we need to be able to deploy new customers within 10 minutes.” I told them you don’t want to use dedicated servers for that, so you’re back to the cloud, but perhaps with a more tailored hardware solution such as SSD drives to optimize I/O performance.

DCD: So what do you think is the big change in approach here? What’s the change that a cloud platform like what you’re using for your customers is driving?

Stephen Hurford: Customers are saying it’s very easy with our platform to open up 2 browsers and move an entire application and infrastructure stack from New York to Tokyo. But that’s not enough.

Applications need to be nomadic. The concept of nomadic applications is way distant in the future, but for me, what we’re able to offer today is a clear sign-post for the future. Applications with their infrastructure will eventually become completely separated from the hardware level and the hypervisor. My application can go anywhere in the world with its data and with its OS that it needs to run on. All it needs to do is to plug into juice (hardware, CPU, RAM) – and I’ve got what I need.

Workloads like this would be liable to know where they are. By the minute, they’ll be able to find the least-cost service provisioning. If you’ve got an application and it doesn’t really matter where it is and it’s easy to move it around, then you can take advantage of least-cost service provisioning within a wider territorial region.

…

Thanks, Stephen, for the time and for sharing your perspectives. You can watch Stephen’s video interview and read more about DNS Europe here.

Ortenzi and ScaleMatrix show what's possible when data center experts start their cloud from scratch

Imagine for a moment that you could take all the smart things that you and a few of the smarter people you know have learned about setting up and running data centers over the past 20 years and apply it, right now. No legacy systems to worry about – you could start over using hardware configurations on the cutting edge of efficiency and a pretty hot software platform to base your cloud services on.

Too late. Mark Ortenzi and his cohorts at ScaleMatrix just built that company.

ScaleMatrix, a new Southern California-based managed service provider (MSP), started up in the middle of last year. Mark and the guys running ScaleMatrix have been in the data center space for years, and decided now was the time to get financial backing, invest in the right amount and kind of infrastructure, and run data centers the way they ought to be run. Their goal? To become an MSP offering a wide variety of cloud services that are in demand with customers while building a great business for ScaleMatrix. They became a big CA 3Tera AppLogic partner following a $3.06 million deal we (CA Technologies & ScaleMatrix) did together in January.

I asked Mark, their CEO, if he’d provide a little background on what ScaleMatrix is up to for the blog. Mark’s background includes senior executive positions with several data center and dedicated server companies. As you might guess, Mark has a strong background in data center design and he has written several industry standards articles relating to data center operations, design, and efficiency. He has several patents pending relating to his latest enclosure design that will be deployed at ScaleMatrix, one piece of their secret sauce. Read on:

Jay Fry, Data Center Dialog: ScaleMatrix is a brand new entity, but your team is made up of data center veterans. What’s your unique pitch to customers and what are you mainly focusing on?

Mark Ortenzi, ScaleMatrix: We’re different. We’ve been in the industry for 20 years, and things have changed in the area of heating and cooling efficiencies. And in being able to grow data centers in an environment without having to spend $50-100 million overnight.

What sets ScaleMatrix apart from other so called “cloud computing companies” is our ability to control the entire process. We’ll be able to architect, deploy, and manage the entire solution in any one of our 12 data centers across the United States or in your own private data center. By controlling the entire process we are able to offer our private cloud solution as a service. Thus, we become an operating expense and not a capital expenditure.

Plus, everybody in our org is a systems engineer. We don’t hire door openers.

DCD: Some have said that cloud computing might be the new innovation that came out of the recent big recession. Whether that ends up being true or not, there’s no doubt that you guys are making a big bet in the hopes that the timing is right for both service providers and cloud services. What market conditions convinced you to strike out on your own with ScaleMatrix right now?

Mark Ortenzi: Flat budgets in the traditional data center realm are a new norm. The role of IT must adjust to [that of] “service provider,” creating internal and external services to deliver on needs. Just about everyone is aware that IT needs to drive revenue…but the reality is that business demand is outpacing IT budgets and resources. IT had been the sole source of IT services in the enterprise until cloud computing options appeared, promising fast, simple access to new services. Instead of going to IT for everything, the business can now go around IT to cloud alternatives.

The low-hanging fruit right now for us is SMBs. Everyone has an initiative in the cloud, and we have a really affordable plan. We can bring it up, run your model, and have a presentation to the CTO – to show them that it works in an affordable manner.

DCD: We’ve recently published the results of an IDG survey about how cloud computing is affecting the IT role that pointed to the importance of many of the business skills. I’ve also talked here about IT titles that may be on their way out, and others that are now appearing. How do you see cloud computing changing the role of IT inside enterprises?

Mark Ortenzi: I see IT becoming an operating expense. The days of owning and maintaining a private data center are nearing an end. Demand for IT within the enterprise will continue to climb. Providing a “pay-as-you-go” model for IT just makes sense. Cloud computing also provides the enterprise the ability to adjust to the current IT atmosphere faster than ever before. Nowadays, it is much easier to develop flexible, scalable and reliable services on the fly.

DCD: You’re banking on some pretty innovative components and operations approaches to run data centers. Can you describe how you guys are doing things differently for your customers?

Mark Ortenzi: There are many different aspects of our business model that differentiate us from our competitors. Our newest data center is being built out on an as-need-basis. We only utilize hardware, electricity and manpower needed for the clients we currently have. Our data center is scalable, energy efficient [a PUE of 1.1 is the number Mark touts, by the way] and our proprietary rack system using commodity servers is fully self-contained. We also are the only private cloud solutions provider that manages, maintains, trains and deploys the entire solution from soup to nuts.

DCD: How are you and your team measuring your success with customers?

Mark Ortenzi: Initially every customer is asked; “What are you trying to achieve by utilizing our private cloud solution?” Once the solution is in place and fully operational, success is measured by our ability to meet their goals, our ability to save the customer money and reducing their IT capital expense.

DCD: You’re using CA 3Tera AppLogic as a basis for your new business. Why did you take that approach versus what else you could have done?

Mark Ortenzi: It’s simple, CA 3Tera AppLogic is a fundamental piece in the ScaleMatrix business model. It provides us the ability to be scalable within our organization and the ability to extend this to our customers. There isn’t any other product on the market today, to our knowledge, that provides the ability to virtualize the entire IT infrastructure of a business while maintaining ease of use and cost effectiveness.

DCD: Regarding cloud computing in general, what’s the most compelling benefit you see organizations getting from cloud computing?

Mark Ortenzi: Maximizing ROI and reducing operating cost while eliminating IT capital expense.

DCD: What are still the biggest hurdles for cloud computing, and for ScaleMatrix? How are you helping folks get over those?

Mark Ortenzi: Bringing awareness to the AppLogic product, how cloud computing works, and how to take advantage of it – these have been the most challenging. It’s so fundamentally different from how business-class computing has been done in the past. Getting the potential customer to understand that is difficult; [using cloud computing and AppLogic] is easy and we make it this way for a reason.

It’s difficult wrapping our customers’ minds around how cloud computing works and how to take advantage of it. The smarter they are, the harder it is to get. They wrap too much into it– they have a cloud initiative, but they don’t know what to do. We put a plan together for them. What you focus on to get them past the hump comes down to figuring out what their business model is and what their pain is at the moment. You find it to be different with everybody. Usually, when you’re partway through it, a light bulb goes off.

DCD: Any advice on where to start with enterprises?

Mark Ortenzi: You have to get their feedback on what they’re thinking, what they’ve learned, who they’ve worked with. Don’t go after the big animal – converting their whole infrastructure over to cloud in one shot – boy, don’t ever do that. Instead, you find that little thing that is troubling them and show them how to resolve it, the pet project that they want to do more cheaply, more quickly.

…

It will be interesting to watch how Mark and the ScaleMatrix team progress over the next few months. One way of looking at the ScaleMatrix business is that they are putting the elasticity and dynamic qualities that cloud brings customers, and using them to support their own cloud services business. Their customers get state-of-the-art data centers and cloud-ready hardware and software infrastructure, but also direct access to Mark and his team with years of operational experience. These guys have been through a lot of real-world scenarios, and it takes quite a lot to surprise them.

I’ll keep tabs on ScaleMatrix and provide updates here and on my Twitter feed about what’s going on with them. If you have questions, you can ping Mark or his team directly.

Forrester's Staten: Realities of private and hybrid clouds aren't what you're expecting

James Staten does not pull punches. And for an IT industry analyst, that’s a good thing.

I first met James a few years back when he joined Forrester during my time at Cassatt. I heard him do a couple presentations at that year’s Forrester IT Forum, had some briefing sessions with him, and realized that with James, friendly conversations quickly turn into very specific advice and commentary. Even better, it was advice and commentary that was very much on target.

For those of you who don’t know James, he is a principal analyst in Forrester Research’s Infrastructure & Operations practice, helping IT ops folks make sense of topics like virtualization, cloud computing, IT consolidation best practices, and other data center- and server-focused issues. From my perspective, James has been a great addition to Forrester, especially in his role as one of the earliest voices helping describe the impact and meaning of cloud computing.

So, I thought I’d turn him loose on a couple current cloud computing topics and see if we couldn’t find a few things to argue over. In a good way, of course. Here’s that interview:

Jay Fry, Data Center Dialog: There’s lots of debate about how cloud computing takes hold in an organization. Some see people starting with public clouds. There is also lots of conversation about private clouds. In your discussions with customers, what path do you see end user organizations taking now – and is it even possible to make any generalizations?

James Staten, Forrester: Most of the time enterprises start by experimenting with public clouds. They are easy to consume and deliver fast results. And typically the folks in the enterprises who do so are application developers and they are simply trying to get their work done as fast and easy as possible and see IT ops as slow, expensive, and a headache to deal with.

In response to this, IT ops likes the idea of a private cloud – their word, not mine. This usually translates into an internal cloud and the desire is to transform parts (if not all) of their virtual server environment into a cloud. Usually this transformation happens only in name, not in operation -- and that’s where a disconnect arises. IT ops pros tend to rebut public cloud by saying, “Hey, I can provision a VM in minutes, too.” But that’s not the full value of cloud computing. Fast deployment is just the beginning.

DCD: How do you see hybrid cloud environments coming into the picture? How soon will that be a reality?

James Staten: It’s a reality for some firms today, but not in the way that many people think. A hybrid between your internal data center and a public cloud isn’t very realistic due to latency, cost, and security. A hybrid between your internal cloud and a public cloud isn’t realistic either. (See the above answers for why.) What is realistic is a hybrid between dedicated hosting and cloud hosting within the same hosting provider. USA.gov is doing just such a thing in Terremark’s Alexandria, VA data center (Forrester customers can read a case study on this here). This kind of a hybrid allows the two separate environments to share the same backbone network and security parameters. And it allows the business service being supported to match the right type of resources to the right parts of the service.

For example, you may not want or need elastic scalability for your database tier, so it’s more stable and economical to host it on a dedicated resource with a predictable 12-month contract. But you have a lot of resource consumption volatility in the app and web tiers and so they are best served being hosted in a cloud environment.

DCD: I’ve written here before about rogue deployments using cloud computing from business users without the explicit buy-in of the IT department. Do you see that as likely or commonplace? How should IT deal with these?

James Staten: They are extremely common place as evidenced by our role-based research, which shows that when you ask application developers if their company is using cloud, you get back that 24% say yes; you ask the same question to IT ops pros and get back that 5% say yes. Clearly app dev is using the cloud and cimcumventing IT ops in doing so. It’s no surprise. They see IT ops as slow and rigid.

How should IT ops respond? First, you can’t be draconian and say, “Don’t use cloud.” Those who are parents know how well that works. Instead, IT ops needs to add value to this activity so they are invited into this process. They need to embrace the use of public clouds by asking how they can help.

DCD: What are some of the big changes that you see underway with regard to cloud computing this year so far? Has anything really surprised you?

James Staten: This year will be all about understanding where to start for most companies, how to move from testing the waters for the percentage who have already gotten this far, and how to optimize your cloud deployment for those who have already moved into production on public clouds.

For IT ops, this year is about roadmapping your transformation for running a virtual server environment to running an internal cloud. They won’t get there in one year but they can build the plan and start moving now.

Nothing has really surprised me in the past 12 months but I look forward to seeing the innovative ways companies will devise to take advantage of clouds in the future. We’ve seen some very promising starts.

DCD: Acquisitions are shaping up to be a major storyline this year from my point of view. And I’m not just saying that because of CA’s recent moves with Cassatt, Oblicore, 3Tera, and Nimsoft; there have been many. You were recently commenting on Twitter about confusion coming from Oracle about the management products related to their Sun acquisition. What role do you think acquisitions are (and should) play in shaping what customers have to choose from in the cloud computing space?

James Staten: For the most part, acquisitions in a new emerging space are about speed to market. The leading software companies could adapt their existing enterprise products to incorporate and integrate cloud computing, but that’s hard, as there are already 50-100 other priorities on the roadmap that keep the installed base happy. Acquisitions also inject new blood (new thinking, new technologies, perhaps even new culture) into an existing player and that is often sorely needed to drive a sense of urgency around addressing a new market opportunity because the immediate revenue opportunity in the new market is much smaller. This is at the heart of Clayton Christensen’s Innovator’s Dilemma. Cloud computing looks very much like a disruptive innovation and according to Christensen’s theory, the disruption can be a king-maker for those that lead the disruption (and make a pauper out of those being disrupted). So that fuels the belief that acquisitions are necessary.

DCD: You wrote one of the earliest analyst reports on cloud computing in March 2008 (“Is Cloud Computing Ready for the Enterprise?”). You’ve also been on top of “how to” topics for end users with research to help clarify some of the fuzziness around cloud computing (“Which Cloud Computing Platform is Right for You?” [April 2009], “Best Practices: Infrastructure-as-a-Service” [Sept. 2009], etc.). Given how the cloud computing category – and the industry debate – has evolved, would you approach some of your earlier research differently now? Any conclusions you would change?

James Staten: No, I feel proud of the research we have done as it was backed by real-world interviews with those who are leading this evolution, rather than theories and leaps of faith about what might occur. We were also very clear in our objective of clarifying what was truly new and different about cloud computing to help guide customers through what we knew would be a hype-filled world. It’s unfortunate the industry has latched on so tightly to the term “private cloud” because in our opinion it is a very nebulous and thus meaningless concept. Heck, anything can be made private. But then again, cloud computing isn’t most precise term, either.

DCD: If many years from now we’re thinking back on how cloud computing got started versus how it ended up, there will be an interesting storyline about the degree of difference between the two. How much of the hype around cloud computing should be ignored and how fundamental do you think it will end up being? What’s going to be the thing that really makes cloud more mainstream in your opinion?

James Staten: The one part about the hype that I think should be ignored is the belief that everything will be cloud in the future. While this is a nice, disruptive statement that draws a ton of discussion and "what if" thinking, it simply isn’t realistic. If it were, there would be no mainframes today. Everything old is still running in enterprise data centers; we simply contain these technologies as we move to adopt new ones that arise.

And cloud computing is definitely not an answer to every question. Some applications have no business in the cloud and frankly will be less efficient if put there.

It’s through better understanding of what the cloud is good for and what it isn’t that IT will move forward. At the heart of cloud computing is the idea of shared empowerment – that by agreeing to a standardized way of doing something, we can share that implementation and thus garner greater efficiencies from it. That concept will manifest itself in many ways over the coming years. SaaS is a classic example that is delivering new and greater functionality to customers faster. IaaS is a great example because when multiple customers share the same pool of resources the overall utilization of the pool can be higher and thus the cost of the infrastructure can be spread more effectively across a bigger customer set, lowering the cost of deployment for all. Take this further and you can imagine many more scenarios:

· Why buy any software when it is more efficient to rent it only when you need it? We haven’t seen that model in SaaS yet.

· Why write code when you can more easily construct a business service by stringing service elements together? This is the core of SOA and builds upon the Java construct of reusable libraries. How far can we take that?

· Why store anything yourself when storing things on the Internet allows that data to be anywhere you are, whenever you need it to be – and to be self-correcting? I’ve been using Plaxo for over 5 years to keep track of all my business contacts so I don’t really care if I lose my mobile phone, laptop, or other device that stores this information. Now that Plaxo links with Facebook and LinkedIn, all the people in my address book can update their own records and I get this info as soon as it is synced. That’s distributed data management in the cloud. Can this same model be applied to other data and storage problems?

DCD: So, what area do you think is the next battleground?

James Staten: There are many areas that will be effected by cloud computing. One market that greatly interests me right now is HPC/grid computing. Loosely-coupled applications are a great fit for the cloud today and flip the economics of grid on their head. There are some incredible examples of companies using this combination to transform how they do business in healthcare, financial services, government and many other fields. Business intelligence is fertile ground for change due to this and the influx of MapReduce. I’m really looking forward to seeing what changes in this arena.

DCD: What do you believe will be some of the more interesting starting points for customers’ cloud-based activity?

James Staten: You gotta start with test and development because this is the one area where any company can get immediate benefit. Every enterprise has a queue of test projects waiting to get lab resources. Use the cloud as an escape valve for these projects. Then take a look at your web applications. If they have traffic volatility they are natural fit for cloud.

DCD: Do you see any dead-ends that some customers are heading down that others should be careful to avoid?

James Staten: It’s a total dead end to think that you can simply buy a “cloud in a box” and suddenly you have an internal cloud. Internal cloud isn’t a “what,” it’s a “how.” How you operate the environment is far more the determiner of [the benefit of] cloud computing than the infrastructure and software technologies it is based on. This is true for service providers, too. Just because an ISP has expertise in managing physical or virtual servers doesn’t mean they can effectively run a cloud. Sure, some of the cloud building block technologies can help you get there, but this is totally an operational efficiency play.

DCD: Forrester recently changed its blogging policy for its analysts to require that any content in research-related areas be posted only to official Forrester blogs. Did this move make it harder or easier to blog, and do you think it’s going to help customers in the long run?

James Staten: It made it significantly easier for me as I strongly believe in separation between work and personal life, and equally believe in freedom of expression – and thankfully, so does Forrester. While I can’t speak for every analyst (nor can I speak for Forrester on this topic), I can say personally that this change in policy was a good one. Prior to this we had team blogs, rather than blogs for each analyst, and if someone wanted their own stage, they had to go outside to do it. Now our blogging platform gives every analyst their own outlet while preserving the aggregation of blog content by client role. We also moved to a blogging system that makes it much, much easier for me to author and publish blog entries myself. Anything that makes me more productive and helps clients consume our value is a good thing.

…

Thanks to James for spending the time for this extended interview. Of course, given that James is a pretty intense endurance runner during his off hours (he’s shooting for 8 marathons and 6 half-marathons this year – and 50 marathons by his 50th birthday), a marathon interview seemed somewhat appropriate.

If you have thoughts or feel an urge to disagree with James about any of topics we touched upon here, feel free to add your comments.

EMA’s Mann: enable the ‘responsible cloud’ while allowing cowboys enough rope to experiment

I remember back in the '90s when the World Wide Web was being described as the Wild Wild Web. For me, that phrase always conjured up jarring visions of gunslingers waiting patiently for Netscape Navigator to download page after page of underlined, blue hyperlinks.

Fast forward to 2010 and the next big wave of IT change -- cloud computing -- is being described in much the same way. Andi Mann, vice president at industry analyst group Enterprise Management Associates (EMA), recently authored a report (“The Responsible Cloud”) that used the same type of a frontier metaphor to describe the situation enterprises are finding themselves in with cloud computing today.

Andi's report centered not only on data describing the state of cloud computing in larger enterprises, but also made a big deal about the fact that many key management disciplines are both critical and still not in place for cloud. Both Carl Brooks of SearchCloudComputing and Denise Dubie of Network World wrote good summaries of some of the EMA report’s findings (CA, my employer, by the way, was one of the report’s sponsors).

To dig into what some of the specific survey findings might mean, Andi spent a few moments to do this Data Center Dialog interview. Read on for Andi’s thoughts on the speed of cloud adoption, why he was so surprised about some of EMA’s data about virtualization, respondents’ strong bias against public clouds, and just how you can make the most of those IT cowboys.

Jay Fry, Data Center Dialog: Andi, the EMA Responsible Cloud study you just published has some great data about customers’ current thoughts on some of the most important issues about cloud computing at the moment (hint to readers: it’s not the definition). First, a couple specific questions about your report. You reported that 11% of your surveyed companies are intending to implement cloud computing in the next 12 months. Does that feel like a lot, a meager number, or just about right given where you feel things are at the moment?

Andi Mann, Enterprise Management Associates: Given that we are really still in an early-adopter period with cloud computing, I think 11% seems just right considering we were looking only at mid- to very large-sized enterprises. Of course, there is a lot of hype around, with predictions of 20, 30, 40% or more of enterprises switching to cloud, but these seem over-optimistic to me. Cloud is a fundamental shift in how we build and deliver IT services, and especially with these larger organizations, it would be surprising to see an overwhelming adoption just yet. With still slow economic growth, that would mean enterprises dumping their sunk cost in existing IT, which realistically is simply not going to happen overnight.

DCD: One of the big on-going debates (still, unfortunately) is about the reality of private clouds. Your survey numbers say that they are not only real, but are favored by a significant number of customers (75%). Some industry watchers have called private clouds a stepping stone to the public cloud; others see it an end in-and-of itself. Others call it purely self-serving vendor hype. What is your take on your results – and the debate?

Andi Mann: The results did not surprise me. In fact, it seems to me that a lot of predictions about public cloud are based on impossibly idealistic notions of IT, not on the realities of a day-to-day, in-the-trenches view. Enterprises like the idea of cloud, but are looking for a balance between the ideal and the achievable. So they will look to get the benefits of cloud computing – the economies, the self-service, the agility and flexibility – from their own existing investments.

Over time they will likely branch out into public clouds in some way, but IT never gets rid of anything – mainframes, COBOL, client-server. Heck, I know some very large organizations still running Windows NT and even DOS on mission-critical systems today. I have no doubt it will be the same with cloud – private and public cloud will both simply extend the IT we already have, not replace it.

DCD: I like your comment that cloud computing is “like any ‘new frontier,’” it has “too many cowboys, and not enough sheriffs.” The whole focus of your report is the “responsible” cloud and your prescriptive maturity model for how to get there. What is so “irresponsible” about how many orgs are approaching the cloud at the moment and how do you suggest that get fixed? What’s going to lead to more sheriffs in IT? Will we get there quickly enough?

Andi Mann: The issue I see with many “irresponsible” cloud deployments is that they are lacking important management discipline – monitoring, audit, change detection, data management, and more. As a direct result, they are open to some pretty crippling problems, like data loss, downtime, poor performance, audit failure, and more – which might be fine for a Web 2.0 startup, but is unacceptable for a global financial enterprise.

As cloud use becomes increasingly mission-critical in major organizations, I do believe we will see repercussions for this lack of management, including loss of business, damaged credibility, prosecution, fines and more. When that starts to happen, we see in our research that performance monitoring, event management, reporting, security, automation, problem diagnosis, alerting, and more become more than nice-to-have, but rather mission-critical in their own right.

DCD: Coming from CA, I’m obviously a big proponent of the management disciplines you talk a lot about in your report and how to bring those to the cloud. However, I’ll play devil’s advocate for the moment: isn’t there something good about breaking the rules sometimes to get huge changes accomplished? I’ve heard lots of anecdotal evidence to suggest that cloud computing is following the same adoption trend that has been followed by so many disruptive innovations that have gone before: adopters often doing their adopting by ignoring the rules (developers paying for EC2 instances on their credit cards and the like). If IT were to always stick to the tried-and-true, innovation would never have a chance. How should companies look at those trade-offs?

Andi Mann: That is actually a really good point. It is important to see that “irresponsible cloud” is not always bad per se, or at least not forever. My colleague Julie Craig actually pointed this out in the report, saying that the “cowboys” of IT, just like in the Wild West, have an important role in opening up new frontiers like cloud. With many positive aspects of the pioneering spirit of the Wild West cowboy – adventurous, innovative, self-sufficient – they take risks so that they and others can eventually reap the rewards.

But there is a time and a place for them, and once they start to threaten the integrity of mission-critical systems and data, they must be reined in. Otherwise organizations will start to face data breaches, compliance and audit failures, service outages, staff costs, and more that will damage their business, rather than enable it.

DCD: You talk a bit in your survey about “rogue deployments” of cloud computing. What should even the most process-driven IT department learn from some of these rogue cloud efforts? Is there a good way to pull some of the rogue efforts back into the mainstream that you’ve seen?

Andi Mann: This comes down to gaining visibility into cloud deployments – such as through application mapping, network monitoring, change detection, or simply asking – and then allowing the cowboys enough rope to experiment, to learn what works and what doesn’t, to build skills and knowledge, to fix broken processes and streamline failing ones, and even to make some mistakes, as long as they are not "playing" with mission-critical systems.

Over time, these cowboys can potentially become important contributors in a new cloud group within IT, with a mandate to experiment, and go outside the box, with non-disruptive systems and experimental applications to start with, but over time with mission-critical systems too. Certainly stomping them out is not the answer – instead, by finding out what they are doing and why, you will learn what is broken and how to fix it.

DCD: Your data about virtualization adoption shows VMware at the top, as expected. However, both Microsoft Hyper-V and Oracle VM (with the Sun xVM numbers added in) are not so very far behind. That seems really surprising to me. What’s your take?

Andi Mann: Yes, that was surprising to me too. VMware leading all is not a shock, of course. I have been seeing Hyper-V gaining strength in virtualization too, so I am not too surprised Microsoft is a strong second choice, especially given the massive deployment of Windows and the strong leaning among respondents toward private, on-premise cloud.

However, I am very surprised that Citrix XenServer in particular is behind Oracle VM/Sun xVM (although the gap between them is within the survey’s margin of error). I think Oracle VM or Sun xVM are well behind even other Xen variants as general virtualization platforms. They especially need to grow their limited ecosystem of management support, particularly in essential areas of cloud management like automation and service management, before they are even close to parity with ESX, Hyper-V, or XenServer. Yet with Sun’s stellar pedigree throughout the Internet boom, Oracle’s market dominance in applications, and a formidable stack that runs from hardware all the way up, perhaps it stands to reason that Oracle has a bigger opportunity in cloud than I and many others (including Larry Ellison, at least in public [prior to their recent Sun briefing, anyway -ed.]) previously thought.

DCD: What were the other big shockers for you as you put together the report?

Andi Mann: For me, a few things really stand out. The first is the importance that these respondents put on management. Common wisdom (which frequently is neither) says that cloud is flexible, open, unrestricted, and unencumbered by processes or disciplines like ITIL or ISO or ITSM. However, the reality is the exact opposite, with a majority of organizations actually believing that most management disciplines are very important, with many cited as being even more important to cloud than to traditional IT.

The second big shocker was the impact on maturity that cloud can help to deliver, with the data showing not just a correlation between maturity and cloud deployment, but even suggesting that cloud deployment actually leads to increased IT operational maturity.

Third is the high number of respondents that cited difficulty or cost of implementation and lack of flexibility and agility as their most critical problems in cloud computing. Again, this runs contrary to the common wisdom that cloud is easy to deploy and flexible to run.

Finally, perhaps the biggest shock is the total beatdown that real enterprises give to the idea of public cloud – with 69% of respondents completely rejecting public cloud options, and only 9% choosing to adopt a purely public cloud approach (compared to 46% adopting a purely private cloud approach), it really stands out as a pariah in the choice of deployment models.

DCD: When customers are looking to select cloud computing technologies, your numbers say that an existing relationship with a vendor is the least important of all selection criteria. So, all bets seem to be off with the cloud, eh? Any insights on why?

Andi Mann: This is not entirely unusual. In fact, we have seen the same result in desktop virtualization. There are a lot of things more important than a single supplier or a relationship with an account manager. Ultimately, these are nice to have, but if you cannot ensure uptime, security, performance, or other absolutely critical values, a supplier relationship will not stop you going out of business. So enterprises are rightly focusing on what is really important. Vendor relationships will come into play, but only after all other requirements are satisfied.

So virtualization and other vendors that have aspirations to be cloud technology providers had best make sure they bring their ‘A’ game – they will not get on the team by reputation alone.

DCD: Many surveys about cloud computing have pointed to security, compliance, technology maturity, and even potential vendor lock-in as barriers to success. Interestingly, yours is one of the few (only?) I’ve seen where “human/political issues” tops the list. From my experience, organizations don’t always realize that is going to be a problem, but it ends up being a huge one, so I think you’re spot on. Any color on this and did you hear anything about how organizations address are currently looking to address this hurdle?

Andi Mann: I think a lot of people, including analysts, can forget that IT is a combination of people, process, and technology. We saw in our research into virtualization on multiple occasions that the human issues were actually the biggest hurdles to success – especially skills, resourcing, and time, but also departmental politics – so we included this in our cloud survey as well.

Especially in new technologies, the technology and process can be difficult, but ultimately it seems the people issues are the most difficult to overcome. Again, you can start to address these issues with controlled ‘skunkworks’ – using deployments in non-critical areas not just to build skills – but also to establish repeatable procedures, and to show how to be successful, so you can at least get a head-start in overcoming skills, resourcing, and political issues when the time comes to deploy cloud for critical systems and applications.

…

Thanks for the additional insights and in-depth commentary on the EMA report and survey results, Andi.

If anyone would like the report, but is not an EMA customer, you can purchase the report here.