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.

Steve Jobs' not-so-accidental role in the consumerization of enterprise IT

There was a wistful feeling that hit me (and from the sounds of it, many of us in Silicon Valley) last Wednesday when I heard about the loss of Steve Jobs.

After pausing for a moment or two to take in his career as a whole, that melancholy quickly turned to something close to amazement. It is hard not to be amazed at all Steve had been able to accomplish. He somehow brought a simple beauty to
technology that had previously been complex and, well, stodgy at best.

However, in the flood of tributes and “what I learned from Steve” articles that came after, the ones about Steve’s impact on enterprise IT were some of the ones that I found more controversial.

How Steve put consumer pressure on enterprise IT

Lisa Schmeiser’s InfoWorld article, for example, caught my eye because it underscored many of the points I thought were so amazing about Steve in the first place. Under his direction, Apple created devices that were so great, you wanted to use them. First for personal tasks. Then for everything. In this way,Apple and Jobs went from “always being an outside force” (as Joe McKendrick of ZDNet put it) to turning up the consumerization pressure on enterprise IT in a big way.

How did he do it? Like Lisa, I think the consumerization of IT push owes a lot of its strength to the iPod. I certainly fell for it. For me, that innocent iPod Shuffle I got as a Christmas present was the gateway drug for me to buy my way up the chain. Next came a Nano, a full-sized iPod, another Shuffle, an iPhone for the wife, 2 more Shuffles for the kids, at last an iPad, and most recently a MacBook Air.

And while I didn’t use the iPods at work (much), the iPad and the Air instantly became part of my work life, given how they helped me get my work done better (and despite some reservations about the iPad by the IT department at my company at the time).

Was his impact on enterprise IT accidental?

“Steve Jobs's disregard for enterprise IT was not a secret,” writes Lisa in her article. “Yet without him, there would be no consumerization of IT. He entirely changed the nature of enterprise computing -- accidentally.”

This is where I have a hard time with Lisa’s article. I agree with a tweet I saw by @robhof: Lisa’s premise that all this was accidental on the part of Steve Jobs misses the point. I think part of his genius was to make it seem accidental, but it to be part of a bigger plan. Or at least part of a logical evolution.

Mixing “insanely great” with enterprise IT

My feeling is this: when you design things to be “insanely great” and to delight the human beings that are supposed to be using your product, it isn’t that odd that they want to use those very same products in all parts of their lives. Personal and work. And enterprise IT would be a bit foolish not to figure out how to embrace what these devices can do eventually. That pressure on large company IT orgs is very real (from what I’ve seen) and today is coming from all sides. That’s an opportunity for both IT and the vendors in this space to help make this possible.

And it won’t stop with hardware. I think we’ll find that the App Store/iTunes metaphor will become the dominant way that software gets purchased going forward. It may have started with Amazon-style on-line stores, but Apple perfected it with music and quickly pivoted to applications, too. The software and mobile industries have learned from this and will never look back. Things like the Android marketplace and even the Cloud Commons effort I helped get underway at CA Technologies (my previous employer) were driven or at least inspired by this approach.

I think seeing all this as accidental on the part of Steve Jobs is probably not right. Jobs had his focus on the only thing that matters, whether the initial target is consumers or enterprise IT – human beings.

Dave Ohara’s Green Data Center Blog pointed me toward a Jobs quote that underscores this. “One of the things I’ve always found is that you’ve got to start with the customer experience and work backwards to the technology.” He may not have been plotting to take over every aspect of IT, but Jobs certainly picked the best way to do it: whatever you create, create it well so human beings want to use it.

Thankfully, enough time to reflect

The news of Steve’s death leaves a hole, for sure. The way it played out, I thought, was actually kind of fitting. By stepping down from his role as Apple’s CEO in August, Steve gave people a rare chance for reflection (I collected and posted some of my favorite Steve Jobs stories published at the time). Whether he meant to or not, he afforded the industry a chance to say good-bye while he was still alive.

Hopefully he also had the chance to see how much of a difference he made. And how much that difference was appreciated.

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.

Looking forward or backward? Cloud makes you decide what IT wants to be known for

Cloud computing is all about choice. I’ve heard that a lot. What most people mean when they say this is that there are suddenly a whole bunch of places to run your IT workloads. At Amazon using EC2 or at Rackspace? At ScaleMatrix or Layered Tech? Or inside your own data center on a private cloud you’ve created yourself?

But there are some more fundamental choices that cloud seems to present as well. These choices are about what IT is going to be when it grows up. Or at least what it’s going to morph into next.

Here are 3 big decisions that I see that cloud computing forces IT to make, all of which add up to one, big, fundamental question: will IT define itself as an organization that looks toward the future or back into the past? Before you scoff, read on: the answer, even for those eagerly embracing the cloud, may not be as clear as you think.

The business folks’ litmus test for IT: Cloud v. No Clouds

First off, the business people in big organizations are using the rise of cloud computing, even after setbacks like the recent Amazon outage, to test whether IT departments are about looking forward or backward. When the business folks come to IT and describe what they are looking for, they now expect cloud-type reaction times, flexibility, infinite options, and pay-as-you-go approaches. At that point, IT is forced to pick sides. Will they acknowledge that cloud is an option? Will IT help make that option possible, if that’s the right choice for the business? Or will they desperately hold onto the past?

Embracing cloud options in some way, shape, or form puts IT on the path to being known as the forward-looking masters of the latest and greatest way of delivering on what the business needs. Rejecting consideration of the cloud paints IT as a cabal of stodgy naysayers who are trying their darnedest to keep from having to do anything differently.

John Treadway tweeted a great quote from Cloud Connect guru Alistair Croll on this same topic: "The cloud genie is out of the bottle. Stop looking for the cork and start thinking [about] what to wish for."

The business folks know this. They will use IT’s initial reaction to these options as a guide for future interactions. Pick incorrectly, and the business isn’t likely to ask again. They’ll do their own thing. That path leads to less and less of IT work being run by IT.

OK. Say IT decides to embrace the cloud as an option. The hard choices don’t stop there.

A decision about the IT role: Factory Manager v. Supply Chain Orchestrator

Starting to make use of cloud computing in real, live situations puts IT on a path to evaluate what the role of IT actually evolves into. Existing IT is about running the “IT factory,” making the technology work, doing what one CIO I heard recently called “making sure the lights don’t flicker.” This is IT’s current comfort zone.

However, as you start using software, platforms, and infrastructure as-a-service, IT finds itself doing less of the day-to-day techie work. IT becomes more of an overseer and less of the people on the ground wiring things together.

I’ve talked about this role before as a supply chain orchestrator, directing and composing how the business receives its IT service, and not necessarily providing all that service from a company’s own data centers. You can make a good case that this evolution of IT will give it a more strategic seat at the table with the business users.

But, even if you decide you want to consider cloud-based options and you’re all in favor of changing the role of IT itself, there’s still another question that will have a big effect on the perception – and eventual responsibilities – of IT.

The problem with sending the new stuff cloud: Building IT expertise in Legacy v. Cutting Edge

Everyone who has made the choice to use cloud computing is next faced with the logical follow-on question: so, what do I move to the cloud? And, then, what do I keep in-house to run myself?
And that’s where I think things get tricky. In many cases, the easiest thing to do is to consider using the cloud for new applications – the latest and greatest. This lets you keep the legacy systems that are already working as they are – running undisturbed as the Golden Rules of IT and a certain 110-year-old light bulb suggest (“if it’s working, don’t touch it!”).

But that choice might have the unintended effect of pigeonholing your IT staff as the caretakers of creaky technology that is not at the forefront of innovation. You push the new, more interesting apps off elsewhere – into the cloud. In trying to make a smart move and leverage the cloud, IT misses its chance to show itself as a team that is at (and can handle) the leading edge.

Maybe I’m painting this too black and white, especially in IT shops where they are working to build up a private cloud internally. And maybe I’m glossing over situations where IT actually does choose to embrace change in its own role. In those situations, there will be a “factory” role, alongside an “orchestrator” role. But that “factory” manager role will be trimmed back to crucial, core applications – and though they are important, they are also the ones least in need of modernization.

Either way, isn’t the result still this?: IT’s innovation skills get lost over time if they don’t take a more fundamental look at how they are running all of their IT systems, environment, and how they look at their own roles.

The problem I see is that big enterprises aren’t going to suddenly reassess everything they have on the first day they begin to venture into the cloud. However, maybe they should. For the good of the skills and capability and success of their IT teams, a broader view should be on the table.

Short-term and long-term answers

So, as you approach each of these questions, be sure to look not only at the immediate answer, but also at the message you’re sending to those doing the asking. Your answers today will have a big impact on all future questions.

All of this, I think, points out how much of a serious, fundamental shift cloud computing brings. The cloud is going to affect who IT is and how it’s viewed from now on. Take the opportunity to be the one proactively making that decision in your organization. And if you send things outside your four walls, or in a private cloud internally, make sure you know why – and the impact these decisions will have on IT’s perception with your users.

Since cloud computing is all about choice, it’s probably a smart idea to make sure you’re the one doing the choosing.

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.

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.

The 110-year-old light bulb is a little too much like today’s IT

Last weekend the San Francisco Chronicle had a big write-up on a crazy fluke of technology: a light bulb that has been working for over a century without burning out.

The celebrity bulb hangs from a ceiling, high above a Livermore, Calif., fire department, and has baffled anyone trying to figure out why it is still functioning after 110 years. It obviously does not have the same manufacturer as the light bulbs in my upstairs hallway – it seems that at least one of those needs replacing every month.

The curious part about the “centennial bulb” – and the part that strikes me as having some relevance to the IT systems we know and interact with on a daily basis – is that no one knows why it’s still working.

And, given that it is still working, no one is going to interrupt its operation to find out why.

That sounds a lot like how IT has traditionally been run. There’s a bunch of hard work and complicated technological details that go into getting a certain system or application up and running. The good news is: getting it up and running in the first place is often the hardest part.

The more successful applications are the ones that then keep running with a minimum of effort, the fewest upgrades, and least changes required. In fact, once something is doing its job, the ROI for an upgrade of an underlying hardware or software infrastructure component is, frankly, really low in the eyes of the users (vendors will often beg to differ, of course). You really don’t want to touch it, lest you break something.

The Golden Rules of IT, starting with “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it”

Amusingly, that same topic came up in a conversation I was having with analyst and ZDNet blogger Dan Kusnetzky. He tied our conversation back to the “Golden Rules of IT,” which I first saw when Dan published them (for a second time, apparently) back in 2007. “If it’s not broken, don’t fix it” was merely the beginning of his list.

Dan included inarguable IT wisdom like “Don’t touch it, you’ll break it” and “If you touched it and it broke, it will take longer to fix and, in all likelihood, cost more than you think to fix.” Which, of course, leads to “Don’t make major changes unless people are screaming!” And, finally, that means settling for “good enough is good enough.”

But, as pithy as they are, those “Golden Rules” lead to really bad IT choices, I would argue.

When Golden Rules become bad advice

Thinking back to the long-lived Livermore light bulb, I can’t argue with the fact that it’s still working. But is it doing anything useful for the fire station other than attracting curious tourists from China, Germany, and Fresno?

Nope. In fact, it’s barely accomplishing its intended purpose – giving off light. It began life as a 60-watt bulb, but is only producing 4 watts at this point – about the same as a night light. Not so good if you’re trying to find the keys to the fire truck.

If you’re running an IT shop that’s supporting a rapidly changing business, this kind of technology nostalgia and tolerance for something that doesn’t seem to be making the grade seems quaint at best. More likely, it’s exactly the kind of thing that, in the end, is going to put your IT systems -- and your business – in jeopardy.

In IT, you would rather have “new idea” light bulbs turning on

In my post about how cloud computing lets organizations focus on “good enough” IT – being able to try out things quickly and effectively, without having to worry about every bell and every whistle – I’m essentially arguing for the opposite of the centennial light bulb. (Sorry, Livermore.)

Just because the old thing hasn’t broken doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try out something new. Tolerating a creaky, old system just because it hasn’t come crashing down yet is not pointing you in the right direction. “Good enough” is not something you settle for, but in fact an approach that gives you the freedom to try things, and to do so quickly. I can’t really speak for the light bulb industry, but the pace of IT technology change is so fast that you really have to be paying attention to what else is possible. And even if you aren’t, you can probably bet your competition is.

In fact, I’m arguing, cloud computing is perfect for this sort of experimentation. Cloud lets you dip your toe in and see how it goes. Cloud lets you try a new way of resourcing (or architecting) a given application. Cloud also means you only have to pay for what you use, when you use it. Experimentation like this is how innovation starts – and how new light bulbs go on in peoples’ heads in the first place. I’m betting it will lead to something better.

Of course, that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy a bit of quirky history along the way. Those looking for a thrill-a-minute can check out the 24-hour-a-day webcam pictures of the centennial bulb doing its thing at http://www.centennialbulb.org/.