For me, it's that time again: start-up life -- and chair building -- beckon

After over 2 years at CA Technologies and almost 6 years with a vendor focused on what is (or would become) the cloud computing space, it’s “that time” for me again.

It’s time for me to jump back into a start-up.

CA has been a welcome change of pace and a rich set of experiences for me. I came into CA from the Cassatt acquisition back in the summer of 2009 -- shifting from Cassatt’s 50-person approach to problems to one in which we could bring the resources of a $4-billion and 12,000-person company to bear.

I like to think that I've helped move things forward at CA and for customers thinking about cloud computing. I joined the team that laid the groundwork for and built CA’s cloud business from the ground up. Following some very impactful strategy discussions, we pulled in a bunch of key acquisitions, including Oblicore, 3Tera, and Nimsoft, and have been building businesses on it since. (See here for what some of luminaries in the cloud market working with CA are doing and here for the company’s most recent cloud-related moves.)

The importance of building…chairs

But, deep down in my DNA, I like doing start-ups. I'm about to join my fourth. Sometimes they work out great, sometimes not, but the connection between the work you do and the results is fresh, visceral, and immediate. They give you a feeling of belonging that is hard to replicate.

I remember Alfred Chuang, one of the founders of BEA, telling over and over again how he had actually put together the chairs for the company’s first conference room in our rental space in East Palo Alto back in ’95 (I was with BEA from those early days until I joined Cassatt in ’05). I remember looking forward to when Ed Scott (my boss at the time) would be on the road with Bill Coleman or his sales team, since I was sharing an unassuming corner of Ed’s office. The office frankly seemed a lot bigger when only one of us was trying to use it at a time.

The New Thing

So what’s the New Thing that I’m going to?

I’m joining a small, stealthy cloud computing /mobility start-up in the Bay Area as VP of marketing. I will share details, the name, and world domination plans as soon as I can.

I start this coming Friday (and I’ll be on a plane with my new CEO twice that day, amusingly enough for those that follow my too-frequent Twitter flight exploits). I’ve worked with several of these folks before – a *really* important prerequisite in my book – and the others come highly recommended.

In one of my meetings with the CEO, I helped folks lug a few boxes out of the conference room so we could meet. While we were talking, a few team members were just outside the door putting together what was in those boxes. Yep, you guessed it: office chairs.

Now, many of the market signs that I’m seeing are pointing in the right direction for my new company and its space. But, when they started putting chairs together, I think that sealed the deal for me.

Getting started

So, this week I’ve been taking a little R&R, playing House Dad a bit, catching up on some blog posts, and buying a few gadgets to get me started.

Going forward, I’ll continue to write here at Data Center Dialog on most of the topics I’ve already been covering, plus expanding into a few more at the cross-section of cloud, mobility, and IT consumerization. I also intend to continue to contribute to Cloud Commons (and will re-subscribe to This Week in Cloud as a non-CA person).

And, when we’re ready, I’m also expecting to have the relevant posts show up on my new company’s site as well.

Thanks to everyone for reading the blog so far. I'm excited about what's next and see it as a great extension of what you've been reading here. I hope to continue to make this a worthwhile dialog for all of us.

At the very least, I should be an expert if you ever need your office chair adjusted.

Why cloud computing hype isn't bad for IT after all

A week or two back, ReadWriteWeb ran and published the results of a reader poll of the “most over-hyped cloud technologies.” Amusingly, the results (aside from a NoSQL mention) read like the basic NIST definition of the key components of cloud computing. Software as a Service, private clouds, Infrastructure as a Service, and Platform as a Service all made the top 5.

Wow, I thought. That barely scratches the surface. Plenty more cloud computing terms were enjoying their moment of irrational exuberance, but were being left out in the cold by this particular survey. A few Twitter conversations unearthed some very deserving nominations. Not to be forgotten:


• Hybrid clouds. Apparently hybrid clouds didn’t have quite enough hype-y-ness to make the list. Weird, considering that term tends to be the punch line to nearly every cloud strategy and direction conversation that I hear. Better luck at next year’s awards ceremony, I guess.


• Cloud bursting (nominated by @reillyusa and @AaronMotsinger). Some folks have been arguing back and forth about whether it is really a legitimate (or even possible) use case. @pdowning1077 noted he much preferred the term “capacity on demand,” but that doesn’t help settle the argument.


• Cloud brokers. Forrester has been posting some interesting research for its subscribers on this new role (also defined by NIST in the July 5 version of its standards roadmap, if you want a standards org to weigh in for legitimacy). I’d say this conversation is still very early. The hype wagon train for this term has just set off down the road.


But probably the most impactful comment was another by @pdowning1077. “How about just the term ‘cloud’ [in general]?” he asked. How could they forget to include the mother of all hype-worthy terms in their polling?


So much hype that “cloud computing” becomes meaningless?


The same week of all this discussion, David Linthicum reported that cloud computing (the term) had now become essentially “meaningless.” That comment came on the heels of Gartner’s annual publication of their hype cycles. A quick scan notes that cloud computing is still close to where it was last year, just nosing over the (hype-laden) peak of inflated expectations. Private cloud computing is rapidly moving to join it, perched perilously over the trough of disillusionment, ready to take the leap.


OK, no one would argue with the extreme levels of marketing attention from everyone from start-ups to 30-year-old software companies (who, us?) to service providers. But just because a bunch of marketing people are in a frenzy doesn’t mean we should write off the trend they are talking about as a bunch of meaningless fluff.


The hype has caused IT to pay attention to cloud computing


In fact, if I’m reading the market right, I’d say that there are actually some really good things that have come out of the hype around cloud (and continue to do so).


• We suddenly had something to call this good idea. There were a bunch of technologies and entrepreneurs out there struggling for several years to put a palatable name to what they were working on. Some started off calling this grid computing, some utility computing, and others more obscure terms than those. But, the early hype around cloud computing a few years back gave a name to the idea. We pulled several of these companies into CA (Cassatt and 3Tera, to name two), but many others were struggling with this same issue. One of my early posts on this blog was about how the term private cloud may not have been precise or perfect, but it enabled us to have the right conversation. I think the same thing goes for the overall cloud computing concept.

• It created a way to catch the attention and imagination of enterprise IT. By talking about a Big Vision of IT infrastructure that matched compute supply with compute demands at any given time (and matched costs accordingly), ears perked up. It was the next logical topic to discuss with the IT guys who were fresh from thinking about how virtualization could free them up from particular pieces of hardware. In a world in which IT is fighting for every budget dollar, mostly just to keep treading water, an idea about how to get off this downhill hamster wheel is at least appealing to consider. That’s step one. (Ken Oestreich, by the way, has a great blog from a few months back on the brief history of the vision of cloud computing.)

• The hype extended the discussion past the technologists to the business people. All the hubbub over cloud computing got the business users excited at a time when the economy was giving them little to be excited about. “So, you mean I might have a way to turn some of these business ideas into reality, despite the drubbing that the sour economy has given us and the measly budget that my IT partners say we have at our disposal?” This has been important – the business guys are the ones, in the end, pushing when IT starts to get nervous and pulls back from the visionary edge that cloud puts them on.


• The hype has pressured big vendors into some self-reflection that will be beneficial for their customers. Many of the larger vendors jumped on the cloud bandwagon through new offerings, blatant rebranding of old offerings (shame on you), acquisitions, and the like. To make any of these moves, vendors have had to take stock and rethink what they can and should be providing given what their customers want. In some cases (like here at CA with Nimsoft), it causes the vendors to broaden the set of customers they are actually serving.


• The intense amount of discussion has started an intense amount of scrutiny, revealing how useful cloud can actually be. One thing that happens when the hype levels reach fever pitch is that people start pushing back. The recent demand for real-world examples and exasperation over cloud outages has been the natural backlash from being force-fed lots and lots of best-case scenarios, rainbows, and unicorns. Journalists and analysts have often helped push for these kind of reality checks, though they also tend to pile on as technologies or ideas drop into the “trough of disillusionment” that Gartner is so fond of describing. Enterprise IT, business users, and the vendors themselves all eventually do a fair bit of policing, sometimes too late for their own good, but we seem to be headed in this (positive) direction right now.

So while a lot of the hype can seem like so much wasted energy from all parties, when the trend or shift being hyped actually has merit, something useful comes out the other end. Now, would

most of us (advertising agencies and ad reps excluded) prefer some way to skip the aggravation of this process and jump right to the end? I’d bet so. However, consider this all a bit of a trial by fire. The only way for something to be proven strong enough to pass through the fire is, well, to actually do it.

So, hold your nose and smile. Hype is good – with a few important caveats. Be critical. Be well-armed with the right questions to ask in order to discern the valuable from the merely fancifully over-marketed. Be ready to see the value in approaching something a new way, even if it’s something you’ve done the same way for decades. Be pragmatic enough to know it won’t happen overnight or with the wave of a magic wand.

If it makes you feel any better, cloud computing isn’t the only term getting the Gartner Hype Curve treatment this year. Added to the list, according to this ReadWriteWeb article, were big data, gamification, Internet of Things, and consumerization. Misery loves company, I guess.


And, in the meantime, it may be time to come up with your own term to start campaigning for next year’s Cloud Hype Awards. I think the hype is here to stay for a while longer.

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.

Boy, my new iPad and I are demanding a lot from IT -- and we're not alone

I caved and joined the revolution this weekend. I bought an iPad.

And while it was very fun to do all the things that a newly minted Apple fan boy does (like downloading the app that turns the iPad into ones like they had on Star Trek: The Next Generation), that was just the beginning. I had yet to try to torment my internal IT department with my demands.

First and foremost: I wanted to use my iPad as part of my normal work day. I'm certainly not the first to want this. The appearance of consumer-purchased devices that employees would like to have (must be!) supported by internal IT is getting an amazing amount of attention. Though not always from IT departments, if they can help it. In addition, it’s not just 1 or 2 folks who want to start using tablets, smartphones, and the like. It’s everyone.

What does “not supported” mean for my iPad?

So, first thing Monday, I tried my luck linking into our IT systems. It started off innocently enough: I easily connected to the in-office wireless network. The first real test was going to be whether I could get my corporate email and calendar.



IT had obviously been through this before; there is a document in place on our help system that explains how to do everything. Unfortunately, it starts like this: "Please check if this iPad was purchased for business purposes or if it was a personal purchase. Note: personal machines are not supported."

Hmmm. That sounded ominous. But, despite being “not supported,” it was really simple to enable email and calendar access. I had to add some security precautions, as you might expect, but it worked. My fingers are crossed that it continues to work, given the help I’m not going to get. And, of course, there are a multitude of our enterprise apps I’m not getting access to.

But I’m satisfied. For now. But not everyone is. And corporations certainly shouldn’t be.

Cloud computing, intriguing mobile devices (and what you can do with them) are ganging up on IT

My process of tormenting IT with my iPad started Monday, but it’s guaranteed to last for a long time. And, as I said, the key issue is that I’m not alone.

People – and, yes, it’s about the people and what they (er, I) want to do – have devices that they love that give them easy, constant access. That should be good. There’s a blurring of the boundary between business and personal that businesses stand to gain from.

Cloud-based resources give organizations a fighting chance to scale sufficiently to keep up with the volume driven by these more-and-more-ubiquitous tablets and smartphones. But management and security are often thought of way too late.

In a piece posted at Forbes.com, Dan Woods, CTO and editor of CITO Research, noted that “the IT monopoly has ended but the need to ensure security, reliability, compliance, and integration has not. Most consumerization efforts are long on choice and short on ways to actually address that fact that IT’s responsibilities to manage the issues have not disappeared.”

Shirking management and security – or leaving it as an afterthought – will not cut it this time around, especially since users don’t think twice about going around the official IT channels, something that those official IT channels really can’t afford to have happen if they are going to get their jobs done.

The train is moving faster than you thought

In a study called “IT Consumers Transform the Enterprise: Are You Ready?” that IDC published a few weeks back (free copy without registration here; CA Technologies was a sponsor), they mention these needs – and the speed they need to be dealt with. “The train is moving faster than you thought. Adoption of public cloud, mobile, and social technologies in business operations has already reached high levels, often driven by ‘stealth IT.’”

IDC noted a “surprisingly high” (and concerning) level of personal and confidential information sharing. While the “consumerization of IT” introduces a bunch of new, innovative services and approaches into the enterprise, it also exposes the org to “business risk, compliance gaps, and security challenges if they are not managed.”

An InfoWorld article by Nancy Gohring noted another IDC study that found that even as more and more people are bringing their own tablets and smartphones to work, IT departments have been “slow to support them and may not even be aware of the trend.” Slow, I understand (given I just bought my first iPad a few days ago); not aware, however, is a recipe for big headaches ahead.

What are those ahead of the train doing to stay ahead?

Not everyone, however, is behind the curve. Part of the IDC survey I mentioned earlier highlighted the top characteristics of leaders in this area – as in, what behaviors are they showing. The leaders are more likely to be those using IaaS, PaaS, and Saas; those who are interacting with customers using their smart mobile devices; those who are concerned about data protection, back-up, and end-to-end user experience. “Businesses that are being proactive about consumer-driven IT are more likely to realize greater benefits from investments made to address the consumerization of IT,” said IDC’s Liam Lahey in a recent blog that summarized their survey findings.

In addition, in Woods’ Forbes article, he pointed out some questions that need asking, many at an application level: “Supporting mobile workers adds a new dimension to every application in a company. Which applications should be supported on mobile devices? How much of each application should be available? When does it make sense to craft custom mobile solutions? How can consumer apps become part of the picture? What is [the] ROI for mobility? How much should be invested[?] None of these questions have obvious answers.” Another post of his has some good suggested approaches for IT.

My CA Technologies colleague Andi Mann did a good job of netting this all out in another recent post: “While a minority of leading organizations already ‘get it’, there is still a massive latent opportunity to establish new game-changing technologies, drive disruptive innovations, build exponential revenues, and beat your competitors.” In other words, having IT bury its head in the sand is going to mean missing some opportunities that don’t come along very often to reshape the competitive landscape.

Especially when you couple the support of these tablets and other mobile devices with the changes coming about with the rise of cloud computing.

Look in the mirror

In the end, says Andi, “it’s all about you! ...The bottom line is that you — as an individual, as a consumer, as an employee, as an IT professional — are responsible for a radical change affecting business, government, and IT. You are both driving this change as a consumer of social, mobile, and cloud applications; and being driven by this change as an IT professional adapting to these new customer behaviors.”

Maybe TIME Magazine wasn’t wrong a few years back when they named You as their Person of the Year (congrats, by the way) with a big mirror-like thing on their front cover. It’s just that the revolution always takes longer than people think, and the results are never quite evenly distributed.

I’m a perfect example. I've been involved in cloud computing for many years, but didn’t join this particular part of the revolution -- the part where I expect flicking my fingers on a piece of glass will get me access to what I want -- until this past weekend.

But I’ll probably be confounding IT departments left and right from now on. Make it so.

A service provider ecosystem gaining steam in the cloud is good news for enterprises

If you’re in enterprise IT, you (or that guy who sits next to you) are very likely looking to figure out how to start using cloud computing. You’ve probably done a fair bit of sleuthing around the industry to see what’s out there. Stats from a number of different analyst firms point overwhelmingly to the fact that enterprises are first and foremost trying to explore private cloud, an approach that gives them a lot of control and (hopefully) the ability to use their existing security and compliance implementations and policies.

And, all that sleuthing will most likely lead you to one pretty obvious fact: there are lots of approaches to building and delivering a private cloud.

So, here’s an additional thing to think about when picking how you’re going to deliver that private cloud: an ecosystem is even more valuable than a good product.

While your current plans may call for a completely and utterly in-house cloud implementation, you just might want to expand your search criteria to include this “what if” scenario: what if at some point you’d like to send a workload or two out to an external provider, even if only on a limited basis?

That “what if” should get you thinking about the service provider partners that you will have to consider when that time comes. Or even a network of them.

The CA Technologies cloud product announcements on July 27 talked a lot about the offerings from CA Technologies (including those targeted for service providers specifically), but I wanted to make sure that the cloud service provider ecosystem that’s building steam around CA AppLogic got the attention it deserved as well.

Kick-starting a cloud ecosystem

In the early days of cloud computing (and prior to being acquired by CA), 3Tera made a lot of headway with service providers. Over the 16 months since 3Tera came onboard, CA has been working to build on that. We’ve really seen why and how to work closely with our growing set of partners. You can’t just focus on technology, but you must also figure out how to enable your partner’s business. For service providers, that’s all about growing revenues and building margin.

We’re now seeing results from those efforts. In the first half of this year alone, we’ve announced new and extended partnerships with ScaleMatrix, Bird Hosting, StratITsphere, Digicor, and others around the world.

A benefit to enterprises: service providers as a safety valve

Interestingly enough, enterprises view this ecosystem as a real benefit as they consider adopting a private cloud platform like CA AppLogic. Not only can they quickly get a private cloud up and running, but they have a worldwide network of service providers that they can rely on as a safety valve for new projects, cloud bursting for existing applications, plus the real-world expertise that comes with having done this many times before.

A number of the partners and service providers using CA AppLogic to deliver cloud services to their customers joined in on the announcement of CA AppLogic 3.0 on July 27. Many posted blogs that talked about how they believed the new capabilities would prove useful for their own business – and why it would be intriguing for enterprise customers as well.

Here are a few highlights from their blog comments:

Kevin Van Mondfrans of Layered Tech pointed to CA AppLogic’s continued innovation for application deployment “with its intuitive drag and drop application deployment interface.” The visual interface, he said, is the “hallmark of AppLogic,” and it “continues to differentiate this platform from the others. AppLogic enables complete deployment of entire application environments including virtual load balancers, firewalls, web servers, application server and databases in a single motion.”

The new AppLogic 3.0 capabilities “are interesting enhancements,” said Kevin in his post, “and they “enable a broader set of use cases for our customers with privacy requirement and who want to migrate VMware and Xen environments to the cloud.”

Mike Vignato of ScaleMatrix notes that he believes “having the ability to use VMware inside the AppLogic environment will turbo charge the adoption rate” of CA AppLogic as a cloud platform. Why? “It will allow enterprise CIOs to leverage their VMware investment while simplifying cloud computing and lowering overall costs.”

DNS Europe thought the ability to import workloads from VMware or Xen using the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) import feature was a “further testament to CA's longstanding commitment to open standards. OVF import simplifies operations, increases agility, and liberates VMware- or Xen-based workloads for operation within AppLogic applications.” They also called out Roll-Based Access Control, as well as the new Global Fabric Controller: “Automatic detection and inventory functions further boost AppLogic as the number one ITSM friendly cloud platform.” (Go here for my interview with Stephen Hurford, their cloud services director.)

Christoph Streit of ScaleUp posted this summary of what’s important to their business in AppLogic 3.0: “One of the most important new features from our perspective is the new VLAN tagging support. This has been a feature that most of our customers, who are mainly service providers, have been asking for. This new feature enables a service provider to offer their customers cloud-based compute resources (such as VMs or complete application stacks) in the same network segment as their co-located or dedicated servers. Also, this makes it possible for a service provider to segregate customer traffic more easily.”

Mike Michalik, whose team at Cirrhus9 spent over 200 documented hours working with the beta code, agreed. The new VLAN capabilities, he writes, “will allow Cirrhus9 to basically build true multi-tenant grids for our MSP clients. This will give them the flexibility to have a single grid that has truly segregated clients on it, as opposed to having multiple grids for each one. It will also allow for easier system administration per client and geographically disperse data centers for the same overall grid.”

ScaleMatrix’s Mark Ortenzi was on the same page. “The ability for CA AppLogic 3.0 to allow VLAN tagging support…is an amazing new feature that will really change the way MSPs can go to market.” (You can read a Q&A I did with Mark a few months back about their business here.)

“The really cool thing I’m excited about,” writes Mike Michalik at Cirrhus9, “is the bandwidth metering. I like the flexibility that this option gives us now because we can have several billing models, if we choose to. Tiered billing can be in place for high consumption users while fixed billing options can be provided to clients that have set requirements that don’t vary much.”

The value of an ecosystem

ScaleUp’s Christoph Streit underscored the importance of these kinds of partnerships in the cloud space. He used ScaleUp and CA AppLogic as an example: “We can effectively show the value of cloud computing to everyone – IT departments, business users, developers, the CIO and, in some cases, even the CEO.”

We’ll be working with these partners and many others even more actively as part of the CA Cloud Market Accelerator Program for Service Providers that we announced this week as well.

Watch this space for more updates on the ecosystem. For profiles on many for them, you can check out the Cloud Accelerator profiles we’ve created as well.

Why it pays to be early -- especially with this much cloud choice

It pays to be early.

Take my flight today, for example. I’ve done this flying-to-New York thing a few times. I’ve learned the hard way that it’s a good idea to reserve your seat early. I know when to head toward the line at the gate to minimize time spent standing around and maximize the chance that there’s still overhead bin space onboard. And, if it looks like this particular flight is headed for delay or cancellation, I already have a pretty good view of what my options are likely to be. I might even already be dialing/browsing customer service.

I think the same applies for cloud computing. To really have a good view of what you need to know, the folks who have been through this a couple times certainly have a head start. Being early to the party lets you assess what’s happening from a position of experience – peppered with a humbling but healthy dose of reality along the way.

I think today’s big cloud announcements from CA Technologies help drive home this point. (As you might have guessed, they are part of what I’ve been working on recently: 10 new/enhanced offerings for enterprises, 4 for service providers, plus a market accelerator program.) The announcements represent quite a bit of early market experience wrapped up for the benefit of very specific customer sets.

What we (and our customers) learned in the past 18 months

Last year, IT was asking some very basic questions about cloud computing, the core of which boiled down to “So, what is cloud computing, anyway?” CA Technologies kicked off 2010 with an aggressive cloud acquisition spree that surprised more than a few folks. We brought aboard a series of key technologies, some very smart folks, and a lot of on-the-ground services experience. Customers and industry-watchers showed interest (and skepticism, as you’d expect) as we brought the pieces together.

If you look back at our CA World announcements last year, you’ll see that we described the way cloud was changing IT and the solutions that we thought were needed. We talked about the IT role morphing into more of a supply chain orchestration job, focused on delivering IT service. We saw a need to understand those services, figure out ways to compare them, manage them, and control them.

But the market hasn’t been standing still. In fact, I think most would agree with me that the changes in IT as a result of cloud have accelerated. Our view that the IT function is shifting seems to be supported by some proof points (especially if you read some of the survey data I’ve seen in the past year). But that doesn’t mean we got everything perfect, right out of the gate. By being in the game early, we’re in a prime seat to watch the evolution. And react.

Evolving and targeting to match how enterprises and service providers adopt cloud

It’s now a little more than a year later, and we’re evolving our cloud portfolio. Today’s announcements are a set of next steps, and they reflect some pragmatic reactions to what we’ve seen. We’re enhancing the offerings we already have. We’ve built some new ones. And all of these are driven by what customers are saying and doing.

Here are some of the highlights, as I see them:

More than ever before, cloud means choice. Looking at cloud forces lots of internal and external decisions. As I’ve noted previously, these are decisions about technology, about organizational structure, about IT ownership and policy. With all of these options, there is no “one size fits all” for cloud. Instead, you have to make your own, very specific choices. And you want to have a portfolio of options that can help you regardless of which choices you need to make for your business. We, as a partner in that business, need to enable you to have your cloud, your way.

A broad portfolio to work from is a plus. The work to enable customers to use and provide cloud computing means a bunch of topic areas need to be covered. Management and security really end up jumping to the top of the list. (The CA portfolio is well-tuned to cover that emphasis, I might add.)

We see a lifecycle of decisions, and a set of capabilities at steps along with way. We think customers need to plan, design, deliver, secure, and assure their cloud efforts. And then constantly optimize these decisions for what’s best for their business.

Enterprises and service providers have very different needs and will make different choices. Enterprise and service providers are doing an interesting dance. Each sees benefit – and profit – in cloud computing, and is adopting it pragmatically. Enterprises are trying to evolve what they have invested in already, while maintaining the control they require and processes they’ve built up. That lets them continue with the heterogeneous components they have. That doesn’t lock them into a proprietary (and probably quite costly) “cloud stack.” Unless they want to be. In some cases, that’s a useful trade-off. But it still needs to be managed and secured.

Service providers are, in many cases, leading the charge to cloud, looking for ways to quickly deliver cloud services but to do so in a way that is going to mean differentiation and revenues, while building margin. Those that don’t won’t be around long. They are feeling pressure from big guys like Amazon and Rackspace. They’re trying to find the right niche. They’re trying to balance the right infrastructure with the financial structure to result in a winning (and sustainable) formula.

As a result of these differences, you’ll see sets of solutions from CA Technologies that address these very specific needs, but help make the connection between the two – the world of hybrid clouds – possible and appealing.

Finally, if you add new perspectives, experience with customers, and resources to some pretty innovative technology, you can move the needle. Several of today’s announcements show the combined effort of the vision of entrepreneurs that joined CA Technologies through the cloud acquisitions and the organic development efforts since then. A lot of these folks have been working on cloud since long before the term “cloud” existed.

Several of those are near and dear to my heart, and I’ll highlight those here:

CA Business Service Insight 8.0. We’re calling it 8.0, because the previous 7 versions were called Oblicore Guarantee and were focused on service level management. However, the work done on CA Business Service Insight since last year opens up new territory. The latest release gives enterprises information about their existing services and the ability to compare and contrast what they are doing internally with services they could choose externally. All this, while also managing the service levels from what they acquire from outside. In addition, CA Business Service Insight’s connection to the Service Measurement Index and Cloud Commons will become more and more intriguing as it matures.

CA AppLogic 3.0. The ability to work at an application level rather than dwelling on low-level hypervisor questions takes a huge step up with the addition of VMware support in this release. Now, you can think in terms of virtual business services instead of ESX or Xen. That’s an important extension to the vision that the 3Tera team brought to CA Technologies, especially if you’re an enterprise.

Service providers are probably still interested in the financial equation of using Xen, but now have new options in working with enterprises who’ve made big VMware investments. And, frankly, that’s everyone at this point. The new languages, VLAN tagging, and role-based access features are probably even more interesting to service providers and how they make money from a cloud business using CA AppLogic as their cloud platform. The service provider ecosystem that’s building around CA AppLogic is should get a mention here, too, but that’s worthy of its own post.

I’m personally pleased to see Cassatt capabilities woven in here, too (check out the Global Fabric Controller to see my previous company’s influence).

Learning pragmatically

There are a lot of moving parts here, mostly driven by the huge number of options that the cloud now presents. In my opinion, CA Technologies made a pretty prescient decision to jump into this market with both feet (and wallet), and to do so early. Much of what you’re seeing come to market here has benefited from early moves by both the innovators CA acquired -- and by CA itself.

The resulting time and experience have infused our offerings (and those of us working on them) with what I’d call a healthy amount of pragmatism. This pragmatism is something that I think will serve CA Technologies, its ecosystem partners, and our collective customers well as cloud computing continues to evolve.

And, of course, it’s good to see all those hours I’ve spent waiting for flights are paying off in interesting ways.

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.