Friday, March 12, 2010

Virtual conference speakers focus on cloud, value to enterprises, how to get started

One of the biggest questions facing companies today is what to make of cloud computing. Does it signal a major shift in how we approach IT -- and the business -- or is it just another ride on the hype wave that will disappear if we just wait it out?

HP tackled this question this month with a series of virtual conferences, "Cloud: Practical Advice for Taking the Next Steps," whose aim was to cut through the fog and to try and point business leaders and IT executives in the value-oriented direction.

A panel of industry analysts, practitioners, and HP experts outlined the value proposition of moving to the cloud, the danger of inaction, and how companies can get started on their cloud journey. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The only choice that’s a really bad choice is to do nothing with cloud computing at this point. Having a strategy and moving forward is very important.



For those who didn't catch the virtual conference live, HP has made the replays available.

Tom Kolopolous, president and founder, of The Delphi Group, opened the series as keynote speaker by stressing the opportunities cloud model provide for innovation, especially during an economic downturn.

Cloud, Kolopoulos said, is a key enabler of innovation. For those who might question the ability to innovate during an economic crisis, Kolopolous had some sage advice: "When you tighten the belt, innovation becomes more of an issue . . . you can’t innovate if your stomach is full. You only innovate when you’re hungry."

Tom Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst of Gartner echoed similar themes in his closing keynote, in which he stressed that the risk of inaction was the greatest risk enterprises face today: "The only choice that’s a really bad choice is to do nothing with cloud computing at this point. Having a strategy and moving forward is very important."

Other speakers included Ken Hamilton, director of Data Center Synergy and Cloud Computing for HP; Tim van Ash, HP director of Products for SaaS; Archie Reed, who is HP’s Chief Technologist for Cloud Security and the author of several publications, including The Definitive Guide to Identity Management; Jim Reavis, Executive Director of the Cloud Security Alliance and president and founder of the Reavis Consulting Group, Chris Whitener, HP Chief Security Strategist; Duncan Campbell, VP Worldwide Marketing, HP; Chris Rence, a CIO from FICO, and Alan Wain, VP Solutions Infrastructure Practice, HP.

Some highlights:
Koulopoulos: My advice is that number one, don’t look at the cloud simply by looking at what’s available today. Think of it as a long-term trend that you will have to adapt to, and you have to begin that adaptation now. You can’t wait until it’s fully evolved.

Begin moving down that road with non-core applications, applications and services that maybe aren’t as critical to the regulatory aspects of your business, to those aspects that would involve more security concerns, and in that way, you acclimate yourself to the cloud. You begin to understand what it means to work, to live, to run a business in the cloud, and the rest of these issues will resolve themselves, and they’ll resolve themselves for the same reason that they always do -- because of pure economics.

When the cloud becomes important enough that we rest enough our economic value on it, we will invest enough to make sure that the security issues have been addressed, but it’s an evolution. So don’t look at the cloud and say, “Well, it’ll never work because today, here’s what exists.” Look at the cloud and say, “I have to evolve with it.”

Bittman: There really are three major benefits. One is cost, the idea of sharing, the idea of economies of scale definitely can reduce cost. But this one, I think, is often overstated and companies that are looking at cloud computing primarily as a cost benefit are probably missing some of the bigger benefits. Another benefit that is very important is quality of service.

In other words, it's the ability to specify explicitly what your service requirements are through a services-oriented interface to set your service levels high or low, to set your performance requirements high or low, depending on what you need, and base your price based on the service levels you need. That quality of service is something that might be very valuable to a business to adjust over time based on changing business dynamic cloud services.

Another part of that that’s important is the ability to change quickly. That gets to the third benefit which I think is the most important, and that’s agility -- the ability to spin up a new business, to spin up a start-up requirement in an enterprise, the ability to change your service level requirements or to change your scale very quickly.

This not only helps the bottom line in a typical company but it helps the top line. It can help a business grow. It can provide a competitive advantage to be able to react to a business change very, very quickly at the speed of business instead of at the speed of IT.

Reed: Security, just like cloud, is hard to define. It’s a very broad term when we think about. It can be many different things for different people. When you get to cloud security, first off, you’ve got to define which part of the cloud you’re talking about -- which cloud service, which cloud computing model you’re talking about. Then we can talk about which specific security aspects apply to that part of the model.

What we do is look to standards, taxonomies; ways of talking about this that make sense both to the business people as well as the technology people . . . Cloud computing represents phase 2 of the internet where we’re actually leveraging the internet connectivity to create this utility of computing. It changes everything.

Van Ash: HP’s approach with Cloud Assure is really about enabling business confidence in the cloud. It’s about mitigating risk and you talked about risk management earlier. We’re really attacking four key categories. We’re attacking security, performance, availability and service levels, and controlling the ongoing cost. Now, why do we go after those four elements? Well, they’re consistently the top four elements that we see from both analysts and customers alike and they map pretty well to the seven deadly sins that Jim talked about right upfront.

Reavis: Don’t read the research in and of itself and assume you’re going to get all the answers. Use it with partners and consultants that you trust, that you know you can work with. Use it in conjunction with our broader guidance of best practices. Use good risk management practices and with that, you can be pretty confident that you’ll come up with a good strategy for how you should adopt cloud.

Campbell: Number one is to make your services shareable. So yes, that makes sense. It’s very intuitive and a first step in that, of course, is really, to think about it from the point of view of the audience. The audience being your application guys, your testers. Having your services available to them in a shared service environment is really the first step and to be able to provision that in a much more rapid fashion.

Second is to make your services more consumable . . . You want to be able to consume that service very importantly and intuitively like in a monthly type of fashion. You’re paying for what you use. What’s also very important is that not only are you presenting it in a consumable fashion, but then also that resource is then returned to the pool.

Third point is to make those services more valuable. It’s really tied to a very critical and relevant business outcome and also very importantly then how we can improve upon that. These three points really speak to a pragmatic evolutionary approach. It’s not a rip in replace. It’s not like you’re going to turn the switch and jump to a private cloud, but I think these are three great suggestions in terms of how to really make that evolution in a very pragmatic way.

Rence: VMs and the cloud are kind of like candy. They’re easily consumed but that doesn’t mean they’re all being used. That’s where the management tools really come in handy, to make sure that a group that’s leveraging the cloud, what you’ve basically taken and given to them to use – are they truly using it or is it something that they needed but they’re not sure when they’re going to get to it.
For those who didn't catch the virtual conference live, HP is making the replays available.
BriefingsDirect contributor Carlton Vogt provided editorial assistance and research on this post.
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Tuesday, March 9, 2010

TIBCO rolls out Spotfire 3.1 with spotlight on predictive analytics

In a move to mainstream predictive analytics, TIBCO Software today rolled out the latest version of its Spotfire platform.

Dubbed Spotfire 3.1, the latest iteration promises a natural language statistical experience. Spotfire 3.1 aims to help anyone in an organization get fact-based answers to questions that help drive revenue.

The company says its software is not just for analytics gurus but also marketing professionals, business development managers and others who need forward-looking business intelligence in a hurry. [TIBCO Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

"Unlike traditional business intelligence tools, which for the most part aggregate historical trends only, Spotfire 3.1 projects them forward with what-if scenarios," says Mark Lorion, vice president of marketing for TIBCO Spotfire. "Anyone in the company can ask questions on demand and our analytics will provide future predictions based on behind-the-scenes data-driven methods. Users don't have to understand the methods. They just have to ask the questions – and they get answers instantly rather than waiting days like you would with today's business intelligence (BI) tools."

Spotfire 3.1 in action

Let’s say you’re trying to promote a new product in the consumer goods market. Spotfire 3.1 lets you choose input variables based on what you suspect might be driving the advertisement response, such as price, discounts, packaged offers, age of the respondent or length of time as a customer. You would then press a button that asks, "Are these related?"

After you push that button, Spotfire 3.1 works behind the scenes to run predictive models, using analytics and statistics to compile sensitivity analysis and correlations, then return a colorful graph that shows the response rate and which factors are most closely correlated to people clicking on your advertisement.

The software's multiple scale bar charts and combination bar and line plots offer analysis of unstructured, ‘free-dimensional’ data to identify key outliers and trends amongst the data.



While BI gives you historical data, the predictive analytics aspect of Spotfire 3.1 offers insights into what could happen next time you run a similar promotion. It can also help you fine-tune your promotions by targeting the customers that clicked on your ad, or offering different promotions to different audiences – and it does it almost instantly.

Unlike traditional BI or static spreadsheets, Lorion says Spotfire 3.1 also includes conditional coloring and lasso and axis marking that allow for better data analysis of patterns, clusters and correlations among sets of variables. The software's multiple scale bar charts and combination bar and line plots offer analysis of unstructured, "free-dimensional" data to identify key outliers and trends amongst the data.

“IT organization and statistician groups aren’t able to respond quickly enough to the many questions that arise from business users, so they go to their gut,” Lorion says. “Spotfire lets you make fact-based decisions rather than gut-based decisions.”

Predictive analytics challenges

Of course, predictive analytics software is not a new concept, and Lorion admits that the predictions are only as good as the quality and breadth of the available data. But predictive analytics is gaining momentum in the enterprise marketplace.

The economic downturn has been good for the analytics space because customers need to make reductions and predictions – but they need to be smart about it



IBM bought predictive analytics firm SPSS last July for $1.2 billion. And IDC predicts the $1.4 billion market for advanced analytics, of which predictive analytics is a subset, will grow 10 percent annually through 2011. Despite tight IT budgets, Lorion is optimistic about the space and the company’s offering.

“The economic downturn has been good for the analytics space because customers need to make reductions and predictions – but they need to be smart about it,” Lorion says. “Companies don’t want to hire PhDs to make sense of their statistics. But we need to drive awareness of our product and educate the market that the power of predictive analytics isn’t in the hands of only a couple of statisticians.”

Spotfire 3.1 works in tandem with Spotfire Application Data Services to let companies analyze data from various sources, including SAP NetWeaver BI, SAP ERP, Salesforce.com, Siebel eBusiness Applications, and the Oracle E-Business Suite.
BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.
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Cast Iron launches integration platform to help pull hybrid cloud models together

In a move to tackle a persistent cloud computing challenge, Cast Iron Systems just rolled out a new platform that aims to help companies large and small securely integrate public clouds, private clouds and on-premise applications.

Dubbed OmniConnect, the cloud integration solution offers a single platform rather than multiple products or on-premise tools to accomplish cloud integrations.

Five pillars undergird OmniConnect: complete integrations, a complete cloud experience, reusability of connectivity and processes, and portable, embeddable, and brandable environments, and centralized cloud management.

"Cloud application use is exploding, but just because you like Salesforce.com doesn't mean you are going to throw out SAP, Oracle or other applications you have on-premise. It's a hybrid world where companies have a combination of cloud and on-premise locations," says Chandar Pattabhiram, vice president of Channel and Product Marketing for Cast Iron Systems. "You don't maximize the value of your cloud applications unless you get all the data into it – so you need integration."

Complete integrations

Integration can get complex in a hurry with a growing number of applications in the enterprise, such as Salesforce, Google Apps, WebEx and ADP. Companies could take a do-it-yourself approach but it won't scale over time. Companies could also use an on-demand vendor for cloud-to-cloud scenarios, or hire an on-premise integration firm. Cast Iron Systems, though, is pushing OmniConnect as a better solution.

"Fifty-six percent of CIOs in a Gartner survey said they are transitioning away from the cloud because too many choices make it too difficult," Pattabhiram says. "Our new platform is meant to solve this problem by bridging the on-premise and cloud worlds. We offer complete integrations that include data migration, process integration, and UI mashup capabilities."

Fifty-six percent of CIOs in a Gartner survey said they are transitioning away from the cloud because too many choices make it too difficult.



OmniConnect, for example, lets SaaS applications access, cleanse, and synchronize data stored in legacy systems in real-time and completes processes such as quote-to-order, purchase-to-pay, and order-to-cash without leaving the Cast Iron OmniConnect environment. The platform can also mash up the data from disparate sources and display them in a single view without taking the data out of one application and putting it into another.

Users can configure their integration processes in the cloud, run them in a multi-tenant cloud-based environment, and monitor all integrations from a single cloud-based console. And the Cast Iron Secure Connector aims to overcome data security issues by offering a secure channel that exchanges encrypted or firewalled data between enterprise applications and Cast Iron’s multi-tenant cloud service.

Reusability, portability and management

C
ast Iron also announced a new Connector Development Kit that works to streamline building connections to new applications and data sources. The kit allows IT gurus to re-use connectivity created in OmniConnect to snap in connections to public clouds, private clouds, and on-premise applications. OmniConnect also offers reusable templates of the most common processes.

Portability is another feature that Cast Iron is boasting about. The software lets users make integrations or the entire OmniConnect portable into any public cloud, private cloud or on-premise data center environment. Infrastructure providers can also embed and brand the platform as their own integration-as-a-service offering. ADP, Dell and Cisco are already reselling the service.

There is significant value in having one platform rather than multiple solutions to bridge private cloud, public cloud and on-premise applications.



Finally, a cloud-based management console makes it possible for users to monitor multiple integrations across customer deployments in a single location. Management APIs are available for IT and SaaS providers to view the monitoring data within their private or public clouds. Cast Iron also announced support for Amazon Web Services customers through integration-as-a-service.

"Security and integration are the two biggest concerns cited in Gartner's study," says Pattabhiram. "That's why you see mega-brands partnering with us. They want to have an enterprise grade solution to help their customers adopt their cloud applications. There is significant value in having one platform rather than multiple solutions to bridge private cloud, public cloud and on-premise applications."
BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.
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