Thursday, February 18, 2010

Mutual embrace of SOA and cloud computing builds into productivity waltz across the IT landscape

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion comes in conjunction with The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference held earlier this month in Seattle.

We assembled a panel to examine service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing -- the relationships, the inter-reliance and the realities. Three years ago, the IT transformation poster child was SOA, and now we're well into the hype curve around cloud computing, but has one actually given way to the other? Are they linear in their relationship, or perhaps mutually dependent in some ways, and to what degree?

We’ll explore now whether SOA has found new value and relevance as a foundation and perhaps catalyst for cloud computing, especially for so-called private clouds. And, we'll see how the emergence of SOA and cloud may be happening in different places inside of enterprises. Shouldn’t one hand get to quickly know what the other is up to and perhaps even work together?

Enjoy a series of podcasts from The Open Group conference on cloud computing, enterprise architecture, business architecture, Archimate, and cloud security.

Here with us now, however, to plumb the depths of how SOA and cloud computing do or don’t come together, are Dr. Chris Harding, director of the SOA Work Group at The Open Group; Stephen G. Bennett, Senior Enterprise Architect at Oracle, and Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Search for Salesforce.com. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:
Harding: Five years ago, when we started getting into SOA, there was a huge amount of excitement and a great deal of buzz about it. Now, we can see that the hype cycle has run its course, but we're still seeing a great deal of technical interest in SOA and we're also seeing that companies are using it and are increasing their use of it. So, there is a steady uptake in the use of SOA, although the excitement about it has died down.

It’s very interesting that service orientation is very much a business concept, and SOA has been about the application of that business concept to the technology. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is very much a technical concept. It’s about what you can do with technology over the Internet.

It is a technical concept, but it has had really a big impact on the business structure. So you can see them as complementary. SOA has been the application of business principles into the technology. Cloud is a technical concept, which has had a huge impact on the business. So, yes, there probably are different parts of the organizations looking at cloud and looking at SOA, but there is a big dynamic that says they should be working together on both of them.

Coffee: I've been covering SOA for a long time. I'd say the people who adopted SOA in the previous decade got considerable upside, but those who did not didn’t really suffer any penalty for not doing so.

In the situation we're in now, where the economics of cloud computing are becoming quite compelling, the downside of not having a SOA is becoming quite apparent. If you don’t have a service environment, then your ability to extend your current assets and integrate them with cloud services is going to be somewhat hampered.

So, people are realizing now that the wait-and-see option is more perilous than it used to be. This is accelerating the actual adoption of what we would call SOA, except that’s no longer the label du jour.

Beyond integration

It seems to me that SOA very quickly became a label of products that vendors wanted to sell. So, you saw a lot of things like enterprise service bus (ESB) products and so on.

It became dangerously easy to think that you were doing SOA, if you were buying the tools and failing to appreciate how much of a cultural and management achievement it was to get people to think of themselves not as owners of and the gatekeepers to an IT asset, but instead being publishers of and supporters of a service to other parts of the business.

It’s absolutely critical to understand that you can view SOA as simply a way of integrating the stuff you have, or you can move to the next level and start to think of it as the way you do your business. The way your business units interact with and support each other with the technology is just the enabler for that.

The same is true of the cloud. It's possible to take the existing IT model of isolated applications, each with their own data stores, and replicate that model in the cloud with elastic scalability of capacity. That would be the level of the cloud industry that’s typically called infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Or, it's possible to use the cloud as a much more interesting and fluid medium for interaction among much more granular and business-oriented services at the level that’s traditionally been called in the industry either platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS). It depends on the level at which you choose to consume other people’s application work, instead of doing new application development yourself.

It’s possible to do SOA without the cloud. It’s possible to do better SOA with it. It is also possible to do an isolated silo-oriented architecture locally and also to do that in a cloud environment. Neither one necessarily implies or impels the other.

Bennett: The majority of large enterprises today are doing SOA in one fashion or another at different levels of maturity, whether that’s from the quite immature approach of seeing it as a pure integration play all the way up to seeing it more as a business agility kind of play.

So, it's becoming a norm and, therefore, we don’t need to keep hyping it or pushing it. We need to use the characteristics it offers with other supporting technology strategies such as cloud

I actually see recession as an opportunity within IT, because it gives you opportunity to reset thinking and reset IT's approach to actually delivering IT to the business.

It's a combination of technologies that are finally ready for prime time, and an ecosystem that’s ready to support those technologies well.



Coffee: The economics of being able to have elastically scalable capacity to be able to handle peak loads without needing to own the peak capacity and wind up with very low utilization rates on your capacity are becoming so compelling that people are asking how they're going to take advantage of this opportunity of this cloud environment.

It's a combination of technologies that are finally ready for prime time, and an ecosystem that’s ready to support those technologies well -- providers of services and providers of expert assistance in using those services.

That’s a very important enabling ware, when your major system integration firms begin fully to understand how they can incorporate cloud services into the portfolio of technologies that they make available to their customers. When you put that all together, the downside of not moving to an SOA becomes an embarrassing lack of ability to take advantages of these incredible economies.

... The combination of SOA, which makes your various business units able to cooperate more effectively, with cloud environments which allow you to handle very "bursty" workloads and conduct very cost-effective pilot projects and scale the ones that work very rapidly, increase the ROI of IT spending.

The IT budget, as a line item, is not conspicuously bigger. In fact, it may actually shrink, because the IT department now is a composer and integrator of stuff that may now be getting done with the operating budget by personnel, who are on the payroll as members of a business unit, instead of members of an IT organization.

Business capability maps

Bennett: What people are talking about is the opportunity to redirect costs to area such as business architecture, and business architecture is part of enterprise architecture (EA). That's not purely IT focused, but the wider concern -- investing stuff like business capability maps to understand exactly where I should utilize SOA and cloud with my organization -- is going to be key.

This will, in turn, enable the consuming enterprises to concentrate on the things that they are particularly good at.



Harding: That certainly must be one of the factors that will enable cloud computing to make enterprises more efficient -- the elasticity and the take-up effect. It also has a major effect on the risk that an enterprise needs to take on. But, there is a bigger factor, which is meant to drive down cost, and that is competition.

If you take service orientation and cloud in combination, you’re seeing the ability of people to buy services from different suppliers, for those suppliers to compete, and for those suppliers to concentrate on the services that they are particularly good at. This will, in turn, enable the consuming enterprises to concentrate on the things that they are particularly good at.

So, you don’t need to dissipate your efforts on running an inefficient IT department, which is not your core business. You can outsource that, get a specialist to do it much better, and concentrate on what you're good at. That is the real dynamic that will improve things economically.

Now, from an Open Group perspective, there is a danger that you may become locked into a particular supplier. Part of our role in promoting open systems is to push for the standards to be in place so that that doesn’t happen. Provided we can prevent that locking, it’s altogether a very healthy situation.

Coffee: The granularity of this marketplace is quite surprising to many people who haven’t looked at it closely. We see already people building applications, in which they have shopped the marketplace and found a cloud storage proposition from one provider, a cloud application development platform from another, social networking algorithms and facilities from yet a third provider and have built some really interesting strategic business solutions. It’s quite startling to many people to realize what a supermarket of services has already come into being.

Bennett: The combination of cloud and SOA obviously brings together kind of speed and modularity. Those basic principles are going to allow us to take evolutionary technologies and approaches and probably revolutionize the way that IT actually interacts with the business.

So, in terms of IT being siloed -- "please develop and look after this application" -- it’s going to be more a move toward collaboration of how we can actually deliver business solutions to the ever-changing business dynamics.

Coffee: Finally, we have an environment in which connectivity and real-time linkage and integration of data and function instead of being costly, brittle, and time-consuming are now nearly free, very resilient, and can be done almost more quickly than they can be described.

This means that people are going to be doing more challenging work and working more closely with business units instead of having their time consumed by arduous, necessary, but relatively low-value tests of infrastructure maintenance.

So the ROI will rise. The relevance to the business of IT will increase. The sophistication of the skills of the person who does IT for a living will be greater 10 years from now than it was 10 years ago or even today, but we’ll all be pretty happy with the results.
There are a series of podcasts from The Open Group conference: on cloud computing, enterprise architecture, business architecture, Archimate, and cloud security.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

You may also be interested in:

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Seeing a golden lining around efficiency, HP expands cloud consulting services portfolio

For more information on virtualization and how it provides a foundation for Private Cloud, plan to attend the HP Cloud Virtual Conference taking place in March. To register for this event, go to:
Asia, Pacific, Japan - March 2
Europe Middle East and Africa - March 3
Americas - March 4

Hewlett-Packard (HP) is pushing deeper into the cloud opportunity with new consulting services that aim to help businesses and government agencies speed cloud-based infrastructure adoption and respond more quickly to market demands for efficiency.


Dubbed HP Cloud Design Service, the new offering advises organizations how to quickly design and deploy scalable, cloud-based infrastructures. HP's consulting services come with risk mitigation in mind and support a hybrid sourcing model that encompass private and public cloud options. HP promises its approach will allow organizations to consume and deliver services that support varied workloads. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

"There's a lot of hype out there, and organizations just can't deal with cool, exciting cloud concepts in a vacuum," says Flynn Maloy, vice president of marketing for HP's Technology Services group. "If you even make a tiny pull of cloud services into your IT environment, it touches everything else in the environment. Our HP Cloud Design Service looks at the big picture."

Anatomy of HP Cloud Design

HP is basing the new consulting services on its own experience with demanding cloud environments, including work with the Defense Information Systems Agency to design a cloud infrastructure solution that accelerates the process of provisioning computing services for U.S. military applications.

A year ago companies were skeptical. Last year they were running pilots. Now, companies are trying to figure out how to leverage cloud innovations internally



Here's how HP's Cloud Design Service works: First, HP explores a client's business and technical requirements, as well as existing IT investments. HP then creates a customized cloud infrastructure design blueprint and implementation plan, complete with cost estimates and deployment, testing, operational management, service lifecycle management, government and support guidelines.

HP outlines four key benefits of its cloud consulting service: access to a common, flexible framework for cloud engagements, faster time to delivery with mitigated implementation risks, reduced technology redundancies, and the ability to leverage existing HP and non-HP technology investments. The result, according to HP, is a cloud-specific infrastructure that's safe and effective – and meets business objectives.


Mapping the cloud

HP's Cloud Design Service builds on existing HP efforts in the cloud, including the Cloud Discovery Workshop and the Roadmap Service. The Cloud Design Service acts as the next step in an organization's move into the cloud. 
The updates this week follow earlier moves last summer on cloud consulting services.

As Maloy describes it, the new service sends HP's cloud consultants into an organization's IT environment with sleeves rolled up, ready to help design and build an architecture that leverages the benefits of a shared internal cloud while offering access to external public clouds.

The big question is, are organizations ready to move beyond private clouds to public clouds? Maloy says organizations are kicking the tires, trying to figure out how to bring public cloud innovations into the enterprise. HP, he says, has established best practices to do this safely.

"A year ago companies were skeptical. Last year they were running pilots. Now, companies are trying to figure out how to leverage cloud innovations internally," Maloy says. "Our HP Reference Architecture for Cloud is part of the Cloud Design Service. It has all of the elements we think a robust, well-designed environment takes into account."

For more information on virtualization and how it provides a foundation for Private Cloud, plan to attend the HP Cloud Virtual Conference taking place in March. To register for this event, go to:
Asia, Pacific, Japan - March 2
Europe Middle East and Africa - March 3
Americas - March 4

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.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

HP ‘trims’ SharePoint web doc management risks, builds advanced workflow tools

Today’s enterprises are creating web-based content at breakneck speed. Much of this digital content becomes bona fide business records that demand document management with regulatory compliance and legal discovery demands in mind.

That’s why Hewlett-Packard (HP) recently rolled out a web-based records management solution specifically designed to help Microsoft SharePoint customers lower business risks. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.)

Dubbed HP Total Records Information Management (TRIM) 7, the latest version of HP’s advanced records management solution aims to help organizations transparently manage Microsoft SharePoint Server records – including documents and information stored on SharePoint Server blogs, wikis, discussions, forms, calendars and workflows – in a single environment.

A Content 2.0 explosion

As HP explains it, TRIM 7 opens the door for consolidation and simplified management of stored content in multiple formats. Using HP TRIM 7, organizations can capture, search and manage physical and electronic files with complete transparency.

“The explosion in Content 2.0 blogs, wikis and discussions creates new information management challenges for organizations trying to meet an escalating set of regulation,” says Jonathan Martin, vice president and general manager of Information Management Solutions at HP. “HP TRIM allows customers to marry records management best practices and governance with dynamic collaboration platforms such as SharePoint.”


An end-to-end solution

HP TRIM 7 offers two modules to address the records management needs of SharePoint products and technologies: HP TRIM Records Management and HP TRIM Archiving.

HP TRIM Records Management aims to improve business records management via transparent access to SharePoint Server content held in HP TRIM directly from the SharePoint Server workspace.

The explosion in Content 2.0 blogs, wikis and discussions creates new information management challenges for organizations trying to meet an escalating set of regulations.



Since the U.S. Department of Defense has awarded HP TRIM its 5015.2 v3 certification, HP notes, organizations are assured the highest levels of records management control for enterprise content. HP has also made improvements that promise faster indexing and search capabilities, along with shorter response times for legal discovery, compliance requests and audits.

Closing the records management loop, HP TRIM Archiving works to help customers lower the risk of data loss while reclaiming storage and system resources from SharePoint Server. This module can either archive specific list objects in SharePoint Server or complete SharePoint Server sites. All this means organizations can take entire SharePoint Server sites offline without losing access to information.
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.

Electric Cloud updates software production offerings with parallelization features

Electric Cloud has accelerated the software production management field today with improvements to two key products: ElectricAccelerator and ElectricCommander 3.5.

ElectricAccelerator boasts a new feature that provides parallel processing and subbuild technology. Dubbed "Electrify," the patented technology promises to speed development on private or public compute clouds by applying the benefits of parallelization to new development tools and tasks.

With Electrify, developers can conduct parallel testing or data modeling on their desktop, in a private cloud or on a dedicated server. Meanwhile, the subbuild technology works to help developers avoid unnecessary or broken builds by identifying only the components required for the current project. [Disclosure: Electric Cloud is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Removing production bottlenecks

“Our goal is to remove the bottlenecks in software production wherever they exist,” explains Electric Cloud CEO Mike Maciag. “ElectricAccelerator speeds Make, NMAKE, Visual Studio, and Ant builds by 10-20x. With Electrify we are broadening the technology to enable these benefits for virtually any compute-intensive development task.”

Maciag offers the example of teams standardizing on tools like SCons. With Electrify, he says, those teams can leverage the benefits of centralization to speed builds, reduce hardware costs and curb server sprawl. The technology also makes way for developers to support multiple configurations through ElectricAccelerator’s virtualization capabilities. All this means more control for developers and fewer headaches for IT.

Commanding the cloud

Electric Cloud's ElectricCommander 3.5 offers a customizable and extensible version of its tool for automating and managing the build-test-deploy process in software development. Developers can customize ElectricCommander 3.5 to extract and display data from the defect tracker along with relevant build and test results. This lets build managers track the status of each fix and receive notification when QA has resolved the issue.

ElectricCommander 3.5 also offers user interface (UI) customization that lets development teams or managers create a custom screen to create and execute a build or test request with the appropriate parameters.

In other words, the UI is purpose-built for the developer’s role or environment. The new version also automates and manages what Electric Cloud calls “error-prone, manual pieces of the build-test-deploy process” to make software production faster and more efficient.
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.