Proliferating, outmoded applications and data explosion hamper enterprises in innovation, any quick move to cloud computing

A proliferation of on-premises applications, many of them outdated, and the ongoing data explosion are posing serious threats to businesses worldwide, according to a recent survey of companies in Europe and America by Capgemini.

The first annual Application Landscape report found that millions of applications are obsolete and no longer deliver full business value. The result, says Capgemini, is a need to rationalize and retire applications, freeing up valuable resources to drive innovation and future growth, rather than maintain outdated systems.

The sheer number of applications supported – up to 10,000 for global enterprises – combined with an estimated average data growth of five percent per month means applications management is on track to quickly become an issue of real significance. Moreover, as companies move toward the transfer of applications to the cloud, the need for systematic and well-managed application retirement will accelerate.

Outmoded applications

In in-depth interviews with CIOs and IT leaders in the US and Europe, Capgemini found that:

• Some 85 percent say their application portfolios are in need of rationalization
• Almost 60 percent of enterprise companies say they currently support "more" or "far more" applications than are necessary to run their business
  
• Only 4 percent say that every IT system they use is considered to be business critical
  
• Half agree that up to 50 percent of their application portfolio needs to be retired
  
• Another 61 percent say they keep all data beyond its expiration date "just in case"
  
• Also, 56 percent of large companies and enterprises say that half or more of their applications are custom-built, increasing the technical complexity of required platforms and technologies
  
• Only 13 percent say their application development and maintenance teams are aligned. And half (48 percent) say their teams are only in synch for 50 percent of the time or even less.

  Successful application management – achieved through a true lifecycle approach of 'build, deploy, maintain and retire' – can deliver tangible business benefits in tough economic times.

Ron Tolido, CTO at Capgemini for Application Services Continental Europe, said: “Our research reveals that key goals for CIOs are value creation, improving efficiencies and cutting costs. Despite the fact that data archiving and application retirement can result in significant cost savings, process efficiencies and increased agility, it still does not rank high enough on the agenda. This report shows that successful application management – achieved through a true lifecycle approach of 'build, deploy, maintain and retire' – can deliver tangible business benefits in tough economic times.”

In addition to acknowledging the growing importance of this issue, the report also reveals the numerous current barriers to effective application management including: the cost of retirement projects, the lack of immediate ROI, cultural resistance to change, regional differences, the lack of qualified developers to migrate retired application data, and most importantly that applications are not considered a key priority.

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HP updates Information Management Portfolio with holistic approach

Reducing risk. Increasing efficiency. Simplifying business information management. Those are the three goals of HP’s updated Information Management Portfolio -- and the updates are all based on consumer demands.

“Three trends are driving how information is managed,” says June Manley, worldwide product marketing director for HP Information Management. She noted those three trends as the information growth, a lack of ownership around information management, and diverse policies. The results of a March survey Coleman Parkes conducted for HP amplifies those trends. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

According to the survey, information management is at a breaking point for the enterprise:

• 68 percent of enterprises say the content explosion is adding greater complexity to an already complex world and causing significant storage issues and costs.
  
• 59 percent of companies say they are under pressure to cut costs on information-related processes and systems.
  
• 43 percent of enterprises leave it to IT to manage information, while 38 percent leave it to the CEO and board of directors.
  
• 70 percent of companies do not have a holistic approach to managing information.
  
• 73 percent of companies do not have a universal and strictly implemented formal information protection policy, and only 18 percent are planning to implement a policy.

Holistic information management

Updates to HP’s Information Management Portfolio work to address some of these pain points with a holistic approach. Essentially, HP is helping organizations break down information silos with a solution that crosses the information lifecycle, including capture, monitor, protect, retain, find, and implement.

“Rather than basing information management on people -- who are constantly changing -- or infrastructure -- which is increasingly complex and physically dispersed -- the most successful approach is managing the information itself,” Manley says.

You are ensuring the right information is saved and can be found when needed to meet both business and regulatory compliance needs.

“Enterprises need to manage the information throughout its life cycle based on its business value. When you do that, you can expect to increase business efficiency, flexibility and simplicity. You are ensuring the right information is saved and can be found when needed to meet both business and regulatory compliance needs.”

Here’s a brief look at HP’s Information Management portfolio:

• HP Information Management Services delivers an integrated solution for managing information in any phase of its life cycle. HP consulting services offer legal, IT, business and chief information security officers to help establish policies.

• HP Integrated Archive Platform scales to manage up to 1 petabyte of data, 300,000 users, and 20 million e-mail messages per day and supports VMware vSphere.
  
• HP TRIM Enterprise Records Management now offers multi-jurisdictional retention and a new bulk data loading capability. Localizing policies eliminates administrative overhead, reduces costs and simplifies compliance.
  
• HP Database Archiving is now integrated with HP TRIM.
  
• HP Data Protector software now provides Granular Recovery Extension for VMware vSphere, as well as snapshot support for 3PAR and non-HP arrays, at up to 70 percent lower total cost of ownership (TCO). HP Data Protector also adds down-to-the-second snapshot recovery to HP StorageWorks P4000.
  
• HP Data Protector Reporter improves insight into backup operations with enterprise-level, multisite global analysis and reporting. It also offers centralized, automated backup reporting.
  
• HP Storage Essentials software decreases costs for managing physical and virtual enterprise information infrastructure. HP Storage Essentials Backup Manager plug-in for HP Data Protector helps organizations monitor the entire backup process.

HP’s future information management vision

The next phase of HP’s information management vision is to break through dataset silos. Currently, there is information in a records management dataset, information in a backup dataset, and information in an archived dataset. HP is working to help enterprises break away from those dataset silos.

“Our vision is to make it possible to have a single policy to manage, whether it’s in a backup archive or in a records management dataset. You have a single copy that is stored. You have a single compliance retention policy,” Manley says.

“The future vision is a single viewpoint of all information and the ability to find that information. All of the lines disappear with this strategy to leave a single platform, a single viewpoint and a single policy. That’s how information management is going to look in the future.”

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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Workday Integration Cloud debut raises bar on integration as service, deeply ingrains integration as apps function

Recognizing broad integration as an essential ingredient to modern business agility, Workday today delivered a set of cloud-based integration capabilities to its partner ecosystem and growing stable of software-as-a-service (SaaS) ERP users.

The Workday Integration Cloud Platform is joined by a graphical tools suite designed to broaden the use of integration by more types of workers so they -- as well as IT -- can build and deploy the desired integrations that best support processes among and between businesses.

Workday is using its SaaS-based enterprise solutions for human resources, payroll, and financial management as a beachhead for popularizing integration platform as a service (iPaaS). The goal is to allow for complex, custom integrations to be built using Workday tools and then be deployed and managed in the Workday Cloud. [Disclosure: Workday is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Opening up integration functions to more users on the front lines of business-to-business requirements empowers those workers. But providing those integration capabilities on a common enterprise cloud environment -- one that exploits enterprise service bus (ESB) technology and SOA benefits -- gives the users freedom without risk of chaos or lack of control and management.

Incidentally, I'll be on a live webinar this Wednesday at 2 pm ET on the general topic of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and cloud-based computing approaches. Sign up to watch the panel discussion.

Early advocacy of iPaaS

An early advocate for the "integration as a service" concept, Workday is delivering on that vision in a way that could rapidly broaden its appeal beyond human resources management (HRM) and enterprise ERP and into more general cloud services. The strong integration capabilities bolsters the appeal of Workday's applications services, draws in more service partners, and sets the stage for providing wider integration capabilities.

While business-to-business integration is a key requirement for how companies support their employees -- with complex interactions across suppliers for payroll, benefits, and recruitment -- the data and access control in human resources systems proves an essential ingredient for making general integrations become more automated and safe. The new cloud integration services and tools allow customers and partners to build, deploy, run and manage custom integrations for the numerous systems and applications that connect to and from Workday.

The bottleneck of IT-administered integrations based on installed integration platforms does not seem up to this task.

But Workday executives say that "the sky is the limit" on where cloud-based integration -- that is part and parcel with applications services -- can go. And the timing is pretty hot. That's because we’re seeing that companies are focused on the business process level more, and that the resources, assets, participants and interfaces that support those processes are more varied and distributed than ever.

The challenge, then, is not just middleware integrations amid a more complex and dynamic environment, but of integrating more types of services and resources from more places by more people. The bottleneck of IT-administered integrations based on installed integration platforms does not seem up to this task. The integration requirements need to shift right along with the elements that support “boundaryless” processes.

Beat the complexity

Additionally, the historic separations of data integration, application integration and web services interoperability and access need to come together better. Those tasked with crafting and adapting business processes need to architect across the domains of integration, not be hobbled by the complexity and incompatibility among and between them. Logic and data need to play well together regardless of where they reside or how their underlying technology behaves.

In order to accomplish these new requirements, an uber integration capability that can be leveraged by various IT constituents amid an ecosystem – not installed by any or all those IT environments – appears the best and fastest approach. An integration platform in the cloud that can be leveraged and managed with enterprise-caliber security and access control at the process level can solve these vexing problems, for data, process, workflow, collaboration and traditional integration methods.

Cloud-based integration can turn IT into a rapid enabler of process innovation, rather than a costly bottleneck.

Embedding the integrations as core features of the common applications architecture also frees up the lock-in from the database integration hairball that often builds around on-premises n-tier architectures. The brittle nature of such custom integrations has also driven up the cost of computing significantly, while holding back companies from adopting new technology at a business pace, rather than an integrations pace.

That's why iPaaS and a multi-tenancy cloud environment can be a powerful productivity enhancer: businesses can far better create relationships between their organizations and pursue process innovations without the need to adjust a vast hairball of legacy software. Cloud-based integration can turn IT into a rapid enabler of process innovation, rather than a costly bottleneck.

Furthermore, the need to address people, process and technology concerns is cliche for all IT activities, but perhaps most important for how process integrations really work. Who gets to integrate what and how, and who can give permissions for cross-organizational interactions has been a thorny issue. Workday's approach to cloud integration building leverages permissions and policy-driven access and governance to make integration crafting a more mainstream corporate competency.

Benefits of multi-tenancy

Because Workday's SaaS offerings are architected on multi-tenancy operational model, whereby all users and partners to the Workday services and applications are in synch on versions and updates, integrations can be made and amended with far less complexity. A major deterrent for legacy-based EAI and middleware integrations is in the risk and complexity of making integrations that break when its time to upgrade apps or platforms.

And while APIs and lightweight connectors have been a huge benefit in recent years, the APIs interactions are not always enough for enterprise-level process integrations. There's also the problem of API sprawl, and the need to manage the interactions holistically and comprehensively.

It's the processes, after all, that count most and should be easy to safely make, remake and iterate on.

In a nutshell, Workday is working to break the integration-platform-database-applications vise that can hinder and bind enterprises and governments. The relations need to go deeper than APIs. Solving this is no small feat, but it may be one of the greatest long-term benefits of the cloud computing model, both in terms of cost and agility. It's the processes, after all, that count most and should be easy to safely make, remake and iterate on.

It's time that agile integration become a feature of more applications, rather than a hand-crafted after-market exercise at the complex database and middleware tiers. And if that can happen quicker and better as a cloud-based iPaaS model, I'm all for it.

Collaboration moves to services level

The need to effectively cobble together services, data, participants and logic and management in business processes needs to go beyond the over-burdened IT team. Social media trends show us that productivity comes from allowing individuals to reach out and craft new and better ways of doing things, of being collaborative wherever and however they can to support their goals.

Already we’re seeing self-motivated users integrate through outside entities, Facebook and Google apps being a prime examples. They are also accessing their own apps and data via web and mobile apps and via app stores. More data is being generated and stored in a variety of clouds and/or partners, and so the need to integrate the data from and amid third parties is an imperative, especially to gain comprehensive analytics. We need to both manage and examine Big Data as well as Far-Flung Data. Integration is a huge part of that.

As I mentioned, I'll be on a live webinar this Wednesday at 2 pm ET on the general topic of integration platform as a service (iPaaS) and cloud-based computing approaches. Sign up to watch the panel discussion.

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Enterprise architecture’s quest for its proper identity

This guest post comes courtesy of Len Fehskens, Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group.

By Len Fehskens

It is my impression, from what I read and hear in many enterprise and business architecture blogs and forums, that the enterprise architecture (EA) community comprises multiple factions, and which faction you are part of depends on how you answer two questions. These are fundamental questions that I suspect many in the EA community (present company excepted, of course) have not asked themselves explicitly, or, if they have, considered why they would answer them one way or the other.

I believe the answers to these questions color the way we talk and think about enterprise architecture, and until the EA community as a whole comes to a consensus regarding their answers, we risk talking past one another, using the same words but meaning significantly different things. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The two questions are:

• Is enterprise architecture primarily about IT or is it about the entire enterprise?
  
  
• Is enterprise architecture a “hard” discipline or a “soft” discipline?

My answers:

Enterprise architecture ought to be about the entire enterprise, because that’s what the name implies. If it’s really about IT, it ought to be called enterprise IT architecture. Whether or not you believe it’s possible or desirable to apply architectural thinking to the entire enterprise doesn’t change the fact that we ought to name things honestly. And when we name architectures, it seems reasonable to me to expect that if an architecture is implemented primarily in the [x] domain, it ought to be called an [x] architecture. Adding two more syllables (IT) to the seven (en-ter-prise ar-chi-tec-ture), or inserting two characters (IT) in the acronym (EA), isn’t an unbearable burden. Say it – “enterprise IT architecture.” Spell it – “EITA.”

Rarely has the cost of honesty been so modest. If you mean the architecture of an enterprise’s IT assets and capabilities, say EITA. Don’t say EA unless you really mean the architecture of the entire enterprise, not just its IT assets. Even if you consider the needs of the enterprise, or the structure of the enterprise’s processes, if the implementation of the architecture you’re developing will be mostly in the IT domain, it’s EITA, not EA. Even if you believe that architectural thinking can be meaningfully applied only to the IT function of an enterprise, it’s still EITA, not EA.

Soft discipline

My answer to the second question is that I believe enterprise architecture, as scoped above, is a “soft” discipline. I think talking about “manufacturing” or “engineering” enterprises is just silly; it’s another example of the kind of aggrandizement that misnaming enterprise IT architecture represents.

Even calling an enterprise a “system” is risky. We use the word system in two senses. One is a very broadly inclusive idea, often expressed as “everything is a system,” in that many things can be viewed as assemblies or aggregates of smaller components. This concept of system is useful because it encourages us to take a holistic, rather than reductionist, perspective, acknowledging that the relationships between the pieces are as important as the individual pieces themselves. The other sense of “system” is the one engineers use – a system is an artifact that has been methodically designed and built from interconnected components. Calling something a system in the first sense doesn’t make it a system in the second sense; it doesn’t make its behavior and performance analytically tractable or deterministic.

It is simply not possible to specify an enterprise as completely, and to the same level of detail, as it is to specify a building or a locomotive or an airplane. And, for the purpose of enterprise architecture, i.e., to ensure that an enterprise’s assets and capabilities are aligned with its vision, mission and strategy, it isn’t necessary to do so, even if we could.

It may be possible to do so for EITA, and maybe that’s where the idea that the same can be said of the enterprise as a whole comes from.

Calling something a system in the first sense doesn’t make it a system in the second sense; it doesn’t make its behavior and performance analytically tractable or deterministic.

If the enterprise as a whole is a system, it’s a people-intensive system, and as such one might as well talk about manufacturing or engineering people.

After all, why do we call them “enterprises”? Consider the first definition of the noun “enterprise” in the Oxford English Dictionary: “A design of which the execution is attempted; a piece of work taken in hand, an undertaking; chiefly, and now exclusively, a bold, arduous or momentous undertaking.” Clearly implicit in this definition is that this is something undertaken by people. There’s a nod to this reality when we refer to an enterprise as a “sociotechnical system”, but the “socio” too often gets short shrift while the “technical” gets the bulk of the attention.

Yes, people play a role in other “systems” – they live and work in buildings, they drive locomotives and pilot airplanes. But people don’t just interact with an enterprise; in a fundamental sense, they are the enterprise. And unlike buildings and locomotives and airplanes, enterprises are continually adapting themselves, in the homeostatic sense of maintaining their integrity and identity in the face of internal and external change, and in the sense of deliberately repurposing themselves in response to such change.

How would you answer these questions, and why would you answer them that way? Our answers strongly influence what we believe is within the purview of enterprise architecture, how we address that scope, and what we imagine we can accomplish by doing so.

This guest post comes courtesy of Len Fehskens, Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group.

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Mobile enablement presents challenges, opportunities as enterprises retool apps for the future now

This guest post comes courtesy of Stefan Andreasen, Founder/CTO, Kapow Software.

By Stefan Andreasen

Mobile adoption rates are on the rise and if market reports are any indication, growth rates aren’t slowing down anytime soon. Consumers and employees alike are the driving forces behind mobile adoption spurred by the evolution in mobile device capabilities along with the speed of mobile networks.

A recent Morgan Stanley research study predicts that sales of smartphones will overtake PC sales (including both desktops and notebooks) in the next two years, supporting the demands of our always-connected society. [Disclosure: Kapow Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The ubiquity of smartphones and more than 300,000 mobile apps available on Apple’s App Store, coupled with the ease and convenience of mobile computing is putting pressure on IT to mobile enable B2C and B2E applications to facilitate organizational efficiency and keep up with consumer and employee demand for mobile access to applications and content.

When it comes to enabling mobile access to mission-critical enterprise apps, companies have made far less progress.

It’s no surprise that millions of employees around the world are bringing their smartphones and mobile devices to work, resetting workplace expectations to have always-on access to the instantly available business apps that they’ve grown accustomed to from their personal lives.

According to a survey conducted by the Yankee Group, 90 percent of organizations surveyed have already enabled smartphone access to corporate email and PIM. Yet when it comes to enabling mobile access to mission-critical enterprise apps, companies have made far less progress, with only 30 percent of those surveyed providing smartphone access to customer relationship management (CRM), 20 percent to enterprise resource planning (ERP), and 18 percent to sales force automation (SFA).

CIOs scrambling

IT leaders and industry analysts are noticing CIOs scrambling to mobile-enable legacy applications to make them available on smartphones, tablets, and even GPS/navigation devices. And, IT departments are feeling the growing pressure to get this done in a matter of months -- to not only stay ahead of the competition, but in many cases, just to keep up.

One of the main challenges companies need to overcome when enabling mobile device access to existing data or legacy applications is the lack of “mobile ready” web service application programming interfaces (APIs) for existing applications.

Adding a service-level interface to a legacy application is a complex development project that typically involves a full or extensive rewrite of the existing legacy application. A common problem is that throughout the years an application has been written and modified by multiple developers, which are likely to have left the company, along with their institutional knowledge about the application. This situation had led many companies to basically re-write the application, which can take several years of coding and insurmountable resources and budget.

This situation had led many companies to basically re-write the application, which can take several years of coding and insurmountable resources and budget

It’s essential that organizations evaluate these important factors when embarking on a mobile enablement project:

• Do the applications you want to mobile-enable have documented APIs?
  
• What components and features of your business application do you want to mobile enable?
  
• How are you taking into account form factor?
  
• How will you deal with business logic and processes too complicated to be executed on a mobile device with a limited keyboard, where air time needs to be controlled, and server round trips need to be minimized?
  
• How will you deal with service interruptions requiring the ability to queue processes for later execution on the back end?
  
• Will you be combining data from multiple apps into one mobile application?
  
• What mobile platforms do you need to support?
  
• To what extent will you want to modify or extend your mobile application in the near future?

The best way to facilitate mobile enablement projects is with focused, goal oriented, up-front planning that doesn’t underestimate the complexity of the process, especially when dealing with traditional data integration techniques.

What many companies aren’t aware of is that there is an alternative approach to developing custom-built, native apps that doesn’t require dependency on pre-existing APIs.

Known as “browser-based data integration,” this emerging approach makes existing business applications and data “mobile ready” by allowing organizations to wrap their existing web application without changing the systems that are already there.

By creating a new web service interface “wrapper” without re-writing any of the existing code, mobile access to enterprise B2C and B2E applications can be possible in days or weeks, not months or years.

It’s no surprise that mobile initiatives are now a top priority for every enterprise. The challenge is to approach these projects as swiftly and efficiently as possible to stay relevant and productive. By combining the proper up-front planning process with browser-based mobile enablement technologies, companies can quickly provide their mobile users with the data and apps they so desperately want and need.

This guest post comes courtesy of Stefan Andreasen, Founder/CTO, Kapow Software.

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