More hints that IT systems analysis and on-demand models are coming together

The hot (albeit not necessarily sexy) segment of IT operations -- the analysis and intelligence-gathering from logs and performance management data -- is showing increasing signs of an on-demand future.

First, Paglo came out last month (in beta) with a free and open source (GPL) crawler service that scours the reams of log files and other electronic records users point it at inside of data centers and server farms. With a subsequent index, IT operators can view on and search for needed analysis and metrics of IT use and performance data as an online service via browsers.

Paglo provides IT administrators and operators the free crawler service to gain information or meta data on all sorts of assets on their networks, including across VPNs to remote offices. As an open source crawler, folks are free to write scripts to search into various modules and whatever else they want to gather data from on their networks. Other users can then benefit from these scripts via the community. Pretty quickly the Paglo community ought to be able to index just about anything of import on their networks. No cost incurred for users but their time involved.

The meta data then -- they assure me, safely -- is sent to an index instance in the cloud managed by Paglo. The managers of the crawler and hosted data can then securely search the logs using all sorts of queries, charts, views, and dashboards to gather quantitative and qualitative business intelligence on their IT systems use and use patterns.

The analysis can initially help with such chores as determining how many Microsoft Office suites are actually in use, or how to do quick audits of this or that element on a network. This can help with audits, to identify straggler application installations and to track down when users have installed things they should not. But later, the service could spawn premium services for operations analytics and troubleshooting.

Furthermore, by aggregating and (one hopes) anonymizing the data from many IT sites, Paglo could create definitive market research on just what constitutes IT use and context based on just the facts, ma-am. Rather than rely on quasi-annual surveys by IT analyst firms (always on the vanguard of objective results), a broad Paglo audit of large swaths of IT use and habits -- based on valid and scientific samplings (if not actual empirical censuses) -- could take the guess work out of what IT is actually being used in certain types of companies, and regions. That would be some mighty fine data, and could hold the IT vendors' feet to the fire on their real penetration and use patterns.

But I can see where this can go much further. Views and queries can show exactly what is beng used and in many respects how. Also, Paglo can then aggregate that across many user sites and types of users to draw empirical, statistically relevant determinations of what is being used in the field. Compare and contrast between verticals, SMBs and enterprises, regions and/or geographies.

If Paglo gets any kind of volume adoption and the data is good and comprehensive, we could end up with a comScore for IT components and infrastructure bits. Perhaps Paglo will make its money from selling the use patterns and market share data, while giving away the means to the tactical analysis for each company. So far they are mum on where their remuneration will come from.

Suffice to say, such a service will generate a lot of page views that only an IT systems administrators could love. That in itself could spell advertising gold for those selling to IT shops.

And, hey, free insight into IT ops -- as long as you feel okay about someone else's crawler sniffing around your network and servers -- could be an offer some cheapo outfits can't refuse. If the CIO won't pay for analytics products, what else could an operations manager do to prevent those awful Monday mornings.

On another IT analysis front, LogLogic announced today that longtime IT infrastructure thought leader Pat Sueltz has joined as CEO. Pat has been marching upward in title (while perhaps sliding a bit in employer size) over the past seven years. You may recall Pat as the gal who managed the Java relationship for IBM, back when Sun Microsystems and IBM saw eye to eye, at least on a common foe: Microsoft.

Then Pat went to Sun -- after making a lot of noise at IBM on why Java ought to be overseen by a standards body (if not open source). And this back in mid-1990s. After a stint at Sun in charge of software (not great timing it turns out) and then Sun services, she did a well-timed stint at Salesforce.com. And there lies the rub on the intersection of LogLogic and SaaS and on-demand models.

She won't commit, of course, this being her first week on how on-demand and LogLogic come together. But I'll wager a new chapter of growth potential for LogLogic lies in some of the interesting things Paglo has been trying, not to mention following the Salesforce ecology thing. There's also Splunk and what it has done with an online open repository of analytics data, know as SplunkBase. [Disclosure: Splunk has been a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Pat comes to LogLogic from SurfControl, where she was CEO. I'll be keeping an eye on Pat, with keen interest on how research, trends, data and online business models come into play with the perhaps no longer esoteric log file management arena. I'm also looking for real business intelligence as applied to IT, culled from this log data. Between those values and the compliance imperatives, this is a high-growth area.

In other words, there's gold in them thar logs.

We'll see more acquisitions that meld telcos with IT vendors

News from London that Deutsche Telekom may make a bid to buy IT services giant EDS. This is only the opening volley in a forthcoming period of acquisitions that meld telcos with IT vendors.

I recently suggested that BEA Systems, as it spurns Oracle's initial bid, may also be a good fit for a large teleco such as AT&T. Much of the same logic I applied to a BEA-telco mashup works for a Deutsche Telekom and EDS marriage.

The fact is that IT vendors -- be they code/systems providers or systems integrators (or both) -- are becoming more like service providers. We see evidence of this with IBM's recent Blue Cloud announcement, the go-to-market match-up between Red Hat and Amazon, and also the way that many new startups are entering the field -- as services -- such as Paglo this week. (Look for a separate blog on Paglo soon.)

The fact also remains that telcos and mobile services providers are increasingly becoming IT providers, either directly or as integrators or aggregators of IT functions that they then deliver to their customers -- both B2B and B2C. Enterprises will enjoy efficiencies in buying business services from a single entity when that organization can combine the IT, network, integration, communications services, outsourcing and software. Who or what best combines these features for the best business-cost benefit, is the $100 billion question.

The value-add to enterprises on IT increasingly comes from the integration, services provisioning and services ecology partnerships, not from the code base or hardware differentiation. Virtualization, open source, and SaaS will hasten this irreversible course. And when everything is a TCP/IP-driven function or asset, why not merge, mash, and package it all up with bright red bow and lock it into a big multi-year services contract?

And, of course, we're now also on the downward slope of a massive IT supplier consolidation era (most notably among software vendors). Some even call it the end of best-of-breed. I'm not sure it's the end of best-of-breed, there will always be standalone functions and/or applications and services that come to markets to meet new needs.

As Peter Zotto, CEO of IONA Technologies, recently told me:

As 'middleware' vendor consolidation continues, big propriety stacks will get bigger, more expensive and more complex-and the speed of innovation will decline. This is the exact opposite of the potential of SOA. "Anti-stack" vendors, like IONA, that deliver industry-standard middleware technology for performance-demanding SOA environments are
already benefiting customers looking for lower-cost and easier-to-deploy software. This is just the beginning of a new innovation cycle kick-started by industry consolidation. (Disclosure, IONA has been a sponsor of my BriefingsDirect podcasts.)

But clearly the larger vendors -- Oracle, IBM, SAP, HP, Microsoft, et al -- have gotten even larger via consolidation, and are closer to providing a full set of IT offerings, with varying degrees of actual deep and meaningful integration. As they become more like service providers these bulked-up vendors actually drive ecologies of ISVs and providers, and -- just like a telco -- manage the customers on one end, and the supply chain participants on the other.

So when you associate and explore the consequences of these trends, it points to more types of mergers along the lines of Deutsche Telekom and EDS, or even BEA and AT&T.

The telcos had better not wait too long as the are buying or being bought. They will eventually be competing with a class of consolidated vendor/suppliers that have traditionally moved more quickly and better than the telcos in their best days. There will only be a handful of these behemoths bestriding the globe (until and if decentralization again appears?).

Indeed, if the telecos wait too long, or make the wrong acquisitions, they might lose that customer relationship altogether. And where would they be then, especially as new networks based on new wireless technologies appear?

One aside: Watch how Cisco Systems moves on this. I predict some interesting mergers involving Cisco and large network/services providers in 2008.

Open Group aims to make IT architects 'distinguished'

The Open Group, a vendor- and technology-neutral consortium, has taken certification to a new level with the announcement of its Distinguished Certified IT Architect designation within the IT Architect Certification program (ITAC).

As enterprise IT moves into new, uncharted waters -- especially the area that encompasses services oriented architecture (SOA) -- one of the chief concerns has been the availability, or lack of availability, of the trained and experienced architects who are necessary to make the vision a reality.

Begun two years ago, ITAC, a peer-review process, has already certified over 2,000 architects from some of the largest names in global enterprises. The new level of certification will require that individuals demonstrate a history of significant impact to the business through the application of IT architecture.

[Disclosure: I recently moderated an Open Group panel.]

The Open Group had already set the bar pretty high for architects certified at the basic level. Steve Nunn, the group's COO, told BriefingsDirect in a round-table discussion last March that one of the initial steps for certification was compiling a resume, and, in some cases, that has amounted to a 52-page document.

The core attributes expected from the Distinguished Certified IT Architect include:

• Executive level communication skills
• Responsibility for significantly complex architecture engagements
• A demonstrated architectural vision for key business initiatives
• Governance expertise

The new certification provides for three distinct career paths: chief/lead architect, profession executive, and enterprise architect.

A great deal of will power and leadership charisma will be required to make inroads toward SOA benefits.

This means that the architects of SOA must be as much evangelists and consensus-builders as technologists. They must be trusted and absolutely respected. Pointy-haired bosses ala Dilbert need not apply.

SOA architects must also balance short-term business outcomes with longer-term objectives aimed at maintaining quality and maximizing IT value. Too often architecture has been focused on discrete initiatives or infrastructure projects, such as server architecture or network architecture, rather than the broader IT perspective.

The concept of total architect also jibes well with Total Architecture, a topic I explored in a recent podcast with Dr. Paul Brown, author of “Succeeding with SOA: Realizing Business Value Through Total Architecture.”

Latest 'The Group' podcast delves into Google Android, Yahoo's China syndrome, and Facebook gestures (again)

Steve Gillmor's The Gang debuts its second coming for the second time. There's always good tibits and chunky nuggets in these roundtable gab-fests.

As usual the topics straddle places more weight on the Web 2.0 side than the IT side, but I'm working on it.

Steve's guests this week include, your's truly, Jason Calacanis, Sam Whitmore, Mike Arrington, Dan Farber, Mike Vizard, Robert Anderson and New York Times Bits columnist Saul Hansell.

This is Calacanis's last appearance on The Gang, so get him while you can. I forget who he impersonates this time, might be Marc Canter again or Don Kirshner, I'm not sure.

Go to Facebook and join The Gillmor Group, if Steve let's you. So far he seems uncharacteristically friendly. It can't last.

IBM's 'Blue Cloud' signals the tipping point for enterprise IT into services model

I recall a front page story I wrote for InfoWorld back in 1997. At the time there were still plenty of naysayers about whether websites were a plaything or a business tool. There was talk of clicks and mortar, and how the mortar would always determine business outcomes.

And then General Motors -- the very definition of a traditional big business -- unveiled an expansive website that fully embraced the Internet across its businesses. We at InfoWorld wrote about GM's embrace of the Web then as a corporate tipping point, from which there was no going back. Clicks became mainstream for businesses. Case closed.

And so it is today, with IBM's announcement of Blue Cloud -- an approach that not only talks the services talk, but walks the services walk. We are all at the tipping point where IT will be delivered of, by and for services. If Google, Yahoo!, Amazon and eBay can do what they do with their applications and services, then why shouldn't General Motors? Or SMB XYZ?

So the king of mainframes and distributed computing moves the value expectations yet again -- to the pre-configured cloud architecture. The standards meet the management that meets the utility that gets the job done faster, better, cheaper. Slap an IBM logo on it and take it to the bank.

The future of IT is clearly about the efficiencies and agility of the grid/utility/Live/fabric/cloud/SOA/WOA thing. There can be no turning back. I believe Nick Carr is coming out with a book on this soon, The Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, and IT is by no means irrelevant this time.

IBM's Blue Cloud, arriving in the first half of 2008, will use IBM BladeCenter servers, a Linux operating system, Xen-based virtualization and the company's own Tivoli management software. Nothing about this is terribly new. Sun Microsystems has been talking about it for years. HP is well on the way to making it so, given its Mercury and Opsware acquisitions. Citrix has an eye on this all too. Red Hat has its approach. Amazon is game. Google is riding the wave. Even Microsoft has hedged its bets.

But the tipping point comes when IBM's global clout in the major accounts is brought into play. The sales force will feel The Force, Luke. IBM will march in and let your IT services architecture mimic the service providers' basic set-ups too. You gain the ability to integrate your internal services with those of your partners, customers, suppliers, vendors and providers. Next will come an ESB in the cloud, no? This makes for a fertile period of innovation.

Perhaps IBM will also cross the chasm and host their own services -- not applications per se, but commodity business functions that ISVs, providers, and companies can innovate on top of or in addition to. Google has maps, but IBM has payroll, or tax returns, or purchasing. Could be quite interesting. I would expect IBM to offer ads in these services too some day (come on, Sam, it's not so bad).

And that also means you'll be provisioning IT internally and externally as subscription services. Charge-backs and IT shared services models become the standard models across both supply chains as well as value-added sales activities. Businesses will determine their margins based on the difference between what they pay for IT services (internal or external) plus the cost of the value added services -- and then what they charge on the receiving end. High-volume, recurring revenue, fewer peaks and troughs.

This is really the culmination of several mega trends in two major areas: IT and economics of online commerce. The trends that support this on the IT side include virtualization, high-availability clustering, open source platforms and tools, industry standard multi-core hardware, storage networks, Java middleware, WAN optimization, data services and federation, scripting language maturity -- as well as application consolidation and modernization, datacenter unification, low-energy-use dictates, and common management frameworks. The result is something like Blue Cloud.

The online economics trends include ecommerce, advertising supported Web services/media/entertainment, pay as you use services and infrastructure as a service, and - of course -- free code, free tools, free middleware, free stacks. It's all free -- except the service, maintenance, and support (otherwise known as a subscription).

And if one major corporation buys into IBM's Blue Cloud and they deploy in such a way as to exploit all these mega trends -- while counting on IBM as the one throat to choke as the means to reduce change risk -- what happens?

Well, they might see total IT operating costs go down by 40% over a few years, while also able to enjoy the productivity benefits of SOA, SaaS, services ecologies like Salesforce.com, and therefore become more agile in how they acquire and adjust their business processes and services delivery. You might get to do more for a lot less. And a lot less IT labor.

And so our Blue Cloud-user corporation has their competitors who will, no doubt, need to follow a similar course, lest they be set on a path of grave disadvantage due to higher costs and an inability to change as quickly in their markets. If a mere 50 of the global 500 move to a Blue Cloud or equivalent, it would be enough to change the game in their respective industries. We're seen it happen in financial services, retail, music and media, and IT itself.

And so large enterprises will need not just make decisions about technology platform, supplier, and computing models. They will need to make bigger decisions based on broad partnerships that produce services ecologies in niches and industries. For an enterprise to adopt a Blue Cloud approach is not just to pick a vendor -- they are picking much more. The businesses and services and hosting all become mingled. It becomes more about revenue sharing than just a supplier contract.

Yes, Blue Cloud and many other announcements and alignments in 2007 point to a 2008 in which a services ecology evolves and matures for many industries. The place where differentiation matters most is at the intercept of proper embrace of the service model, of picking the right partners, and of exerting leadership and dominance of best practices within a business vertical or niche. You'll have a different relationship with your services partner than you do with your IT vendor. IBM will show you the way.

Hear the music? It ain't the Blues! It's the quick-step. Dancers, pick your partners carefully. You're going to be spending a lot of time sharing your futures together.