Tuesday, June 24, 2008

Sonoa Systems appeals to industry powerhouses with ServiceNet appliance

Sonoa Systems, Inc., which provides software and appliances to ensure data protection and access control in customer-facing applications, has added some world-class enterprises to its customer list.

The Santa Clara, Calif.-based company today announced that Pfizer, the world's largest research-based pharmaceutical company, Warner Music, and Insights OnDemand, a provider of on-demand business intelligence solutions, will be taking advantage of Sonoa's technology backbone. These companies join such other powerhouses as JP Morgan Chase, Level 3, Landslide, Net One and Aizu University.

Sonoa's ServiceNet appliance enables enterprises and software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers to enable secure, flexible access control to manage a large number of clients without the risk of data exposure. The appliance can also monitor service-level agreements (SLAs) to ensure regulatory compliance.

Another key feature is interoperability, designed to reduce the time and effort required to add new clients, even those with different protocol or security requirements. It accomplishes this by mediating across versions, which can be done without generating new code.

Currently, the challenges of providing security for customer-facing applications, especially with diverse clients, are solved with point products or hand-coded software, which adds time and cost, making the solution economically unattractive.

Sonoa ServiceNet employs a network router-like architecture that non-intrusively enforces security, interoperability and performance policies in real-time 'on the wire'. By handling the access control, interoperability and performance issues that occur at cloud scale, teams can ensure maximum performance and scalability in the environment, making it easy to create new products and add new users and services.

Sonoa ServiceNet is available as a network or virtual appliance.

ITIL's influence extends beyond IT operations to enhance SOA, portfolio management and change management

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) advances have helped IT departments recast themselves as mature and process-oriented. But the role and influence of ITIL, especially version 3, is extending well beyond IT organization and operations improvements to impact such essential endeavors as as service oriented architecture (SOA), portfolio management and low-risk change management.

ITIL, in effect, is fostering cultural and behavioral change inside of IT departments, which also has a direct bearing on general business transformation and the ability of enterprises to innovate and compete writ large.

To help better understand the role and impact of ITIL on actual IT departments in a variety of use-case scenarios, I interviewed two ITIL practitioners, Sean McClean, principal at KatalystNow, and Hwee Ming Ng, solutions architect in HP's Consulting and Integration group. The discussion was recorded June 18 at HP's Software Universe event in Las Vegas.

This ITIL impact podcast comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Monday, June 23, 2008

Interview: HP SOA Center director Tim Hall on new business drivers and efficiency benefits from SOA

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Service oriented architecture (SOA) is at a crossroads, moving from pilot to enterprise status for many companies. As the trends and economics landscapes shift, SOA's benefits and pay-offs are accelerating.

Green and energy-conscious companies are seeing SOA through the context of data center and applications modernization. Toss in a surge of interest in virtualization, ongoing methodological on-ramps to SOA and a budding fascination in cloud computing methods, and we’re looking at the means to accommodate (at lower TCO) all the old and new of IT systems, platforms, framework, applications and delivery services.

That takes data center transformation, and not just adding more servers. We also need is the means to manage the complexity, fragility, scale and cost. HP seems to see this clearly. The goal of data center transformation that goes hand in hand with SOA efficiency is clear, but how to get there is another matter.

To probe deeper into SOA's impact on enterprise IT and business transformation, we sat down with Tim Hall, director of HP's SOA Center products for a discussion moderated by me, recorded June 18 at HP's Software Universe event in Las Vegas.

Listen to this SOA impact podcast, part of a series of discussions with HP executives from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Saturday, June 21, 2008

Will ebizQ post my comment on proper blog link etiquette?

I wonder if this comment (below) that I left on Joe McKendrick's SOA blog on ebizQ will show up. I'll let you all know.

[UPDATE: They did, they did publish my comment, and did the requested customary link to my blog ... all's well with the web world. No harm done.]

"Thanks for the blog on my storage and SOA observations, Joe. And thanks for the link back to my SearchSOA Q&A.

However, it is customary in blogs to link back to an individual's blog when you reference them by name, though I notice that ebizQ is often stingy on this point. I've had to ask them several times now to do baseline linking.

So for ebizQ's edification, here are the links to use when referencing my name and analysis for the benefit of their readers:

--http://blogs.zdnet.com/Gardner/
--http://briefingsdirectblog.blogspot.com/
--http://www.briefingsdirect.com/
--http://briefingsdirect.blogspot.com/
--http://www.findtechblogs.com/soa/
--http://www.interarbor-solutions.com/home.html

Thanks!"

Friday, June 20, 2008

Interview: HP information management maven Rod Walker describes how BI empowers business leaders to innovate

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Business intelligence (BI) has been a top investment for corporations in the past several years, but the ability for BI to generate value and strategic direction guidance is merely in adolescence.

In health care, customer retention, energy and oil management, and for global risk reduction and compliance, BI is offering some of the best payoffs from IT and datacenter investments, says Rod Walker, vice president for information management at HP's Consulting and Integration group.

In this podcast discussion, Walker joins me to explore how BI will continue to be one of the most effective ways for business leaders to leverage IT over he next decade. Proper information management -- including all content in all forms, and not just structured data -- provides powerful market analytics and customer and user behavior inferences to enable real-time decisions about core services, product offerings and go to market campaigns.

Listen to this BI business opportunity overview podcast recorded at HP's Software Universe event June 18, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas. The Walker interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Interview: Dan Rueckert of HP consulting digs into ITIL's role in accelerating SOA, IT service management

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

More enterprise IT departments are working toward Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) principles and reference models for running their organizations. Yet ITIL can provide more benefits than initially meets the eye, including accelerating service oriented architecture (SOA) adoption, faster mean time to recovery in IT operations, and more effective change management.

Dan Rueckert, worldwide practice director for both the service management and security practices in HP's Consulting and Integration group, explains in an interview the direct and significant ancillary payoffs from ITIL adoption -- from establishing an IT service lifecycle to defining an overall IT service strategy.

Listen to this ITIL overview podcast recorded at HP's Software Universe event June 18, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas. The Rueckert interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Thursday, June 19, 2008

Interview: HP Software's David Gee on next generation data center trends and opportunities

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Enterprise CIOs face mounting challenges that are hard and getting even harder. HP says it has a lifeline for these IT departments and leaders over the next five years by helping them to dramatically cut the size of IT budgets relative to the enterprises' total revenue. This allows a shift on IT spending from operations to innovation via next generation data centers.

David Gee, vice president of marketing for HP Software, in a podcast interview from HP's Software Universe event this week, discusses the large global opportunity for enterprises and service providers to cut the relative size of IT budgets by investing in modern data centers that save energy, consolidate applications, leverage virtualization, and rely more on automation than manual upkeep processes.

Listen to this interview podcast, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas, for more on HP's plans for next generation data centers that focus IT on the businesses' interests.

The Gee interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives I'll be doing this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Interview: HP's BTO chief Ben Horowitz on how application lifecycles and data center operations can find common ground

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

There may be no greater "silos" in all of IT than the gulf between application development and data center operations. For the sake of enhancing both, however, common ground is needed -- and HP is putting together a path of greater collaboration, visibility, management and automation to engender "application lifecycle optimization" to better bind design time with runtime.

Ben Horowitz, vice president and general manager of HP’s BTO software unit, and former CEO of HP's 2007 acquisition, Opsware, explains in a podcast interview from HP's Software Universe event this week how these hither to fore distinct orbits of IT can finally coalesce.

Through managed requirements collaboration and the use of "contracts" between the designers, testers, business leaders and IT operators, application lifecycle optimization has arrived, says Horowitz. Bringing more input and visibility into applications design, test and refinement, in a managed fashion, allows applications to better meet business goals, while also providing the data center operators better means to host those applications efficiently with high availability, he says.

Listen to this interview podcast, moderated by your's truly from Las Vegas, for more on HP's plans for and philosophy on how BTO and next generation data centers come together.

The Horowitz interview comes as part of a series of discussions with HP executives I'll be doing this week from the HP Software Universe conference. See the full list here.

Read a full transcript of the discussion.

Listen to the podcast. Download the podcast. Listen on iTunes/iPod. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.