Looking forward to webinar on applications modernization trends and techniques with Nexaweb

Application modernization as a precursor and accelerant to IT transformation is the topic of a webinar I'm on this Thursday at 1 p.m. ET.

The topic is a no-brainer. Old apps that waste money need to come out to the web services and RIA model and join the grand mashup.

Application modernization is one of those IT initiatives that packs the one-two wallop of cutting costs while improving agility and business outcomes. That combination of doing more for less makes so much sense these days, and it may be the new number one requirement for any IT budget.

Services and logic locked up in mainframes, COBOL, n-tier Java, and other 3-4GL client-server implementations can find a new life as rich Internet services on virtualized or standard hardware and platforms. The process recovers past investments, closes down wasteful operations spending, and extends value into the platforms that operate at peak efficiency and lower costs. Hard to argue.

Remember the wave of ROI studies back in 2003? Well now you need ROI plus provable business improvements of the qualitative variety. Application modernization fits the bill because application sprawl wastes server utilization, leaves apps and data in silos that resist services orientation and prevents the sun-setting of older, expensive platforms -- plus you can do all kinds of innovative things with the services you couldn't do before.

Oh, and getting these services into a SOA and on virtualized platforms opens the door to more exploitation of cloud and SaaS models, as they make more sense.

I'll be discussing the rationale for application modernization, how to target which apps and platforms, what processes need to be in place, and how to scale app modernization projects appropriately. Joining me on the webinar will be David McFarlane, COO at Nexaweb. [Disclosure: Nexaweb is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

McFarlane, no doubt, will be explaining how the Nexaweb Reference Framework is engineered to reduce the time, costs, and architectural decisions associated with modernizing business applications and bringing them to the Web.

I like the idea of app modernization for mainframe and COBOL code, but Nexaweb goes further in terms of the webification trend: Sybase PowerBuilder, Microsoft Visual Basic, Oracle Forms and other 3GL/4GL-based applications are what it has in mind, with as much as 67 percent in total costs savings in early customer implementations, says Nexaweb.

Sign up to listen in and watch the slides go by. Q&A to follow. Should be fun.

Solving IT energy conservation issues requires holistic approach to management and planning, say HP experts

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The critical and global problem of energy management for IT operations and data centers has emerged as both a cost and capacity issue. The goal is to find innovative means to conserve electricity use so that existing data centers don't need to be expanded or replaced -- at huge cost.

In order to promote a needed close matching of tight energy supply with the lowest IT energy demand possible, the entire IT landscape needs to be considered. That means an enterprise-by-enterprise examination of the "many sins" of energy mis-management. Wasted energy use, it turns out, has its origins all across IT and business practices.

To learn more about how enterprises should begin an energy-conservation mission, I recently spoke with Ian Jagger, Worldwide Data Center Services marketing manager in Hewlett-Packard's (HP) Technology Solutions Group, and Andrew Fisher, manager of technology strategy in the Industry Standard Services group at HP.

Here are some excerpts:

Data centers typically were not designed for the computing loads that are available to us today ... (and so) enterprise customers are having to consider strategically what they need to do with respect to their facilities and their capability to bring enough power to be able to supply the future capacity needs coming from their IT infrastructure.

Typically the cost of energy is now approaching 10 percent of IT budgets and that's significant. It now becomes a common problem for both of these departments (IT and Facilities) to address. If they don't address it themselves then I am sure a CEO or a CFO will help them along that path.

Just the latest generation server technology is something like 325 percent more energy efficient in terms of performance-per-watt than older equipment. So simply upgrading your single-core servers to the latest quad-core servers can lead to incredible improvements in energy efficiency, especially when combined with other technologies like virtualization.

Probably most importantly, you need to make sure that your cooling system is tuned and optimized to your real needs. One of the biggest issues out there is that the industry, by and large,drastically overcools data centers. That reduces their cooling capacity and ends up wasting an incredible amount of money.

You need to take a complete end-to-end solution that involves everything from analysis of your operational processes and behavioral issues, how you are configuring your data center, whether you have hot-aisle or cold-aisle configurations, these sorts of things, to trying to optimize the performance or the efficiency of the power delivery, making sure that you are getting the best performance per watt out of your IT equipment itself.

The best way of saving energy is, of course, to turn the computers off in the first place. Underutilized computing is not the greatest way to save energy. ... If you look at virtualizing the environment, then the facility design or the cooling design for that environment would be different. If you weren't in a virtualized environment, suddenly you are designing something around 15-35 kilowatts per cabinet, as opposed to 10 kilowatts per cabinet. That requires completely different design criteria.

You’re using four to eight times the wattage in comparison. That, in turn, requires stricter floor management. ... But having gotten that improved design around our floor management, you are then able to look at what improvements can be made from the IT infrastructure side as well.

If you are able to reduce the number of watts that you need for your IT equipment by buying more energy efficient equipment or by using virtualization and other technologies, then that has a multiplying effect on total energy. You no longer have to deliver power for that wattage that you have eliminated and you don't have to cool the heat that is no longer generated.

This is a complex system. When you look at the total process of delivering the energy from where it comes in from the utility feed, distributing it throughout the data center with UPS capability or backup power capability, through the actual IT equipment itself, and then finally with the cooling on the back end to remove the heat from the data center, there are a thousand points of opportunity to improve the overall efficiency.

We are really talking about the Adaptive Infrastructure in action here. Everything that we are doing across our product delivery, software, and services is really an embodiment of the Adaptive Infrastructure at work in terms of increasing the efficiency of our customers' IT assets and making them more efficient.

To complicate it even further, there are lot of organizational or behavioral issues that Ian alluded to as well. Different organizations have different priorities in terms of what they are trying to achieve.

The principal problem is that they tend to be snapshots in time and not necessarily a great view of what's actually going on in the data center. But, typically we can get beyond that and look over annualized values of energy usage and then take measurements from that point.

So, there is rarely a single silver bullet to solve this complex problem. ... The approach that we at HP are now taking is to move toward a new model, which we called the Hybrid Tiered Strategy, with respect to the data center. In other words, it’s a modular design, and you mix tiers according to need.

One thing that was just announced is relevant to what Ian was just talking about. We announced recently the HP Performance-Optimized Data Center (POD), which is our container strategy for small data centers that can be deployed incrementally.

This is another choice that's available for customers. Some of the folks who are looking at it first are the big scale-out infrastructure Web-service companies and so forth. The idea here is you take one of these 40-foot shipping containers that you see on container ships all over the place and you retrofit it into a mini data center.

... There’s an incredible opportunity to reclaim that reserve capacity, put it to good use, and continue to deploy new servers into your data center, without having to break ground on a new data center.

... There are new capabilities that are going to be coming online in the near future that allow greater control over the power consumption within the data center, so that precious capacity that's so expensive at the data center level can be more accurately allocated and used more effectively.

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ITIL requires better log management and analytics to gain IT operational efficiency, accountability

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Implementing best practices from the the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) has become increasingly popular in IT departments. As managers improve IT operations with an eye to process efficiency, however, they need to gain operational accountability through visibility and analytics into how systems and networks are behaving.

Innovative use of systems log management and analytics -- in the context of entire IT infrastructures -- produces an audit and performance data trail that both helps implement and refine such models as ITIL. Compliance is also a building requirement that can be solved through verification tools such as systems monitoring and analytics in the context of ITIL best practices.

To learn more about how systems log tools and analysis are aiding organizations as they adopt ITIL, I recently spoke with Sean McClean, principal at consultancy KatalystNow, and Sudha Iyer, director of product management at LogLogic.

Here are some excerpts:

IT, as a business, a practice, or an industry is relatively new. The ITIL framework has been one that's always been focused on how we can create a common thread or a common language, so that all businesses can follow and do certain things consistently with regard to IT. ... We are looking to do even more with tying the IT structure into the business, the function of getting the business done, and how IT can better support that, so that IT becomes a part of the business.

Because the business of IT supporting a business is relatively new, we are still trying to grow and mature those frameworks of what we all agree upon is the best way to handle things. ... When people look at ITIL, organizations assume that it’s something you can simply purchase and plug into your organization. It doesn't quite work that way.

ITIL is generally a guidance -- best practices -- for service delivery, incident management, or what have you. Then, there are these sets of policies with these guidelines. What organizations can do is set up their data retention policy, firewall access policy, or any other policy.

But, how do they really know whether these policies are being actually enforced and/or violated, or what is the gap? How do they constantly improve upon their security posture? That's where it's important to collect activity in your enterprise on what's going on.

Our log-management platform ... allows organizations to collect information from a wide variety of sources, assimilate it, and analyze it. An auditor or an information security professional can look deep down into what's actually going on, on their storage capacity or planning for the future, on how many more firewalls are required, or what's the usage pattern in the organization of a particular server.

All these different metrics feed back into what ITIL is trying to help IT organizations do. Actually, the bottom line is how do you do more with less, and that's where log management fits in. ... Our log management solutions allows [enterprises] to create better control and visibility into what actually is going on in their network and their systems. From many angles, whether it's a security professional or an auditor, they’re all looking at whether you know what's going on.

You want to figure out how much of your current investment is being utilized. If there is a lot of unspent capacity, that's where understanding what's going on helps in assessing, “Okay, here is so much disk space that is unutilized." Or, "it's the end of the quarter, we need to bring in more virtualization of these servers to get our accounting to close on time."

[As] the industry matures, I think we will see ... people looking and talking more about, “How do I quantify maturity as an individual within ITIL? How much do you know with regard to ITIL? And, how do I quantify a business with regard to adhering to that framework?”

There has been a little bit of that and certainly we have ITIL certification processes in all of those, but I think we are going to see more drive to understand that and to formalize that in upcoming years.

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Genuitec, Eclipse aim for developer kit to smooth rendering of RIAs on mobile devices

The explosion in mobile Web use, due partly to the prevalence of the iPhone and other smart-phone devices -- and a desire to make developers less grumpy -- have led Genuitec to propose a new open-source project at the Eclipse Foundation for an extensible mobile Web developer kit for creating and testing new mobile rich Internet applications (RIAs).

Coming as a sub-project under the Device Software Development Platform (DSDP), the FireFly DevKit project is still in the proposal phase, and the original committers are all from Genuitec, Flower Mound, Tex. [Disclosure: Both Genuitec and the Eclipse Foundation are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Included in the developer kit will be a previewer and a debugger, a Web rendering kit, a device service access framework, a deployment framework, and educational resources.

The two tool frameworks will enable mobile web developers to visualize and debug mobile web applications from within an Eclipse-based integrated development environment (IDE). Beyond this the FireFly project will develop next-generation technologies and frameworks to support the creation of mobile web applications that look and behavior similarly to native applications and are able to interact with device services such as GPS, accelerometers and personal data.

The issue of developer grumpiness was raised in the project proposal:

When programming, most developers dislike switching between unintegrated tools and environments. Frequent change of focus interrupts their flow of concentration, reduces their efficiency and makes them generally grumpier :). For mobile web application development, web designers and programmers need to quickly and seamlessly perform incremental development and testing directly within an IDE environment rather than switching from an IDE to a device testing environment and back again.

One goal of the Web rendering toolkit is to make Web applications take on the look and feel of the host mobile device. Possibly, an application could run in the Safari browser on an iPhone, but appear similar to a native iPhone app.

Initially, example implementations of the project frameworks will be provided for the iPhone. As resources become available, examples for the G1-Android platform will also be developed. The project will actively recruit and accept contributions for other mobile platforms such as Symbian, Windows Mobile and others.

The current timeframe of the project calls for it to piggyback an incubation release on top of the Eclipse 3.5 platform release. The entire project proposal is available on the Eclipse site.

BriefingsDirect Analysts take Microsoft's pulse: Will the software giant peak in next few years?

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Welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Insights Edition, Vol. 32, a periodic discussion and dissection of software, services, SOA and compute cloud-related news and events, with a panel of IT analysts and guests.

In this episode, recorded Oct. 10, 2008, our experts examine the state of Microsoft at the onset of the annual Professional Developers Conference. Two narratives emerge from our roundtable discussion, that Microsoft is behind on many new IT trends and is tied to past business models. The opposing view is that Microsoft will ride pedestrian app dev, business intelligence, data services, Xbox, unified communications, virtualization and cloud computing to become bigger and more pervasive than ever.

Please join noted IT industry analysts and experts Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research; Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum; Dave Linthicum, independent SOA consultant at Linthicum Group; Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis; Mike Meehan, a senior analyst at Current Analysis, and Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger. Our discussion is hosted and moderated by yours truly, Dana Gardner.

Here are some excerpts:

Kobielus: There’s some validity to the viewpoint that Microsoft's growth potential has capped on the business side, when you consider packaged applications, and software- and application-development tools, in the sense that the entire product niche of the service-oriented architecture (SOA) universe is rapidly maturing.

The vendors in this space -- the SOA vendors, the business-intelligence (BI) vendors, the master data management (MDM) vendors -- are going to realize revenue growth and profitability. Those who survive this economic downturn and thrive in the next uptick, will be those who very much focus on providing verticalized and customized applications on a consulting or professional services basis.

In that regard, Microsoft is a bit behind the eight ball. They don’t really have the strength on the consulting, professional services, and verticalization side, that an SAP, Oracle, or an IBM can bring to the table.

Microsoft, if they want to continue to grow in the whole platform and application space and in the whole SOA universe, needs to put a greater focus on consulting services.

McKendrick: Microsoft has its own economy. No matter what happens to the economy at large, Microsoft has its own economy going, and just seems to get through all this.

What’s driven Microsoft from day one, and continues to do so, is that Microsoft is the software company for Joe the Plumber. That’s their constituency, not necessarily Joe the Developer. They cater to Joe the Developer, Joe the CIO, and Joe the Analyst certainly likes to check in on what they are doing. It's this whole idea of disruptive technology. They have always targeted the under-served and un-served parts of the marketplace and move up from there.

... The base of Microsoft, these companies that are using Microsoft technology, don’t necessarily get virtualization or cloud computing. They just want a solution installed on their premises and want it to work.

Linthicum: I think they are behind the eight ball. A lot of the strategy I’ve seen coming out of Microsoft over the last few years, especially as it relates to cloud computing, SOA, and virtualization, has been inherently flawed. They get into very proprietary things very quickly. It really comes down to how are they going to sell an additional million desktop operating systems.

Ultimately, they just don’t get where this whole area is going. ... We’re heading into an area where they may not be as influential as they think they should be. They may be not only behind the eight ball, but lots of other organizations that are better at doing cloud computing, virtualization, and things like that, and have a good track record there, are going to end up owning a lot of the space.

Microsoft isn’t going to go away, but I think they’re going to find that their market has changed around them. The desktop isn't as significant as it once was. People aren’t going to want to upgrade Office every year. They’re not going to want to upgrade their desktop operating systems every year. Apple Macs are making big inroads into their market space, and it’s going to be a very tough fight for them. I think they’re going to be a lot smaller company in five years than they are today.

Meehan: Dave is absolutely right in that the one area that Microsoft never really conquered that it needed to conquer, given its strength in the desktop, is the handheld. If they are not going to be there with the handheld long-term, that’s a major growth area that they are going to miss out on. That’s where a lot of the business is going to shift to. ... On the SOA side, as I said before, Microsoft is just trying to be as service-oriented as they can for users who are trying to be not SOA-driven, but "As Service-Oriented As Possible" (ASOAP).

In fact, make that an acronym, ASOAP. There are going to be a number of users who are not going to go fully into SOA, because they have an enterprise architecture. It’s too hard to do, too hard to maintain. They’re never going to quite figure that out. They are just going to try to be tactical and ASOAP. Microsoft will try to service them and hold that part of their business.

What’s the next big thing they’re going to do? Joe referred to Microsoft having come up with that in previous downturns. I don’t see where they have got that right yet, and so I think that leads to them being smaller long-term.

Shimmin: [Microsoft is going to have an opportunity to change this perception] and simply because they don’t have to. I think back to a number of points that’s been made here that to be successful Microsoft doesn’t need to convince the world. It just needs to convince the people that attend the PDC. They have such an expansive and well-established channel, with all the little plumber-developers running around building software with their code, that just as 40 is the new 30, Microsoft is really kind of the new Apple, in a way.

They don’t need to be Oracle to succeed, they really need to have control over their environment and provide the best sort of tooling, management, deployment, and execution software that they can for those people who have signed on to the Microsoft bandwagon and are taking the ride with them. ... (Microsoft) is kind of capped out in many ways relative to the consumer market. But, gosh, they have shown that with things like SharePoint, for example, Microsoft is able to virally infest an organization successfully with their software without having to even lift a finger.

They’ll continue to do that, because they have this Visual Basic mentality. I hate to say it, but they have the mentality of “Let’s make it as simple as possible” for the people that are doing ASOAP, as Mike said, that don’t need to go all the way, but really just need to get the job done. I think they’ll be successful at that.

Kobielus: I think Microsoft will be larger, and they will be larger for the simple reason that they do own the desktop, but the desktop is becoming less relevant. But now, what’s new is that they do own the browser, in terms of predominant market share or installed base. They do own the spreadsheet. They do own the portal. As Brad indicated, SharePoint is everywhere.

One of the issues that many of our customers at Forrester have hit on -- CIO, CTO, that level -- is that SharePoint is everywhere. How do they manage SharePoint? It's a fait accompli, and enterprises have to somehow deal with it. It’s the de-facto standard portal for a large swath of the corporate world. Microsoft, to a great degree, owns the mid-market database with SQL Server.

So owning so many important components of the SOA stack, in terms of predominant market share, means that Microsoft has great clout to go in any number of directions. One direction in which they’re clearly going in a very forceful way that brings all this together is in BI and online analytical processing (OLAP). The announcements they made a few weeks ago at the BI conferenceshow where Microsoft clearly is heading. They very much want to become and remain a predominant BI vendor in the long run.

Gardner: ... On the total cost perspective, I think what I am hearing from you is that if you go all Microsoft all the time, there are going to be efficiencies, productivity, and cost savings. Is that the mantra? Is that the vision?

Shimmin: That‘s exactly right, Dana. That’s what they’re banking on, and that’s why I think they are the next Apple, in a way, because they are downtrodden, compared to some of the other big guns we’re talking about with Oracle, SAP, and IBM inside the middleware space. But that doesn’t matter, because they have a loyal following, which, if you guys have ever attended these shows of theirs, you’d see that they are just as rabid as Mac fans in many ways.

Microsoft is going to do their best job to make their customers lives as easy as possible, so that they remain loyal subjects. That’s a key to success. That’s how you succeed in keeping your customers.

Linthicum: Ultimately, people are looking for open solutions that are a lot more scalable than this stuff that Microsoft has to offer. The point that was just made, there are a bunch of huge Microsoft fans that will buy anything that they sell, that’s the way the shops are. But the number of companies that are doing that right now are shrinking.

People are looking for open, scalable, enterprise-ready solutions, they understand that Microsoft is going to own the desktop, at least for the time being, and they are going to keep them there. But, as far as their back office things and some of the things that Microsoft has put up as these huge enterprise class solutions, people are going to opt for other things right now.

It's just a buying pattern. It may be a perception issue or a technological issue. I think it’s a matter of openness or their insistence that everything be proprietary and come back to them. I heard the previous comment that looking at all Microsoft all the time will provide the best bang for the buck. I think people are very suspicious of that.

Gardner: We’ve heard quite a bit on this cloud operating system from Red Hat, Citrix, VMware, IBM, and HP talked it up a little bit. No one’s really come out with a lot of detail, but clearly this seems to be of interest to some of the major vendors. What is the nature of this operating system for the cloud, and does it have the same winner-take-all advantage for a vendor that the operating system on the desktop and departmental server had?

Linthicum: I think it does in virtualization. Once one vendor gets that right, people understand it, there are good standards around it, there are good use cases around it, and there’s a good business case around it, that particular vendor is going to own that space.

I’m not sure it’s going to be Microsoft. They’re very good about building operating systems, but in understanding my Vista crashes that are happening once a day, they are not that good.

Also, there are lots of guys out there who understand the virtualization space and the patterns for use there. The technology they’re going to use, the enabling standards, are going to be very different than what you are going to use on a desktop or even a small enterprise departmental kind of problem domain. Ultimately, a large player is going to step into this game and get a large share of this marketplace pretty quickly, because the cost and ease of moving to that particular vendor is very low.

... These virtualization operating systems that are enterprise bound or even in a gray area with the cloud are going to come from somebody else besides Microsoft.

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