Wednesday, June 12, 2013

Dissecting the Converged Cloud news from HP Discover: What it means

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

The next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series brings together three HP executives to explore the implications and business value from the Converged Cloud portfolio updates announced at HP Discover 2013 in Las Vegas.

There's no hotter topic -- and nothing more top of mind these days -- than cloud computing. Not surprisingly, HP has made that a major focus at day two of Discover.

To put some context around it all, BriefingsDirect assembled Chief Evangelist at HP Software, Paul Muller; Christian Verstraete, Chief Technologist for Cloud Solutions at HP, and Tom Norton, Vice President for Big Data Technology Services at HP. The panel was moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Christian, tell us about the state of the market before we get into HP’s response to it.

Verstraete: What's happening in the market today, is that on one end, you have startups that are rushing to the cloud very quickly, that use cloud and don't use anything else, because they don't want to spend a penny on building up an IT department.

Verstraete
On the other extreme, you have very large corporations that look at all the things that are unknown around cloud and are sticking their toe in the water.

And you have everything possible and every possible scenario in the middle. That's where things are getting interesting. You have forward-looking CIOs who are embracing clouds, and understand how cloud can help them add value to the business and, as such, are an important part of the business.

You have other CIOs who are very reluctant and that prefer to stay managing the traditional boat, if I can put it that way, in keeping and providing that support to our customers. It's a interesting market right now.

Muller: The challenge that both vendors and consumers have is that one size does not fit all. When you find yourself in that situation, you only have two responses available to you.

Muller
If you're a one-trick pony, if you have only got one technology, one approach, then it's one size fits all. Henry Ford, one of your fellow countrymen, once said that you can have the car in any color you want, so long as it’s black.

It's a great idea in terms of simplifying what your choices are, but it doesn't help you if you're an enterprise that's struggling to deal with complexity and heterogeneity.

We believe that there are three absolutely critical priorities that anyone looking into cloud should have. The first is confidence. Confidence, because you are moving typically mission-critical services in it. Even if it's develop and test, you're counting on this to work.

The second is consistency. There is absolutely nothing to be gained by having a cheap cloud service, on one hand, and then having to retrain people in order to use that, because it's completely different from your internal systems. It's just moving costs around. So consistency is absolutely critical.

Giving users choice

The third piece we talk about all the time, choice. You should have your choice of operating system, database, and application development environment, whether it's Java or .NET, you shouldn’t have to compromise when you're looking at cloud technology. So it's those three things -- confidence, consistency, and choice.

Gardner: Here at Discover, we're hearing a lot about a variety of announcements for Converged Cloud. Let's look at a couple of these major aspects of the announcements and then delve into how they come together, perhaps forming a whole greater than the sum of the parts.

The first part, Christian, is this real emphasis on OpenStack and the Cloud OS. So give us a quick overview of where HP is going with OpenStack and Cloud OS and how that relates to some of the requirements that we've just discussed?

Verstraete: What we want to do across the different clouds that we offer -- private cloud, the managed cloud, and the public cloud -- is a capability to be able to port workloads very quickly to build some consistency around them.
It will also provide our customers with the capability to test and play with Cloud OS through a sandbox. So there's a lot of emphasis on that.

Cloud OS is all about that. It’s about building a consistent infrastructure environment or infrastructure management environment to do that. And that's where we are using OpenStack.

So what is cloud OS? Cloud OS is nothing more than HP’s internal OpenStack distribution, with a set of additional functionalities on top of it, to provide a second-to-none infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) delivery that can then be used for our private cloud, our managed cloud, and is already used for our public cloud.

That’s the first thing that we announced. We are building on top of that. It’s an evolution of what we started about a year-and-a-half ago with Converged Cloud. So we just keep moving and working around with that.

We also announced that we not only support Cloud OS in our traditional blade environment and our x86 servers, but also on the newly announced HP Moonshot servers. That combination may become interesting when we start talking about the "internet of things" and a number of other things in that particular area. It will also provide our customers with the capability to test and play with Cloud OS through a sandbox. So there's a lot of emphasis on that.

Gardner: It also seems that you are expanding your support of different virtual machines (VMs), so heterogeneity is supported. As Paul Muller pointed out, it's supporting all the various frameworks. Is there something fundamentally different about the way HP is going about this cloud support with that emphasis on openness vis-à-vis some of the other approaches?

One-trick pony

Verstraete: Many of the other players, many of our competitors, have what Paul mentioned earlier, a one-trick pony. They're either in the public space or the private space, but with one hypervisor. Where we're starting from, and that’s the essence of Converged Cloud, is to say that a company going to cloud is not one size fits all. They're going to need a combination of different types of clouds to provide, on one hand, the agility that they need and, on the other hand, the price point that they're looking for.

They'll put some stuff in their private cloud and they'll put some other stuff in the public cloud. They'll probably consume software-as-a-service (SaaS) services from others. They'll probably put some things into a managed cloud. It’s going to be a combination of those, and they're going to have to handle and live with that combination.

The question is how to make that easy and how to allow them to access all of that through one pane of glass, because you don’t want to give that complexity to the end users. That’s exactly where Cloud OS is starting to play. Cloud OS is the foundation for us to do that.

Gardner: Tom Norton, seeing that this field is very diverse in terms of the needs and requirements, it seems like a perfect fit for lots of consulting, professional, and support services, but we don't often hear about them in conjunction with cloud. Tell us a little bit about why the market is ripe for much more emphasis on the services portion here?

Norton: As you start to take advantage of the varying services that are available through the cloud, or that you want to present to the cloud, the varying presentation formats, the varying architectures are an issue for whether you're a startup or in the enterprise.

Norton
From a consulting perspective, you need to have a strategy and understand the challenges and complexities of that hybrid type of delivery or that hybrid consumption, and establish some type of design for how that's going to be used and presented. So consulting becomes very important the more you start to consume or present cloud-based type services.

When you start thinking of that design and that whole approach from balancing across the network, to balancing the infrastructure component pieces, you need to have some kind of consistent support structure. One of the most expensive parts of this is going to be how you support those different environments, so that if you have an issue, you're not doing component-based support anymore. You need a holistic-based cloud support.
Having advice from seasoned experts can help you avoid some of the pitfalls of cloud adoption.

For organizations truly to transform themselves as an IT organization and be able to present their service, which in many cases is an application, that app may be something presented internally to business units because the business units are getting some value, or even externally to a customer or to a customer’s application.

Those apps are designed, in many cases, in either a more mainframe-based environment or also in the distributed environment. When you start thinking of presenting it as a service, there are other considerations that need to take effect.
When you think of modernizing applications to a cloud-based presentation, there are multiple layers that have to be considered to even address the applications.

You start looking at how that application performs in terms of more virtualized and automated environments. You also think about how you can manage that application from a service perspective. How do you monitor the application? How is it metered in terms of the presentation? How is that application presented within a service portfolio or a service catalog? How do you then manage and monitor the application for service operations? The user demands an end user experience for meeting a certain service level.

When you think of modernizing applications to a cloud-based presentation, there are multiple layers that have to be considered to even address the applications. When you think about the application piece and the work that needs to be done, you also have to think about the management component pieces of it.

That’s why you'll hear of services around, say, cloud design services that will enable us to take a look at that service portfolio, look at the service catalog, and understand the application presentations and how you can ensure quality delivery and ensure that you're meeting those service levels, so that business can continue to take advantage of what that application provides to them.

So from an application perspective, you have both the cloud design piece that’s referred to that, but, at the same time, you have to address the complexities of the application.

Verstraete: Tom, allow me to add one point. You talked about the application, but the next point associated with that is, on what device am I going to consume that application? Increasingly, we're seeing bring your own device (BYOD), and it’s not just PCs, but also tablets, phones, and all of the other things.

Managing devices

We have to have the capability to manage those devices and make sure that we have the appropriate security levels and that they're compliant, so that I can run my enterprise applications on those devices without any trouble. That complements all of this.

Dana, to go back to a question that you had earlier, this is where all of these things are starting to come together. We talked about Cloud OS and the infrastructure and the environment, so that I could build on my applications. We talked about the Application Transformation Services, which allow us to put those applications on top of that. And we're talking about the other extreme, which is consuming those applications and the devices on which we are starting to consume those applications.

Regardless of whether this is in a private cloud, a managed cloud, or a public cloud, that’s where you start seeing the different parts and the different pieces coming together.

Gardner: Why is the hybrid model so important with HP strategy?
The CIO had better understand the potential issues related to the security and compliance of what is happening, and start acting on it.

Verstraete: Whether companies like it or not, most large enterprises today already have a hybrid model. Why? Because they have a lot of shadow IT, which is consumed outside the control of IT. It's consumed from external services, being in most of the cases public clouds. So that’s already a fact of life.

Why is that used? Because there's a feeling from the business user that the CIO can’t respond fast enough. So the CIO had better understand the potential issues related to the security and compliance of what is happening, and start acting on it.

He can't speed up his delivery of what the business is looking for by developing everything himself and taking the old fashioned approach. I choose an application. I test the application for six months. I install the application. I configure the application, and two years down the road, I deliver the application to the business users.

What becomes clear quickly to a lot of CIOs is that if they take a hard and cold look at their workloads, not all workloads are the same. Some of them are very specific to the core of what the enterprise is doing. Those should stay within their private cloud.

There are a bunch of other things that they need to deliver. Frankly, they are no different from what their competitors are doing. Do those need to be in a private cloud or could they be in another type of environment, a managed cloud or public cloud? That automatically brings you to that hybrid environment that we're talking about.

New core competency

Gardner: Paul Muller, how is hybrid perhaps the new core competency for IT, managing hybrid processes and hybrid systems and managing the continuum?

Muller: Again, Dana, you get to the core of the issue here, which is that it’s about a shift. This is a generational shift in how we think about building, buying, and integrating IT services in the service of the business or the enterprise, depending on where you work.

It’s about a couple of key shifts. It’s about the balance of power shifting from IT to the business. We have probably said this countless times over the last three decades, but the simplicity, the focus on user experience, the ease with which competitive services can be procured from outside by laypeople from an IT standpoint has created a symmetry in the relationship between business and IT that no one can afford to ignore.

The second generational shift is the speed with which people expect response to their ideas. Techniques like agile and dev-ops are changing the way we think about building and delivering services.

Finally, to your point, it used to be that you either build or you buy, you either outsourced everything or you did it all yourself. Now we live in a world where you can consistently do both. I don’t believe that the majority of IT professionals are ready for that new reality in terms of processes and people, not to mention the software stack, the infrastructure stack, on which they're building services.
This is a generational shift in how we think about building, buying, and integrating IT services in the service of the business or the enterprise.

There's a lot of work to be done. It sounds daunting. The good news is that if you take a smart approach, some of the work that Tom and our Professional Services and Technologies Services team have been working on, it helps ease that transition and avoid people repeating the mistakes of some of the early adopters that we have seen.

Gardner: Tom Norton, as we factor what Paul said about transitioning the organization from supporting technology to supporting the continuum of a hybrid approach, how big a change is that for an organization?

Norton: It's a significant change, when you think of how traditional support structures have been. When you look at more complex systems, and you can think of a hybrid cloud environment as being a complex cloud system itself, traditionally support structures have been component-based and they've been infrastructure-based, or application-based. So you look at a storage support solution, or you may look at a network support solution or a compute solution itself.

When you start thinking of a complex system, like a cloud model, and especially a hybrid cloud model, where you have varying delivery mechanisms and varying supporting structures, supporting that can be a very complicated issue. It's one that many organizations are unprepared to do, especially if they're going to try to approach it strategically, as opposed to being a opportunistic-type cloud environment.

Access to expertise

What IT is trying to do today and the question they keep asking is how they can view this as being that kind of ecosystem that has a singular support structure to it, where they can get access to expertise.

That's what HP is stepping up to do. With our own experience, across the spectrum, building on-premise and private, working in the managed infrastructure places, we have public cloud experience and we also have the experience of the integration across all of those.

The benefit from a services perspective for our customers is that we can help break down those isolated barriers in singular cloud services that a customer is consuming and give them a support structure that bridges all of those and truly approaches a converged support structure for managing that hybrid environment. That's what we're working towards and that's where our announcements have been all about.
We can help break down those isolated barriers in singular cloud services that a customer is consuming and give them a support structure that bridges all of those.

Gardner: What is the most important change that HP has brought to the cloud landscape with this series of announcements?

Verstraete: Two things -- first, and you hit the nail earlier, the whole concept of hybrid cloud, looking at multiple ways and multiple clouds to address the needs of the business. And second, within that frame of hybrid cloud, making sure that there is consistency across the different clouds, and that's where we're using OpenStack.

Gardner: Paul Muller, what's different in your mind about what HP has been doing this week?

Muller: It is all about accelerating the introduction of applications and improving the user experience. It is not about technology for technology’s sake. The single biggest difference.

Differentiated

Gardner: And lastly, Tom, what jumps out at you as a differentiator in terms of the market in general and what HP is doing?

Norton: I think the market is looking for someone that can help with the integration component pieces of it. As the hybrid and heterogeneous deployments continue to grow and more and more services are offered that way, organizations need help consolidating that into a more integrated approach, so they have that kind of overall cloud concepts that give them the value they are looking for. So it's becoming more and more about integration.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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With Cloud OS, HP takes up mantle of ambassador to the future of hybrid cloud models

HP's innovations in its Converged Cloud portfolio, announced today at HP Discover 2013 in Las Vegas, are aimed at better ushering large enterprises from legacy to hybrid cloud environments.

Despite the great interest in SaaS and cloud, many large enterprises are still grappling with the right mixture of on-premises, hosted and various cloud deployment models for their applications, infrastructure and data. And the formula for picking which apps and assets should run where will be a changing one, as business goals, economic pressures and technology advances all conspire to make last year's IT model obsolete. Ongoing.

HP officials say the next phase of a common OpenStack-based architecture for HP’s private, managed, and public cloud offerings recognizes this dynamic environment. Not only does one-size cloud not fit all, no company can predict what their risk path is nor how well cloud will work for them in coming years. That's why choice and operating environment standardization -- and not just price -- must be the critical requirements for cloud adoption.

"You should have your choice of operating system, database, and application development environment, whether it's Java or .NET, you shouldn’t have to compromise when you're looking at cloud technology," said Chief Evangelist at HP Software, Paul Muller. "We have focused on ensuring that the cloud infrastructure, the workloads, the automation, the compliance tools, everything around that, are focused on optimizing the application experience."

But HP also acknowledges that where cloud clearly makes sense, a quick path to its benefits must be made. And so HP also announced new software and services to accelerate time to market for private cloud implementations, and unveiled new capabilities in HP’s managed and public cloud solutions under the Converged Cloud banner.

Research commissioned on behalf of HP predicts that by 2016, some 75 percent of enterprise IT will be delivered across private, managed and public clouds. Further, half of the respondents believe that open standards are important in the emergence of cloud computing. This indicates that customers want an open, hybrid cloud solution to generate new opportunities, drive competitive differentiation and lower the cost of operations, said. HP.

HP Cloud Operating System (OS) is therefore an open and extensible cloud technology platform that leverages the community strength of OpenStack technology to enable workload portability, simplified installation and enhanced life cycle management across hybrid clouds, said HP. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts. My travel to HP Discover 2013 was paid for by HP.]

HP CloudSystem, HP’s private cloud offering, already embeds Cloud OS technology. To help customers get started quickly with an initial private cloud deployment, HP also is offering the HP CloudSystem Enterprise Starter Suite. This solution allows organizations to get started with rich application cloud services, and reduces up-front costs by up to 20 percent with the bundled offering.

Verstraete
Christian Verstraete, Chief Technologist for Cloud Solutions at HP, explained the importance of Cloud OS. "What we want to do across the different clouds that we offer -- private cloud, the managed cloud, and the public cloud -- is a capability to be able to port workloads very quickly to build some consistency around them," he said. "Cloud OS is all about that. It’s about building a consistent infrastructure environment or infrastructure management environment to do that. And that's where we are using OpenStack."

Open Stack distribution

"So what is cloud OS? Cloud OS is nothing more than HP’s internal OpenStack distribution, with a set of additional functionality on top of it, to provide a second-to-none infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) delivery that can then be used for our private cloud, our managed cloud, and is already used for our public cloud," said Verstraeta.

But while HP is making an OpenStack-based cloud platform environment, it is bundling hardware and software-defined infrastructure so that the ease of deployment -- similar to appliance benefits -- makes those seeking openness a value and simplicity offer they can't refuse.

Inexpensive and energy-stingy HP Moonshot servers also will be offered with HP Cloud OS, providing simplified provisioning and management for specific cloud workloads such as dedicated hosting and large-scale websites. HP Cloud Services also leverages HP Cloud OS technology. To encourage customers to evaluate and understand the benefits of an OpenStack-based architecture for their cloud needs, HP is offering HP Cloud OS Sandbox for experimentation at no cost.

Forty-three percent of respondents in the HP-commissioned survey said that finding the right strategic partner to get them started was a barrier to cloud adoption. So to help guide customers, HP introduced the HP Converged Cloud Professional Services Suite.
It’s about building a consistent infrastructure environment or infrastructure management environment to do that.

HP announced such new services designed to help customers take advantage of the cloud. These new offerings include HP Converged Cloud Support, HP Cloud Design Service, HP Cloud-ready Networking Services, HP Proactive Care for CloudSystem, and HP Cloud Security Risk and Controls Advisory Services, as well as enhancements to HP Applications Transformation to Cloud Services.

"From a consulting perspective, you need to have a strategy and understand the challenges and complexities of that hybrid type of delivery or that hybrid consumption, and establish some type of design for how that's going to be used and presented. So consulting becomes very important the more you start to consume or present cloud-based type services," said Tom Norton, Vice President for Big Data Technology Services at HP.

"This is not just a technology decision that you need guidance on. It's structuring contracts and understanding how to deal with termination of service -- what happens to the intellectual property (IP) you have in the cloud. That's where having advice from seasoned experts can help you avoid some of the pitfalls of cloud adoption," said Muller.

"With our own experience, across the spectrum, building on-premise and private, working in the managed infrastructure places, we have public cloud experience and we also have the experience of the integration across all of those," said Norton.

HP Enterprise Services has enhanced its portfolio of cloud service offerings to address increased customer needs for mobile and enterprise applications. These include:
  • HP Enterprise Cloud Services for Enterprise Applications that give clients choice and flexibility when integrating and deploying applications in the cloud while maintaining business continuity and ensuring data security.
  • HP Mobile Enterprise Cloud Solution that provides a fully managed and integrated set of mobile consulting and management services to securely enable applications and data sharing from many device types.
  • HP Enterprise Cloud Services - Private Cloud that enables clients to quickly adopt cloud services by designing, building and managing a complete Infrastructure as a Service that creates the foundation for an enterprise-wide shared IT services model.
  • HP Cloud Security Risk and Control AdvisoryServices, a new offering in the HP professional services portfolio that helps clients safeguard their information, manage potential for data breaches and remain compliant while transitioning applications to public, private and hybrid clouds.  
 Engaging customers

In addition, HP Autonomy introduced the Autonomy Marketing Cloud, a cloud-based version of the Autonomy Marketing Performance Suite, enabling organizations to understand, attract, engage and convert customers in real time.

New HP Cloud Services capabilities make it easier and faster for enterprises to simplify the development and deployment of applications in the public cloud. Enhancements include:
  • Access to new, larger instance types that enable users to run big data analytics and high-performance computing workloads in the public cloud.
  • New virtual private cloud network functionality, powered by software-defined networking that provides advanced security when connecting their public cloud to on- site networks.
  • New custom image uploading that increases customer productivity by simplifying the set up and deployment of instances with images unique to their business requirements.
  • A new Bulk Import Service that speeds application delivery by allowing users to provide hard drives for direct data upload into HP Cloud Block Storage and HP Cloud Object Storage.
In other infrastructure news at Discover, HP yesterday unveiled Project HAVEn, which leverages HP’s analytics software, hardware, and services to create big-data ready analytics applications and solutions. HAVEn pulls together the growing army of HP analytics technologies and capabilities -- from Autonomy to Vertica to ArcSight and more -- allowing all kinds of data and information to be exploited in unison, with the dependencies and relationships mappable and hidden insights attainable across sources.

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Tuesday, June 11, 2013

Podcast recap: HP Experts analyze and explain the HAVEn big data news from HP Discover

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

The next edition of the HP Discover Performance Podcast Series brings together three HP executives to dig into one of the biggest news events at the HP Discover 2013 Conference this week in Las Vegas, the Project HAVEn unveiling.

There has been a lot said about big data in the last year and HP has made a big announcement around a broader vision for businesses to help them gain actionable intelligence from literally a universe of potential sources and data types.

To learn how, BriefingsDirect assembled Chief Evangelist at HP Software, Paul Muller; Chris Selland, Vice President of Marketing at HP Vertica, and Tom Norton, Vice President for Big Data Technology Services at HP. The panel was moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:
Gardner: Fairly recently, only critical data was given this high-falutin' treatment for analysis, warehousing, applying business intelligence (BI) tools, making sure that it was backed up and treated almost as if it were a cherished child.

But almost overnight, the savvy businesses, those who are looking for business results, are more interested in all the data of any kind so that they can run their businesses better, and find insights in the areas that they maybe didn’t understand or didn’t even know about.

So what do you think has happened? Why have we moved from this BI-as-sacred ivory tower approach to now more pedestrian?

Competitive issue

Selland: First-and-foremost, it’s really become a competitiveness issue. Just about every company will pay attention to their customers.

Selland
You can tell senior management that this data is important. We're going to analyze it and give you insights about it, but you start realizing that we have an opportunity to grow our business or we're losing business, because we're not doing a good enough job, or we have an opportunity to do better job with data.

Social media has been the tip of the arrow here, because just about all industries all of a sudden realize that there is all data out there floating around. Our customers are actually talking to each other and talking about us, and what are we doing about that? That’s brought a lot of attention above and beyond the CIO and made this an issue that the CMO, the CFO, the COO, the CEO start to care about.

Big data is about far more than social media, but I do think social media gets a lot of the credit for making companies pay a lot more attention. It's, "Wait a minute. There is all this data, and we really need to be doing something with this."

Muller: In the conversations that I'm having consistently around the globe, executives, both CIOs, but also non-IT executives, are realizing that "big" data is probably not the most helpful phrase. It’s not the size of the data that matters, but it’s what you do with it.

Muller
It’s about finding the connections between different data sets to help you improve competitiveness, help you improve efficiency if you are in the public sector, help you to detect fraud pattern. It's about what you do with the data in that connected intelligence that matters.

To make that work, it’s about not just the volume of data. That certainly helps, not having to throw out my data or overly summarize it. Having high-fidelity data absolutely helps, but it’s also the variety of data. Less than 15 percent of what we deal with on a daily basis is in structured form.

Most of the people I meet are still dealing with information in rows and columns, because traditionally that’s what a computer has understood. They’ve not built for the unstructured things like video, audio, images, and for that matter, social, as Chris just mentioned.

Finally, it’s about timeliness. Nobody wants to might be making tomorrow’s decision with last week’s data, if that makes sense. In other words, with a lot of the decisions we have to make, it’s usually done through a revision mirror, which is not helpful, if you're trying to operate today’s thoughts as well.

Variety of systems

Selland: I have a love-hate relationship with the term "big data." The love part is the fact that it really has been adopted. People gravitate to it and are starting to realize that there is something here they need to pay attention to. And that’s not just IT.

And this is really what’s driven the HAVEn initiative and the HAVEn strategy. We have this tremendous portfolio of assets here at HP -- from software to hardware to services -- and HAVEn is about putting that portfolio behind these different analytic engines – Vertica, IDOL, Logger, and Hadoop -- that complement each other.
Broad strategy

So how do we bring this together under a single broad strategy to help companies and global enterprises get their hands around all of this, because it’s a lot more than big? Big data is great. It’s great that the term is taken off, but it’s a lot bigger than that.

Norton: Both Paul and Chris mentioned that data platforms and data analysis have been around for years, but this is still a shift.

Norton
The traditional systems or platforms that IT is used to providing are now becoming legacy. In other words, they're not providing the type of service level to meet the workload demands of the organization. So IT is faced with the challenge of how to transform that BI environment to more of a data refinement model or a big data ecosystem, if you want to still hang on to big data as a term.

So the business is now demanding action from IT.

The ability to respond quickly to this platform transformation is what we want to help our customers do from our technology services' perspective. How can we speed the maturity or speed the transformation of those traditional BI systems? Business have to have relevant and refined information available to them at the time they need it -- whether it’d be 1.5 seconds or 15 hours.

The business needs the information to be able to compete and IT needs to be able to adapt, to have that kind of flexible, secure, and high-performing platform that can deal with the different complexities of raw data that’s available to them today.

Gardner: Let’s get back to the news of the day, Project HAVEn. What it is?

Selland: I talked about the tip of the spear before. In this case the tip of the spear are our analytic engines, our analytic platforms, the Vertica Analytics Platform, Autonomy IDOL, ArcSight Logger. HAVEn is about taking this entire HP portfolio and then combining those with the power of Hadoop.

There are a number of Hadoop distributions, and we support them all. It's taking that software platform, running it on HP’s Converged Infrastructure, wrapping HP’s services around it, and then enabling our customers, our channel partners, our systems integrators, and our resellers to build these next-generation analytic-enabled solutions and big-data analytic-enabled solutions.

Changing the business

When you're talking to businesspeople, you can't talk about platforms and you can’t talk about speeds and feeds. When you say Hadoop to a businessperson they usually say, "God bless you," these days.

You have to talk about customer analytics. You have to talk about preventing fraud. You have to talk about being able to operationally be more effective, more profitable, and all of those things that drive the business. It really becomes more-and-more a solutions discussion.

HAVEn is the HP platform that provides our customers, our partners, and of course, our consultants, when our customers choose to have us do it for them, the ability to deliver these solutions. They're big-data solutions, analytic-enabled solutions. They're the solutions that companies, organizations, and global enterprises need to take their businesses forward and to make their customers more satisfied to become more profitable. That's what HAVEn is all about.

Gardner: How then do you put this into business terms, so they can get just how powerful this really is?

Muller: That’s ultimately the question. Let me just give you an example that we talk about and that I share with people quite frequently, and it usually generates a bit of a smirk. We’ve all been on the telephone and called a company or a public service, where you've been told by the machine that the call will be monitored for quality of service purposes. And I am sure we’re all thinking, "Gosh, if only."

The scary part is that all those calls are recorded. They're not only recorded, but they're recorded digitally. In other words, they're recorded to a computer. Almost all of that data is habitually thrown away, unless there is an exception to the rule.
What we're able to do with the HAVEn announcement is combine those concepts into one integrated platform.

If there is a problem with the flight or if there is some complaint about the call that escalates the senior management, they may eventually look at it. But think about how much information, how much valuable insight is thrown away on a daily basis across a company, across the country, across the planet. What we've aimed to do with HAVEn is liberate that information for us to find that connected intelligence.

In order to do that, we get back to this key concept that you need to be able to integrate telemetry from your IT systems. What’s happening inside them today? For example, if somebody to send an email to somebody outside of the company, that typically will spawn a question that asks who they send that email to? Was there an attachment there? Is it a piece of sensitive information or not? Typically that would require a person to look at it.

Finally, it's to be able to correlate patterns of activity that are relevant to think about revenue, earnings, or whatever that might be. What we're able to do with the HAVEn announcement is combine those concepts into one integrated platform. The power of that would be something like in that call center example. We can use autonomy technology to listen to the call, to understand people's emotions, and whether they’ve said, "If you don't solve this problem, I'm never going to buy from you again."

Take that nugget of information, marry that to things like whether they are a high net worth customer, what their spending patterns have been, whether they're socially active, are they more likely to tell people about their bad experience, and correlate that all in real-time to help give you insight. That's the sort of being the HAVEn can do it, and that's a real world application that we're trying to communicate in business.

Norton: I have one more example of what Paul has just indicated. Take healthcare, for example. We're working with the healthcare providers. There are some three-tier healthcare providers. A major healthcare organization could have as many as 50 different business units. These separate business units have their own requirements for information that they want to feed to hospital systems.

Centralized structure

So you have a centralized organizational IT structure. You have a requirement of a business unit within the organization that has its own processing requirement, and then you have hospital systems that buy and share information with the business unit.

Think about three-tiered structure and you think of some of the component pieces that HAVEn brings to that. You have IT which can manage some of those central systems that becomes that data lake or data repository, collecting years and years of historical healthcare information from the hospital systems, from the business units, but also from the global healthcare environment that could be available globally.

IT provides this ecosystem around the data repository that needs to be secured, and and that data pool needs to be governed.

Then, you combine that with information that's coming publicly and needs to be secured. You have those corner pieces which are natural to the Hadoop distributed system inside that data lake that keeps that repository of healthcare information.

The business unit has a requirement because it wants to be able to feed information to the healthcare providers or the hospital systems, and to collect from them as well. Their expectations of IT is that they may need instant response. They may need a response from a medical provider in seconds, or they may look at reporting on changes in healthcare in certain environmental situations that are creating change in healthcare. So they might get daily reporting or they might have half-day reporting.
That's what's driving IT, because they need that very flexible and responsive data repository.

Within HAVEn, you look at Vertica, to drive that immediate satisfaction of that query that comes from the hospital system. Combine that with Hadoop and combine that with the kind of data-governance models that Autonomy brings. Then, look at security policies around the sensors from patients that are being sent to that hospital system. That combination is a very powerful equation. It's going to enable that business to be very successful in terms of how it handles information and how it produces it.

When we start looking at that integration of those components, that's what's driving IT, because they need that very flexible and responsive data repository that can provide that type of insight that the hospital systems need from that from the business unit that's driving the healthcare IT organization itself.

Those are the fits even in a large enterprise, where you can take that platform and apply it in an industry sense, and it makes complete sense for that industry overall.

Gardner: HP has, of course, been a very large company with a long heritage, but are we really stepping outside of the traditional role that HP has played? It sounds as if HP is becoming a business-services company, not a technology services company.

Bridging the gap

Selland: Yes and no. First of all, we do need to acknowledge that there is a need to bridge the gap between the IT organization and the business organization, and enable them to talk the same language and solve problems together.

First of all, IT has to become more of an enabler. Second, and I mentioned this earlier and I really want to play this up, it's absolutely an opportunity for our partners. HP has a number of assets, but one of our greatest assets is HP's partner network -- our partner ecosystem, our global systems integrators, our technology partners, even our services providers, our training providers, all of the companies that work in and around the global HP.

We can't know every nuance of every business at HP. So the HAVEn initiative is very much about enabling our partners to create the solutions we're creating. We're using our own platform to create solutions for the core audiences that we serve, which in many cases, are things like IT management solutions or security solutions which are being featured and will continue to be featured.

We're going to need to get into all of these different nuances of all of these different industries. How do these companies and organizations compete with each other in particular verticals? We can’t possibly know all of that. So we're very reliant on our partners.

The great news is we have, we have what I believe, is the world's greatest partner network and this is very much about enabling those partners and those solutions. In many cases, those solutions will be delivered by partners and that’s what the solutions are all about as well.
We have what I believe, is the world's greatest partner network and this is very much about enabling those partners and those solutions.

Gardner: Now that we put together the various platforms, given the whole is greater than the sum of the parts in terms of a business value, what's the vision beyond that to making these usable, exploitable?

Are there APIs and tools or is that something also that you are going to look to the partners for, or both? How does it work in terms of the go-to-market?

Selland: There absolutely are APIs and tools. We need to prime the pump, to some degree, with building and creating some of our own solutions to show what can be done in the markets we serve, which we're doing, and we also we have partners on board already.

If you look at the HAVEn announcements, you'll see partners like Avnet and Accenture and other partners that are already adopting and building HAVEn-based solutions. In many cases, we've started delivering to customers already.

It's really a matter of showing what can be done, building what can be built, and delivering them. I mentioned earlier the crossing-the-chasm moment we're having. The other thing that happens, when you get into this market, is you're moving from its being purely a CIO decision to where the business starts getting involved.

Great ROI

There is great return on investment (ROI), there's this big data analytic solution we're going to enable, and we are going to build to deliver better customer loyalty. We are going to better customer retention and lower churn. The first thing I need to say is, "Okay, show me the numbers, show me the money." Those are Jerry Maguire terms, and the best way to do that is show examples of other companies that have done it.

You've got to get that early momentum, but we're already in the process of getting it, and we've already got partners on board. So we're really excited.

Gardner: Given what we've now seen with the HP Discover announcements with HAVEn, how HP is uniquely positioned in big data?

Muller: Insight without action is a bit like saying that you have a strategy without execution. In other words, it’s pretty close to hallucination, right?

The ability to take that insight and then reflect that into your business rapidly is critical. I have a point of view that says that almost every enterprise is defined by software these days. In other words, when you make an insight and you want to make a change, you're changing the size. If you are Mercedes, you're changing one of the 100 million lines of code in your typical S class. Some of the major based around the planet now hire more programmers than Microsoft has working on Windows today.

Most companies are defined by software. So when they do get in an insight, they need to rapidly reflect that insight in the form of a new application or a new service, it’s typically going to require IT.

Absolutely critical

Your ability to quickly take that insight and turn that into something a customer can see, touch, and smell is absolutely critical, and using technique like Agile delivery, increasing automation levels, DevOps approaches, are all critical to being able to execute to get to that.

Selland: It's not just big data, but helping our customers be successful in leveraging big data is a core focus and a core pillar of HP strategy. So first of all it’s focus.

Second of all, it’s breadth. I talked about this earlier, so I don’t want to repeat myself too much. The software, hardware, and converged cloud assets, capabilities of services, and of course their service’s portfolio -- all of the resources that the global HP brings to bear -- are focused on big data.

And it’s also the uniqueness. Obviously, being an HP Software Executive, I'm most familiar with the software. If you really look at it, nobody, none of HP’s competitors, has anything like Vertica. None of HP’s competitors have anything like IDOL. None of HP’s competitors has anything like ArcSight Logger. None of HP's competitors has the ability to bring those assets together and get them interoperating with each other and get them solving problems and building solutions.
Your ability to quickly take that insight and turn that into something a customer can see, touch, and smell is absolutely critical.

Then, you take our partner channel, wrap it around that, and you combine it with the power of open-source industry initiatives like Hadoop. HP has very much openness of the core of everything we're doing.

You’ve got to have a broad enough portfolio to know that you’ve got the confidence and the assets to eventually solve the problem, but at the same time start with understanding the problem, the industry, and solutions. This is where our service is, and this is where our partner ecosystem comes into play. And having the breadth of the portfolio of software/hardware and cloud services to be able to deliver on it is really what’s it’s all about, but there is no one-size-fits-all answer to the question we just asked.

There is no one-size-fits-all big-data-in-a-box solution.
Norton: HP actually has, from a services' perspective, a unique approach to this. You've seen it before in the cloud and you've seen it before in the days of IT transformation, where we started looking at that transformation experience.

Through our services' groups within HP, we have the ability from an information management and analytics approach to work with companies to understand the business value that they're trying to drive with information, and ideally try to understand what data is available to them today that is going to provide that business aligned information.

Through the Big Data Discovery Experience workshops, we're able to ask, "What is the business I am capable of doing with the data they have available to them today, and how can that be enhanced with alternative data sources that may fall outside of the organization today?"

As we mentioned earlier, it’s that idea of what can be done. What's the art of the possible here that is going to provide value to the organization? Through services we can take that all the way down, then say, now once you have got the idea, that says I’ve got a road map for analytical value and the management of the information that we have, and we could have made available to the businesses.

Then, you can align that, as I mentioned before, through IT strategies where you do the same thing. You align the business to IT and ask how IT is going to be able to enable those actions that the business wants to take on that information.

Entire lifecycle

So there's an entire lifecycle of raw material data to business-aligned and business-valued information through a service’s approach, through a consultative approach, that HP is able to bring to our customers.

That’s unique, because we have the ability through that upfront strategy from business value of information to the collection and refinement of raw materials and meeting in the middle in this big data ecosystem. HP can supply that from end to end, all the way from software to hardware to services, it's very unique.

Muller: I’ve got to summarize this by saying that the great part about HAVEn is that you can pretty much answer any question you could think of. The challenge is whether you can think of smart questions to ask.

Selland: Let me give you a tangible example that I was reading about not long ago in The Wall Street Journal. They were talking about how the airline industry is starting to pay attention to social media. Paul talked before about intersections. What do we mean by intersections?
The great part about HAVEn is that you can pretty much answer any question you could think of. The challenge is whether you can think of smart questions to ask.

This article in The Wall Street Journal was talking about how airlines are starting to pay attention to social media, because customers are tweeting when they're stuck at the airport. My flight is delayed, and I am upset. I'm going to be late to go visit my grandmother -- or something like that.

So somebody tweets. Paul tweets "I'm stuck at the airport, my flight is delayed and I am going to be late to grandma’s house." What can you really do about that besides respond back and say, "Oh, I'm sorry. Maybe I can offer you a discount next time," or something like that? But it doesn’t do anything to solve the problem.

Think about the airline industry, customer loyalty programs or frequent-flyer programs. Frequent-flyer programs were among the first customer loyalty problems. They have all this traditional data, as well which some might call customer relationship management (CRM). In the airline industry, they call it reservation systems.

I gave the example before about a jet engine throwing off two terabytes of data per hour. By the way, on any flight that I'm on, I want that to be pretty boring data that just says all systems are go, because that’s what you want.

At the same time, you don’t want to throw it away, because what if there are blips, or what if there are trends? What if I can figure out a way to use that to do a better job of doing predictive maintenance on my jets?

Better job

By doing a better job of predictive maintenance on my jets, I keep my flights on time. By keeping my flights on time, then I do a better job of keeping my customers satisfied. By keeping my customers more satisfied, I keep them more loyal. By keeping my customers more loyal, I make more money.

So all of this stuff starts to come together. You think about the fact there is a relationship between these two terabytes per hour of sensor data that’s coming off the sensors on the engine, and the upset customers, and social media tweeting in the airport. But if you look at the stuff in a stove-piped fashion, we don’t get any of that.

How do we start to bring this stuff together? This stuff does not sit in a single database and it’s not a single type of structure and it’s coming in all over the place. How do I make sense of it?

As Paul said very well, ask smart questions, figure out the big picture, and ultimately make my organization more successful, more competitive, and really get to the results I want to get to. But really, it’s a much, much bigger set of questions than just "My database is getting really big. Yesterday, I had this many terabytes and I am adding more terabytes a day." It’s a lot bigger than that.
HAVEn gives us that platform model, which is scalable, flexible, secure, and integrated.

We need to think bigger and you need to work with an organization that has the breadth of resources and the breadth not just inside the organization but within our partnerships to be able to do that. HP has got the unmatched capability to do that, in my view, and that’s why this HAVEn initiative is so very exciting and why we have such great expectations from this.

HAVEn is really about the future, the competitiveness of the business, and IT becoming an enabler for that. It’s about the CIO, really having a chance to play a key role in driving the strategy of the business, and that’s what all CIOs want to do.

We have these inflection points in the marketplace, the last one was like 12 years ago, when the whole e-business thing came along. And, while I just used a competitor's tag line, it changed everything. The web did change everything. It forced businesses to adapt, but it also enabled the lot of businesses to change how they do business, and they did.

Now, we're at another one, a very critical inflection point. It really does change everything, and there is still some skepticism out there. Is this big-data thing real? We think it’s very real and we think you're going to see more-and-more examples. We're working with customers today or showing some of those examples how it really does change everything.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

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HP's Project HAVEn rationalizes HP's portfolio while giving businesses a path to total data analysis

HP's new data analytics platform, announced today in Las Vegas, is designed to help organizations overcome the roadblocks to big data success and reap the rewards of data analysis.

Unveiled at HP Discover 2013, Project HAVEn leverages HP’s analytics software, hardware, and services to create big-data ready analytics applications and solutions.

HAVEn tackles some very big issues, both for the IT market and for HP. For the market, data and information remain fragmented, uncoordinated and hard to manage. At the same time, enterprises want to be able to use all the data they can access to better understand their businesses, users, and markets.

So HAVEn pulls together the growing army of HP analytics technologies and capabilities -- from Autonomy to Vertica to ArcSight and more -- allowing all kinds of data and information to be exploited in unison, with the dependencies and relationships mappable and hidden insights attainable across sources. And that insight can come from any type of information or content (Autonomy), with great speed and scale (Vertica) and associate with machine and IT systems data (ArcSight).

For HP, HAVEn shows the analytics whole is greater than the sum of the product parts, and presents a rationalization and uber value from its business intelligence, data and big data acquisitions and developments of the past five years. It also shows an agnostic approach to Hadoop, and an inclusive architecture alignment across analytics products and technologies, which is welcome.

According to a study commissioned by HP nearly 60 percent of companies surveyed will spend at least 10 percent of their innovation budget on big data this year. The study also found, however, that more than one in three organizations have failed with a big data initiative. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts. My travel to HP Discover 2013 was paid for by HP.]

HAVEn combines technologies from HP Autonomy, HP Vertica, HP ArcSight, and HP Operations Management, as well as key industry initiatives such as Hadoop, enabling clients and partners to:
  • Avoid vendor lock-in with an open architecture that supports a broad range of analytics tools.
  • Protect investments with support for multiple virtualization technologies.
  • Speed time to value with highly optimized hardware solutions.
  • Gain value from 100 percent of information, including structured, semistructured and unstructured data, via HP’s portfolio of more than 700 connectors into HAVEn.
Chris Selland, Vice President of Marketing at HP Vertica, explained the initiative: "The tip of the spear are our analytic engines, our analytic platforms, the Vertica Analytics Platform, Autonomy IDOL, ArcSight Logger. HAVEn is about taking this entire HP portfolio and then combining those with the power of Hadoop."

The first integrated big data analytics solution built on HAVEn is HP Operations Analytics, which delivers insight into all aspects of IT operations. The solution allows organizations to consume, manage, and analyze massive streams of IT operational data from a variety of HP products, including HP ArcSight Logger and the HP Business Service Management portfolio, as well as third-party sources.

Muller
HP Enterprise Services has introduced HP Actionable Analytics Services. These solutions will enable clients to implement analytics and extract insight hidden within big data, as well as streamline key organizational processes, such as customer offers, procurement, supply chain and inventory operations.

Paul Muller, Chief Evangelist at HP Software, explained the value of analytics: "It’s not the size of the data that matters, but it’s what you do with it. It’s about finding the connections between different data sets to help you improve competitiveness, help you improve efficiency if you are in the public sector, help you to detect fraud pattern. It's about what you do with the data in that connected intelligence that matters."

Big-data consulting

HP Technology Services has also expanded its Big Data Consulting Practice to ensure optimal IT infrastructure performance as well as support for increasing big data demands. New offerings include IT Strategy and Architecture, System Infrastructure, and Protection services that enable clients to align their IT infrastructure to organizational goals, while achieving compliance with industry standards and government regulations.

"The traditional systems or platforms that IT is used to providing are now becoming legacy. In other words, they're not providing the type of service level to meet the workload demands of the organization. So IT is faced with the challenge of how to transform that BI environment to more of a data refinement model or a big data ecosystem," said Tom Norton, Vice President for Big Data Technology Services at HP.

"The ability to respond quickly to this platform transformation is what we want to help our customers do from our technology services' perspective. How can we speed the maturity or speed the transformation of those traditional BI systems which are more sequential and more structured to be able to deal with the demands of the business to have relevant and refined information available to them at the time they need it, whether it’d be 1.5 seconds or 15 hours," said Norton.

HP also announced two additional products to help that effort:
  • The HP Vertica Community Edition—free, downloadable software that delivers the same functionality of the HP Vertica Analytics Platform Enterprise Edition with no commitments or time limits, allowing clients to analyze up to one terabyte of data before investing in an enterprise-wide solution.

  • The HP Autonomy Legacy Data Cleanup—information governance solution that helps clients analyze legacy data, lower costs, and reduce risks while driving value from big data. With this solution, organizations can access, understand and classify, as well as defensibly dispose of outdated and unnecessary legacy information, while retaining data deemed valuable for production applications.
Selland summed up the initiative this way, "You have to talk about customer analytics. You have to talk about preventing fraud. You have to talk about being able to operationally be more effective, more profitable, and all of those things that drive the business. It really becomes more-and-more a solutions discussion.

Selland
"HAVEn is the HP platform that provides our customers, our partners, and of course, our consultants, when our customers choose to have us do it for them, the ability to deliver these solutions. They're big-data solutions, analytic-enabled solutions. They're the solutions that companies, organizations, and global enterprises need to take their businesses forward and to make their customers more satisfied to become more profitable. That's what HAVEn is all about, the fundamental story behind the HAVEn initiative."

In other infrastructure news today at Discover, HP expanded the company's Converged Storage portfolio with a solid-state optimized all-flash HP 3PAR StoreServ system. It has also announced a StoreOnce Virtual Storage Appliance (VSA) that promises to cut the cost of small site backup by 65 percent.
They're the solutions that companies, organizations, and global enterprises need to take their businesses forward.

The HP 3PAR StoreServ 7450 Storage system delivers more than 550,000 input/output operations per second with less than 0.7 millisecond response time. Flash-specific caching algorithms dynamically adjust read/write granularity to reduce latency and speed transactions. In addition, HP 3PAR Priority Optimization software assures performance for specific workloads to improve overall productivity.

HP StoreOnce VSA deploys as a virtual machine on existing industry-standard servers, eliminating the need for customers to purchase dedicated hardware. It enables backup as a service offering for hosting providers and lowers costs for enterprise remote office protection. In addition, HP StoreOnce VSA reduces physical hardware requirements by up to 50 percent and energy costs by up to 70 percent.

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Friday, June 7, 2013

Customer data remains strewn around internal systems even as clound and hybrid models add to complications, says Scribe study

As companies rely more heavily on quality customer data, they still have a long ways to go in integrating core business systems to deliver that data to users across the enterprise. That's the finding from the latest survey from Scribe, a provider of data integration and access solutions.

Titled the State of Customer Integration 2013, the report finds that the biggest stumbling block on the path to data integration is an increasingly complex IT environment. While customer relationship management (CRM) systems are increasingly transitioning to cloud, the report found, enterprise resource planning (ERP) and business intelligence (BI) systems remain in silos behind the firewall.

“Businesses are struggling to reach the connected enterprise nirvana,” noted Lou Guercia, CEO of Scribe. “With the continued move to cloud and complex hybrid environments, the lack of integration between these systems is becoming clearer and significantly slowing business value.”
Businesses are struggling to reach the connected enterprise nirvana despite their focus on the importance of core business system integration.

Respondents also reported that almost half of budget ownership of core business systems now resides outside of IT, indicating a sea change toward chief marketing officers (CMOs) having an increasing stake in IT budget decisions in the years ahead.

Although IT continues to own a sizeable portion of the budget, sales, operations and marketing departments together are responsible for 48 percent of the planned systems investments in 2013. In addition, while almost half of business respondents (44 percent) plan to invest more in their business systems in 2013, the majority (60 percent) plan to take a cautious approach – increasing their customer-facing systems investment by no more than 20 percent compared to 2012.

Leading the way

Cloud has penetrated all core business systems with CRM leading the way. Some 26 percent of businesses report a pure cloud environment for CRM, while ERP and BI systems are still predominantly on-premise (with only six percent and five percent respectively reporting cloud adoption). In addition, the growing importance of hybrid environment support for customer data is clear, as 47 percent of businesses and 73 percent of third-party systems integrators point to hybrid environment support as either a top priority or "important" for their CRM strategy.

The majority of businesses (73 percent) and systems integrators (80 percent) report revenue growth as top priority, but they are also quick to note as top priorities the need for increased customer satisfaction and increased revenue per customer.

The importance of CRM and core business system integration to support customer-focused business growth is clear, said privately owned Scribe, based in Manchester, NH. In fact, businesses report measuring the success of their CRM data integration initiatives based on CRM satisfaction (at 45 percent), complete customer view (at 43 percent), and CRM system adoption (at 41 percent).
The lack of  integration between these systems is becoming clearer and significantly slowing business value.

However, with the majority of respondents noting integration between CRM and business intelligence (74 percent), CRM and customer support systems (73 percent), and CRM and marketing automation (71 percent) as a top priority, only 16 percent of business respondents report full integration among their various business systems. When compared to 15 percent reporting full integration in 2012, it is evident that organizations still have a long way to go to fully integrate customer data across core business systems. While only 10 percent report a complete lack of integration, partial integration is still the norm.

Among additional findings:
  • Businesses expect their CRM systems to have the ability to share data among key departments, and companies prioritize the value of CRM data integration in terms of its ability to drive accuracy and consistency of customer information
  • The majority of systems integrators (84 percent) and businesses (71 percent) rate mobile CRM as either important or top priority for their CRM strategy in 2013
  • The lowest levels of reported between-systems integration are between CRM and ERP (13 percent) and CRM and social (10 percent)
  • Custom code continues to be the way the majority (48 percent) of businesses report integrating their systems – but that is a significant drop from 2012 when 59 percent reported doing so
  • Most businesses (64 percent) still do not have a formal process for evaluating their CRM data integration progress, yet failure to integrate CRM with other critical business systems is driving 18 percent of respondents to switch to a new system in 2013.
For a copy of the report, go to http://www.scribesoft.com/state-of-cdi-2013-report?cid=scratchmm. Scribe will also host a webinar on June 13 at 11 a.m. EDT. To register, go to https://www2.gotomeeting.com/register/114971418.

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Friday, May 31, 2013

Why should your business care about Platform 3.0? A Tweet Jam

On Thursday, June 6, The Open Group will host a "tweet jam" examining Platform 3.0 and why the concept has great implications for businesses.

Over recent years a number of technologies -- cloud, mobile, big data, social -- have emerged and converged to disrupt the way we engage with each other in both our personal and business lives. Most of us are familiar with the buzz words, including "the Internet of things," "machine-to-machine (M2M)," and "consumerization of IT," but what do they mean when they act in concert? How can we treat them as separate? How can we react best?
Technologies have emerged and converged to disrupt the way we engage with each other in both our personal and business lives.

I was early to recognize this confluence as more than the sum of its parts, back in 2010. And Gartner was early too to recognize this convergence of trends representing a number of architectural shifts which it called a "Nexus of Forces." This nexus was presented as both an opportunity in terms of innovation of new IT products and services and a threat for those who do not keep pace with evolution, rendering current business architectures obsolete.

Understanding opportunities

Rather than tackle this challenge solo, The Open Group is working with a number of IT experts, analysts and thought leaders to better understand the opportunities available to businesses and the steps they need to benenefit and prosper from Platform 3.0, not fall behind. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

So please join the burgeoning Platform 3.0 community on Twitter on Thursday, June 6 at 9 a.m. PT/12 p.m. ET/5 p.m. GMT for a tweet jam, moderated by me, Dana Gardner (@Dana_Gardner), BriefingsDirect, that will discuss and debate the issues and implications around Platform 3.0.
All are welcome, including The Open Group members and interested participants from all backgrounds.

Key areas that will be addressed during the discussion include: the specific technical trends (big data, cloud, consumerization of IT, etc.), and ways businesses can use them – and are already using them – to increase their business opportunities.

All are welcome, including The Open Group members and interested participants from all backgrounds, to join the one-hour online chat session and interact with our panel's thought leaders. To access the discussion, please follow the #ogp3 and #ogChat hashtags during the discussion time.

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Friday, May 24, 2013

User-centric tools go long way to reaping most benefits from big data projects, says IDG survey

Big data is proving to be like the proverbial 800-pound gorilla -- big and powerful, but difficult to tame and control.

While nearly 90 percent of business and IT leaders agree that big data can be useful in making intelligent business decisions, only one-third of companies have implemented big-data initiatives. That's the finding from a recent International Data Group (IDG) survey, sponsored by Kapow Software.

Furthermore, more than 50 percent of survey respondents said that they had only lukewarm success with getting big data to deliver value in terms of competitive advantage, differentiation, top-line growth, strategic insights, employee productivity and effectiveness, among other business metrics.

Respondents reported that big-data projects take too long, cost too much, and aren't delivering a sufficient return on investment (ROI). Part of this is because these projects require expensive consultants or hard-to-find data scientists. Yet, while this lag in adoption continues, the mass of data from a variety of sources is growing.

Among the barriers to drawing value out of big data, according to survey respondents, are:
  • High cost and complexity. Many business leaders believe such projects require a prohibitively expensive infrastructure. Sixty percent said projects take 18 months or more to complete.
    Despite the current low reliance on big data, adoption is expected to increase over the next 12 months, as business and IT leaders turn to user-centric tools

  • Employee workarounds. Respondents said employees often take matters into their own hands, but without effective solutions, are resorting to manual aggregation. This is putting pressure on IT to automate these efforts.
  • Poor data accessibility. Nearly half of IT leaders said they find it difficult to find, access, and integrate the right information, which is often unstructured and spread among a wide variety of sources.
  • Lacking skills and tools. Big data is proving to be inaccessible by employees without special training, again putting pressure on IT to pave the way.
Despite the current low reliance on big data, adoption is expected to increase over the next 12 months, as business and IT leaders turn to user-centric tools -- such as those provided by Kapow Software. With such tools, IT leaders anticipate improved productivity and a better relationship with the business leaders.

Business leaders surveyed are looking for a variety of benefits from an increased use of big data. They say the following are either "critical" or "very important:"
  • More informed business decision - 80 percent
  • Increased competitive advantage - 71 percent
  • Improved customer satisfaction - 68 percent
  • Increased end-user productivity - 62 percent
  • Improved security or compliance - 60 percent
  • New products and services - 55 percent
  • Monitoring and responding to social media in real time - 33 percent.
For more information on the survey results, go to http://www.slideshare.net/Kapowmarketing/kapow-idg-bigdataidg051513 or http://www.kapowsoftware.com/. [Disclosure: Kapow Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

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