Cloud Computing Blog

Time to Make It Rain!

Bill Ahlstrom — Tue, 13 Jul 2010 19:34:00 GMT

“The Cloud” has given us far too many metaphors. And most of us have overused them, peppering our discussions, presentations and blogs – all too often over-reaching for an apt image.

At TM Forum Management World, a new one arose. Arguing that “it’s time to make it rain,” Deutsche Bank’s Sean Kelley, global asset management CIO and head of DB’s platform services, asked assembled suppliers and providers to accelerate the “rain” – the results of the Cloud. Keying off the American image of “rainmaker” – someone who makes things happen – Kelley forcefully argued in multiple presentations and discussions that the Cloud enables a totally different business model for IT and for IT-based services.

Kelley challenged the 3,000+ Management World participants to move beyond the obvious Cloud benefits of reduced costs through virtualization, consolidation, on-demand-access to just-in-time resources and utility billing. He posed instead a world where those savings would allow substantial reinvestment in creating and delivering new services much faster and more easily than ever before. He sketched some key attributes of the new Cloud operating model:

CapEx --> OpEx

Fixed Costs --> Variable Costs

Cost Allocation -->Cost Attribution

Stand-in-line Service --> Self-Service

Just-in-case capacity --> Just-in-time capacity

Months to deploy --> Minutes to deploy

One of the driving forces behind and newly named chairman of the Forum’s Enterprise Cloud Leadership Council (see http://www.tmforum.org/TMForumPressReleases/TMForumsCloudServices/42285/article.html), Kelley argued that this new agility and flexibility will force IT organizations and leaders to abandon their internal monopolies and enter a new world of competition driven by the easy availability of Cloud-based services which will allow their business-leader colleagues to choose among a broad range of suppliers. But it will also enable the IT leaders themselves to refocus spending on innovation and to provide the agility that the business lines demand.

Kelley’s ECLC colleagues, Nick Holdsworth and Jon Waldron of Commonwealth Bank of Australia, are completing a draft version of a reference architecture for Database as a Service developed by CBA to accelerate their private Cloud implementation. The draft, soon to be open for comment, also includes bills of materials for standardized hardware and software “platform servers” or PODs to support DBaaS. The intent is to get vendors to pre-build standard SKUs based on these PODs and for Cloud-services providers to use them as well, thereby facilitating a competitive market.

At least a few “showers” were present in the multiple demonstration and prototype projects in the Forum’s Catalyst program .Whether the Defense Interest Group’s project focused on rapid reliable services deployment in times of disasters such as hurricanes or earthquakes, or other projects demonstrating how Cloud service brokers can lace IPTV services across multiple domains, or provide virtualized services ranging from desktops to applications to backup for small and medium businesses, or unified communications as a Cloud-based service, the projects clearly demonstrated that rain is on the way – and not too far over the horizon (see http://www.tmforum.org/Catalysts/8342/home.html ).

In multiple presentations, hallway and other informal discussions, it is clear that a psychological shift of major significance is well along the way. No longer is the discussion about how the Cloud can drive costs out of operations. Cost reductions are a given.

The discussion now is focused on how the Cloud enables developing new services much more quickly as well as deploying them much more rapidly – following the “fix or fail quickly” learning model pioneered by Google and others.

This is what Kelley, Eric Pulier and others of the ECLC are evangelizing: Use the Cloud to develop and deploy new apps much more quickly than ever before. And also use the Cloud as an appropriate place for capacity-constrained functions.

This leads to the concept of “right placing” of functions…….discussed next time.

And, by the way, I’ll try very hard to erase Cloud metaphors in future comments!

A Tale of Two Cities.....

Bill Ahlstrom — Wed, 26 May 2010 15:48:00 GMT

TM Forum Management World in Nice and CA World in Las Vegas collided last week.

But what happens in Vegas (or Nice) doesn’t stay there any more, as presentations, demos and keynotes are available on the Web…and even YouTube.

Let me be candid right up front: I work at CA Technologies, and serve on the TM Forum’s Executive Committee. So I have interests in what happened in both places.

The discussions in the Desert Babylon and the Mediterranean Haven were remarkably parallel. Both events focused heavily on the current transition in IT – oversimplified as the Cloud “paradigm shift.”

Here are some of the key insights and observations that swirled around the Mandalay Bay and the Acropolis:

The new IT department will manage a dynamic supply chain of internal and external resources -- some cloud-based -- to deliver services to the business, and its internal and external customers and clients. IT leaders will not manage hardware elements in a datacenter but will manage a sophisticated IT supply chain to deliver business-critical services.

Instead of focusing internally, IT organizations can start looking outside the walls of the data center for resources and services. And can start leveraging new business models as well as new technologies.

IT will focus on the business services, not on the technologies, processes, infrastructures and tools.

IT’s primary role will no longer be cost reduction. Rather it will be rapid, reliable, flexible, agile development and deployment of new services to internal and external customers, following the “try it, fix it or fail quickly” methods pioneered by Google and others. IT’s success will be judged on service-delivery and creation – not just on expense reduction.

Cost savings enabled by IT will be redirected at innovation – new products, new services for new communities of interest, new markets.

The "new data center" is based on the Internet and the Cloud together as a unit.

Just like we have witnessed a progression from mainframes, to client-server, to Internet…we now see another, to Cloud. And they don’t replace each other – they are additive. Prior “generations” evolve parallel to the “new paradigms.”

The Cloud isn’t just technology. It’s about using existing, new and emerging technologies in new ways to enable IT to develop and deliver services in new, more efficient, more cost-effective ways.

The Cloud enables unprecedented IT flexibility. It allows big enterprises to act with the agility of small companies. The Cloud enables IT organizations to take full advantage of mainframe, distributed assets, physical environment and virtual environments as well as services and solutions accessed from the Cloud.

The discussion of business model changes is perhaps most interesting – and controversial. The context runs as follows: IT has had an internal monopoly, broken occasionally by rebellions such as departmental computing, PC and smart-device proliferation. The Cloud bodes well to permanently break that monopoly by enabling flexible and easy access to powerful resources needed by the business. IT organizations can either embrace those changes, or fight rearguard actions against them. [A separate comment on these business model issues is in the works.]

These are fundamental issues that the industry at large – customers in all verticals, markets and geos, service providers, suppliers – is wrestling with. How we respond will determine how well we harness the new powers available to deliver both business and social benefit.

TM Forum Management World overviews and keynotes are at: http://tmforum.telecomtv.com/

Directly on point at CA World, CA Technologies EVP Ajei Gopal described how the Cloud will transform the future of IT: http://www.ca.com/us/press/release.aspx?cid=235911

Other CA World announcements, including about the new Cloud Commons, are at: http://www.ca.com/us/content/campaign.aspx?cid=231278

In the Blink of an Eye.....Management World 2009 to 2010

Bill Ahlstrom — Fri, 21 May 2010 12:30:00 GMT

A year ago in Nice, the debate was whether “the cloud” was reality or hype. Economic virtues were touted and praised. Vendors and SPs alike were challenged to “think of everything as a service” – available on demand, self-service, with use-based pricing. But skeptics abounded.

Six months ago in Orlando, discussion swirled around active cloud experiments. Who was running them? Focused on what? -- More often than not, on dev/test. Talk rife about “rogue” experiments in departments, paid for with credit cards and using compute power from Amazon or Google -- outside control and often invisible to IT. Presentations focused on squeezing the costs and provisioning delays out of IT infrastructure and operations as a result of “just in time” capacity instead of “just in case” to handle peak loads. And a challenge from several large enterprise organizations, such as Commonwealth Bank of Australia, to develop reference architectures for cloud-based services. Hence the formation of a group, affiliated with the TM Forum, of enterprise customers, major suppliers and service providers to accelerate the adoption of cloud technologies for mutual benefit.

Nice 2010: Most skepticism has abated due to the relative flood of cloud services announcements from major suppliers. Cost advantages are no longer debated – but are assumed. Economic discussion has turned to using the cost savings resulting from virtualization and cloud-based services to driving innovation, much more rapid development and delivery of new products and services. Cloud-based services are presented as enabling – or perhaps forcing? -- a new operating business model for IT that breaks the internal monopoly and forces IT and business leaders to think and behave in new ways. Speculation focuses on large scale deployments and “bold moves” that will galvanize the market.

And, thankfully, food and wine as excellent as ever…..

What a Difference a Year Makes!

Bill Ahlstrom — Mon, 03 May 2010 17:56:00 GMT

Last May at Management World, there was lots of chatter about “the Cloud”---much of it unfocused, skeptical, sometimes confused as people speculated and argued about what “the Cloud really means.”

By December’s Management Americas, some of the skepticism had dissipated, some of the confusion had abated, as more and more people had a clearer understanding of the business drivers behind the Cloud and a surprising number of people had already begun experiments with cloud-based services – both user and supplier.

Over the six months since, cloud-based services announcements have accelerated. Enterprises and government agencies have gained more experience with “just in time” instead of “just in case” capacity. Many internal departments have experimented (often off central IT’s radar) with commercial services from Amazon or Google. Many IT organizations have experimented with internal private clouds leveraging virtualization and supporting data center consolidation.

And there has even been agreement on basic definitions. The most formal (and useful!) definition comes from the US National Institute of Standards and Technology: “Cloud computing is a model for enabling convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources (e.g., networks, servers, storage, applications, and services) that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” (Elaboration on this capsule definition can be found in the TM Forum Quick Insights Report #2 “Seeing Through the Clouds” at: http://tmforum.org/QuickInsights/8201/home.html which also recaps a Management Americas TM Forum executive roundtable).

It has increasingly become clear that the Cloud is not a technology. It is a new way of architecting, delivering, consuming, managing and securing IT services. It is based on a broad range of enabling technologies. It can assume several different forms: private; community; public; hybrid or mixed. (A “community” cloud could, for example, link an enterprise and its suppliers in a segregated, shared cloud infrastructure dedicated to their common purposes and functions, or link related government agencies around a common mission).

As the NIST definition implies, the Cloud requires IT execs to think outside the walls of their data centers and firewalls. It portrays an IT environment where end-to-end extends from an application – somewhere – to an end-user or smart end-device – also somewhere – with lots of different systems, equipment, resources, and shifting locations (due to virtualization) in between. IT and business executives need to view this new end-to-end as a supply chain linking the application and the end-user in as flexible a way possible to meet changing requirements.

An often overlooked clause in the NIST definition is: “[resources and services that]…can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.”

Much is embedded in these dozen or so words. IT and business executives alike must dig deeply into their implications.

Everyone agrees that the new end-to-end in a virtualized environment increases complexity in multiple dimensions. Technologies. Paths. Capacities. Monitoring. Problem identification. Problem diagnosis. Problem resolution. Security. Management.

We use rubrics like automation, policy-based management and closed-loop self-monitoring/self-adjusting systems to describe what we think is required. We underscore the need for true plug-and-play interoperability to enable “minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” But these, too, hide the implications of complexity.

Management World this month can help IT and business executives wrestle with these issues.

An executive roundtable (once again sponsored by my company, CA, Inc) will focus on “Realizing Cloud Services”. Chaired by Stephen Ward of Deloitte Consulting, with Elay Cohen of Salesforce.com and Sean Kelley of DeutscheBank as provocateurs, this will no doubt challenge conventional wisdom and IT shibboleths. If interested in attending the roundtable, email Suzy Mahew: smayhew@tmforum.org

There is also a full program of presentations and panels on May 19th and 20th targeting “Enabling Profitable Cloud Services” that looks at the issues from the perspective of both the enterprise user as well as the cloud services provider. For details see: http://tmforum.org/ManagementWorld2010/CloudServices/8268/Home.html

Last year, some of us believed we are at the beginning of another of those periodic shifts in IT that seem to happen every 15 years or so. But skeptics abounded.

This year, more of us (enterprises, government agencies, service providers, ISVs and other suppliers) agree that a large scale shift is underway.

Your time at Management World can help you and your organization understand, cope, and benefit from this shift. I look forward to seeing you in Nice.

Seeing Through the Clouds

Bill Ahlstrom — Sun, 13 Dec 2009 16:47:00 GMT

From the opening moments of the plenary session when the audience dubbed cloud services as their top interest, the focus of this year’s TM Forum Management World Conference in Orlando was clear: Service providers and their suppliers are moving rapidly to understand how to apply the cloud to their businesses and monetize the resultant services.

In May, at TMWorld in Nice, attendees were skeptical of cloud hype. In Orlando, the pace of experimentation was apparent and a flurry of announcements confirmed that SPs are rapidly becoming cloud services providers. Google and Amazon have been joined by substantial AT&T and Verizon offerings, with more sure to announced soon.

As a result of these sorts of offerings, experiments range from using external public clouds for application dev/test and data storage to private clouds for on-demand services for the full range of internal IT needs. And while everyone is talking about hybrid clouds that link internal and external cloud environments, a few (my company, CA among them) are actually doing that.

Nonetheless, the accelerating hype breeds skepticism.

Providers and their potential customers are still not clear about how rapidly cloud services will become mainstream. There is clearly an adoption cycle that reflects maturity both of the offerings and of the ability of individual users to successfully take advantage of them. Almost everyone is still experimenting. (The single largest exception may be startup companies that have flooded to cloud computing offerings to avoid creating internal IT staffs and compute capacity, who have adopted cloud-based services such as salesforce.com or cloud-based HR and financial services -- enabling them to avoid “overhead costs” that divert scare capital away from product development, sales and marketing. Extinct is the VC who will allow a young company to spend on building its own data center for development and operations.)

Even as experimentation accelerates, and before large-scale deployments actually occur, most observers as well as cloud providers agree with an emerging consensus that the typical cloud deployment will be a hybrid model. As cloud users build out their internal virtualized data centers and provide on-demand services for their internal users, they will rely on external clouds to cover peak demands. Obvious examples cited in numerous presentations were: retailers and e-tailers that need extra capacity on Black Friday and Cyber Monday at the start of the holiday shopping season. But all IT users have such peaks – weekly, bi-weekly, monthly, quarterly, annually -- regardless of reasons. And CFOs and CIOs are saying: Why build for the peaks and leave much of the capacity idle or underused for the majority of the time when we can purchase what we need when we need it from external suppliers? “Just in case” thinking about IT capacity has shifted to “just in time” models – as it has in so many other areas of business operations.

But many presenters said the peak-demand based hybrid would rapidly evolve into an on-going hybrid where more and more IT departments would rely on external cloud providers for continuing support of non-core functions, such as data conversion and storage, as well as peak-load compute power.

This will create a permanent link between internal private clouds and external public clouds, where the boundaries of the traditional IT environment are stretched and blurred, creating new and interesting challenges for the traditional IT management and security disciplines.

While security in its many facets remains a major concern, opinion appears to be moving toward a consensus that security of access to and of data in cloud environments will be “at least as good” as in private data centers. Some find this comforting---others scary.

SPs who have rolled out various early cloud services offerings are already hearing from their initial customers that they expect to be able to use the same management and security policies and systems and ITIL processes in hybrid cloud environments as they use internally or in private clouds. They want the same levels of visibility and control over “their resources” as they are used to in internal IT and network operations. They expect their tried and true methods to extend seamlessly into the hybrid cloud. It is yet to be seen if they will be more tolerant of variations in managing “just-in-time” capacity from a public cloud.

Conversations in the hallways as well as in panels swirled around how SPs can differentiate their cloud offerings. Two answers appear to be emerging: Cloud services providers will specialize on what services they actually offer and will back them with demonstrable brand value; and they will differentiate the quality of the offered services by the quality of management and security they provide to their customers --- both in reporting validation of SLAs, and in actual visibility and control. But these are very early days and the conversations are still very speculative.

A key initiative to help accelerate adoption of cloud services was announced by TMForum in Orlando. Drawing together major technology and services providers with a core group of major enterprise customers who form the Enterprise Cloud Buyers Council, the TMForum cloud initiative also draws in other industry organizations including the DMTF and itSMF. Founding members include AT&T,BT, Telecom Italia, and Telstra, CA, EMC, HP, IBM and Microsoft, Cisco and Nokia Siemens Networks. The charter is to accelerate commercial availability and adoption of secure and managed cloud services.

So, while cloud hype clearly remains, it no longer dominates. Real, demonstrable, substantial projects are underway and global companies are making significant cloud-based services available in the marketplace. One can’t help but wonder where all this will be at the TMForum conference in Nice in May 2010.

A Cloud by Any Other Name

James Warner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:28:00 GMT

Most of us have had the experience of travelling to acountry where we can’t speak the language and trying to function. Except for a few words like “please,”“thank you” and “where is a restaurant” we are filled with a mix of excitement, uncertainly and confusion.

That pretty much sums up where users are with respect tocloud computing services these days. The brochure looks great but what’s the reality? And while there the list ofuncertainties and questions is lengthy, one of the most basic issues is that of language.

Today, the marketplace is filled with a baffling array ofterms such as public cloud, private cloud, internal and external clouds, hybrid clouds and on and on. And for the most part, everyone defines these terms a little differently – sometimes to suit their own purposes. Sometimes to obscure reality.

Within each of these terms are other names for various products and services. And company A may not use a particular name the same way as company B. In other words, ‘a rose is not a rose by any other name.’ This makes it impossible for a user to make a fair and honest comparison when trying to procure a given cloud service.

This is one of the first problems the TM Forum’s Cloud Initiative will solve. Starting with our soon to be announced buyers council, we will set out to define a consistent set of product and service definitions so users can compare offerings and make intelligent buying decisions.

In parallel with this activity, our Cloud9 Service Model Catalyst demonstration at Management World America is working to incorporate those common definitions into an Active Catalog environment so help automate the ordering, provisioning and delivery processes for Cloud Service Providers.

This is a very exciting time in the cloud space and TM Forum is poised to make a major announcement at Management World Orlando.

I’ve been with TM Forum since its inception and been a part of countless press announcements. Trust me – you don’t want to miss this one.

Clouds - Where Should Users Start

James Warner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:27:00 GMT

Any discussion of cloud computing has to acknowledge that on one hand, it holds huge promise while on the other hand, is possibly the most over-hyped technology trend to come down the pike in many a year.

That aside, the potential to save costs and gain flexibility in offering new services is compelling. And between those two,my advice is to make the business case on the new service flexibility aspectsas most new technologies that promise significant costs savings end up not delivering on that promise because of unanticipated hidden costs or simple over-estimation.

As far as guidance,like any transformation endeavor, the TM Forum recommends starting with a thorough examination of the business processes that support the strategic aimsof the company. This allows you tore-design the key processes needed to achieve the desired levels of efficiency,flexibility, time-to-market, customer service and profitability. From there, one can decide what sortsof systems and applications are needed to support those processes and whether these are best delivered via a cloud-based environment or not.

Cloud Security

James Warner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:26:00 GMT

Was thumbing through a past issue of Network World and came upon a very good perspective on Cloud Computing.

http://www.networkworld.com/columnists/2009/091509antonopoulos.html

LA, Google and what to expect

James Warner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:25:00 GMT

By now, most everyone has heard the the City of LA has decided to replace much of it's Microsoft and Novell apps with Google Apps.
http://business.timesonline.co.uk/tol/business/industry_sectors/telecoms/article6894607.ece

While much of the talk has has centered around GMail, the deal in fact is much broader and encompasses all of the Google Apps that compete with Office and Novell's GroupWise.

The most obvious issues involve security and quality of service and it's interesting to note that an agreement on penalties should a security breach occur has been added to the contract. But we've had penalties for SLAs for decades so this isn't anything new.

Of greater concern is should a breach happen, what will this do to confidence in the market for cloud services? The recent outage with Sidekick caused a huge stir but frankly, that's nothing compared to someone getting access to Financial files, Law Enforcement records or just email from the City Council or Mayor's office.

I hope we aren't running before we can walk but would like to hear other's opinions on this.

Internal Clouds - peeling the onion

James Warner — Fri, 27 Nov 2009 22:24:00 GMT

A new term has cropped up - Internal Cloud - which replaces the term Private Cloud. But whatever you call it, users are still peeling away the layers of the onion to understand exactly what a cloud environment means in terms of IT capabilities as well as benefits for users.

As expected, it's a lot more complex than just hosting a virtual machine on a server and sooner or later, we have to start being more specific about what a cloud service is and what it isn't (today, almost every online/web service is being called a cloud service and that's just going to add to the confusion and potentially stall or derial a very promising technology.

For more - read: https://www.networkworld.com/news/2009/101409-internal-clouds.html