- Comparative cost and demographic rating and attractiveness of Colombia ’s key cities ( Bogota , Medellin , Cali ) compared to other key Nearshore locations. A focus on Zagada Captive city datasets.

- Key drivers that service suppliers should prioritize in attracting and satisfying U.S corporate buyside clients, with a focus on Zagada’s Cultural Domain Acuity Model Score (CDAM), care quality delivery (METACARE), and service delivery production function (SDPF).

Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast coming to you from the Ariba LIVE 2010 Conference in Orlando.

This podcast is a presentation of a May 25 stage-based panel event on the implications of cloud computing for procurement, supply-chain management, and a host of other business functions. For those of you unable to attend the actual conference, please now listen to this lively and informative panel by a group of noted industry analysts.

Here is the moderator of our discussion, Tim Minahan, Chief Marketing Officer at Ariba.

Minahan: When discussing heady topics like the cloud, procurement, and finance, and looking at the future of business-to-business (B2B) commerce, we thought it important for you to hear from the experts. So we have assembled a panel of the leading analysts — the folks that you turn to to benchmark your performance, uncover best practices, and make IT buying decisions.

I’d like to welcome our panelists: Mickey North Rizza from AMR Research (a Gartner company), Chris Sawchuk from The Hackett Group, Robert Mahowald from IDC, and Bruce Guptill from Saugatuck Technology.

Here are some excerpts from the discussion:

Guptill: The first thing is to figure out how to handle this cloud thing. It’s the single most disruptive influence that we’ve seen in not just IT, but in how IT is bought, used, paid for, and how that affects how everybody does business. So how is it accounted for? Who has responsibility for managing what aspects?

If you have some of it on-premise and some of it out in the cloud, who is responsible? How is it managed? How is that budgeted for?

If you have some of it on-premise and some of it out in the cloud, who is responsible? How is it managed? How is that budgeted for? It changes the way we operate as a business, because it changes the way we spend, the way we buy, and the way we manage. It’s very, very disruptive, and policies and practices really haven’t caught up yet to the reality, and we’re not getting a breather. The change is accelerating.

Sawchuk: When we ask procurement executives what are they focused on going into 2010 from a technology standpoint, the number one area is just utilizing better the technology investments that they have made — digesting them. So, it’s a lot of the basics — cleaning up our master data and just getting more utilization on our eProcurement, eSourcing types of tools in the organization.

But there are a couple of emerging trends that are occurring in the most progressive procurement organizations, in three areas. One is around collaborative technologies. Why is it so difficult to do this in business, when it’s so easy with Facebook and all that type of stuff in the non-business type of world? It’s not just externally that this applies, but internally as well.

The cloud offers a way to do that a lot more quickly, for less cost, in a way that is still as secure and authenticated as it would be in my IT shop.

Number two, around better management of the knowledge and intelligence across the organization, structured, unstructured, internal, and external types of information.

And lastly, driving more agility into the procurement service delivery model, which includes the technology tools.

Mahowald: For the last 10 years or so, we have seen lines of business start to get more acclimated using software-as-a-service (SaaS) services. Some of those lessons are how those services are delivered and filtered back to IT.

Virtualization, automation, and standardization are finding their ways into our IT departments and they’re finding ways to do things like reduce the number of physical assets they spend their time counting, and keep them up and running, and rely more and more on external services that can safely provide the functionality that their users require.

And the typical scenario is that, if I am in the line of business and I want to build an application, or I need to have access to an IT service, I’ve got to go to my IT team. It can often be long and time-consuming to get that thing spun up and tested, kick all the tires, and get it up and running in the environment that is being used.

The cloud offers a way to do that a lot more quickly, for less cost, in a way that is still as secure and authenticated as it would be in my IT shop, and probably done in a way that is much, much more service enabled, for the ultimate constituency I want to serve, my user, the internal user. So, it’s a big opportunity.

North Rizza: Basically, what we’re seeing is that companies have a lot of pent up demand over the last couple of years. They haven’t been able to change some of their business processes and automate them the way they would like to. What they’ve been doing is standing back, trying to get more out of their ERP systems or basic business processes. They’ve had to make a lot of cuts and they’re not getting everything they need. What we’re finding now is that spending is starting to pick up.

We’re also finding that companies are looking for alternative deployment models. They’re starting to say, “What can I do above and beyond just the technology application? Where else can I look for services and other opportunities that are, one, going to quickly drive value to my line of business buyer, because those are the folks that do the business day in and day out? They’re the ones that need to make a difference. And finally, how do I do it quickly, without a lot of disruption, very flexible, and a great investment, but a really quick return on that investment?”

Sawchuk: When we asked CFOs in the broader enterprise, coming into 2010, what was the number one area of focus for them, it was cash. When we asked the same question to the procurement executives and community, it was cost. Cash was number 10. So the question is, are we misaligned or do we feel that we have done everything we can over the last 18-24 months and there’s nothing more to do?

When you look at this, procurement and the data as just being cost focused are fading. We’ve got to get much more balanced in the way we actually deliver our value, not just cost, but also working capital and other areas as well.

You wanted some examples of what these world-class organizations do around working capital and how they do it well. Number one, they measure it. They bring visibility to it. They put it on their scorecards. They have cash conversions, cycle time matrix, DPO, DIO, etc.

Number two, they manage it and the source-to-settle, purchase-to-pay process.

Number three, they create collaborative communities with procurement, with the business, finance, and treasury, around working capital strategies and objectives.

And, fourth, they actually compensate. We see organizations out there where some of the procurement folks and these folks on these collaborative communities are compensating. Up to one-third of their compensation is based on their achievement of working capital objectives.

Mahowald: In many IT organizations, as much as 55 percent of the budget is spent on keeping systems running, and that involves paying for the ongoing license and maintenance and support of software and hardware and all the power pipe cost that it takes to run an IT center.

The ability to reduce some of those costs by outsourcing them in lower-cost subscription models that are operating costs is an enormously helpful transition for many customers. CIOs that we talk to are excited about introducing cloud services and also what we call naked compute services or offsite storage to improve the efficiency of certain applications that are widely used in the organization or offsite development platforms, where they can actually build applications.

It’s a major activity for many IT organizations to build new applications, objects, and customizations on-site. If they can offshore that and not have to pay application licenses or infrastructure cost, that’s a big help to them in lowering their fixed-cost structure. Ultimately, it’s a big help to make IT organizations much more lean and responsive to their needs.

Guptill: If you can take the software and put it in the cloud, and if you can take the hardware and the infrastructure service, the IT, and put it in the cloud and take advantage of that, we have all these vendors — let’s take Ariba for an example — that have these terrific technologies, applications, and the expertise to use them. Why can’t that be delivered and used as a service, as a utility, cloud-based or otherwise?

Then, we have the business logic, we have the software, the applications, the functionality, and the technology, to make it happen. We can do that as an as-needed, on-demand, or subscription basis. It removes a lot of the fixed cost that we’ve been talking about. It reduces our reliance on fixed assets or fixed cost for what could be cyclical or temporary needs in terms of functionality. It’s basically outsourcing business tasks, business functions, or business processes to the cloud. It’s “cloud temping” basically.

Over time, these things start from very simple, straightforward, and standardized capabilities, similar to what SaaS, or infrastructure as a service (IaaS) started as, but we are seeing them start to evolve into more configurable or more customizable capabilities.

Pool of functionality

So that we can now — it’s just starting now, but will be much more over the course of the next four or five years — take advantage of a large pool of business functionality that we don’t want to buy. It’s not just a technology. It’s not just a software. But it’s the business tasks that we don’t want to buy, we don’t want to train, and we don’t want on our books. We can rent those as we need them, and when the work is done, they retire back to the cloud.

North Rizza: We found that 96 percent of those in our studies are using cloud-based solutions, but out of that 96 percent, 46 percent are geared into a hybrid cloud solution. And by hybrid we mean that they’re actually using cloud technology applications. They’re optimizing those against their IT on-premise investments, and further, they’re extending the capabilities into cloud services technology. So they’re looking at the whole gamut.

When it’s executed well and done well, it allows you to execute on your working capital and supplier payment types of strategies.

The second part of that is the next leading area, and that’s 41 percent around a private cloud. The difference there is that they’re looking at technology capabilities from the cloud and they’re putting that with their ERP or on-premise IT investments, but they’re not necessarily extending those capabilities.

… We found that those that actually deployed cloud solutions, technologies, and services and put them out there, found anywhere from 5-7 percent difference in greater value, just by deploying, versus those that are thinking about it or trying to get into the mode of, “We want to go down that path and we are thinking about that investment process.”

What were the benefits? It’s really interesting. The first is that they were able to drive more revenue. Understandably, if we get those cloud-based solutions, we’re going to drive more revenue. If you think about that gap from 5-9 percent, that’s huge, on a revenue standpoint.

Two other points: the cost-to-serve model. They’re able to look at what their costs are, what are costing to serve from the enterprise, all the way through their trading partners, all the way back out into where the demand cycle begins, from a supply chain perspective. They get more savings, and those two go hand in hand. Then lastly, it’s around that business cycle time improvement aspect.

… So, while we see this as a big area, and companies keep going down this path, one of the things we also find is that it really means a sharper focus on master data management (MDM), your business processes, how that’s orchestrated, both inside the enterprise and externally into your trading partners, and understanding your governance structure. We’ll see more and more of that come out, as time goes on here.

Sawchuk: We’ve been talking about the cloud. How does it help? First of all, and you’ve heard a lot about this, cloud gives you much faster, easier, and more economical access to technology solutions. Now that you’re connected, you can speed the transactions across your supply base, etc.

More importantly, it gives you much more predictability in your ability to execute. For example, a lot of us say we moved our terms. We moved our terms from 45 to 60 days. When we do that, the suppliers say, “When we were on 45, you couldn’t pay me on time. You moved it to 60. Can you pay me now on time?” It gives you some predictability in the execution. That’s important to them.

Number two is, if you negotiate early pay discounts, you have the ability to execute and take advantage of those kinds of things that you have in your commercial agreement.

The cloud also does a couple of things. It certainly brings much more visibility to the overall activities that are occurring across the entire source-to-settle process. But also, once you are connected in this whole cloud environment, it certainly gives you access to intelligent services that exist out there. I’m talking about working capital, things like information about the financial health of your suppliers, their historical performance, the cost of capital, etc.

That kind of collision between outside the cloud and inside the organization is going to change and it could change business pretty dramatically.

Mahowald: We talked about lower cost, leaner IT organizations, because they are able to source outside of the organization, and get lower cost services. We think that kind of collision between outside the cloud and inside the organization is going to change and it could change business pretty dramatically.

Where business happens

Another thing is that, when you’ve got solutions that are brought in by business users — maybe it’s a salesforce.com or some other SaaS application — it’s important to them, and it’s important for them, to get agility and speed to that functionality, but there are going to be many places where you are going to be brought outside of your organization, because that’s where business happens.

Whether it’s in a commerce cloud or another forum or marketplace for the exchange of products, you will be forced there essentially to do business, to maintain your presence in the game, see that transparency, and have it help your business. We think that’s probably the most likely place for that collision to occur.

Guptill: We’ve researched, interviewed, and surveyed a little over 7,000 executives worldwide — finance, procurement, HR, IT, line of business — over the last six or seven years about what it is that they want to do with cloud IT, whether it’s SaaS or IaaS, platform as a service (PaaS) or whatever. In every single case so far, they’re using it to add to what they have. It’s filling in the gaps. It’s enabling better efficiencies, better cost. It’s delivering benefits that they could not get earlier cost effectively.

When you think about it, that’s the pattern of IT investment over the last 50- 60 years. It’s very, very rare that we replace what we have with whatever new is coming in. There’s all this hype about new stuff is coming and it’s going to change everything. It’s going to get rid of this. We are going to dump that.

Within four to five years, by year end 2015, more than 50 percent of new IT spending will be in the cloud for the first time.

Our latest survey research, which we are just in the process of publishing right now, very strongly indicates that within four to five years, by year end 2015, more than 50 percent of new IT spending will be in the cloud for the first time. That’s within four or five years. But, that means that about 50 percent, or a little less than half, is still going to be on-premise, so that stuff is not going away.

So, over time, what’s going to happen is that we have a series of decisions to make. What costs are we trying to control? How are we going to change our purchasing, procurement, management, payment, relationship management, and so on?

Then, as our traditional on-premise systems, not all of them, but as each one comes up, as they reach the end of their useful life, what do we do? Because traditionally, we would add to them, we would just build out around them, until they take over the entire data center, or we would outsource. Now, we have a combination. We can put some in the cloud and some on-premise.

Those are the decisions that we’re going to have to face, as we go ahead. What goes out there? What stays in here? What goes in between? The stuff has to be made to work together. Who has that responsibility? What’s it going to cost? How is that going to be budgeted? And how are we going to manage all this?

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Ariba.

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Welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series, coming to you from the HP Software Universe 2010 Conference in Washington, D.C. We’re here the week of June 14, 2010, to explore some major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations making news across HP’s ecosystem of customers, partners, and developers.

Our next customer case study focuses on Delta Air Lines and the use of quality assurance tools for requirements management as well as mapping the test cases and moving into full production quickly.

We’re joined by David Moses, Manager of Quality Assurance for Delta.com and its self-service apps efforts, and John Bell, a Senior Test Engineer at Delta. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Moses: Generally, the airline industry, along with the lot of other industries I’m sure, is highly competitive. We have a very, very quick, fast-to-market type environment, where we’ve got to get products out to our customers. We have a lot of innovation that’s being worked on in the industry and a lot of competing channels outside the airline industry that would also like to get at the same customer set. So, it’s very important to be able to deliver the best products you can as quickly as possible. “Speed Wins” is our motto.

It goes back to speed to market with new functionality and making the customer’s experience better. In all of our self-service products, it’s very important that we test from the customers’ point of view.

We deliver those products that make it easier for them to use our services. That’s one of the things that always sticks in my mind, when I’m at an airport, and I’m watching people use the kiosk. That’s one of the things we do. We bring our people out to the airports and we watch our customers use our products, so we get that inside view of what’s going on with them.

A lot on the line

I‘ll see people hesitantly reaching out to hit a button. Their hand may be shaking. It could be an elderly person. It could be a person with a lot on the line. Say it’s somebody taking their family on vacation. It’s the only vacation they can afford to go on, and they’ve got a lot of investment into that flight to get there and also to get back home. Really there’s a lot on the line for them.

A lot of people don’t know a lot about the airline industry and they don’t realize that it’s okay if they hit the wrong button. It’s really easy to start over. But, sometimes they would be literally shaking, when they reach out to hit the button. We want to make sure that they have a good comfort level. We want to make sure they have the best experience they could possibly have. And, the faster we can deliver products to them, that make that experience real for them, the better.

By offering these types of products to the customers, you give them the best of both worlds. You give them a fast pass to check in. You give them a fast pass book. But, you can also give the less-experienced customer an easy-to-understand path to do what they need as well.

Bell: One thing that we’ve found to be very beneficial with HP Quality Center is that it shows the development organization that this just isn’t a QA tool that a QA team uses. What we’ve been able to do by bringing the requirements piece into it and by bringing the defects and other parts of it together, is bring the whole team on board to using a common tool.

In the past, a lot of people have always thought of Quality Centers as a tool that the QA people use in the corner and nobody else needs to be aware of. Now, we have our business analysts, project managers, and developers, as well as the QA team and even managers on it, because each person can get a different view of different information.

From Dashboard, your managers can look at your trends and what type of overall development lifecycle is coming through. Your project managers can be very involved in pulling the number of defects and see which ones are still outstanding and what the criticality of that is. The developers can be involved via entering information in on defects when those issues have been resolved?

We’ve found that Quality Center is actually a tool that has drawn together all of the teams. They’re all using a common interface, and they all start to recognize the importance of tying all of this together, so that everyone can get a view as to what’s going on throughout the whole lifecycle.

Moses: We’ve realized the importance of automating, and we’ve realized the importance of having multiple groups using the same tool.

It’s not just a tool. There are people there too. There are processes. There are concepts you’re going to have to get in your head to get this to work, but you have to be willing to buy-in by having the people resources dedicated to building the test scripts. Then, you’re not done. You’ve got to maintain them. That’s where most people fall short and that’s where we fell short for quite some time.

Once we were able to finally dedicate the people to the maintenance of these scripts to keep them active and running, that’s where we got a win. If you look at a web site these days, it’s following one of two models. You either have a release schedule, that’s a more static site, or you have a highly dynamic site that’s always changing and always throwing out improvements.

We fit into that “Speed Wins,” when we get the product out for the customers’ trading, and improve the experience as often as possible. So, we’re a highly dynamic site. We’ll break up to 20 percent of all of our test scripts, all of our automated test scripts, every week. That’s a lot of maintenance, even though we’re using a lot of reusable code. You have to have those resources dedicated to keep that going.

Bell: One thing that we’ve been able to do with HP Quality Center is connect it with Quick Test Pro, and we do have Quality Center 10, as well as Quick Test Pro 10. We’ve been able to build our automation and store those in the Test Plan tab of Quality Center.

It’s very nice that Quality Center has it all tied into one unit. So, as we go through our processes, we’re able to go from tab to tab and we know that all of that information is interconnected. We can ultimately trace a defect back to a specific cycle or a specific test case, all the way back to our requirement. So, the tool is very helpful in keeping all of the information in one area, while still maintaining the consistent process.

This has really been beneficial for us, when we go into our test labs and build our test set. We’re able to take all of these automated pieces and combine them into test set. What this has allowed us to do is run all of our automation as one test set. We’ve been able to run those on a remote box. It’s taken our regression test time from one person for five days, down to zero people and approximately an hour and 45 minutes.

So, that’s a unique way that we’ve used Quality Center to help manage that and to reduce our testing times by over 50 percent.

I look back to metrics we pulled for 2008. We were doing fewer than 70 projects. By 2009, after we had fully integrated Quality Center, we did over 129 projects. That also included a lot of extra work, which you may have heard about us doing related to a merger.

Moses: The one thing I really like about the HP Quality Center suite especially is that your entire software development cycle can live within that tool. Whenever you’re using different tools to do different things, it becomes a little bit more difficult to get the data from one point to another. It becomes a little bit more difficult to pull reports and figure out where you can improve.

Data in one place

What you really want to do is get all your data in one place and Quality Center allows you to do that. We put our requirements in in the beginning. By having those in the system, we can then map to those with our test cases, after we build those in the testing phase.

Not only do we have the QA engineers working on it in Quality Center, we also have the business analysts working on it, whenever they’re doing the requirements. That also helps the two groups work together a bit more closely.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript. Sponsor: HP.

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Today’s sponsored podcast discussion delves into how to better harness the power of information to drive and improve business insights.

We’ll examine how the tough economy has accelerated the progression toward more data-driven business decisions. To enable speedy proactive business analysis, information management (IM) has arisen as an essential ingredient for making business intelligence (BI) for these decisions pay off.

Yet IM itself can become unwieldy, as well as difficult to automate and scale. So managing IM has become an area for careful investment. Where then should those investments be made for the highest analytic business return? How do companies better compete through the strategic and effective use of its information?

We’ll look at some use case scenarios with executives from HP to learn how effective IM improves customer outcomes, while also identifying where costs can be cut through efficiency and better business decisions.

To get to the root of IM best practices and value, please join me in welcoming our guests, Brooks Esser, Worldwide Marketing Lead for Information Management Solutions at HP; John Santaferraro, Director of Marketing and Industry Communications for BI Solutions at HP, and Vickie Farrell, Manager of Market Strategy for BI Solutions at HP. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Santaferraro: The customers that we work with tend to have very complex businesses, and because of that, very complex information requirements. It used to be that they looked primarily at their structured data as a source of insight into the business. More recently, the concern has moved well beyond business intelligence to look at a combination of unstructured data, text data, IM. There’s just a whole lot of different sources of information.

The idea that they can have some practices across the enterprise that would help them better manage information and produce real value and real outcomes for the business is extremely relevant.

If you look at the information worker or the person who has to make decisions on the front line, if you look at those kinds of people, the truth is that most of them need more than just data and analysis. In a lot of cases, they will need a document, a contract. They need all of those different kinds of data to give them different views to be able to make the right decision.

… I’d like to think of it as actually enterprise IM. It’s looking across the entire business and being able to see across the business. It’s information, all types of information as we identify structured, unstructured documents, scanned documents, video assets, media assets.

… By effectively using the information they have and further leveraging the investments that they’ve already made, there is going to be significant cost savings for the business. A lot of it comes out of just having the right insight to be able to reduce costs overall. There are even efficiencies to be had in the processing of information. It can cost a lot of money to capture data, to store it, and cleanse it.

Then it’s about the management, the effective management of all of those information assets to be able to produce real business outcomes and real value for the business. … Obviously, the companies that figure out how to streamline the handling and the management of their information are going to have major cost reductions overall.

The way to compete

Esser: This is really becoming the way that leading edge companies compete. I’ve seen a lot of research that suggests that CEOs are becoming increasingly interested in leveraging data more effectively in their decision-making processes.

It used to be fairly simple. You would simply identify your best customers, market like heck to them, and try to maximize the revenue derived from your best customers.

Now, what we’re seeing is emphasis on getting the data right and applying analytics to an entire customer base, trying to maximize revenue from a broader customer base.

We’re going to talk about a few cases today where entities got the data right, they now serve their customers better, reduced cost at the same time, and increased their profitability.

… We think of IM as having four pillars. The first is the infrastructure, obviously — the storage, the data warehousing, information integration that kind of ties the infrastructure together.

The second piece, which is very important, is governance. That includes things like data protection, master data management, compliance, and e-discovery.

The third is information processes. We start talking about paper-based information, digitizing documents, and getting them into the mix. Those first three pillars taken together really form the basis of an IM environment. They’re really the pieces that allow you to get the data right.

The fourth pillar, of course, is the analytics, the insight that business leaders can get from the analytics about the information. The two, obviously, go hand in hand. Rugged information infrastructure for your analytics isn’t any better than poor infrastructure with solid analytics. Getting both pieces of that right is very, very important.

… [And, again,] governance processes are the key to everything I talked about earlier — the pillars of a solid IM environment. Governance [is] about protecting data, quality, compliance, and the whole idea of master data management — limiting access and making sure that right people have access to input data and that data is of high-quality.

Farrell: We recently surveyed a number of data warehouse and BI users. We found that 81 percent of them either have a formal data governance process in place or they expect to invest in one in the next 12 months.

… What we’ve seen in the last couple of years is serious attention on investing in that data structure — getting the data right, as we put it. It’s establishing a high level of data quality, a level of trust in the data for users, so that they are able to make use of those tools and really glean from that data the insight and information that they need to better manage their business.

… A couple of years ago, I remember, a lot of pundits were talking about BI becoming pervasive, because tools have gotten more affordable and easier to use. Therefore anybody with a smartphone or PDA or laptop computer was going to be able to do heavy-duty analysis.

Of course, that hasn’t happened. There is more limiting the wide use of BI than the tools themselves. One of the biggest issues is the integration of the data, the quality of the data, and having a data foundation in an environment where the users can really trust it and use it to do the kind of analysis that they need to do.

… The more effectively you bring together the IT people and the business people and get them aligned, the better the acceptance is going to be. You certainly can mandate use of the system, but that’s really not a best practice. That’s not what you want to do.

By making the information easily accessible and relevant to the business users and showing them that they can trust that data, it’s going to be a more effective system, because they are going to be more likely to use it and not just be forced to use it.

Esser: Organizations all over the world are struggling with an expansion of information. In some companies, you’re seeing data doubling one year over the next. It’s creating problems for the storage environment. Managers are looking at processes like de-duplication to try to reduce the quantity of information.

The challenge for a CIO is that you’ve got to balance the cost of IT, the cost of governance and risk issues involved in information, while at the same time, providing real insight to your business unit customer.

Then, you’re getting pressure from business leaders for timely and accurate information to make decisions with. So, the challenge for a CIO is that you’ve got to balance the cost of IT, the cost of governance and risk issues involved in information, while at the same time, providing real insight to your business unit customer. It’s a tough job.

Key examples

Farrell: Well, one key example comes to mind. It’s an insurance company that we have worked with for several years. It’s a regional health insurance company faced with competition from national companies. They decided that they needed to make better use of their data to provide better services for their members, the patients as well as the providers, and also to create a more streamlined environment for themselves.

And so, to bring the IT and business users together, they developed an enterprise data warehouse that would be a common resource for all of the data. They ensured that it was accurate and they had a certain level of data quality.

They had outsourced some of the health management systems to other companies. Diabetes was outsourced to one company. Heart disease was outsourced to another company. It was expensive. By bringing it in house, they were able to save the money, but they were also able to do a better job, because they could integrate the data from one patient, and have one view of that patient.

That improved the aggregate wellness score overall for all of their patients. It enabled them to share data with the care providers, because they were confident in the quality of that data. It also saved them some administrative cost, and they recouped the investment in the first year.

… Another thing that we’re doing is working with several health organizations in states in the US. We did one project several years ago and we are now in the midst of another one. The idea here is to integrate data from many different sources. This is health data from clinics, schools, hospitals, and so on throughout the state.

Doing this gives you the opportunity to bring together and integrate in a meaningful way data from all these different sources. Once that’s been done, that can serve not only these systems, but also some of the potential systems more real-time systems that we see coming down the line, like emergency surveillance systems that would detect terrorist threat, bioterrorism threats, pandemics, and things like that.

It’s important to understand and be able to get this data integrated in a meaningful way, because more real-time applications and more mission-critical applications are coming and there is not going to be the time to do the manual integration.

Santaferraro: We find that a lot of our customers have very disconnected sets of intelligence and information. So, we look at how we can bring that whole world of information together for them and provide a connected intelligence approach. We are actually a complete provider of enterprise class industry-specific IM solutions.

… Probably the hottest topic that I have heard from customers in the last year or so has been around the development of the BI competency center. Again if you go to our BI site, you will find some additional information there about the concept of a BICC.

And the other trend that I am seeing is that a lot of companies are wanting to move from just the BI space with that kind of governance. They want to create an enterprise information competency center, so expanding beyond BI to include all of IM.

We have expertise around several business domains like customer relationship management, risk, and supply chain. We go to market with specific solutions from 13 different industries. As a complete solution provider, we provide everything from infrastructure to financing.

Obviously, HP has all of the infrastructure that a customer needs. We can package their IM solution in a single finance package that hits either CAPEX or OPEX. We’ve got software offerings. We’ve got our consulting business that comes in and helps them figure out how to do everything from the strategy that we talked about upfront and planning to the actual implementation.

We can help them break into new areas where we have practices around things like master data management or content management or e-discovery.

Esser: We have a couple of ways to get started. We can start with a business value assessment service. This is service that sets people up with a business case and tracks ROI, once they decide on a project. But, the interesting piece of that is they can choose to focus on data integration, master data management, what have you.

You look at the particular element of IM and build a project around that. This assessment service allows people to identify the element in their IM environment, their current environment, that will give them the best ROI. Or, we can offer them a master planning service which generates really comprehensive IM plan, everything from data protection and information quality to advanced analytics.

Obviously, you can get details on those services and our complete portfolio for that matter at www.hp.com/go/bi and www.hp.com/go/im, as well as at www.hp.com/go/neoview. There is some specific information about the Neoview Advantage enterprise data warehouse platform there.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: HP.

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There’s a huge drive now for improved enterprise data center performance. Nearly all enterprises are involved nowadays with some level of data-center transformation, either in the planning stages or in outright build-out.

We’re seeing many instances where numerous data centers are being consolidated into a powerful core few, as well as completely new, so-called green-field, data centers with modern design and facilities coming online. The heightened activity runs the gamut from retrofitting and designing new data centers to the building and occupying of them.

The latest definition of data center is focused on being what’s called fit-for-purpose, of using best practices and assessments of existing assets and correctly projecting future requirements to get that data center just right — productive, flexible, efficient and well-understood and managed.

Yet these are, by no means, trivial projects. They often involve a tremendous amount of planning and affect IT, facilities, and energy planners. The payoffs are potentially huge, as we’ll see, from doing data center design properly — but the risks are also quite high, if things don’t come out as planned.

This podcast examines the lifecycle of data-center design and fulfillment by exploring a successful project at Valero Energy Corp. We’re here with two executives from HP and an IT leader at Valero Energy to look at proper planning, data center design and project management.

Please join me in welcoming Cliff Moore, America’s PMO Lead for Critical Facilities Consulting at HP; John Bennett, Worldwide Director of Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP, and John Vann, Vice President of Technical Infrastructure and Operations at Valero Energy Corp. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect’s Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Bennett: If you had spoken four years ago and dared to suggest that energy, power, cooling, facilities, and buildings were going to be a dominant topic with CIOs, you would have been laughed at. Yet, that’s definitely the case today, and it goes back to the point about IT being modern and efficient.

Data-center transformation, as we’ve spoken about before, really is about not only significantly reducing cost to an organization — not only helping them shift their spending away from management and maintenance and into business projects and priorities — but also helping them address the rising cost of energy, the rising consumption of energy and the mandate to be green or sustainable.

Data-center transformation tries to take a step back, assess the data center strategy and the infrastructure strategy that’s appropriate for a business, and then figure how to get from here to there. How do you go from where you are today to where you need to be?

You have organizations that discover that the data centers they have aren’t capable of meeting their future needs. … All of a sudden, you discover that you’re bursting at the themes. … [You] have to support business growth by addressing both infrastructure strategies, but probably also by addressing facilities. That’s where facilities really come into the equation and have become a top-of-mind issue for CIOs and IT executives around the world.

You’ll need a strong business case, because you’re going to have to justify it financially. You’re going to have to justify it as an opportunity cost. You’re going to have to justify in terms of the returns on investment (ROIs) expected in the business, if they make choices about how to manage and source funds as well.

Growth modeling

One of the things that’s different today than even just 10 years ago is that the power and networking infrastructure available around the world is so phenomenal, there is no need to locate data centers close to corporate headquarters.

You may choose to do it, but you now have the option to locate data centers in places like Iceland, because you might be attracted to the natural heating of their environment. It’s a good time [for data center transformation] from the viewpoint of land being cheap, but it might be a good time in terms of business capital.

Moore: The majority of the existing data centers out there today were built 10 to 15 years ago, when power requirements and densities were a lot lower.

People are simply running out of power in their data centers. The facilities today that were built 5, 10, or 15 years ago, just do not support the levels of density in power and cooling that clients are asking for going to the future, specifically for blades and higher levels of virtualization.

Some data centers we see out there use the equivalent of half of a nuclear power plant to run. It’s very expensive.

It’s also estimated that, at today’s energy cost, the cost of running a server from an energy perspective is going to exceed the cost of actually buying the server. We’re also finding that many customers have done no growth modeling whatsoever regarding their space, power, and cooling requirements for the next 5, 10, or 15 years — and that’s critical.

When a customer is looking to spend $20 million, $50 million, or sometimes well over a $100 million, on a new facility, you’ve got to make sure that it fits within the strategic plan for the business. That’s exactly what boards of directors are looking for, before they will commit to spending that kind of money.

We’ve got to find out first off what they need — what space, power, and cooling requirements. Then, based on the criticality of their systems and applications, we quickly determine what level of availability is required, as well.

This determines the Uptime Institute Tier Level for the facility. Then, we go about helping the client strategize on exactly what kinds of facilities will meet those needs, while also meeting the needs of the business that come down from the board. … We help them collaboratively develop that strategy in the next 10 to 15 years for the data center future.

One of the things we do, as part of the strategic plan, is help the client determine the best locations for their data centers based on the efficiency in gathering free cooling, for instance, from the environment.

One of the things that the Valero is accomplishing is the lower energy costs, as a result of building their own data centers with a strategic view.

Vann: Valero is a Fortune 500 company in San Antonio, Texas and we’re the largest independent refiner in the North America. We produce fuel and other products from 15 refineries and we have 10 ethanol plants.

We market products in 44 states with large distribution network. We’re also into alternative fuel with renewables and one of the largest ethanol producers. We have a wind farm up in northern Texas, around Amarillo, that generates enough power to fuel our McKee refinery.

So what drove us to build? We started looking at building in 2005. Valero grew through acquisitions. Our data center, as Cliff and John have mentioned, was no different than others. We began to run into power,space, and cooling issues.

Even though we were doing a lot of virtualization, we still couldn’t keep up with the growth. We looked at remodeling and also expanding, but the disruption and risk to the business was just too great. So, we decided it was best to begin to look for another location.

Our existing data center is on headquarters’ campus which is not the best place for the data center, because it’s inside one of our office complexes. Therefore, we have water and other potentially disruptive issues close to the data center — and it was just concerning considering where the data center is located.

[The existing facility] is about seven years old and had been remodeled once. You have to realize Valero was in a growth mode and acquiring refineries. We now have 15 refineries. We were consolidating quite a bit of equipment and applications back into San Antonio, and we just outgrew it.

We were having hard time keeping it redundant and keeping it cool. It was built with one foot of raised floor and, with all the mechanical inside the data center, we lost square footage.

We began to look for alternative places. We also were really fortunate in the timing of our data center review. HP was just beginning their build of the six big facilities that they ended up building or remodeling, and so we were able to get good HP internal expertise to help us as we were beginning our decision of design and building our data center.

The problem with collocation back in those days of 2006, 2007, and 2008, was that there was a premium for space.

So, we really were fortunate to have experts give us some advice and counsel. We did look at collocation. We also looked at other buildings, and we even looked at building another data center on our campus.

As we did our economics, it was just better for us to be able to build our own facility. We were able to find land northwest of San Antonio, where several data centers have been built. We began our own process of design and build for 20,000 square feet of raised floor and began our consolidation process.

Power and cooling are just becoming an enormous problem and most of this because virtualization blades and other technologies that you put in a data center just run a little hotter and they take up the extra power. It’s pretty complex to be able to balance your data center with cooling and power, also UPS, generators, and things like that. It just becomes really complex. So, building a new data center really put us in the forefront.

We had a joint team of HP and the Valero Program Management Office. It went really well the way that was managed. We had design teams. We had people from networking architecture, networking strategy and server and storage, from both HP and Valero, and that went really well. Our construction went well. Fortunately, we didn’t have any bad weather or anything to slow us down; we were right on time and on budget.

Probably the most complex was the migration, and we had special migration plans. We got help from the migration team at HP. That was successful, but it took a lot of extra work.

Probably we’d put more project managers on managing the project, rather than using technical people to manage the project. Technical folks are really good at putting the technology in place, but they really struggle at putting good solid plans in place. But overall, I’d just say that migration is probably the most complex.

Bennett: Modernizing your infrastructure brings energy benefits in its own right, and it enhances the benefits of your virtualization and consolidation activities.

We certainly recommend that people take a look at doing these things. If you do some of these things, while you’re doing the data center design and build, it can actually make your migration experience easier. You can host your new systems in the new data center and be moving software and processes, as opposed to having to stage and move servers and storage. It’s a great opportunity.

It’s a great chance to start off with a clean networking architecture, which also helps both with continuity and availability of services, as well as cost.

It can be a big step forward in terms of standardizing your IT environment, which is recommended by many industry analysts now in terms of preparing for automation or to reduce management and maintenance cost. You can go further and bring in application modernization and rationalization to take a hard look at your apps portfolio. So, you can really get these combined benefits and advantages that come from doing this.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: HP.

We’ll look at a use case — at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY — for HP Data Protector Notebook Extension (DPNE) software and examine how backup and recovery software has evolved to become more transparent, reliable, and fundamentally user-driven.

Using that continuous back-up principle, the latest notebook and PC backup software captures every saved version of a file, efficiently transfers it all in batches to a central storage location, and then makes it easily and safely accessible for recovery by user from anywhere. That’s inside or outside of the corporate firewall.

We’ll look at how DPNE slashes IT recovery chores, allows for managed policies and governance to reduce data risks systemically, while also downsizing backups, the use of bandwidth, and storage.

The economies are compelling. The cost of data lost can be more than $400,000 annually for an average-sized business with 5,000 users. Getting a handle on recovery cost, therefore, helps reduce the total cost of operating and supporting mobile PCs, both in terms of operations and in the cost of lost or poorly recovered assets.

To help us better understand the state of the art remote in mobile PC data protection, we’re joined by an HP executive and a user of HP DPNE software, Shari Cravens, Product Marketing Manager for HP Data Protection, and a user of DPNE, John Ferguson, Network Systems Specialist at Roswell Park Cancer Institute in Buffalo, NY. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Cravens: We started hearing from our customers a couple of years ago that PC backup was becoming increasingly important in their lives. Part of that’s because the workforce is increasingly mobile and flexibility for the workforce is at an all-time high. In fact, we found that 25 percent of staff in some industries operates remotely and that number is growing pretty rapidly.

In fact, in 2008, shipments of laptops overtook desktops for the very first time. What that really means for the end user or for IT staff is that vast amounts of data now live outside the corporate network. We found that the average PC holds about 55,000 files. Of those 55,000, about 4,000 are unique to that user on that PC. And, those files are largely unprotected.

The economics of PC backup are really changing. We’re finding that the average data loss incident costs about $2,900, and that’s for both IT staff time and lost end user productivity. Take that $2,900 figure and extrapolate that for an average company of about 5,000 PCs. Then, look at hard drive failures alone. There will be about 150 incidents of hard drive failure for that company every year.

If you look at the cost to IT staff to recover that data and the loss in employee productivity, the annual cost to that organization will be over $440,000 a year.

If you look at the cost to IT staff to recover that data and the loss in employee productivity, the annual cost to that organization will be over $440,000 a year. If that data can’t be recovered, then the user has to reconstruct it, and that means additional productivity loss for that employee. We also have legal compliance issues to consider now. So if that data is lost, that’s an increased risk to the organization.

We all have very sensitive files on our laptops, whether it’s competitive information or your personal annual review. One of the things that’s been a suggestion in the past was, “Well, we’ll just save it to the corporate network.” The challenge with that is that people are really concerned about saving these very sensitive files to the corporate network.

What we really need is a solution that’s going to encrypt those files, both in transit and at rest, so that people can feel secure that their data is protected.

Historical evolution

The concept behind HP Data Protector Notebook Extension is that we’re trying to minimize the risk of that PC data loss, but we’re also trying to minimize the burden to IT staff. The solution is to extend some of the robust backup policies from the enterprise to the client environment.

We’re protecting data no matter where the user is — the home, the coffee shop, the airport.

DPNE does three things. One, it’s always protecting data, and it’s transparent to the user. It’s happening continuously, not on a fixed schedule, so there is no backup window that’s popping up.

We’re protecting data no matter where the user is — the home, the coffee shop, the airport. Whether they are online or offline, their data is being protected, and it’s happening immediately. The instant that files are created or changed, data is being protected.

Continuous file protection is number one. Backup policies are centralized and automated by the IT staff. That means that data is always protected, and the IT staff can configure those policies to support their organization’s particular data protection goals.

Number two, no matter where they are, users can easily recover their own data. This is a really important point. Getting back to the concept of minimizing the burden to IT staff, DPNE has a simple, single-click menu. Users can recover multiple versions of a file without ever involving IT. They don’t ever have to pick up the phone and call the Help Desk. That helps keep IT costs low.

Then, also by optimizing performance, we’re eliminating that desire to opt out of your scheduled backup. The process is transparent to the user. It doesn’t impact their day, because DPNE saves and transmits only the changed data. So, the impact to performance is really minimized.

DPNE has a local repository on each client and we established that to store active files. Whether you’re connected to the network or not, data is captured and backed up locally to this local repository. This is important for accidental deletions or changes or even managing multiple versions of a file. You’re able to go to the menu, click, and restore a file from a previous version at any point in time, without ever having to call IT.

Each client is then assigned to a network repository or data vault inside the network. That holds the backup files that are transferred from the client, and that data vault uses essentially any Windows file share.

The third element is a policy server that allows IT staff to administer the overall system management from just a single web interface, and the centralized administration allows them to do file protection policies and set encryption policies, data vault policies, to their particular specifications.

Finding the cure

Ferguson: Roswell Park Cancer Institute is the oldest cancer research center in the United States. We’re focused on understanding, preventing, and eventually finding the cure for cancer. We’re located in downtown Buffalo, NY. We have research, scientific, and educational facilities, and we also have a 125-bed hospital here.

Our researchers and scientists are frequently published in major studies, reported globally, for various types of cancers, and with related research studies. A number of breakthroughs in cancer prevention and treatment have been developed here. For example, the PSA test, which is used for detecting prostate cancer, was invented here.

The real challenge is that data is moving around. When you are dealing with researchers and scientists, they work at different schedules than the rest of us. When they are working, they are focused and that might be here, off campus, at home, whatever.

They’ve got their notebook PCs, their data is with them and they’re running around and doing their work and finding their answers. With that data moving around and not always being on the network, the potential for the data loss of something that could be the cure for cancer is something that we take very seriously and very important to deal with

One of the big things was transparency to the user and being simple to use if they do need to use it. We were already in the process of making a decision to replace our existing overall backup solution with HP’s Data Protector. So, it was just a natural thing to look at DPNE and it really fits the need terrifically.

There’s total transparency to the user. Users don’t even have to do anything. They’re just going along, doing their work, and everything is going on in the background. And, if they need to use it, it’s very intuitive and simple to use.

When people are working on something, they don’t think to “save it,” until they’re actually done with it. And, DPNE provides us that versioning saving. You can get old versions of documents. You can keep track of them. That’s the type of thing that’s not really done, but it’s really important, and they don’t want to lose it.

In terms of the overall Data Protector implementation, we’re probably about 40 percent complete. The DPNE implementation will immediately follow that.

A good test run

We anticipate initially just getting our IT staff using the application and giving it a good test run. Then we’ll focus on key individuals throughout the organization, researchers, the scientists, the CEO, CIO, the people with all the nice initials after their name, and get them taken care of. We’ll get a full roll-out after that.

When it comes to federal regulations, it always is a rising tide, but we’ve got a good solution that we are now implementing and I think it puts us ahead of the curve.

Cravens: Information is continuing to explode and that’s not going to stop. In addition to that, the workforce is only going to get more mobile. This problem definitely isn’t going to go away, and we need solutions that can address the flexibility and mobility of the workforce and be able to manage, as John mentioned, the increase in regulations.

HP Data Protector is very simple to implement. It snaps into your existing infrastructure. You don’t need any specialized hardware. All you need is a Windows machine for the policy server and some disk space for the data vault. You can download a 60-day trial version from hp.com. It’s a full-featured version, and you can work with that.

If you have a highly complex multi-site organization, then you might want to employ the services of HP’s Backup and Recovery Fast Track Services for Data Protector. They can help get a more complex solution up and running quickly and reduce the impact on your IT staff just that much sooner.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download the transcript. Sponsor: HP.

• Harnessing ‘Virtualization Sprawl’ Requires Managing Your Ecosystem of Technologies

• HP Roadmap Dramatically Reduces Energy Consumption Across Data Centers

• Consolidation, Modernization, and Virtualization: A Triple-Play for Long-Term Enterprise IT Cost Reduction

Listen

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion comes in conjunction with The Open Group’s Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference held earlier this month in Seattle.

We assembled a panel to examine service-oriented architecture (SOA) and cloud computing — the relationships, the inter-reliance and the realities. Three years ago, the IT transformation poster child was SOA, and now we’re well into the hype curve around cloud computing, but has one actually given way to the other? Are they linear in their relationship, or perhaps mutually dependent in some ways, and to what degree?

We’ll explore now whether SOA has found new value and relevance as a foundation and perhaps catalyst for cloud computing, especially for so-called private clouds. And, we’ll see how the emergence of SOA and cloud may be happening in different places inside of enterprises. Shouldn’t one hand get to quickly know what the other is up to and perhaps even work together?

Here with us now, however, to plumb the depths of how SOA and cloud computing do or don’t come together, are Dr. Chris Harding, director of the SOA Work Group at The Open Group; Stephen G. Bennett, Senior Enterprise Architect at Oracle, and Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Search for Salesforce.com. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Harding: Five years ago, when we started getting into SOA, there was a huge amount of excitement and a great deal of buzz about it. Now, we can see that the hype cycle has run its course, but we’re still seeing a great deal of technical interest in SOA and we’re also seeing that companies are using it and are increasing their use of it. So, there is a steady uptake in the use of SOA, although the excitement about it has died down.

It’s very interesting that service orientation is very much a business concept, and SOA has been about the application of that business concept to the technology. Cloud computing, on the other hand, is very much a technical concept. It’s about what you can do with technology over the Internet.

It is a technical concept, but it has had really a big impact on the business structure. So you can see them as complementary. SOA has been the application of business principles into the technology. Cloud is a technical concept, which has had a huge impact on the business. So, yes, there probably are different parts of the organizations looking at cloud and looking at SOA, but there is a big dynamic that says they should be working together on both of them.

Coffee: I’ve been covering SOA for a long time. I’d say the people who adopted SOA in the previous decade got considerable upside, but those who did not didn’t really suffer any penalty for not doing so.

In the situation we’re in now, where the economics of cloud computing are becoming quite compelling, the downside of not having a SOA is becoming quite apparent. If you don’t have a service environment, then your ability to extend your current assets and integrate them with cloud services is going to be somewhat hampered.

So, people are realizing now that the wait-and-see option is more perilous than it used to be. This is accelerating the actual adoption of what we would call SOA, except that’s no longer the label du jour.

Beyond integration

It seems to me that SOA very quickly became a label of products that vendors wanted to sell. So, you saw a lot of things like enterprise service bus (ESB) products and so on.

It became dangerously easy to think that you were doing SOA, if you were buying the tools and failing to appreciate how much of a cultural and management achievement it was to get people to think of themselves not as owners of and the gatekeepers to an IT asset, but instead being publishers of and supporters of a service to other parts of the business.

It’s absolutely critical to understand that you can view SOA as simply a way of integrating the stuff you have, or you can move to the next level and start to think of it as the way you do your business. The way your business units interact with and support each other with the technology is just the enabler for that.

The same is true of the cloud. It’s possible to take the existing IT model of isolated applications, each with their own data stores, and replicate that model in the cloud with elastic scalability of capacity. That would be the level of the cloud industry that’s typically called infrastructure as a service (IaaS).

Or, it’s possible to use the cloud as a much more interesting and fluid medium for interaction among much more granular and business-oriented services at the level that’s traditionally been called in the industry either platform as a service (PaaS) or software as a service (SaaS). It depends on the level at which you choose to consume other people’s application work, instead of doing new application development yourself.

It’s possible to do SOA without the cloud. It’s possible to do better SOA with it. It is also possible to do an isolated silo-oriented architecture locally and also to do that in a cloud environment. Neither one necessarily implies or impels the other.

Bennett: The majority of large enterprises today are doing SOA in one fashion or another at different levels of maturity, whether that’s from the quite immature approach of seeing it as a pure integration play all the way up to seeing it more as a business agility kind of play.

So, it’s becoming a norm and, therefore, we don’t need to keep hyping it or pushing it. We need to use the characteristics it offers with other supporting technology strategies such as cloud

I actually see recession as an opportunity within IT, because it gives you opportunity to reset thinking and reset IT’s approach to actually delivering IT to the business.

It’s a combination of technologies that are finally ready for prime time, and an ecosystem that’s ready to support those technologies well.

Coffee: The economics of being able to have elastically scalable capacity to be able to handle peak loads without needing to own the peak capacity and wind up with very low utilization rates on your capacity are becoming so compelling that people are asking how they’re going to take advantage of this opportunity of this cloud environment.

It’s a combination of technologies that are finally ready for prime time, and an ecosystem that’s ready to support those technologies well — providers of services and providers of expert assistance in using those services.

That’s a very important enabling ware, when your major system integration firms begin fully to understand how they can incorporate cloud services into the portfolio of technologies that they make available to their customers. When you put that all together, the downside of not moving to an SOA becomes an embarrassing lack of ability to take advantages of these incredible economies.

… The combination of SOA, which makes your various business units able to cooperate more effectively, with cloud environments which allow you to handle very “bursty” workloads and conduct very cost-effective pilot projects and scale the ones that work very rapidly, increase the ROI of IT spending.

The IT budget, as a line item, is not conspicuously bigger. In fact, it may actually shrink, because the IT department now is a composer and integrator of stuff that may now be getting done with the operating budget by personnel, who are on the payroll as members of a business unit, instead of members of an IT organization.

Business capability maps

Bennett: What people are talking about is the opportunity to redirect costs to area such as business architecture, and business architecture is part of enterprise architecture (EA). That’s not purely IT focused, but the wider concern — investing stuff like business capability maps to understand exactly where I should utilize SOA and cloud with my organization — is going to be key.

This will, in turn, enable the consuming enterprises to concentrate on the things that they are particularly good at.

Harding: That certainly must be one of the factors that will enable cloud computing to make enterprises more efficient — the elasticity and the take-up effect. It also has a major effect on the risk that an enterprise needs to take on. But, there is a bigger factor, which is meant to drive down cost, and that is competition.

If you take service orientation and cloud in combination, you’re seeing the ability of people to buy services from different suppliers, for those suppliers to compete, and for those suppliers to concentrate on the services that they are particularly good at. This will, in turn, enable the consuming enterprises to concentrate on the things that they are particularly good at.

So, you don’t need to dissipate your efforts on running an inefficient IT department, which is not your core business. You can outsource that, get a specialist to do it much better, and concentrate on what you’re good at. That is the real dynamic that will improve things economically.

Now, from an Open Group perspective, there is a danger that you may become locked into a particular supplier. Part of our role in promoting open systems is to push for the standards to be in place so that that doesn’t happen. Provided we can prevent that locking, it’s altogether a very healthy situation.

Coffee: The granularity of this marketplace is quite surprising to many people who haven’t looked at it closely. We see already people building applications, in which they have shopped the marketplace and found a cloud storage proposition from one provider, a cloud application development platform from another, social networking algorithms and facilities from yet a third provider and have built some really interesting strategic business solutions. It’s quite startling to many people to realize what a supermarket of services has already come into being.

Bennett: The combination of cloud and SOA obviously brings together kind of speed and modularity. Those basic principles are going to allow us to take evolutionary technologies and approaches and probably revolutionize the way that IT actually interacts with the business.

So, in terms of IT being siloed — “please develop and look after this application” — it’s going to be more a move toward collaboration of how we can actually deliver business solutions to the ever-changing business dynamics.

Coffee: Finally, we have an environment in which connectivity and real-time linkage and integration of data and function instead of being costly, brittle, and time-consuming are now nearly free, very resilient, and can be done almost more quickly than they can be described.

This means that people are going to be doing more challenging work and working more closely with business units instead of having their time consumed by arduous, necessary, but relatively low-value tests of infrastructure maintenance.

So the ROI will rise. The relevance to the business of IT will increase. The sophistication of the skills of the person who does IT for a living will be greater 10 years from now than it was 10 years ago or even today, but we’ll all be pretty happy with the results.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: The Open Group.

You may also be interested in:

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• The Open Group’s Cloud Work Advances Understanding of Cloud-Use Benefits for Enterprises

Listen

For more information on virtualization and how it provides a foundation for Private Cloud, plan to attend the HP Cloud Virtual Conference taking place in March. To register for this event, go to:

Asia, Pacific, Japan – March 2

Europe Middle East and Africa – March 3

Americas – March 4

Improved data center productivity now appears to be a natural progression from converged infrastructure. Many enterprise data centers have embraced a shared service management model to some degree, and now converged infrastructure applies the shared service model more broadly to leverage modular system design and open standards, as well as to advance proven architectural frameworks.

The result is a realignment of traditional technology silos into adaptive pools that can be shared by any application, as well as optimized and managed as ongoing services. Under this model, resources are dynamically provisioned efficiently and automatically, gaining more business results productivity. This also helps rebalance IT spending away from a majority of spend on operations and more toward investments, innovations, and business improvements.

This latest BriefingsDirect discussion explores the benefits of a converged infrastructure approach, and now how to better understand attaining a transformed data center environment. We’ll see how converged infrastructure provides a stepping stone to private cloud initiatives. But, as with any convergence, there are a lot of moving parts, including people, skills, processes, services, outsourcing options, and partner ecosystems.

We’re here with two executives from Hewlett-Packard (HP) to delve deeply into converged infrastructure and to learn more about how to get started and deal with some of the complexity, as well as to know what to expect as payoff. Please welcome Doug Oathout, Vice President, Converged Infrastructure at HP Storage, Servers, and Networking, and John Bennett, Worldwide Director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Bennett: I often think of many CIOs as being at the heart of a vise, where, on one side, they have the business pressures. … They need to support growth. They need to do a faster job of creating acquisitions. They need to spend more on business projects and innovation. They need to exploit technology for business advantage. They need to reduce costs.

On the other side of the vise are the constraints that they have in the environment that get in the way of them successfully addressing the business needs — legacy infrastructure and applications and antiquated methods of managing the infrastructure that make it difficult to be responsive to change, or people with the skills that won’t serve modern technology’s needs or environments.

Data-center transformation (DCT) helps enterprises implement a data center and infrastructure strategy that’s aligned to their goals and objectives. The key here is that it’s customer-driven, and it has to be built around the plans and directions of the targeted organization. This is clearly not a one-size-fits-all type of environment.

For many organizations, those strategies for infrastructure can include traditional shared infrastructure solutions or servers using virtualization and automation with shared storage environments. Increasingly, we’ve seen a natural evolution into a tighter integration of the capabilities and assets of the data center in the fabric infrastructure.

HP’s Converged Infrastructure represents a pretty significant step forward in terms of benefits and capabilities for customers looking at having infrastructure strategy aligned to their future needs. The neat thing is that converged infrastructure can be the foundation for private cloud architectures.

Oathout: About two-thirds, if not 70 percent, of the IT operations budget is spent on maintaining IT and the IT workload within the data center.

When you have a recession, like we just experienced, what happens is that 30 percent spent on innovation or new workload placement gets cut immediately to help manage the budget within an organization. Therefore, in the last 18 months, very little innovation and few new projects were taken on by IT to support new business growth.

Now we have customers who are starting to spend again and who are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They want their IT environment to be more flexible in the future. So, they’re looking at their server and storage upgrades, and how they can implement converged infrastructure, so that the new infrastructure is more flexible and can adapt more to the requirements of the business.

As you’re going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment. You can also use better and more efficient processes — virtualization, automation, and management. When you put those pools of resources in place, you put them in a virtual environment so they can be shared among applications or can be transferred among applications when needed.

You are in the process now of creating pools of resources, versus dedicated silo resources, like you had prior to the recession, which couldn’t be reused for some of the application, and therefore you couldn’t support business growth.

The opportunity now is to break down those silos, give our customers the ability to share resources in the same footprint they have today, and actually become more efficient, so that when business changes or business needs change, they can adapt to the requirements of the business.

In a converged infrastructure environment, you really don’t want to care about the infrastructure you are putting it on. What you want to care about is that it’s resilient, it’s optimized, and it’s modular, so it can grow and shrink with the application’s demand.

Servers and storage lead the way

Let me give you an example. A server consolidation using virtualization and new server equipment will generally double or triple your capacity within your data center for the same footprint, just by getting the utilization of the servers up, better performance within the servers, and better capabilities within virtual environments. You can basically double or even triple the size of your capacity within your data center.

As you’re going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment.

The same thing holds true for storage. Storage disk drives become twice as dense over a two- or three-year period. The performance of the drives gets better. So, for the same footprint in your data center you can actually fit twice as much storage.

… What you really have is a process change that’s required between the IT application managers, the test and development people, and a team that actually runs the infrastructure. They need to talk more about standardization. They need to talk about how their IT comes together.

That’s where the Data Center Transformation Workshop that John Bennett’s team does helps. It gives you an architecture for future deployments, so that you have a converged infrastructure. You have pools of resources to put new applications down or revamp older applications onto a newer architecture, so it becomes more flexible.

You have to break down that silo or break down that fence between application deployments and what line of businesses are telling the application deployers and the people who run the infrastructure. Customers really do see that as a deployment barrier, but they’re working through it, because there are significant benefits on the other side, just due to the fact that you increase agility, lower cost, and you have more money and more people to go do the innovation to support the workloads of future businesses.

Bennett: Good organizations are always rethinking IT. What are the organization’s strategy, goals, and objectives? What is it going to take to realize those objectives? What capabilities do we need from IT in order to make those real? And then, how do we make them happen?

This is where the partnership between the technology team and the business team comes into play. The technology team will have more insights into how it can be exploited, and the key thing for the business is to make sure they specify their needs and not specify the answer.

… There’s economic return to the organization from being able to roll out a new business service more quickly. There’s an economic return to the business from being able to provision more resources when they are needed based on demand, so that demand doesn’t disappear. There’s a competitive business benefit, which is financial in nature, in being able to respond to competitive threats more quickly.

And a lot of the benefits of this are in the nature of direct cost savings — the consolidation, modernization, and virtualization that Doug spoke to — the savings from energy related projects and investments with Data Center Smart Grid, for example. All are easily quantifiable.

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For more information on HP’s Virtual Services, please go to: www.hp.com/go/virtualization and www.hp.com/go/services

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Oathout: A cloud-computing environment is really an application-rich environment that allows you to bring more users on quickly and expand your capabilities and shrink your capabilities as you need them.

Converged infrastructure can be for public cloud, private cloud, or for a web workload or an high-performance computing (HPC) workload or an SAP workload. It doesn’t really matter. A converged infrastructure is the optimal deployment of IT to support any kind of application, because it’s modular in nature.

It has the flexibility to have more storage, more memory, less CPUs or more CPUs, less storage, or less memory, but it’s all modular, so you can put the pieces together as you need them. So, it is a base support for either a cloud environment or a traditional IT environment. It really doesn’t matter. It’s designed to support both.

A private cloud is the IT department saying, “I’m now going to create a service catalog for my lines of business to develop upfront.” You’re getting software as a service (SaaS) now sitting on top of either a converged infrastructure or legacy infrastructure. A converged infrastructure is a lot easy to put SaaS on. But, you make that service catalog available to line of businesses, so they can turn on applications as they need them, very quickly.

Optimizing over time

Then, you can put more users on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, an online application, or a Web 2.0 application. IT is there as a support service now, setting that up, taking it down, and optimizing it over time, depending on the business needs.

So, private cloud is kind of that SaaS that sits on either a converged infrastructure or a legacy infrastructure or uniquely designed infrastructures that you get from some of the public cloud providers. Converged infrastructure is the optimal way to develop and deploy that in a standard data-center environment, and it’s in support of a private cloud.

When you start bringing a storage and server and networking platforms together through a flexible fabric, the economies of scale of a shared resources and open systems is going to drive down the cost of acquiring IT. Then, with the software and the services capabilities that companies bring to market, they’re going to bring the efficiencies along with them.

So, it is inevitable, starting with the simplest of workloads, moving to some of the hardest of workloads, that you are going to have a converged infrastructure. You are going to have application as a service, whether it’s internal or external from a cloud provider, just because the economies of scale are there, and the ability to deploy the stuff is so simple once you get it set up that the efficiencies are also there besides the economies of purchase.

For example, a customer, the Dallas Cowboys, built a new football stadium in the Dallas area. It’s a $1.4 billion investment. In the bottom of the thing is their data center. They run 30 different businesses out of the data center in the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

They have built it on a virtual environment. They have BladeSystems. They have the FlexFabric built into the environment. They went from over 500 servers down to 16 blades, with virtual machines running on them for the point of sale environment within the stadium. It drove a smaller footprint, but also the dynamics in the server and storage environment, so they can bring on new applications for the 30 businesses very quickly.

They changed their infrastructure to support their environment. … They bring applications online and very reactive to the lines of businesses they are supporting. That’s what a converged infrastructure really delivers, besides the lower economic cost that John and I have talked about. It’s that efficiency to bring new opportunities to the lines of businesses, accelerate business growth, or increase customer satisfaction.

There are two ways to get started. They can contact one of HP’s business partners. Our business partners are enabled to do our Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model. Or, you can come to HP.com/go/ci, and it will take you to the landing page for a converged infrastructure.

For more information on virtualization and how it provides a foundation for Private Cloud, plan to attend the HP Cloud Virtual Conference taking place in March. To register for this event, go to:

Asia, Pacific, Japan – March 2

Europe Middle East and Africa – March 3

Americas – March 4

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Listen

In this podcast Vid Byanna, executive director of Accenture’s internal IT infrastructure, talks about his company’s and collaborative computing, and cloud computing initiatives.

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Gain more insights into “Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line” via a series of regional HP virtual conferences:

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IT budget planners are using the strident economic environment to force a harder look at alternatives to inflexible and hard-to-manage legacy systems, especially as enterprises seek to cut their total and long-term IT operations spending.

The rationale around reducing total costs is also forcing a recognition of the intrinsic difference between core applications and so-called context — context being applications that are there for commodity productivity reasons, not for core innovation, customization or differentiation.

With a commodity productivity application, the most effective delivery is on the lowest-cost platform or from a provider. The problem is that 20 or 30 years ago, people put everything on mainframes. They wrote it all in code.

The challenge now is how to free up the applications that are not offering any differentiation — and do not need to be on a mainframe — and which could be running on a much more lower cost infrastructure, or come from a completely different means of delivery, such as software as a service (SaaS).

There are demonstrably much less expensive ways of delivering such plain vanilla applications and services, and significant financial rewards for separating the core from the context in legacy enterprise implementations.

This discussion is the third and final in a series that examines “Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line.” The series coincides with a trio of Hewlett-Packard (HP) virtual conferences on the same subject.

Access the regional Asia Pacific conference, the EMEA conference, or the Americas event.

Helping to examine how alternatives to mainframe computing can work, we’re joined by John Pickett, worldwide mainframe modernization program manager at HP; Les Wilson, America’s mainframe modernization director at HP, and Paul Evans, worldwide marketing lead on applications transformation at HP. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect’s Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: We have seen organizations doing a lot with their infrastructure, consolidating it, virtualizing it, all the right things. At the same time, a lot of CIOs or IT directors know that the legacy applications environment has been somewhat ignored.

Now, with the pressure on cost, people are saying, “We’ve got to do something, but what can come out of that and what is coming out of that?” People are looking at this and saying, “We need to accomplish two things. We need a longer term strategy. We need an operational plan that fits into that, supported by our annual budget.”

Foremost is this desire to get away from this ridiculous backlog of application changes, to get more agility into the system, and to get these core applications, which are the ones that provide the differentiation and the innovation for organizations, able to communicate with a far more mobile workforce.

What people have to look at is where we’re going strategically with our technology and our business alignment. At the same time, how can we have a short-term plan that starts delivering on some of the real benefits that people can get out there?

… These things have got to pay for themselves. An analyst recently looked me in the face and said, “People want to get off the mainframe. They understand now that the costs associated with it are just not supportable and are not necessary.”

One of the sessions from our virtual conference features Geoffrey Moore, where he talks about this whole difference between core applications and context — context being applications that are there for productivity reasons, not for innovation or differentiation.

Pickett: It’s not really just about the overall cost, but it’s also about agility, and being able to leverage the existing skills as well.

One of the case studies that I like is from the National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (NACF). It’s a mouthful, but take a look at the number of banks that the NACF has. It has 5,500 branches and regional offices, so essentially it’s one of the largest banks in Korea.

One of the items that they were struggling with was how to overcome some of the technology and performance limitations of the platform that they had. Certainly, in the banking environment, high availability and making sure that the applications and the services are running were absolutely key.

At the same time, they also knew that the path to the future was going to be through the IT systems that they had and they were managing. What they ended up doing was modernizing their overall environment, essentially moving their core banking structure from their current mainframe environment to a system running HP-UX. It included the customer and account information. They were able to integrate that with the sales and support piece, so they had more of a 360 degree view of the customer.

We talk about reducing costs. In this particular example, they were able to save $40 million on an annual basis. That’s nice, and certainly saving that much money is significant, but, at the same time, they were able to improve their system response time two- to three-fold. So, it was a better response for the users.

But, from a business perspective, they were able to reduce their time to market. For developing a new product or service, that they were able to decrease that time from one month to five days.

Makes you more agile

If you are a bank and now you can produce a service much faster than your competition, that certainly makes it a lot easier and makes you a lot more agile. So, the agility is not just for the data center, it’s for the business as well.

To take this story just a little bit further, they saw that in addition to the savings I just mentioned, they were able to triple the capacity of the systems in their environment. So, it’s not only running faster and being able to have more capacity so you are set for the future, but you are also able to roll out business services a whole lot quicker than you were previously.

… Another example of what we were just talking about is that, if we shift to Europe, Middle East, and Africa region, there is very large insurance company in Spain. It ended up modernizing 14,000 MIPS. Even though the applications had been developed over a number of years and decades, they were able to make the transition in a relatively short length of time. In a three- to six-month time frame they were able to move that forward.

With that, they saw a 2x increase in their batch performance. It’s recognized as one of the largest batch re-hosts that are out there. It’s just not an HP thing. They worked with Oracle on that as well to be able to drive Oracle 11g within the environment.

Wilson: … In the virtual conferences, there are also two particular customer case studies worth mentioning. We’re seeing a tremendous amount of interest from some of the largest banks in the United States, insurance companies, and benefits management organizations, in particular.

In terms of customer situations, we’ve always had a very active business working with organizations in manufacturing, retail, and communications. One thing that I’ve perceived in the last year specifically — it will come as no surprise to you — is that financial institutions, and some of the largest ones in the world, are now approaching HP with questions about the commitment they have to their mainframe environments.

We’re seeing a tremendous amount of interest from some of the largest banks in the United States, insurance companies, and benefits management organizations, in particular.

Second, maybe benefiting from some of the stimulus funds, a large number of government departments are approaching us as well. We’ve been very excited by customer interest in financial services and public sector.

The first case study is a project we recently completed at a wood and paper products company, a worldwide concern. In this particular instance we worked with their Americas division on a re-hosting project of applications that are written in the Software AG environment. I hope that many of the listeners will be familiar with the database ADABAS and the language, Natural. These applications were written some years ago, using those Software AG tools.

Demand was lowered

The user company had divested one of the major divisions within the company, and that meant that the demand for mainframe services was dramatically lowered. So, they chose to take the residual applications, the Software AG applications, representing about 300-350 MIPS, and migrate those in their current state, away from the mainframe, to an HP platform.

Many folks listening to this will understand that the Software AG environment can either be transformed and rewritten to run, say, in an Oracle or a Java environment, or we can maintain the customer’s investment in the applications and simply migrate the ADABAS and Natural, almost as they are, from the mainframe to an alternative HP infrastructure. The latter is what we did.

By not needing to touch the mainframe code or the business rules, we were able to complete this project in a period of six months, from beginning to end. The user tells us that they are saving over $1 million today in avoiding the large costs associated with mainframe software, as well as maintenance and depreciation on the mainframe environment.

… The more monolithic approach to applications development and maintenance on the mainframe is a model that was probably appropriate in the days of the large conglomerates, where we saw a lot of companies trying to centralize all of that processing in large data centers. This consolidation made a lot of sense, when folks were looking for economies of scale in the mainframe world.

Today, we’re seeing customers driving for a higher degree of agility. In fact, my second case study represents that concept in spades. This is a large multinational manufacturing concern. We will just refer to them as “a manufacturing company.” They have a large number of businesses in their portfolio.

Our particular customer in this case study is the manufacturer of electronic appliances. One of the driving factors for their mainframe migration was … to divest themselves from the large mainframe corporate environment, where most of the processing had been done for the last 20 years.

They wanted control of their own destiny to a certain extent, and they also wanted to prepare themselves for potential investment, divestment, and acquisition, just to make sure that they were masters of their own future.

Pickett: … Just within the past few months, there was a survey by AFCOM, a group that represents data-center workers. It indicated that, over the next two years, 46 percent of the mainframe users said that they’re considering replacing one or more of their mainframes.

Now, let that sink in — 46 percent say they are going to be replacing high-end systems over the next two years. That’s an absurdly high number. So, it certainly points to a trend that we are seeing in that particular environment — not a blip at all.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Gain more insights into “Application Transformation: Getting to the Bottom Line” via a series of regional HP virtual conferences:

New architectures for data and logic processing are ushering in a game-changing era of advanced analytics.

These new approaches support massive data sets to produce powerful insights and analysis — yet with unprecedented price-performance. As we enter 2010, enterprises are including more forms of diverse data into their business intelligence (BI) activities. They’re also diversifying the types of analysis that they expect from these investments.

At the same time, more kinds and sizes of companies and government agencies are seeking to deliver ever more data-driven analysis for their employees, partners, users, and citizens. It boils down to giving more communities of participants what they need to excel at whatever they’re doing. By putting analytics into the hands of more decision makers, huge productivity wins across entire economies become far more likely.

But such improvements won’t happen if the data can’t effectively reach the application’s logic, if the systems can’t handle the massive processing scale involved, or the total costs and complexity are too high.

In this sponsored podcast discussion we examine how convergence of data and logic, of parallelism and MapReduce — and of a hunger for precise analysis with a flood of raw new data — are all setting the stage for powerful advanced analytics outcomes.

To help learn how to attain advanced analytics and to uncover the benefits from these new architectural activities for ubiquitous BI, we’re joined by Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research, and Sharmila Mulligan, executive vice president of marketing at Aster Data Systems. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect’s Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Kobielus: Advanced analytics is focused on how to answer questions about the future. It’s what’s likely to happen — forecast, trend, what-if analysis — as well as what I like to call the deep present, really current streams for complex event processing.

What’s streaming in now? And how can you analyze the great gushing streams of information that are emanating from all your applications, your workflows, and from social networks?

Advanced analytics is all about answering future-oriented, proactive, or predictive questions, as well as current streaming, real-time questions about what’s going on now. Advanced analytics leverages the same core features that you find in basic analytics — all the reports, visualizations, and dashboarding — but then takes it several steps further.

… What Forrester is seeing is that, although the average data warehouse today is in the 1-10 terabyte range for most companies, we foresee the average warehouse size going, in the middle of the coming decade, into the hundreds of terabytes.

In 10 years or so, we think it’s possible, and increasingly likely, that petabyte-scale data warehouses or content warehouses will become common. It’s all about unstructured information, deep history, and historical information. A lot of trends are pushing enterprises in the direction of big data.

… We need to rethink the platforms with which we’re doing analytical processing. Data mining is traditionally thought of as being the core of advanced analytics. Generally, you pull data from various sources into an analytical data mart.

That analytical data mart is usually on a database that’s specific to a given predictive modeling project, let’s say a customer analytics project. It may be a very fast server with a lot of compute power for a single server, but quite often what we call the analytical data mart is not the highest performance database you have in your company. Usually, that high performance database is your data warehouse.

As you build larger and more complex predictive models you quickly run into resource constraints on your existing data-mining platform. So you have to look for where you can find the CPU power, the data storage, and the I/O bandwidth to scale up your predictive modeling efforts.

… But, [there is] another challenge, which is advanced analytics producing predictive models. Those predictive models increasingly are deployed in-line to transactional applications to provide some basic logic and rules that will drive such important functions as “next best offer” being made to customers based on a broad variety of historical and current information.

How do you inject predictive logic into your transactional applications in a fairly seamless way? You have to think through that, because, right now, quite often analytical data models, predictive models, in many ways are not built for optimal embedding within your transactional applications. You have to think through how to converge all these analytical models with the transactional logic that drives your business.

New data platform

Mulligan: What we see with customers is that the advanced analytics needs and the new generation of analytics that they are trying to do is driving the need for a new data platform.

What you’ve got is a situation where enterprises want to be able to do more scalable reporting on massive data sets with very, very fast response times. On the reporting side, in terms of the end result to the customer, it is similar to the type of report they are trying to achieve, but the difference is that the quantity of data that they’re trying to get at, and the amount of data that these reports are filling up is far greater than what they had before.

That’s what’s driving a need for a new platform underneath some of the preexisting BI tools that are, in themselves, good at reporting, but what the BI tools need is a data platform beneath them that allows them to do more scalable reporting than you could do before.

… Previously, the choice of a data management platform was based primarily on price-performance, being able to effectively store lots of data, and get very good performance out of those systems. What we’re seeing right now is that, although price performance continues to be a critical factor, it’s not necessarily the only factor or the primary thing driving their need for a new platform.

What’s driving the need now, and one of the most important criteria in the selection process, is the ability of this new platform to be able to support very advanced analytics.

Customers are very precise in terms of the type of analytics that they want to do. So, it’s not that a vendor needs to tell them what they are missing. They are very clear on the type of data analysis they want to do, the granularity of data analysis, the volume of data that they want to be able to analyze, and the speed that they expect when they analyze that data.

There is a big shift in the market, where customers have realized that their preexisting platforms are not necessarily suitable for the new generation of analytics that they’re trying to do.

They are very clear on what their requirements are, and those requirements are coming from the top. Those new requirements, as it relates to data analysis and advanced analytics, are driving the selection process for a new data management platform.

There is a big shift in the market, where customers have realized that their preexisting platforms are not necessarily suitable for the new generation of analytics that they’re trying to do.

We see the push toward analysis that’s really more near real-time than what they were able to do before. This is not a trivial thing to do when, it comes to very large data sets, because what you are asking for is the ability to get very, very quick response times and incredibly high performance on terabytes and terabytes of data to be able to get these kind of results in real-time.

Social network analysis

Kobielus: Let’s look at what’s going to be a true game changer, not just for business, but for the global society. It’s a thing called social network analysis.

It’s predictive models, fundamentally, but it’s predictive models that are applied to analyzing the behaviors of networks of people on the web, on the Internet, Facebook, and Twitter, in your company, and in various social network groupings, to determine classification and clustering of people around common affinities, buying patterns, interests, and so forth.

As social networks weave their way into not just our consumer lives, but our work lives, our life lives, social network analysis — leveraging all the core advanced analytics of data mining and text analytics — will take the place of the focus group.

You’re going to listen to all their tweets and their Facebook updates and you’re going to look at their interactions online through your portal and your call center. Then, you’re going to take all that huge stream of event information — we’re talking about complex event processing (CEP) — you’re going to bring it into your data warehousing grid or cloud.

You’re also going to bring historical information on those customers and their needs. You’re going to apply various social network behavioral analytics models to it to cluster people into the categories that make us all kind of squirm when we hear them, things like yuppie and Generation X and so forth.

They can get a sense of how a product or service is being perceived in real-time, so that the the provider of that product or service can then turn around and tweak that marketing campaign …

Social network analysis becomes more powerful as you bring more history into it — last year, two years, five years, 10 years worth of interactions — to get a sense for how people will likely respond likely to new offers, bundles, packages, campaigns, and programs that are thrown at them through social networks.

If you can push not just the analytic models, but to some degree bring transactional applications, such as workflow, into this environment to be triggered by all of the data being developed or being sifted by these models, that is very powerful.

Mulligan: One of the biggest issues that the preexisting data pipeline faces is that the data lives in a repository that’s removed from where the analytics take place. Today, with the existing solutions, you need to move terabytes and terabytes of data through the data pipeline to the analytics application, before you can do your analysis.

There’s a fundamental issue here. You can’t move boulders and boulders of data to an application. It’s too slow, it’s too cumbersome, and you’re not factoring in all your fresh data in your analysis, because of the latency involved.

One of the biggest shifts is that we need to bring the analytics logic close to the data itself. Having it live in a completely different tier, separate from where the data lives, is problematic. This is not a price-performance issue in itself. It is a massive architectural shift that requires bringing analytics logic to the data itself, so that data is collocated with the analytics itself.

MapReduce plays a critical role in this. It is a very powerful technology for advanced analytics and it brings capabilities like parallelization to an application, which then allows for very high-performance scalability.

What we see in the market these days are terms like “in-database analytics,” “applications inside data,” and all this is really talking about the same thing. It’s the notion of bringing analytics logic to the data itself.

… In the marriage of SQL with MapReduce, the real intent is to bring the power of MapReduce to the enterprise, so that SQL programmers can now use that technology. MapReduce alone does require some sophistication in terms of programming skills to be able to utilize it. You may typically find that skill set in Web 2.0 companies, but often you don’t find developers who can work with that in the enterprise.

What you do find in enterprise organizations is that there are people who are very proficient at SQL. By bringing SQL together with MapReduce what enterprise organizations have is the familiarity of SQL and the ease of using SQL, but with the power of MapReduce analytics underneath that. So, it’s really letting SQL programmers leverage skills they already have, but to be able to use MapReduce for analytics.

… One of the biggest requirements in order to be able to do very advanced analytics on terabyte- and petabyte-level data sets, is to bring the application logic to the data itself. Earlier, I described why you need to do this. You want to eliminate as much data movement as possible, and you want to be able to do this analysis in as near real-time as possible.

What we did in Aster Data 4.0 is just that. We’re allowing companies to push their analytics applications inside of Aster’s MPP database, where now you can run your application logic next to the data itself, so they are both collocated in the same system. By doing so, you’ve eliminated all the data movement. What that gives you is very, very quick and efficient access to data, which is what’s required in some of these advanced analytics application examples we talked about.

Pushing the code

What kind of applications can you push down into the system? It can be any app written in Java, C, C++, Perl, Python, .NET. It could be an existing custom application that an organization has written and that they need to be able to scale to work on much larger data sets. That code can be pushed down into the apps database.

It could be a new application that a customer is looking to write to do a level of analysis that they could not do before, like real-time fraud analytics, or very deep customer behavior analysis. If you’re trying to deliver these new generations of advanced analytics apps, you would write that application in the programming language of your choice.

Kobielus: In this coming decade, we’re going to see predictive logic deployed into all application environments, be they databases, clouds, distributed file systems, CEP environments, business process management (BPM) systems, and the like. Open frameworks will be used and developed under more of a service-oriented architecture (SOA) umbrella, to enable predictive logic that’s built in any tool to be deployed eventually into any production, transaction, or analytic environment.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Aster Data Systems.

You may also be interested in:

• Aster Data archietcts application logic with data for speeded-up analytics processing en masse
• Aster targets mid-market with budget-conscious, massively parallel data warehousing appliance
• A technical look at how parallel processing brings vast new capabilities to large-scale data analysis

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Read a full transcript, or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Today’s podcast discussion focuses on the economic benefits of cloud computing — of how to use cloud-computing models and methods to control IT cost by better supporting application workloads.

As we’ve been looking at cloud computing over the past several years, a long transition is under way, of moving from traditional IT and architectural method to this notion of cloud — be it private cloud, at a third-party location, or through some combination of the above.

Traditional capacity planning is not enough in these newer cloud-computing environments. Elasticity planning is what’s needed. It’s a natural evolution of capacity planning, but it’s in the cloud.

Therefore traditional capacity planning needs to be reexamined. So now we’ll look at how to best right-size cloud-based applications, while matching service delivery resources and demands intelligently, repeatedly, and dynamically. The movement to pay-per-use model also goes a long way to promoting such matched resources and demand, and reduces wasteful application practices.

We’ll also examine how quality control for these cloud applications in development reduces the total cost of supporting applications, while allowing for a tuning and an appropriate way of managing applications in the operational cloud scenario.

Here to help unpack how Cloud Assure services can take the mystique out of cloud computing economics and to lay the foundation for cost control through proper cloud capacity management methods, we’re joined by Neil Ashizawa, manager of HP’s Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) Products and Cloud Solutions. The discussion is moderated by me, BriefingsDirect’s Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Ashizawa: Old-fashioned capacity planning focuses on the peak usage of the application, and it had to, because when you were deploying applications in-house, you had to take into consideration that peak usage case. At the end of the day, you had to be provisioned correctly with respect to compute power. Oftentimes with long procurement cycles, you’d have to plan for that.

In the cloud, because you have this idea of elasticity, where you can scale up your compute resources when you need them, and scale them back down, obviously that adds another dimension to old-school capacity planning.

The new way look at it within the cloud is elasticity planning. You have to factor in not only your peak usage case, but your moderate usage case and your low-level usage as well. At the end of the day, if you are going to get the biggest benefit of cloud, you need to understand how you’re going to be provisioned during the various demands of your application.

If you were to take, for instance, the old-school capacity-planning ideology to the cloud, you would provision for your peak use-case. You would scale up your elasticity in the cloud and just keep it there.

But if you do it that way, then you’re negating one of the big benefits of the cloud. That’s this idea of elasticity, and paying for only what you need at that moment.

One of the main factors why people consider sourcing to the cloud is because you have this elastic capability to spin up compute resources when usage is high and scale them back down when the usage is low. You don’t want to negate that benefit of the cloud by keeping your resource footprint at its highest level.

[Editor's Note: On Dec. 16, HP announced three new offerings designed to enable cloud providers and enterprises to securely lower barriers to adoption and accelerate the time-to-benefit of cloud-delivered services.

This same week, Dana Gardner also interviewed HP's Robin Purohit, Vice President and General Manager for HP Software and Solutions, on how CIOs can contain IT costs while spurring innovation payoffs such as cloud architectures.

Also, HP announced, back in the spring of 2009, a Cloud Assure package that focused on security, availability, and performance.]

Making the road smoother

Ashizawa: What we’re now bringing to the market works in all three cases [of cloud capacity planning]. Whether you’re a private internal cloud, doing a hybrid model between private and public, or sourcing completely to a public cloud, it will work in all three situations.

The new enhancement that we’re announcing now is assurance for cost control in the cloud. Oftentimes enterprises do make that step to the cloud, and a big reason is that they want to reap the benefits of the cost promise of the cloud, which is to lower cost. The thing here, though, is that you might fall into a situation where you negate that benefit.

If you deploy an application in the cloud and you find that it’s underperforming, the natural reaction is to spin up more compute resources. It’s a very good reaction, because one of the benefits of the cloud is this ability to spin up or spin down resources very fast. So no more procurement cycles, just do it and in minutes you have more compute resources.

The situation, though, that you may find yourself in is that you may have spun up more resources to try to improve performance, but it might not improve performance. I’ll give you a couple of examples.

You can find yourself in a situation where your application is no longer right-sized in the cloud, because you have over-provisioned your compute resources.

If your application is experiencing performance problems because of inefficient Java methods, for example, or slow SQL statements, then more compute resources aren’t going to make your application run faster. But, because the cloud allows you to do so very easily, your natural instinct may be to spin up more compute resources to make your application run faster.

When you do that, you find yourself in is a situation where your application is no longer right-sized in the cloud, because you have over provisioned your compute resources. You’re paying for more compute resources and you’re not getting any return on your investment. When you start paying for more resources without return on your investment, you start to disrupt the whole cost benefit of the cloud.

Applications need to be tuned so that they are right-sized. Once they are tuned and right-sized, then, when you spin up resources, you know you’re getting return on your investment, and it’s the right thing to do.

Whether you have existing applications that you are migrating to the cloud, or new applications that you are deploying in the cloud, Cloud Assure for cost control will work in both instances.

Cloud Assure for cost control solution comprises both HP Software and HP Services provided by HP SaaS. The software itself is three products that make up the overall solution.

The first one is our industry-leading Performance Center software, which allows you to drive load in an elastic manner. You can scale up the load to very high demands and scale back load to very low demand, and this is where you get your elasticity planning framework.

Moderate and peak usage

Ashizawa: The second solution from a software’s perspective is HP SiteScope, which allows you to monitor the resource consumption of your application in the cloud. Therefore, you understand when compute resources are spiking or when you have more capacity to drive even more load.

The third software portion is HP Diagnostics, which allows you to measure the performance of your code. You can measure how your methods are performing, how your SQL statements are performing, and if you have memory leakage.

When you have this visibility of end user measurement at various load levels with Performance Center, resource consumption with SiteScope, and code level performance with HP Diagnostics, and you integrate them all into one console, you allow yourself to do true elasticity planning. You can tune your application and right-size it. Once you’ve right-sized it, you know that when you scale up your resources you’re getting return on your investment.

You want to get a grasp of the variable-cost nature of the cloud, and you want to make this variable cost very predictable. Once it’s predictable, then there will be no surprises. You can budget for it and you could also ensure that you are getting the right performance at the right price. … If you’re thinking about sourcing to the cloud and adopting it, from a very strategic standpoint, it would do you good to do your elasticity planning before you go into production or you go live.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Learn more. Read a full transcript, or download a copy. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript of the podcast, or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

The crucial migration phase when moving or modernizing data centers can make or break the success of these complex undertakings. Much planning and expensive effort goes into building new data centers, or in conducting major improvements to existing ones. But too often there’s short shrift in the actual “throwing of the switch” — in the moving and migrating of existing applications and data.

But, as new data center transformations pick up — due to the financial pressures to boost overall IT efficiency — so too should the early-and-often planning and thoughtful execution of the migration itself get proper attention. This podcast examines the best practices, risk mitigation tools, and requirements for conducting data center migrations properly.

To help pave the way to making data center migrations come off effectively, we’re joined by three thought leaders from Hewlett-Packard (HP): Peter Gilis, data center transformation architect for HP Technology Services; John Bennett, worldwide director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP, and Arnie McKinnis, worldwide product marketing manager for Data Center Modernization at HP Enterprise Services.

The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect’s Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Bennett: We see a great deal of activity in the marketplace right now of people designing and building new data centers. They have this wonderful new showcase site, and they have to move into it.

The reasons for this growth, the reasons for moving to other data centers, are fueled by a lot of different activities.

In many cases it’s related to growth. The organization and the business have been growing. The current facilities were inadequate — because of space or energy capacity reasons or because they were built 30 years ago — and so the organization decides that it has to either build a new data center or perhaps make use of a hosted data center. As a result, they are going to have to move.

Whether they’re moving to a data center they own, moving to a data center owned and managed by someone else, or outsourcing their data center to a vendor like HP, in all cases you have to physically move the assets of the data center from one location to another.

The impact of doing that well is awfully high. If you don’t do it well, you’re going to impact the services provided by IT to the business. You’re very likely, if you don’t do it well, to impact your service level agreements (SLAs). And, should you have something really terrible happen, you may very well put your own job at risk.

So, the objective here is not only to take advantage of the new facilities or the new hosted site, but also to do so in a way that ensures the right continuity of business services. That ensures that service levels continue to be met, so that the business, the government, or the organization continues to operate without disruption, while this takes place. You might think of it, as our colleagues in Enterprise Services have put it, as changing the engine in the aircraft while it’s flying.

Gilis: If you don’t do the planning, if you don’t know where you’re starting from and where you’re going to, then it’s like being on the ocean. Going in any direction will lead you anywhere, but it’s probably not giving you the path to where you want to go. If you don’t know where to go to, then don’t start the journey.

Most of the migrations today are not migration of the servers, the assets, but actually migration of the data. You start building a next-generation data center –most of the time with completely new assets that better fit what your company wants to achieve.

Migration is actually the last phase of a data center transformation. The first thing that you do is a discovery, making sure that you know all about the current environment, not only the servers, the storage, and the network, but the applications and how they interact. Based on that, you decide how the new data center should look.

… If you build your new engine, your new data center, and you have all the new equipment inside, the only thing that you need to do is migrate the data. There are a lot of techniques to migrate data online, or at least synchronize current data in the current data centers with the new data center.

Usually, what you find out is that you did not do a good enough job of assessing the current situation, whether that was the assessment of a hardware platform, server platform, or the assessment of a facility.

There’s not that much difference between local storage, SAN storage, or network attached storage (NAS) and what you designed. The only thing that you design or architect today is that basically every server or every single machine, virtual or physical, gets connected to a shared storage, and that shared storage should be replicated to a disaster recovery site.

That’s basically the way you transfer the data from the current data centers to the new data centers, where you make sure that you build in disaster recovery capabilities from the moment you do the architecture of the new data center. … The moment you switch off the computer in the first data center, you can immediately switch it on in the new data center.

McKinnis: From an outsourcing perspective, companies don’t always do 100 percent outsourcing of that data-center environment or that shared computing environment. It may be part of it. Part of it they keep in-house. Part of it they host with another service provider.

What becomes important is how to manage all the multiple moving parts and the multiple service providers that are going to be involved in that future mode of operation. It’s accessing what we currently have, but it’s also designing what that future mode needs to look like.

There are all sorts of decisions that go around that from a client perspective to get to that decision. In many cases, if you look at it from a technology standpoint, the point of decision is something around getting to an end of life on a platform or an application. Or, there is a new licensing cycle, either from a support standpoint or an operating system standpoint.

There is usually something that happens from a technology standpoint that says, “Hey look, we’ve got to make a big decision anyway. Do we want to invest going this way, that we have gone previously, or do we want to try a new direction?”

Once they make that decision, we look at outside providers. It can take anywhere from 12 to 18 months to go through the full cycle of working through all the proposals and all the due diligence to build that trust between the service provider and the client. Then, you get to the point, where you can actually make the decision of, “Yes, this is what we are going to do. This is the contract we are going to put in place.” At that point, we start all the plans to get it done.

. . . There are times when deals just fall apart, sometimes in the middle, and they never even get to the contracting phase.

There are lots of moving parts, and these things are usually very large. That’s why, even though outsourcing contracts have changed, they are still large, are still multi-year, and there are still lots of moving parts.

Bennett: The elements of trust come in, whether you’re building a new data center or outsourcing, because people want to know that, after the event takes place, things will be better. “Better” can be defined as: a lot cheaper, better quality of service, and better meeting the needs of the organization.

This has to be addressed in the same way any other substantial effort is addressed — in the personal relationships of the CIO and his or her senior staff with the other executives in the organization, and with a business case. You need measurement before and afterward in order to demonstrate success. Of course, good, if not flawless, execution of the data center strategy and transformation are in play here.

The ownership issue may be affected in other ways. In many organizations it’s not unusual for individual business units to have ownership of individual assets in the data center. If modernization is at play in the data center strategy, there may be some hand-holding necessary to work with the business units in making that happen. This happens whether you are doing modernization and virtualization in the context of existing data centers or in a migration. By the way, it’s not different.

Be aware of where people view their ownership rights and make sure you are working hand-in-hand with them instead of stepping over them. It’s not rocket science, but it can be very painful sometimes.

Gilis: You have small migration and huge migrations. The best thing is to cut things into small projects that you can handle easily. As we say, “Cut the elephant in pieces, because otherwise you can’t swallow it.”

Should be a real partnership

And when you work with your client, it should be a real partnership. If you don’t work together, you will never do a good migration, whether it’s outsourcing or non-outsourcing. At the end, the new data center must receive all of the assets or all of the data — and it must work.

If you do a lot of migrations, and that’s actually what most of the service companies like HP are doing, we know how to do migrations and how to treat some of the applications migrated as part of a “migration factory.”

We actually built something like a migration factory, where teams are doing the same over and over all the time. So, if we have to move Oracle, we know exactly how to do this. If we have to move SAP, we know exactly how to do this.

That’s like building a car in a factory. It’s the same thing day in and day out, everyday. That’s why customers are coming to service providers. Whether you go to an outsourcing or non-outsourcing, you should use a service provider that builds new data centers, transforms data centers, and does migration of data centers nearly every day.

Most of the time, the people that know best how it used to work are the customers. If you don’t work with and don’t partner directly with the customer, then migration will be very, very difficult. Then, you’ll hit the difficult parts that people know will fail, and if they don’t inform you, you will have to solve the problem.

McKinnis: Cloud computing has put things back in people’s heads around what can be put out there in that shared environment. I don’t know that we’ve quite gotten through the process of whether it should be at a service provider location, my location, or within a very secure location at an outsourced environment.

Where to hold data

I don’t think they’ve gotten to that at the enterprise level. But, they’re not quite so convinced about giving users the ability to retain data and do that processing, have that application right there, held within that confinement of that laptop, or whatever it happens to be that they are interacting with. They’re starting to see that it potentially should be held someplace else, so that the risk of that data isn’t held at the local level.

Bennett: Adopting a cloud strategy for specific business services would let you take advantage of that, but in many of these environments today cloud isn’t a practical solution yet for the broad diversity of business services they’re providing.

We see that for many customers it’s the move from dedicated islands of infrastructure, to a shared infrastructure model, a converged infrastructure, or an adaptive infrastructure. Those are significant steps forward with a great deal of value for them, even without getting all the way to cloud, but cloud is definitely on the horizon.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript of the podcast, or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

You may also be interested in:

• In ‘Everything as a Service’ Era, Quality of Services and Processes Grows Paramount, Says HP’s Purohit
• Application Transformation Case Study Targets Enterprise Bottom Line with Eye-Popping ROI
• Caught Between Peak and Valley — How CIOs Can Survive Today, While Positioning for Tomorrow
• Podcast in Briefingsdirect.blogspot.com

Listen

The latest BriefingDirect podcast delivers an executive interview with Robin Purohit, Vice President and General Manager for HP Software and Solutions.

I had the pleasure to recently sit down with Purohit to examine how CIOs are managing their IT budgets for 2010. During the economic recovery, the cost-containment conundrum of “do more for less” — that is, while still supporting all of your business requirements — is likely to remain the norm.

So this discussion centers on how CIOs are grappling with implementing the best methods for higher cost optimization in IT spending, while also seeking the means to improve innovation and business results. The interview coincides with HP’s announcements this week at Software Universe in Germany on fast-tracks to safer cloud computing.

“Every CIO needs to be extremely prepared to defend their spend on what they are doing and to make sure they have a great operational cost structure that compares to the best in their industry,” says Purohit.

The 25-minute interview is conducted by me, Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Purohit: Well, just about every CIO I’ve talked to right now is in the middle of planning their next year’s budget. Actually, it’s probably better to say preparing for the negotiation for next year’s budget. There are a couple of things.

The good news is that this budget cycle doesn’t look like last year’s. Last year’s was very tough, because the financial collapse really was a surprise to many companies, and it required people to very quickly constrain their capital spend, their OPEX spend, and just turn the taps off pretty quickly.

… [Now] they need to be able to prepare to make a few big bets, because the reality is that the smartest companies out there are using this downturn as an advantage to make some forward looking strategic bets. If you don’t do that now, the chances are that, two years from now, your company could be in a pretty bad position.

… There are a couple of pretty important things to get done. The first is to have an extremely good view of the capital you have, and where it is in the capital cycle. Getting all of that information that is timely, accurate, and at your fingertips, so you can enter the planning cycle, is extraordinarily important and fundamental.

When you are going to deploy new capital, always make sure that it’s going to be able to be maintained and sustained in the lowest-cost way. The way we phrase this is, “Today’s innovation is tomorrow’s operating cost.”

When you do refresh, there are some great new ways of actually using capital on server storage and networking that’s at a much lower cost structure, and much easier to operate, than the systems we had three or four years ago.

In the past, we’ve seen mistakes made, where people deployed new capital without really thinking how they were going to drive the long-term cost structure down in operating that new capital.

This is where we really see an opportunity: To help customers put in place IT financial management solutions, which are not just planning tools — not just understanding what you have — but essentially a real-time financial analytic application that is timely and accurate as an enterprise resource planning (ERP) system, or a business intelligence (BI) system that’s supporting the company’s business process.

New business agenda

Companies want to see the CIOs use capital to support the most important business initiatives they have, and usually they are associated with revenue growth, by expanding the sales force, and new business units, some competitive program, or eventually a new ecommerce presence.

It’s imperative that the CIO shows as much as possible that they’re applying capital to things that clearly align with driving one of those new business agendas that’s going to help the company over the next three years.

Now, in terms of how you do that, it’s making sure that the capital spend that you have, that everything in the data center you have, is supporting a top business priority. It’s the most important thing you can do.

One thing that won’t change is that demand from the business will all of a sudden strip your supply of capital and labor. What you can do is make sure that every person you have, every piece of equipment you have, every decision you are making, is in the context of something that is supporting an immediate business need or a key element of business operation.

It also means there are more things and more new things to manage.

There are lots of opportunities to be disciplined in assessing your organization, both in how you spend capital, how you use your capital, and what your people are working on. I wouldn’t call it waste, but I would call it just a better discipline and whether what you’re doing truly is business critical or not.

If you don’t get the people and process right, then new technologies, like virtualization or blade systems, are just going to cause more headaches downstream, because those things are fantastic ways of saving capital today. Those are the latest and greatest technologies. Four or five years ago, it was Linux and Windows Server.

It also means there are more things and more new things to manage. If you don’t have extremely disciplined processes that are automated, and if you don’t have all of your team with one play book on what those processes are, and making sure that there is a collaborative way for them to work on those processes, and which is as automated as possible, your operating costs are just going to increase as you embrace the new technologies that lower your capital. You’ve got to do both at the same time.

Say that you’re a new CIO coming to organization and you see a lack of standardization, a lack of centers of excellence, and a lot of growth through merger and acquisition, there is a ton of opportunity to take out operating cost.

The right governance

We’ve seen customers generally take out 5 to 10 percent, when a new CIO comes on board, rationalizes everything that’s being done, and introduces rigorous standardization. That’s a quick win, but it’s really there for companies that have been probably a little earlier in the maturity cycle of how they run IT.

A couple of new things that are possible now with the outsourcing model and the cloud model — whether you want to call it cloud or software as a service (SaaS) — is that there’s an incredibly rich marketplace of boutique service shops and boutique technology providers that can provide you either knowledge or technology services on-demand for a particular part of your IT organization.

The cost structures associated with running infrastructure as a service (IaaS) are so dramatically lower and are very compelling, so if you can find a trusted provider for that, cloud computing allows you to move at least markets that are lower risk to experiment with those kind of new techniques.

The other nice thing we like about cloud computing is that there is at least a perception that is going to be pretty nimble, which means that you’ll be able to move services in and out of your firewall, depending on where the need is, or how much demand you have.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Learn more. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.

You may also be interested in:

• In ‘Everything as a Service’ Era, Quality of Services and Processes Grows Paramount, Says HP’s Purohit
• Application Transformation Case Study Targets Enterprise Bottom Line with Eye-Popping ROI
• Caught Between Peak and Valley — How CIOs Can Survive Today, While Positioning for Tomorrow

Direct download: BriefingsDirect-Data_Center_Consolidation_Trends_With_Akamai.mp3

Listen:

Lew Moorman is instrumental in driving strategic planning, product development and new business initiatives for Rackspace. He joined the company in April of 2000 and has served a variety of strategy and marketing roles throughout the company’s growth. Before joining Rackspace, Moorman held several positions at the management consulting firm McKinsey & Company, advising a variety of high technology clients on critical strategic issues.

Read Press Release

Direct download: BriefingsDirect-Modernizing_Data_Center_Cores.mp3

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The interview comes on the heels of IBM’s recently announced enterprise collaboration service based on its Lotus Live iNotes cloud-based service platform.

Having previously been a part of CrossWorlds – a US$100 million company – which IBM acquired – Sean’s tenure at IBM is approaching 15 years and embraces a portfolio of senior roles with the US$100 billion service – leader firm.

Sean shares with Philip some of the key insights and management thinking about IBM’s strategic understating and deployment of its Cloud solution.

MIAMI, FL and CORAL GABLES, FL–(Marketwire – September 4, 2009) – Zagada Markets, Inc. announces the posting of the third in its new high-level podcast interview series in a one-hour in-depth interview with Alok Misra, Co-Founder & Principal of Navatar Group. The interview focuses on Cloud Computing and its impact on the IT outsourcing industry. Navatar is a premier salesforce.com partner and reseller, and a global cloud services provider. The interview is conducted by Philip Peters, Zagada’s CEO. The podcast is now available at the company’s NearshoreJournal.com blog.

Alok Misra is a top expert in SaaS business transformation and a thought leader in the Cloud Computing world. He has been the driving force behind some of the most complex commercial Independent Service Vendor – ISV products built on Force.com, salesforce.com’s Platform as a Service (PaaS). His stewardship has, over the last four years, turned Navatar into one of the top Salesforce.com partners as well as a leading provider of Force.com applications in the financial sector. Before joining Navatar, Alok played several senior roles at Deloitte Consulting, leading large business transformations for Fortune 500 clients. He is the author of the whitepaper “The Dos and Don’ts of the transition to Cloud Computing” as well as an upcoming book “Building a Force.com App … Ask the Smart Questions.”

In addition to discussing the implementation successes his company has achieved with the Cloud and Force.com deployment, Alok shares with Philip, his insights about the necessary shift in strategy and operation that software companies need to take to successfully adapt to the expanding US$ 8 billion Cloud Computing outsourcing opportunity.

Listeners will find the podcast engaging and informative and are invited to visit Zagada’s NearshoreJournal.com blog, take a listen, and offer your feedback.

The following links associated with the podcast are below:

Download the podcast at the NearshoreJournal.com blog:
http://www.nearshorejournal.com/2009/09/04/alok-mishra-principal-of-navatar-group-interviewed-by-zagada’s-ceo-philip-peters-in-zagada’s-nearshorejournalcom-blog-high-level-executive-interview-series/

Visit Navatar Group’s Web Site:
www.navatargroup.com

Visit Navatar Group’s Blog:
www.navatarforce.com

Download Alok Misra’s Whitepaper — The Dos and Don’ts of the Transition to Cloud Computing:
http://navatargroup.com/WhitePaper.html

Review Alok Misra’s biography:
http://www.navatargroup.com/about_meet_our_team.html

Review Philip Peters’ biography:
http://www.zagada.com/team.php
Listeners are encouraged to send their feedback and make comments on the NearshoreJournal.com blog.

About Zagada Markets

Zagada is a business development analytics firm. The company provides research, indexes, rating and tailor-made advisory services on countries, cities and service suppliers to corporations. The company principally serves the corporate buy-side and is totally focused on delivering sourcing analytics on the service globalization sector. The company is the developer and publisher with its Swedish based partner — Waagstein Research of the Zagada Waagstein Global Outsourcing 100 Index – www.zagadawaagstein.com. Zagada publishes the leading NearshoreJournal.com sourcing blog.

About the NearshoreJournal.com Blog

The NearshoreJournal.com blog is a growing niche destination for all things outsourcing. We specialize in aggregating news and content specific to the intersection between outsourcing, technology and capital markets. Our goal is to capture how service globalization outsourcing and its effects are impacting the world. The blog is jointly owned and produced by Zagada Markets and Moodstudio (www.moodstudio.net)

About Navatar Group

Navatar Group (http://www.navatargroup.com), a premier salesforce.com partner and reseller, is a global firm providing Cloud Computing services and products. Founded by veterans of Deloitte Consulting, Navatar Group has enabled several large companies to develop, market and support commercial Cloud products as well as helped hundreds of organizations successfully implement SaaS solutions on the Force.com platform

One of the first to bring Wall Street experience to Cloud Computing, Navatar Group also has first-hand experience in launching Cloud products, being a leading provider of Force.com solutions for the financial sector. Our comprehensive SaaS Transformation methodology is designed to help ISVs with all business and technical aspects of a SaaS transition. Navatar’s SaasCase™ is a Proof-Of-Concept offering that helps ISVs test the market and perform a cost/benefit analysis before developing a SaaS product. Navatar Group is headquartered on Wall Street, New York with offices in Washington DC, London and New Delhi, India.

Navatar Group Press Contact:
Allan Siegert
Email Contact
212 461 2140 X392

Media:
305 529 9028
Email Contact

Alok Misra

In addition to discussing the implementation successes his company has achieved with the Cloud and Force.com deployment, Alok shares with Philip, his insights about the necessary shift in strategy and operation that software companies need to take to successfully adapt to the expanding US$ 8 billion Cloud computing outsourcing opportunity.

Navatar Group Press Contact: Allan Siegert, asiegert@navatargroup.com, 212 461 2140 X392

Visit Navatar Force blog: http://www.navatarforce.com

Visit Navatar Group’s Web Site:  www.navatargroup.com

Podcast Interview Conducted by Philip Peters, Zagada’s CEO.

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