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

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

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

Among the barriers to drawing value out of big data, according to survey respondents, are:

• High cost and complexity.Many business leaders believe such projects require a prohibitively expensive infrastructure. Sixty percent said projects take 18 months or more to complete.
• Employee workarounds.Respondents said employees often take matters into their own hands, but without effective solutions, are resorting to manual aggregation. This is putting pressure on IT to automate these efforts.
• Poor data accessibility. Nearly half of IT leaders said they find it difficult to find, access, and integrate the right information, which is often unstructuredand spread among a wide variety of sources.
• Lacking skills and tools. Big data is proving to be inaccessible by employees without special training, again putting pressure on IT to pave the way.

Despite the current low reliance on big data, adoption is expected to increase over the next 12 months, as business and IT leaders turn to user-centric tools -- such as those provided by Kapow Software. With such tools, IT leaders anticipate improved productivity and a better relationship with the business leaders.

Business leaders surveyed are looking for a variety of benefits from an increased use of big data. They say the following are either "critical" or "very important:"

• More informed business decision - 80 percent
• Increased competitive advantage - 71 percent
• Improved customer satisfaction - 68 percent
• Increased end-user productivity - 62 percent
• Improved security or compliance - 60 percent
• New products and services - 55 percent
• Monitoring and responding to social media in real time - 33 percent.

For more information on the survey results, go to http://www.slideshare.net/Kapowmarketing/kapow-idg-bigdataidg051513 or http://www.kapowsoftware.com/. [Disclosure: Kapow Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

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Our guest is Chris Haydon, Vice President of Solutions Management for Procurement, Finance, and Network at Ariba, here to explain the latest conference news, and to offer insights into how Ariba will be broadening its services procurement management value, mobile push and AribaPay roll-out.

The interview is conducted Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Ariba, an SAP company, is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Where we are now with Ariba in terms of some of the big news at LIVE?

Haydon: We have some really exciting innovation coming in the near-term to Ariba in a couple of areas. First, let's talk about Network RFQ or the Spot Buy. We think this is part of the undiscovered country, where, according to The Hackett Group, 40-plus percent of spend is not sourced.

By linking this non-sourced spend to the Ariba Network, we think we're going to be able to address a large pain-point for our buyers and our sellers. Network RFQ or Spot Buy is a near-term solution that we announced at LIVE, and we're bringing that forward over the next six months.

The next exciting innovation is at the other end of the process. That’s a solution we call AribaPay. AribaPay is what we think is a game-changing solution that delivers rich remittance and invoice information that’s only available from the Ariba Network through solution secure, global payment infrastructure.

Down market

Gardner: It seems to me, Chris, that you're going to the mid-market. You're creating some services with Spot Buy that help people in their ad-hoc, low-volume purchasing.

You're providing more services types of purchasing capabilities, maybe for those mid-market organizations or different kinds of companies like services-oriented companies. And, you're also connecting via Dell Boomi to QuickBooks, which is an important asset for how people run small businesses. Are we expanding the addressable market here?

Haydon: We are, and that’s an excellent point. We look at it two ways. We're looking to address all commerce. Things like the Spot Buy, AribaPay, services, procurement, and estimate-based services are really addressing the breadth of spend, and that applies at the upper end and the lower end.

There are important pieces that you touched on, especially with our Dell Boomi partnership and the announcement here for QuickBooks. We want to make it accessible to grow the ecosystem and to make the collaboration across the network as frictionless as possible.

With Dell Boomi announcing QuickBooks, it enables suppliers specifically with that back-end system to be able to comply with all the collaboration of business processes on the Ariba Network, and we're really only just getting started.

There is a massive ecosystem out there with QuickBooks, but when we have a look around, there are more than 120 prominent backend systems. So it's not just the SAPs, the Oracles, the JD Edwards, and Lawsons. It's the QuickBooks and the Intuits. It's the Great Plains of the world.

Think about at it as back-end agnostic. We want our customers on both the buy-side and the sell-side of their partners to make their own choices. It's really their own choice of deployment.

If they want to take an integrated business-to-business (B2B) channel, they can. If they want to come to a portal, they can. If they want to have an extract that goes into their own customized system, they can do that as well, or all of the above at the same time, and really just taking that process forward.

Gardner: How does AribaPay work? Is this a credit card, a debit card? Is this a transactional banking interface?

Brand new

Haydon: Number one, it's brand-new. First, let's talk about the problems that we had, and how we think we are going to address it. More than 40 percent of payments in corporate America are still check based. Check-based payments present their own problems, not just for the buyers, but also from the sellers. They don’t know when they're going to get paid. And when they are getting paid, how do they reconcile what they're actually getting paid for?

AribaPay is a new service. It's not a P-Card. It's leveraging a new type of electronic payment through an ACH-styled channel. It enables buyers to take 100 percent of their payments through the Ariba Network. It lets the suppliers opt in to be able to match and move from our paper-based payment channel check, to an electronic channel that is married. This is the interesting value prop for the network. That is married with their rich information.

So that’s the value. We think it's very differentiated. We're going to be leveraging a large financial institution provider who has great breadth and penetration, not just here in the United States, but globally as well, and that's via Discover Financial Services.

We announced this at LIVE this month, and I know they're as excited as we are. Discover has the wherewithal to bring the credibility and the scale to the payments channel, while Ariba has the credibility in the scale of the supply base and the commercial B2B traffic. We think that that one plus one equals three and is a game changer in electronic payment.

Gardner: Moving on to the future or vision that you're painting, what should we expect in the roadmap of the next two or three years for the Ariba Network?

Haydon: We're really excited about the Ariba Network and we have four or five themes. One piece of big news is that we're getting into and supporting supply chain and logistics processes, and adding that level of collaboration. Today, we have 10 or 11 types of collaborations that you can do on the Ariba Network, like an order, an invoice, and so on.

Over the next several releases, we're going to be more than doubling that amount of collaboration that you can do between trading partners on the network. That’s exciting, and there are things like forecasting and goods receipt notices.

I won’t go into the specifics of every single transaction, but think about of doubling the amount of collaboration that you can do and the visibility in that. The ability to apply your own business rules and logic to those collaborations is massive.

The second thing we're doing on the network is adding a new spend category, which we call services invoicing. This is estimate-based spend and this is another up market, down market, broad approach, in which there are a whole heap of services.

This is more of an estimate-based style spend where you don’t necessarily know the full cost of an item until you finish it. Whether you're drilling an oil well or constructing a building, there are variations there. So we're adding that capability into the network.

User interface

Another area is what we call Network 2.0, and this is extending and changing not just the user interface, but extending and adding more intrinsic core capabilities to the network. Ariba has a number of network assets and we think it's important to have a single network platform globally. It's the commerce internet, the network.

So our Network 2.0 program is a phase delivery of extending the core capabilities of the Ariba network over the next couple of years in terms of order status, results, requests in terms of goods receipt notices, advanced shipping notices, more invoice capability, and just growing that out globally.

Last but not least is just more and more supply collaboration, focusing on the ability for suppliers to more easily respond, comply, and manage their profiles on the Ariba Network.

Gardner: The Ariba applications themselves, what should we expect there?

Haydon: We have a whole raft of capability coming across that whole application suite. We can break that into two or three areas. In our sourcing, contract management, supplier information management, and supply performance management suite, we're doing functionality enhancements on one of the exciting pieces.

In the spend visibility area, we're going to be leveraging the SAP In-Memory technology HANA. What we are doing there is early for us, but there are some very exciting, encouraging results in terms of the speed and the performance we've heard about from SAP. Running our own technology on that and seeing the results is exciting for us and will be exciting for our customers.

As we move more into our procurement suite, we're introducing a new look and feel, a consumer like look and feel, to our catalog and our search engine. The more Amazon-style search touches more users than anyone else. As you can imagine, that’s how they need to requisition tools. So making that a friendly UI and taking that UI or user experience through to the other products is fantastic.

One of the other most exciting areas for us is services procurement, a very large investment for us. Services procurement is our application to be able to support temporary or contingent labor, statement of work or consulting labor, print, marketing and also light industrial. This really is one of the underpinning differences for Ariba, and this is where we're bringing it together.

We're not just building applications any more. We're building network-centric applications or network-aware applications. It means that when we're launching our new services procurement solution, not only are we are going to have a brand-new, refreshed, modern user interface, which is very important.

Differential insights

We're going to be able to leverage the power of the Ariba Network to provide differential insights, into standard day-to-day services procurement on-boarding. That will be looking at average labor rates in the area for the type of service that you're buying and using the network intelligence to give you advice, to give you instruction, to help you manage exceptions on the network.

Gardner: What’s really interesting to me is all of your vision so tightly aligns with the mega trends of today, from cloud to mobile to big data. Tell me little bit about the potential.

Haydon: Absolutely. When we think about the networked economy, the networked apps, the network-centric apps, the network itself, one should be able to connect any demand generating or receiving system. We touched on that with Dell Boomi, but it's seamless integration across the piece. We want to be comprehensive, which is adding more collaboration.

Critical mass

The interesting thing about this collaboration, is it starts driving at some levels a critical mass of data. The trend is that the network is intelligent. It's actually able to piece together not just the transaction itself, but who you are. We're quite excited, because this is the massive differentiator of the network. You talked about apps. We have not just the transactional data, but we have the master data, and we can also take other sources of information.

That could be weather, location, stock reports, SEC filings, Dun and Bradstreet writings, whatever you like, to intersect.

So this data plus knowledge gives you information. With SAP, it's a very exciting technology. SAP InfoNet, Supplier InfoNet, is able to leverage network data. Today, it has over 160 feeds. It's smart, meaning it's smart intelligence. It can automatically take those feeds and contextualize.

And that's the real thing we're trying to do -- knowing who the user is, knowing the business process they are trying to execute, and also knowing what they are trying to achieve. And it's bringing that information to the point of demand to help them make actionable, intelligent, and sometimes predictive decisions.

Where we would like to go is, heaven forbid there is another tsunami, but let's just work through that use case. You get a news alert there is tsunami in Japan again, terrible event. What if you knew that, and what if 80 percent of your core, raw material inputs came from there? Just that alert of that to notify you to saying you've got to know that you might well have a supply problem. What are you going to do?

And by the way, here are three or four other suppliers who can supply this material to you, and they're available on the network. What is that worth? Immeasurable.

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

You may also be interested in:

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So if cloud is a way of doing an end-run around IT — yet, IT is integral to proper applications deployment and care — how exactly do these disparate propositions co-exist?

Not too well, it turns out, especially as the pace that apps development and deployment — and the skyrocketing need to bring more mobile apps into production — complicates the already tough task of overall applications management.

HP Software today announced four products that aim to tackle this thorny reality: That traditional apps deployment was already broken, and that the new requirements make automation and comprehensive management an inescapable necessity.

HP is also banking on the role it can play as a neutral party to better orchestrate the apps lifecycle, because — unlike most other large enterprise software vendors — it doesn't have a legacy application, operating system, hypervisor, database, and/or middleware heritage (and cash cows) to favor and protect. That means supporting heterogeneity in total is the imperative, not the exception, for HP.

The next generation of HP's datacenter automation, orchestration, and cloud management software scales in terms of volume, supports all the installed enterprise kit, and allows for unprecedented simplicity, so that IT can get control before it's too late, said Manoj Raisinghani, senior director of Worldwide Product Marketing for Cloud Automation Software and software as a service (SaaS) at HP Software.

It's not enough to solve parts of the enterprise IT complexity problem, said Raisinghani. The management of the server deployment and management has an impact on the database and middleware management, which then need to be orchestrated as a whole, and then need to apply to the cloud services deployment options. So, server, data, middleware, cloud, and orchestration all need to be part of the management solution for the scale, simplicity, and automation to be impactful and practical, he said.

And that's why HP has bundled these four major products under a common release, with a common version number: 10.

Key to cloud

"Server automation is key to the cloud path," said Raisinghani. He said the announcements were a "10" on a scale of 1 to 10 for HP Software.

Managing complex distributed systems and heterogeneous environments is so time consuming and complex — hindering business agility and innovation — that IT has relied on systems integrators, and is now being tempted to hand over more process orchestration to the cloud providers. But the trends around mobility, big data, and SaaS services mean that IT needs to be more in control, not less. And IT staff members need the means to deploy the answer themselves, and rely on the software orchestration they control to move the workloads to where the model works best, said Raisinghani.

Therefore, whether it's routine datacenter maintenance to the delivery of extended enterprise business processes, automation and cloud management software reduces automating repetitive, manual and time-consuming operations, and makes the entire approach more secure and more easily tracked for intrusions, according to HP.

Even deploying the HP Server Automation (SA) 10 product itself is being streamlined via a virtual appliance, said Raisinghani. IT users can do it themselves, he said. Thanks to the virtual appliance model, the suite is "customer installable", said Raisinghani.

HP Database and Middleware Automation (DMA) 10 further automates manual database management tasks. HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2 provides service life cycle automation and IT assets management capabilities to scale to cloud services safely. HP Operations Orchestration (OO) 10 automates up to 15,000 simultaneous operations to track all of the above products, processes, and services.

HP SA 10, the life cycle management platform, enables IT to manage more than 100,000 physical and virtual servers from a single pane of glass, and improves operational economics by reducing the administrator-to-server ratio by up to 60 percent, said Raisinghani.

This HP Software approach has been long in the making — from the acquisition of Mercury and Opsware to the business service management emphasis to the early recognition that hybrid cloud was the long-term IT model.

And while the total management approach — supporting all the major OSes, hypervisors, RDBs, apps, and clouds — makes HP a services management company, there are some advantages for HP. By focusing on the automation and orchestration, it is building a default capability to the HP public cloud for those organizations seeing an integrated advantage over the efforts required for other public clouds, such as Amazon Web Services, said Raisinghani.

"You can go agile, to where the applications can be best deployed," said Raisinghani. "But this is seamless to the user. It just gets deployed. IT can automate how the services are pre-packaged and cloud burst."

Up and running

And HP is determined to make the HP public cloud the best way to get those services up and running, although the customer will have choice on which cloud or clouds to target, said Raisinghani. "The user gets choice — but the default is the HP cloud," he said. "HP on HP is going to work better. We'll be making them an offer that's very attractive."

So, think about it. Would you, as a vendor, rather be in a race to the bottom on hypervisor price? On public cloud price? On database price? On storage price? Or would you rather be building market at being the best at enabling the automation, speed, and security of the workloads and processes that IT needs to navigate the new IT landscape?

Management, orchestration, and automation may well be the killer apps of the cloud era. Management, orchestration, and automation from apps and data cradle to grave is the sticky value that locks in based on productivity, not technology. HP has clearly got its eyes on this prize, and the latest releases this week are a major salvo in the cloud enablement as a function of IT — not outside of IT. Because, like it or not, enterprise IT is the ultimate cloud broker to win over.

In other cloud applications automation news, ServiceNow on Monday announced its ServiceNow App Creator, designed to enable "citizen developers" to rapidly create enterprise and mobile applications on the ServiceNow Service Automation Platform.

Originally targeting the ITSM function, ServiceNow is broadening the use of its tools and platform for apps outside the IT management domain, but with IT as the driver as to what platforms the developers will use. The App Creator technology itself is now included in the platform.

"This arms IT to provide developers with a rich RAD platform, and puts those apps on a single platform in a single place," said Arne Josefsberg, CTO at ServiceNow.

Leveraging a forms-based workflow on making and deploying apps and process flows, App Creator ensures "best practice" development of custom applications without requiring coding or technology expertise, said Josefsberg.

Applications that the enterprise builds on the platform are then separately licensed on a per-user basis. The ServiceNow App Creator is available today to all current ServiceNow customers.

Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingDirect podcasts.

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We'll learn why a cloud-of-clouds approach is providing new types of IT services to Thomas Duryea's many Asia-Pacific region customers.

The first part of our series addressed the rationale and business opportunity for TD's cloud-services portfolio, which is built on VMware software.

The latest discussion continues a three-part series on how Thomas Duryea, or TD, designed, built, and commercialized an adaptive cloud infrastructure. This second installment focuses on how a variety of risks associated with cloud adoption and cloud use have been identified and managed by actual users of cloud services.

Learn more about how adopters of cloud computing have effectively reduced the risks of implementing cloud models from Adam Beavis, general manager of Cloud Services at Thomas Duryea in Melbourne, Australia. The interview was conducted by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Below are some excerpts.

Moving off-site

Adam, we've been talking about cloud computing for years now, and I think it's pretty well established that we can do cloud computing quite well technically. The question that many organizations keep coming back with is whether they should do cloud computing. If there are certain risks, how do they know what risks are important? How do they get through that? What are you in learning so far at TD about risk and how your customers face that?

People are becoming more comfortable with the cloud concept as we see cloud becoming more mainstream, but we're seeing two sides to the risks. One is the technical risks, how the applications actually run in the cloud.

What we're also seeing — more at a business level — are concerns like privacy, security, and maintaining service levels. We're seeing that pop up more and more, where the technical validation of the solution gets signed off from the technical team, but then the concerns begin to move up to board level.

We're seeing intense interest in the availability of the data. How do they control that, now that it's been handed off to a service provider? We're starting to see some of those risks coming more and more from the business side.

I've categorized some of these risks over the past few years, and I've put them into four basic buckets. One is the legal side, where there are licenses and service-level agreements (SLAs), issues of ownership, and permissions.

The second would be longevity. That is to say, will the service provider be there for the long term? Will they be a fly-by-the-seat-of-the-pants organization? Are they are going to get bought and maybe merged into something else? Those concerns.

The third bucket I put them in is complexity, and that has to do with the actual software, the technology, and the infrastructure. Is it mature? If it's open source, is there a risk for forking? Is there a risk about who owns that software and is that stable?

And then last, the long-term concern, which always comes back, is portability. You mentioned that about the data and the applications. We're thinking now, as we move toward more software-defined datacenters, that portability would become less of an issue, but it's still top of mind for many of the people I speak with.

So, let's go through these, Adam. Let's start with that legal concern. Do you have any organizations that you can reflect on and say, here is how they did it, here is how they have figured out how to manage these license and control of the IP risks?

The legal one is interesting. As a case study, there's a not-for-profit organization for which we were doing some initial assessment work, where we validated the technical risk and evaluated how we were going to access the data once the information was in a cloud. We went through that process, and that went fine, but obviously it then went up to the legal team.

One of the big things that the legal team was concerned about was what the service level agreement was going to be, and how they could capture that in a contract. Obviously, we have standard SLAs, and, being a smaller provider, we're flexible with some of those service levels to meet their needs.

But the one that they really started to get concerned about was data availability ... if something were to go wrong with the organization. It probably jumps into longevity a little bit there. What if something went wrong and the organization vanished overnight? What would happen with their data?

Escrow clause

That's where we see legal teams getting involved and starting to put in things like the escrow clause, similar to what we had with software as a service (SaaS) for a long time. We're starting to see organizations' legal firms focus on doing these, and not just for SaaS — but infrastructure as a service (IaaS) as well. It provides a way for user organizations to access their data if provider organizations like TD were to go down.

So, that's one that we're seeing at the legal level. Around the terms and conditions, once again, being a small service provider, we have a little more flexibility in what we can provide to the organizations on those.

Once our legal team sits down and agrees on what they're looking for and what we can do for them, we're able to make changes. With larger organizations, where SLAs are often set in stone, there's no flexibility about making modifications to those contracts to suit the customer.

Tell us about your organization, how big you are, and who your customers are, and then we'll get back into some of these risks issues and how they have been managed.

Traditionally, we came from a system-integrator background, based on the east coast of Australia — Melbourne and Sydney. The organization has been around for 12 years, and had a huge amount of success in that infrastructure services arena, initially with VMware.

Other companies heavily expanded into the enterprise information systems area. We still have a large focus on infrastructure, and, more recently, cloud. We've had a lot of success with the cloud, mainly because we can combine that with a managed service.

We go to market with cloud. It's not just a platform where people come and dump data or an application. A lot of the customers that come into our cloud have some sort of managed service on top of that, and that's where we're starting to have a lot of success.

As we spoke about in part one, our customers drove us to start building a cloud platform. They can see the benefits of cloud, but they also wanted to ensure that for the cloud they were moving to, they had an organization that could support them beyond the infrastructure.

That might be looking after their operating systems, looking after some of their applications such as Citrix, etc, that we specialize in, looking after their Microsoft Exchange servers, once they move it to the cloud and then attaching those applications. That's where we are. That's the cloud at the moment.

Is there something about the platform and industry-standard decisions that you've made that helps your customers feel more comfortable? Do they see less risk because, even though your organization is one organization, the infrastructure is broader, and there's some stability about that that comes to the table?

Definitely. Partnering with VMware was one of our core decisions, because their platform everywhere is end-to-end standard VMware. It really gives us an advantage when addressing that risk if organizations ask what happens if our company doesn't run or they're not happy with the service.

The great thing is that within our environment — and it's one part of VMware's vision — you can then pick up those applications, and move them to another VMware cloud provider. Thank heaven, we haven't had that happen, and we intend it not to happen. But, for organizations to understand that, if something were to go wrong, they can move that to another service provider without having to re-architect those applications or make any major changes. This is one area where we're well getting around that longevity risk discussion.

Is there a confluence between portability and what organizations are doing with disaster recovery (DR)? Maybe they're mirroring data and/or infrastructure and applications for purposes of business continuity and then are able to say, "This reduces our risk, because not only do we have better DR and business continuity benefits, but we're also setting the stage for us to be able to move this where we want, when we want."

They can create a hybrid model, where they can pick and choose on-premises, versus a variety of other cloud providers, and even decide on those geographic or compliance issues as to where they actually physically place the data. That's a big question, but the issue is business continuity, as part of this movement toward a lower risk, how does that pan out?

That's actually one of the biggest movements that we're seeing at the moment. Organizations, when they refresh their infrastructure, don't see the value refreshing DR on-premises. Let the first step cloud be "let's move the DR out to the cloud, and replicate from on-premises out into our cloud".

Then, as you said, we have the advantage to start to do things like IaaS testing, understanding how those applications are going to work in the cloud, tweak them, get the performance right, and do that with little risk to the business. Obviously, the production machine will continue to run on-premises, while we're testing snapshots.

It's a good way to put a live snapshot of that environment, and how it's going to perform in the cloud, how your users are going to access it, bandwidth, and all that type of stuff that you need to do before starting to run up. DR is still the number one use case that we're seeing people move to the cloud.

As we go through each of these risks, and I hear you relating how your customers and TD, your own organization, have reacted to them, it seems to me that, as we move toward this software-defined datacenter, where we can move from the physical hardware and the physical facilities, and move things around in functional blocks, this really solves a lot of these risk issues.

Backup integration

You can manage your legal, your SLAs, and your licenses better when you know that you can pick and choose the location. That longevity issue is solved, when you know you can move the entire block, even if it's under escrow, or whatever. Complexity and fear about forking or immaturity of the infrastructure itself can be mitigated, when you know that you can pick and choose, and that it's highly portable.

It's a roundabout way of getting to the point of this whole notion of software-defined datacenter. Is that really at heart a risk reduction, a future direction that will mitigate a lot of these issues that are holding people back from adopting cloud more aggressively?

From a service provider's perspective, it certainly does. The single-pane management window that you can do now, where you can control everything from your network — the compute and the storage — certainly reduces risk, rather than needing several tools to do that.

And the other area where the venders are starting to work together is the integration of things like backup, and, as we spoke about earlier, DR. Tools are now sitting natively within that VMware stack around the software-defined datacenter, written to the vSphere API, as we're trying to retrofit products to achieve file-level backups within a virtual datacenter, within vCloud. Pretty much every day you wake up, there's a new tool that's now supported within that.

From a service provider's perspective, it's really reducing the risk and time to market for the new offerings, but from a customer's perspective, it's really getting in that experience that they used to. On-premises over a TD cloud, from their perspective, makes it a lot easier for them to start to adopt and consume the cloud.

I suppose this is a good segue into this notion of how to make your data, applications, and the configuration metadata portable across different organizations, based on some kind of a standard or definition. How does that work? What are the ways in which organizations are asking for and getting risk reduction around this concept of portability?

Once again, it's about having a common way that the data can move across. The basics come into that hybrid-cloud model initially, like how people are getting things out. One of the things that we see more and more is that it's not as simple as people moving legacy applications and things up to the cloud.

To reduce that risk, we're doing a cloud-readiness assessment, where we come in and assess what the organization has, what their environment looks like, and what's happening within the environment, running things like the vCenter Operations tools from VMware to right-size those environments to be ready for the cloud.

More comfortable

Now, the flip-side of that would be that some of your customers who have been dabbling in cloud infrastructure, perhaps open-source frameworks of some kind, or maybe they have been integrating their own components of open-source available software, licensed software. What have you found when it comes to their sense of risk, and how does that compare to what we just described in terms of having stability and longevity?

Especially in Australia, we probably have 85 percent to 90 percent of organizations with some sort of VMware in their datacenter. They no doubt seem to be more comfortable gravitating to some providers that are running familiar platforms, with teams familiar with VMware. They're more comfortable that we, as a service provider, are running a platform that they're used to.

We'll probably talk about the hybrid cloud a bit later on, but that ability for them to still maintain control in a familiar environment, while running some applications across in the TD cloud, is something that is becoming quite welcoming within organizations. So there's no doubt that choosing a common platform that they're used to working on is giving them confidence to start to move to the cloud.

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

Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.

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The cloud-based service, announced at the Ariba Live conference, will combine the applications and insights embedded in the Ariba Network, and deliver them through a trusted and secure global-payments infrastructure to streamline and enhance settlement and reconciliation of business commerce. The service is expected to be generally available in 2014.

"It's the classic joke: The check is in the mail. But few companies find it funny," said Kevin Costello, president of Ariba. "Buyers are drowning in paper, and sellers have no idea when — or how much — they will be paid. AribaPay will effectively eliminate these issues."

AribaPay will provide a way for buyers to create purchase orders, receive invoices, and send payments, while sellers will receive more detailed remittance information in a fast, secure, electronic environment.

Improving commerce

"Ariba and Discover are seizing the opportunity to digitize a share of the estimated $30 trillion in B2B payments that are still mostly made with paper checks," said Roger Hochschild, president and chief operating officer for Discover. "Discover is broadening its network capabilities and infrastructure, and choosing diverse business partners like Ariba to move beyond facilitating payments to enabling and improving business commerce."

For buyers and sellers connected to the Ariba Network, AribaPay will deliver data that shows what payments represent at the invoice and line-item level, fueling faster, more accurate reconciliation on both sides.

Other benefits include:

• Lower processing cost

• Richer remittance advice

• Reduced fraud risk

• Elimination of paper checks and invoices

• Fewer payments lost to escheatment

• Ability to track and trace transactions

• Faster reconciliation and dispute resolution.

To learn more about AribaPay and the benefits it is expected to deliver, visit the AribaPay website.

Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.

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• Discover and Ariba partner for B2B Payments

Leading the list of enhanced Ariba tools are:

• Ariba Spot Buy: With the integration of Ariba Procure-to-Pay and Ariba Discovery, buyers can quickly discover and qualify new sources of supply for one-off, time-sensitive, or hard-to-find purchases.
• Ariba Recommendations: Through new services that push network-derived intelligence and community-generated content directly into the context of specific business processes and use cases, companies can make more informed decisions at the point of transaction or activity. "Suppliers You May Like", for example, helps guide buyers to qualified suppliers based on a host of inputs, including buyer requirements, supplier capabilities and performance ratings, and how often other buyers on the network have awarded business to them.

"Just as consumers tap into personal networks like Facebook, Twitter, and Amazon.com to connect with friends and family, share and shop, companies are leveraging digital networks to more efficiently engage with their trading partners and collaborate across the entire commerce process," said Sanish Mondkar, Ariba chief product officer. "This new, more social and connected way of operating is redefining the way business is done. But it demands a new set of tools and processes that are only possible at a scale in a truly networked environment. Ariba is delivering these tools today."

Spot buys — or unplanned purchases of unique items — account for more than 40 percent of a company's total spend. Spot buys are challenging because they require quick turnaround, and buyers generally lack efficient or effective methods to source them. 

Selective leveraging

According to independent research firm The Hackett Group: "By selectively leveraging software tools in areas like supplier discovery and online bidding, organizations can reduce the time it takes to find the right suppliers from weeks to days or even hours, and drive cost reductions of between 2 percent and 5percent on average."

Nearly a million selling organizations across more than 20,000 product categories are connected to the Ariba Network. And they have access to more than 13 million leads worth over $5 billion that are posted each year by more than half of the Global 2,000 who are connected to the network as well.

New features added to Ariba Discovery allow selling organizations to get the right messages to the right audience, and convert these leads into sales.

• Profile Pitch: Sellers can create highly targeted profiles and messaging based on industry, commodity, territory, and other factors to promote themselves to active buyers. 
• Badges and Social Sharing: Selling organizations can further raise their visibility by adding Ariba badges to their company websites and/or email signatures, defining vanity URLs for their company profiles, and sharing their public URLs and postings on social sites such as Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn.

Pre-packaged integration

Ariba and Dell Boomi will announce that they are teaming to deliver pre-packaged integration as a service offerings to help selling organizations drive new levels of efficiency and effectiveness across their operations.

Designed to simplify and for speed integration to the Ariba Network, the Ariba Integration Connector, powered by Dell Boomi Integration Packs, enables companies to collaborate more efficiently and drive game-changing improvements in productivity and performance. The first connector integrates with Intuit QuickBooks. Additional connectors to enable sellers who own Microsoft Dynamics AX, Netsuite, and Sage Peachtree solutions to quickly and easily integrate with the Ariba Network are planned to be released later this year.

"From the beginning, the Ariba Network has been built to be an open platform to connect all companies using any system to foster more efficient business-to-business collaboration," said Tim Minahan, senior vice president, network strategy, Ariba. "With these new connectors, we are making it even easier for sales organizations of all sizes to fully automate their customer transactions and collaborations over the Ariba Network — directly from their preferred CRM, ERP, and accounting systems."

The Ariba Integration Connector removes the barriers to system-to-network integration by eliminating complexity. An out-of-the-box solution delivered as a service, the connector provides a fast, easy, and affordable way for companies to connect to the Ariba Network — regardless of the backend systems they use. The connector currently supports integration with Intuit QuickBooks Desktop 2009-2013, Premier and Enterprise for US, UK, and CA Enterprise and Enterprise Plus.

The connector is available and in use today. To learn more about Ariba's Connection solutions and the benefits they can deliver to your organization, visit http://www.ariba.com/services/connection-solutions.

Disclosure: Ariba and Dell are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.

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The higher value from such ecosystem and heterogeneous management support is the ability for virtualization server and system administrators to comprehensively optimize various flavors of datacenter server virtualization, as well as the major VDI types, with added capabilities to track and analyze performance from the application level all the way to the server and storage hardware level. This week's announcements have also shone a spotlight on the recently updated Foglight for Storage Management 2.5.

"With Foglight for Virtualization, Enterprise Edition, Dell is showing its commitment to offering a solution that encompasses all aspects of virtual infrastructure performance monitoring and management, built on a platform that can scale as the infrastructure grows," said Steve Rosenberg, general manager for Performance Monitoring, Dell. "This new release expands Foglight's ability, not only to monitor the additional infrastructure area of VDI, but also to correlate metrics from VDI with performance for applications, the virtual layer, the network, and underlying servers and storage."

Dell Software also last week released a series of BYOD-targeted products and services, which are related to the better VDI management capabilities. That's because many enterprises and mid-market firms that are tasked with moving quickly to BYOD are using VDI to do it.

With the increasing adoption of VMware View in virtualized datacenters (including for MSPs), VDI support is fast becoming a mainstay for today's IT departments and managed service providers. VDI and server virtual machines (VMs) often utilize the same hardware components. Yet, both of these virtualized infrastructures serve different users, and have separate requirements and resource demands, explained John Maxwell, vice president of product management for performance monitoring for virtualization, networking,storage and hardware at Dell Software.

Single-source solution

As a result, VDI and server VMs require dedicated performance monitoring systems. However, these systems must also be connected, because so many underlying resources are often shared. Agent-based Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition offers virtualization administrators a more single-source solution that not only identifies and fixes performance issues within VMware View, but continues to run all features available in vOPS Server Enterprise with no effect on overall vCenter performance.

Foglight for Storage Management 2.5 has been released as an optional "cartridge" to Foglight for Virtualization. Foglight for Storage Management now offers physical storage performance reporting in addition to virtual reporting, providing customers with complete "VM to physical LUN" visibility. 

Additional enhancements in this release include LUN latency reporting, NPIV support, and the ability for customers to purchase the product either as a standalone cartridge, or as an optional cartridge to Foglight for Virtualization.

Additionally, Foglight is a unified performance monitoring platform that allows individual product solutions, delivered as sets of pluggable "cartridges", to run standalone or to interoperate. Each individual product delivers best-of-breed functionality to the admin for that area, while simultaneously integrating with other cartridges to deliver true end-to-end monitoring from end-user experience to the underlying storage and server hardware layers, and everything in between, said Maxwell.

Foglight for Virtualization Enterprise Edition 6.8 is available now for a 45-day trial from www.quest.com. Pricing starts at $799 per socket. Foglight for Storage Management 2.5 is also available now for a 45-day trial from www.quest.com. Pricing starts at $499 per socket.

Because Foglight is built on a common architecture to support the cartridges, it seems likely that it will move from an on-premises only offering to a SaaS-based version, too, especially to support cloud- and MSP-based VDI offerings, and to manage hybrid VDI implementations.

Disclosure: Dell Software and WMware are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.

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We'll hear how TTNET deployed advanced Service Virtualization (SV) solutions to automate end-to-end test cases, gaining a path to integrated Unified Functional Testing (UFT).

To learn how, we're joined by Hasan Ykselten, test and release manager at TTNET, which is a subsidiary of Trk Telekom, based in Istanbul. The interview was conducted by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Below are some excerpts.

What was the situation there before you became more automated, before you started to use more software tools?

We're the leading ISP in Turkey. We deploy more than 200 applications per year, and we have to provide better and faster services to our customers every week, every month. Before HP SV, we had to use the other test infrastructures in our test cases.

We mostly had problems on issues such as the accessibility, authorization, downtime, and private data for reaching the other third-party's infrastructures. So, we needed virtualization on our test systems, and we needed automation for getting fast deployment to make the release time shorter. And of course, we needed to reduce our cost. So, we decided to solve the problems by implementing SV.

How did you move from where you were to where you wanted to be?

Before SV, we couldn't do automation, since the other parties are in discrete locations and it was difficult to reach the other systems. We could automate functional test cases, but for end-to-end test cases, it was impossible to do automation.

First, we implemented SV for virtualizing the other systems, and we put SV between our infrastructure and the third-party infrastructure. We learned the requests and responses, and then could use SV instead of the other party infrastructure.

After this, we could also use automation tools. We managed to use automation tools via integrating Unified Functional Testing (UFT) and SV tools, and now we can run automation test cases and end-to-end test cases on SV.

We started to use SV in our test systems first. When we saw the success, we decided to implement SV for the development systems also.

Automation tools

Give me a sense of the type of applications we're talking about.

We are mostly working on customer relationship management (CRM) applications. We deploy more than 200 applications per year and we have more than 6 million customers. We have to offer new campaigns and make some transformations for new customers, etc.

We have to save all the information, and while saving the information, we also interact the other systems, for example the National Identity System, through telecom systems, public switched telephone network (PSTN) systems.

We have to ask information and we need make some requests to the other systems. So, we need to use all the other systems in our CRM systems. And we also have internet protocol television (IPTV) products, value added services products, and the company products. But basically, we're using CRM systems for our development and for our systems.

So clearly, these are mission-critical applications essential to your business, your growth, and your ability to compete in your market.

If there is a mistake, a big error in our system, the next day, we cannot sell anything. We cannot do anything all over Turkey.

Let's talk a bit about the adoption of SV. What do you actually have in place so far?

Actually, it was very easy to adopt these products into our system, because including proof of concept (PoC), we could use this tool in six weeks. We spent first two weeks for the PoC and after four weeks, we managed to use the tool.

For the first six weeks, we could use SV for 45 percent of end-to-end test cases. In 10 weeks, 95 percent of our test cases could be run on SV. It was very easy to implement. After that, we also implemented two other SVs in our other systems. So, we're now using three SV systems. One is for development, one is just for the campaigns, and one is for the E2E tests.

HP Software helped us so much, especially R&D. HP Turkey helped us, because we were also using application lifecycle management (ALM) tools before SV. We were using QTP LoadRunners, Quality Center, etc, so we had a good relation with HP Software.

Since SV is a new tool, we needed a lot of customization for our needs, and HP Software was always with us. They were very quick to answer our questions and to return for our development needs. We managed to use the tool in six weeks, because of HP's Rapid Solutions.

Easy to implement

My understanding is that you have something on the order of 150 services. You use 50 regularly, but you're able to then spin up and use others on a more ad-hoc basis. Why is it important for you to have that kind of flexibility and agility?

We virtualized more than 150 services, but we use 48 of them actively. We use these portions of the service because we virtualized our third-party infrastructures for our needs. For example, we virtualized all the other CRM systems, but we don't need all of them. In gateway remote, you can simulate all the other web services totally. So, we virtualized all the web services, but we use just what we need in our test cases.

In three months, we got the investment back actually, maybe shorter than three months. It could have been two and half months. For example, for the campaign test cases, we gained 100 percent of efficiency. Before HP, we could run just seven campaigns in a month, but after HP, we managed to run 14 campaigns in a month.

We gained 100 percent efficiency and three man months in this way, because three test engineers were working on campaigns like this. For another example, last month, we got the metrics and we saw that we had a total blockage for seven days, so that was 21 working days for March. We saved 33 percent of our manpower with SV and there are 20 test engineers working on it. We gained 140 man months last month.

For our basic test scenarios, we could run all test cases in 112 hours. After SV, we managed to run it in 54 hours. So we gained 100 percent efficiency in that area and also managed to do automation for the campaign test cases. We managed to automate 52 percent of our campaign test cases, and this meant a very big efficiency for us. Totally, we saved more than $50,000 per month.

Broader applications

Do you expect now to be able to take this to a larger set of applications across Trk Telekom?

Yes. Trk Telekom licenses these tools and started to use these tools in their test service to get this efficiency for those systems. We have a branch company called AVEA, and they also want to use this tool. After our getting this efficiency, many companies want to use this virtualization. Eight companies visited us in Turkey to get our experiences on this tool. Many companies want this and want to use this tool in their test systems.

Do you have any advice for other organizations like those you've been describing, now that you have done this? Any recommendations on what you would advise others that might help them improve on how they do it?

Companies must know their needs first. For example, in our company, we have three blockage systems for third parties and the other systems don't change every day. So it was easy to implement SV in our systems and virtualize the other systems. We don't need to do virtualization day by day, because the other systems don't change every day.

Once a month, we consult and change our systems, update our web services on SV, and this is enough for us. But if the other party's systems changes day by day or frequently, it may be difficult to do virtualization every day.

This is an important point. Companies should think automation besides virtualization. This is also a very efficient aspect, so this must be also considered while making virtualization.

We started to use UFT with integrating SV. As I told you, we managed to automate 52 percent of our campaign test cases so far. So we would like to go on and try to automate more test cases, our end-to-end test cases, the basic scenarios, and other systems.

Our first goal is doing more automation with SV and UFT, and the other is using SV in development sites. We plan to find early defects in development sites and getting more quality products into the test.

Rapid deployment

Of course, in this way, we get rapid deployment and we make shorter release times because the product will have more quality. Using performance test and SV also helps us on performance. We use HP LoadRunner for our performance test cases. We have three goals now, and the last one is using SV with integrating LoadRunner.

Well, it's really impressive. It sounds as if you put in place the technologies that will allow you to move very rapidly, to even a larger payback. So congratulations on that. Gain more insights and information on the best of IT Performance Management at www.hp.com/go/discoverperformance. And you can always access this and other episodes in our HP Discover performance podcast series on iTunes under BriefingsDirect.

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

Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of this and other BriefingsDirect podcasts.

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Fast to their rescue, the suppliers of development tools and testing systems are tripping over each other to appeal to enterprises and vendors in this new game. And, as in the past with other deployment advances, we're seeing a major philosophical split between the "nativists" (running directly on the device hardware) and the "virtualizers" (with their scripting and interpretive layers and containers).

First, the nativists. Embarcadero Technologies, with its RAD Studio and former Borland CodeGear assets, is not surprisingly catering to its skills base — the hard core developers at home in Delphi and C++Builder, as well as C and Objective-C. Embarcadero therefore today delivered RAD Studio XE4, with an attractive offer to those seeking native (what Embarcadero calls "multi-device, true native") apps development, but across most mobile devices from a singular code base and a single core skills set. RAD Studio XE4 has a single application framework for iOS, Windows, and Mac OSX, with support for Android coming soon.

Embarcadero RAD Studio XE4 allows developers to gain more control over the development lifecycle and deliver apps with tighter security, a better user experience, lightning quick performance, and a small footprint. Those that want to target iOS devices, as well as OSX and Windows PCs, can write once and run anywhere, so to speak, says Embarcadero. The key is FireMonkey, a cross-platform GUI framework developed by Embarcadero to provide Delphi and C++Builders with a single framework. This is the same lineage of the graphical language tools that sprung from native (fat) PC development.

But native development for mobile (see PCs) isn't the only game in town, nor the only way to seek the "run anywhere" nirvana. The other approaches to the mobile and cross-platform development complexity problem are more aligned with open source, HTML5, and scripting, all with roots in the web.

And so last month HP threw it's weight from the IT management perspective behind "a hybrid approach" for mobile. HP Anywhere, as HP calls it, aids in the distributing and consuming of IT management information to mobile devices. But this may well be a model for far broader enterprise-to-mobile process alignment.

Especially where BYOD is the goal, the hybrid approach works best, says Genefa Murphy, Director of Mobile Product Management and User Experience at HP Software. [Disclosure: Both Embarcadero and HP are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Under this "virtualizers" vision, the HP Anywhere server connects IT management systems to the HP Anywhere Client on Android or iOS devices, forming the basic client app or container on the end-point devices. Then so-called Mini-Apps are downloadable to that container to provide the access and interface to specific IT management tasks or modules.

Two best ends

These two examples of mobile enablement to me represent the two best ends of the enterprise mobile needs spectrum. And chances are, enterprises are going to need both, especially for existing applications and processes. For example, the Embarcadero approach can swiftly take existing full-client applications and deliver them to the needed mobile tier devices with strong performance and security, and no need to rewrite for each client and OS, said John Thomas (JT), Director of Product Management at Embarcadero.

For more on my views of how cloud, mobile and enterprise IT intersect, see my two-part interview on the Gathering Clouds blog.

The question yet to be answered is what combination of native, scripting, or hybrid container-type models will fit best for entirely new "mobile first" applications. This is a work in progress, and will also vary greatly from company to company, based on a maze of variables for each. Look for a lot more blogs on that greenfield apps trend in the future.

For now, however, a lot of the pain for IT in going mobile is in getting existing PC applications via code reuse — as well as business processes on back-end systems — out to where they can be used . . . on the modern mobile landscape and in the hands of newly empowered mobile users. Incidentally, the new Embarcadero tools and framework allows .NET apps to be driven out to iOS devices in a pretty snappy fashion. That's assuming, of course, Windows CE won't be your preferred client environment after all. You know who you are.

Currently, RAD Studio XE4 delivers multi-device development for ARM and Intel devices, including Apple iPhone, iPod Touch, iPad, Mac OSX, Windows PCs, Slates, and Surface Pro tablets, said JT. And RAD Studio XE4 allows developers to take advantage of the full range of capabilities available on each of those devices to deliver the best user experience, he added. The full Android support should come mid-year.

The Embarcadero tools allow developers or designers to also quickly create no-code, visual mockups with live or simulated data and deploy to actual target devices (like PCs, phones, or tablets), or simulate on Windows or Mac, so that the requirements and app role can be best defined and tuned.

RAD Studio XE4 is available immediately. To download a free trial, visit http://www.embarcadero.com/products/rad-studio/downloads. Pricing starts at $1,799. Delphi and C++Builder pricing starts at $149 for Starter edition and $999 and up for full commercial development licenses. Upgrade discounts are available for users of recent earlier versions. An introductory 10 percent discount is available on most RAD Studio XE4 family products through May 22.

As for HP Anywhere, it manages the cross-platform device client issue using HMTL5 and Javascipt, and we'll be seeing a lot of that too from many "virtualizers." HP also boats RAD via an emulator that allows quick switching between device views. HP is taking its HP Anywhere story to both the test and QA people as well as developers as they seek ways to bring more business functions to the mobile enterprise worker corps.

You may also be interested in:

• Cloud, mobile bringin new value to Agile development methods, even in bite-sized chunks
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• New HP application transformation offerings help enterprises tackle growing use of mobile computing and social media
• Multi-device tool architecture from Embarcadero primes pump for accelerated enterprise mobile development for 2013
• Android gaining as enterprises ramp up mobile app development across platforms and business models

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

A data dichotomy has changed the face of information management, bringing with it huge new data challenges for businesses to solve.

The dichotomy means that organizations, both large and small, not only need to manage all of their internal data to provide intelligence about their businesses, they need to manage the growing reams of increasingly external big data that enables them to discover new customers and drive new revenue.

The latest BriefingsDirect software how-to discussion then focuses on bringing far higher levels of automation and precision to the task of solving such varied data complexity. By embracing an agnostic, end-to-end tool chain approach to overall data and information management, businesses are both solving complexity and managing data better as a lifecycle.

To gain more insights on where the information management market has been and where it's going, we are joined by Matt Wolken, Executive Director and General Manager for Information Management at Dell Software. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Dell Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What are the biggest challenges that businesses need to solve now when it comes to data and information management?

Wolken: About 10 or 15 years ago, the problem was that data was sitting in individual databases around the company, either in a database on the backside of an application, the customer relationship management (CRM) application, the enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, or in data marts around the company. The challenge was how to bring all this together to create a single cohesive view of the company?

What we're seeing now is that there are many complexities that have been added to that situation over time. We have different vendor silos with different technologies in them. We have different data types, as the technology industry overall has learned to capture new and different types of data -- textual data, semi-structured data, and data warehouse. All of the data was moved to it, and you then queried that larger data warehouse where all of the data was for a complete answer about your company.

The other thing that we notice is that a lot of data isn't on premise any more. It's not even owned by the company. It's at your software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider for CRM, your SaaS provider for ERP, or your travel or human resources (HR) provider. So data again becomes siloed, not only by vendor and data type, but also by location. This is the complexity of today, as we notice it.

Cohesive view

All of this data is spread about, and the challenge becomes how do you understand and otherwise consume that data or create a cohesive view of your company? Then there is still the additional social data in the form of Twitter or Facebook information that you wouldn't have had in prior years. And it's that environment, and the complexity that comes with it, that we really would like to help customers solve.

Gardner: When it comes to this so-called data dichotomy, is it oversimplified to say it's internal and external, or is there perhaps a better way to categorize these larger sets that organizations need to deal with?

Wolken: There's been a critical change in the way companies go about using data. There are some people who want to use data for an outcome-based result. This is generally what I would call the line-of-business concern, where the challenge with data is how do I derive more revenue out of the data source that I am looking at.

What's the business benefit for me examining this data? Is there a new segment I can codify and therefore market to? Is there a campaign that's currently running that is not getting a good response rate, and if so, do I want to switch to another campaign or otherwise improve it midstream to drive more real value in terms of revenue to the company?

That’s the more modern aspect of it. All of the prior activities inside business intelligence (BI) -- let’s flip those words around and say intelligence about the business -- was really internally focused. How do I get sanctioned data off of approved systems to understand the official company point of view in terms of operations?

That second goal is not a bad goal. That's still a goal that's needed, and IT is still required to create that sanctioned data, that master data, and the approved, official sources of data. But there is this other piece of data, this other outcome that's being warranted by the line of business, which is, how do I go out and use data to derive a better outcome for my business? That's more operationally revenue-oriented, whereas the internal operations are around cost orientation and operations.

So where you get executive dashboards for internal consumption off of BI or intelligence for the business, the business units themselves are about visualization, exploration, and understanding and driving new insights.

It's a change in both focus and direction. It sometimes ends up in a conflict between the groups, but it doesn't really have to be that way. At least, we don't think it does. That's something that we try to help people through: How do you get the sanctioned data you need, but also bring in this third-party data and unstructured data and add nuance to what you are seeing about your company.

Gardner: Do traditional technology offerings allow this dichotomy to be joined, or do we need a different way to create these insights across both internal and external information?

Wolken: There are certainly ways to get to anything. But if you're still amending program after program or technology after technology, you end up with something less than the best path, and there might be new and better ways of doing things.

Agnostic tool chain

There are lots of ways to take a data warehouse forward in today's environment, manipulate other forms of data so it can enter a data warehouse or relational data warehouse, and/or go the other way and put everything into an unstructured environment, but there's also another way to approach things, and that’s with an agnostic tool chain.

Tools have existed in the traditional sense for a long time. Generally, a tool is utilized to hide complexity and all of the issues underneath the tool itself. The tool has intelligence to comprehend all of the challenges below it, but it really abstracts that from the user.

We think that instead of buying three or four database types, a structured database, something that can handle text, a solution that handles semi-structured or structured, or even a high performance analytical engine for that matter, what if the tool chain abstracts much of that complexity? This means the tools that you use every day can comprehend any database type, data structure type, or any vendor changes or nuances between platforms.

That's the strategy we’re pursuing at Dell. We’re defining a set of tools -- not the underlying technologies or proliferation of technologies -- but the tools themselves, so that the day-to-day operations are hidden from the complexity of those underlying sources of vendor, data type, and location.

That's how we really came at it -- from a tool-chain perspective, as opposed to deploying additional technologies. We’re looking to enable customers to leverage those technologies for a smoother, more efficient, and more effective operation.

Let's just take data integration as a point. I can sometimes go after certain siloed data integration products. I can go after a data product that goes after cloud resources. I can get a data product that only goes after relational. I can get another data product to extract or load into Hive or Hadoop. But what if I had one that could do all of that? Rather than buying separate ones for the separate use cases, what if you just had one?

Gardner: What are the stakes here? What do you get if you do this right?

Institutional knowledge

Wolken: There are a couple of ways we think about it, one of which is institutional knowledge. Previously, if you brought in a new tool into your environment to examine a new database type, you would probably hire a person from the outside, because you needed to find that skill set already in the market in order to make you productive on day one.

Instead of applying somebody who knows the organization, the data, the functions of the business, you would probably hire the new person from the outside. That's generally retooling your organization.

Or, if you switch vendors, that causes a shift as well. One primary vendor stack is probably a knowledge and domain of one of your employees, and if you switch to another vendor stack or require another vendor stack in your environment, you're probably going to have to retool yet again and find new resources. So that's one aspect of human knowledge and intelligence about the business.

There is a value to sharing. It's a lot harder to share across vendor environments and data environments if the tools can't bridge them. In that case, you have to have third-party ways to bridge those gaps between the tools. If you have sharing that occurs natively in the tool, then you don't have to cross that bridge, you don't have the delay, and you don't have the complexity to get there.

So there is a methodology within the way you run the environment and the way employees collaborate that is also accelerated. We also think that training is something that can benefit from this agnostic approach.

But also, generically, if you're using the same tools, then things like master data management (MDM) challenges become more comprehensive, if the tool chain understands where that MDM is coming from, and so on.

You also codify how and where resources are shared. So if you have a person who has to provision data for an analyst, and they are using one tool to reach to relational data, another to reach into another type of data, or a third-party tool to reach into properties and SaaS environments, then you have an ineffective process.

You're reaching across domains and you're not as effective as you would be if you could do that all with one tool chain.

So those are some of the high-level ideas. That's why we think there's value there. If you go back to what would have existed maybe 10 or 15 years ago, you had one set of staff who used one set of tools to go back against all relational data. It was a construct that worked well then. We just think it needs to be updated to account for the variance within the nuances that have come to the fore as the technology has progressed and brought about new types of technology and databases.

Gardner: What are typically some of the business paybacks, and do they outweigh the cost?

Investment cycles

Wolken: It all depends on how you go about it. There are lots of stories about people who go on these long investment cycles into some massive information management strategy change without feeling like they got anything out of it, or at least were productive or paid back the fee.

There's a different strategy that we think can be more effective for organizations, which is to pursue smaller, bite-size chunks of objective action that you know will deliver some concrete benefit to the company. So rather than doing large schemes, start with smaller projects and pursue them one at a time incrementally -- projects that last a week and then you have 52 projects that you know derive a certain value in a given time period.

Other things we encourage organizations to do deal directly with how you can use data to increase competitiveness. For starters, can you see nuances in the data? Is there a tool that gives you the capability to see something you couldn't see before? So that's more of an analytical or discovery capability.

There's also a capability to just manage a given data type. If I can see the data, I can take advantage of it. If I can operate that way, I can take advantage of it.

Another thing to think about is what I would call a feedback mechanism, or the time or duration of observation to action. In this case, I'll talk about social sentiment for a moment. If you can create systems that can listen to how your brand is being talked about, how your product is being talked about in the environment of social commentary, then the feedback that you're getting can occur in real time, as the comments are being posted.

Now, you might think you'll get that anyway. I would have gotten a letter from a customer two weeks from now in the postal system that provided me that same feedback. That’s true, but sometimes that two weeks can be a real benefit.

Imagine a marketing campaign that's currently running in the East, with a companion program in the West that's slightly different. Let's say it's a two-week program. It would be nice if, during the first week, you could be listening to social media and find out that the campaign in the West is not performing as well as the one in the East, and then change your investment thesis around the program -- cancel the one that's not performing well and double down on the one that's performing well.

There's a feedback mechanism increase that also can then benefit from handling data in a modern way or using more modern resources to get that feedback. When I say modern resources, generally that's pointing towards unstructured data types or textual data types. Again, if you can comprehend and understand those within your overall information management status, you now also have a feedback mechanism that should increase your responsiveness and therefore make your business more competitive as well.

Gardner: Given that these payoffs could be so substantial, what's between companies and the feedback benefits?

It's the complexity

Wolken: I think it's complexity of the environment. If you only had relational systems inside your company previously, now you have to go out and understand all of the various systems you can buy, qualify those systems, get pure feedback, have some proofs of concept (POCs) in development, come in and set all these systems up, and that just takes a little bit of time. So the more complexity you invite into your environment, the more challenges you have to deal with.

After that, you have to operate and run it every day. That's the part where we think the tool chain can help. But as far as understanding the environment, having someone who can help you walk through the choices and solutions and come up with one that is best suited to your needs, that’s where we think we can come in as a vendor and add lots of value.

When we go in as a vendor, we look at the customer environment as it was, compare that to what it is today, and work to figure out where the best areas of collaboration can be, where tools can add the most value, and then figure out how and where can we add the most benefit to the user.

What systems are effective? What systems collaborate well? That's something that we have tried to emulate, at least in the tool space. How do you get to an answer? How do you drive there? Those are the questions we’re focused on helping customers answers.

For example, if you've never had a data warehouse before, and you are in that stage, then creating your first one is kind of daunting, both from a price perspective, as well as complexity perspective or know-how. The same thing can occur on really any aspect -- textual data, unstructured data, or social sentiment.

Each one of those can appear daunting if you don't have a skill set, or don't have somebody walking you through that process who has done it before. Otherwise, it's trying to put your hands on every bit of data and consume what you can and learning through that process.

Those are some of the things that are really challenging, especially if you're a smaller firm that has a limited number of staff and there's this new demand from the line of business, because they want to go off in a different direction and have more understanding that they couldn't get out of existing systems.

How do you go out and attain that knowledge without duplicating the team, finding new vendor tools, and adding complexity to your environment, maybe even adding additional data sources, and therefore more data-storage requirements. Those are some of the major challenges -- complexity, cost, knowledge, and know-how.

Gardner: Why are mid-market organizations now more able to avail themselves of some of these values and benefits than in the past?

Mid-market skills

Wolken: As the products are well-known, there is more trained staff that understands the more common technologies. There are more codified ways of doing things that a business can take advantage of, because there's a large skill set, and most of the employees may already have that skill set as you bring them into the company.

There are also some advantages just in the way technologies have advanced over the years. Storage used to be very expensive, and then it got a little cheaper. Then solid-state drives (SSD) came along and then that got cheaper as well. There are some price point advantages in the coming years, as well.

Dell overall has maintained the status that we started with when Michael Dell started recreating PCs in his dorm room from standard product components to bring the price down. That model of making technology attainable to larger numbers of people has continued throughout Dell’s history, and we’re continuing it now with our information management software business.

We’re constantly thinking about how we can reduce cost and complexity for our customers. One example would be what we call Quickstart Data Warehouse. It was designed to democratize data to a lower price point, to bring the price and complexity down to a much lower space, so that more people can afford and have their first data warehouse.

We worked with our partner Microsoft, as well as Dell’s own engineering team, and then we qualified the box, the hardware, and the systems to work to the highest peak performance. Then, we scripted an upfront install mechanism that allows the process to be up and running in 45 minutes with little more than directing a couple of IP addresses. You plug the box in, and it comes up in 45 minutes, without you having to have knowledge about how to stand up, integrate, and qualify hardware and software together for an outcome we call a data warehouse.

Another thing we did was include Boomi, which is a connector to automatically go out and connect to the data sources that you have. It's the mechanism by which you bring data into it. And lastly, we included services, in case there were any other questions or problems you had to set it up.

If you have a limited staff, and if you have to go out and qualify new resources and things you don't understand, and then set them up and then actually run them, that’s a major challenge. We're trying to hit all of the steps, and the associated costs -- time and/or personnel costs – and remove them as much as we can.

It's one way vendors like Dell are moving to democratize business intelligence a little further, bring it to a lower price point than customers are accustomed too and making it more available to firms that either didn’t have that luxury of that expertise link sitting around the office, or who found that the price point was a little too high.

Gardner: You mentioned this concept of the tool chain several times -- being agnostic to the data type, holistic management, complete view, and then of course integrate it. What is it about the tool chain that accomplishes both a comprehensive value, but also allows it to be adopted on a fairly manageable path, rather than all at once?

Wolken: One of the things we find advantageous about entering the market at this point in time is that we're able to look at history, observe how other people have done things over time, and then invest in the market with the realization that maybe something has changed here and maybe a new approach is needed.

Different point of view

Whereas the industry has typically gone down the path of each new technology or advancement of technology requires a new tool, a new product, or a new technology solution, we’ve been able to stand back and see the need for a different approach. We just have a different point of view, which is that an agnostic tool chain can enable organizations to do more.

So when we look at database tools, as an example, we would want a tool that works against all database types, as opposed to one that works against only a single vendor or type of data.

The other thing that we look at is if you walk into an average company today, there are already a lot of things laying around the business. A lot of investment has already been made.

We wanted to be able to snap in and work with all of the existing tools. So, each of the tools that we’ve acquired, or have created inside the company, were made to step into an existing environment, recognize that there were other products already in the environment, and recognize that they probably came from a different vendor or work on a different data type.

That’s core to our strategy. We recognize that people were already facing complexity before we even came into the picture, so we’re focused on figuring out how we snap into what they already have in place, as opposed to a rip-and-replace strategy or a platform strategy that requires all of the components to be replaced or removed in order for the new platform to take its place.

What that means is tools should be agnostic, and they should be able to snap into an environment and work with other tools. Each one of the products in the tool chain we’ve assembled was designed from that point of view.

But beyond that, we’ve also assembled a tool chain in which the entirety of the chain delivers value as a whole. We think that every point where you have agnosticism or every point where you have a tool that can abstract that lower amount of complexity, you have savings.

You have a benefit, whether it’s cost savings, employee productivity, or efficiency, or the ability to keep sanctioned data and a set of tools and systems that comprehend it. The idea being that the entirety of the tool chain provides you with advantages above and beyond what the individual components bring.

Now, we're perfectly happy to help a customer at any point where they have difficultly and any point where our tools can help them, whether it's at the hardware layer, from the traditional Dell way, at the application layer, considering a data warehouse or otherwise, or at the tool layer. But we feel that as more and more of the portfolio – the tool chain – is consumed, more and more efficiency is enabled.

Gardner: It also sounds as if this sets you up for a data and information lifecycle benefits, not just on the business and BI benefits, but also on the IT benefits.

Wolken: One of the problems that you uncover is that there's a lot of data being replicated in a lot of places. One of the advantages that we've put together in the tool chain was to use virtualization as a capability, because you know where data came from and you know that it was sanctioned data. There's no reason to replicate that to disk in another location in the company, if you can just reach into that data source and pull that forward for a data analyst to utilize.

You can virtually represent that data to the user, without creating a new repository for that person. So you're saving on storage and replication costs. So if you’re looking for where is there efficiency in the lifecycle of data and how can you can cut some of those costs, that’s something that jumps right out.

Doing that, you also solve the problem of how to make sure that the data that was provisioned was sanctioned. By doing all of these things, by creating a virtual view, then providing that view back to the analyst, you're really solving multiple pieces of the puzzle at the same time. It really enables you to look at it from an information-management point of view.

One of the advantages

Gardner: How should enterprises and mid-market firms get started?

Wolken: Most companies aren’t just out there asking how they can get a new tool chain. That's not really the strategy most people are thinking about. What they are asking is how do I get to the next stage of being an intelligent company? How do I improve my maturity in business intelligence? How would I get from Excel spreadsheets without a data warehouse to a data warehouse and centralized intelligence or sanctioned data?

Each one of these challenges come from a point of view of, how do I improve my environment based upon the goals and needs that I am facing? How do I grow up as a company and get to be more of a data-based company?

Somebody else might be faced with more specific challenges, such a line of business is now asking me for Twitter data, and we have no systems or comprehension to understand that. That's really the point where you ask, what's going to be my strategy as I grow and otherwise improve my business intelligence environment, which is morphing every year for most customers.

That's the way that most people would start, with an existing problem and an objective or a goal inside the company. Generically, over time, the approach to answering it has been you buy a new technology from a new vendor who has a new silo, and you create a new data mart or data warehouse. But this is perpetuating the idea that technology will solve the problem. You end up with more technologies, more vendor tools, more staff, and more replicated data. We think this approach has become dated and inefficient.

But if, as an organization, you can comprehend that maybe there is some complexity that can be removed, while you're making an investment, then you free yourself to start thinking about how you can build a new architecture along the way. It's about incremental improvement as well as tangible improvement for each and every step of the information management process.

So rather than asking somebody to re-architect and rip and replace their tool chain or the way they manage the information lifecycle, I would say you sort of lean into it in a way.

If you're really after a performance metric and you feel like there is a performance issue in an environment, at Dell we have a number of resources that actually benchmark and understand the performance and where bottlenecks are in systems.

Sometimes there’s an issue occurring inside the database environment. Sometimes it's at the integration layer, because integration isn’t happening as well as you think. Sometimes it's at the data warehouse layer, because of the way the data model was set up. Whatever the case, we think there is value in understanding the earlier parts of the chain, because if they’re not performing well, the latter parts of the chain can’t perform either.

And so at each step, we've looked at how you ensure the performance of the data. How do you ensure the performance of the integration environment? How do you ensure the performance of the data warehouse as well? We think if each component of the tool chain in working as well as it should be, then that’s when you enable the entirety of your solution implementation to truly deliver value.

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

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Available in consumer basic, consumer pro, and enterprise editions, nCrypted Cloud encrypts information stored on popular cloud services such as Dropbox, Google Drive, and Microsoft's SkyDrive. The software is as simple to use as the services it works with, according to Nick Stamos, the CEO and co-founder of nCrypted Cloud, while offering the robustness and controls that enterprise IT departments need.

Stamos said nCrypted Cloud's security privacy protections fill a glaring gap in cloud storage services today.

"The promise of the cloud is 'put everything in the cloud and it will be available' — but that's the problem as well as the promise," said Stamos, who is also principal and founder of the Stamos Group.

Popular cloud-based storage services lack the security and privacy that enterprises require, yet employees are using them anyway. With the rise of BYOD and mobility, users want access to files anytime, from anywhere. This leaves enterprise IT departments searching for a way to protect corporate information stored in the cloud.

In a related development, last month, we reported on OwnCloud Inc and its release of the latest version of the ownCloud Community Edition with a number of usability, performance, and integration enhancements. The ownCloud file sync and share software, deployed on-premises, not only offers users greater control, but also allows organizations to integrate existing security, storage, monitoring, and reporting tools.

Mobile data management solutions have proven to be too restrictive and inflexible, said Stamos, while trying to implement corporate policies that prohibit employees from storing and accessing personal and corporate data from a mobile device is unreasonable. Enterprise IT needs a solution that users won't attempt to work around, but will embrace, he said.

"We allow users to apply privacy controls to personal data, as well as corporate data, so that if an employee parts ways with a company, he can revoke access to that personal data from a corporate device, and vice versa," explained Stamos. "That makes it a value proposition that users feel comfortable with." Meanwhile, enterprise security policies can be used to govern work files and allow for revocation of access if needed.

Enhance, not replace

One key distinction about nCrypted Cloud is that it works with existing cloud-storage services, instead of replacing them.

"We provide the same sort of native user experience ... so it's not disruptive [to] end users. The last thing the world needed was a new storage provider," said Stamos. "What people need is to be able to use the Dropbox they love ... in the context of it being more secure by just being able to make folders private or share them securely. They can continue to have their data where it is and how it's organized without being disruptive in any way, shape, or form."

nCrypted Cloud's persistent client-side encryption ensures that data isn't exposed and the software offers comprehensive key-management features to facilitate administration. When a user accesses corporate files from any device, their predefined access policies and sharing status is verified and keys for their user ID are sent to the device.

That client caches keys for offline access to files, and keys can be removed if the access policies change. Users can easily access and share files in different cloud-based storage services and have a single-pane view of cloud and corporate file repositories.

The consumer basic version of nCrypted Cloud is available for free. The consumer pro version costs $5 per month and includes managed secure sharing, some file auditing, and the capability to manage files stored in different cloud services. The enterprise edition — which enters beta testing next week — will be priced at $10 per month. It includes all of the capabilities of the consumer pro version, as well as enhancements such as multiple identities, centralized provisioning, and policy control, and a full audit trail of 30-day archives.

Downloads and more information are available at www.ncryptedcloud.com.

(BriefingsDirect contributor Cara Garretson provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached on LinkedIn.)

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With special attention devoted to enterprise transformation, speakers and a variety of sessions will place the transformation in the context of vertical industries such as finance, defense, exploration, mining, and minerals.

As a prelude to the event, BriefingsDirect recently interviewed two of the main speakers at the conference — Hugh Evans, the chief executive officer of Enterprise Architects, a specialist enterprise architecture (EA) firm based in Melbourne, Australia; and Craig Martin, chief operations officer and chief architect at Enterprise Architects.

As some background, Hugh Evans is both the founder and CEO at Enterprise Architects. His professional experience blends design and business, having started out in traditional architecture, computer games design, and digital media, before moving into enterprise IT and business transformation.

In 1999, Evans founded the IT Strategy Architecture Forum, which included chief architects from most of the top 20 companies in Australia. He has also helped found the Australian Architecture Body of Knowledge and the London Architecture Leadership Forum in the UK.

Since starting Enterprise Architects in 2002, Evans has grown the team to more than 100 people, with offices in Australia, the UK, and the US.

With a career spanning more than 20 years, Craig Martin has held executive positions in the communications, high tech, media, entertainment, and government markets, and has operated as an Enterprise Architect and Chief Consulting Architect for a while.

In 2012, Martin became COO of Enterprise Architects to improve the global scalability of the organization, but he is also a key thought leader for strategy and architecture practices for all their clients, and also across the EA field.

Martin has been a strong advocate of finding differentiation in businesses through identifying new mixes of business capabilities in those organizations. He advises that companies that do not optimize how they reassemble their capabilities will struggle, and he also believes that business decision-making should be driven by economic lifecycles.

The interview was conducted by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Below are some excerpts.

What are some of the big problems that businesses are facing that architecture-level solutions can benefit?

Evans: I'll start with the trend in the industry around fast-paced change and disruptive innovation. You'll find that many organizations, many industries, at the moment in the US, Australia, and around the world are struggling with the challenges of how to reinvent themselves with an increasing number of interesting and innovative business models coming through.

For many organizations, this means that they need to wrap their arms around an understanding of their current business activities and what options they've got to leverage their strategic advantages.

We're seeing business architecture as a tool for business model innovation, and on the other side, we're also seeing business architecture as a tool that's being used to better manage risk, compliance, security, and new technology trends around things like cloud, big data, and so on.

Martin: Yes, there is a strong drive within the industry to try and reduce complexity. As organizations are growing, the business stakeholders are confronted with a large amount of information, especially within the architecture space. We're seeing that they're struggling with this complexity and have to make accurate and efficient business decisions on all this information.

What we are seeing, and based upon what Hugh has already discussed, is that some of those industry drivers are around disruptive business models. For example, we're seeing it with the likes of higher education, the utility space, and financial services space, which are the dominant three.

There is a lot of change occurring in those spaces, and businesses are looking for ways to make them more agile to adapt to that change, and looking towards disciplined architecture and the business-architecture discipline to try and help them in that process.

Is there anything about the past 10 or 15 years in business practices that have led now to this need for a greater emphasis on that strategic architectural level of thinking?

Martin: A lot has to do with basically building blocks. We've seen a journey that's traveled within the architecture disciplines specifically. We call it the commodification of the business, and we've seen that maturity in the IT space. A lot of processes that used to be innovative in our business are now becoming fairly utility and core to the business.

In any Tier 1 organization, a lot of the processes that used to differentiate them are now freely available in a number of vendor platforms, and any of their competitors can acquire those.

Looking for differentiation

So they are looking for that differentiation, the ability to be able to differentiate themselves from their competitors, and away from that sort of utility space. That's a shift that's beginning to occur. Because a lot of those IT aspects have become industrialized, that's also moving up into the business space.

In other words, how can we now take complex mysteries in the business space and codify them? Or, how can we create building blocks for them, so that organizations now can actually effectively work with those building blocks and string them together in different ways to solve more complex business problems?

Evans: EA is now around 30 years old, but the rise in EA has really come from the need for IT systems to interoperate and to create common standards and common understanding within an organization for how an IT estate is going to come together and deliver the right type of business value.

Through the '90s, we saw the proliferation of technologies as a result of the extension of distributed computing models and the emergence of the internet. We've seen now the ubiquity of the internet and technology across business. The same sort of concepts that ring true in technology architecture extend out into the business, around how the business interoperates with its components.

The need to change very fast for business, which is occurring now in the current economy, with the entrepreneurship and the innovation going on, is seeing this type of thinking come to the fore. This type of thinking enables organizations to change more rapidly. The architecture itself won't make the organization change rapidly, but it will provide the appropriate references and enable people to have the right conversations to make that happen.

Business architecture, as well as strategic architecture, is still quite a nascent capability for organizations, and many organizations are really still trying to get a grip on this. The general rule is that organizations don't manage this so well at the moment, but organizations are looking to improving in this area, because of the obvious, even heuristic, payoffs that you get from being better organized.

You end up spending less money, because you're a more efficient organization, and you end up delivering better value to customers, because you're a more effective organization. This efficiency and effectiveness need within organizations is worth the price of investment in this area.

The actual tangible benefits that we're seeing across our customers includes reduced cost of their IT estate.

Meeting profiles

You have improved security and improved compliance, because organizations can see where their capabilities are meeting the various risk and compliance profiles, and you are also seeing organizations bring products to market quicker.

The ability to move through the product management process, bring products to market more rapidly, and respond to customer need more rapidly puts organizations in front and makes them more competitive.

The sorts of industries we're seeing acting in this area would include the postal industry, where they are moving from a traditional mail- to parcels, which is a result of a move towards online retailing. You're also seeing it in the telco sector and you're seeing it in the banking and finance sector.

In the banking and finance sector, we've also seen a lot of this investment driven by the merger and acquisition (M&A) activity that's come out of the financial crisis in various countries where we operate. These organizations are getting real value from understanding where the enterprise boundaries are, how they bring the business together, how they better integrate the organizations and acquisitions, and how they better divest.

Martin: We're seeing, especially at the strategic level, that the architecture discipline is able to give business decision makers a view into different strategic scenarios.

For example, where a number of environmental factors and market pressures would have been inputs into a discussion around how to change a business, we're also seeing business decision makers getting a lot of value from running those scenarios through an actual hypothesis of the business model.

For example, they could be considering four or five different strategic scenarios, and what we are seeing is that, using the architecture discipline, it's showing them effectively what those scenarios look like as they cascade through the business. It's showing the impact on capabilities, on people and the approaches and technologies, and the impact on capital expenditures (CAPEX) and operational expenditures (OPEX).

Those views of each of those strategic scenarios allows them to basically pull the trigger on the better strategic scenario to pursue, before they've invested all of their efforts and all that analysis to possibly get to the point where it wasn't the right decision in the first place. So that might be referred to as sort of the strategic enablement piece.

We're also seeing a lot of value for organizations within the portfolio space. We traditionally get questions like, "I have 180 projects out there. Am I doing the right things? Are those the right 180 projects, and are they going to help me achieve the types of CAPEX and OPEX reductions that I am looking for?"

With the architecture discipline, you don't take a portfolio lens into what's occurring within the business. You take an architectural lens, and you're able to give executives an overview of exactly where the spend is occurring. You give them an overview of where the duplication is occurring, and where the loss of cohesion is occurring.

Common problems

A common problem we find, when we go into do these types of gigs, is the amount of duplication occurring across a number of projects. In a worst-case scenario, 75 percent of the projects are all trying to do the same thing, on the same capability, with the same processes.

So there's a reduction of complexity and the production of efforts that's occurring across the organizations to try and bring it and get it into more synergistic sessions.

We're also seeing a lot of value occurring up at the customer experience space. That is really taking a strong look at this customer experience view, which is less around all of the underlying building blocks and capabilities of an organization and looking more at what sort of experiences we want to give our customer? What type of product offerings must we assemble, and what underlying building blocks of the organization must be assembled to enable those offerings and those value propositions?

That sort of traceability through the cycle gives you a view of what levers you must pull to optimize your customer experience. Organizations are seeing a lot of value there and that's basically increasing their effectiveness in the market and having a direct impact on their market share.

And that's something that we see time and time again, regardless of what the driver was behind the investment in the architecture project, seeing the team interact and build a coalition for action and for change. That's the most impressive thing that we get to see.

One of the things that's puzzling to me, when I go to these Open Group Conferences, is to better understand the relationship between business architecture and IT architecture and where they converge and where they differ. Perhaps you could offer some insights and maybe tease out what some discussion points for that would be at the conference?

Martin: That's actually quite a hot topic. In general, the architecture discipline has grown from the IT space, and that's a good progression for it to take, because we're seeing the fruits of that discipline in how they industrialize IT components.

We're seeing the fruits of that in complex enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, the modularization of those ERP systems, their ability to be customized, and adapt to businesses. It's a fairly mature space, and the natural progression of that is to apply those same thinking patterns back up into the business space.

In order for this to work effectively well, when somebody asks a question like that, we normally respond with a "depends" statement. We have in this organization a thing called the mandate curve, and it relates to what the mandate is within the business. What is the organization looking to solve?

Are they looking to build an HR management system? Are they looking to gain efficiencies from an enterprise-wide ERP solution? Are they looking to reduce the value chain losses that they're having on a monthly basis? Are they looking to improve customer experience across a group of companies? Or are they looking to improve shareholder value across the organization for an M&A, or maybe reduce cost-to-income.

Problem spaces

Those are some of the problem spaces, and we often get into that mind space to ask, "Those are the problems that you are solving, but what mandate is given to architecture to solve them?" We often find that the mandate for the IT architecture space is sitting beneath the CIO, and the CIO tends to use business architecture as a communication tool with business. In other words, to understand business better, to begin to apply architecture rigor to the business process.

Evans: It's interesting, Dana. I spent a lot of time last year in the UK, working with the team across a number of business-architecture requirements. We were building business-architecture teams. We were also delivering some projects, where the initial investigation was a business-architecture piece, and we also ran some executive roundtables in the UK.

One thing that struck me in that investigation was the separation that existed in the business-architecture community from the traditional enterprise and technology architecture or IT architecture communities in those organizations that we were dealing with.

One insurance company, in particular, that was building a business-architecture team was looking for people that didn't necessarily have an architecture background, but possibly could apply that insight. They were looking for deep business domain knowledge inside the various aspects of the insurance organization that they were looking to cover.

So to your question about the relationship between business architecture and IT architecture, where they converge and how they differ, it's our view that business architecture is a subset of the broader EA picture and that these are actually integrated and unified disciplines.

However, in practice you'll find that there is often quite a separation between these two groups. I think that the major reason for that is that the drivers that are actually creating the investment for business architecture are actually now from coming outside of IT, and to some extent, IT is replicating that investment to build the engagement capability to engage with business so that they can have a more strategic discussion, rather than just take orders from the business.

I think that over this year, we're going to see more convergence between these two groups, and that's certainly something that we are looking to foster in EA.

I just came back from The Open Group Conference in California a few weeks ago, where the topic was focused largely on big data, but analysis was certainly a big part of that. Now, business analysis and business analysts, I suppose, are also part of this ecosystem. Are they subsets of the business architect? How do you see the role of business analysts now fitting into this, given the importance of data and the ability for organizations to manage data with new efficiency and scale?

Martin: Once again, that's also a hot topic. There is a convergence occurring, and we see that across the landscape, when it comes to the number of frameworks and standards that people certify on. Ultimately, it comes to this knife-edge point, in which we need to interact with the business stakeholder and we need to elicit requirements from that stakeholder and be able to model them successfully.

The business-analysis community is slightly more mature in this particular space. They have, for example, the Business Analysis Body of Knowledge (BABOK). Within that space, they leverage a competency model, which in effect goes through a cycle, from an entry level BA, right up to what they refer to as the generalist BA, which is where they see the start of the business-architecture role.

Career path

There's a career path from a traditional business analyst role, which is around requirements solicitation and requirements management, which seems to be quite project focused. In other words, dropping down onto project environments, understanding stakeholder needs and requirements, and modeling those and documenting them, helping the IT teams model the data flows, the data structures but with a specific link into the business space.

As you move up that curve, you get into the business-architecture space, which is a broader structural view around how all the building blocks fit together. In other words, it's a far broader view than what the business analyst traditional part would take, and looks at a number of different domains. The business architect tends to focus a lot on, as you mentioned, the information space, and we see a difference between the information and the data space.

So the business architect is looking at performance, market-related aspects, and  customer, information, as well as the business processes and functional aspects of an organization.

You can see that the business analysts could almost be seen as the soldiers of these types of functions. In other words, they're the guys that are in the trenches seeing what's working on a day-to-day basis. They've got a number of tools that they're equipped with, which for example the BABOK has given them.

And there are all different ways and techniques that they are using to elicit those requirements from various business stakeholders, until they move out that curve up into the business architecture and strategic architecture space.

Craig, in your presentation at The Open Group Conference in Sydney, what do you hope to accomplish?

Martin: How do I build cohesion in an organization? How do I look at different types of scenarios that I can execute against? What are the better ways to assemble all the efforts in my organization to achieve those outcomes? That's taking us through a variety of examples that will be quite visual. 

We'll also be addressing the specific role of where we see the career path and the complementary nature of the business analyst and business architect, as they travel through the cycle of trying to operate at a strategic level and as a strategic enabler within the organization.

How do you often find that enterprises get beyond the inertia and into this discussion about architecture and about the strategic benefits of it?

Martin: We often have two market segments, where a Tier 1 type company would want to build the capability themselves. So there's a journey that we need to take them on around how to have a business-architecture capability while delivering the actual outcomes?

Tier 2 and Tier 3 clients often don't necessarily want to build that type of capability, so we would focus directly on the outcomes. And those outcomes start with two views. Traditionally, we're seeing the view driven almost on a bottom-up view, as the sponsors of these types of exercises try to get credibility within the organization.

That relates to helping the clients build what we refer to as the utility of the business-architecture space. Our teams go in and, in effect, build a bunch of what we refer to as anchor models to try and get a consistent representation of the business and a consistent language occurring across the entire enterprise, not just within a specific project.

And that gives them a common language they can talk about, for example, common capabilities and common outcomes that they're looking to achieve. In other words, it's not just a bunch of building blocks, but the actual outcome of each of those building blocks and how does it match something like a business-motivation model.

They also look within each of those building blocks to see what the resources are that creates each of those building blocks — things like people, process and tools. How do we mix those resources in the right way to achieve those types of outcomes that the business is looking for? Normally, the first path that we go through is to try to get that sort of consistent language occurring within an organization.

As an organization matures, that artifact starts to lose its value, and we then find that, because it has created a consistent language in the organization, you can now overlay a variety of different types of views to give business people insights. Ultimately, they don't necessarily want all these models, but they actually want insight into their organizations to enable them to make decisions.

We can overlay objectives, current project spend, CAPEX, and OPEX. We can overlay where duplication is occurring, where overspend is occurring, where there's conflict occurring at a global scale around duplication of efforts, and with the impact of costs and reduction and efficiencies, all of those types of questions can be answered by merely overlaying a variety of views across this common language.

Elevating the value

That starts to elevate the value of these types of artifacts, and we start to see our business sponsors walking into meetings with all of these overlays on them, and having conversations between them and their colleagues, specifically around the insights that are drawn from these artifacts. We want the architecture to tell the story, not necessarily lengthy PowerPoint presentations, but as people are looking at these types of artifacts, they are actually seeing all the insights that come specifically from it.

The third and final part is often around the business getting to a level of maturity, in that they're starting to use these types of artifacts and then are looking for different ways that they can now mix and assemble. That's normally a sign of a mature organization and the business-architecture practice.

They have the building blocks. They've seen the value or the types of insights that they can provide. Are there different ways that I can string together my capabilities to achieve different outcomes? Maybe I have got different critical success factors that I am looking to achieve. Maybe there are new shift or new pressures coming in from the environment.

How can I assemble the underlying structures of my organization to better cope with it? That's the third phase that we take customers through, once they get to that level of maturity.

Evans: I agree with Craig on the point that, if you show the business what can actually be delivered such as views on a page that elicit the right types of discussions and that demonstrate the issues, when they see what they're going to get delivered, typically the eyes light up and they say, "I want one of those things".

The thing with architecture that I have noticed over the years is that architecture is done by a lot of very intelligent people, who have great insights and great understanding, but it's not just enough to know the answer. You have to know how to engage somebody with the material. So when the architecture content that's coming through is engaging, clear, understandable, and can be consumed by a variety of stakeholders, they go: "That's what I want. I want one of those".

So my advice to somebody who is going down this path is that if they want to get support and sponsorship for this sort of thing, make sure they get some good examples of what gets delivered when it's done well, as that's a great way to actually get people behind it.

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

Disclaimer: The above interviews (podcasts) were sponsored by The Open Group.

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In part one of a two-part sponsored interview series, we discuss how a mid-market health services provider rapidly adopted server and client virtualization, and how that quickly led to the ability to move to mobile, bring your own device (BYOD), and ultimately advanced disaster recovery (DR) benefits.

Associated Surgeons and Physicians found the right prescription for allowing users to designate and benefit from their own device choices, while also gaining an ability to better manage sensitive data and to create a data-protection lifecycle approach.

Here to share his story on how they did it, we welcome, Ray Todich, Systems Administrator at Associated Surgeons and Physicians. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Below are some excerpts.

When I go to the physician's office, I see how they've gotten so efficient at moving patients in and out, the scheduling is amazing. Every minute is accounted for. Downtime is just very detrimental and backs up everything. This critical notion of time management is so paramount.

Oh, it's absolutely massive. If we have a snag somewhere, or even if our systems are running slow, then everything else runs slow. The ability that virtualization gives us is the core or heart of the entire infrastructure of the business. Without an efficient heart, blood doesn't move, and we have a bigger problem on our hands.

So over the past 10 or 15 years, as you pointed out, technology has just become so much more important to how a health provider operates, how they communicate to the rest of the world in terms of supplies, as well as insurance companies and payers, and so forth. Tell me a little bit about Associated Surgeons and Physicians. How big is the organization, what do you do, how have they been growing?

Pretty rapidly. Associated Surgeons and Physicians is a group of multi-specialty physicians and practices in Northeast Indiana and Northwest Ohio.

It began at the practice level, and then it really expanded. We're up to, I think, 14 additional locations and/or practices that have joined. We're also using an electronic medical record (EMR) application, given to us by Greenway, and that's a big one that comes in.

We're growing exponentially. It went from one or two satellite practices that needed to piggyback Greenway, to probably 13 or 14 of them, and this is only the beginning. With that type of growth rate, you have to concern yourself with the amount of money it costs to serve everybody. If you have one physical server that goes out, you affect hundreds of users and thousands of patients, doctors, and whatnot. It's a big problem, and that's where virtualization came in strong.

How about this in terms of the size of the organization? How many seats are you accommodating in terms of client, and then what is it about an IT approach to an organization such as yours that also makes virtualization a good fit?

Right now, we have somewhere around 300 employees. As far as how many clients this overall organization has, it's thousands. We have lots of people who utilize the organization. The reality is that the IT staff here is used in a minimalist approach, which is one thing that I saw as well when I was coming into this.

One or even two persons to manage that many servers can be a nightmare, and, on top of that, you try to do your best to help all the users. If you have 300-plus people and their desktops, printers, and so forth, so the overall infrastructure can be pretty intimidating, when you don't have a lot of people managing it.

Going virtual was a lifesaver. Everything is virtualized. You have a handful of physical ESX hosts that are managing anything, and everything is stored on centralized storage. It makes it considerably efficient as an IT administrator to utilize virtualization.

That's actually how we went into the adoption of VMware View, because of 300-plus users, and 300-plus desktops. At that point, it can be very hairy. At times, you have to try and divine what the right answer is. You have this important scenario going on, and you have this one and another one, and how do you manage them all. It becomes easier, when you virtualize everything, because you can get to everything very easily and cover everyone's desktops.

The right answer

What attracted you, at the beginning, to go to much higher total levels of server — and then client — virtualization?

When I first started here, the company was entirely physical. And as background, I came from a couple of companies that utilized virtualization at very high levels. So I'm very aware of the benefits, as far as administration, and the benefits of overall redundancy and activities — the software and hardware used to allow high performance, high availability, access to people's data, and still allow security be put in place.

When I came in, it looked like something you might have seen maybe 15 years ago. There were a lot of older technologies in place. The company had a lot of external drives hanging off the servers for backups, and so on.

My first thing to implement was server virtualization, which at the time was the vSphere 4.1 package. I explained to them what it meant to have centralized storage, what it meant to have ESX host, and how creating virtual machines (VMs) would benefit them considerably over having physical servers in the infrastructure.

I gave them an idea on how nice it is to have alternate redundancy configured correctly, which is very important. When hardware drops out, RAID configuration goes south, or the entire server goes out, you've just lost an entire application — or applications — which in turn gives downtime.

I helped them to see the benefits of going virtualized, and at that time, it was solely for the servers.

How long did it take you to go from being 100 percent physical to where you are now, basically 100 percent virtual?

We've been going at it for about about a year and a half. We had to build the infrastructure itself, but we had to migrate all our applications from physical to virtual (P2V). VMware does a wonderful job with its options for using P2V. It's a time saver as well. For anybody who has to deal with the one that's building the house itself, it can really be a help.

VMware, in itself, has the ability to reach out as far and wide as you want it to. It's really up to the people who are building it. It was very rapid, and it's so much quicker to build servers or desktops, once you get your infrastructure in place.

In the previous process of buying a server, in which you have to get it quoted out and make sure everything is good, do all the front-end sales stuff, and then you have to wait for the hardware to get here. Once it's here, you have to make sure it's all here, and then you have to put it all together and configure everything, so forth. Any administrator out there who's done this understands exactly what that's all about.

Then you have to configure and get it going, versus, "Oh, you need another server, here, right click, deploy from template", and within 10 minutes you have a new server. That, all by itself, is priceless.

Technology more important

And you have a double whammy here, because you're a mid-market-sized company and don't have a large, diversified IT staff to draw on. At the same time, you have branch offices and satellites, so you're distributed. To have people physically go to these places is just not practical. What is it about the distributed nature of your company that also makes virtualization and View 5.1 a good approach for a lean IT organization?

It helped us quite a bit, first and foremost, with the ability to give somebody a desktop, even if they were not physically connected to our network. That takes place a lot here.We have a lot of physicians who may be working inside of another hospital at the time.

Instead of them creating a VPN connection back into our organization, VMware View gave them the ability to have a client on their desktop, whether it be a PC, a MacBook, an iPod, an iPad, or whatever they have, even a phone, if they really want to go that route. They can connect anywhere, at anytime, as long as they have an Internet connection and they have the View client. So that was huge, absolutely huge.

They also have the ability to use PC over IP, versus RDP, That's very big for us as well. It keeps the efficiency and the speed of the machines moving. If you're in somebody else's hospital, you're bound to whatever network you are attached to there, so it really helps and it doesn't bother their stuff as much. All you're doing is borrowing their Internet and not anything else.

Tell me a bit more about your footprint. We've spoken about vSphere 4.1 and adopting along the path of 5.1. You even mentioned View. What else are you running there to support this impressive capabilities set?

We moved from vSphere 4.1 to 5.1, and going to VMware View. We use 5.1 there as well. We decided to utilize the networking and security vCloud Networking package, which at the time was a package called vShield. When we bought it, everything changed, nomenclature wise, and some of the products were dispersed, which actually was more to our benefit. We're very excited about that.

As far as our VDI deployment, that gave us the ability to use vShield Endpoint, which takes your anti-virus and offloads it somewhere else on the network, so that your hosts are not burdened with virus scans and updates. That's a huge.

The word huge doesn't even represent how everybody feels about that going away. It's not going away physically, just going away to another workhorse on the network so that the physicians, medical assistants (MAs), and everybody else isn't burdened with, "Oh, look, it's updating," or "Look, it's scanning something." It's very efficient.

Network and security

You mentioned the networking part of this, which is crucial when you're going across boundaries and looking for those efficiencies. Tell me a bit more about how the vCloud networking and security issues have been impacted.

That was another big one for us. Along with that, the networking and security package comes a portion of the package called the vShield Edge, which will ultimately give us the ability to create our own DMZ the way that we want to create it, something that we don't have at this time. This is very important to us.

Utilizing the vShield Edge package was fantastic, and yet another layer of security as well. Not only do we have our physical hardware, our guardians at the gate, but we also have another layer, and the way that it works, wrapping itself around each individual ESX host, is absolutely beautiful. You manage it just like you manage firewalls. So it's very, very important.

Plus, some of the tools that we were going to utilize we felt most comfortable in, as far as security servers for the VDI package, that you want them sitting in a DMZ. So, all around, it really gave us quite a bit to work with, which we're very thankful for.

One of the things, of course, that's key in your field is compliance and there's a lot going on with things like HIPAA, documents, and making sure the electronic capabilities are there for payers and provided. Tell me a bit about compliance and what you've been able to achieve with these advancements in IT?

With compliance, we've really been able to up our security, which channels straight into HIPAA. Obviously, HIPAA is very concerned with people's data and keeping it private. So it's a lot easier to manage all our security in one location.

With VDI, it's been able to do the same. If we need to make any adjustments security wise, it's simply changing a golden image for our virtual desktop and then resetting everybody's desktops. It's absolutely beautiful, and the physicians are very excited about it. They seem to really get ahold of what we have done with the ability that we have now, versus the ability we had two years ago. It does wonders.

Upgrading to a virtual infrastructure has helped us considerably in maintaining and increasing meaningful use expectations, with the ability to be virtual and have the redundancy that gives, along with the fact that VMs seem to run a lot more efficiently virtually. We have better ways to collect data, a lot more uptime, and a lot more efficiency, so we can collect more data from our customers.

The more people come through, the more data is collected, the more uptime there is, the more there are no problems, which in turn has considerably helped meeting and exceeding the expectations of what's expected with meaningful use, which was a big deal.

Exceeding expectations

I've heard that term "meaningful use" elsewhere. What does that really mean? Is that just the designation that some regulatory organization has, or is that more of a stock-in-trade description?

My understanding of it, as an IT administrator, is basically the proper collection of people's data and keeping it safe. I know that it has a lot in with our EMR application, and what is collected when our customers interact with us.

Are there any milestones or achievements you've been able to make in terms of this adoption, such as behaviors and then the protection of the documents and privacy data that has perhaps moved you into a different category and allows you to move forward on some of these regulatory designations?

It's given us the ability to centralize all our data. You have one location, when it comes to backing up and restoring, versus a bunch of individual physical servers. So data retention and protection has really increased quite a bit as far as that goes.

Disaster recovery

How about DR?

With DR, I think there are a lot of businesses out there that hear that and don't necessarily take it that seriously, until disaster hits. It's probably the same thing with people and tornadoes. When they're not really around, you don't really care. When all of a sudden, a tornado is on top of your house, I bet you care then.

VMware gives you the ability to do DR on a variety of different levels, whether it's snapshotting, or using Site Recovery Manager, if you have a second datacenter location. It's just endless.

One of the most important topics that can be covered in an IT solution is about our data. What happens if it stops or what happens if we lose it? What can we do to get it back, and how fast, because once data stops flowing, money stops flowing as well, and nobody wants that.

It's important, especially if you're recording people's private health information. If you lose certain data that's very important, it's very damaging across the board. So to be able to retain our data safely is of the highest concern, and VMware allows us to do that.

Also, it's nice to have the ability to do snapshotting as well. Speaking of servers and whatnot, I'll have to lay it on that one, because in IT, everybody knows that software upgrades come. Sometimes, software upgrades don't go the way that they're supposed to, whether it's an EMR application, a time-saving application, or ultrasounds.

If you take a snapshot before the upgrade and run your upgrade on that snapshot, if everything goes great and everybody is satisfied. You can just merge the snapshot with the primary image and you are good to go.

If it doesn't work out in your favor, you have the ability to delete that snapshot and you're back to where you started from before the migration, which was hopefully a functioning state.

Let's look to the future a bit. It sounds as if with these capabilities and the way that you've been describing DR benefits, you can start to pick and choose datacenter locations, maybe even thinking about software-defined networking and datacenter. That then allows you to pick and choose a cloud provider or a hosting model. So are you thinking about being able to pick up and virtually move your entire infrastructure, based on what makes sense to your company over the next say five or 10 years.

That's exactly right, and the way this is growing, something that's been surfacing a lot in our neck of the woods is the ability to do hosting and provide cloud-based solutions, and VMware is our primary site on that as well.

But, if need be, if we had to migrate our datacenter from one state to another, we'll have the option to do that, which is very important, and it helps with uptime as well. Stuff happens. I mean, you can be at a datacenter physically and something happens to a generator that has all the power. All of a sudden, everybody is feeling the pain.

So with the ability to have the Site Recovery, it's priceless, because it just goes to location B and everybody is still up. You may see a blip or you may not, and nothing is lost. That leaves everybody to deal with the datacenter issue and everything is still up and going, which is very nice.

Creating redundancy

I imagine, too, Ray, that it works both ways. On one hand, you have a burgeoning ecosystem of cloud and hosting, of providers and options, that you can pursue, do your cost-benefit analysis, think about the right path, and create redundancy.

At the same time, you probably have physicians or individual, smaller physician practices, that might look to you and say, "Those guys are doing their IT really well. Why don't we just subscribe to their services or piggyback on their infrastructure?" Do you have any thoughts about becoming, in a sense, an IT services provider within the healthcare field? It expands your role and even increases your efficiency and revenues.

Yes, our sights are there. As a matter of fact, our heads are being turned in that direction without even trying to, because a lot of people are doing that. It's a lot easier for smaller practices, instead of buying all the infrastructure and putting it all in place to get everything up, and then maintaining it, we will house it for you. We'll do that.

Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.

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

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Based on an open-source project of the same name, the ownCloud file sync and share software, deployed on-premises, not only offers users greater control, but also allows organizations to integrate existing security, storage, monitoring, and reporting tools, while still taking advantage of the software's simplicity and flexibility.

File sync and share services like Dropbox, Google Docs, and Box have revolutionized the way users share information. These cloud-based services make it easy to share files with clean interfaces and seemingly endless amounts of storage. However, not everyone wants to turn over their information to a service provider — for those who prefer to control how and where their data is stored, there's ownCloud.

OwnCloud comes in a free, community edition, and the company will launch a commercially supported enterprise edition of the software in the second quarter. That version will target enterprise IT departments in need of on-premises file sync and share for sensitive corporate data. The company estimated that it has more than 750,000 users worldwide today.

In the latest offering, the user interface has been streamlined, so that the main web navigation panel is now clearly differentiated from in-app navigations, said Markus Rex, CEO of ownCloud. And the way in which the software's settings are laid out have been revamped, making it easier to distinguish personal settings from app-specific settings, he said.

"We've completely revamped the design with a much simplified interface so you can differentiate the navigation elements and focus on what you want to work with, instead of distracting from that," said Rex.

New features

This version of ownCloud also features a Deleted Files app that lets users restore accidentally deleted files and folders, and improved app management, so that third-party apps can be easily installed from the central apps repository and automatically removed from the server, if disabled. Also included is a new search engine that lets users find files stored by both name and by content, thanks to the Lucene-based full text search engine app, and a new antivirus feature courtesy of Clam AV scans uploaded files for malware. This release also includes improved contacts, calendar, and bookmarks, said Rex.

Performance benefits in this release come from improved file cache and faster syncing of the desktop client, according to company officials. Externally mounted file systems such as Google Drive, Dropbox, and FTP can be scanned on demand and in the background to increase performance. And hybrid clouds can be created by mixing and matching storage, thanks to file system abstraction that offers more flexibility and greater performance.

"You can get to the data in all of your data silos from one spot on a mobile client or desktop client, so you can get to files you might not be able to access otherwise from those devices," said Rex.

This release features improved integration with LDAP and Active Directory and an enhanced external storage app to boost performance of integrated secondary storage, including Dropbox, Swift, FTP, Google Docs, Amazon S3, WebDAV, and external ownCloud servers.

BriefingsDirect contributor Cara Garretson provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached on LinkedIn.

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Having delivered many talks on business architecture over the years, I'm often struck by the common vision driving many members in the audience — a vision of building cohesion in a business, achieving the right balance between competing forces, and bringing the business strategy and operations into harmony. However, as with many ambitious visions, the challenge in this case is immense. As I will explain, many of the people who envision this future state of nirvana are, in practice, inadvertently preventing it from happening.

Standards silos

There are a host of standards and disciplines that are brought into play by enterprises to improve business performance and capabilities. For example, standards such as PRINCE2, BABOK, BIZBOK, TOGAF, COBIT, ITIL, and PMBOK are designed to ensure reliability of team output and approach across various business activities. However, in many instances these standards, operating together, present important gaps and overlaps. One wonders whose job it is to integrate and unify these standards. Whose job is it to understand the business requirements, business processes, drivers, capabilities, and so on?

Apples to apples?

As these standards evolve, they often introduce new jargon to support their view of the world. Have you ever had to ask your business to explain what they do on a single page? The diversity of the views and models can be quite astonishing:

• The target operating model

• The business model

• The process model

• The capability model

• The value chain model

• The functional model

• The business services model

• The component business model

• The business reference model

• The business anchor model

The list goes on and on.

Each has a purpose and brings value in isolation. However, in the common scenario where they are developed using differing tools, methods, frameworks and techniques, the result is usually greater fragmentation, not more cohesion — and consequently, we can end up with some very confused and exacerbated business stakeholders who care less about what standard we use and more about finding clarity to just get the job done.

The convergence of business architecture and business analysis

Ask a room filled with business analysts and business architects how their jobs differ and relate, and I guarantee that you would receive a multitude of alternative and sometimes conflicting perspectives.

Both of these disciplines try to develop standardized methods and frameworks for the description of the building blocks of an organization. They also seek to standardize the means by which to string them together to create better outcomes.

In other words, they are the disciplines that seek to create balance between two important business goals:

• To produce consistent, predictable outcomes

• To produce outcomes that meet desired objectives

In his book, The Design of Business: Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage, Roger Martin describes the relationships and trade-offs between analytical thinking and intuitive thinking in business. He refers to the "knowledge funnel", which charts the movement of business focus from solving business mysteries using heuristics to creating algorithms that increase reliability, reducing business complexity and costs and improving business performance.

The disciplines of business architecture and business analysis are both currently seeking to address this challenge. Martin refers to this as "design thinking".

(Click here to see an illustration that further explains these concepts.)

Vision vs. reality for business analysts and business architects

When examining the competency models for business analysis and business architecture, the desire is to position these two disciplines right across the spectrum of reliability and validity.

The reality is that both the business architect and the business analyst spend a large portion of their time in the reliability space, and I believe I've found the reason why.

Both the BABOK and the BIZBOK provide a body of knowledge focused predominantly around the reliability space. In other words, they look at how we define the building blocks of an organization, and less so at how we invent better building blocks within the organization.

Integrating the disciplines

While we still have some way to go to integrate, the business architecture and business analysis disciplines are currently bringing great value to business through greater reliability and repeatability.

However, there is a significant opportunity to enable the intuitive thinkers to look at the bigger picture and identify opportunities to innovate their business models, their go-to-market, their product and service offerings, and their operations.

Perhaps we might consider introducing a new function to bridge and unify the disciplines? This newly created function might integrate a number of incumbent roles and functions, and cover:

• A holistic structural view covering the business model, and the high-level relationships and interactions between all business systems

• A market model view in which the focus is on understanding the market dynamics, segments, and customer need

• A products and services model view focusing on customer experience, value proposition, product and service mix, and customer value

• An operating model view — this is the current focus area of the business architect and business analyst. You need these building blocks defined in a reliable, repeatable, and manageable structure. This enables agility within the organization, and will support the assembly and mixing of building blocks to improve customer experience and value.

At the end of the day, what matters most is not business analysis or business architecture themselves, but how the business will bridge the reliability and validity spectrum to reliably produce desired business outcomes.

I will discuss this topic in more detail at The Open Group Conference in Sydney, April 15-18, which will be the first Open Group event to be held in Australia.

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We'll hear how Achmea rearchitected its IT operations to both be more responsive to users and more manageable by the business, all based on clear metrics.

Here to explore these and other enterprise IT performance issues, we're joined by our co-host for this sponsored podcast, Georg Bock, director of the customer success group at HP Software, and he's based in Germany.

And we also welcome our special guest, Richard Aarnink, leader in the IT Management Domain at Achmea in the Netherlands, to explain how they've succeeded in making IT better governed and agile — even to attain enterprise resource planning (ERP) for IT benefits.

Here are some excerpts:

Why is running IT more like a business important? Why does this make sense now?

Aarnink: Over the last year, whenever a customer asked us questions, we delivered what he asked. We came to the conclusion that delivery of every request that we got was an intensive process for which we created projects.

It was very difficult to make sure that it was not a one-time hero effect, but that we could deliver to the customer what he asked every time, on scope, on specs, on budget, and on time. We looked at it and said, "Well, it is actually like running a normal business, and therefore why should we be different? We should be predictive as well."

Trend in the market

Georg Bock, is this something you are seeing more and more of in the field?

Bock: Yes, we definitely see this as a trend in the market, specifically with the customers that are a little more mature in their top-down strategic thinking. Let's face it, running IT like a business is an end-to-end process that requires quite a bit of change across the organization -- not only technology, but also process and organization. Everyone has to work hand in hand to be, at the end of the day, predictable and repeatable in what they're doing, as Richard just explained.

That's a huge change for most organizations. However, when it's being done and when it has lived in the organization, there's a huge payback. It is not an easy thing to undertake but it's inevitable, specifically when we look at the new trends around cloud multi-sourcing, mobility, etc., which brings new complexity to IT.

You'd better have your bread and butter business under control before moving into those areas. That's why also the timing right now is very important and top of people's minds.

Tell us a bit about Achmea, the size of your organization, and why IT is so fundamentally important to you.

Aarnink: Achmea is a large insurance provider in the Netherlands. We have around eight million customers in the Netherlands with 17,000 employees. We're a very old and cooperative organization, and we have had lots and lots of mergers and acquisitions in the last 20 years. So we had various sets of IT departments from all the other companies that we centralized over the past years.

If you look at insurance, it's actually having the trust that whenever something happens to a customer, he can rely on the insurer to help him out, and usually this means providing money. IT is necessary to ensure that we can deliver on those promises that we made to our customers. So it's a tangible service that we deliver, it's more like money, and it's all about IT.

Of the 17,000 employees that we have in the Netherlands, about 1,800-2,000 employees work in the centralized IT department. Over the last year, we changed our target operating model to centralize the technologies in competence centers, as we call them, in the department that we call Solution Development.

We created a new department, IT Operations, and we created business-relationship departments that were merged with the business units that were asking or demanding functionality from our IT department. We changed our entire operating model to cope with that, but we still have a lot of homegrown applications that we have to deliver on a daily basis.

Changing the department and the organizational structure is one thing, and now we need to change the content and the applications we deliver.

Strategy and governance

How has all this allowed you to better manage all the aspects of IT, and make it align with the business?

Aarnink: To answer that question I need to elaborate a little bit on the strategy and governance department, which is actually within the IT department. What we centralized there were project portfolio and project steering, and also the architectural capabilities.

We make sure that whatever solution we deliver is architectured from a single model that we manage centrally. That's a real benefit that we gained in centralizing this and making sure that we can -- from both the architecture and project perspectives -- govern the projects that we're going to deliver to our business units.

Bock: Achmea is a leader in that, and the structure that Richard described is inevitable to be successful. ERP for IT, or running IT as a business, the fundamental IT processes, is all about standardization, repeatability, and predictability, especially in situations where you have mergers and acquisitions. It's always a disruption if you have to bring different IT departments together. If you have a standard that's easy to replicate, that's a no-brainer and winner from a business bottom-line perspective.

In order to achieve that, you have to have a team that has a horizontal unit and that can drive the standardization of the company. Richard and Achmea are not alone in that. Richard and I have quite a number of discussions with other companies from other industries, and we very much see that everyone has the same problem, and given those horizontal teams, primary enterprise architecture, chief technology officer (CTO) office, or whatever you like to call those departments, is definitely a trend in the industry and for those mature customers that want to take that perspective and drive it forward that way.

But as I said, it's all about standardization. It's not rocket science from an intellectual perspective, but we have to cut through the political difficulties of driving the adoptions across the different organizations in the company.

What sort of problems or issues did you need to resolve as you worked to change things for the better?

Aarnink: We looked at the entire scope of implementing ERP for IT and first we looked at the IT projects and the portfolio. We looked at that and found out that we still had several departments running their own solutions in managing IT projects and also budgets. In the past, we had a mechanism of only controlling the budget for the different business units, but no centralized view on the IT portfolio, as a whole, for Achmea.

We started in that area, looking at one system of record for IT projects and portfolio management, so we could steer what we wanted to develop and what we wanted to sunset.

Next, we looked at application portfolio management and tried to look at the set of applications that we want to currently use and want to use in the future and the set of applications that we want to sunset in the next year and how that related to the IT project. So that was one big step that we made in the last two years. There's still a lot of work to be done in that area, but it was a big topic.

Service management

Aarnink: The second big topic was looking at service management. Due to all the mergers, we still had lots of variations on IT process. Incident management was covered in a whole different way, when you looked at several departments from the past.

We adopted service desks to cater to all those kind of deviations from the standard ITIL process. We looked at that and said that we had to centralize again and we had to make sure that we become more prescriptive in how these process will look and how we make sure that it's standardized.

That was the second area that we looked at. The third area was more on the application quality. How could we make sure that we got a better first-time-right score in delivering IT projects? How could we make sure that there is one system of record for requirements and one system of record for test results and defects. That's three areas that we invested in the first phase.

Lots of change going on

What have you have seen in the market that leads you to believe that ERP for IT is not a vision, but is, in fact, happening, and that we're starting to see tangible benefits?

Bock: Richard very much nicely described real, practical results, rather than coming up with a dogmatic, philosophical process in the first place. I think it's all about practical results and practical results need to be predictable and repeatable, otherwise it's always the one-time hero effort that Richard brought up in the beginning, and that's not scalable at all.

At some point you need process, but you shouldn't try that dogmatically. I also hear about the Agile versus the waterfall, whatever is applicable to the problem is the right thing to do. Does that rule out process? No, not at all. You have to live the process in a little different way.

Everyone has to get-away from their dogmatic position and look at it in a little more relaxed way. We shouldn't take our thoughts too seriously, but when we drive ERP for IT to apply some standard ways of doing things, we just make our life easier. It has nothing to do with esoteric vision, but it's something that is very achievable. It's about getting a couple of people to agree on practical ways of getting it done.

Then, we can draw the technological consequences from it, rather than the other way around. That's been the problem in IT from my perspective for years. Technology always came first and now we look for the nail that you can use that hammer for. That's not the right thing to do.

From my perspective, standardization is simply a necessary conclusion from some of the trial-and-error mistakes that have been made over the last 10-15 years, where people tried to customize the hell out of everything just to be in line with the specificity of how things are being done in their particular company. But nobody asked why it was that way.

I completely agree. We had several discussions about how the incident process is being carried out, and it's the same in every other company as well. Of course there are slight differences, but the fact is that an incident needs to be so resolved, and that's the same within every company.

Best practice

Aarnink: You can easily create a best practice for that, adopt it within your own company, and unburden yourself from thinking about how you should go for this process, reinvent it, creating your own tool sets, interfaces with external companies. That can all be centralized, it can all be standardized.

It's not our business to create our own IT tools. It's the business of delivering policy management systems for our core industry, which is insurance. We don't want all the IT that we need in order to just to keep the IT running. We want that standardized, so we can concentrate on delivering business value.

... getting more data, more insight, repeatability, analyzing processes, determining best processes and methods and then instantiating them, is at the core of ERP. But when we try to do that with IT, how do we measure, what is the data, and what do we analyze?

At Achmea, are you looking at key performance indicators (KPIs) and are using project portfolio management maturity models? How is it that you're measuring this so that you can, in fact, do what ERP does best, make it repeatable, make it standardized?

Aarnink: If you look from the budget perspective, we look at the budgets, the timeframes, and the scope of what we need to deliver and whether we deliver on time, on budget, and on specs, as I already said. So those are basically the KPIs that we're looking for when we deliver projects.

But also, if you look at the processes involved when you deliver a project, then you talk about requirements management. How quickly can you create a set of requirements and what is the reuse of requirements from the past. Those are the KPIs we're looking for in the specific processes when you deliver an IT project.

So the IT project is a vehicle helping you deliver the value that you need, and the processes underneath that actually do the work for you. At that level we try to standardize and we try to make KPIs in order to make sure that we use as much as possible, that we deliver quality, and we have the resources in place that we actually need to deliver those functionalities.

You need to look at small steps that can be taken in a couple of months' time. So draw up a roadmap and enable yourself to deliver value every, let's say 100 days. Make sure that every time you deliver functionality that's actually used, and you can look at your roadmap and adjust it, so you enable yourself to be agile in that way as well.

The biggest thing that you need to do is take small steps. The other thing is to look at your maturity. We did a CMMi test review. We didn't do the entire CMMi accreditation, but only looked at the areas that we needed to invest in.

Getting advice

Aarnink: We looked at where we had standardized already and the areas that we needed to look at first. That can help you prioritize. Then, of course, look at companies in your network that actually did some steps in this and make sure that you get advice from them as well.

Bock: I absolutely agree with what Richard said. If we're looking for some recipe for successes, you have to have a good balance of strategic goals and tactical steps towards that strategic goal. Those tactical step need to have a clear measure and a clear success criteria associated with them. Then you're on a good track.

I just want to come back to the notion of ERP for IT that you alluded to earlier, because that term can actually hurt the discussion quite a bit. If you think about ERP 20 years ago, it was a big animal. And we shouldn't look at IT nowadays in the same manner as ERP was looked at 20 years ago. We don't want to reinvent a big animal right now, but we have to have a strategic goal where we look at IT from an end-to-end perspective, and that's the analogy that we want to draw.

ERP is something that has always been looked as an end-to-end process, and having a clear, common context associated from an end-to-end perspective, which is not the case in IT today. We should learn from those analogies that we shouldn't try to implement ERP literally for IT, because that would take the whole thing in one step, where as Richard just said very nicely, you have to take it in digestible pieces, because we have to deal with a lot of technology there. You can't take that in one shot.

Listen to the podcast, find it on iTunes, read a full transcript, or download a copy. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.

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The adoption of UC and CC as a service (UCaaS and CCaaS) brings utility-based pricing to cloud-service providers (CSPs) so that they can offer varied and flexible packages to many types of clients. This creates new revenue streams for CSPs by allowing them to deliver app integrations, mobile collaboration, and multichannel customer service for their customers. And it allows buyers to only pay for the IP-based communications services they want and need.

This makes the burgeoning bring you own device (BYOD) trend easier for enterprises to manage because they can off-load more of the complexities of mobile and BYOD environments to their cloud and service providers, said Bruce MacVarish, director of cloud solutions at Avaya. The offerings enable CSPs to evolve and augment enterprise communications with cloud-based solutions, as well as provide greater interoperability across vendors, domains, and protocols, he said.

Santa Clara-based Avaya is carving out four delivery and distribution models for UCaaS and CCaaS: private cloud/on-premises stacks, managed services for service providers, hosted multi-tenancy services for channel players, and a full software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud capability powered by Avaya focused on the mid-market and smaller organization users.

The video services are more geared toward synchronous video interactions, and not hosted, asynchronous video serving, although Avaya offers both. Think of it as video conferencing as a service on demand, integratable into more mobile devices and therefore business processes.

Avaya's move, like with many evolving cloud models, forms a transition from CapEx to OpEx, utility-based pricing and consumption. It also offers ease and speed in adoption, and a single point of integration for value-added SPs and developers.

I expect to see more SaaS business apps providers and cloud-savvy enterprises integrate Avaya's and other UC services into their web, mobile, and cloud offerings. These would include such benefits as click-to-call, customer support interception points, and embedded video conferencing, brought directly into more business apps, services, and processes.

Hybrid deployments

It will be curious to see how the hybrid deployments of UCaaS and CCaaS are assimilated into other business cloud services as the market matures. Will enterprises and SPs alike seek to embed more UC functions, while themselves controlling the UC stack? Or will communications, like many other business services, be something they expect in any cloud stack? Or what combo of hosting will they prefer in which apps?

A lot of the noise around hybrid cloud fails to take the communications feature and their integration into account. Same for big data; shouldn't all the unstructured data in communications by part of any analytics mix? How to manage that?

Avaya is now in a controlled release of the solutions, and expects general availability in three to six months, said MacVarish.

Earlier this month, Avaya announced new security enhancements for enterprise collaboration.

In more detail, the new and expanded Avaya offerings for CSPs are:

• Avaya Cloud Enablement for Unified Communications and Customer Experience Management. Based on Avaya Aura, it allows flexible, utility-based, OpEx pricing for CSPs so they pay on actual customer usage. Avaya Control Manager enables centrally managed multi-tenancy

• Avaya Cloud Enablement for Video provides CSPs with a scalable platform and multi-tenancy that delivers interoperable, multi-vendor mobile video collaboration. Enhancements to the Elite Series MCUs, Scopia Mobile ,and Scopia Desktop extend BYOD videoconferencing across most endpoints

• Avaya Communications Outsourcing Solutions (COS) Express, a private cloud offering for up to 500-seat contact centers, can be hosted by Avaya, a CSP, or channel partners — either as Avaya or co-branded services.

Avaya Collaborative Cloud solutions also include Avaya Collaboration Pods, a portfolio of cloud-ready, turnkey solutions designed to simplify installation and operations of real-time applications; and the AvayaLive suite of public-cloud based communications and collaboration services.

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By Jason Bloomberg

Combine the supercharged cloud computing marketplace with the ubergeek cred of the open-source movement, and you’re bound to have some Mentos-in-Diet-Coke moments. Such is the case with today’s cloud service orchestration (CSO) platforms. At this moment in time, the leading CSO platform is OpenStack. Dozens of vendors and cloud service providers (CSPs) have piled on this effort, from Rackspace to HP to Dell, and most recently, IBM has announced that it's going all in as well. Fizzy to be sure, but all Coke, no Mentos.

Then there are CloudStack, Eucalyptus, and a few other OpenStack competitors. With all the momentum of OpenStack, it might seem that these open source alternatives are little more than also-rans, doomed to drop further and further behind the burgeoning leader. But there’s more to this story. This is no techie my-open-source-is-better-than-your-open-source battle of principle, of interest only to the cognoscenti. On the contrary: Big players are now involved, and they’re placing increasingly large bets. 

Understanding the CSO Marketplace

Look around the infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) market. Notice that elephant in the corner? That’s Amazon Web Services (AWS). The IaaS market simply doesn’t make sense unless you realize that AWS essentially invented IaaS. And by invented, I mean actually got it to work. Which if you think about it, is rather atypical for most technology vendors. Your average software vendor will identify a new market opportunity, take some old stuff it has been struggling to sell, give it a nice new coat of PowerPoint, and shoehorn it into the new market. If customers bite, then the vendor will devote resources into making the product actually do what it’s supposed to do. Eventually. We hope.

But AWS is different. Amazon.com is an online reseller, not a software vendor. It thinks more like Wal-Mart than IBM. It figured out elasticity at scale, added customer self-service, and christened it IaaS. Then it grew it exponentially, defining what cloud computing really means. Today, it leverages its market dominance and economies of scale to continually lower prices, squeezing competitors’ margins to nothing. It worked for Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, and it works for Wal-Mart. Now it’s working for Amazon.

But as with any market, there are always competitors looking to carve off a bit of opportunity for themselves. Given AWS’s dominance, however, there are two basic approaches to competing with Amazon: Do what AWS is doing but try to do it a bit better (say, with Rackspace’s promise of better customer service), or do something similar to AWS but different enough to interest some segment of the market (leading in particular to the enterprise public cloud space populated by the likes of Verizon Terremark and Savvis, to name a few).

And then there are the big vendors like HP and IBM, who not only offer a range of enterprise software products, but who also offer enterprise data center managed services and associated consulting. Such vendors want to play two sides of this market: they want to be public cloud providers in its own right, and also offer “turnkey” cloud gear to customers who want to build its own private clouds.

Enter OpenStack. Both of the aforementioned vendors as well as the smaller players realize that piecing together its own cloud offerings will never enable it to catch up to AWS. Instead, its joining forces to build out a common cloud infrastructure platform that supports the primary capabilities of IaaS (compute, storage, database, and network), as well as providing the infrastructure platform for platform-as-a-service (PaaS) and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) capabilities down the road. The open source model is perfect for such collaboration, as the Apache license allows contributors to take the shared codebase and build out whatever proprietary add-ons it likes.

Most challenging benefits

Perhaps the most touted, and yet most challenging benefits of the promised all-OpenStack world is the holy grail of workload portability. In theory, if you’re running your workloads on one OpenStack-based cloud, you should be able to move it lock, stock, and barrel to any other OpenStack-based cloud, even if it belongs to a different CSP. Workload portability is the key to cloud-based failover and disaster recovery, cloud bursting, and multi-cloud deployments. Today, workload portability requires a single proprietary platform, and only VMware offers such portability. AWS offers a measure of portability within its cloud, but will face challenges supporting portability between itself and other providers. As a result, if OpenStack can get portability to work properly, participating CSPs will have a competitive lever against Amazon.

Achieving a strong competitive position against AWS with OpenStack is easier said than done, however. OpenStack is a work in progress, and many bits and pieces are still missing. Open source efforts take time to mature, and meanwhile, AWS keeps growing. In response, the players in this space are taking different tacks to build mature offerings that have a hope of carving off a viable chunk of the IaaS marketplace:

• Rackspace is trying to capitalize on its OpenStack leadership position and the aforementioned customer service to provide a viable alternative to AWS. It is also touting the workload portability benefits of OpenStack. But downward pricing pressure combined with the holes in OpenStack capabilities are pounding on Rackspace’s stock price.
• Faced with the demise of its traditional PC business, Dell is focusing on its Boomi B2B integration product, recently rechristened as cloud integration. Cloud integration is a critical enabler of hybrid clouds, but doesn’t address the workload portability challenge. As a result, Dell’s cloud marketing efforts are focused on the benefits of integration over portability. Dell’s recent acquisition of Quest Software also hints at a Microsoft application migration strategy for Dell Cloud.
• HP wants to rush its enterprise public cloud offering to market, and it doesn’t want to wait for OpenStack to mature. Instead, it’s hammering out its own version of OpenStack, essentially forking the OpenStack codebase to its own ends, according to Nnamdi Orakwue, vice president for Dell Cloud. Such a move may pay off for HP, but increases the risk that the HP add-ons to OpenStack will have quality issues.
• IBM recently announced that it is “all in” with OpenStack with the rollout of  IBM SmartCloud Orchestrator built on the platform.  But IBM has a problem: the rest of its SmartCloud suite isn’t built on OpenStack, leaving it to scramble to rewrite a number of existing products leveraging OpenStack’s incomplete codebase, while in the meantime, integrating the mishmash of SmartCloud components at the PowerPoint layer.
• Red Hat is making good progress hammering out what it considers an “enterprise” deployment of OpenStack. As perhaps the leading enterprise open source vendor, It is well-positioned to lead this segment of the market, but it still remains to be seen whether enterprise customers will want to  build all open source private clouds in the near term, as the products gradually mature. On the other hand, IBM has a history of leveraging Red Hat’s open source products, so an IBM/Red Hat partnership may move SmartCloud forward more quickly than IBM might be able to accomplish on its own. 

CSO Wild Card: CloudStack

There are several more players in this story, but one more warrants a discussion, Citrix. The desktop virtualization leader had been one face in the OpenStack crowd, but it suddenly decided to switch horses and take a contrarian strategy. It ditched OpenStack, took its 2011 Cloud.com acquisition and donated the code to CloudStack. Then it switched CloudStack’s licensing model from GNU (derivative products must be licensed under GNU) to Apache (OK to build proprietary offerings on top of the open source codebase), and subsequently passed the entire CloudStack effort along to the Apache Foundation, where it’s now in incubation.

There are far fewer players on the CloudStack team than OpenStack’s, and its core value proposition is quite similar to OpenStack, so on first glance, Citrix’s move raises eyebrows. After all, why bail on the market leader to join the underdog? But look more closely, and it seems that Citrix may be onto something.

First, Citrix’s open source cloud strategy is not all about CloudStack. It is also heavily invested in Xen. Xen is one of the two leading open source virtualization platforms, and provides the underpinnings to many commercial virtualization products on the market today. Citrix’s 2007 acquisition of XenSource positioned it as a Xen leader, and it has been driving development of the Xen codebase ever since.

Citrix’s heavy investment in Xen bucks the conventional virtualization wisdom: since Xen’s primary competitor, KVM (Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is distributed as part of standard Linux distros, KVM is the no-brainer choice for the virtualization component of open source CSOs. After all, it’s essentially part of Linux, so any CSP (save those focusing on Windows-centric IaaS) don’t have to lift a finger to build its offerings on KVM. Citrix, however, picked up on a critical fact: KVM is simply not as good as Xen. And now that Citrix has been pushing Xen to mature for half a dozen years, Xen is a far better choice for building turnkey cloud solutions than KVM. So Citrix combined Xen and CloudStack into a single cloud architecture it dubbed Windsor, which forms the basis of its CloudPlatform offering.

And therein lies the key to Citrix’s contrarian strategy: CloudPlatform is a turnkey cloud solution for customers who want to deploy private clouds – or as close to turnkey as today’s still nascent cloud market can offer. Citrix is passing on the opportunity to be its own CSP (at least for now), instead focusing on driving CloudStack and Xen maturity to the point that it can put together a complete cloud infrastructure software offering. In other words, it is focusing on a niche and giving it all it has.

The ZapThink Take

If this ZapFlash makes comprehending the IaaS marketplace look like herding cats, you’re right. AWS has gotten so big, so fast, and its products are so good, that everyone else is scrambling to put something together that will carve off a piece of what promises to be an immense market. But customers are holding the cards, because everyone knows how AWS works, which means that everyone knows how IaaS is supposed to work. If a vendor or CSP brings an offering to market that doesn’t compare with AWS on quality, functionality, or cost, then customers will steer clear, no matter how good the contenders’ PowerPoints are.

But as with feline wrangling, it’s anybody’s guess where this tabby or that calico is heading next. If anyone truly challenges Amazon’s dominance, who will it be? Rackspace? IBM? Dell? Or any of the dozens of other four-legged critters just looking for a warm spot in the sun? And then there’s the turnkey cloud solution angle. Today, building out your own private cloud is difficult, expensive, and fraught with peril. But if tomorrow brings simple, low cost, low risk private clouds to the enterprise, how will that impact the public CSP marketplace? You pays your money, you takes your chances. But today, the safe IaaS choice is AWS, unless you have a really good reason for selecting an alternative.

This BriefingsDirect guest post comes courtesy of Jason Bloomberg, president of ZapThink, a Dovel Technologies company.

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As IT aligns itself with business goals, Agile software development is increasingly enabling developers to better create applications that meet user needs quickly. And, now, the advent of increased mobile apps development is further accelerating the power of Agile methods.

Thought it’s been around for decades, Agile’s tenets of collaboration, incremental development, speed, and flexibility resonate with IT leaders who want developers to focus on working with users to develop the applications. This method stands in contrast to the more rigid and traditional process of collecting user requirements, taking months to create a complete application, and delivering the application to users with the hopes that it fits the bill and that requirements haven’t changed during the process.

"The business has alternatives, thanks to cloud -- all the services they could need are available with a credit card."

In fact, in today’s world, where business leaders can shop for the technology they need with any cloud or software-as-a-service (SaaS) provider they choose, IT must ensure enterprise applications are built collaboratively to meet needs, or lose out to the competition.

“In many cases today, the business has alternatives, thanks to cloud -- all the services they could need are available with a credit card,” says Raziel Tabib, Senior Product Manager of Application Lifecycle Management with HP Software . “IT has to work to be the preferred solution. If the IT department wants to maintain its position, it has to make the best tools to meet business needs. Developers have to get engaged with end users to ensure they are meeting those needs.” [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP Software recently released HP Agile Manager, a SaaS-based solution for planning and executing agile projects. And the division itself has embraced some of the principles of agile that have, for example, helped it to move from an 18-month release cycle to come up with product releases and refreshes every month, says Tabib.

Pick and choose

However, Agile is far from an all-or-nothing proposition, particularly for large organizations with developers distributed across the globe that may have a harder a time adopting certain agile work styles, he warns.

“We’re not saying any organization can just look at the agile manifesto and start tomorrow with scrum meetings and everything will work well,” Tabib says. “We have engineers in Israel, Prague, and Vietnam. While some agile practices are easy to pick up, others are really difficult to adopt, when you’re talking about organizations at that scale.”

That’s okay, he adds -- organizations should be encouraged to cherry pick the elements of agile that make sense to embrace, blend them with more traditional approaches to application development, and still reap benefits.

A report published in September of 2012 by Forrester Consulting on behalf of HP supports the idea that Agile is one of many disciplines that can be used to develop applications that meet users needs.

The report, entitled Agile Software Development and the Factors that Drive Success, surveyed 112 professionals regarding application development habits and success. It found that companies already successful in application development used Agile techniques to make them even better.

For example, respondents cited the Agile practice of limiting the amount of work in progress to reduce the impact of sudden business change meant that requirements didn’t grow stale while waiting for coding to begin -- but that their overall success was based on more than just implementing agile.

And it found respondents at companies that weren’t as successful with application development reported using aspects of agile. The upshot of the survey was that simply adopting agile did not ensure success. “Agile software development is one tool in a vast toolbox,” reads the report. “But a fool with a tool is still a fool.”

I think Agile will get even more of a boost in value as developers move toward a "mobile first" approach, which seems tightly coupled with fast, iterative apps improvement schedules.

One of the neat things about a mobile first orientation is that it forces long-overdue simplification and ease in use in apps. When new apps are designed for their mobile device deployment first, the dictates of the mobile constraints prevail.

Combine that with Agile, and the guiding principles of speed and keeping user requirements dominant help keep projects from derailing. Revisions and updates remain properly constrained. Mobile First discourages snowballing of big applications, instead encouraging releases of smaller, more manageable apps.

Mobile First design benefits combined with Agile methods can be well extended across SaaS, cloud, VDI, web, and even client-server applications.

(BriefingsDirect contributor Cara Garretson provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached on LinkedIn.)

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We recently assembled a panel of enterprise architecture (EA) experts to explain how such simultaneous and complex trends as big data, cloud computing, security, and overall IT transformation can be helped by the combined strengths of The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF®) and the ArchiMate® modeling language.

The panel consisted of Chris Forde, General Manager for Asia-Pacific and Vice President of Enterprise Architecture at The Open Group; Iver Band, Vice Chair of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Enterprise Architect at The Standard, a diversified financial services company; Mike Walker, Senior Enterprise Architecture Adviser and Strategist at HP and former Director of Enterprise Architecture at Dell; Henry Franken, the Chairman of The Open Group ArchiMate Forum and Managing Director at BIZZdesign, and Dave Hornford, Chairman of the Architecture Forum at The Open Group and Managing Partner at Conexiam. I served as the moderator.

This special BriefingsDirect thought leadership interview series comes to you in conjunction with The Open Group Conference recently held in Newport Beach, California. The conference focused on "big data -- he transformation we need to embrace today." [Disclosure: The Open Group and HP are sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Is there something about the role of the enterprise architect that is shifting?

Walker: There is less of a focus on the traditional things we come to think of EA such as standards, governance and policies, but rather into emerging areas such as the soft skills, business architecture, and strategy.

Walker

 

To this end I see a lot in the realm of working directly with the executive chain to understand the key value drivers for the company and rationalize where they want to go with their business. So we're moving into a business-transformation role in this practice.

At the same time, we've got to be mindful of the disruptive external technology forces coming in as well. EA can’t just divorce from the other aspects of architecture as well. So the role that enterprise architects play becomes more and more important and elevated in the organization.

Two examples of this disruptive technology that are being focused on at the conference are big data and cloud computing. Both are providing impacts to our businesses not because of some new business idea but because technology is available to enhance or provide new capabilities to our business. The EA’s still do have to understand these new technology innovations and determine how they will apply to the business.

We need to get really good enterprise architects, it’s difficult to find good ones. There is a shortage right now especially given that a lot of focus is being put on the EA department to really deliver sound architectures.

Not standalone

Gardner: We've been talking a lot here about big data, but usually that's not just a standalone topic. It's big data and cloud, cloud, mobile and security.

So with these overlapping and complex relationships among multiple trends, why is EA and things like the TOGAF framework and the ArchiMate modeling language especially useful?

Band: One of the things that has been clear for a while now is that people outside of IT don't necessarily have to go through the technology function to avail themselves of these technologies any more. Whether they ever had to is really a question as well.

Band

One of things that EA is doing, and especially in the practice that I work in, is using approaches like the ArchiMate modeling language to effect clear communication between the business, IT, partners and other stakeholders. That's what I do in my daily work, overseeing our major systems modernization efforts. I work with major partners, some of which are offshore.

I'm increasingly called upon to make sure that we have clear processes for making decisions and clear ways of visualizing the different choices in front of us. We can't always unilaterally dictate the choice, but we can make the conversation clearer by using frameworks like the TOGAF standard and the ArchiMate modeling language, which I use virtually every day in my work.

Hornford: The fundamental benefit of these tools is the organization realizing its capability and strategy. I just came from a session where a fellow quoted a Harvard study, which said that around a third of executives thought their company was good at executing on its strategy. He highlighted that this means that two-thirds are not good at executing on their strategy.

Hornford

If you're not good at executing on your strategy and you've got big data, mobile, consumerization of IT and cloud, where are you going? What's the correct approach? How does this fit into what you were trying to accomplish as an enterprise?

An enterprise architect that is doing their job is bringing together the strategy, goals and objectives of the organization. Also, its capabilities with the techniques that are available, whether it's offshoring, onshoring, cloud, or big data, so that the organization is able to move forward to where it needs to be, as opposed to where it's going to randomly walk to.

Forde: One of the things that has come out in several of the presentations is this kind of capability-based planning, a technique in EA to get their arms around this thing from a business-driver perspective. Just to polish what Dave said a little bit, it's connecting all of those things. We see enterprises talking about a capability-based view of things on that basis.

Gardner: Let's get a quick update. The TOGAF framework, where are we and what have been the highlights from this particular event?

Minor upgrade

Hornford: In the last year, we've published a minor upgrade for TOGAF version 9.1 which was based upon cleaning up consistency in the language in the TOGAF documentation. What we're working on right now is a significant new release, the next release of the TOGAF standard, which is dividing the TOGAF documentation to make it more consumable, more consistent and more useful for someone.

Today, the TOGAF standard has guidance on how to do something mixed into the framework of what you should be doing. We're peeling those apart. So with that peeled apart, we won't have guidance that is tied to classic application architecture in a world of cloud.

What we find when we have done work with the Banking Industry Architecture Network (BIAN) for banking architecture, Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture (SABSA) for security architecture, and the TeleManagement Forum, is that the concepts in the TOGAF framework work across industries and across trends. We need to move the guidance into a place so that we can be far nimbler on how to tie cloud with my current strategy, how to tie consumerization of IT with on-shoring?

Franken: The ArchiMate modeling language turned two last year, and the ArchiMate 1.0 standard is the language to model out the core of your EA. The ArchiMate 2.0 standard added two specifics to it to make it better aligned also to the process of EA.

Franken

According to the TOGAF standard, this is being able to model out the motivation, why you're doing EA, stakeholders and the goals that drive us. The second extension to the ArchiMate standard is being able to model out its planning and migration.

So with the core EA and these two extensions, together with the TOGAF standard process working, you have a good basis on getting EA to work in your organization.

Gardner: Mike, fill us in on some of your thoughts about the role of information architecture vis-à-vis the larger business architect and enterprise architect roles.

Walker: Information architecture is an interesting topic in that it hasn’t been getting a whole lot of attention until recently.

Information architecture is an aspect of enterprise architecture that enables an information strategy or business solution through the definition of the company's business information assets, their sources, structure, classification and associations that will prescribe the required application architecture and technical capabilities.

Information architecture is the bridge between the business architecture world and the application and technology architecture activities.

The reason I say that is because information architecture is a business-driven discipline that details the information strategy of the company. As we know, and from what we’ve heard at the conference keynotes like in the case of NASA, big data, and security presentations, the preservation and classification of that information is vital to understanding what your architecture should be.

Least matured

From an industry perspective, this is one of the least matured, as far as being incorporated into a formal discipline. The TOGAF standard actually has a phase dedicated to it in data architecture. Again, there are still lots of opportunities to grow and incorporate additional methods, models and tools by the enterprise information management discipline.

Enterprise information management not only it captures traditional topic areas like master data management (MDM), metadata and unstructured types of information architecture but also focusing on the information governance, and the architecture patterns and styles implemented in MDM, big data, etc. There is a great deal of opportunity there.

From the role of information architects, I’m seeing more and more traction in the industry as a whole. I've dealt with an entire group that’s focused on information architecture and building up an enterprise information management practice, so that we can take our top line business strategies and understand what architectures we need to put there.

This is a critical enabler for global companies, because oftentimes they're restricted by regulation, typically handled at a government or regional area. This means we have to understand that we build our architecture. So it's not about the application, but rather the data that it processes, moves, or transforms.

Gardner: Up until not too long ago, the conventional thinking was that applications generate data. Then you treat the data in some way so that it can be used, perhaps by other applications, but that the data was secondary to the application.

But there's some shift in that thinking now more toward the idea that the data is the application and that new applications are designed to actually expand on the data’s value and deliver it out to mobile tiers perhaps. Does that follow in your thinking that the data is actually more prominent as a resource perhaps on par with applications?

Walker: You're spot on, Dana. Before the commoditization of these technologies that resided on premises, we could get away with starting at the application layer and work our way back because we had access to the source code or hardware behind our firewalls. We could throw servers out, and we used to put the firewalls in front of the data to solve the problem with infrastructure. So we didn’t have to treat information as a first-class citizen. Times have changed, though.

Information access and processing is now democratized and it’s being pushed as the first point of presentment. A lot of times this is on a mobile device and even then it’s not the corporate’s mobile device, but your personal device. So how do you handle that data?

It's the same way with cloud, and I’ll give you a great example of this. I was working as an adviser for a company, and they were looking at their cloud strategy. They had made a big bet on one of the big infrastructures and cloud-service providers. They looked first at what the features and functions that that cloud provider could provide, and not necessarily the information requirements. There were two major issues that they ran into, and that was essentially a showstopper. They had to pull off that infrastructure.

The first one was that in that specific cloud provider’s terms of service around intellectual property (IP) ownership. Essentially, that company was forced to cut off their IP rights.

Big business

As you know, IP is a big business these days, and so that was a showstopper. It actually broke the core regulatory laws around being able to discover information.

So focusing on the applications to make sure it meets your functional needs is important. However, we should take a step back and look at the information first and make sure that for the people in your organization who can’t say no, their requirements are satisfied.

Gardner: Data architecture is it different from EA and business architecture, or is it a subset? What’s the relationship, Dave?

Hornford: Data architecture is part of an EA. I won’t use the word subset, because a subset starts to imply that it is a distinct thing that you can look at on its own. You cannot look at your business architecture without understanding your information architecture. When you think about big data, cool. We've got this pile of data in the corner. Where did it come from? Can we use it? Do we actually have legitimate rights, as Mike highlighted, to use this information? Are we allowed to mix it and who mixes it?

When we look at how our business is optimized, they normally optimize around work product, what the organization is delivering. That’s very easy. You can see who consumes your work product. With information, you often have no idea who consumes your information. So now we have provenance, we have source and as we move for global companies, we have the trends around consumerization, cloud and simply tightening cycle time.

Gardner: Of course, the end game for a lot of the practitioners here is to create that feedback loop of a lifecycle approach, rapid information injection and rapid analysis that could be applied. So what are some of the ways that these disciplines and tools can help foster that complete lifecycle?

Band: The disciplines and tools can facilitate the right conversations among different stakeholders. One of the things that we're doing at The Standard is building cadres equally balanced between people in business and IT.

We're training them in information management, going through a particular curriculum, and having them study for an information management certification that introduces a lot of these different frameworks and standard concepts.

Creating cadres

We want to create these cadres to be able to solve tough and persistent information management problems that affect all companies in financial services, because information is a shared asset. The purpose of the frameworks is to ensure proper stewardship of that asset across disciplines and across organizations within an enterprise.

Hornford: The core is from the two standards that we have, the ArchiMate standard and the TOGAF standard. The TOGAF standard has, from its early roots, focused on the components of EA and how to build a consistent method of understanding of what I'm trying to accomplish, understanding where I am, and where I need to be to reach my goal.

When we bring in the ArchiMate standard, I have a language, a descriptor, a visual descriptor that allows me to cross all of those domains in a consistent description, so that I can do that traceability. When I pull in this lever or I have this regulatory impact, what does it hit me with, or if I have this constraint, what does it hit me with?

If I don’t do this, if I don’t use the framework of the TOGAF standard, or I don’t use the discipline of formal modeling in the ArchiMate standard, we're going to do it anecdotally. We're going to trip. We're going to fall. We're going to have a non-ending series of surprises, as Mike highlighted.

"Oh, terms of service. I am violating the regulations. Beautiful. Let’s take that to our executive and tell him right as we are about to go live that we have to stop, because we can't get where we want to go, because we didn't think about what it took to get there." And that’s the core of EA in the frameworks.

Walker: To build on what Dave has just talked about and going back to your first question Dana, the value statement on TOGAF from a business perspective. The businesses value of TOGAF is that they get a repeatable and a predictable process for building out our architectures that properly manage risks and reliably produces value.

The TOGAF framework provides a methodology to ask what problems you're trying to solve and where you are trying to go with your business opportunities or challenges. That leads to business architecture, which is really a rationalization in technical or architectural terms the distillation of the corporate strategy.

From there, what you want to understand is information -- how does that translate, what information architecture do we need to put in place? You get into all sorts of things around risk management, etc., and then it goes on from there, until what we were talking about earlier about information architecture.

If the TOGAF standard is applied properly you can achieve the same result every time, That is what interests business stakeholders in my opinion. And the ArchiMate modeling language is great because, as we talked about, it provides very rich visualizations so that people cannot only show a picture, but tie information together. Different from other aspects of architecture, information architecture is less about the boxes and more about the lines.

Quality of the individuals

Forde: Building on what Dave was saying earlier and also what Iver was saying is that while the process and the methodology and the tools are of interest, it’s the discipline and the quality of the individuals doing the work.

Forde

Iver talked about how the conversation is shifting and the practice is improving to build communications groups that have a discipline to operate around. What I am hearing is implied, but actually I know what specifically occurs, is that we end up with assets that are well described and reusable.

And there is a point at which you reach a critical mass that these assets become an accelerator for decision making. So the ability of the enterprise and the decision makers in the enterprise at the right level to respond is improved, because they have a well disciplined foundation beneath them.

A set of assets that are reasonably well-known at the right level of granularity for them to absorb the information and the conversation is being structured so that the technical people and the business people are in the right room together to talk about the problems.

This is actually a fairly sophisticated set of operations that I am discussing and doesn't happen overnight, but is definitely one of the things that we see occurring with our members in certain cases.

Hornford: I want to build on that what Chris said. It’s actually the word "asset." While he was talking, I was thinking about how people have talked about information as an asset. Most of us don’t know what information we have, how it’s collected, where it is, but we know we have got a valuable asset.

I'll use an analogy. I have a factory some place in the world that makes stuff. Is that an asset? If I know that my factory is able to produce a particular set of goods and it’s hooked into my supply chain here, I've got an asset. Before that, I just owned a thing.

I was very encouraged listening to what Iver talked about. We're building cadres. We're building out this approach and I have seen this. I'm not using that word, but now I'm stealing that word. It's how people build effective teams, which is not to take a couple of specialists and put them in an ivory tower, but it’s to provide the method and the discipline of how we converse about it, so that we can have a consistent conversation.

When I tie it with some of the tools from the Architecture Forum and the ArchiMate Forum, I'm able to consistently describe it, so that I now have an asset I can identify, consume and produce value from.

Business context

Forde: And this is very different from data modeling. We are not talking about entity relationship, junk at the technical detail, or third normal form and that kind of stuff. We're talking about a conversation that’s occurring around the business context of what needs to go on supported by the right level of technical detail when you need to go there in order to clarify.

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

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