2008: “A Year in the Clouds”

Barring some incredible news in the next two days, this will be my second to last post of the year. And my final enterprise-related post. Naturally, it’s got to be about cloud computing–the story, the trend, for 2008. (My final post will be a round-up of the best top ten lists.) Now onwards, upwards to the clouds. Here’s a summary based on a recent InfoWorld article.

To start go back and check out InfoWorld’s first salvo in what became a barrage of articles, reports, and opinions on cloud computing. It really kicked things off nicely. Ultimately, there were three categories: “infrastructure services such as Amazon EC2; software as a service à la Salesforce; and development platforms as a service” (e.g. Microsoft’s Azure).

Then there’s the debate out the external and internal cloud. Basically, the difference between services and apps that you can get outside your company (say from Salesforce.com), than from your internal IT department, which “aggregates other IT trends, such as SOA (service-oriented architecture), virtualization, datacenter automation, and EDA (event-driven architecture) into one harmonious internal cloud.”

Two arcticles, each from different points in the year, highlighted how companies were taking advantage of external clouds: “Early experiments in cloud computing” and “Cloud computing to the max“.

The InfoWorld crew also spent a lot of time “playing” in the clouds and they reported back on their experiences. Google App Engine “was best for dynamic Web sites that act as a relatively thin layer of business logic sitting on top of a data store.” Other platforms were tried such as JotForm, FormAssembly, Wufoo, and Zoho Creator. A separate review was done on Coghead and it’s competitor Caspio Bridge.

Then in October, inevitably, Microsoft got into the mix big time with the launch of Azure. A review followed that stated Azure “reveals a thoughtfully designed cloud computing architecture where seasoned .Net developers will feel at home.” Another review was done comparing Amazon, Google, AppNexus, and GoGrid. Then, a much more comprehensive  study looked at Amazon’s offerings and it’s still well worth reading.

Less space was given to reviewing SaaS applications, but there were a couple of articles to look at again: Zoho CRM and a shootout between Microsoft Office and Google Docs and Zoho.

So 2008 was the break-out year for cloud computing. As I’ve written before, we’re entering a perfect storm that should see more adoption, more creativity, and more controversy. Personally, I can’t wait….

Biggest Open Source Stories of 2008

Well, as we finally wind down the year it’s time to look back and take stock of the most important and interesting stories in enterprise technology. Let’s start with open source. And with that, here’s probably the best review I’ve seen: “The year 2008 showed open source–both in the form of Linux specifically and as a software development model generally–coming into the mainstream like never before.” So, on with the top ten list:

1. The Rise (and Falling Price) of the Netbook–Linux comes of age, driving down the cost and the perception that you need a full-blown notebook to get work done. MacBook? I don’t need no stinking MacBook. (Okay, I own one an love it, but still..)
2. Sun’s Slow Spiraling Towards Nova–Relentlessly pursuing an open source strategy, reaching its culmination (so far) with the acquisition of MySQL. It should be quite a year ahead, no matter how you look at it.
3. The Release of Ubuntu 8.10 and Fedora 10–With Canonical’s latest Ubuntu release and Red Hat’s newest revision of Fedora, I’ll agree with the consensus that this past year was the “long-vaunted year of the Linux desktop.”
4. The Release of Google Chrome–Minimal design, built for speed, safety, and security. What’s not to like? And this isn’t even version 1.0. Okay, it’s Windows-only. For now…
5. The Release of Google Android–Mobile Linux. Google. Enough said.
6. Nokia Picks Up Symbian–Unless, of course, you’re talking about this combo. The handset makers seem very interested in this pairing. It’s Iron Chef Android versus Iron Chef Symbian. Can’t wait to see what Google and Nokia cook up for 2009.
7. Courts Rule that Copyrights on Open Source Software are Enforceable–The decision makes “it clear that not upholding the provisions of an open source license is an infringement of the original code creator’s copyrights.” A legal precedent is set.
8. Omitted by choice.
9. Debian’s OpenSSL Blunder–A major security bug is found. Then it’s found to have existed since 2006. It gets fixed. The moral: “ Many eyes may make bugs shallow, but they also need to be open and looking in the right direction first.”
10. SCO Loses to Novell–Finally, it’s looks over for SCO as it’s three most critical claims are “dismissed with prejudice“.

Weekly Roundup

Well, we’ve got less than six days of shopping to go before Christmas, as we wind down the final two weeks of the year. But, that hasn’t stopped the tech industry from churning out interesting news and things to consider for 2009. So, let’s recap the week:

Oracle and HP made came out with a bang today with their world record benchmark running Oracle Fusion Middleware on HP Integrity server blades. Oracle showed a 30% improvement over the previous champ, IBM. Get the details here…

Oracle CRM On Demand appears to be gaining momentum and big name customers like Fidelity, The Economist, and 3M Taiwan among many others. Could a remark from Salesforce.com’s Mark Benioff be far away? Read more…

There’s more detail emerging about Cisco’s upcoming blade server–code named California–that will join Cisco’s Nexus 5000 switch, Intel’s Nehalem processors, and VMware’s virtualization management software. Read more here…

Sun released a new update of xVM VirtualBox, its desktop virtualization software. Better performance across platforms–Windows, Linux, Macintosh, and Solaris–on any PC hardware is the thrust of the 2.1 release. Here’re the details…

On the data center front, you might want to check out this article on IronScale, which promises to bring data center automation to small and medium-sized businesses. Read more here…

Amazon has been busy building strategic relationships an effort to boot it’s EC2 services. The goal is to push into the enterprise with the help of partners like Sun, Red Hat, Capgemini and more niche players like Elastra and RightScale. Here’s a great analysis that includes a focus on Capgemini and their practice around AWS…

Well, that’s about it for the week. Now back to shopping…

Enterprise Content Mangement: What’s that Rumble?

In a world where everything appears to be contracting, there is one area that continues to grow, quite literally, like weeds. And that one thing is content. We seem to have no problem creating ever more email, documents, presentations, and videos, among a myriad of other file types. It’s like a tremor that you only notice after a seismic jolt.

Of course, throwing more storage at the problem is like a band-aid. It doesn’t begin to address the demands for compliance and e-discovery that are placed on every organization.  Nor does it consider access rights and privileges. We’re talking about the massive amounts of unstructured data that live outside traditional enterprise content management systems (ECM).

A new InformationWeek article describes “a new approach to collaboration and enterprise content management” and its well worth considering. First, compliance and record retention will move “to something that lots of companies will do with lots of data.” Secondly, Microsoft’s SharePoint collaboration software will play a crucial role. Finally, “new initiatives aim to ensure that ECM platforms balance availability, interoperability, and management in this sea of information.” So, standards will become more important too.

At the same time, another article points to open source software and software-as-a-service (SaaS) “will challenge the  dominant deployment of proprietary, premises-based software.” Alfresco and SpringCM “attack two major weaknesses of ECM vendors: cost and time.”

Alfresco comes at it with an open source business model and touts it’s community as a major benefit. At 74,000 registered members and 3,500 active participants, that’s leaves a lot of potential coming from those most interested in seeing Alfresco succeed.

SpringCM comes at things from the SaaS angle.”Rather than deploy an on-premises platform and force it to fit different needs, departments can turn to the cloud and configure the application to their needs.” Cox Communications is cited as runnning 13 different applications from SpringCM.

The bottom line is that ECM is going to get more and more attention and that means more ideas and solutions to help organizations manage and keep a lid on all their content.

Contrarian View: Partly Cloudy?

Well, no sooner did I write that we’d be calling 2009 “The Year of the Cloud” did I come across a more sobering view in a Cnet article titled “Handicapping cloud computing: the big picture”. It’s a summary of a recent report by Berstein Research that includes an analysis on cloud computing and its “imperfect storm”.

As for the analysis, it’s pretty sobering but I don’t think it’s going to forestall the “momentum” around cloud computing–at least for 2009. Factor in all the dismal news and the tech industry is going to need the cloud story just to keep people interested. Also, I think customers will adopt a variety of approaches when it comes to the cloud. That is, it will be project or initiative dependent and people will choose to implement cloud offerings in different ways. For example, build something out on Amazon’s EC2, utilize Salesforce.com’s CRM solution, and then maybe build an “internal” cloud within the enterprise for a specific business unit or initiative.

As with most things in the tech/hype conitnuum, the reality will be somewhere in the middle. But, utility computing is definitely here to stay. And the economic downturn might just be the catalyst that’s needed to propel it even further. That’s why I think a vendor like Salesforce may be in the best position. They offer a real pay-as-you-go  service in the “cloud’, they’ve built a platform for others to develop on, and they’ve staked out a partnership with Google that gives them more legs.

Of course, Google themselves may have something to say about that. And Microsoft and IBM have the deep pockets necessary to make a meaningful impact. And, Sun will try to regain its footing in what is arguably natural territory. And then there’re those like Zoho and Xcalibre who could easily make more noise. So, stay tuned because just like weather forecasting, things can change quickly–and for the better.

Weekly Highlights – What you need to know

Well, the Chinese New Year for 2009 is officially the Year of the Ox. Unofficially, we should call it the Year of the Cloud. I don’t think any other technology topic has been hotter than cloud computing. And it looks like 2009 will be the break out year, as more and more vendors solidify their offers and customers start to really use and experiment within the enterprise. Speaking of which…

Of course, you can’t talk about the cloud without talking about Salesforce.com–and that usually means CEO Marc Benioff  has something to say. Well, they’re getting even closer to Google by announcing, among other things, a set of tools and services for letting Force.com developers write to the Google App Engine platform. And don’t miss Benioff’s strong words about Salesforce’s position against the establishment–SAP, Oracle, and Micorsoft. Check it out here and here.

Sun made news this week by announcing a renewed effort toward cloud computing. They have a lot of assets (e.g. MySQL, xVM) to bring to bear, so it will be interesting to see how it all comes to fruition with their new cloud offering. Read more here and here.

An interesting change by SugarCRM sees them launching Cloud Connectors that seeks to open the leading open source CRM vendor to cloud services like Linkedin. Read about it here.

I thought the news from IBM about a partnership with Canonical, the company behind Ubuntu, was really eye catching. Now there’s a way to roll out corporate Linux desktops in a very fast, efficient, and intelligent way. Read this blog to find out more.

What else will 2009 have in store for us? How about Cisco entering the data center with their soon-to-be-announced blade server? In the meantime, they’re going to focus on improving the technology the stiches things like servers, switches, and storage together. Cisco calls it “unified computing” and you can read more here.

HP added Linux support to its desktop virtualization suite–HP Virtual Client Essentials–which previously only ran on Windows. You can find more here.

And, finally, back to Sun with the release of MySQL 5.1, which they promise will boost performance and simplify management of large-scale database applications. I suppose 250,000 downloads in the first ten days of availability would be an indication of some things. Here’s the press release and some commentary.

Now that was an interesting week. (But, aren’t they all?) In any case, like I said, get ready for the Year of the Cloud…

Storage Weathering Downturn

I thought I’d recap some recent news in the storage arena as there’s lots of interesting things going on in that you should be aware of.

Possibly the biggest surprise didn’t come from a vendor. The news from IDC is that the storage business grew by 9% in the last quarter. Midrange systems ($15,000-$299,999) led the way. “IP storage was a major factor…led by strong adoption of iSCSI SANs, particularly within virtual server environments, and solid growth in NAS-based solutions.”

Of course, vendors have not been quite. Here are some of the more interesting announcements:

• Intel, Hitachi Make a Splash in Solid State Storage (SSDs) paving the way for the technology to find its way into Hitachi Data System’s high-end storage arrays… Read on
• EMC Retools Backup for Virtualization, Dedupe… Read on
• HP unveiled a direct-attach storage (DAS) product that works with its server BladeSystem to give smaller businesses a storage solution to match their virutal server environments… Read on
• Symantec announced new services the let users know when changes to their data center environment could put them at risk for unwanted downtime… Read on

I’ll keep my eye on this space, because where there’s growth, there’s competition and that brings out the best in vendors. Again, it’s a chance for customers to benefit.

Weekly Highlights: What you need to know

Another week and another flury of announcements and commentary. With all the turmoil in the markets it’s reassuring, to some degree, that the technology sector is responding with innovation and business value. Here’s what really made news this week.

If you must cut costs, make sure you do it with discrimination. Baseline provides 13 ideas on where and how to cut IT costs. More>

Thinking about virtualization. Of course you are. Want an idea of where it’s going in the next five years? Check out eWeek’s five-year roadmap. More>

There’s a good analysis and set of guidelines for planning the next-generation data center, again by eWeek, that’s shouldn’t be missed. More>

Sun Microsystems unveils JavaFX 1.0 with immersive media capabilities targeted at the market’s 800 million Java powered desktops. More>

The open source invasion of the data center continues this week with an Apache Tomcat Java application server offering from SpringSource. More>

VMware View 3 addresses key pitfalls that have slowed virtualization on the desktop. More>

Intel will be the sole supplier of NAND flash memory technology for Hitachi’s high-end solid-state drives for servers, workstations, and storage systems. More>

Interesting news from Google in the cloud computing space with the Google App Engine. More>

Microsoft plans to integrate RSA data-loss prevention technology into its products to enable security managers to monitor sensitive data and block unauthorized use. RSA is EMC’s security division. More>

What You Can Learn from HP’s IT Transformation

HP just released the results of its three-year IT transformation and they’re impressive and instructive. The transformation focused on five key initiatives: next generation global data centers, portfolio management, workforce effectiveness, building a world-class technology organization, and building a next generation enterprise data warehouse.

And the results are in: IT operating costs cut in half; cost savings of more than $1 billion; more reliable and better availability of information; the creation of a more simplified and dependable IT infrastructure. Oh, and they did this while adding more than $25 billion in revenue over the same three year period.

Randy Mott, HP executive vice president and chief information officer, ran the show after previous stints at Wal-Mart and Dell. As he says, “HP’s IT transformation was not just a technology initiative within the IT organization, it was a business strategy adopted throughout the company.”  The goal of course is to make HP more nimble in responding to business opportunities, while doing a better job of investing in IT where it matters—in the area of innovation and new projects targeted at the bottom line. It was essentially a dramatic shift to literally get revenue out of IT, by changing the focus to new project development, rather than support and maintenance.

If you’re interested there’s more detail in an InfoWorld article with on Mott’s strategy, results, and the implications for enterprise IT. Mott went “all in” and felt there was no other way to do it. He didn’t feel he could “pick-and-choose” because, as he warns, “the parts you don’t do will undermine the parts you do.”  He quickly cautions that executive support is paramount to success and without it you’re likely to miss your goals or fail. There’s also a bit more on the importance of revenue of IT and it shows how those “figures have credibility with execs because they’re based on a cost-benefit analysis agreed to by business unit leaders and their controllers, so they’re finance numbers, not IT department numbers.”

Of course, it’s great to see HP succeeding and leading by example. But you do have to wonder how likely it is for other companies to take such an all-or-nothing approach. Careful planning and commitment are what’s really needed to shift IT’s strategic value. I would’ve like to see a little more detail into alternative paths that could be taken to lighten the load as projects are reprioritized. Perhaps, this is where things like cloud computing and pay-as-you go infrastructure and software will have a bigger role to play. In the end, it is all about becoming more valuable and more nimble. HP looks to be on their way to setting a new benchmark.