Regardless of industry or organisation, the unstoppable forces of change will impact how IT services are operated and delivered. Organisations that choose to remain static will see their carefully crafted castles eventually crumble into a pile of sand.
A list of the basic 'don'ts' to consider before saying 'I do' to a technology investment - whether it is hardware, software or serviceswhether it is hardware, software or services.
Despite showing promising form in the United States, “Cloud Computing” failed to make it out of the starting gates of the Australian Federal Government ICT Stakes in 2010. Indeed the event was pretty much a two horse race – with “NBN” capturing the crowd and winning by a comfortable margin from “Gov 2.0”. “ICT Reform Program” seemed to get bogged in a swampy part of the track, entangling “Data Centre Strategy”. “Internet Filter” fell early in the race after colliding with “Election Realities”. Punters are tipping a better run for “Cloud Computing” in 2011.
Hear ye! Hear ye! Announcing the new Enterprise ICT Strategy.
All areas of the business are required to cease and desist entering into any new arrangements to procure or renew contracts for customised, on premises, applications, in-house operated ICT infrastructure and long-term contract outsourcing arrangements. In their place you may select from The Menu of standardised, configurable and interoperable applications and office productivity tools that will run on The Corporate ICT Utility. Existing applications, infrastructure and outsourcing arrangements will be migrated to The Utility with all possible haste. Development or procurement of applications or infrastructure services outside of The Menu requires the approval of the CFO, who we respect as a person with deep pockets, short arms and a mean disposition.
Last year cloud computing started to pick up some serious momentum, with the IT industry playing catch-up to a book retailing company providing computing infrastructure as an online service. Amazon continued to push its innovation pedal to the metal all year, surprising us all by launching the ultimate commoditised IT service into beta in December – the EC2 Spot Instances service.
The service operates in a similar manner to demand-side bids in the spot electricity market. Customers place orders, or bids, for a virtual machine instance at a specified price. The system dynamically sets the spot price at a level matching supply and demand, and if your bid is at or above the spot price your workload runs. If not, it remains pending until the spot price falls to your bid price or below.
Early this year, CIO online ran Bernard Golden’s excellent article, “The case against cloud computing”. Having formulated key issues against cloud computing, he concluded that there are, usually, solutions.
Golden’s five key issues all raise legal questions as well. So, is the case against cloud computing made out from a legal perspective?
Hamlet: Do you see yonder cloud that’s almost in shape of a camel?
Polonius: By the mass, and ‘tis like a camel, indeed.
Serendipitously, both IBM and HP held events this week to describe their cloud computing initiatives. Their presentations offered insight into what they're doing and provide some food for thought to IT organizations assessing what cloud computing means to their future-as well as some information that might give pause as well.
IBM announced a number of separate things as well as doing an actual demo of cloud capability. First, it's created a Cloud Computing division that reports directly to IBM's head-equivalent to the software, sevices, and hardware divisions. Second, it announced a raft of cloud computing offerings, including services relating to cloud strategy, transitioning current data centers to cloud-enabled data centers, and IBM facilities to enable testing of cloud solutions. Third, it announced a capability to allow IT organizations to use external clouds to migrate workloads from internal cloud data centers to external clouds. The demo showed how an application with multiple systems running software could have some of those systems live migrated to an external cloud. This capability is done through Tivoli, which manages all the systems. Juniper participated in the event, with Juniper networking underlying the application migration with MPLS-based connectivity providing high-bandwidth communication between the internal data center and the public cloud data center.
I was at the IBM Lotusphere conference in January – a gathering of nearly 10,000 passionate Lotus fanciers in an unusually cold Florida winter. One of the major announcements at the event was LotusLive.com – IBM’s long awaited entry into the software-as-a-service and cloud computing arenas. LotusLive will formally launch mid 2009, offering ‘as a service’ access to Lotus office productivity and collaboration software as well as a cloud computing platform where users can store and share data and documents online.
LotusLive as an announcement was hardly a great innovation – in some ways it’s a year-late ‘me too’ following of Microsoft’s Software + Services strategy, Microsoft Live and Microsoft Online.
Clayton Christensen's book, The Innovator's Dilemma, is a touchstone here in Silicon Valley. His book examines the process of innovation as it attempts to answer the question "why do most new technologies seem to come from startups and not from established companies that are also familiar with the technology?" He cites many markets as examples, including tube table radios (displaced by transistor radios), cable-driven steam diggers (displaced by hydraulic diggers), and disk drives (where successive waves of technology were represented in shrinking form factors) that brought new companies to the fore at each new wave. In each of these markets, according to Christensen, innovation shook up the established way of doing things and propelled new market entrants past companies that had dominated the previous technology.
No longer are people sitting obediently in front of a television
screen, reading full-age advertisements in newspapers, magazines or
A funny thing happened recently: a very, very large IT company asked
me to travel more than 20 kilometres on congested city roads at peak
Cloud computing is all about the data. The essential issues are who
owns it, who holds it and who has access to it?
Gartner released its annual "Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009" last week and pride of place goes to virtualisation, put right at the top of the list. More surprising, perhaps, is the fact that Gartner placed Cloud Computing directly below virtualisation in the second spot.
