Posts Tagged ‘cloud computing’
Consulting Ecosystems – What’s Next
(Originally posted on 4/28/10 and reposted 8/10/10 due to technical problems)
I was recently at a SIM (Society for Information Management) dinner. The speaker was Jim Stikeleather, CTO of Dell Services (formerly Perot Systems). The title of his presentation was “Next Generation Computing”. I’m not going to try to repeat the presentation here, he did a much better job than I could do (it was a good presentation). I will focus on a few of the points he made. They relate to my last post, “A Consulting Ecosystem“. In that post, I warned you that there would be more on the topic. Well, here is the next installment.
I have included three slides from his presentation. All of these images are linked to full size versions, so click on them if you want to see the details of the slides. I have also included a PDF version of the full presentation here. The presentation includes some specific information about Dell Services that may be of interest to you as well.
In my last post I discussed the idea of the “Hollywood” business model and what it meant for small consulting companies. This presentation provided some of the inspiration for those views. I believe what I liked most about it was that our views of the future were so similar. Obviously, if he agrees with me he must be right on target. In the above slide he identified 
the trends and drivers in play. The point here is that as computing functionality becomes more available and less expensive, it can be more widely used. It also makes it less of a differentiator for individual companies. I have long believed that computing power has no intrinsic value. Its only value comes from those business capabilities that are enabled by its use. I’m sure that view is not well received by much of the IT community but my experience proved to me long ago that this is true.
I think another interesting point is show in the slide covering the evolution of cloud computing. In this slide, he provides a vision for the evolution toward the federation of cloud resources and applications. In this context, a “federation” means using multiple cloud applications together to meet a business goal or goals. What this means to me is that we should see more and more “specialist” applications being mashed-up and used together. This idea is some time away but I believe it is a reasonable expectation since we’re seeing it today to some extent. As standards mature this trend should accelerate.
Some of the slides in this presentation offer a specific timeline with forecasts by year. While these forecasts seem reasonable, I am a little nervous about forecasting specifics far into the future. However, I do agree with the overall trends. I do believe our comfort level with the use of cloud-based applications will grow steadily over time. I believe that standards will continue to mature. I do believe that more and more organizations will want someone else to provide the computing infrastructure. I believe that cloud-based applications will become more capable over time. I believe that the physical infrastructure of the cloud will become more capable and reliable over time.
The presentation document speaks to business process outsourcing, or BPO, more that the speaker actually did. The presentation was very interactive and so it was hard to get to everything. As a disclaimer, I must mention that my business does not include BPO but does include the analysis of business processes. The two are separate but the analysis work is often part of a larger consulting engagement for BPO firms. The question here is very personal for each BPO customer. Essentially, it boils down to whether a prospective customer is comfortable with their business process living outside their firewall. The data that I’ve seen implies that small to midsize businesses (SMB) are signing up quickly but larger businesses are taking more time to decide. It’s basically a cost reduction decision with some business simplification thrown in to the mix.
I can’t say that I’m as enthusiastic about this as the other topics of the presentation. Besides that, I can’t find a consistent definition of what BPO “2.0″ means. I’m going to assume in this post that it means more pervasive use of BPO than “1.0″ versions and includes the idea of federated BPO providers. Having run many manufacturing business processes over the years, I struggle with the idea of my business processes living outside the firewall. I’m sure I’ll get there eventually. The closer an application lives to my company’s P&L, the closer I like it to be to me. I just worry about the exposure to cloud-centric risks like a patch or upgrade to the application coming as a surprise.
In conclusion, I think this presentation was valuable in that it collects insight from various sources, not just Dell/Perot. It did include some Dell/Perot sales material but that’s to be expected and wasn’t emphasized by the speaker. I encourage you to take a harder look at the presentation. It has some valuable nuggets of information. It does support the notion that the technology world is evolving in a direction which will allow smaller consulting companies to be far more scalable and effective than ever before (good news for us!).
Thanks for stopping by.
Microsoft and the Energy Industry
The new issue of Digital Energy Journal (Issue 25) is just out. In it is an article about Microsoft’s new products and directions relevant to the energy industry. With my interests in IT leadership, manufacturing operations and E&P surface operations, I was immediately compelled to read it. Since I have a long history with Microsoft both as a customer and a channel partner I have some well entrenched ideas about how Microsoft fits into the manufacturing and energy world (mostly good with a dash of frustration).
As I read the article, a couple of points jumped out at me. First is the use of the Xbox 360 with the upcoming Kinect user interface device (shown in the image on the right). It is a controller-less device that allows the user to control a game like a Nintendo Wii but without any hand held controllers. This device is primarily intended for the gaming world but has potential for the manufacturing and E&P worlds as well. For example, Halliburton Landmark has just announced a new application called GeoGraphix Discovery 3D. It will build on their GeoGraphix product and make that visualization environment easier to navigate.
What got me excited is the ability to apply an Xbox/PC/Network system to create business visualization environment at an affordable cost. Many of us are old enough to remember when cell phones were big, expensive and had to be installed in your car by a technician. We can also remember what happened to their use when cell phones got cheaper and more portable. Their use grew geometrically as well as their applications. Now consider the large and hugely expensive visualization environments now sold to the E&P industry. Then consider what happens when you can have something acceptably close to the same functionality but on commodity hardware. The cell phone evolution gets replayed for visualization systems.
Now let’s consider what happens when that same commodity visualization environment gets connected to 3-D CAD environments of manufacturing plants and E&P surface operations along with other business applications. Now combine that new mix of tools with a more highly regulated and monitored operational environment. That will happen thanks to incidents like the current BP spill in the Gulf of Mexico and numerous industrial explosions, fires and chemical releases. The best way to image what I’m talking about is through an example.
Let’s image we’re in an ordinary conference room. We’re facing a wall with three large screen monitors in a row. On the middle monitor is a 3-D model of a process manufacturing plant, offshore platform or some other organized industrial collection of pipes, tanks, buildings and equipment. As we walk through this facility we can reach down and touch a piece of equipment as we pass it. When we touch it, its spec sheet and maintenance history are displayed on the screen on the left. If we are concerned about what we see we touch the equipment again with another gesture of our hand and we dictate a note to be attached on that piece of equipment. That note appears on the screen on the right and a flag appears on the equipment shown on the center screen, indicating the need for follow up. All of this data can also be displayed and accessed in a more tradition way on PCs or laptops located elsewhere (or in the same room). This kind of scenario could have applications for the management of these operations to be able to more easily survey and diagnose issues in their facilities. Connecting to a master data management system would allow such a system to be applied to multiple, similar facilities and managed together more easily. Environmental, maintenance and operational data can be displayed together in more intuitive ways. That can lead to the avoidance of future problems of all sorts. This is industrial strength business-IT alignment.
You can use the above example as a base from which to imagine a scenario more specific to your own experiences. Just don’t forget that we’re seeing this using commodity hardware and lower cost software. This puts such a system within reach of mid-sized manufacturers, energy and service companies. That’s a game changer for those mid-size companies.
The second point that jumped out to me in the article was Steve Balmer’s vision of the energy industry’s migration toward cloud computing. He’s probably right but I struggle with that idea when applied to large quantities of data that need to be brought down to a local system for use and analysis. It really depends on how cloud computing standards, security and infrastructure evolve. I have commented on cloud computing issues in the past so I won’t do it again here. If you’re interested, just click on the cloud computing tag in the tag cloud to the right of this post.
In summary, I think that whether you love or hate Microsoft they are one of the very few companies that can provide a sufficiently diverse, integrated set of applications and devices to allow the creation of such architectures at relatively low cost. Let’s hope that Steve Balmer’s vision for the energy industry can become reality and not get bogged down in bureaucracy or drifting priorities along the way.
Thanks for stopping by. Stay tuned for more…
Brokering Clouds
I recently attended an interesting presentation on cloud computing (I’m a sucker for the topic). It was just another perk for being a member of the Houston SIM (Society of Information Management) chapter. The presenter was Gene Phifer, Managing Vice President at Gartner. It covered a history and other background information as well as an interesting perspective from Gartner. I have included a couple of slides here but, unfortunately, I am not able to provide the entire presentation.
While acknowledging the benefits that we have all come to appreciate, he also included a warning of the existing problems. As I have pointed out in previous posts, there is a lot of excitement on the benefits but not enough attention to the risks (they will all eventually be addressed, but not for a while). In my official role as the cloud computing Grinch I want to be sure to draw your attention to the risks associated with those tantalizing benefits. From the Gartner presentation they are:
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Data/Process Location & Isolation
- Security, privacy & ownership
- Security, privacy & ownership
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Regulatory, Compliance & Policies
- Limits, e-discovery, investigations
- Limits, e-discovery, investigations
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Portability between Providers
- Lack of standards, vendor lock-in
- Lack of standards, vendor lock-in
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Provider Trust Management
- Transparency to provider operations
- Immature vendors and certifications
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Uncertain Failure Remediation
- SLA guarantees, redundancy
- SLA guarantees, redundancy
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Integration and Process Integrity across the cloud
- Technical & Support issues
- Technical & Support issues
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Bandwidth & Latency
- Accessing or integrating “clouds”
- Accessing or integrating “clouds”
- Licensing Issues
- Uncertain Financial Models
Now that I have fulfilled my “party pooper” responsibilities I can return to my usual optimistic tone. His presentation went on to highlight the aggressive expansion of both Microsoft and Google into more sophisticated cloud offerings. While Google’s preferences are not surprising, seeing all of Microsoft’s offerings shown on one slide was interesting. While I was aware of each of their cloud based products, seeing them listed together was enlightening. Microsoft is making a real push into cloud computing, which is quite a balancing act for them.
Then the presentation moved into its most interesting phase for me. We started covering the development of cloud applications and assembling them into solutions to business problems. There is now a large selection of application development environments available and covering a broad range of sophistication. The Spectrum of Cloud Computing slide above showed up in this section of the presentation. I like it because it captures the various cloud environments that are possible. It’s easy for the definitions of public, private and hybrid cloud environments to blur. This slide captures the spectrum with a little more granularity and 
clarity.
One point that stood out to me was the idea of cloud brokers. While I’ve heard of cloud brokers before, I hadn’t paid much attention to the concept. It’s actually an intriguing concept once you imagine a future where the cloud-based applications and services are more plentiful, complex and available. The slide on the right is handy for visualizing the attributes of brokers.
There were other slides in the presentation that emphasized how complex these ecosystems will become and the need for brokers will grow. I found a handy resource guide for such brokers as of this moment in time. Its link is here. I found another article on selecting a cloud service broker that is consistent with this presentation. Its link is here.
I am now convinced that the notion of cloud service brokers will become very important to our business. Our target markets are mid-size manufacturers, mid-size manufacturing related service business and independent E&P companies with interest in the notion of Digital Energy. Understanding the cloud service broker universe is now a priority for us. It’s moved way up the priority list. I believe that the risks listed above will provide a useful list of metrics against which to evaluate these brokers. As we get into it, the list may vary a little but this list will provide a good starting point.
Since I am unable to provide you with a copy of the presentation, I would like to provide some alternative. I found a complimentary eWeek article and provide the link here. Stay tuned for future posts on cloud service brokers. They should be interesting.
Thanks for stopping by. See you next time…
Cloud Alignment – Part IV(Privacy)
This post is the last of the series on Cloud Computing addressing the business application of cloud based resources, focusing on midsize companies. It will also include the conclusion for the series which was originally was going to be Part V. The previous posts in this series are:
In this post we’ll focus on a recent report from the World Privacy Forum titled “Privacy in the Clouds: Risks to Privacy and Confidentially from Cloud Computing”. You can pick up a full copy of the report at their website. Recently, I also attended a presentation on cloud computing. The speaker is a Managing VP at Gartner. It was an interesting presentation and will be the subject of a future post. His pitch was very consistent with my earlier posts on the subject and has influenced this post. Agreement with my views just proves that Gartner has some visionary people on staff.
The tone of this report is sober and cautious. It emphasizes the exposure the terms and conditions impose on the customer by their cloud provider(s). I agree with this concern. As I’ve mentioned before, cloud computing is growing faster than it’s maturing. Standards and regulations are catching up but still have far to go. Another valid concern is the physical location of the data. For example, if the data is located on a server in the US it is subject to disclosure to the Federal Government (with a subpoena) under the Patriot Act. Many foreign companies specifically exclude US servers in their cloud contracts for just that reason.
For many midsize companies, the cost benefits are hard to resist. Essentially, a company exchanges the capital costs associated with building a data center for the operating expenses associated with buying computing power as services. That can be intoxicating and result in a smaller company rushing into the arms of immature cloud service providers. Clearly, it is not advisable at this time for companies to put their proprietary intellectual property in the cloud unless it’s a private cloud behind your own firewall. The main concern is the public cloud but that is also the most accessible source of cloud services.
The health care industry has its own issues with HIPAA and is a major issue in this report. The unintended release of health records for any individual to unauthorized use is about as severe a breach of privacy as you can get. There can be some circumstances where the Patriot Act and HIPPA conflict. I’m not a lawyer or politician so I don’t want to even think about that scenario.
One issue that I had not thought about directly is the scenario when a cloud provider goes out of business. There are now thousands of small companies growing up around cloud computing services. As we have seen over and over again in the technology world, a new technology is born, large numbers of companies vie for their piece of the rock, the field gets overcrowded and a “rationalization” occurs where the strongest survive and the weak can go down hard and fast. There may be some contractual language in the service agreements of those weak companies, but trying to determine how the customer’s data was managed during the dying company’s last days may be impossible to determine with confidence.
The WPF website offers these tips for business and government:
- Beware of “ad hoc” cloud computing. Any organization should have standardized rules in place telling employees when and if they may utilize cloud computing and for what data.
- Don’t put anything in the cloud you wouldn’t want a competitor, your government, or another government to see.
- Read the Terms of Service. Then read the Terms of Service again.
- Make sure that you are not violating any law or policy, by putting data in the cloud, and think twice before putting any consumer data in the cloud.
- Consult with your technical, security or corporate governance advisors about the advisability of putting data in the cloud.
These are simple, sensible guidelines to follow in your voyage into cloud computing. Check out their website for more details.
Conclusion
As we’ve seen over this series, cloud computing is here, it’s not going away and it’s going to grow faster than it matures. The promise is compelling and worth exploring, but cautiously. There are public, private and hybrid clouds. Each of which is appropriate for different purposes. Most of us are already using some form of cloud computing (have you every booked a ticket on an airplane, rented a car online or attended a webinar?) It makes sense that we embrace this technology carefully and expend the effort to be informed consumers.
I believe that eventually, most the problems and risks will be addressed to the point where we can sleep at night. That’s going to take a while. Until then, staying on the sidelines is overly cautious. Try out cloud computing on small, low risk projects until you’re comfortable and more knowledgeable. Then use it for where it makes sense.
I hope this series has been of value. Thanks for stopping by.
A Cloudy Day at TechExecs
I moderated a panel at an event here in Houston today. The event was our local TechExecs CIO Panel Forum and covered Cloud 2.0 topics. I have been writing about similar topics in recent posts on this blog. See a security focused example here. Prior to our panel segment, we heard from several vendors mostly talking about cloud technology. There was quite a bit of good information presented and I learned that several vendors have been making more progress in the maturity of their products and services than I had given them credit for.
For example, one of the vendors was layeredtech. An intriguing notion in their presentation was the idea of a Virtual Private Data Center, or VPDC. While this acronym seems to be a natural extension of virtualization and cloud technologies that have been around for a while now the acronym is actually fairly new. My simple metric for that assessment is that there is no listing in Wikipedia for VPDC or Virtual Private Data Center (heads up layeredtech, you should fix that). The attraction of a VPDC is the notion of a holistic, virtualized data center that can dramatically simplify corporate IT life and lower costs for large, mid-size and small companies is compelling. The ability to quickly adapt a data center to align a company’s data center to better align with business process changes is music to my ears.
Another example was from iland. The presentation today discussed cloud-based disaster recovery. While that idea has been around a while and there are multiple vendors offering similar services, I found it interesting how well thought out their presentation was. It was just another indication to me of growing maturity. If you haven’t considered this scenario for disaster recovery yet, I suggest it’s time to do so.
Our panelists represented primarily larger and mid-sized companies. My overall impression from their comments was that they had well thought out opinions on each topic that not long ago were considered quite controversial. Remember, the Gartner Hype Cycle chart referenced in my security focused post mentioned above is new information. It still shows cloud computing at the peak of inflated expectations with some amount of negative hype still ahead. Our panelists were all highly competent professionals. There comments reflected well considered opinions about cloud security and value to their businesses. My overall conclusion from today’s event is that cloud computing has matured to the point of acceptable risks for people whose necks are on the line for such decisions. That’s a big deal.
I suggest that you catch a TechExecs event in a city near you. They don’t require much travel and only last half a day. Yet they are still able to provide useful information and a good networking opportunity. And as we all know, the moderators are really the big draw. It’s their witty way of reading printed questions, shutting up and listening for someone else to deliver the wisdom. I do the shut up part really well.
Thanks for stopping by. Until next time…