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February 2012 - Posts

Cloud Luminary: Sage advice from Vivek Kundra

Published: February 17 2012, 08:40 AM | no comments
by Katherine Demacopoulos

Truth be told, I was a little star-struck when I had the opportunity at CA World in November to interview Vivek Kundra, former CIO of the US government (who is now at Salesforce.com), for the Cloud Luminaries thought leadership series. I'd followed his career and the impact of his bold ‘Cloud First' stance for years and eagerly anticipated the chance to engage him in conversation about how he overcame the cloud-resistance he faced and learn more about the strategies he put in place to influence change.

I found his point of view around cloud security particularly interesting. Vivek believes that cloud security concerns are being overhyped by those who want to preserve the status quo.  He feels that cloud computing can be far more secure than a traditional environment. Consider that when he first took on the position of CIO, the US federal government had more than 2000 data centers (800 of which, by the way, are now on track to be consolidated by 2015). This more traditional, distributed environment results in fragmentation of not only digital assets, but the talent responsible for securing those sites. As Vivek put it, "you can't guarantee you have your best minds trying to protect your most sensitive information." 

He also talked about a change in approach to cloud security implemented by the State Department, as they moved from spending hundreds of millions of dollars on cyber-security reports that didn't really make the State Department more secure, to now having Red Teams and Blue Teams attacking their own systems to identify security holes and vulnerabilities that need to be addressed.

Watch the full interview with Vivek Kundra to learn more about how he chose to redirect the cost savings realized from moving to a shared services model, the progress being made in closing the technology gap between the public and private sectors, strategies for overcoming inertia, advice on how to respond to the consumerization of IT trend and more.

For more guidance from cloud thought leaders and enterprises and service providers on the leading-edge of cloud computing, visit www.ca.com/cloudluminaries.

 

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By: Katherine Demacopoulos
Katherine Demacopoulos is senior advisor, cloud computing, at CA Technologies. She has more than 15 years experience in marketing and communications for innovative enterprise software companies. She was one of the earliest employees in several start-ups, including NetEdge Systems (acquired by Larscom...
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What's in a Name? App store. Marketplace. Exchange.

Published: February 15 2012, 09:31 AM | no comments
by Jeffrey Abbott

Ever since e-commerce came on the scene, businesses have been cashing in. E-commerce is faster, cheaper, and secure (enough) for many types of goods and services. For many businesses, e-commerce is the primary revenue source and it is expected that this trend will continue. In the new age of social media, e-commerce is perceived as a must-have. If you're a business and you don't have it, you're old-school and your products probably are too, right? Well what I'm seeing now is that some businesses feel that it's more important to look like they are doing e-commerce, than it is to actually do it. Are they right? That's not a rhetorical question. I really don't know.

One challenge is some things are easier to sell online than others.  And in the case of B2B, there can be quite a bit of behind-the-scenes magic to make the "add to cart" option available on a website. Looking at enterprise software/hardware, the products are very expensive; people aren't used to buying $100,000+ solutions on a credit card. Selling these products often involves contracts, volume-based discounts, mandatory support agreements, and of course, golf outings, just to name a few. Enterprise-class solutions are a bit harder to download than the latest MP3 from Lady Gaga, and hardware doesn't always fit in a FedEx box (or even a truck for that matter). Another issue is that the person buying the product may want to install it locally, or they may prefer to have a 3rd party run it for them and grant them access to it (this is the case with many cloud solutions). Coordinating those logistics adds another layer of complexity to the purchase process.

I'm sure you've seen news of enterprise "app stores" and marketplaces popping up for cloud solutions. What you'll find, though, probably because it's just so difficult to do, that these are not stores! There are no transactions taking place directly on these sites. It is not e-commerce. They are sources of information, directory listings of products, or at best, places to download free trial software. How do they work? If you click on a product in hopes of buying it, you are taken to a 3rd party website where you often find a phone number or email for more information, not a landing page to input your credit card info to actually make the purchase. Most would agree - that is not a marketplace, app store, or exchange. It may still be effective marketing and these vendors may have ambitions to take it to the next step and make it real. Time will tell.

Imagine searching for a product on Amazon.com, finding what you want, clicking the "Add to Cart" link and being brought to a third-party seller's site to make the purchase. How would you feel about making that purchase? I know I would think twice. Amazon.com figured this out a long time ago - offer everything under the sun from many sellers, but make the purchase process seamless for the consumer. In the end, you're shopping at Amazon.com, and it's so easy that you keep coming back for more.

At this point you're probably wondering, why is this important and why do I care so much about this? Well, CA Technologies does have a vested interest in this subject. It's exactly what we're trying to accomplish with our support of the Cloud Commons Ecosystem. The Cloud Commons website actually processes subscription-based transactions for real cloud solutions (via credit cards, PayPal, and it can even accommodate PO processes). It has taken countless hours of development -- I've already pointed out this is much harder than simple one-time downloads for a fixed price (keep in mind iTunes was once revolutionary in its time, too). Here, software vendors can post enterprise-class cloud solutions (IaaS, SaaS, PaaS, packaged services, content, etc.) for sale in the Cloud Commons Marketplace.  An enterprise customer can research and identify a cloud solution from one of these vendors, choose to buy it, and either download it to their private cloud (and here's the magic), or... wait for it... choose one of many Cloud Commons service provider partners to host it for them. All without leaving the CloudCommons.com domain.

The entire transaction between the software vendor, hosting provider, and enterprise user is managed on the site. And remember, because these are cloud solutions, the billing is often subscription based, with royalties, licensing, and hosting costs paid on a recurring basis. It's all automated. Vendors can manage their customers. Customers can manage their purchases. And uniquely, Cloud Commons Marketplace offers the freedom for end users to determine which hosting provider is right for them. The other cloud "marketplaces" lock the end users into their platforms and require that the software be hosted on their infrastructures.

I understand the marketing value of saying that you have an "app store" - appearance matters. The packaging may be great, but besides the Cloud Commons Marketplace, all I'm seeing are brochures in otherwise empty boxes. So you tell me -- in the age of social media, is the sizzle now more important than the steak?

I hope not.

*Image courtesy of stock.xchng.

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By: Jeffrey Abbott
Jeffrey Abbott ( @JeffreyAbbott ) is a Senior Product Marketing Manager for Cloud Commons at CA Technologies. In this role, Jeff focuses on industry trends and IT management challenges to position the company’s cloud solutions to viable market segments. When he’s not thinking about clouds, Jeff is often...
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Cloud Luminaries: IGT drives innovation in the gaming industry with cloud

Published: February 14 2012, 09:07 AM | no comments
by Katherine Demacopoulos

International Game Technology provides and manages gaming systems for casinos and online gaming sites. They've got a long history of innovation and are doing some amazing things to change what's possible in the gaming industry.

Check out today's press release to learn more about how IGT and CA Technologies are working together.

When I interviewed IGT's CTO, Christopher Satchell, (appropriately) in Las Vegas recently for our Cloud Luminaries series, I was fascinated to learn about a cloud-based casino management system they are pioneering, which is built on the CA AppLogic cloud platform. IGT can provide casinos with server-based gaming consoles that can be adjusted on the fly to rotate in different games. It also includes social media components so the players can share scores and compete with their friends. This server-based technology allows IGT to gather and analyze data to provide guidance on what additional games a given user would be interested in playing, which games are most popular at certain times of the day and which games should be positioned near each other to maximize revenue. Using these techniques, IGT was able to help Casino Evian in France increase the amount of revenue generated on the casino floor by 20 percent - a remarkable improvement.

It's a really compelling value proposition, made even more so by the fact that customers don't need to make a large up-front investment to try out these capabilities.

Watch the full video interview to learn more about how IGT is leveraging cloud computing to change what's possible in the gaming industry.

And check out the rest of the Cloud Luminaries site for more perspectives and guidance from industry experts, enterprises and service providers on the leading-edge of cloud computing.

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By: Katherine Demacopoulos
Katherine Demacopoulos is senior advisor, cloud computing, at CA Technologies. She has more than 15 years experience in marketing and communications for innovative enterprise software companies. She was one of the earliest employees in several start-ups, including NetEdge Systems (acquired by Larscom...
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What Does "Rationalize" Mean?

Published: February 09 2012, 10:09 AM | no comments
by Mark Lukianchuk

I've been looking into the concept of "rationalize" recently given the work I'm doing related to our new CA Cloud 360 solution. In this new offering, we even have a stage called "Rationalize" where we help our customers examine and understand their portfolio of existing applications and look at suitable candidates for migration to cloud computing platforms. But all of this has me wondering, what does "rationalize" really mean?

Taking a look at some online dictionaries, I saw the following at Dictionary.com:

"to remove unreasonable elements from"

That seems to be the traditional IT view of rationalization - the desire to cull unneeded services from the herd of existing enterprise applications. This definition is a bit simplistic, though, especially when you look at what cloud computing is supposed to do for an organization. Let's take a look at a sample business service such as corporate email.

Company XYZ is currently running Microsoft Exchange, and while they're generally happy with it, the CIO is looking at alternatives. Here are a few:

  • Keep it running as-is (the "do nothing" strategy)
  • Run an open-source equivalent at the enterprise (say Open-Xchange)
  • Switch to Google's Gmail or an alternative
  • Keep Exchange, but have it hosted by a third party provider
  • Move to Microsoft Exchange Online and have Microsoft host it

Email happens to be a commodity service that has many alternatives, so XYZ's CIO has many options to choose from, many of which come with good ROI justification and performance guarantees. Net-net - the CIO of XYZ isn't looking at getting rid of email, just seeing if it's something appropriate to be spending internal resources managing. As a corporate steward of IT, the CIO's job is to always look at alternatives that can provide the same or better quality to the company with less cost.

However, if we look at another corporate application, say an engineering toolset, the CIO may have a few different options to choose from. They might include:

  • Keep it running as-is in the data center (again, "do nothing")
  • Move it to an alternative data center (perhaps offshore to benefit from labor arbitrage)
  • Outsource the hosting and management of the application
  • Keep control of the application in-house, but use an IaaS provider for compute capacity
  • Replace the engineering tool with a SaaS alternative (if available)
  • Rewrite the engineering tool on a common PaaS platform along with other applications

Unless the engineering application isn't being used at all, decommissioning it isn't in the plan, but what criteria should be used to decide if, how, and when this application should move to take advantage of cloud computing benefits? Regardless of the criteria considered it should be something that is consistently applied across all of the applications in the enterprise, so that priorities can be set based upon business criteria and not guesswork (or worse, emotion!).

And that's the whole point about rationalization. I found a much more appropriate definition at another online dictionary, Merriam-Webster.com:

"to apply the principles of scientific management to (as an industry or its operations) for a desired result (as increased efficiency)"

Thanks Merriam-Webster, now we're really talking about the meaning of rationalize.

 

*Image courtesy of stock.xchang.

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By: Mark Lukianchuk
Mark Lukianchuk, advisor, Product Management for Enterprise & Cloud Solutions at CA Technologies, is responsible for bringing to market new and innovative cloud computing offerings, including a new solution designed to help customers select and validate applications to move to the cloud. Prior to...
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Pragmatic Cloud: Peeling the Cloud's Green Onion

Published: February 06 2012, 09:56 AM | 1 Comment(s)
by George Watt

Does cloud computing really make things greener?

The Green Onion's Three Layers

Recently my colleague Dhesi Ananchaperumal and I were invited to speak at several conferences on the topics of energy management and consumption, and cost reduction. During those sessions I was asked to share some of our experiences in our journey to providing a private cloud and to discuss whether the cloud made CA Technologies greener. In preparation for these sessions I realized that we had actually progressed through three levels of green awareness and maturity in our cloud's early years. (You can watch a short YouTube video of one of our sessions here.)

1. Collateral Greenage

Though it would make me very happy to begin by stating that we had a greener planet in our sights when we created our private cloud many years ago, that was not at all the case. We created our cloud to address a serious business agility challenge that was impacting product quality and extending our delivery times; and to address resource requirement challenges caused by demands that changed with our business lifecycle. It was only as our service matured that we realized that, in addition to addressing our agility and business cycle challenges, our private cloud had also brought some green benefits.

We did not truly appreciate this until we were asked to participate in an exercise to help reduce our corporate real estate footprint. We had been consolidating facilities routinely, though this project would require a concerted effort. In the first phase the team was asked to replace 19 labs. A second opportunistic project the following fiscal year required closing another 25 in one quarter. It was during this exercise, and all of the financial analysis that accompanied it, that we were made aware of some of the green benefits of our cloud implementation. We realized the cloud economics that are widely discussed now, and our focus on resource pooling, automation, and operational efficiency had resulted in the provision of services with reduced overall energy consumption.

Initially we focused only on the financial benefits related to reduced consumption. Though later we came to understand that whenever we were greener we almost always had reduced expenses, and when we reduced expenses we were often greener (as a result of reduced consumption). And as a cloud provider it was certainly a very good thing to have business value that could be relevant to both the Chief Financial Officer and the Chief Sustainability Officer. It was also at this point that we realized just how valuable our partnership with the Finance team was.

2. Deliberately Green

Once we discovered this "collateral greenage" effect, we realized that it was an area that deserved some deliberate attention. Our company had begun to focus on sustainability as a key corporate initiative; and I cannot think of any company that does not have minimization of costs listed somewhere in their corporate objectives. We began to deliberately seek green benefits and focused on improving our infrastructure "with green in mind". And whenever we were greener in this context, our costs were lower. The team was able to purchase less, to raise the chiller and air handler temperatures, reduce copper consumption, and reduce carbon consumption by thousands of tons. This resulted in a significant contribution to our sustainability objectives. (CA Technologies has recently become one of the top ten green companies in the United States.)

Deliberately Challenged - "It's not that easy, being green."

Though we had success with our deliberate initiatives, and our increased awareness and capability enabled us to be opportunistically green, we realized we were far from obtaining the maximum value possible, both in terms of cost reduction and green benefits. As well, creating reports that demonstrated the value of what had been accomplished was extremely challenging. It involved a lot of mind-numbing human effort, and many of the reports were of value for a very limited amount of time. A high priority "out of cycle" request for executive information could result in a 48-hour fire drill for one or more people; possibly worse if the data had never before been requested.

The impact of not having this data readily available created several challenges:

  • How could we accurately identify targets for "green action"?
  • How could we demonstrate the value of those actions in a business context?
  • How could we be confident that the actions we took actually had the impact we intended them to have?
  • How could we know when those actions added cost or made us less green?

3. A Measured Approach

And this is where the discussion returns to Dhesi. As we were trying to address these questions we had another "slap yourself in the forehead" moment. Dhesi, a friend and colleague, was now a customer of our cloud service. He had experience in this domain and, as we learned, was creating what became the CA ecoSoftware enterprise energy and sustainability management solutions. Of course, we turned to Dhesi for assistance and guidance (and software). Though what's critical here is, as I have stated in other contexts, measurement is key. And improving the timeliness of the data, reducing the cost required to produce the measurement, and reducing the manual effort required (and potential for human error) will improve the effectiveness of such a program.

Are all clouds green?

So, does simply moving to a cloud make you greener? Probably. (How's that for commitment?) There are two things to consider. First, there are some who are very good at "traditional IT". Not knowing whether you are amongst those makes answering the question a challenge. Though if you're not doing anything cloudy I would bet that cloud computing will make you at least a little greener. Second, it's possible to do anything poorly, so I would bet there are some cloud providers (both private and public) who are not yet recognizing the full potential of cloud computing in terms of agility, expense reduction, resource optimization, and sustainability.

Overall I do believe cloud computing can "make you greener". Though there are many other things that must also be considered when deciding whether to adopt cloud computing.

 

This blog is cross-posted at Pragmatic Cloud. Follow @GeorgeDWatt on Twitter.

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By: George Watt
George Watt ( @GeorgeDWatt ) is VP of Strategy for the Cloud Computing organization at CA Technologies. For nearly 25 years, George has been helping customers simplify and automate their complex IT infrastructures. Prior to his current role, George founded CA Technologies Engineering Services team, which...
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