We need Cloud - of services; not of server racks

In this Forbes article, Andy Greenberg quotes McKinsey analyst William Forrest, stating that cloud computing in its present form could turn out costlier for (large) enterprise users. Now my question is what is the ‘present form’ of cloud computing? If your answer is a ‘completely externally hosted I.T infrastructure, provisioned on-demand, charged on a pay-as-you-use basis’, I agree, the benefits are not much beyond SMEs, risk is high as well. But if it’s about ‘Provisioning and consuming I.T capabilities as shared, distributed, on-demand services spread across a cloud of computing infrastructure that include external and internal environments’, I would say the result will be very positive.

Firstly I think we should get away with this ‘Amazon and Amazon only’ mindset when talking about cloud computing. Cloud is a ‘cloud of IT capabilities’ and not a ‘cloud of server racks’ IMO. Now these I.T capabilities could come from your internal shared services environments, it could come from the externally hosted high capacity systems or it could come from externally hosted shared business services. I think then only it forms a true ‘cloud’.

So even if you are a cautious enterprise user who would not want to completely trust an external vendor to take care of your information technology needs and still want to manage it all in a cost effective way, I say a hybrid cloud approach sure will help you. Firstly, by having internal, shared services, you have achieved a level of normalization and streamlining of your I.T environments (Let me not use SOA here). Secondly by using external environments for high intensity processing jobs (on which I’ve written on multiple occasions here), you get rid of a large cost factor. Thirdly, by consuming relevant external business services (Yes, from SaaS providers), you further reduce investment and maintenance requirements.

Now I’m no MBA to tell you what are your ‘ROI’ gains by having such an approach, all I can say is if you smartly plan, architect and re-arrange your I.T environments leveraging both internal and external computing capabilities, that becomes your cloud, which becomes your cost effective I.T that we always talk about.

Amazon Elastic MapReduce(Beta)

In one of my earlier posts, I’ve mentioned some of the purposes for which enterprises can use cloud environments, even in their current ‘immature’ form. The key I think is exploring how we can use them for information processing capabilities such as performance benchmarking, fault tolerance testing etc. I think the newly released Amazon Elastic MapReduce (Beta) is a platform that exactly serves this purpose. Though I’m no expert on Map-Reduce or functional programming for that matter, from what I understand, this is the best method for crunching large amount of data and extracting key information out of it(We all know what Google does with it; don’t we).

Another key enterprise use for this platform is for business intelligence systems, as rightly mentioned in the Amazon article. Also organizations that process large amount of data in batches need not wait for doing that now at end of day; they can now be done more real-time, during business hours itself. We need no MBA to know that the faster you can process information; the better your business gains will be. I think the potential is also immense for companies that do image processing etc. Agree, programmers will have to do some work to get things done rightly, still this is a good example for demonstrating how cloud based computing will work for the enterprise, even in its present form.

Running for a cause

What do you think is the one single factor that decides the bigness of news items to choose for a weekly news analysis column? Is it the number of people affected by it? Is it the number of people involved in it? Is it the ‘weight’ of the people involved? Is it the economic repercussions that matters? Or is it all simply media conspiracy? Since I’m no journalist working in controlled environments under supervision of egoistic editors, it’s the absurdity that’s the deciding factor for me. So here is an analysis of few very important news items that I came across last week.

The biggest news for me last week was that on March 28th we proudly celebrated ‘Earth Hour’ by switching to candles for an hour – from kerosene lanterns. The move has become such a success I understand, that people in my part of the world are now asking when can we NOT observe Earth Hour. My only question here is why did they chose March 28th, notwithstanding the fact that we had April 1st falling on the same week, a more apt day for people - especially in rural India - to observe Earth Hour(s).

The biggest landmark we as a nation crossed last week was that we now have our own seven wonders to litter around. I wonder why wonders are always seven in number. Is there a global standard set for the number of wonders that you can have at a time - like the number of U.N security council members, the number of KKR captains etc. Or does it symbolize something; say the number of colors that men can recognize? Now you might say it could be symbolizing the seven days in a week, then my question will be why not 12 or 365 or even why not for the number of holes in a human head. Your week proposition hence is a weak one as well. Now the news report quoted above also says that actor Aishwarya Rai, Her F-I-L Mr Bachchan, her M-I-L Mrs.Bachchan, her S-I-L Ms.Nanda, her husband Mr.Abhishek, Mr.Amar Singh and Mr. Kamal Hassan attended the ceremony that announced the wonders. Again, seven of them! Now I wonder what that symbolizes, I mean other than the obvious ‘odd man out’ question. Anyway, we are becoming a wonderful nation, which is good.

Now those are on the ‘up’ side of news which makes us prouder than the week before, I must also mention few things on the down side as well, to complete the article in true journalistic spirit. Though we humiliate ourselves everyday with our religions, politics, casts, moral-policing etc, here is one where we really failed in front of the world – According to this report , “Chowmein beats Indian curry as Britain's favourite food”. We better do something about it I say, rather than just sitting and watching the Chinese conquering the world, after all we are the world’s largest democracy. Not that it matters when comes to culinary expertise, but we got to console ourselves with something when compared with our neighbour right?

Now to the weeks biggest recession related news – On how a French pole-vaulter is trying to attract sponsors as his present sponsor backed out due to the financial crisis. It seems sports enthusiasts are waiting for other sports personalities around the world to follow him. I think this could even open up a new era for sports sponsorships if the running sports person also holds her/his hat out and seek public contribution. I’m sure she/he can collect enough sponsorship money to fund their entire career that way. Also more people will get to sponsor their favourite sports persons and reap the benefit upfront as well, no matter whether she or he wins in the actual game.

Before I go, here are some etiquette tips - for men in business and businessmen who employ them.

Internal Cloud – Another SOA in the making?

In the CIO blog article titled Economic Recession: Good or Bad for Cloud Computing?, Bernard Golden points to a few important questions on how fruitful will be an exercise to build an internal(private) cloud. I think he has some good points here that anybody attempting to build such environments should consider before jumping into the conclusion that it will improve the efficiency of their enterprise I.T environments without having to compromise on security and ownership issues.

The most important pitfall he points out is that the exercise needs investment, to build a ‘cloud’ layer over the existing (mostly legacy) systems, nobody is going to invest in such a thing. The second point he is raising is that whether there are ‘unused equipments’ lying in your data centers that can be used for building the cloud? Most of the time the answer will be ‘NO’ in my opinion too, simply because application owners are always short of systems, unless of course they have plenty of ‘center of excellence’s within the company who most of the time are ‘center of expenses’.

Also, we have the ‘almost failed’ example of SOA that it’s not easy to shift the I.T structure that is built over the years by multiple teams with multiple needs and priorities into a new umbrella, no matter how much future benefits you can show there, nobody is going to invest there, though all of us like the word ‘innovation’ more than earlier these days. No matter what skills you have in your enterprise I.T, you simply cannot build something that matches the external cloud providers in terms of capabilities and robustness, so you might as well leverage them than competing.

Having supported these arguments, I must say that I’m no a naysayer for internal clouds; my take is that, you sure need it, but don’t attempt building each and every layer of cloud computing within physically. Leverage the existing capabilities of external clouds such as processing power, networks, fault tolerance, dynamic provisioning and even storage for not so critical data backups etc, and build/host your business systems and services over it and form some sort of virtual internal cloud. As a first step, start using existing external clouds for computing needs where you don’t have to worry too much about data security. (Some of my thoughts on this model here).

Business services – an essential cloud capability

People who talk about cloud computing often divide the environment as a three layered structure - an infrastructure layer, an operating platform layer and an application layer. But in my opinion, this is not the cloud layers I would subscribe to in future, I would say the most important of them is going to be a – a services layer, comprising business services that aggregates capabilities from all the three underlying layers. This is what should be utilized by enterprise users, to take full advantage of the platform. Services and even process automation systems should be part of clouds.

Now you might ask isn’t it a little too much to imaging that companies will leverage externally defined and hosted business processes? I say they should, as long as they are definable, configurable, automate-able, service aggregations to make full use of cloud environments. Now I’m no technology expert on cloud computing to advice on how it can be achieved etc, all I would say is this is how I envisage a true shared services model to work. I would also say that utilizing the same infrastructure, same applications and storage doesn’t mean the services should give exactly the same output to every customer as well, they should be agile too.

IPL Highlithighs

Any large landscape where everyone is part of some or other – religious/linguistic/original/gender-al/habitual/regional/occupational/ cultural – minority or majority is a mine of subjects for a news analyst; in terms of abundance as well as explosiveness, something can get her/him into losing a vital organ or two too, no matter how many pages of the constitution are set aside for guaranteeing freedom of speech and expression. So an analyst has to be very careful not to hurt any types of sentiments of any of the above mentioned swarms while at work. That’s why in this space I always act as Courage the cowardly dog and restrict myself to things that generally doesn’t emotionally itch any beefy mafia - that is, things such as recession, common men and women, dogs, cats, cockroaches, research findings, cricket and things like that.

Today, I was forced to write a non-weekender column on The change of IPL venue from India because of the sheer weight of the subject(as well as it’s sponsors') plus its socio-economic/political implications. Though I’m neither a cricket fan nor a an exhaust fan in any political restrooms, I decided to comment on the subject because we analysts(of any size and shape) think anything that is pomp, bollywoody etc is more important than your that mean grocery bill and jolty job. United we stand in supporting the IPL stakeholders decision to move it all - including it’s flesh and boolood cheer leading – elsewhere. I must remind you all naysayers that cricket is a colonial game after all, we believe in exploiting the raw materials available here, building products elsewhere and selling it back here and earning huge profits.

I as a person believing in Export Led Industrialization bet Indians abroad would be ready to pay ten times more than that of an average local(country) Indian for a cricket ticket and the countries anyway can be satisfied by showing them the ‘high-li-thighs’ through the omnipresent idiot box - in typical bollywood style. So my advice to all cricket fans is, don’t get disappointed, de-motivated, emotional, commotional or subside for any other types of motions that originates in your body, keep watching the match highlithighs, it’s the economy we are talking about you foo ladies and gentlemen!

Building Enterprise Services Network

In a recent blog post titled “SOA without service-enabled applications?”, Joe McKendrick points to a big misconception in the I.T circles about achieving an enterprise-wide service oriented environment - that every providing system has to be ‘service enabled’ to achieve SOA. He is right, services that are built from the functions of the underlying applications need not be part of the applications themselves, in fact in many cases it should not be too, in my opinion.

Everybody (including those saying SOA is a dead cow; no more milk-able that is) accepts the importance of building a ‘business services network’ in enterprise I.T these days, and such a layer can be built as an isolated layer above the business applications, though I wouldn’t say we would need a ‘ commercial SOA stack’ to achieve the same. Taking this approach has many advantages, including composing coarse grained business services from multiple underlying system functions as well as achieving better loose coupling levels.

Another advantage that I see is that, as enterprise environments are consuming more and more externally hosted services(yes, I mean the SaaS, Cloud stuff), the business services layer will help provisioning these services to the enterprise consumers easily because all we have to do is to connect it through the business services layer. This kind of an approach I would say make one of the key enterprise I.T concerns today - how to replace internal systems with Cloud/SaaS services - addressed better as well because now there is a clear abstraction between the consuming systems and the providers, the consumers just have to point to the same end-point in the business services layer no matter whether that service is provided by an internal system or an external one.

Confusio Linguarum – Hyperspeech protocols

…And the news continues…so is this self-syndicated column that looks into the various socio-economic aspects of news that breaks into our drawing rooms every day via the various modern day communication channels like TV, internet, SMS etc as well as through the more traditional channels such as newspapers, bais, auntijis etc. Starting this week, I’ve decided to give a permanent name to my column - ‘Confusio Linguarum’ (roughly translates to Verbal Gastroenteritis in medical terms). Here is an analysis of few important(according to me) events that happened last week which could potentially change your life forever; even if you are not married.

The biggest news for me last week was that IBM’s research scientists in India have developed something called HSTP - stands for Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol and not High Speed Traffic Problems as you thought wrongly. For me the term ‘Hyperspeech’ sounded very interesting, especially because my online dictionary says ‘hyper’ means “behaving in an overexcited or hyperactive way”, ”easily excited, or having a high-strung temperament” etc. I thought it has something to do with the upcoming Parliament elections and started digging more into it – to see whether there are going to be protocols put in place that stops our politicians from spreading the medical condition mentioned earlier. Unfortunately, it’s not about that, an IBM paper defines “Hyperspeech” as “a voice fragment in a voice application that is a hyperlink to a voice fragment in another voice application.”. Now whatever that means, I think it has far reaching consequences, especially because you and I don’t understand it at the moment, exactly the same situation we were in when we first heard - Hypertext Transfer Protocol, Kyoto protocol etc.

The second biggest news of course is the security concern that looms over IPL like Billy Bowden’s crooked finger. But I’ll skip that since it’s an issue of national security(that bollywood-barbies are controlling cricket these days) and move on to another important news that came out last week - an insurance company’s research shows that “Mothers work 40 percent harder than fathers”. Now that is news with far reaching consequences. At last one company is accepting watching TV, reading newspaper etc are essential domestic duties. That 40 percent sure will be a huge morale booster for existing fathers to perform more on those lines and aspirants to become one as well.

Last but not the least - news on the impact of recession on various industries. I would say this sure needs attention of more expert syndicated columnists who can recommend how to save the affected industry, a not so knowledgeable ones like myself can only recommend a government bailout plan because I know such measures sure won’t help. Another important news item for the week was that we now have somebody officially titled “Mrs. India”. Congratulations to the winner. My only request to the organizers of this show is that, though we all understand what you actually meant by that title, I recommend you change it to…say something like “Married Indian woman of the year” etc so that it sounds a little less offensive?

Open source and utility computing

Though I’m not a big fan of having open source software in enterprise environments, I follow the movements because of my personal interests (ultimately we are all ‘freedom’ guys, aren’t we) in the area. I was wondering whats the future of open source computing, in the wake of the upcoming utility computing models. Especially because till now most of the open source success stories are in the personal/experimental/collaborative computing space, with that landscape changing, I wonder what will be the next generation of open source look like.

There sure are a lot of indicators currently itself how ‘openness’ will be in the future environments, in terms of need for interoperability standards, open APIs, open platforms to build custom applications on top (Google Maps) etc.

Tim O’Reilly has this great article on the future of open source movements in the wake of increased attention on cloud computing these days.

Domesticating Cloud for enterprise use

For the past couple of years, I’ve been pursuing trends in enterprise computing firstly because it’s my bread, butter and cheese(cheesy stuff..hmm..). Secondly because it’s a trait of primates of all types to follow things that excite them. Frank(synatra)ly speaking, that’s the reason why I started pursuing the cloud computing bandwagon, even before it wasn’t this cloudy and we were calling it utility computing, ASP, SaaS etc. Now that we are all blind men and women trying to understand this mammoth, I was wondering what could be the best fit jobs that we can assign to it so that we can be familiar with the beast, and once it become a more domesticated, predictable, mature and usable one we can confidently ride on it.

Here are few things I feel we(enterprise I.T) can do even today with existing clouds

1. As I mentioned in another post here, testing sure is an area that we can look into, since no production data goes in there.


2. Outward facing shared I.T services – Say B2B connectivity environments etc. One reason they are anyway externally facing, and a cloud hosted system can act as the gateway, plus give you all the benefits of cloud.


3. High computing power required internal systems such as
   
   
   
   • Systems with occasional very high payload, such as reconciliation systems, payroll calculators etc can hire on-demand processing power of cloud rather than investing in ten servers for a ten minute job in ten months?
   
   
   • Desktop applications like word processors etc – Now here there could be issues of data confidentiality etc, but if being found secure enough, these mass consumed applications can be moved to cloud.
   
   
   • E-mail systems – we have some of the most successful e-mail systems in the world on cloud already, I think corporate e-mails can also move there, security sure is a concern, but e-mails are pretty much secure these days, aren’t they?


4. Data archival – Store all your 19th century operational data in cloud data stores.


5. Communication, collaboration apps - if e-mails can, then why not all your other white/black boarding etc moved there as well? Why not even your online meeting stuff?

I'm bored..what else?