Considerations and reflection on technology and IT strategy
The 2011 Future of Cloud Computing Survey was released this week at the Structure Conference. Get a look at the most interesting slides and the top comments from cloud leaders.
An overview of the survey result is available on TechRepublic at http://ow.ly/5r4kn
For a more detailed presentation of the results see http://ow.ly/5r4oU
So many things to do before leaving for holidays… I have no time for a complete post but this one really made me laugh: http://geekandpoke.typepad.com/.a/6a00d8341d3df553ef0133f21964a3970b-pi
Recent evolutions on SaaS pricing include long term engagement or price per year. This tends to move away from the genuine concept of pay-as-you-go and may lead to customer lock-in.
Some analysts think customer should worry while others argue that the pay by the sip model may not be viable for vendors and that the market is going to find a balance between classic licensing mode and the pay-as-you-go principle.
Read the complete post of Larry Dignan: http://ow.ly/1YWCY
As we have seen in the previous article, consumers are supposed to gain multiple advantages from Cloud Computing (flexibility, cost reduction,…) but let’s see in detail what are the opportunities of Cloud.
SMBs are probably in a position to get the greatest advantages of the Cloud paradigm. Indeed, as of today, SMBs usually can’t afford Enterprise class solutions. Such high end solutions often require investments that SMBs can’t bear or subscriptions on volumes they can’t reach. Furthermore, in the case of starting businesses, it is also obvious that investing on an infrastructure, or subscribing services on several years is a real burden that increase the financial pressure.
For instance, ERP are quiet expensive to implement, so expensive that the economic equation is not always positive for SMBs. But with a SaaS model, an ERP becomes affordable. With a real pay per use model and no infrastructure expense, cloud can open such solutions to businesses that weren’t able to use them before. Because Cloud is more flexible than traditional outsourcing and with a finer granularity, it will be a very interesting field for SMBs.
Enterprises usually already have an IT department with IT facilities. They potentially have access to every type of solutions. So, what value Cloud can bring for this type of actor?
The market is of course underlying that Cloud improves IT resources utilization and, as a consequence, lowers the utilization prices. This is of course an advantage, but Cloud also brings better capacity management, as Amazon underlined in its now famous Capacity versus Demand Curve:
Classic capacity is expanded through acquisition expenditures. In the most favorable case, resources can be provided through outsourcing but this type of service requires sometime mid to long term engagement. As you can see on the curve, Classic Capacity never really matches the demand. It is either above, leading to overcapacity, or under. In this situation, either you don’t get the full benefit from your IT investments or you may have direct impact on your business.
Each time an under capacity situation is encountered, if the upcoming demand can not be precisely predicted, the decision to add capacity is very risky.
Because Cloud brings flexibility and a virtually unlimited capacity to consumers, demand can be matched precisely.
But focusing only on an infrastructure optimization will only result in costs rationalization and improved efficiency. This would just be missing the global picture ; Capacity and Utilization are only IT performance indicators. They are not related to Business Value and Return On Investment. To define Cloud’s value we should examine how it could be beneficial from a business perspective.
Who has never experienced project delays due to the late provisioning of the hardware, or network? In a traditional IT environment, one generally follows a design – procure – setup cycle. This cycle usually last several weeks (months in the worst case). Furthermore, it is often placed on the critical path of a project. Indeed, procurement can’t be launched until the design is over and soon after the design phase is over, you need to setup your environments for development and testing (as illustrated by the following).
In short, you nearly have no margin during this phase and any delay in procurement or setup results in a global delay for the project.
With a Cloud provisioning cycle, you dramatically reduce the time required to have an operational environment or service. What usually takes weeks or months can be reduced to days:
This reduces the risks on the planning and leads to a simplified development phase (as you no longer need to manage a long and complex early work). On the global picture, this enables to have a shorter project.
The benefits for the Business are obvious. The sooner a project is done, the sooner new functions are available. This enable to achieve greater agility and shorter time to market. This is particularly interesting for enterprises on a rapidly evolving market and who are looking for a competitive advantage.
As we already told at the beginning, Cloud enables to provision resources and licenses in a flexible way that avoids over capacity. But what could be the associated benefit?
Capacity is generally allocated to fit the peak demand, thus in other periods, resources are idle. The utilization ratio varies among studies. But you’ll read that it ranges from 5% to 20%. This is a huge source of optimization. Furthermore, a Cloud provider will buy large volumes of hardware and software licenses. This results in an improved service price for consumers.
Another important source of costs relates to administration and operations management. Depending on the service levels, operating a platform can be very complex and expensive. Sometimes, companies don’t reach the critical mass enabling them to have industrialized procedures and a high level of skills. On the opposite, a cloud provider has efficient management processes and a high level of skills. For a given level of service, providers operate at a lower price.
With Cloud, consumers will transfer outside the responsibility of matching capacity and demand. A paper from Berkeley University draws a very relevant parallel with the semi conductors industry to illustrate this interest:
Cloud Computing is likely to have the same impact on software that foundries have had on the hardware industry. At one time, leading hardware companies required a captive semiconductor fabrication facility, and companies had to be large enough to afford to build and operate it economically. However, processing equipment doubled in price every technology generation. A semiconductor fabrication line costs over $3B today, so only a handful of major “merchant” companies with very high chip volumes, such as Intel and Samsung, can still justify owning and operating their own fabrication lines. This motivated the rise of semiconductor foundries that build chips for others, such as Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC). Foundries enable “fab-less” semiconductor chip companies whose value is in innovative chip design: A company such as nVidia can now be successful in the chip business without the capital, operational expenses, and risks associated with owning a state-of-the-art fabrication line. Conversely, companies with fabrication lines can time-multiplex their use among the products of many fab-less companies, to lower the risk of not having enough successful products to amortize operational costs. Similarly, the advantages of the economy of scale and statistical multiplexing may ultimately lead to a handful of Cloud Computing providers who can amortize the cost of their large datacenters over the products of many “datacenter-less” companies.
quoted from Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing
In short, Cloud will help consumers to concentrate on their core business, leaving production issues to specialized people and enabling to invest capital in other activities.
Cloud is going to change the way of financing IT. As we have already seen, traditional IT mainly relies on CAPEX as you need to invest in capacity before using it. From a business perspective it means:
Cloud enables to move from CAPEX to OPEX. No upfront investment is needed and OPEX is mainly driven by the demand. Instead of being tied up in fixed assets (IT resources) money is still available to be invested elsewhere (or less money is needed to launch a service). If you consider that capital has a cost (Weighted Average Cost of Capital), Cloud helps to improve revenue or to use capital in the more efficient way. And if we compare with traditional IT you have:
It is hard to be exhaustive when talking about Cloud challenges, but here are some of the most important.
Although Security was seen a major show stopper, people now tend to consider that many provider are able to guarantee higher security levels than most in-house IT systems. But Security is still a major concern for enterprises, especially regarding sensitive data hosting.
There a lot to bet that Security is going to be managed as a service level in the years to come. This will surely simplify things. But regulations will probably still be an issue for some time. Indeed, Data Privacy and Protections laws require in some case that private data stay on a national territory and in some cases these data can’t be hosted outside the enterprise. Providers begin to sell specialized services for such requirements, like localized datacenters with special access policies, but as of today, this still raises obstacles to cloud adoption.
One of the great promises of Cloud Computing is a reduced complexity from the point of view of the consumer. As far as we talk about Software as a Service like Mail I can’t disagree: every end user can easily subscribe a new mail account without any help from an IT department. But as soon as you deal with Platform or Infrastructure as a Service, it is hard to imagine a business user requesting the provisioning of a new system image and configuring its fresh Oracle database installation for the new application development project.
This is what I would call the illusion of reduced complexity. For sure, Cloud makes things easier but not to the point where the IT departments are just going to manage their contracts with cloud providers. Cloud is going to bring new challenges that will have to be addressed:
Cloud relies on a simple paradigm: resources or services can quickly be instantiated and released. Provisioning a service that will never be released breaks this paradigm to some extend. Two points must be underlined here:
This means that IT Governance has to evolve to take Cloud into account (choosing appropriate loads, subscription usage tracking, …) otherwise cloud adoption could simply fail.
As of today Cloud Computing lacks of standard. Each actor is proposing it own formats and interfaces. Consumers face the risk of a lock in effect. Once data are hosted outside, a consumer may become dependent of a proprietary system whose cost may escalate or terms of service may change unilaterally.
If no standard emerge sooner or later, consumers will have to maintain an abstraction level between them and their provider to manage interoperability.
As we have seen, there are many opportunities and challenges. If you’re interested in moving to Cloud as a consumer, you should first assess what are your current IT capabilities and what could be the potential impact of a cloud adoption. In a second time, you should assess the impact on your business model. This second point is really important. If you see Cloud as a simple opportunity to reduce your IT costs you’re missing a major part of this disruptive change. Organizations that are going to define a Cloud strategy to improve their business model or to create new products and services are going to create new markets or take a decisive advantage against competition.
Starting with a pilot is a good choice. Choose an appropriate workload type and a business imperative where Cloud benefits can be compared to a traditional IT. Make your choice among the different types of Cloud (IaaS, SaaS, …) and analyze your pilot experimentation to confirm your global strategy.
In this series of posts I’m going to expose and discuss the opportunities and challenges of Cloud Computing as they are seen now.
First of all, we have to quickly define the different types of actors as each of them will not have the same expectations and concerns. The Cloud Computing ecosystem is represented on the following figure (each actor relies on the others below):
Editors and Hardware vendors are pervasively present in the ecosystem. They provide hardware and software solutions to the other actors. Cloud is nothing new for them (in term of business), except that it brings technical innovation and a potential new market to address with new products. That’s why I’m not going to discuss this type of actor any more in the next articles.
The pure provider is, as its name states, an actor who provides the complete service stack he sells. As he relies on no other one, this type of actor has to provide at least Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS). He could also possibly provide other types of services relying on its infrastructure (Software as a Service or Platform as a Service).
The pure provider deals with a unique concern in the cloud ecosystem. Whereas cloud computing is heavily based on virtual resources and flexibility, the pure provider has the responsibility to manage a real infrastructure (I mean physically manage hardware, cables, square meters in datacenters, etc …). He is the only one in the ecosystem who deals with the infrastructure investment (and risks!) as others are going to rely on him to provide computing resources.
The pure consumer uses the services provided by others. As he provides no service, he stands ‘at the end’ of the ecosystem and is the opposite of the pure provider; that is, he fully benefits from the Cloud Computing ecosystem without having to bear a specific investment.
This actor provides services to external customers, but he also consumes services offered by others; to develop a new service, the hybrid provider relies on another external service. For instance, the hybrid provider could develop a PaaS offer and rely on a IaaS provider who will supply the processing power. This enables the hybrid provider either to concentrate on its core business or to test the success of the offer before investing in hardware hosting (investment deferring).
The hybrid provider’s business model is to sell services.
The hybrid consumer is very similar to the hybrid provider. He consumes services but uses them to provide the internal services needed by the business.
The typical hybrid consumer is the IT department of a large business. Its business model is not to literally ‘sell’ services outside.
As you may already have guessed, the hybrid provider and consumer are two sides of the same coin. Indeed, they both ‘resell’ the service they buy to their own consumers and they must provide the same pay as you go billing system. I’m using the word ‘billing’ on purpose, even if it may seem inappropriate for the hybrid consumer. But as we are going to discuss in another post, even internal consumer should be billed for their use of the services.
In the upcoming articles, we are going to discuss cloud opportunities and challenges for each type of actor.
I just published an article on IBM DeveloperWorks presenting how to use WS-Trust for token transformation:
http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/websphere/library/techarticles/1003_chades/1003_chades.html
In the previous post I introduced Cloud. It is now considered that Cloud Computing encompasses the following:
But some people consider that Software as a Service and Platform as a Service are not Cloud. In a discussion at the Churchill Club in september 2009, Larry Ellison (Oracle CEO) declared that SaaS like Salesforce.com already existed 10 years ago (see references at the bottom).
I could also quote an example from my own experience. Indeed, in 2003 my colleagues and I started to work on Telco Enablers platforms. These projects aimed at selling access to web services provided by Telco companies (SMS sending, subscriber locating, …). But in 2003 nobody talked about Platform as a Service and Cloud Computing.
One year before the Churchill Club discussion, in september 2008, Larry Ellison denounced the growing hype :
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The interesting thing about cloud computing is that it is either going to be or already is the most important computing architecture in the world because we’ve redefined cloud computing to include everything that we currently do. [...] I can’t think of anything that isn’t cloud computing with all of these announcements. [...] The computer industry is the only industry that is more fashion-driven than women’s fashion.
Larry Ellison
And he’s completely right! Do you remember the SOA hype? Few years ago, everything was Service Oriented. And there were also the e-business, the PC replacing passive terminals, …
Some experts at the EmTec conference in 2009, tried to define what is cloud. They generally agreed that cloud computing involves software running off premises. Ok, so, I’m proud to announce that I was doing cloud in 1998 with my webmail study project at engineer school! Actually it was a poor copy of HotMail who could claim the paternity of cloud with its mail client application running outside the premises of its users at the end of the 90s. As you probably guessed, this brilliant definition of cloud was issued by people from the companies having stakes in the new trend.
But my purpose here is not to convince you that Cloud Computing is an empty concept. Cloud computing is based on an old idea: it’s just about being able to easily dispose of externalized resources and pay for them just when you need them. And the technology is now able to deliver this.
The problem is that everyone wants to be associated with this new market, renaming what they are doing to pretend they invented technology. Cloud is then the new golden hammer. But this is not a reason to act as a roadblock, as any tool, Cloud can bring value to the business. It’s all about applying the right tool on the right situation.
‘Cloud’. To me, this first sounded like a new buzzword. When beginning to read about cloud, my first impression was ‘Huh, it doesn’t seem that much different than outsourced virtualized resources available on demand’. But actually, cloud brings a real pay-as-you-go billing mode and a self-service access that brings true flexibility. Then, with Cloud you really can create or delete virtual servers in several minutes through a simple interface and pay only while you use them ; kind of a dream for IT managers! But this doesn’t come without issues. Let’s take a closer look at Cloud computing and see how to use it. In this first post, I will just introduce the concepts coming with cloud.
For those who haven’t had the opportunity to learn about cloud yet, Cloud Computing mainly refers to the ability to quickly create virtual servers on a virtualized infrastructure. I really like the following video when it comes to explaining Cloud:
It is generally accepted that the main characteristics of Cloud are:
As you can see, the goal is to have something really simple to use. Like a service you use when you need it. This is really what you should have in mind. Cloud computing is here to provide what you need when you need it, and you don’t wanna know how it is built. The immediate benefit is that you don’t have to worry about hosting and all its aspects.
Lets get into more detail ; there is not one single type of cloud. As introduced by the previous video:
When talking about IaaS you can find the following:
This note briefly introduced Cloud Computing, in a second one we’ll discuss how cloud can be used.
Ok ok, I know that IT and SOA governance have been quite fashionable words. But let’s stay away from hype in this short note.
Sometimes, integrators don’t see the need for governance. Recently I even heard someone saying ‘SOA governance are boyscouts’ practices ! We don’t need this‘. In his defense, I must admit that we have heard and red so many things (too many?), that governance has been completely discredited. Furthermore, integrators are often present for a limited period. They deliver the system their customer ordered and their action is over. They not always see what a system without governance can become.
From a recent experience, I would say that SOA governance must be implemented directly by customers (or with some help from third party consultants). First, this is a way to ensure that the implementation and management of the system fits in the initial vision. The second point is that SOA governance is often a question of arbitration between actors of the enterprise. Considering this, an integrator, as an external actor, may not have sufficient political weight to be efficient in this role due to the following points (not exhaustive ; feel free to add yours in the comments):
Another common pitfall I’ve met is the illusion of SOA governance. In this case, the project had a good design method, that ensured traceability of the functional requirements from logical architecture to the code delivery. This is a good practice, and the technical leader argued that since it was possible to track the impact of a change in the code, it was enough to avoid the definition of services governance. But SOA and services governance are different things, good design and development practices don’t substitute to governance (and vice versa). SOA governance is not about managing the implementation and the internal design of services. It focuses on the services availability to consumers, evolution decisions and the impact analysis on actual consumers, decision to expose or withdraw a service, management of the service levels and capacity planning …
No matter in which case you are, if your governance process is not efficient or doesn’t exist, one day or another, someone is going to say ‘Oh my god!! We had a really clear vision of what we wanted and how it was supposed to work, how did we get here?‘. But ‘efficient’ doesn’t mean necessarily heavy. A good governance process must be appropriate. By appropriate, I mean 2 things:
As a conclusion I would just say don’t neglect your governance process. It’s not required to be huge and overwhelming, keep it simple and rational.
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