Open Group Cloud Panel Forecasts Cloud as Spurring Useful Transition Phase for Enterprise IT Architecture

Transcript of a sponsored podcast panel discussion from The Open Group 2011 U.S. Conference on newly emerging cloud models and their impact on business and government.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to BriefingsDirect.

We now present a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you from The Open Group 2011 Conference in San Diego. We're here the week of February 7, and we have assembled a distinguished panel to examine the expectation of new types of cloud models -- and perhaps cloud specialization requirements -- emerging quite soon.

By now, we're all familiar with the taxonomy around public cloud, private cloud, software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and my favorite, infrastructure as a service (IaaS). But we thought we would do you all an additional service and examine, firstly, where these general types of cloud models are actually gaining use and allegiance, and look at vertical industries and types of companies that are leaping ahead with cloud. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Then, second, we're going to look at why one-size-fits-all cloud services may not fit so well in a highly fragmented, customized, heterogeneous, and specialized IT world -- which is, of course, the world most of us live in.

How much of cloud services that come with a true price benefit -- and that’s usually at scale and cheap -- will be able to replace what is actually on the ground in many complex and unique enterprise IT organizations?

What's more, we'll look at the need for cloud specialization, based on geographic and regional requirements, as well as based on the size of these user organizations -- which of course can vary from 5 to 50,000 seats. Can a few types of cloud work for all of them?

Here to help us better understand the quest for "fit for purpose" cloud balance and to predict, at least for some time, the considerable mismatch between enterprise cloud wants and cloud provider offerings, is our panel: Penelope Gordon, co-founder of 1Plug Corp., based in San Francisco. Welcome, Penelope.

Penelope Gordon: Thank you.

Gardner: We're also here with Mark Skilton, Director of Portfolio and Solutions in the Global Infrastructure Services with Capgemini in London. Thank you for coming, Mark.

Mark Skilton: Thank you.

Gardner: Ed Harrington joins us. He is the Principal Consultant in Virginia for the UK-based Architecting the Enterprise organization. Thank you, Ed.

Ed Harrington: Thank you.

Gardner: Tom Plunkett is a Senior Solution Consultant with Oracle in Huntsville, Alabama.

Tom Plunkett: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And lastly, we're here with TJ Virdi, Computing Architect in the CAS IT System Architecture Group at Boeing based in Seattle. Welcome.

TJ Virdi: Thank you.

Gardner: Let me go first to you, Mark Skilton. One size fits all has rarely worked in IT. If it has, it has been limited in its scope and, most often, leads to an additional level of engagement to make it work with what's already there. Why should cloud be any different?

Three areas

Skilton: Well, Dana, from personal experience, there are probably three areas of adaptation of cloud into businesses. For sure, there are horizontal common services to which, what you call, the homogeneous cloud solution could be applied common to a number of business units or operations across a market.

But we're starting to increasingly see the need for customization to meet vertical competitive needs of a company or the decisions within that large company. So, differentiation and business models are still there, they are still in platform cloud as they were in the pre-cloud era.

But, the key thing is that we're seeing a different kind of potential that a business can do now with cloud -- a more elastic, explosive expansion and contraction of a business model. We're seeing fundamentally the operating model of the business growing, and the industry can change using cloud technology.

So, there are two things going on in the business and the technologies are changing because of the cloud.

Gardner: Well, for us to understand where cloud fits best, and perhaps not so well, let's look at where it's already working. Ed, you talked a lot about the U.S. federal government. They seem to be going like gangbusters to the cloud. Why so?

Harrington: Perceived cost savings, primarily. The federal government has done some analysis. In particular, the General Services Administration (GSA), has done some considerable analysis on what they think they can save by going to, in their case, a public cloud model for email and collaboration services. They've issued a $6.7 million contract to Unisys as the systems integrator, with Google being the cloud services supplier.

So, the debate over the benefits of cloud, versus the risks associated with cloud, is still going on quite heatedly.

Gardner: How about some other verticals? Where is this working? We've seen in some pharma, health-care, and research environments, which have a need for a lot of elasticity,that it makes sense, given that they have highly variable loads. Any other suggestions on where this works, Tom?

Plunkett: You mentioned variable workloads. Another place where we are seeing a lot of customers approach cloud is when they are starting a new project. Because then, they don’t have to migrate from the existing infrastructure. Instead everything is brand new. That’s the other place where we see a lot of customers looking at cloud, your greenfields.

So, the debate over the benefits of cloud, versus the risks associated with cloud, is still going on quite heatedly.

Gardner: TJ, any verticals that you are aware of? What are you seeing that’s working now?

Virdi: It's not probably related with any vertical market, but I think what we are really looking for speed to put new products into the market or evolve the products that we already have and how to optimize business operations, as well as reduce the cost. These may be parallel to any vertical industries, where all these things are probably going to be working as a cloud solution.

Gardner: We've heard the application of "core and context" to applications, but maybe there is an application of core and context to cloud computing, whereby there's not so much core and lot more context. Is that what you're saying so far?

Unstructured data

Virdi: In a sense, you would have to measure not only the structured documents or structured data, but unstructured data as well. How to measure and create a new product or solutions is the really cool things you would be looking for in the cloud. And, it has proven pretty easy to put a new solution into the market. So, speed is also the big thing in there.

Gardner: Penelope, use-cases or verticals where this is working so far?

Gordon: One example in talking about core and context is when you look in retail. You can have two retailers like a Walmart or a Costco, where they're competing in the same general space, but are differentiating in different areas.

Walmart is really differentiating on the supply chain, and so it’s not a good candidate for public cloud computing solutions. That might possibly be a candidate for private cloud computing.

But that’s really where they're going to invest in the differentiating, as opposed to a Costco, where it makes more sense for them to invest in their relationship with their customers and their relationship with their employees. They're going to put more emphasis on those business processes, and they might be more inclined to outsource some of the aspects of their supply chain.

A specific example within retail is pricing optimization. A lot of grocery stores need to do pricing optimization checks once a quarter, or perhaps once a year in some of their areas. It doesn't makes sense for smaller grocery store chains to have that kind of IT capability in-house. So, that's a really great candidate, when you are looking at a particular vertical business process to outsource to a cloud provider who has specific industry domain expertise.

Gardner: So for small and medium businesses (SMBs) that would be more core for them than others?

Gordon: Right. That’s an example, though, where you're talking about what I would say is a particular vertical business process. Then, you're talking about a monetization strategy and then part of the provider, where they are looking more at a niche strategy, rather than a commodity, where they are doing a horizontal infrastructure platform.

In the telecom sector, which is very IT intensive, I'm seeing the emergence of their core business of delivering service to a large end user or multiple end user channels, using what I call cloud brokering.

Gardner: Ed, you had a thought?

Harrington: Yeah, and it's along the SMB dimension. We're seeing a lot of cloud uptake in the small businesses. I work for a 50-person company. We have one "sort of" IT person and we do virtually everything in the cloud. We have people in Australia and Canada, here in the States, headquartered in the UK, and we use cloud services for virtually everything across that. I'm associated with a number of other small companies and we are seeing big uptake of cloud services.

Gardner: Allow me to be a little bit of a skeptic, because I'm seeing these reports from analyst firms on the tens of billions of dollars in potential cloud market share and double-digit growth rates for the next several years. Is this going to come from just peripheral-application-"context" activities, mostly from SMBs? What about the core in the enterprises? Does anybody have an example of where cloud is being used in those?

Skilton: In the telecom sector, which is very IT-intensive, I'm seeing the emergence of their core business of delivering service to a large end user or multiple end user channels, using what I call cloud brokering.

Front-end cloud

So, if where you're going with your question is that, certainly in the telecom sector we're seeing the emergence of front-end cloud, customer relationship management (CRM)-type systems and also sort of back-end content delivery engines using cloud.

The fundamental shift away from the service orientated architecture (SOA) era is that we're seeing more business driven self-service, more deployment of services as a business model, which is a big difference of the shift of the cloud. Particularly in telco, we're seeing almost an explosion in that particular sector.

Gordon: A lot of companies don’t even necessarily realize that they're using cloud services, particularly when you talk about SaaS. There are a number of SaaS solutions that are becoming more and more ubiquitous. If you look at large enterprise company recruiting sites, often you will see Taleo down at the bottom. Taleo is a SaaS. So, that’s a cloud solution, but it’s just not thought necessarily of in that context.

Gardner: Right. Tom?

Plunkett: Another place we're seeing a lot of growth with regard to private clouds is actually on the defense side. The U.S. Defense Department is looking at private clouds, but they also have to deal with this core and context issue. We're in San Diego today. The requirements for a shipboard system are very different from the land-based systems.

Ships have to deal with narrow bandwidth and going disconnected. They also have to deal with coalition partners or perhaps they are providing humanitarian assistance and they are dealing even with organizations we wouldn’t normally consider military. So they have to deal with lots of information, assurance issues, and have completely different governance concerns that we normally think about for public clouds.

Gardner: However, in the last year or two, the assumption has been that this is something that’s going to impact every enterprise, and everybody should get ready. Yet, I'm hearing mostly this creeping in through packaged applications on a on-demand basis, SMBs, greenfield organizations, perhaps where high elasticity is a requirement.

A lot of companies started adopting Linux, but it was for peripheral applications and peripheral services, some web services that weren’t business critical. It didn’t really get into the core enterprise until much later.

What would be necessary for these cloud providers to be able to bring more of the core applications the large enterprises are looking for? What’s the new set of requirements?

As I pointed out, we have had a general category of SaaS and development, elasticity, a handful of infrastructure services. What’s the next set of requirements that's going to make it palatable for these core activities and these large enterprises to start doing cloud? Let me start with you, Penelope.

Gordon: It’s an interesting question and it was something that we were discussing in a session yesterday afternoon. Here is a gentleman from a large telecommunications company, and from his perspective, trust was a big issue. To him, part of it was just an immaturity of the market, specifically talking about what the new style of cloud is and that branding. Some of the aspects of cloud have been around for quite some time.

Look at Linux adoption as an analogy. A lot of companies started adopting Linux, but it was for peripheral applications and peripheral services, some web services that weren’t business-critical. It didn’t really get into the core enterprise until much later.

We're seeing some of that with cloud. It’s just a much bigger issue with cloud, especially as you start looking at providers wanting to moving up the food chain and providing greater value. This means that they have to have more industry knowledge and that they have to have more specialization. It becomes more difficult for large enterprises to trust a vendor to have that kind of knowledge.

No governance

Another aspect of what came up in the afternoon is that, at this point, while we talk about public cloud specifically, it’s not the same as saying it’s a public utility. We talk about "public utility," but there is no governance, at this point, to say, "Here is certification that these companies have been tested to meet certain delivery standards." Until that exists, it’s going to be difficult for some enterprises to get over that trust issue.

Gardner: Assuming that the trust and security issues are worked out over time, that experience leads to action, it leads to trust, it leads to adoption, and we have already seen that with SaaS applications. We've certainly seen it with the federal government, as Ed pointed out earlier.

Let’s just put that aside as one of the requirements that’s already on the drawing board and that we probably can put a checkmark next to at some point. What’s next? What about customization? What about heterogeneity? What about some of these other issues that are typical in IT, Mark Skilton?

Skilton: One of the under-played areas is PaaS. We hear about lock-in of technology caused by the use of the cloud, either putting too much data in or doing customization of parameters and you lose the elastic features of that cloud.

The second thing that we need to be seeing is much more offering transition services, transformation services, to accelerate the use of the cloud in a safe way.

As to your question about what do vendors or providers need to do more to help the customer use the cloud, the two things we're seeing are: One, more of an appliance strategy, where they can buy modular capabilities, so the licensing issue, solutioning issue, is more contained. The client can look at it more in a modular appliance sort of way. Think of it as cloud-in-a-box.

The second thing that we need to be seeing is much more offering of transition services, transformation services, to accelerate the use of the cloud in a safe way. And I think that’s something that we need to really push hard to do. There's a great quote from a client, "It’s not the destination, it’s the journey to the cloud that I need to see."

Gardner: You mentioned PaaS. We haven’t seen too much yet with a full mature offering of the full continuum of PaaS-to-IaaS. That's one where new application development activities and new integration activities would be built of, for, and by the cloud and coordinated between the dev and the ops, with the ops being any number of cloud models -- on-premises, off-premises, co-lo, multi-tenancy, and so forth.

So what about that? Is that another requirement -- that there is continuity between the past and the infrastructure and new deployment, Tom?

Plunkett: We're getting there. PaaS is going to be a real requirement going forward, simply because that’s going to provide us the flexibility to reach some of those core applications that we were talking about before. The further you get away from the context, the more you're focusing on what the business is really focused in on, and that’s going to be the core, which is going to require effective PaaS.

Gardner: TJ?

More regulatory

Virdi: I want to second that, but at the same time, we're looking for more regulatory and other kinds of licensing and configuration issues as well. Those also make it a little better to use the cloud. You don’t really have to buy, or you can go for the demand. You need to make your licenses a little bit better in such a way that you can just put the product or business solutions into the market, test the waters, and then you can go further on that.

Gardner: Penelope, where do you see any benefit of having a coordinated or integrated platform and development test and deploy functions? Is that going to bring this to a more core usage in large enterprises?

Gordon: It depends. I see a lot more of the buying of cloud moving out to the non-IT line of business executives. If that accelerates, there is going to be less and less focus. Companies are really separating now what is differentiating and what is core to my business from the rest of it.

There's going to be less emphasis on, "Let’s do our scale development on a platform level" and more, "Let’s really seek out those vendors that are going to enable us to effectively integrate, so we don’t have to do double entry of data between different solutions. Let's look out for the solutions that allow us to apply the governance and that effectively let us tailor our experience with these solutions in a way that doesn’t impinge upon the provider’s ability to deliver in a cost effective fashion."

That’s going to become much more important. So, a lot of the development onus is going to be on the providers, rather than on the actual buyers.

Gardner: Now, this is interesting. On one hand, we have non-IT people, business people, specifying, acquiring, and using cloud services. On the other hand, we're perhaps going to see more PaaS -- the new application development, be it custom or more of a SaaS type of offering -- that’s brought in with a certain level of adjustment and integration. But, these are going off without necessarily any coordination. At some point, they are going to even come together. It’s inevitable, another integration mess perhaps.

A lot of the development onus is going to be on the providers, rather than on the actual buyers.

Mark Skilton, is that what you see, that we have not just one cloud approach, but multiple approaches, and then some need to rationalize it all?

Skilton: There are two key points. There's a missing architecture practice that needs to be there, which is a workload analysis, so that you design applications to fit specific infrastructure containers, and you've got a bridge between the the application service and the infrastructure service. There needs to be a piece of work by enterprise architects (EAs) that starts to bring that together as a deliberate design for applications to be able to operate in the cloud. And the PaaS platform is a perfect environment.

The second thing is that there's a lack of policy management in terms of technical governance, and because of the lack of understanding. There needs to be more of a matching exercise going on. The key thing is that that needs to evolve.

Part of the work we're doing in The Open Group with the Cloud Computing Work Group is to develop new standards and methodologies that bridge those gaps between infrastructure, PaaS, platform development, and SaaS.

Gardner: We already have the Open Trusted Technology Forum. Maybe soon we'll see an open trusted cloud technology forum?

Skilton: I hope so.

Gardner: Ed Harrington, you mentioned earlier that the role of the enterprise architect is going to benefit from cloud. Do you see what we just described in terms of dual tracks, multiple inception points, heterogeneity, perhaps overlap and redundancy? Isn't that where the enterprise architect flourishes?

Shadow IT

Harrington: I think we talked about line management IT getting involved in acquiring cloud services. If you think we've got this thing called "shadow IT" today, wait a few years. We're going to have a huge problem with shadow IT.

From the architect’s perspective, there's lot to be involved with and a lot to play with, as I said in my talk. There's an awful lot of analysis to be done -- what is the value that the cloud solution being proposed is going to be supplying to the organization in business terms, versus the risk associated with it? Enterprise architects deal with change, and that’s what we're talking about. We're talking about change, and change will inherently involve risk.

Gardner: TJ?

Virdi: All these business decisions are going to be coming upstream, and business executives need to be more aware about how cloud could be utilized as a delivery model. The enterprise architects and someone with a technical background needs to educate or drive them to make the right decisions and choose the proper solutions.

It has an impact how you want to use the cloud, as well as how you get out of it too, in case you want to move to different cloud vendors or providers. All those things come into play upstream, rather than downstream.

Gardner: We all seem to be resigned to this world of, "Well, here we go again. We're going to sit back and wait for all these different cloud things to happen. Then, we'll come in, like the sheriff on a white horse, and try to rationalize." Why not try to rationalize now before we get to that point? What could be done from an architecture standpoint to head off mass confusion around cloud? Let me start at one end and go down the other. Tom?

Plunkett: One word: governance. We talked about the importance of governance increasing as the IT industry went into SOA. Well, cloud is going to make it even more important. Governance throughout the lifecycle, not just at the end, not just at deployment, but from the very beginning.

If you think we've got this thing called "shadow IT" today, wait a few years. We're going to have a huge problem with shadow IT.

Gardner: TJ?

Virdi: In addition to governance, you probably also have to figure out how you want to plan to adapt to the cloud. You don’t want to start as a Big Bang theory. You want to start in incremental steps, small steps, test out what you really want to do. If that works, then go do the other things after that.

Gardner: Penelope, how about following the money? Doesn’t where the money flows in and out of organizations tend to have a powerful impact on motivating people or getting them moving toward governance or not?

Gordon: I agree, and toward that end, it's enterprise architects. Enterprise architects need to break out of the idea of focusing on how to address the boundary between IT and the business and talk to the business in business terms.

One way of doing that that I have seen as effective is to look at it from the standpoint of portfolio management. Where you were familiar with financial portfolio management, now you are looking at a service portfolio, as well as looking at your overall business and all of your business processes as a portfolio. How can you optimize at a macro level for your portfolio of all the investment decisions you're making, and how the various processes and services are enabled? Then, it comes down to, as you said, a money issue.

Gardner: Perhaps one way to head off what we seem to think is an inevitable cloud chaos situation is to invoke more shared services, get people to consume services and think about how to pay for them along the way, regardless of where they come from and regardless of who specified them. So back to SOA, back to ITIL, back to the blocking and tackling that's just good enterprise architecture. Anything to add to that, Mark?

Not more of the same

Skilton: I think it's a mistake to just describe this as more of the same. ITIL, in my view, needs to change to take into account self-service dynamics. ITIL is kind of a provider service management process. It's thing that you do to people. Cloud changes that direction to the other way, and I think that's something that needs to be done.

Also, fundamentally the data center and network strategies need to be in place to adopt cloud. From my experience, the data center transformation or refurbishment strategies or next generation networks tend to be done as a separate exercise from the applications area. So a strong, strong recommendation from me would be to drive a clear cloud route map to your data center.

Gardner: So, perhaps a regulating effect on the self-selection of cloud services would be that the network isn't designed for it, and it's not going to necessarily help?

Skilton: Exactly.

Gardner: That's one way to govern your cloud. Ed Harrington, any other further thoughts on working toward a cloud future without the pitfalls?

It's a combination of governance, treating the cloud services as services per se, and enterprise architecture.

Harrington: Again, the governance, certification of some sort. I'm not in favor of regulation, but I am in favor of some sort of third-party certification of services that consumers can rely upon safely. But, I will go back to what I said earlier. It's a combination of governance, treating the cloud services as services per se, and enterprise architecture.

Gardner: What about the notion that was brought up earlier about private clouds being an important on-ramp to this? If I were a public cloud provider, I would do my market research on what's going on in the private clouds, because I think they are going to be incubators to what might then become hybrid and ultimately a full-fledged third-party public cloud providing assets and services.

What can we learn from looking at what's going on with private cloud now, seemingly a lot of trying to reduce cost and energy consumption -- but what does that tell us about what we should expect in the next few years? Again, let's start with you, Tom.

Plunkett: What we're seeing with private cloud is that it’s actually impacting governance, because one of the things that you look at with private cloud is charge-back between different internal customers. This is forcing these organizations to deal with complexity, money, and business issues that they don't really like to do.

Nowadays, it's mostly vertical applications, where you've got one owner who is paying for everything. Now, we're actually going back to, as we were talking about earlier, dealing with some of the tricky issues of SOA.

Gardner: TJ, private cloud as an incubator ... What we should expect?

Securing your data

Virdi: Configuration and change management -- how in the private cloud we are adapting to it and supporting different customer segments is really the key. This could be utilized in the public cloud too, as well as how you are really securing your information and data or your business knowledge. How you want to secure that is key, and that's why the private cloud is there. If we can adapt to or mimic the same kind of controls in the public cloud, maybe we'll have more adoptions in the public cloud too.

Gardner: Penelope, any thoughts on that, the private-to-public transition?

Gordon: I also look at it in a little different way. For example, in the U.S., you have the National Security Agency (NSA). For a lot of what you would think of as their non-differentiating processes, for example payroll, they can't use ADP. They can't use that SaaS for payroll, because they can't allow the identities of their employees to become publicly known.

Anything that involves their employee data and all the rest of the information within the agency has to be kept within a private cloud. But, they're actively looking at private cloud solutions for some of the other benefits of cloud.

In one sense, I look at it and say that private cloud adoption to me tells a provider that this is an area that's not a candidate for a public-cloud solution. But, private clouds could also be another channel for public cloud providers to be able to better monetize what they're doing, rather than just focusing on public cloud solutions.

Gardner: So, then, you're saying this is a two-way street. Just as we could foresee someone architecting a good private cloud and then looking to take that out to someone else’s infrastructure, you're saying there is a lot of public services that for regulatory or other reasons might then need to come back in and be privatized or kept within the walls? Interesting.

Mark Skilton, any thoughts on this public-private tension and/or benefit?

The lessons that we're learning in running private clouds for our clients is the need to have a much more of a running-IT-as-a-business ethos and approach.

Skilton: I asked an IT service director the question about what was it like running a cloud service for the account. This is a guy who had previously been running hosting and management, and with many years experience.

The surprising thing was that he was quite shocked that the disciplines that he previously had for escalating errors and doing planned maintenance, monitoring, billing and charging back to the customer fundamentally were changing, because it had to be done more in real-time. You have to fix before it fails. You can’t just wait for it to fail. You have to have a much more disciplined approach to running a private cloud.

The lessons that we're learning in running private clouds for our clients is the need to have a much more of a running-IT-as-a-business ethos and approach. We find that if customers try to do it themselves, either they may find that difficult, because they are used to buying that as a service, or they have to change their enterprise architecture and support service disciplines to operate the cloud.

Gardner: Perhaps yet another way to offset potential for cloud chaos in the future is to develop the core competencies within the private-cloud environment and do it sooner rather than later? This is where you can cut your teeth or get your chops, some number of metaphors come to mind, but this is something that sounds like a priority. Would you agree with that, Ed, that coming up with a private-cloud capability is important?

Harrington: It's important, and it's probably going to dominate for the foreseeable future, especially in areas that organizations view as core. They view them as core, because they believe they provide some sort of competitive advantage or, as Penelope was saying, security reasons. ADP's a good idea. ADP could go into NSA and set up a private cloud using ADP and NSA. I think is a really good thing.

Trust a big issue

But, I also think that trust is still a big issue and it's going to come down to trust. It's going to take a lot of work to have anything that is perceived by a major organization as core and providing differentiation to move to other than a private cloud.

Gardner: TJ?

Virdi: Private clouds actually allow you to make more business modular. Your capability is going to be a little bit more modular and interoperability testing could happen in the private cloud. Then you can actually use those same kind of modular functions, utilize the public cloud, and work with other commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vendors that really package this as new holistic solutions.

Gardner: Does anyone consider the impact of mergers and acquisitions on this? We're seeing the economy pick up, at least in some markets, and we're certainly seeing globalization, a very powerful trend with us still. We can probably assume, if you're a big company, that you're going to get bigger through some sort of merger and acquisition activity. Does a cloud strategy ameliorate the pain and suffering of integration in these business mergers, Tom?

Plunkett: Well, not to speak on behalf of Oracle, but we've gone through a few mergers and acquisitions recently, and I do believe that having a cloud environment internally helps quite a bit. Specifically, TJ made the earlier point about modularity. Well, when we're looking at modules, they're easier to integrate. It’s easier to recompose services, and all the benefits of SOA really.

Gardner: TJ, mergers and acquisitions in cloud?

Virdi: It really helps. At the same time, we were talking about legal and regulatory compliance stuff. EU and Japan require you to put the personally identifiable information (PII) in their geographical areas. Cloud could provide a way to manage those things without having the hosting where you have your own business.

That kind of thinking, the cloud constructs applied up at a business architecture level, enables the kind of business expansion that we are looking at.

Gardner: Penelope, any thoughts, or maybe even on a slightly different subject, of being able to grow rapidly vis-à-vis cloud experience and expertise and via having architects that understand it?

Gordon: Some of this comes back to some of the discussions we were having about the extra discipline that comes into play, if you are going to effectively consume and provide cloud services, if you do become much more rigorous about your change management, your configuration management, and if you then apply that out to a larger process level.

So, if you define certain capabilities within the business in a much more modular fashion, then, when you go through that growth and add on people, you have documented procedures and processes. It’s much easier to bring someone in and say, "You're going to be a product manager, and that job role is fungible across the business."

That kind of thinking, the cloud constructs applied up at a business architecture level, enables the kind of business expansion that we are looking at.

Gardner: Mark Skilton, thoughts about being able to manage growth, mergers and acquisitions, even general business agility vis-à-vis more cloud capabilities?

Skilton: Right now, I'm involved in merging in a cloud company that we bought last year in May, and I would say yes and no. The no point is that I'm trying to bundle this service that we acquired in each product and with which we could add competitive advantage to the services that we are offering. I've had a problem with trying to bundle that into our existing portfolio. I've got to work out how they will fit and deploy in our own cloud. So, that’s still a complexity problem.

Faster launch

But, the upside is that I can bundle that service that we acquired, because we wanted to get that additional capability, and rewrite design techniques for cloud computing. We can then launch that bundle of new service faster into the market.

It’s kind of a mixed blessing with cloud. With our own cloud services, we acquire these new companies, but we still have the same IT integration problem to then exploit that capability we've acquired.

Gardner: That might be a perfect example of where cloud is or isn’t working. When you run into the issue of complexity and integration, it doesn’t compute, so to speak.

Skilton: It’s not plug and play yet, unfortunately.

Gardner: Ed, what do you think about this growth opportunity, mergers and acquisitions, a good thing or bad thing?

Harrington: It’s a challenge. I think, as Mark presented it, it's got two sides. It depends a lot on how close the organizations are, how close their service portfolios are, to what degree has each of the organizations adapted the cloud, and is that going to cause conflict as well. So I think there is potential.

With our own cloud services, we acquire these new companies, but we still have the same IT integration problem to then exploit that capability we've acquired.

Skilton: Each organization in the commercial sector can have different standards, and then you still have that interoperability problem that we have to translate to make it benefit, the post merger integration issue.

Gardner: Well, thanks. We've been discussing the practical requirements of various cloud computing models, looking at core and context issues where cloud models would work, where they wouldn’t. And, we have been thinking about how we might want to head off the potential mixed bag of cloud models in our organizations, and what we can do now to make the path better, but perhaps also make our organizations more agile, service oriented, and able to absorb things like rapid growth and mergers.

I'd like to thank you all for joining and certainly want to thank our guests. This is a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you from The Open Group’s 2011 Conference in San Diego. We're here the week of February 7, 2011.

A big thank you now to Penelope Gordon, cofounder of 1Plug Corp.

Gordon: Thank you.

Gardner: Mark Skilton, Director of Portfolio and Solutions in the Global Infrastructure Services with Capgemini. Thank you, Mark.

Skilton: Thank you very much.

Gardner: Ed Harrington, Principal Consultant in Virginia for the UK-based Architecting the Enterprise.

Harrington: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Tom Plunkett, Senior Solution Consultant with Oracle. Thank you.

Plunkett: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: TJ Virdi, the Computing Architect in the CAS IT System Architecture group at Boeing.

Virdi: Thank you.

Gardner: I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for joining, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Learn more. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast panel discussion from The Open Group 2011 U.S. Conference on newly emerging cloud models and their impact on business and government. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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