Forrester Analyst Kurt Bittner on the Inevitability of DevOps

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on what’s making DevOps such a hot topic and steps that organizations are taking to make it successful.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the next edition of the HPE Discover Podcast Series. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this ongoing discussion on IT innovation and how it’s making an impact on people’s lives.

Gardner

Our next thought leadership discussion explores the building interest in DevOps -- of making the development, test, and ongoing improvement in software creation a coordinated, lean, and proficient process for enterprises.

We're here with a prominent IT industry analyst from Forrester Research to explore why DevOps is such a hot topic, and to identify steps that successful organizations are taking to make advanced applications development a major force for business success.

Please join me in welcoming Kurt Bittner, Principal Analyst, Application Development and Delivery at Forrester Research. Welcome, Kurt.

Kurt Bittner: Thanks, Dana. Great to be here.

Gardner: Let’s start by looking at the building interest in DevOps. What’s driving that?

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Bittner: It’s essentially the end-user or client organizations as they face increasing pressure from competition and increasing expectations from customers to delivering functionality faster.

I was at a dinner the other night, and there were half a dozen or so large banks there. They were all saying, to my surprise, that they didn’t feel like they were competing with one another, but that they felt like they were competing with companies like Apple, Google, PayPal, and increasingly startup companies. Square is a good example, too.

They're getting into the payment mechanism, and that’s siphoning our business from the banks. The banks are beginning to see drops in their own bottom lines because of the competition from ... software companies. You see companies like Uber having a big impact on traditional taxi companies and transportation.

Increasing competition

So it’s essentially increasing competition, driven by increasing customer expectations. We're all part of that as consumers where we've gravitating toward our mobile smartphones. We're increasingly interacting with companies through mobile devices.

Bittner

Delivering new functionality through mobile experiences, through cloud experiences, through the web, through various kinds of payment mechanisms -- all of these things contribute to the need to deliver services much faster.

Startup companies get this and they're already adopting these techniques in large numbers. What we're finding is that traditional companies are increasingly saying, "We have to do this. This a competitive threat to us." Like Blockbuster Video, they may cease to exist if they don’t.

Gardner: Companies like Apple or Uber probably define themselves as being technology companies. That’s what they do. Software is a huge part of what makes them a successful company. It defines them. What is it that DevOps brings to the table for them and others?

Bittner: DevOps optimizes the software delivery pipeline, all the steps that you have to go through between when you have an idea and when a customer starts benefiting from that idea. In the traditional delivery processes, you have lots of hand-offs, lots of stops and starts. You have relatively inefficient processes, and it can take months -- and sometimes years -- to go from idea to having somebody get a benefit.

With DevOps, we're reducing the size of the things you're delivering, so you can deliver more frequently. Then, you can eliminate hand-offs and inefficiencies in the delivery process, so that you can deliver it as fast as possible with higher quality.

Gardner: And what was broken? What needs to be fixed? Wasn’t Agile suppose to fix this?

Bittner: Agile is part of the solution, but many Agile teams find that they'd like to be more agile. They're held back by lack of testing environments. They're held back by lack of testing automation. They're held back by lack of deployment automation. They, themselves, have lots of barriers.

So, Agile is part of the solution in the sense of involving the business more on a day-to-day basis in the project decision-making. It also provides the ability to break a problem down into smaller increments, and at least demonstrate in smaller increments, but it doesn’t actually deliver into production in smaller increments.

Other capabilities

You need to have other capabilities to do that. One illustration of how DevOps helps to accelerate Agile came in talking to a large manufacturing organization that was making the transition to Agile.

They had a problem in that they weren't able to get to development or test environments for months. IT operations processes had been set up in a very siloed way. Development and testing environments got low priority when other things were going on.

So, as much as the team wanted to work in an Agile way, they couldn’t get a rapid test environment. In effect, they were completely stopped from any forward progress. There's only so much you can do on a developer workstation.

These DevOps practices benefit Agile as well, by enabling Agile to really fully realize the promise that it’s had.

These DevOps practices benefit Agile as well, enabling Agile to really fully realize the promise that it’s had.

Gardner: Is there a change in philosophy, too, Kurt, where software is released before it's really cooked and let the environment, the real world, be their test bed, their simulation if you will? And then they do rapid iterations? Are we going to begin seeing that now, as DevOps gains ground in established traditional enterprises?

Bittner: You're right. There is a tendency toward getting functionality out there, seeing what the market says about it, and then improving. That works in certain areas. For example, Google has an internal motto that says if you're not somewhat embarrassed by your first release, you didn’t move fast enough.

But we also have to realize that we have software in our automobiles and in our aircraft, and you don’t want to put something out there into those environments that’s basically not functional.

I separate the measures of quality from measures of aesthetic qualities. The software that gets delivered early has to be high-quality. It can’t be buggy. It has to work and satisfy a certain set of needs. But there's a wide variety of variability on whether people will like it or not or whether people will use it or not.

So when organizations are delivering quickly and getting feedback from the market, they're really getting feedback on things like usability and aesthetics and not necessarily on some critical business-processing capability. Or let’s say the software in your anti-lock braking system (ABS) system in your car. You don’t want that to fail, but you might be very interested in how the climate-control system works.

That may be subject to wide variations. To get better fuel efficiency, you may be willing to sacrifice something in the air conditioner to provide better efficiency. So, it’s largely driving feedback on non-safety-critical features. That's where most organizations are focused. 

More feedback

Gardner: You mentioned feedback. That seems to be a core aspect of DevOps, more feedback between operations, the real world, the use of software, and the development  and test process. How do we compress that feedback loop -- not only for user experience, but also data coming out of an embedded system, for example -- so that we can improve? Let’s address feedback and compressing the feedback-loop.

Bittner: If you think about what traditional application releases do, they tend to bundle a lot of different features into a single release. If you think about this from a statistical perspective, that means you have a lot of independent variables. You can’t tell when something improves. You can’t tell why it improved, because you have so many variables in there.

In the feedback loop with DevOps, you want to make the increment of releases as small as possible, basically one thing at a time, and then measure the result from that, so you know that your results improve because of that one single feature.

The other thing is that we start to shift toward a more outcome-oriented software release. You're not releasing features, but you're doing things that will change a customer’s outcome. If it doesn’t change a customer’s outcome, the customer doesn’t really care.

You optimize the delivery cycle, removing waste and hand-offs to make that as fast as possible with a high degrees of automation.

So by having the increment of a release be one outcome at a time, and then measuring the result from that, you get the capabilities out there as quickly as possible. Then you can tell whether you actually improved because of what you just did. If you didn’t improve, then you stop doing that and do something else.

Gardner: Is that what you mean by continuous delivery, these iterative small parts, rather than the whole big dump every six to 12 months?

Bittner: That’s a big part of it. Continuous delivery is also, more precisely, a process by which you make small changes. You optimize the delivery cycle, removing waste and hand-offs to make that as fast as possible with a high degrees of automation, so that you can get out there and get the feedback as quickly as possible.

So, it’s a combination. It needs not just fast delivery, but a number of techniques that are used to improve that delivery.

Gardner: Folks listening and reading this might very well like the idea of DevOps: "I'd like to do DevOps; where do I buy it?" DevOps, though, isn't really a product, a box, or a download. It’s a way of thinking in a methodological approach. How people go about implementing DevOps? Where do you start?

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Bittner: You’re right. It's more of a philosophy than a product. It’s not even really a product category, but a bunch of different products, and processes, and to some degree, a philosophy behind that. When we talk to organizations that implemented this successfully, there are a couple of patterns.

First of all, you don't implement DevOps across an entire organization all at once. It tends to happen product by product, team by team. It happens first in the applications that are very customer-facing, because that's where the most pressure is right now. That’s where the biggest benefit is. So on the team-by-team basis, first of all you have to have some executive mandate to make a change. Somebody has to feel like this is important enough to the company.

While developers, engineers, and IT Ops people can be passionate about this, it typically requires executive leadership to get this to happen, because these changes cut across traditional organizational silos. Without some executive sponsorship, these initiatives tend not to go very far.

There's too much wait time when people are assigned to multiple projects or multiple applications.

The first step – and this is sort of very mundane area -- tends to be changing the way that environments are provisioned. That includes getting environments provisioned on-demand, using techniques like infrastructure-as-code to automatically generate environments based on configuration settings so that you can have an environment anytime you need it. That removes a lot of friction and a lot of delays.

The second thing that tends to be implemented are techniques like continuous integration and then, after that, test automation, based on APIs. There's a shift to APIs on an integrated architecture for the applications, and then usually deployment automation comes after that. Once you have environments provisioned in code that you can put into those environments, you need a way to move that code between environments.

As you make those changes, you start to run into organizational barriers, silos in the organization, that prevent effectively working together. There's too much wait-time when people are assigned to multiple projects or multiple applications.

There's a shift in team structure to become more product-oriented with dedicated resources to a product, so that you can release, and do release after release most effectively. That tends to break the organization silos down and start shifting to a more product-centric organization and away from a functionally oriented organization.

All of those changes together typically take years, but it usually starts with some sort of executive mandate, then environment provisioning, and so on.

Management capability

Gardner: It sounds, too, that it's important to have better management capabilities across these silos -- with metrics, dashboards, validating efforts, of being able to measure discretely what's going on, and then reinforce the good and discard the bad.

Are there any particular existing ways of doing that? I'm thinking about the long-term application lifecycle management (ALM) marketplace. Does that lend itself to DevOps? Should we start from scratch and create a new management layer, if you will, across the whole continuum of software design, test, and delivery?

Bittner: It’s a little bit of both. DevOps is really an outgrowth of ALM, and all of the aspects of ALM are there. You need to be able to manage the work, track the work, and to determine what work got done. In addition to that, you’re adding automation in the areas that I was just describing; environment provisioning, continuous integration, test automation, and deployment automation.

There's another component that becomes really important, because out of those applications, you want to start gathering customer experience data. So things like operational and application analytics are important to start measuring the customer experience.

You don’t find one DevOps suite from one company that provides everything.

Combining all of those into a single view, single dashboard is evolving now. The ALM tools are evolving in that direction, and there are ways of visualizing that. But right now it tends to be a multi-vendor ecosystem. You don’t find one DevOps suite from one company that provides everything.

But the good news is that the same thing that’s been happening in the rest of the industry around services and interoperability has happened in applications. We have a high degree of interoperability between tools from different vendors today that allows you to customize this delivery pipeline to give you the DevOps capability.

Gardner: It seems that, in some ways, the prominence of hybrid cloud models, mobile, and mobile-first thinking, when it comes to development, are accelerants to DevOps. If you have that multiple cloud goal, you're going to want to standardize on your production environment. Hence, also the interest in containers these days. And, of course, mobile-first forces you to think about user experience, small iterations apps, rather than applications. Do you see an acceleration from these other trends reinforcing DevOps?

Bittner: It’s both reinforcing it and, to some degree, causing it, because it's mobile that’s triggered this explosion and the need for DevOps -- the need for faster delivery. To a large degree, the mobile application is the proverbial tip of the iceberg. Very few mobile applications stand alone. They all have very rich services running behind them. They have systems of record providing the data. Virtually every mobile application is really a composite application with some parts in the cloud and some parts in traditional data centers.

The development across all of those different code lines and the coordination of releases across all those different code lines really requires the DevOps approach to be able to do that successfully.

Demand and complexity

So it's both demand created by higher customer expectations from mobile customers, but also the complexity of delivering these applications in a really rapid way across all those different platforms. You made an interesting point about cloud and containers being both drivers for demand and also enablers, but they're also changing the nature of the work.

As containers and microservices become more prevalent -- we’re seeing growth in those areas -- it's increasing the complexity of application delivery. It simplifies the deployment, but it increases the complexity. Now, instead of having to coordinate dozens of moving parts, you have to coordinate hundreds and, we think, in the future, thousands of moving parts. That's well beyond what somebody can do with spreadsheets and manual management techniques.

The other thing is that cloud simplifies environment provisioning tremendously and it provides this great elastic infrastructure for deploying applications. But it also simplifies it by standardizing environments, making it all software configurable. It's a tremendous benefit to delivering applications faster and it gives you much more flexibility than traditional data-center applications. There's definitely movement toward those kind of applications, especially for DevOps.

Cloud simplifies environment provisioning tremendously and it provides this great elastic infrastructure for deploying applications.

Gardner: When I heard you mention the complexity, it certainly sounds like automating and moving away from manual processes, standardizing processes across your development test-to-deploy continuum, would be really important steps to take.

Bittner: Absolutely. I would say more than important. It’s absolutely essential that, without automation and that data-driven visibility into what's happening in the applications, there's almost no way to deliver these applications at speed. We find that many organizations are releasing quarterly now, not necessarily the same app every quarter, but they have a quarterly release cycle. At quarterly rates of speed, through seat of the pants and sort of brute force, you can manage to get that release out. It’s pretty painful, but you can survive.

If you turn up the clock rate faster than that and try to get down to monthly, those manual processes completely fall apart. We have organizations today that want to be delivering at weekly and daily intervals, especially in SaaS-based environments or cloud-based environments. Those kinds of delivery speeds are inconceivable with any kind of manual processes. As organizations move away from quarterly releases to faster releases, they have to adopt these techniques.

Gardner: Listening to you Kurt, it sounds like DevOps isn't another buzzword or another flashy marketing term. It really sounds inevitable, if you're going to succeed in software.

Bittner: It is inevitable, and over the next five years, what we’ll see is that the word itself will probably fade, because it will simply become the way that organizations work.

Gardner: I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been exploring the popularity of DevOps for making sure that development, test, deployment and ongoing improvement in software creation are coordinated, lean, and proficient process. We've heard from a prominent industry analyst at Forrester Research about what’s making DevOps such a hot topic and steps that organizations are taking to make it successful.

Please join me in thanking Kurt Bittner, Principal Analyst Applications Development and Delivery at Forrester Research.

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And a big thank you also to our audience as well for joining us for this DevOps thought leadership discussion. I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this ongoing series of HPE-sponsored discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Hewlett Packard Enterprise.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on what’s making DevOps such a hot topic and steps that organizations are taking to make it successful. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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App Stores-They're Not Just for Consumers Any More, as More Enterprises Adopt the Model to Support Mobile Applications

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the emerging concept of enterprise app stores based on the popular consumer model.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

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

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the impact that mobile devices and applications are having on enterprises. We'll specifically examine what steps businesses can take to manage mobile applications and develop their own versions of enterprise app stores.

The skyrocketing popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets has, on one hand, energized users, but on the other hand, it has caused IT and business leaders to scramble to support these new clients productively and safely.

We'll explore how enterprise app stores are part of the equation for better mobile management and overall mobility-enabled work success.

We'll start by examining some of the driving trends around enterprise mobility with a principal analyst from Forrester Research. Then we'll hear from Partnerpedia on how enterprise app stores can be added to the usual mix of IT applications delivery and management strategies. [Disclosure: Partnerpedia is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We're really at this rare moment in time for the technology sector, whether you're talking about vendors, end-users, or CIOs who are trying to manage all this.

Please join me now in welcoming our panel, John McCarthy, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Welcome, John.

John McCarthy: Thanks, Dana. How are you today?

Gardner: I'm great. We are also here with Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. Welcome back, Sam.

Sam Liu: Hey, Dana. How are you doing?

Gardner: I'm doing great. John, let’s start with you. It seems that a day doesn’t go by when we don't see more data pointing to a sea change in how applications, communications, and information are being delivered to workers. I think this has a lot to do with the way these workers now want to gain access to these assets.

From your perspective, John, how profound is the shift that we're in? Is this iterative or are we in a real sea change, a real sort of shift in the landscape, a tectonic plate type of shift?

Rare moment in time

McCarthy: It’s definitely the latter. We're really at this rare moment in time for the technology sector, whether you're talking about vendors, end-users, or CIOs who are trying to manage all this. It’s not just mobile. It’s not just cloud. Software as a service (SaaS), smart computing, machine to machine, analytics, social, all these things are spinning up together to create an accelerating array of change in the marketplace.

Gardner: You mentioned cloud and SaaS. It seems to me that the mobility issue is almost accelerated in a virtuous cycle. That is to say, the more mobility, the more reliance on cloud, the richer and safer it is. The more confidence people have in cloud, the more they can do with their mobility. Is that the case? It’s an adoption vector of some sort?

McCarthy: You pointed it out very articulately. These things are feeding off of each other. As soon as I start talking about deploying mobile, and increasingly, it’s not just deploying mobile to my employees, but deploying mobile to my partners and customers, whether it’s B2B or B2C, I am talking about a much broader network problem.

So the network architectures of the cloud solutions are becoming almost synonymous with mobile solutions. So the two innovation cycles are intersecting and feeding off of each other.

Gardner: I'm sure we could spend an hour just talking about the network and the WAN optimization issues, but let’s focus today on the applications.

We've seen changes in the past around interfaces, application architectures, whether it was client-server, web, or moving toward services orientation. What is it now that organizations need to do to get their very necessary mission-critical information out to these mobile devices? Is this as easy or more difficult? How does it compare to the past?

McCarthy: The analogy that I draw, when I have discussions with clients now, is that it’s like being the captain of the Titanic, if you're the CIO. Everybody is focusing on those things that they see above the waterline -- how am I going to design these applications and how am I going to deliver them? There's this whole debate of whether I need to go native, hybrid, or browser-based.

But below the waterline is a huge broader part of the iceberg -- how am I going to manage these applications, how do I need to rethink my security architecture, is SOA really going to be enough for the level of integration that I need? The skill sets that I need as an IT shop are very different in this world?

We are working from a current research point of view that mobile and all these other things that are being bundled up with it that we just talked about are going to drive probably an order of magnitude bigger shift in IT and the CIO’s organization than the PC did 20 years ago.

It’s the PC shift on steroids that we are going to be looking at over the next three to five years as mobile completely enables companies to rethink their business processes, and that drives rethinking of their technology architectures, management, and skill sets underneath that.

The app store

Gardner: Sam Liu, we've seen an example, at least in the consumer space, of one way to start going at this applications delivery problem in order to get the full benefit and productivity of mobile devices and cloud delivery. Of course I'm talking about the app store. We've seen them in a handful of organizations and probably most prominently at Apple.

From your perspective, why does the app store model on the consumer side, what we've seen already, have applicability to the enterprise?

Liu: Dana, it’s setting the bar in terms of the user experience in the enterprise, the fact that people who are both consumers and employees of companies are essentially buying the devices, bringing them into the workplace, and forcing the issue onto IT.

You have the mobile professionals and power users of the company taking what they've experienced in the consumer role and requesting a similar experience in the enterprise. The challenge for IT is that this opens up a whole new can of worms for them in terms of policies, procedures, security, and control.

If you look back maybe 15, even 10 years ago, a mobile device was somewhat of a luxury, used by a few people in the company for primarily email. Most of the time, it was a BlackBerry device. We've gone from a singular device and a singular application environment to this perfect storm of a combination of a multitude of devices, platforms, and apps, popularized by the consumer world. That's a big challenge for IT.

Gardner: John, we've seen Apple take it to the desktop as well. They have an app store for their more modern desktop operating environment. Is this the solution, part of the solution? How confident are you that the app store is going to be an integral part of what the enterprise does vis-à-vis mobility?

McCarthy: Clearly the notion of an app store is an interface to this technology. The rate of change and the complexity of this environment basically says that I need more of a self-service module. I can’t go out there and hand-provision these applications like I did in the PC world.

The rate of change and the complexity of this environment basically says that I need more of a self-service module.

Because people have become so accustomed to this app store model, as Sam just pointed out, from a consumer adoption point of view, that user interface paradigm is going to continue over. I think what’s going to happen is that, behind the scenes, the enterprise app store functionality, from a management point of view, will be much richer over time, and that's where the divergence is going to be.

But as an interface and a way to get people the information and applications, there's one school of thought that says these app stores will replace the old intranet as the paradigm for not only getting apps, but actually subscribing to information.

Using technologies like Flipboard where you subscribe to the travel policy and you ultimately get the most updated version of that. That it’s going to evolve pretty dramatically from where we are today. It’s going to be the user interface paradigm to all this management capability that IT will use, but also these additional capabilities that the end-user -- whether that's customer, employee, or partner -- will access.

Mobile internet paradigm

Liu: I agree with John on the point about the app store becoming the sort of mobile intranet paradigm. Today, I'm not seeing any corporate intranet that work even halfway decent on a mobile device. So if you extend the concept of an app to content, information, anything that is relevant in a corporation, the app store paradigm is a very nice interface and a very effective delivery model for a mobile intranet, for that matter.

McCarthy: The other thing Sam is that, if you think about these apps, they're called apps, because they are not full-fledged applications. They're much simpler and task-oriented, so there's going to be more of them to manage. The app intensity of the organization is going to grow geometrically, as we start to unbundle these big complex systems like SAP and Office and provide them in more digestible and more segmented experiences. It’s no longer a one-size-fits-all world. The homogeneity of these applications and the PC as the end-user device is blowing apart as we speak.

Liu: Definitely agree.

Gardner: I think this aligns also very well with the methodological approach of services orientation. So with an SOA environment, for example, you would look for a registry or repository to list the apps and services that would be available, and those could either be ordered up by someone crafting a business process or directly by the end users.

Furthermore, to your point, John, about more granularity, we're seeing services and components that can be crafted into business processes, rather than those large hunking and brittle supported applications around enterprise resource planning (ERP) or some other big business activity. So we have a number of different levels in which app stores make sense.

Let’s move on now to how you get there. Is there an apps model or an app store model that we can look to? Let me start with you, Sam. You've had some experience here. What is it that people need to do? Should they build, buy, partner? How are you seeing it manifest in the market?

They're not going to be able to stop it, and so they're trying to figure out the right approach to dealing with all this multitude of devices and applications.

Liu: You're going to see a range of approaches. We've been talking to about a dozen or so enterprise IT organizations. The majority of them are in the early stages of trying to figure this out. They see the momentum coming. They're not going to be able to stop it, and so they're trying to figure out the right approach to dealing with all this multitude of devices and applications.

In most cases, they seem to be prompted by the influx of tablets and smartphones, but many of them are thinking beyond that. They're actually planning ahead. They're thinking about devices in general. It could be a mobile device or it could be even a desktop or a stationary endpoint. So they're looking beyond the immediate issues.

Our advice to them is, look, figure out your near term and long-term objectives, and then scope a pilot accordingly. Start with a clear definition of what you're trying to accomplish from a business standpoint, the objectives and the metrics, and then go about it that way. Identify the most pressing needs in terms of the users, apps, and devices and define your first project around that, so you can get a handle around what’s feasible and what’s not.

One of the challenges is that clearly the technology has changed a lot, but also just the lifecycle of hardware and software. It used to be anywhere between three to five years that IT could depend on. Now, you're looking at one year for changes of the devices, platforms, and new apps. That rate of change is also a big challenge for them.

Gardner: John, it seems that on the consumer side of app stores the goal is to move a lot of apps, charge for them, and make a lot of money. It seems to me that on the enterprise side, this is really more a function of control, of exerting policy, learning what apps are being used, by whom and how.

How do you see the difference between an app store in the consumer space that we're familiar with and how the requirements around that should perhaps be different in the enterprise?

Working in parallel

McCarthy: To go back to the question you asked Sam -- what’s happening and what’s been the catalyst for these different level of discussions -- there are two things happening in parallel.

People are moving out of the renegade pilot phase, and as Sam laid out, trying to take an architected approach. How do we holistically look at what our strategy is around mobile? Not just developing the apps, but how are we going to manage the apps? How are we going to manage the fact that different constituents, both internal and external, need different amounts of functionality and different amounts of security is driving it?

The other thing that we're seeing happening is, companies are now saying, "Oh my God, how am I going to manage the lifecycle of these apps? It’s relatively cheap and easy to build them, but how do I keep up with the endless releases that are going on and the operating system wars on these devices?" Apple and Google are doing four operating system releases a year that you need to manage to make sure your apps still runs.

Then there is the whole point, particularly in the customer-facing space, of how do I update my app so that it stays competitive, and we can really use that system of engagement with our customers to build that ongoing communication, which every company wants to get with their customers?

What we are seeing is that people are starting to look at how to manage the lifecycle of these apps and then, in parallel to that, I need to figure out what are my policies going to be and then how do I enforce or instantiate those policies That's where people are turning to these enterprise app stores from the vendors.

Then there is the whole point, particularly in the customer-facing space, of how do I update my app so that it stays competitive.

It's less of a selling and more of a management prerogative and design point. Then, of course, there is the complexity of the device environment.

Gardner: To that point Sam, do you see the app stores and enterprises also allowing for automated updates to go out? It really helps in the configuration, security, and patching types of issues, as well as upgrading the app over time. Also, to John’s point about policy enforcement, perhaps you could address what you're seeing in terms of updates, security, and management for the enterprise version of app stores?

Liu: The enterprise app store, is all about the app, how to procure and vet the app, so to ensure security and integrity, as well as distribute it to users, and controlling which users can have access to which apps. Also, it's enforcing policies, such as mandatory installs and updates of versions. Those are overall key elements of enterprise app store.

That said, it's not the end-all be-all. Enterprise app lifecycle management is much more than that. It's another issues, from tools to the actual hardware device controls, but certainly when it comes to apps and managing apps on mobile devices, mobile users, the enterprise app store is a big component of that.

Gardner: I wonder if there are some economic lessons here. It may be early on, but I'm wondering whether there is way to better manage application licenses, to be able to charge back on who is using apps, and when we have that policy and we have that data usage, apply a better economic model, so IT can be more transparent in terms of costs and benefits.

Sam, do you have any instances where folks have done this, and are there any monetary or business metrics of success that we can look to that say "We like app stores, because they're convenient, but can they help the bottom line as well?"

Other features

Liu: Some enterprise app stores don’t go beyond a basic app distribution and tracking, but in others you'll find features such as license management. Not all apps will be developed in-house. Some will actually even be purchased from third parties.

In a mobile world, you can expect to see more and more of that, only because, if nothing else, most IT organizations don’t have the system and the resources in-house for mobile devices and apps, so those tend to look outside to third parties for their solutions.

So in that situation, license management is an important part of enterprise app stores, so that IT can actually control just who has what license. If their job changes, we can bring it back and reallocate it to another user. Otherwise, you lose that cost that you paid for the app. Things like that should be built into enterprise app store.

You can also do bulk licensing. Most recently, you saw Apple’s program around bulk purchasing for businesses. Similarly, enterprise app stores will have some mechanism, when it's applicable, where companies can make bulk purchases and manage a pool of licenses across entire employee or contractor base.

Gardner: John, a similar question to you, do you see an economic benefit to this as well as a convenience and productivity benefit?

They have to go out to a third-party universe, because the value isn’t going to come from managing these things.

McCarthy: Initially it's going to be, "I need to manage these things." It's going to be knowing what's out there and making it easy for people to get at these things.

Sam made the point that this is much more of an ecosystem play. This notion where I am going to be developing everything myself isn’t going to work. There's going to be a lot of these third-party apps that the company, either on their own or through their services provider vets and says, "Here are all these other productivity apps that you can take advantage of. We have made sure that they work with our core business apps that we've developed."

But that focusing of what are limited IT resources is part of what's driving the app store phenomenon. IT doesn’t have time to build this themselves. They have to go out to a third-party universe, because the value isn’t going to come from managing these things. The value is going to come from these new customer or employee apps that allow us to rethink our business processes. We need to manage that complexity or we're going to have huge liabilities and huge risk and compliance issues.

Gardner: So Sam, it sounds as if the enterprise app store could also have a benefiting role when it comes to a hybrid model. Apps might originate with third parties, clouds, or SaaS providers. They might be developed in-house or even a combination thereof, and yet the user, the employee, would be able to access them in a singular fashion through a common interface and with a common policy and management. So is that the vision over time do you think with these app stores?

Liu: Absolutely. It's even a vision now. It shouldn’t matter, especially to the employee or the user, where the apps come from or who built it. It's all about the experience.

Also, in some ways it shouldn’t matter what device they're coming in from, whether it's a smartphone, an iPad, laptop, or desktop. There should be a similar rich user experience that’s appropriate for that particular form factor. So you abstract these hows and whats from a user standpoint. It becomes a more user-friendly and more productive environment for the user.

Gardner: We will have to begin closing out, but let's get a quick look to the future. John, any thoughts about either other trends or influences that will be encouraging organizations to examine and consider the app store model for their own application lifecycle management?

Reinventing the process

McCarthy: I think we are going to see more and more of these apps driving the reinvention of business processes. The reliance on these apps is only going to explode over the next three to five years. So we need a way, as we have talked about, where it's easy to find those apps, but also it's easy to manage those apps.

It's serving both sides, serving the needs of the businessperson or the customer, but also serving the requirements of the organization to allow us to harness this, but minimize the cost of managing these devices, making sure that they are secure, that we are not doing stuff with consumer data that’s going to get us into trouble. This is part of the whole rethinking of management and security in a world where it's much more mobile and much more outside the firewall.

Gardner: Same question to you, Sam, about the future. I wonder whether enterprises will be creating app stores for their employees, but could also start creating apps that they could sell in terms of limited access to certain data or certain functionality. In a sense they could create new revenue, new business models, that would reach mass market. Any thoughts about the future for how businesses use app stores, not just internally, but as a business channel?

Liu: Actually we've run into a few enterprises already thinking in that mode. Initially when we talk to IT, they're thinking about the internal issues, especially about controlling management policies, but they're also being asked to build systems that are customer-facing, and in some cases systems that deliver and sell products to customers. So, where it applies, such as software and apps, they're looking at how to use the same paradigm for delivery of app services and apps to end customers.

So it's potentially a new channel and a new revenue model for companies, not just simply a cost issue of trying to manage and control.

This is part of the whole rethinking of management and security in a world where it's much more mobile and much more outside the firewall.

McCarthy: And there are all of those businesses that are going to emerge where people talk about data exhausts. We know what people are doing. The app store becomes a way for people to tap into that and you can start to monetize that.

Gardner: And it strikes me that there shouldn’t be any reason that the same infrastructure that supports an internal app store wouldn’t also support an external one.

Liu: No, it's very similar.

Gardner: I'm afraid we are about out of time, Sam, is there a place folks can go for more information? I understand you have a white paper available. Where would people go to get more information on this enterprise app store and the management of mobility as a result?

Liu: We have a white paper that’s freely available as a download on our website, www.partnerpedia.com.

Gardner: And John, any research reports or notes that are available on this subject from Forrester?

McCarthy: There are a number of reports that we've done outlining kind of the future of mobile management. People can come to forrester.com and search the site and they'll find the stuff that myself and a number of colleagues have written relative to this topic.

Gardner: You've been listening to a sponsored podcast discussion on how enterprise app stores are part of the equation for better mobile management and related mobile work success. I want to thank our guests. We've been here with John McCarthy, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Thanks so much, John.

McCarthy: Thanks very much, Dana.

Gardner: We've also been here with Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. Thank you, Sam.

Liu: Thanks, Dana, and thanks, John.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

For a free white papers on enterprise app stores and mobile management, go to www.forrester.com or www.partnerpedia.com.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Download the transcript. Sponsor: Partnerpedia.

Transcript of a sponsored podcast discussion on the emerging concept of enterprise app stores based on the popular consumer model. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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• Verizon Rolls Out Enterprise App Store
• Enterprise 'App Store' Unveiled . . . Cool Idea

Business and Technical Cases Build for Data Center Consolidation and Modernization

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how data center consolidation and modernization helps enterprises reduce cost, cut labor, slash energy use, and become more agile.

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

Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you’re listening to BriefingsDirect.

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on how data-center consolidation and modernization of IT systems helps enterprises reduce cost, cut labor, slash energy use, and become more agile.

We'll look at the business and technical cases for reducing the numbers of enterprise data centers. Infrastructure advancements, standardization, performance density, and network services efficiencies are all allowing for bigger and fewer data centers that can carry more of the total IT requirements load.

These strategically architected and located facilities offer the ability to seek out best long-term outcomes for both performance and cost -- a very attractive combination nowadays. But, to gain the big payoffs from fewer, bigger, better data centers, the essential list of user expectations for performance and IT requirements for reliability need to be maintained and even improved.

Network services and Internet performance management need to be brought to bear, along with the latest data-center advancements to produce the full desired effect of topnotch applications and data delivery to enterprises, consumers, partners, and employees.

Here to help us better understand how to get the best of all worlds -- that is high performance and lower total cost from data center consolidation -- we're joined by our panel. Please join me in welcoming James Staten, Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Welcome, James.

James Staten: Thanks for having me.

Gardner: We're also joined by Andy Rubinson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Akamai Technologies. Welcome, Andy.

Andy Rubinson: Thank you, Dana. I'm looking forward to it.

Gardner: And, Tom Winston, Vice President of Global Technical Operations at Phase Forward, a provider of integrated data management solutions for clinical trials and drug safety, based in Waltham, Mass. Welcome, Tom.

Tom Winston: Hi, Dana. Thanks very much.

Gardner: Let me start off with James. Let's look at the general rationale for data-center modernization and consolidation. What are the business, technical, and productivity rationales for doing this?

Data-center sprawl

Staten: There is a variety of them, and they typically come down to cost. Oftentimes, the biggest reason to do this is because you've got sprawl in the data center. You're running out of power, you're running out of the ability to cool any more equipment, and you are running out of the ability to add new servers, as your business demands them.

If there are new applications the business wants to roll out, and you can't bring them to market, that's a significant problem. This is something the organizations have been facing for quite some time.

As a result, if they can start consolidating, they can start moving some of these workloads onto fewer systems. This allows them to reduce the amount of equipment they have to manage and the number of software licenses they have to maintain and lower their support costs. In the data center overall, they can lower their energy costs, while reducing some of the cooling required and getting rid of some of those power drops.

Gardner: James, isn't this sort of the equivalent of Moore's Law, but instead of at silicon clock-speed level, it's at a higher infrastructure abstraction? Are we virtualizing our way into a new Moore's Law era?

Staten: Potentially. We've always had this gap between how much performance a new CPU or a new server could provide and how much performance an application could take advantage of. It's partly a factor of how we have designed applications. More importantly, it's a factor of the fact that we, as human beings, can only consume so much at so fast a rate.

Most applications actually end up consuming on average only 15-20 percent of the server. If that's the case, you've got an awful lot of headroom to put other applications on there.

We were isolating applications on their own physical systems, so that they would be protected from any faults or problems with other applications that might be on the same system and take them down. Virtualization is the primary isolating technology that allows us to do that.

Gardner: I suppose there are some other IT industry types of effects here. In the past, we would have had entirely different platforms and technologies to support different types of applications, networks, storage, or telecommunications. It seems as if more of what we consider to be technical services can be supported by a common infrastructure. Is that also at work here?

Unique opportunity

Staten: That's mostly happening as well. The exception to that rule is definitely applications that just can't possibly get enough compute power or enough contiguous compute power. That creates the opportunity for unique products in the market.

More and more applications are being broken down into modules, and, much like the web services and web applications that we see today, they're broken into tiers. Individual logic runs on its own engine, and all of that can be spread across some more monetized, consistent infrastructure. We are learning these lessons from the dot-coms of the world and now the cloud-computing providers of the world, and applying them to the enterprise.

Gardner: I've heard quite a few numbers across a very wide spectrum about the types of payoffs that you can get from consolidating and modernizing your infrastructure and your data centers. Are there any rules of thumb that are typical types of paybacks, either in some sort of a technical or economic metric?

Staten: There's a wide range of choices from the fact that the benefits come from how bad off you are when you begin and how dramatically you consolidate. On average, across all the enterprises we have spoken to, you can realistically expect to see about a 20 percent cost reduction from doing this. But, as you said, if you've got 5,000 servers, and they're all running at 5 percent utilization, there are big gains to be had.

Gardner: The economic payoff today, of course, is most important. I suppose there is a twofold effect as well. If you're facing a capacity issue and you're thinking about spending $40 or $50 million for an additional data center, and if you can reduce the need to do that or postpone it, you're saving on capital costs. At the same time, you could, perhaps through better utilization, reduce your operating costs as well.

Staten: Absolutely. One of the biggest benefits you get from virtualization is flexibility. It's so much easier to patch a workload and simply keep it running, while you are doing that. Move it to another system, but apply the patch, make sure the patch worked, deploy a clone, and then turn off the old version.

That's much more powerful, and it gives a lot more flexibility to the IT shop to maintain higher service-level agreements (SLAs), to keep the business up and running, to roll out new things faster, and be able to roll them back more easily.

Gardner: Andy Rubinson, this certainly sounds like a no-brainer: Get better performance for less money and postpone large capital expenditures. What are some of the risks that could come into play while we are starting to look at this whole picture? I'm interested in what's holding people back.

Rubinson: I focus mainly on delivery over the Internet. There are definitely some challenges, if you're talking about using the Internet with your data center infrastructure -- things like performance latency, availability challenges from cable cuts, and things of that nature, as well as security threats on the Internet.

It's thinking about how can you do this, how can you deliver to a global user base with your data center, without having to necessarily build out data centers internationally, and to be able to do that from a consolidated standpoint.

Gardner: So, for those organizations that are not just going to be focused on employees, or, if they are, that they are a global organization, they need to be thinking the most wide area network (WAN) possible. Right?

Rubinson: Absolutely.

Gardner: Let's go to our practitioner, Tom Winston. Tom, what sort of effects were you dealing with at Phase Forward, when you were looking at planning and strategy around data center location, capacity, and utilization?

Early adopter

Winston: Well, we were in a somewhat different position, in that we were actually an early adopter of virtualization technology, and certainly had seen the benefits of using that to help contain our data-center sprawl. But, we were also growing extremely rapidly.

When I joined the organization, it had two different data centers -- one on the East Coast and one on the West Coast. We were facing the challenge of potentially having to expand into a European data center, and even potentially a Pacific Rim data center.

By continuing to expand our virtualization efforts, as well as to leverage some of the technologies that Andy just mentioned as far as, Internet acceleration, via some of the Akamai technologies, we were able to forego that data center expansion. In fact, we were able to consolidate our data center to one East Coast data center, which is now our primary hosting center for all of our applications.

So, it had a very significant impact for us by being able to leverage both that WAN acceleration, as well as virtualization, within our own four walls of the data center. [Editor's note: WAN here and in subsequent uses refers to public wide area networks and not private.]

Gardner: Tom, just for the edification of our listeners, tell us a little bit about Phase Forward. Where are your users and where do your applications need to go.

In an age where . . . people are expecting things to be moving extremely quickly and always available, it's very important for us to be able to provide that application all the time, and to perform at a very high level.

Winston: We run electronic data capture (EDC) software, and pharmacovigilance software for the largest pharmaceutical and clinical device makers in the world. They are truly global organizations in nature. So, we have users throughout the world, with more and more heavy population coming out of the Asia Pacific area.

We have a very large, diverse user base that is accessing our applications 24x7x365, and, as a result, we have performance needs all the time for all of our users.

In an age where, as James mentioned, people are expecting things to be moving extremely quickly and always available, it's very important for us to be able to provide that application all the time, and to perform at a very high level.

One of the things James mentioned from an IT perspective is being able to manage that virtual stack. Another thing that virtualization allows us to do is to provide that stack and to improve performance very quickly. We can add additional compute resources into that virtual environment very quickly to scale to the needs that our users may have.

Gardner: James Staten, back to you. Based on Tom's perspective of the combination of that virtualization and the elasticity that he gets from his data center, and the ability to locate it flexibly, thanks to some network optimization and reliability issues, how important is it for companies now, when they think about data center consolidation, to be flexible in terms of where they can locate?

All over the place

Staten: It's important that they recognize that their users are no longer all in the same headquarters. Their users are all over the place. Whether they are an internal employee, a customer, or a business partner, they need to get access to those applications, and they have a performance expectation that's been set by the Internet. They expect whatever applications they are interacting with will have that sort of local feel.

That's what you have to be careful about in your planning of consolidation. You can consolidate branch offices. You can consolidate down to fewer data centers. In doing so, you gain a lot of operational efficiencies, but you can potentially sacrifice performance.

You have to take the lessons that have been learned by the people who set the performance bar, the providers of Internet-based services, and ask, "How can I optimize the WAN? How can I push out content? How can I leverage solutions and networks that have this kind of intelligence to allow me to deliver that same performance level?" That's really the key thing that you have to keep in mind. Consolidation is great, but it can't be at the sacrifice of the user experience.

Gardner: When you find the means to deliver that user experience, that frees you up to then place your data centers strategically based on things like skills or energy availability or tax breaks, and so forth. Isn't that yet another economic incentive here?

Staten: You want to have fewer data centers, but they have to be in the right location, and the right location has to be optimized for a variety of factors. It has to be optimized for where the appropriate skill sets are, just as you described. It has to be optimized for the geographic constraints that you may be under.

We're able to take some of that load off of the servers, and do the work in the cloud, which also helps reduce them.

You may be doing business in a country in which all of the citizen information of the people who live in that country must reside in that country. If that's the case, you don't necessarily have to own a data center there, but you absolutely have to have a presence there.

Gardner: Andy, back to you. What are some of the pros and cons for this Internet delivery of these applications? I suppose you have to rearchitect, in order to take advantage of this as well.

Rubinson: There are two main areas from the positives, the benefits, and that's the cost efficiency of delivering over the Internet, as well as the responsiveness. From the cost perspective, we're able to eliminate unnecessary hardware. We're able to take some of that load off of the servers, and do the work in the cloud, which also helps reduce them.

A lot of cost efficiencies

There are a lot of cost efficiencies that we get, even as you look to Tom's statement about being able to actually eliminate a data center and avoid having to build out a new data center. Those are all huge areas, where it can help to use the Internet, rather than having to build out your own infrastructure.

Also, in terms of responsiveness, by using the Internet, you can deploy a lot more quickly. As Tom explained, it's being able to reach the users across the globe, while still consolidating those infrastructures and be able to do that effectively.

This is really important, as we have seen more and more users that are going outside of the corporate WANs. People are connecting to suppliers, to partners, to customers, and to all sorts of things now. So, the private WANs that many people are delivering their apps over are now really not effective in reaching those people.

Gardner: As James said earlier, we've got different workloads and different types of applications. Help me understand what Akamai can do. Do you just accelerate a web app, or is there a bit more in your quiver in terms of dealing with different types of loads of media, content, application types?

Rubinson: There are a variety of things that we are able to deliver over the Internet. It includes both web- and IP-based applications. Whether it's HTTP, HTTPS, or anything that's over TCP/IP, we're able to accelerate.

. . . The other key area where we have benefit is through the delivery of dynamic data. By optimizing the cloud, we're able to speed the delivery of information from the origin as well.

We also do streaming. One of the things to consider here is that we actually have a global network of servers that kind of makes up the cloud or is an overlay to the cloud. That is helping to not only deliver the content more quickly, but also uses some caching technology and other things that make it more efficient. It allows us to give that same type of performance, availability, and security that you would get from having a private WAN, but doing it over the much less expensive Internet.

Gardner: You're looking at specifics of an application in terms of what's going to be delivered at frequent levels versus more infrequent levels, and you can cache the data and gain the efficiency with that local data store. Is that how it works?

Rubinson: A lot of folks think about Akamai as being a content delivery network (CDN), and that's true. There is caching that we are doing. But, the other key area where we have benefit is through the delivery of dynamic data. By optimizing the cloud, we're able to speed the delivery of information from the origin as well. That's where it's benefiting folks like Tom, where he is able to not only cache information, but the information that is dynamic, that needs to get back from the data center, goes more quickly.

Gardner: Let's check in with Tom. How has that worked out for you? What sort of applications do you use with wide area optimization, and what's been your experience?

Flagship application

Winston: Our primary application, our flagship application, is a product called InForm, which is the main EDC product that our customers use across the Internet. It's accelerated using Akamai technology, and almost 100 percent of our content is dynamic. It has worked extremely well.

Prior to our deployment of Akamai, we had a number of concerns from a performance standpoint. As James mentioned, as you begin to virtualize, you also have to be very conscious of the potential performance hits. Certainly, one of the areas that we were constrained with was performance around the globe.

We had users in China who, due to the amount of traffic that had to traverse the globe, were not happy with the performance of the application. Specifically, we brought in Akamai to start with a very targeted group of users and to be able to accelerate for them the application in that region.

It literally cut the problem right out. It solved it almost immediately. At that point, we then began to spread the rest of that application acceleration product across the rest of our domains, and to continue to use that throughout the product set.

Having an application perform to the level of a Google is something that our end users expect, even though obviously it's a much different application in what it's attempting to solve and what it's attempting to do.

It was extremely successful for us and helped solve performance issues that our end users were having. I think some of the comments that James made are very important. We do live in a world where everybody expects every application across the Internet to perform like Google. You want to search and you expect it to be back in seconds. If it's not, people tend to be unhappy with the performance of the application.

In our application, it's a much more complex application. A lot more is going on behind the scenes -- database calls, whatever it may be. Having an application perform to the level of a Google is something that our end users expect, even though obviously it's a much different application in what it's attempting to solve and what it's attempting to do. So, the benefits that we were able to get from the acceleration servers were very critical for us.

Rubinson: Just to add to that, we recently commissioned a study with Forrester, looking at what is that tolerance threshold [for a page to load]. In the past it had been that people had tolerance for about four seconds. As of this latest study, it's down to two seconds. That's for business to consumer (B2C) users. What we have seen is that the business-to-business (B2B) users are even more intolerant of waiting for things.

It really has gotten to a point where you need that immediate delivery in order to drive the usage of the tools that are out there.

Gardner: I suppose that's just human nature. Our expectations keep going up. They usually don't go down.

Rubinson: True.

Gardner: Back to you, Tom. Tell me a little bit more about this application. Is this a rich Internet application (RIA)? Is this strictly a web interface? Tell us a little bit more about what the technical challenge was in terms of making folks in China get the same experience as those on the East Coast, who were a mile away from your data center.

Everything is dynamic

Winston: The application is one that has a web front-end, but all the information is being sent back to an Oracle database on the back-end. Literally, every button click that you make is making some type of database query or some type of database call, as I mentioned, with almost zero static content. Everything is dynamic.

There is a heavy amount of data that has to go back and forth between the end user and the application. As a result, prior to acceleration, that was very challenging when you were trying to go halfway around the globe. It was almost immediate for us to see the benefits by being able to hop onto the Akamai Global Network and to cut out a number of the steps across the Internet that we had to traverse from one point to our data center.

Gardner: So, it was clearly an important business metric, getting your far-flung customers happy with their response times. How did that however translate back when you reverse engineered from the experience to what your requirement would be within that data center? Was there sort of a meeting of the minds between what you now understand the network is capable of, with what then you had to deliver through your actual servers and infrastructure?

l guess I'm looking for an efficiency metric or response in terms of what the consolidation benefit was.

Winston: As I mentioned, we had already consolidated from a virtualization standpoint within the four walls of the data center. So, we were continuing to expand in that footprint. But, what it allowed us to do was forego having to put a data center in the Pacific Rim or put a data center in Europe to put the application closer to the end user.

Operating like a cloud is really operating in this more homogeneous, virtualized, abstracted world that we call server virtualization in most enterprises.

Gardner: Let's look to the future a little bit. James, when people think nowadays about cloud computing, that's a very nebulous discussion and topic set. It seems as if what we're talking about here is that more enterprises are going to have to themselves start behaving like what people think of as a cloud.

Staten: Yes, to a degree. There is obviously a positive aspect of cloud and one that can potentially be a negative.

Operating like a cloud is really operating in this more homogeneous, virtualized, abstracted world that we call server virtualization in most enterprises. You want to operate in this mode, so that you can be flexible and you can put applications where they need to be and so forth.

But, one of the things that cloud computing does not deliver is that if you run it in the cloud, you are not suddenly in all geographies. You are just in a shared data center somewhere in the United States or somewhere in your geography. If you want to be global, you still have to be global in the same sense that you were previously.

Cloud not a magic pill

Rubinson: Absolutely. Just putting yourself in the cloud doesn't mean that you're not going to have the same type of latency issues, delivering over the Internet. It's the same thing with availability in trying to reach folks who are far away from that hosted data center. So, the cloud isn't necessarily the answer. It's not a pill that you can take to fix that issue.

Gardner: Andy, I don't think you can mention names, but you are not only accelerating the experience for end users of enterprise applications like a Phase Forward. You're also providing similar services for at least several of the major cloud providers.

Rubinson: It really is anybody who is using the cloud for delivery. Whether it's a high-tech, a pharma company, or even a hosting provider in the cloud, they've all seen the value of ensuring that their end users are having a positive experience, especially folks like software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers.

We've had a lot of interest from SaaS companies that want to ensure that they are not only able to give a positive user experience, but even from a sales perspective, being able to demonstrate their software in other locations and other regions is very valuable.

Obviously, by using the best practices that we've adopted to have blazing fast websites and applying them to make sure that all of your applications, consumed by everyone, are still blazing fast means that you don't have to reinvent the wheel.

Gardner: Now, James, when a commercial cloud provider provides an SLA to their customers, they need to meet it, but they also need to keep their costs as low as possible. More and more enterprises are trying to behave like service providers themselves, whether it's through ITIL adoption, IT shared services or service-oriented architecture (SOA). Over time, we're certainly seeing movement toward a provider-supplier, consumer-subscription relationship of some kind.

If we can use this acceleration and the ability to use the network for that requirement of performance to a certain degree, doesn't this then free up the folks who have to meet those SLAs in terms of what they need to provide? I'm getting back to this whole consolidation issue.

Staten: To some degree. Obviously, by using the best practices that we've adopted to have blazing fast websites and applying them to make sure that all of your applications, consumed by everyone, are still blazing fast means that you don't have to reinvent the wheel. Those practices work for your website. You just apply them to more areas.

If you're applying practices you already know, then you can free up your staff to do other things to modernize the infrastructure, such as deploying ITIL more widely than you have so far. You can make sure that you apply virtualization to a larger percentage of your infrastructure and then deal with the next big issue that we see in consolidation, which is virtual machine (VM) sprawl.

Can get out of control

This is where you are allowing your enterprise customers, whether they are enterprise architects, developers, or business units to deploy new VMs much more quickly. Virtualization allows you to do that, but you can quickly get out of control with too many VMs to manage.

Dealing with that issue is what is front and center for a lot of enterprise IT professionals right now. If they haven't applied the best practices or performance to their application sets and to their consolidation practices, that's one more thing on their plate that they need to deal with.

Gardner: So, this also can relate to something that many of us are forecasting. Not much of it happening yet, but it's this notion of a hybrid approach to cloud and sourcing, where you might use your data center up to a certain utilization, and under certain conditions, where there is a spike in demand, you could just offload that to a third-party Cloud provider.

If you're assured from the WAN services that the experience is going to be the same, regardless of the sourcing, they are perhaps going to be more likely to pursue such a hybrid approach. Is that fair to say, James?

Staten: This is a really good point that you're bringing up. We wrote about this in a report we called "Hollow Out The MOOSE." MOOSE is Forrester's term for the Maintenance and Ongoing Operations, Systems, and Equipment, which is basically everything you are running in your data center that hasn't yet been deployed up to this point.

The real answer is that you need to choose the right type of solution for the right problem. We call this Strategic Rightsourcing . . .

The challenge most enterprises have is that MOOSE consumes 70 or 80 percent of their entire budget, leaving very little for new innovation and other things. They see things like cloud and they say, "This is great. I'll just move this stuff to the cloud, and suddenly it will save me money."

No. The real answer is that you need to choose the right type of solution for the right problem. We call this Strategic Rightsourcing, which says to take the things that others do better than you and have others do them, but know economically whether that's a positive tradeoff for you or not. It doesn't necessarily have to be cash positive, but it has to be an opportunity to be cost positive.

In the case of cloud computing, if I have something that I have to run myself, it's very unique to how I design it, and it's really best that I run it in my data center, you're not saving money by putting that in the cloud.

If it's an application that has a lot of elasticity, and you want it to have the ability to be on two virtual machines during the evening, and scale up to as many as 50 during the day, and then shrink back down to 2, that's an ideal use of cloud, because cloud is all about temporary capacity being turned on.

A lot of people think that it's about performance, and it's not. Sure, load balancing and the ability to spawn new VMs increases the performance of your application, but performance is experienced by the person at the end of the wire, and that's what has to be optimized. That's why those types of networks are still very valuable.

Gardner: Tom Winston, is this vision of this hybrid and the use of cloud for ameliorating spikes and therefore reducing your total cost appealing to you?

Has to be right

Winston: It is, but I couldn't agree more with what James just said. It has to be for the right situation. Certainly, we've started to look at some of our applications, potentially using them in a cloud environment, but right now our critical application, the one that I mentioned earlier, is something that we have to manage. It's a very complex environment. We manage it and we need to hold it very close to the vest.

People have the idea that, "Gee, if I put it in the cloud, my life just got a lot easier." I actually think the reverse might be true, because if you put it into the cloud, you lose some control that you have when it's inside your four walls.

Now, you lose the ability to be able to provide the level of service you want for your customers. Cloud needs to be for the right application and for the right situation, as James mentioned. I really couldn't agree more with that.

For Akamai, it's really about how we're able to accelerate that.

Gardner: So, the cloud is not the right hammer for all nails, but for when that nail is correct, that hybrid model can perhaps be quite a economic benefit. Andy, at Akamai, are you guys looking at that hybrid model, and is there something there that your services might foster?

Rubinson: This is really something that we are agnostic about. Whether it's in a data center owned by the customer or whether it's in a hosted facility, we are all about the means of delivery. It's delivering applications, websites, and so forth over the public Internet.

It's something we're able to do, if there are facilities that are being used for, say, disaster recovery, where it's the hybrid scenario that you are describing. For Akamai, it's really about how we're able to accelerate that. How we are able to optimize the routing and the other protocols on the Internet to make that get from wherever it's hosted to a global set of end users.

We don't care about where they are. They don't have to be on the corporate, private WANs. It's really about that global reach and giving the levels of performance to actually provide an SLA. Tell me who else out there provides an SLA for delivery over the Internet? Akamai does.

Gardner: Well, we'll have to leave it there. We've been discussing how data center consolidation and modernization can help enterprises cut costs, reduce labor, slash their energy use, and become more agile, but also keeping in mind the requirements about the performance across wide area networks.

We've been joined by James Staten, he is a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research. Thank you, James.

Staten: Thank you.

Gardner: We were also joined by Andy Rubinson, Senior Product Marketing Manager at Akamai Technologies. Thank you, Andy.

Rubinson: Thank you very much.

Gardner: Also, I really appreciate your input Tom Winston, Vice President of Global Technical Operations at Phase Forward.

Winston: Dana, thanks very much. Thanks for having me.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on how data center consolidation and modernization helps enterprises reduce cost, cut labor, slash energy use, and become more agile. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.