Converged Infrastructure Approach Paves Way for Improved Data Center Productivity

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on achieving cost control and increased utilization through coordinated design, open standards and application-specific infrastructure.

For more information on virtualization and how it provides a foundation for Private Cloud, plan to attend the HP Cloud Virtual Conference taking place in March. To register for this event, go to:
Asia, Pacific, Japan - March 2
Europe Middle East and Africa - March 3
Americas - March 4

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

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 improved data center productivity for a natural progression toward converged infrastructure. Many enterprise data centers have embraced a shared service management model to some degree, but converged infrastructure applies the shared service model more broadly to leverage modular system design and open standards, as well as to advance proven architectural frameworks.

The result is a realignment of traditional technology silos into adaptive pools that can be shared by any application, as well as optimized and managed as ongoing services. Under this model, resources are dynamically provisioned efficiently and automatically, gaining more business results productivity. This also helps rebalance IT spending away from a majority of spend on operations and more toward investments, innovations, and business improvements.

We're here to explore the benefits of a converged infrastructure approach and to better understand the challenges of attaining a transformed data center environment. We'll see how converged infrastructure provides a stepping stone to private cloud initiatives. But, as with any convergence, there are a lot of moving parts, including people, skills, processes, services, outsourcing options, and partner ecosystems.

We're here with two executives from Hewlett-Packard (HP) to delve deeply into converged infrastructure and to learn more about how to get started and deal with some of the complexity, as well as to know what to expect as payoff. Please join me in welcoming our guests today. We're here with Doug Oathout, Vice President, Converged Infrastructure at HP Storage, Servers, and Networking. Welcome to the show, Doug.

Doug Oathout: Thank you, Dana. Happy to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with John Bennett, Worldwide Director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Welcome back to BriefingsDirect, John.

John Bennett: Thank you very much, Dana. Glad to be with you again.

Gardner: Let me start with you, John. We're talking about some pretty big subjects. There's a lot to chew on here. Data-center transformation (DCT), I suppose, is the most general topic to approach and then to delve down more deeply. What do we mean nowadays by DCT? How does HP define it, and how does that relate to some of the business issues that IT folks are grappling with?

Not one-size-fits-all

Bennett: DCT helps customers implement a data center and infrastructure strategy that's aligned to their goals and objectives. The key here is that it's customer-driven, and it has to be built around the plans and directions of the targeted organization. This is clearly not a one-size-fits-all type of environment.

For many organizations, those strategies for infrastructure can include traditional shared infrastructure solutions or servers using virtualization and automation with shared storage environments. Increasingly, we've seen a natural evolution into a tighter integration of the capabilities and assets of the data center in the fabric infrastructure.

HP's Converged Infrastructure represents a pretty significant step forward in terms of benefits and capabilities for customers looking at having infrastructure strategy aligned to their future needs. The neat thing is that converged infrastructure can be the foundation for private cloud architectures.

Whichever combination of these fits a particular customer, there is the practical challenge of how to change from where you are today to having that implemented? That's what DCT is really about, because it helps implement these strategies through an integrated roadmap of data center projects by consolidation, energy efficiency initiatives, and technology initiatives, like virtualization and automation.

Each of these has its own short-term benefits and returns, but collectively the results get compounded over time, delivering the kind of benefits that we traditionally talk to with DCT. This is all in response to what's going on in customer environments.

I often think of many CIOs as being at the heart of a vise, where, on one side, they have the business pressures. They need to support growth. They need to do a faster job of creating acquisitions. They need to spend more on business projects and innovation. They need to exploit technology for business advantage. They need to reduce costs.

On the other side of the vise are the constraints that they have in the environment that get in the way of them successfully addressing the business needs -- legacy infrastructure and applications and antiquated methods of managing the infrastructure that make it difficult to be responsive to change, or people with the skills that won’t serve modern technology's needs or environments.

Facilities and data centers that were designed and built even five years ago might not have the energy and capacity to support current infrastructure environments. Then, of course, there's energy cost.

So, the CIO is at the heart of this vise. I like to think of DCT and converged infrastructure as kind of the yellow brick road and the Emerald City, where converged infrastructure is Emerald City. It's where you want to get to. DCT is the yellow brick road. It's how you get there, and they complement each other quite nicely.

Gardner: Doug, help me understand why this is important now. The way John is describing it, it seems that the same old approach just won’t hold up, that the trajectory of data centers is unsustainable, whether it's through cost, energy, or capacity issues.

It's not clear to me yet why this converged infrastructure is the right thing to do in totality. Are we talking about a rip-and-replace or are we talking about a gradual direction? Help me understand why, if you are going to move in that direction, you should start now.

Cutting innovation

Oathout: There is a major economic situation going on right now, Dana. As you said earlier, about two-thirds, if not 70 percent, of the operations budget is spent on maintaining the IT and the IT workload within the data center.

When you have a recession, like we just experienced, what happens is that 30 percent spent on innovation or new workload placement gets cut immediately to help manage the budget within an organization. Therefore, in the last 18 months, very little innovation and few new projects were taken on by IT to support new business growth.

Converged infrastructure is important now because we have customers who are starting to spend again and who are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel. They want their IT environment to be more flexible in the future. So, they're looking at their server and storage upgrades, and how they can implement converged infrastructure, so that the new infrastructure is more flexible and can adapt more to the requirements of the business.

Let me give you an example. A server consolidation using virtualization and new server equipment will generally double or triple your capacity within your data center for the same footprint, just by getting the utilization of the servers up, better performance within the servers, and better capabilities within virtual environments. You can basically double or even triple the size of your capacity within your data center.

As you're going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment.

The same thing holds true for storage. Storage disk drives become twice as dense over a two or three year period. The performance of the drives gets better. So, for the same footprint in your data center you can actually fit twice as much storage.

As you're going through your technology refresh now, coming out of the recession, you can start implementing better and faster IT equipment. You can also use better and more efficient processes -- virtualization, automation, and management. When you put those pools of resources in place, you put them in a virtual environment so they can be shared among applications or can be transferred among applications when needed.

You are in the process now of creating pools of resources, versus dedicated silo resources, like you had prior to the recession, which couldn’t be reused for some of the application, and therefore you couldn’t support business growth.

The opportunity now is to break down those silos, give our customers the ability to share resources in the same footprint they have today, and actually become more efficient, so that when business changes or business needs change, they can adapt to the requirements of the business.

Gardner: So, clearly it's efficiency and better balance between supply and demand of resources, and then being able to apply those resources dynamically with a shared service model. All sounds very well and good. What are the hurdles? What's preventing people from getting to this vision?

Resilient and optimized

Oathout: The big hurdles to get over are the application managers themselves. Line of business comes to the applications team and say they need a SAP deployment or an Oracle deployment, and they tell them what hardware to put it on. In a converged infrastructure environment, you really don’t want to care about the infrastructure you are putting it on. What you want to care about is that it's resilient, it's optimized, and it's modular, so it can grow and shrink with the application's demand.

What you really have is a process change that's required between the IT application managers, the test and development people, and a team that actually runs the infrastructure. They need to talk more about standardization. They need to talk about how their IT comes together.

That's where the Data Center Transformation Workshop that John's team does helps. It gives you an architecture for future deployments, so that you have a converged infrastructure. You have pools of resources to put new applications down or revamp older applications onto a newer architecture, so it becomes more flexible.

You have to break down that silo or break down that fence between application deployments and what line of businesses are telling the application deployers and the people who run the infrastructure. Customers really do see that as a deployment barrier, but they're working through it, because there are significant benefits on the other side, just due to the fact that you increase agility, lower cost, and you have more money and more people to go do the innovation to support the workloads of future businesses.

Gardner: John, it sounds as if we're asking people, in a sense, to rethink things a little bit. Typically, as Doug pointed out, you start with the application set and you deploy it, and then you figure out the best way to operate that over time. We are trying to flip that on its head, thinking about what the operational outcome should be, and then go about applying those applications in the right fashion. Is that fair?

So whether it's 2010 or 2003 or 1992 or mini computers back in 1975, rethinking IT is a very healthy practice, but it always has to be aligned to the question of what the organization and business need.

Bennett: Well, I would suggest that good organizations are always rethinking IT. What are the organization's strategy, goals, and objectives? What is it going to take to realize those objectives? What capabilities do we need from IT in order to make those real? And then, how do we make them happen?

So whether it's 2010 or 2003 or 1992 or mini computers back in 1975, rethinking IT is a very healthy practice, but it always has to be aligned to the question of what the organization and business need.

We also have the question of how it can be exploited for benefit. This is where the partnership between the technology team and the business team comes into play. The technology team will have more insights into how it can be exploited, and the key thing for the business is to make sure they specify their needs and not specify the answer.

Doug characterized it very well, when he said the SAP team wants a new deployment and they tell you what to put it on. The moment you do that, you're losing any of the advantages of a converged infrastructure.

Gardner: As you point out, rethinking IT has been happening for quite some time. We really don't have the luxury of standing still for very long in this industry. On the other side of the equation, you need to have a business or financial rationale to create that change in addition to having the vision of where you would like to go.

So, is there a business case, a rationale, a economic formula of some sort that HP is reflecting about -- how to go to those people who control the purse strings in order to move in this direction of a converged infrastructure?

Business plan in play

Bennett: There clearly is a business plan in play here. A lot of the benefits of this are in the nature of cost savings -- the consolidation, modernization, and virtualization that Doug spoke to -- the savings from energy related projects and investments with Data Center Smart Grid, for example. All are easily quantifiable.

Other benefits have financial benefits too. There's economic return to the organization from being able to roll out a new business service more quickly. There's an economic return to the business from being able to provision more resources when they are needed based on demand, so that demand doesn't disappear. There's a competitive business benefit, which is financial in nature, in being able to respond to competitive threats more quickly.

The business case for transformation and the business case for a converged infrastructure should be constructed, and it's the best way to get the buy in from senior executives.

Technologists playing with toys is not a compelling argument for investment by a business. Technologists making significant investments to make sure that IT is aligned to the needs of the business and having the business case for it is a great way to get approval to go ahead.

Gardner: Doug, when we think about a shared services model and a natural progression toward more of a converged infrastructure that borrows from that shared services mentality, how do we move into this as a manageable progression? How do we avoid that thinking about a rip and replace or a massive disruption or throwing of a switch? How is this applied in terms of a managed process or a progression or evolution?

It also has a very quick payback, because basically you're getting back 30 percent of your disk, which was over-provisioned, and now can be used.

Oathout: The way you go back and look at your infrastructure is very important, Dana. Let's just take the storage environment for a moment. You have a number of storage environments. They could either be direct-attached storage (DAS), network-attached storage (NAS), or storage area networks (SANs).

All these environments have performance application service-level agreements (SLAs), associated with them. If you look at the different types of storage environments, there are different technologies that virtualize those today. These allow you to take large blocks of the storage and put them behind a virtual SAN or behind a virtualized environment, which allows you to share those resources amongst multiple server environments.

For example, we have a SAN Virtual Services Platform from HP, in which you can take heterogeneous storage, put it behind this virtual SAN technology, and actually get 30 percent of the capacity back, because all the over-provisioned disks now become available for all those applications sitting on the other side of the virtual SAN. We have a very similar technology from our LeftHand team, with our P4000, it does the same thing for direct-attached storage.

Using technologies like those to grab the excess capacity you have today by doing storage virtualization is very easy to do. It also has a very quick payback, because basically you're getting back 30 percent of your disk, which was over-provisioned, and now can be used. A lot of our customers don't have to buy disks for two to three months, and then when they do buy disk, they can actually put it behind the SAN environment and multiple applications can use it and share it.

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For more information on HP's Virtual Services, please go to: www.hp.com/go/virtualization and www.hp.com/go/services

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Server consolidation

On the server side of things, server consolidation is very prevalent today, because the new servers are faster than the old. They have more memory capacity. They have virtual I/O built into them. So, it's very simple for you to consolidate servers, and when you are consolidating you use virtual I/O environment or FlexFabric environment. You then have the capability to dial up and dial down the I/O capacity of the server to meet the demand of the virtual machines running on it.

There is the server consolidation with virtualization that everybody knows, but then there is also the big benefit of storage virtualization and the fabric virtualization that can go on. Those are the three pieces. Once you get them in place, you can then start doing the automation, management, and the provisioning of workloads that John talked about much faster.

It's basically virtualizing that whole environment with resiliency and everything built into our ProLiant boxes and high availability business critical system boxes. You get all the capabilities and all the resiliency you need in them, and then you put virtualization on top of the storage networking and servers, and you really get the pool of resources that you can dynamically allocate.

Those three projects are the ones that give you that base from which you can then springboard your projects or your new applications.

Gardner: We've heard so much in the last year or two about cloud computing and private clouds. I think there is some confusion about private cloud. What we are talking about in terms of these converged infrastructures, the virtualization of various major aspects of your infrastructure, and then getting them to work in some harmony as a fabric. Are we talking about the same thing? Is cloud computing and converged infrastructure essentially the same? What is the relationship?

Converged infrastructure can be for public cloud, private cloud, or for a web workload or an high-performance computing (HPC) workload or an SAP workload. It doesn't really matter.

Oathout: A cloud-computing environment is really an application-rich environment that allows you to bring more users on quickly and expand your capabilities and shrink your capabilities as you need them.

Converged infrastructure can be for public cloud, private cloud, or for a web workload or an high-performance computing (HPC) workload or an SAP workload. It doesn't really matter. A converged infrastructure is the optimal deployment of IT to support any kind of application, because it's modular in nature.

It has the flexibility to have more storage, more memory, less CPUs or more CPUs, less storage, or less memory, but it's all modular, so you can put the pieces together as you need them. So, it is a base support for either a cloud environment or a traditional IT environment. It really doesn't matter. It's designed to support both.

A private cloud is the IT department saying, "I'm now going to create a service catalog for my lines of business to develop upfront." You're getting software as a service (SaaS) now sitting on top of either a converged infrastructure or legacy infrastructure. A converged infrastructure is a lot easy to put SaaS on. But, you make that service catalog available to line of businesses, so they can turn on applications as they need them, very quickly.

Optimizing over time

Then, you can put more users on an enterprise resource planning (ERP) application, an online application, or a Web 2.0 application. IT is there as a support service now, setting that up, taking it down, and optimizing it over time, depending on the business needs.

So, private cloud is kind of that SaaS that sits on either a converged infrastructure or a legacy infrastructure or uniquely designed infrastructures that you get from some of the public cloud providers. Converged infrastructure is the optimal way to develop and deploy that in a standard data-center environment, and it's in support of a private cloud.

Gardner: John Bennett, when we think about that earlier imperative around flipping the balance of spending on operations into spending on innovation, when we think about moving toward a private cloud or cloud environment, and we charge people based on their usage, do they factor together? I'm trying to understand how we can both reconcile moving toward cloud and fabric and "blank as a service," and, at the same time, reduce those costs, so that we can get that business benefit and innovation engine roaring?

Bennett: That's a very interesting question. For an organization to make good business decisions, they need to have a very good understanding, not only of the benefits, which I talked about earlier, but of the costs. In this environment you get line of sight into the cost infrastructure, so you know what it costs you to provide services.

The businesses, in turn, know what it costs to take an offering to market, a cost based on reality and not based on just spread out mayonnaise models of financing. It lets them really understand the business and whether or not it's an investment they should make. There are clearly benefits on that side, if you can go that far. The benefit of moving to that services orientation is that it gives you clear insight into the cost structures.

It allowed a smaller number of people to manage the environment, so that the rest of their IT team could work on improving service levels for the store and how to improve getting new applications to the new environment.

Gardner: I'm always an advocate of showing rather than telling. I hope we have some examples to illustrate how some of your clients have undertaken a converged infrastructure initiative, and what some of the outcomes were. Does either of you have any examples today?

Oathout: There is a retailer we worked with called Stein Mart. They had an inflexible infrastructure to run nearly 300 stores in the Americas, and they were struggling to bring new applications on line quickly enough to support the demands of the store environment.

They bought into the converged infrastructure story. They bought into our BladeSystem Matrix product, which is the combination of storage, server, flexible network, software, and services.

We enabled them to run this BladeSystem Matrix environment. It allowed them to spin up applications in hours instead of days. It allowed a smaller number of people to manage the environment, so that the rest of their IT team could work on improving service levels for the store and how to improve getting new applications to the new environment.

Increased productivity

Stein Mart saw a significant cost reduction, because of the floor space they had in their data center. They saw a significant increase in productivity from their staff. They saw a 2x increase in response time for calls from the stores, and they saw a significant increase in the time to market for new applications. Instead of days, they were taking hours to set up new applications.

The second customer is the Dallas Cowboys. They built a new football stadium in the Dallas area. It's a $1.4 billion investment. In the bottom of the thing is their data center. They run 30 different businesses out of the data center in the Dallas Cowboys stadium.

They have built it on a virtual environment. They have BladeSystems. They have the FlexFabric built into the environment. They went from over 500 servers down to 16 blades, with virtual machines running on them for the point of sale environment within the stadium. It drove a smaller footprint, but also the dynamics in the server and storage environment, so they can bring on new applications for the 30 businesses very quickly.

They changed their infrastructure to support their environment. That's an evolution, versus a Stein Mart, which did a rip and replace to get better productivity to support their business.

Gardner: Any other examples and perhaps ways to demonstrate what HP can bring to this very complex equation?

The infrastructure was there to set up their operating environment on, so that they could run their business relatively quickly.

Oathout: One other example we have is the airport in Dubai, which was a new business, one of the fastest growing airports in the world. They wanted to set up a shared-service environment for their retailers and other businesses around the airport. So, they actually set up a BladeSystem Matrix environment to run their video surveillance, their infrastructure, baggage handling, and all that.

They set up another environment, which allowed their retailers, passport personnel, and other businesses on site to use their shared service environment to really a full service to their client base inside the airport.

So, when a new business, a new government, or a new agency had to come into the airport, they didn’t have to worry about bringing infrastructure with them. The infrastructure was there to set up their operating environment on, so that they could run their business relatively quickly.

Very productive

All three examples: Stein Mart, Cowboys, and Dubai airport, are very productive in how they bring applications online, very reactive to the lines of businesses they are supporting. That's what a converged infrastructure really delivers, besides the lower economic cost that John and I have talked about. It's that efficiency to bring new opportunities to the lines of businesses, accelerate business growth, or increase customer satisfaction.

Gardner: I recall that HP announced converged infrastructure in November 2009, and this is something that I think pulls together a lot of aspects of what HP had been doing for some time. It's a complex process involving people, skills, and different product sets, different professional services, capabilities, and so forth. What makes HP different in terms of how they are accomplishing this notion of DCT, John?

Bennett: What makes us different is that, first of all, we don’t believe one size fits all. We believe that we need to do a good job working with our customers in understanding their strategies and goals and developing an infrastructure strategy that is aligned to that.

We also don’t believe that these infrastructure strategies for the future should have at their core monolithic computing solutions from the past. We also have a very flexible approach in our projects, in that we try to wrap the services we have available around the capabilities of the customer, rather than making them pay to have HP do everything.

Customers who have a great deal of staff, skills, and capabilities with tools . . . will be quite capable of undertaking these efforts on their own.

Customers who have a great deal of staff, skills, and capabilities with tools -- like the Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model and the assessment that goes with that -- will be quite capable of undertaking these efforts on their own.

We try to offer a great deal of flexibility in how we work with customers, and also in how these are implemented. Customers can do these in a traditional customer-owned data-center environment, in an HP hosted environment, or even outsource it to HP. So, there's incredible flexibility based around the customers' needs and interests.

Gardner: You mentioned the maturity model. Is that a potential stepping stone of how to get started on some of these initiatives? Where could some of the folks who are contemplating their next moves architecturally, in terms of transforming their data centers, go to start? How do they get more information?

Oathout: There are two ways to get started. They can contact one of HP’s business partners. Our business partners are enabled to do our Converged Infrastructure Maturity Model. Or, you can come to HP.com/go/ci, and it will take you to the landing page for a converged infrastructure. A client or a customer could click on the Maturity Model, find out about what it can do for them, and then find a practitioner from HP that can come help them, through the Maturity Model, to show them the roadmap or the yellow brick road that John talked about to help them get to converged infrastructure.

Bennett: If the customer is interested in understanding all the things that HP might be able to do with them, they can engage with HP in a Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop, Doug mentioned the CI landing page. They can also go to www.hp.com/go/dct to find out more about that. That will help them take a broader look at the IT infrastructure and facilities and environment, and look at it from a transformational perspective.

Gardner: Focusing on the future, as we look to close up, this strikes me as something that's not just a flash in the pan or a one- or two-year trend. This seems to me a long-term trajectory. This is pretty much an inevitable way in which data centers are going to develop, that is to say converged, fabric, service-oriented, with the efficiency of dynamic provisioning involved. Any thoughts about where this direction is going to take us, and do you agree that this is essentially inevitable?

Economies of scale

Oathout: It is inevitable, just because of the economies of scale, Dana. Truly, when you start bringing a storage and server and networking platforms together through a flexible fabric, the economies of scale of a shared resources and open systems is going to drive down the cost of acquiring IT. Then, with the software and the services capabilities that companies bring to market, they're going to bring the efficiencies along with them.

So, it is inevitable, starting with the simplest of workloads, moving to some of the hardest of workloads, that you are going to have a converged infrastructure. You are going to have application as a service, whether it's internal or external from a cloud provider, just because the economies of scale are there, and the ability to deploy the stuff is so simple once you get it set up that the efficiencies are also there besides the economies of purchase.

Gardner: Any last thoughts John in terms of the future direction and how long of a trend we are talking about here?

Bennett: How long a term is always difficult to say. One of the exciting things about IT in general is that we see this wonderful yin and yang, this give and take between technology advancements and customer expectations and uses. Customers challenge us to step forward to meet tomorrow's problems. Technology evolves, and we challenge customers to take advantage of it for a business benefit.

That's going to continue, as Doug highlighted, the economic value that comes from this convergence of infrastructure, and the economies of scale are very compelling, but I'm not going to predict how long it's going to last.

Gardner: Well, we'll certainly find out, won't we? It's been very good speaking with you. We've been talking about improved data center productivity through a progression to converged infrastructure.

We've been joined by two executives from HP. Doug Oathout is the Vice President of Converged Infrastructure at HP Storage, Servers, and Networking. Thanks so much, Doug.

Oathout: Thank you Dana.

Gardner: Also John Bennett, Worldwide Director, Data Center Transformation Solutions at HP. Thanks again, John.

Bennett: And thank you, Dana, and thank you, Doug.

Gardner: And, thank you all for listening. 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: Hewlett-Packard.

For more information on virtualization and how it provides a foundation for Private Cloud, plan to attend the HP Cloud Virtual Conference taking place in March. To register for this event, go to:
Asia, Pacific, Japan - March 2
Europe Middle East and Africa - March 3
Americas - March 4

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on achieving cost control and increased utilization through coordinated design, open standards and application-specific infrastructure. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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BriefingsDirect Analyst Panelists Peer into Crystal Balls for Latest IT Growth and Impact Trends

Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 49, with panel of analysts discussing the future of cloud computing, SOA, social networks and the economy.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints.

Special offer: Download a free, supported 30-day trial of Active Endpoint's ActiveVOS at www.activevos.com/insight.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to the latest BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Vol. 49. I'm your host and moderator Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

This periodic discussion and dissection of IT infrastructure related news and events, with a panel of industry analysts and guests comes to you with the help of our charter sponsor, Active Endpoints, maker of the ActiveVOS business process management system.

Our topic this week hones in on the predictions for IT industry growth and impact, now that the recession appears to have bottomed out. We're going to ask our distinguished panel of analysts and experts for their top five predictions for IT growth through 2010 and beyond.

To help us gaze into the new IT trends crystal ball we are joined by our panel. Please join me in welcoming Jim Kobielus, senior analyst at Forrester Research. Hey, Jim.

Jim Kobielus: Hey, Dana. Hi, everybody.

Gardner: Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger. Howdy, Joe.

Joe McKendrick: Hi, Dana. Very nice to be here.

Gardner: Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum. And, Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis. Hi, Brad.

Brad Shimmin: Hey, Dana.

Gardner: Dave Linthicum, CEO of Blue Mountain Labs. Good to have you with us, Dave.

Dave Linthicum: Hey, guys.

Gardner: Dave Lounsbury, vice-president of collaboration services at The Open Group. How do you do, Dave? [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts. See more on the consortium's recent conference in Seattle.]

Dave Lounsbury: Hello, Dana. Happy to be here.

Gardner: Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink.

Jason Bloomberg: Good morning, everybody.

Gardner: And, JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant. Good to have you with us, JP.

JP Morgenthal: Good to be here.

Gardner: I've decided to do this in a random order this time. So, based on the pick of the short straw, Brad Shimmin, you're up, what are your top five predictions for IT in 2010?

Brad Shimmin

Shimmin: Thanks, Dana. And, I have got a set of five. Obviously, mine are geared toward collaboration and conferencing, so I'll just put that out there as a caveat, but I think it will help if we're going to try to strive for consensus later on.

Let me just begin with the first and most obvious, which is that clouds are going to become less cloudy. Vendors, particularly those in the collaboration space, are going to start to deliver solutions that are actually a blend of both cloud and on-premise.

We've seen Cisco take this approach already with front-ending some web conferencing to off-load bandwidth requirements at the edge and to speed internal communications. IBM, at least technically, is poised do the same with Foundations, their appliances line, and LotusLive their cloud-based solution.

With vendors like these that are going to be pulling hybrid, premise/cloud, and appliance/service offerings, it's going to really let companies, particularly those in the small and medium business (SMB) space, work around IT constraints without sacrificing the control and ownership of key processes and data, which in my mind is the key, and has been one of the limiting factors of cloud this year.

Next up, I have "software licensing looks like you." As with the housing market, it's really a buyer's market right now for software. It's being reflected in how vendors are approaching selling their software. Customers have the power to demand software pricing that better reflects their needs, whether it's servers or users.

I think the weapons will be user facing enterprise apps that work in concert with line-of-business solutions on the back-end.

So, taking cues from both the cloud and the open-source licensing vendors out there, we will see some traditional software manufacturers really set up a "pick your poison" buffet. You can have purchase options that are like monthly or yearly subscriptions or flat perpetual licenses that are based on per seat, per server, per CPU, per request, per processor, or per value unit, with a shout out at IBM there -- or any of the above.

You put those together in a way that is most beneficial to you as a customer to meet your use case. We saw last year with web conferencing software that you could pick between unlimited usage with a few seats or unlimited seats with limited usage. You can tailor what you pay to what you need.

Third for me is the mobile OS wars are going to heat up. I'm all done with the desktop. I'm really thinking that it's all about the Google Chrome/Android. I know there's a little bit of contention there, but Google Chrome/Android, Symbian, RIM, Apple iPhone, Windows Mobile, all those devices will be the new battle ground for enterprise users.

I think the weapons will be user facing enterprise apps that work in concert with line-of-business solutions on the back-end. We'll see the emergence of native applications, particularly within the collaboration space, that are capable of fully maximizing the underlying hardware of these devices, and that's really key. Capabilities like geo-positioning, simultaneous web invoice and, eventually, video are really going to take off across all these platforms this year.

Win or lose

But, the true battle for this isn't going to be in these cool nifty apps. It's really going to be in how these vendors can hopefully turn these devices into desktops, in terms of provisioning, security, visibility, governance, etc. That, to me, is going to be where they're going to either win or lose this year.

Four is "The Grand Unification Theory" -- the grand unification of collaboration. That's going to start this year. We're no longer going to talk about video conferencing, web conferencing, telepresence, and general collaboration software solutions as separate concerns. You're still going to have PBXs, video codecs, monitors, cameras, desk phones, and all that stuff being sold as point solutions to fill specific requirements, like desktop voice or room-based video conferencing and the like.

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But, these solutions are really not going to operate in complete ignorance of one another as they have in the past. Vendors with capabilities or partnerships spanning these areas, in particular -- I'm pointing out Cisco and Microsoft here -- can bring and will be bringing facets of these together technically to enable users to really participate in collaboration efforts, using their available equipment.

It will be whatever they have at hand. They're not forced to go to a particular room to participate in a conference, for example. They can just pick up their mobile phone or their preferred method of communication, whether they just want to do voice, voice/video, or chat.

For enterprise-focused vendors, we're going to see them playing in the waves in a number of ways.

And last but not least ... I'm sorry. I'm probably going to get kicked for this, but, because I'm a technical optimist . . . the Google Wave is really going to kick in in 2010. I may be stating the obvious, or I maybe stating something that's going to be completely wrong, but I really feel that this is going to be the year that traditional enterprise collaboration players jump head long into this Google Wave pool in an effort to really cash in on what's already a super-strong mind share within the consumer ranks.

Even though they have a limited access to the beta right now, there are over a million users of it, that are chunking away at this writing code and using Wave.

Of course, Google hosted rendition will excel in supporting consumer tasks like collaborative apps and role playing games. That's going to be big. For enterprise-focused vendors, we're going to see them playing in the waves in a number of ways. They're going to embed them within existing collaborative applications. They're going to enable existing apps to interact with Google Waves.

This is the case with Novell’s recently announced Pulse. You guys saw that. They're going to extend existing apps to make use of wave-like capabilities. They're going to create some competitive functionality that looks like a Google Wave but isn't a Google Wave, and doesn't really care what Google is doing with Wave. And that's it, Dana.

Gardner: Well, Brad, that was an excellent list. If I can plumb through this a little bit, it sounds like we are going to be using Google Wave to do unified collaboration on a mobile operating system, coming from the cloud and we are going to get to negotiate for the price we will pay for it.

Shimmin: Perfect. You strung them together like jewels on a thread. Thanks.

Gardner: Dave Linthicum, you're up next. What are your top five?

Dave Linthicum

Linthicum: My top five are going to be, number one, cloud computing goes mainstream. That's a top prediction, I'm just seeing the inflection point on that.

I know I'm going out on the edge on this one. Go to indeed.com and do a search on the cloud-computing jobs postings. As I posted on my InfoWorld blog few weeks ago, it's going up at an angle that I have never seen at any time in the history of IT. The amount of growth around cloud computing is just amazing. Of course, it's different aspects of cloud computing, not just architecture with people who are cloud computing developers and things like that.

The Global 2000 and the government, the Global 1, really haven't yet accepted cloud computing, even though it's been politically correct for some time to do so. The reason is the lack of control, security concerns, and privacy issues, and, of course, all the times the cloud providers went down. The Google outages and the loss of stuff with T-Mobile, hasn't really helped, but ultimately people are gearing up, hiring up, and training up for cloud computing.

We are going to see a huge inflection point in cloud computing. This can be more mainstream in Global 2000 than it has been in the past. It's largely been the domain of SMBs, pilot projects, things like that. It's going to be a huge deal in 2010 and people are going to move into cloud computing in some way, shape, or form, if they are in an organization.

People are pushing back on that now. They’ve had it. They really don’t want all of their information out there on the Internet ...

That's going to continue going forward. I don’t think we are going to outsource everything as a cloud, but, in the next five years, there is going to be a good 10-20 percent existing on the cloud, which is huge.

The next is privacy. I’ll shift gears a bit. Privacy becomes important. Facebook late last year pulled a little trick, where they changed the privacy settings, and you had to go back and reset your privacy settings. So, in essence, if you weren’t diligent about looking at the privacy settings within your Facebook account and your friends list, your information was out on the Internet and people could see it.

The reason is that they're trying to monetize people who are using Facebook. They're trying to get at the information and put the information out there so it's searchable by the search engines. They get the ad revenue and all the things that are associated with having a big mega social media site.

People are pushing back on that now. They’ve had it. They really don’t want all of their information out there on the Internet, who their friends are, who they are dating, all these sorts of things. They want it secured. I think the rank and file are going to demand that regulations be set.

People are going to move away from these social media sites that post their private information, and the social media sites are going to react to that. They're going to change their policies by the end of 2010, and there's going to be a big uproar at first.

Cloud crashes

Next, the cloud crashes make major new stories. We've got two things occurring right now. We've got a massive move into the cloud. That was my first prediction. We have the cloud providers trying to scale up, and perhaps they’ve never scaled up to the levels that they are going to be expected to scale to in 2010. That's ripe for disaster.

A lot of these cloud providers are going to over extend and over sell, and they're going to crash. Performance is going to go down -- very analogous to AOL’s outage issues, when the Internet first took off.

We're going to see people moving to the cloud, and cloud providers not able to provide them with the service levels that they need. We're going to get a lot of stories in the press about cloud providers going away for hours at a time, data getting lost, all these sorts of things. It's just a matter of growth in a particular space. They're growing very quickly, they are not putting as much R&D into what these cloud systems should do, and ultimately that's going to result in some disasters.

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Next, Microsoft becomes cloud relevant. Microsoft, up to now, has been the punch line of all cloud computing. It had the Azure platform out there. They've had a lot of web applications and things like that. They really have a bigger impact in the cloud than most people think, even though when we think of cloud, we think of Amazon, Google, and larger players out there.

Suddenly, you're going to see Microsoft with a larger share of the cloud, and they're going to be relevant very quickly.

With Azure coming into its own in the first quarter of next year in the rise of their office automation applications for the cloud, you are going to see a massive amount of people moving to the Microsoft platform for development, deployment, infrastructure, and the office automation application. The Global 2000 that are already Microsoft players and the government that has a big investment in Microsoft are going to move in that direction.

Suddenly, you're going to see Microsoft with a larger share of the cloud, and they're going to be relevant very quickly. In the small- and medium-sized business, it's still going to be the domain of Google, and state and local governments are still be going to be the domain of Google, but Microsoft is going to end up ruling the roost by the end of 2010.

Finally, the technology feeding frenzy, which is occurring right now. People see the market recovering. There is money being put back into the business. That was on the sidelines for a while. People are going to use that money to buy companies. I think there is going to be a big feeding frenzy in the service-oriented architecture (SOA) world, in the business intelligence (BI) world, and definitely in the cloud-computing world.

Lots of these little companies that you may not have heard about, which may have some initial venture funding, are suddenly going to disappear. Google has been taking these guys out left and right. You just don’t hear about it. You could do a podcast just on the Google acquisitions that have occurred this week. That's going to continue and accelerate in 2010 to a point where it's almost going to be ridiculous. Well, with that, Dana, those are my predictions.

Gardner: Excellent, Dave. We appreciate that. Let's go to other Dave today. This is Dave Lounsbury. Tell us please from your perspective at The Open Group, what your top five predictions are?

Dave Lounsbury

Lounsbury: I'm going to jump on the cloud bandwagon initially. We’ve seen huge amounts of interest across the board in cloud and, particularly, increasing discussions about how people make sense of cloud at the line-of-business level.

Another bold prediction here is that the cloud market is going to continue to grow, and we'll see that inflection point that Dave Linthicum mentioned. But, I believe that we're going to see the segmentation of that into two overarching markets, an infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service market (PaaS) and software-as-a-service (SaaS) market. So that's my number one prediction.

We'll see the continued growth in the acceptance by SMBs of the IaaS and PaaS for the cost and speed reasons. But, the public IaaS and PaaS are going to start to become the gateway drug for medium- to large-size enterprises. You're going to see them piloting in public or shared environments, but they are going to continue to move back towards that locus of controlling their own resources in order to manage risk and security, so that they can deliver their service levels that their customers expect.

My third prediction, again in cloud, is that SaaS will continue to gain mainstream acceptance at all levels in the enterprise, from small to large. What you’ll see there is a lot of work on interfaces and APIs and how people are going to mash up cloud services and bring them into their enterprise architectures.

Of course all of this is set against the context that all distributed computing activities are set against, which is security and privacy issues.

This is actually going to be another trend that Dave Linthicum has mentioned as a blurring of a line between SaaS and SOA at the enterprise level. You’ll see these well on the way to emerging as disciplines in 2010.

The fourth general area is that all of this interest in cloud and concern about uptake at the enterprise level is going to drive the development of cloud deployment and development skills as a recognized job function in the IT world, whether it's internal to the IT department or as a consultancy. Obviously, as a consultancy, we look to the cloud to provide elasticity of deployment and demand and that's going to demand an elastic workforce.

So the question will be how do you know you are getting a skilled person in that area. I think you'll see the rise of a lot of enterprise-level artifacts such as business use cases, enterprise architecture tools, and analytic tools. Potentially, what we'll see in 2010 is the beginning of the development of a body of knowledge: practitioners in cloud. We'll start to recognize that as a specialty the way we currently recognize SOA as a specialty.

Of course all of this is set against the context that all distributed computing activities are set against, which is security and privacy issues. I don’t know if this is a prediction or not, but I wonder whether we're going to see our cloud harbor in 2010 its first big crash and the first big breach.

We've already mentioned privacy here. That's going to become increasingly a public topic, both in terms of the attention in the mainstream press and increasing levels of government attention.

There have been some fits and starts at the White House level about the cyber czar and things like that, but every time you turn around in Washington now, you see people discussing cyber security. How we're going to grow our capability in cyber security and increasing recognition of cyber security risk in mainstream business are going to be emerging hot topics of 2010.

Gardner: Thanks so much. Next up, Jim Kobielus. Tell us where you see things going in 2010. Your top five, please?

Jim Kobielus

Kobielus: Yes, my top five in 2010. In fact, I blogged that yesterday. I blogged six yesterday, but I'll boil it down to five and I'll make them even punchier. It's only going to be focused on analytics my core area.

Number one: IT more or less gives up BI. Let me constrain that statement. IT is increasingly going to in-source much of BI development of reports, queries, dashboards, and the like to the user through mash up self-service approaches, SaaS, flexible visualization, and so forth, simply because they have to.

IT is short staffed. We're still in a recession essentially. IT budgets are severely constrained. Manpower is severely constrained. Users are demanding mashups and self-service capabilities. It's coming along big time, not only in terms of enterprise deployment, but all the BI vendors are increasingly focused on self-service solution portfolios.

Number two: The users who do more of the analytics development are going to become developers in their own right. That may sound crazy based on the fact that traditionally data mining is done by a cadre of PhD statisticians and others who are highly specialized.

Basically, we're taking data mining out of the hands of the rocket scientists and giving it to the masses through very user-friendly tools.

Question analysis, classification and segmentation, and predictive analytics is coming into the core BI stack in a major way. IBM’s acquisition of SPSS clearly shows that not only is IBM focusing there, but other vendors in this space, especially a lot of smaller players, already have some basic predictive analytics capabilities in their portfolios or plan to release them in 2010.

Basically, we're taking data mining out of the hands of the rocket scientists and giving it to the masses through very user-friendly tools. That's coming in 2010.

Number three: There will be an increasing convergence of analytics and transactional computing, and the data warehouse is the hub of all that. More-and-more transactional application logic will be pushed down to be executed inside of the data warehouse.

The data warehouse is a greater cloud, because that's where the data lives and that's where the CPU power is, the horse power. We see Exadata, Version 2 from Oracle. We see Aster Data, nCluster Version 4.0. And, other vendors are doing similar things, pointing ahead to the coming decade, when the data warehouse becomes a complete analytic application server in its own right -- analytics plus transaction.

Predictive analysis

Number four: We're seeing, as I said, that predictive analytics is becoming ever more important and central to where enterprises are going with BI and the big pool of juicy data that will be brought into predictive model. Much of it is coming from the whole Web 2.0 sphere and from social networks -- Twitters, Facebooks and the like, and blogs. That's all highly monetizable content, as Dave Linthicum indicated.

We're seeing that social network analysis has a core set of algorithms and approaches for advanced analytics that are coming in a big way to data mining tools, text analytics tools, and to BI. Companies are doing serious marketing campaign planning, optimization, and so forth, based on a lot of that information streaming in real-time. It's customer sentiment in many ways. You know pretty much immediately whether your new marketing campaign is a hit or a flop, because customers are tweeting all about it.

That's going to be a big theme in 2010 and beyond. Social network analysis really is a core business intelligence for marketing and maintaining and sustaining business in this new wave.

Right now, we're in the middle of a price war for the enterprise data warehousing stack hardware and software.

And, finally, number five: Analytics gets dirt cheap. Right now, we're in the middle of a price war for the enterprise data warehousing stack hardware and software. Servers and storage, plus the database licenses, query tools, loading tools, and BI are being packaged pretty much everywhere into appliances that are one-stop shopping, one throat to choke, quick-deploy solutions that are pre-built.

Increasingly, they'll be for specific vertical and horizontal applications and will be available to enterprises for a fraction of what it would traditionally cost them to acquire all those components separately and figure it out all themselves. The vendors in the analytics market are all going appliance. They're fighting with each other to provide the cheapest complete application on the market.

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You can see what Oracle has already done with Exadata Version 2, 20K per usable terabyte. We see other vendors packaging even more functionality into these appliances and delivering them to mid-market and large enterprises. Small companies can deploy a complete analytics environment with BI, ETL, and everything for much less than they could just a few years ago.

And, one last thing. There is a cloud twist in everything I am describing or discussing here. Analytics gets dirt cheap, and even more so, as more of this functionality is available in the cloud. We're seeing a boom of SaaS-based BI and data warehousing vendors. In the coming years, pay-as-you-go, subscription-based, low risk, fund it out of OpEx rather than CapEx, is coming to analytics everywhere. So, that will be a huge trend in the coming year.

Gardner: Thanks Jim. Next, we're going to Joe McKendrick. Joe, what's your top five for 2010?

Joe McKendrick

McKendrick: Thanks, Dana. You also gave us the option to talk about the decade ahead, and I was thinking whether I should talk about the year ahead or the decade ahead. It occurred to me that just as we had a 2000 problem a decade ago, we now have a year 2012 problem. I just saw the movie 2012 a couple of weeks ago. The world is going to end and it's going to get flooded.

Gardner: So, the cloud is going to be big, dark, and made of soot. That's it. It's all over. We are all going to – cloud.

McKendrick: Exactly. I might have some arks floating around, and you worry about the IT systems on those arks.

Gardner: Well, you are a pessimist. Back down to earth.

McKendrick: Back down to earth. Okay, 2010. My world, of course, is SOA, and the big question for 2010 is what will Anne Thomas Manes have to say about SOA to start off the year?

Gardner: What's dead this year?

McKendrick: Right. In the first week of this year, Anne came out and said that SOA is dead. That caused a lot of angst, anxiety, discussion, and brooding for pretty much the entire year. It really had an impact.

Gardner: It kept you in page views.

McKendrick: Yeah, thanks, Anne. So, I am hoping Anne will come out with something good at the beginning of 2010. She'll probably say that SOA is still dead. That's my prediction.

Gardner: What is the state of SOA in 2010, Joe?

McKendrick: Part of it will be tied into the economy. By all indications, 2010 is going to be a growth year in the economy. We're probably in this V shape. See, I'm actually an optimist, not a pessimist. The world may end in 2012, but for 2010, we're going to have a great economy. It's going to move forward.

For this decade, we're looking forward to the rise of something called "social commerce," where the markets are user-driven and are conversations.

What happened with SOA? SOA really proved itself through 2009. I know a lot of instances where companies had a service-oriented culture, had flexibility, had visibility into their applications, their services, and their data. This played a great role in helping them pull through in terms of visibility into the supply chains and logistics. I know of a home builder -- and that's a tough industry -- where a SOA implementation really increased its sales turnaround time and enabled it to tighten up, be more efficient, and pull through this economic dark hole we went through.

I think 2010 will be a year of growth. As I said in previous podcast, we had these economic downturns: 2000-2001, 1990-1991, 1981-82. These downturn periods were always followed by periods of spectacular growth, especially in terms of technology -- and usually a huge paradigm shift in technology.

It's hard to say what. Nobody at the time of those downturns could have predicted what was ahead. Nobody predicted the dot-com boom back in 1992. But, what we're seeing is the service-oriented thinking. It's not just IT. It's service-oriented across the board -- the idea of the loosely coupled business, businesses that could start on a shoe string budget in IT, thanks to the availability of cloud, and move forward in the market.

Ten years ago, we saw the rise of e-commerce. For this decade, we're looking forward to the rise of something called "social commerce," where the markets are user-driven and are conversations. To use the quote from the book "The Cluetrain Manifesto," markets will be driven by users who interact with each other. Companies that will succeed and get ahead will encourage this social commerce, the interaction with customers over social networking sites.

Gardner: Alright Joe, I'm confused. Are we still on number one prediction or are you on number two?

McKendrick: That was my number one prediction, the impact of the economy. We're going to start seeing some new paradigms rising. Folks here talk about cloud computing.

The new normal

Number two: Cloud computing. We’ve all been talking about that. That's the big development, the big paradigm shift. Clouds will be the new "normal." From the SOA perspective, we're going to be seeing a convergence. When we talk about cloud, we're going to talk about SOA, and the two are going to be mapped very closely together.

Dave Linthicum talks a lot about this in his new book and in his blog work. Services are services. They need to be transparent. They need to be reusable and sharable. They need to cross enterprise boundaries. We're going to see a convergence of SOA and cloud. It’s a service-oriented culture.

Number three: Google is becoming what I call the Microsoft of the clouds. Google offers a browser and email. It has a backend app engine. It offers storage. They're talking about bringing out an OS. Google is essentially providing an entire stack from which you can build your IT infrastructure. You can actually build a company’s IT infrastructure on the back of this. So, Google is definitely the Microsoft of the cloud for the current time.

Microsoft is also getting into the act as well with cloud computing, and they are doing a great job there. It’s going to be interesting to see what happens. By the way, Google also offers search as a capability.

Gardner: Is there anything that Google won’t do? That’s the easier list. What won’t Google get into this year?

McKendrick: They probably won’t get into building and selling hardware.

Gardner: I heard about a phone they’re into selling. Are they in partnership with a phone?

Everybody will be providing and publishing services, and everybody will be consuming services.

McKendrick: Right, with Verizon, but it's the only thing they won’t really touch.

Gardner: My prediction is that they won’t get into snow plowing. Google will not get into snow plowing in 2010. That’s my only safe bet.

McKendrick: That’s probably about it.

Number four: We're going to see less of a distinction between service providers and service consumers over clouds, SOA, what have you. That's going to be blurring. Everybody will be providing and publishing services, and everybody will be consuming services.

You're going to see less of a distinction between providers and consumers. For example, I was talking to a reinsurance company a few months back. They offer a portal to their customers, the customers being insurance companies. They say that they offer a lot of analytics capabilities that their customers don’t have, and the customers are using their portal to do their own analytic work.

They don’t call it cloud. Cloud never entered the conversation, but this is a cloud. This is a company that’s offering cloud services to its consumers. We're going to see a lot of that, and it’s not necessarily going to be called cloud. You're not going to see companies saying, "We're offering clouds to our partners." It’s just going to be as the way it is.

Number five: In the enterprise application area, we've seen it already, but we're going to see more-and-more pushback against where money is being spent. As I said, the economy is growing, but there is going to be a lot of attention paid to where IT dollars are going.

I base this on a Harvard Medical School study that just came out last month. They studied 4,000 hospitals over a three-year period and found that, despite hundreds of millions of dollars being invested at IT, IT had no impact on hospital operations, patient care quality, or anything else.

Gardner: And, that’s why I don’t go to hospitals.

McKendrick: There are ramifications for other industries as well. What’s the impact of all this IT expenditure? Ultimately, this may help the cloud model in the long run. Okay, that's my five.

Gardner: Excellent. Let’s go to JP Morgenthal. What are your top five predictions, JP?

JP Morgenthal

Morgenthal: First, I'm going to predict that Microsoft, Oracle, Google, IBM -- none of them are going to be supporting Tiger Woods as a sponsor next year.

Gardner: Another risk-taker.

Morgenthal: Sorry, man. I had to throw it out there. It was just sitting there, and no one else picked it up, like a $100 bill on the street. Okay, number one: Cyber security. As someone stated earlier, it's interesting what’s going on out there. I am beginning to understand how little people actually understand about the differences between what security is and information assurance is, and how little people realize that their systems are compromised and how long it takes to eliminate threat within an organization.

Because of all of this connectedness, social networking, and cloud, a lot of stuff is going to start to bubble up. People who thought things were taken care of are going to learn that it wasn’t taken care of, and there will be a sense of urgency about responding to that. We're going to see that happen a lot in the first half of 2010.

Number two: Mobile. The mobile platforms are now the PC of yesterday, right? The real battle is for how we use these platforms effectively to integrate into people’s lives and allow them to leverage the platform for communications, for collaboration, and to stay in touch.

It seems everywhere I go, people are willing to spend a lot of money on their data plan. So, that’s a good sign for telecoms.

My personal belief is that it overkills information overlook, but that’s me. I know that everywhere I go, I see people using their iPhones and flicking through their apps. So, they hit upon a market segment, a very large market segment, that actually enjoys that. Whether small people like me end up in a cave somewhere, the majority of people are definitely going to be focused on the mobile platform. That also relates to the carriers. I think there still a carrier war here. We've yet to see AT&T and iPhone in the US break apart and open up its doors to other carriers.

Gardner: Let that happen in 2010.

Morgenthal: We all say that, but this is a fertile ground for priming what’s been a notoriously dead pump. Two years ago, I wrote a blog entry about what happens to technology in an era where the economy is down? It seems everywhere I go, people are willing to spend a lot of money on their data plan. So, that’s a good sign for telecoms.

Gardner: Yeah, the human species has spoken. They like mobile and they like ubiquitous broadband, and that’s not going to change, right?

Morgenthal: I agree with you. But the question is, should people pay for it or should the government give to you free? In the US, I hear a lot of social groups saying, "Hey, everybody should have broadband like it’s electricity."

Gardner: So, maybe Tiger Woods pays for everybody’s broadband for six months. He's got the money to do it, and then everybody will forget about this marriage thing.

BI and analytics

Morgenthal: I think you’ve got a new business model. Number three: Business intelligence and analytics, especially around complex event processing (CEP). CEP is still in an immature state. It does some really interesting things. It can aggregate and correlate. It really needs to go to that next step and help people understand how to build models for correlation. That’s going to be a difficult step.

As somebody was saying earlier, you had these little Poindexters sitting in the back room doing the stuff. There's a reason why the Poindexters were back there doing that. They understand math and the formulas that are under building these analytical models. Teaching your average USA Today reader how to build an analytical model is akin to teaching everybody how to write programs by drawing pictures. It still hasn’t happened. There's a reason why.

Gardner: So, you are saying that this is a year of CEP, that’s your stake in the ground?

Morgenthal: CEP and analytics -- and the two tied together. You’ll see that the BI, and data aspects of the BI, side will integrate with the CEP modeling to not only report after the fact on a bunch of raw data, but almost be proactive, and try to, as I said in my blog entry, know when the spit hits the fan.

Gardner: Right. So, at this time next year, I won’t be having analysts on to predict that what’s going to happen in 2011. We’ll just plug it into a CEP engine and we’ll get all the right answers.

Morgenthal: That’s assuming you could find the right people to program it, which is a whole other issue. I had done as my number five, so I’ll save that, but number four is collaboration. We’ve crossed the threshold here. People want it. They're leveraging it.

The labor market has not caught up to take advantage of these tools, design them, architect the solutions properly, and deploy and manage them.

I've been seeing some uptake on Google Wave. I think people are still a little confused by the environment, and the interaction model is not quite there yet to really turn it on its ear, but it clearly is an indication that people like large-scale interactions with large groups of people and to be able to control that information and make it usable. Google is somewhat there, and we'll see some more interesting models emerge out of that as well.

Gardner: So, is there another way to say that, JP, which is the people stop living in their email and start living in something more like Google Wave?

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Morgenthal: I don't see them doing that and wouldn't predict that, but they are clamoring for collaboration, and I think the market will respond.

Gardner: Alright.

Morgenthal: New and innovative ways to collaborate.

Gardner: Alright, number five for you.

Morgenthal: Labor. We're at a point where the market is based on all these other things based on the cloud. We had a lot of disruptive technologies hit in the past five years -- enterprise mashups, SOA, and cloud computing. The labor market has not caught up to take advantage of these tools, design them, architect the solutions properly, and deploy and manage them.

I think that 2010 has to be a year for training, rebuilding, and getting some of those skills up. Today, you hear a lot of stories, but there is a large gap for any company to be able to jump into this. Skills are not there. The resources are not there and they are not trained. That's going to be a huge issue for us in 2010.

Gardner: Thanks. We're on to our next analyst prediction, and that would be with Jason Bloomberg. Jason, what are your top five?

Jason Bloomberg

Bloomberg: Thanks for getting to me, Dana. I'm going to be a bit of the naysayer of the bunch. We work primarily with enterprise architects now, so we are on the demand side more than the supply side for IT capabilities. So, our perspective is colored through the glasses of the architect.

Dana, you asked us for not just the one- or 10-year predictions, but also positive and negative. So, my first four are things that I predict won't happen, and we can fill in the blanks in terms of what will happen.

First of all, sorry, Dave, I just don't see cloud computing striking it big in 2010. When we talk to enterprise architects, we see a lot of curiosity and some dabbling. But, at the enterprise scale, we see too much resistance in terms of security and other issues to put a lot of investment into it. It's going to be gradually growing, but I don't see such a point coming as soon as you might like.

Small organizations are a different story. We see small organizations basing their whole business models on the cloud, but at the enterprise level, it's sort of a toe in the water, and we see that happening in the 2010.

Another thing we don't see really taking off in any big way is Enterprise 2.0. That is Web 2.0 collaborative technologies for the enterprise. You know, "Twitter On Steroids," and that kind of thing. Again, it's going to be more of a toe in the water thing. Collaborative technologies are maturing, but we don't see a huge paradigm shift in how collaboration is done in the enterprise. It's going to be more of a gradual process.

Another thing that we are not seeing happening in 2010 is CIOs and other executives really getting the connection between business process management (BPM) and SOA. We see those as two sides of the same coin. Architects are increasingly seeing that in order to do effective BPM you have to have the proper architecture in place. But, we don't see the executives getting that and putting money where it belongs in order to effect more flexible business process. So, this is another work in progress, and it's going to be a struggle for architects to make progress over the course of the year.

Gardner: Alright, Jason, would today's announcement that IBM is acquiring Lombardi be a buttress to your point there?

Bloomberg: Well, that's a software story at this point. It's not a best practice story. IBM, being on the supply side, is attempting to push products like this into the market and they have this strategy for integrating the Lombardi technology with their existing technology. That doesn't necessarily mean that, from the buyer perspective, they see the full connection of how BPM and how SOA fit together and how leveraging architecture will support the business process optimization efforts in the enterprise.

Software vendors were hoping for a huge year, but they're going to be disappointed. It's going to be a growth year, but it's going to be moderate growth for the vendors.

So, tools are there and the tools are maturing, but as far as the demand, I see it growing slowly in fits and starts, as people figure out the role architecture plays.

Gardner: Okay, next one please.

Bloomberg: As far as the end of the recession, yeah, we're all hoping that the economy picks up, and I do see that there is going to be a lot of additional activity as a result of an improving economy, but I don't see a huge uptake in spending on software per se.

Spending in IT is going to go up, but in terms of what the executives going to invest in, they're going to be very careful about purchasing software. That's going to drive some money to cloud-based solutions, but that's still just a toe in the water as well.

Software vendors were hoping for a huge year, but they're going to be disappointed. It's going to be a growth year, but it's going to be moderate growth for the vendors.

Gardner: So that must be why Oracle bought Sun, right?

Bloomberg: Well, we'll have to see. There's been a lot of press on their core strategy in terms of what they are trying to do. Clearly, consolidation is in the cart. I'd agree with that. Part of that is because there are only so many software dollars to go around, and that's going to continue to be the case for a while.

Gardner: Okay, thank you. What’s your next point?

Bloomberg: Those are my first four. Those are the negatives. Not to be too negative, in terms of the positive, what we see happening in 2010 is increased focus on "MSW." You know what MSW is, right? Politely speaking it's "Make Stuff Work." Of course, you could put a different word in there for the S, but Make Stuff Work, that's what we see the architects really focusing on.

They have a good idea now of what SOA is all about. They have a good idea about how the technology fits in the story and the various technologies that have been mentioned on this call, whether it's analytics, data management, SaaS, and the cloud-based approaches. Now, it's time to get the stuff to work together, and that's the real challenge that we see.

SOA-Plus

The SOA story is no longer an isolated story. We're going to do SOA, let's go do SOA. But, it's SOA plus other things. So, we're going to do SOA, BPM, and the architecture driving that, despite the fact that the CIO may not quite connect the dots there.

SOA plus master data management (MDM) -- it's not one or the other now. It's how we get those things to work together. SOA plus virtualization. That's another challenge. Previously, those conversations were separate parts of the organization. We see more and more conversations bringing those together.

SOA and SaaS -- somebody already mentioned that SaaS is one segment of the cloud category. It's little more mature than the rest. We see more organizations understanding the connection between those two and trying to put them together.

Gardner: Are you that we're seeing services orientation of the enterprise?

Bloomberg: You can put it that way, and we like putting it that way, because we're the SOA guys. It depends on who you talk to whether the people in the organization see it that way or, rather, see that that there's a role for architecture as part of how you do things right. When we talk about architecture broadly, we're just talking about general best practices.

No one piece of the story is the whole story anymore. It's going to be a heterogeneity story in the enterprise and how we actually get this stuff to work together.

If you think about governance, for example, as a core set of best practices for running an organization, the key best practice is for it to be architecture driven, and that simply means best-practice driven. So, you can think of architecture as a way of codifying and communicating IT best practices as well as organizational best practices for leveraging IT.

We see that becoming more prevalent over time, as organizations understand the importance of connecting architectural best practices with the other things they're doing.

Before, we had this disconnect. We'll do middleware and we'll do SOA, but we don't really see the connection where we confuse one for the other, and that was a big issue. A large part of why Anne Manes said SOA was dead was because we were confusing SOA with the software enablers that vendors were trying to sell them. With the SOA label on the box, they opened the box and said, "Where's my SOA? I don't get it."

Well, organizations are getting that. Now, they're seeing that there is a connection, and they're trying to get this stuff to work together. In the enterprise context where it's heterogeneous, it needs to scale. It’s broad based, and there are a lot of moving parts. No one piece of the story is the whole story anymore. It's going to be a heterogeneity story in the enterprise and how we actually get this stuff to work together.

Gardner: A services-oriented whole greater than the sum of the IT parts?

Bloomberg: Yeah. We're happy to call this services-oriented, even though the organization, as a whole, may call it variety of different things, depending on the perspective of the individual.

Gardner: Great. Thanks so much. Okay, last but not least, Tony Baer, are you still out there? Thanks for your patience.

Tony Baer: I am here, present, and I am alive.

Gardner: You have to be quick, because we're almost out of time. What are your top five, Tony?

Tony Baer

Baer: Not a problem. I’ll make it very, very quick. Actually, I am just going to add various comments. On cloud and virtualization, basically I agree with Jason, and I don't agree with David or with Joe. It’s not going to be the "new normal." We're going to see this year an uptake of all the management overhead of dealing with cloud and virtualization, the same way we saw with outsourcing years back, where we thought we'd just throw labor costs over the wall.

Secondly, JP, I very much believe that there is going to be convergence between BI and CEP this year. I agree with him that there's not going to be a surge of Albert Einsteins out there. On the other hand, I see this as a golden opportunity for vendors to package these analytics as applications or as services. That's where I really see the inflection curve happening.

Number three: Microsoft and Google. Microsoft will be struggling to stay relevant. Yes, people will buy Windows 7, because it's not Vista. That’s kind of a backhanded compliment to say, "We're buying this, because you didn't screw up as badly as last time." It doesn't speak well for the future.

Google meets a struggle for focus. I agree with Joe that they are aspiring to be the Microsoft of the cloud, but it may or may not be such a good thing for Google to follow that Microsoft model.

Finally, I agree with Jim that you are going to see a lot more business-oriented, whether it's BI, BPM, or IBM buying Lombardi. I hope they don't mess up Lombardi and especially I hope they don't mess up Blueprint. I've already blogged about that.

I very much believe that there is going to be convergence between BI and CEP this year.

One other point -- and I don't know if this fits into a top five or not -- but I found what Joe was talking about very interesting in terms of the let-down on health-care investment in IT. There's going to be lot a of pushing in electronic medical records (EMR) this year. I very much believe in EMRs, but, on the other hand, they are no panacea. We're going to see a trough of disillusionment happen on that as well.

I don't know if that's fast, but that's my story and I am sticking to it.

Gardner: Well, that was great, very zippy, I appreciate that and I'm afraid we're out of time. I want to thank our guests and our panel for these very insightful predictions. It's going to be a fun year. Everything from Google and snow plowing to cheap, but not private and not secure, cloud -- a lot to look forward to.

Let me again thank our panel, Jim Kobielus, senior analyst of Forrester Research, thank you so much.

Kobielus: Have a good, happy new year everybody.

Gardner: Joe McKendrick, independent analyst and prolific blogger. Thank you, sir.

McKendrick: Thank you and looking forward to a great 2010.

Gardner: Tony Baer, senior analyst at Ovum, thank you.

Baer: Yes, thanks.

Gardner: Great insights from Brad Shimmin, principal analyst at Current Analysis. Thanks.

Shimmin: Thanks much, Dana.

Gardner: Dave Linthicum, CEO of Linthicum Group, again appreciating your insights.

Linthicum: Thanks, everybody.

Gardner: Dave Lounsbury, vice president, collaboration services at The Open Group, thanks so much for joining us.

Lounsbury: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Jason Bloomberg, managing partner at ZapThink. Very good. I appreciate your input.

Bloomberg: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: And JP Morgenthal, independent analyst and IT consultant. Thank you, sir.

Morgenthal: Thank you, Dana. Thank you for inviting me. It's always a pleasure to be with this group.

Gardner: And, I would like to thank our sponsors for the BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition, Active Endpoints.

This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening, and come back next time. Have a great and happy new year.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Charter Sponsor: Active Endpoints.

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Edited transcript of BriefingsDirect Analyst Insights Edition podcast, Vol. 49, with panel of analysts discussing the future of cloud computing, SOA, social networks and the economy. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

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