From VMworld, NYSE Euronext on Hybrid Cloud Vision and Strategy Behind the Capital Markets Community Platform Vertical Cloud

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the VMworld 2011 Conference focusing on NYSE Euronext's use of cloud in making a foray into providing customer services in a vertical market.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you from the VMworld 2011 Conference in Las Vegas. We're here in the week of August 29 to explore the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I’ll be your host throughout this series of VMware-sponsored BriefingsDirect discussions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

When we hear about cloud, especially public clouds, we often encounter one-size-fits-all services. Advanced adapters of cloud delivery models are quickly creating more specialized hybrid clouds for certain industries. And they're looking to them as both major sources of new business, and the means to bring much higher IT efficiency to their clients.

Today, we'll learn about how the NYSE Euronext recently unveiled one such vertical offering, their Capital Markets Community Platform. We’ll see how they built the cloud, which amounts to a Wall Street IT services destination, what it does, and how it’s different from other cloud offerings.

Here to tell us about how specialized clouds are changing the IT game in such vertical industries as finance is Steve Rubinow, Executive Vice-President and Chief Information Officer at NYSE Euronext. Welcome, Steve.

Steve Rubinow: Hello there.

Gardner: I’d like to hear more about how you put your cloud together, but before we do that, you are delivering more than compute power on demand. You have some very specialized services of historical trading data, innovative trading services, and even third-party applications. And you're supporting these both inside your cloud as well as your clients'. So maybe you could help us understand how you came about to define this type of offering. Why have you done it this way?

Rubinow: It’s the convergence of a couple of trends and also things that our customer started to tell us. Like a lot of companies, we started to use cloud technology within our own company to service our own internal needs for the reasons that many people do -- lower cost, more flexibility, more rapid spin up, those kinds of things, and we found, of course, that was very useful to us.

At the same time, we've talked to a lot of our customers via our commercial division, which we call NYSE Technologies. By virtue of all the turbulence that's happened in the world, especially in the financial markets in the last couple of years, a lot of our customers -- big ones, small ones, banks, brokerages, and everyone in between -- said the infrastructure that we traditionally have supported within our own companies, is a new model that we could adapt, given these technologies that are available, and given that we NYSE Technologies wants to provide these services. We asked if we should take a different look at what we are doing and see if we should pursue some of these things.

What it comes down right down to is that many of these companies said that maintaining their own infrastructure is not a competitive advantage for them. It’s really a cost of doing business like telephones and office furniture. It would be better if someone else helped them with it, maybe not 100 percent, but like we propose to do, and everyone wins. They get lower cost and they get to offload a burden that wasn’t particularly strategic to them.

We say we can do it with good service and at a good price, and everybody comes away a winner. So we launched this program this summer, with one offering called Compute on Demand, which has a number of attributes that make it different than your run-of-the-mill public cloud.

Higher Requirements

In the capital markets community, we have some attributes of infrastructure, a higher requirement, that most companies wouldn’t care so much about, but in our industry they are very, very critical. We have a higher level of security than an average company would probably pay attention to.

And reliability, as you can imagine. The markets need to be up all the time when they are supposed to be open. A few seconds makes a big difference. So we want to make sure that we pay extra attention to reliability.

Another thing is performance. Our industry is very performance-sensitive. Many of the executions are measured in micro-seconds. Any customer of ours, including ourselves, are sensitive to make sure that any infrastructure that we would depend on has the ability to make sure that transactions happen. You don’t find that in the run-of-the-mill public cloud because there just isn’t a need for the average company to do that.

For that reason, we thought our private offering, our community cloud, was a good idea. By the way, our customers seem to be nodding their heads a lot to the idea as well.

Gardner: Could I understand a bit more about the architecture? You do have public cloud services, those being hosted by you and delivered to your clients, but you're also having some element of this as your clients choose on-premises. How does that work? What's the split or why have it a hybrid model?

We're a very rich source of market data, as one might imagine. We generate a lot of market data ourselves because of the large marketplace we are.

Rubinow: In the spirit of trying to accommodate all the needs that people will have, for many of the cloud services, you get the most leverage out of them, if you as a customer are situated in the data center with us.

Many customers choose to do that for the simple reason of speed-of-light issues. The longer the network is between Point A and Point B, the longer it takes a message to get across it. In an industry where latency is so important, people want to minimize that distance, and so they co-locate there. Then, they have high-speed access to everything that's available in the data center.

Of course, customers outside the data center certainly can have access to those services as well. We have a dedicated network that we call SFTI, Secure Financial Transaction Infrastructure. That was designed to support high speed, high reliability, and high resiliency, things that you would expect from a prominent financial services network. Our customers come to our data centers over that network, and they can avail themselves of the services that we have there too.

Earlier in the conversation I talked about the attributes of the infrastructure, but there's something that we also have in our data center that our customers make use of. They have for a while, and now even more so, in a more flexible manner via some of these cloud services.

We're a very rich source of market data, as one might imagine. We generate a lot of market data ourselves because of the large marketplace we are. We take data from other marketplaces, consolidate them, and provide feeds of those data to our customers. We want to make sure we do that in a fast, cost-effective, flexible way.

Historical data

We have historical data that lot of our customers would like to take a look at and analyze, rather than having to store the data themselves. We have it all here for them. We have applications like risk management and other services that we intend to offer in the future that customers would be hard-pressed to find somewhere else, or if they could find it somewhere else, they probably won't find it in as efficient a manner. So it makes sense for them to come to us to take a look at it and see how they can take advantage of it here.

Gardner: And so it certainly seems that,with the mission-critical nature of the issues and the requirements that you mentioned that applying a cloud model here, if you can do it there you could probably do it anywhere. Let's learn a little bit more about NYSE for those folks on the podcast that aren't familiar with you. Tell us about your organization, your global nature, and where you expect to deliver these cloud services over time?

Rubinow: The full name of the company is NYSE Euronext, and that reflects the fact that we are a collection of markets not only in the United States but also in Europe. We operate a number of cash and derivative exchanges in Europe as well. So we talk about the whole family being part of NYSE Euronext.

We segment our business into three segments. There is the cash business, which is global. There is the derivatives business, which is global, and those are the things that people would have normally associated our company with, because the thing we've been doing for many years.

The newest piece of our business is the piece that I've referred to earlier and that's our commercial technology business, which we call NYSE Technologies. Through that segment of the business, we offer all these services, whether it be software products we might develop that our customers take advantage of or services as we've already referenced.

Over the years, we've been offering these services to our customers, and then a couple of years ago we decided to do it in a much bigger way, because we realized the need was there.

The genesis of that is that we did a lot of good things for ourselves in terms of high speed, high performance, high transaction volumes, reliability, security, functionality, low cost -- all these things that are necessary to be a major competitor in today's market.

In a small way, over the years, we've been offering these services to our customers, and then a couple of years ago we decided to do it in a much bigger way, because we realized the need was there. Our customers told us that they would take advantage of these services. So we made a bigger effort in that regard. Right now, the commercial part of our business is several hundred million dollars a year in terms of revenue.

We have great expectations to grow that significantly over the next few years, and it's through that that we offer it. Now, our two major hubs, our data centers that we just built. are almost brand spanking new. They are full production facilities. We finished them last year.

One is in northern New Jersey and the other one is outside of London. Most of the space in those data centers are for our customers, not for us. We certainly have a piece of those data centers that we run our core operations from, because they were designed to do that, but we also had in mind all the products and services that we can offer our customers that choose to be in the data center with us. So you'll find that a good number of our customers have taken us up on that, and are co-located with us.

We plan to have additional centers not identical to our prime data centers that we have in London and New Jersey, but in Asia, Europe, and North America, where customers can come, take advantage of services that we offer there and then can connect to the other data centers as need be.

Question of latency

I have to add one note in terms of latency. For people who aren't familiar with our obsession with latency, the true textbook cloud profile means that one could execute cloud-like services. If we had 20 data centers across the world, they could be executed across any of those data centers and transparent to the customer as long as they get done.

In ours latency-sensitive world, we are a little bit constrained with some of the services that we offer. We can't afford to be moving things around from data center to data center, because those network differences, when you're measuring things in micro-seconds, are very noticeable to our customers. So some of our services could be distributed across the world, but some of our services are very tied to a physical location to make sure we get the maximum performance.

To add further to that, one of the cornerstone technologies, as we all know, of cloud computing is virtualization. That gives you a lot of flexibility to make sure that you get maximum utilization of your compute resources.

Some of the services we offer can't use virtualization. They have to be tied to a physical device. It doesn't mean that we can't use a lot of other offerings that VMware provides to help manage that process, but some are tied to physical devices, because virtualization in some cases introduces an overhead. Again, when you're measuring in micro-seconds, it's noticeable. Many other of our services where virtualization is key to what we do to offer the flexibility in cost to our customers.

So we have kind of a mixed bag of unique provisioning that's designed for the low-latency portion of our business, and then more general cloud technologies that we use for everything else in our business. You put the two of them together and we have a unique offering that no one else that we know of in the world offers, because we think we're the first, it’s not among the first, to do this.

You put the two of them together and we have a unique offering that no one else that we know of in the world offers.

Also, we have a very focused target customer base here. It's not for the average company. It's for those customers that demand these kinds of things, and we're determined to make sure they get what they want.

Gardner: Okay, Steve, you've certainly outlined a very impressive capability set and because you're involved with cloud services, whether they're built on virtualization infrastructure or not, it seems to me that you're going to be able to add more services and really judge closely what your customers want and demand, gather their trust, demonstrate your value, and then perhaps be in a position to add even more services over the coming year. So this is a rather big business undertaking for you. This cloud is really an instrument for your business in a major way.

Rubinow: That's right. Sometimes we think the core of our business is trading. That is the core. That's our legacy That's the core of what we do. It's a very important source of our business, and it generates a lot of the things that we've been talking about. Without our core business we wouldn’t have the market data to offer to our customers in a variety of formats.

The technologies that we used to make sure that we were the leader in the marketplace in terms of trading technology and all the infrastructure to support that, that's also what we're offering our customers. What we're trying to do is cover all the bases in the capital markets community, and not only trading services, which of course is the center of what we do and it's core to everything that we do.

All the things that surround that our customers can use to support their traditional trading activities and then other things that they didn't used to look to us to do. These are things like extensive calculations that they would not have asked the NYSE to do, but today they do it, because we provide the infrastructure there for them.

Fulfilling a need

It’s the inner layer of trading technology plus everything on the periphery that we can imagine and offer to our customers that our customers can imagine themselves as fulfilling a need of theirs. We're intent on doing that. If you think of this as a supply-chain approach, we’re trying to cover every base we can in the supply chain to make sure that we can be a primary provider for all of our customers’ needs in the space.

Gardner: It’s a little bit soon, I suppose, to develop metrics of success. As you pointed out, you've been doing this now just for the summer in a full general availability mode. But do you have any sense from your customers? Are they witnessing removal of redundancy? Are they able to remove costs. And do they have some ability to compare and contrast the way they did business as usual and the way that they’re starting to employ more of your services? What are some of the underlying numbers perhaps of how this works economically?

Rubinow: From a metrics standpoint, it's probably too early to provide metrics, but I can tell you, qualitatively speaking, the few customers that we have that were early adopters are happy to get on stage with us and give great testimonials about their experience so far. So that’s a really good leading indicator.

Again, without offering numbers, our pipeline of people wanting these services globally has been filling very nicely. So we know we've hit a responsive chord. We expect that we will fulfill the promises that we’re offering and that our customers will be happy. It’s too early, though, to say, "Here's three case studies that show, our customers are saying how it’s gone, because they haven’t been in it long enough to deliver those metrics.

Gardner: Speaking of being on stage, you yourself have been on stage here at VMworld in Las Vegas and told your story. Maybe you could reiterate a bit or summarize what it is that you’ve done vis-à-vis VMware to enable this capability.

Many of the things needed to be done from scratch, because we didn’t have models to look for that we could copy in a marketplace.

Rubinow: When we were putting together our cloud architecture and thinking about the special needs that we had -- and I keep on saying it’s not run-of-the-mill cloud architecture -- we we’re trying to make sure that we did it in a way that would give us the flexibility, facilities, and cost that we needed. Many of the things needed to be done from scratch, because we didn’t have models to look for that we could copy in a marketplace.

And we also realized that we couldn’t do it ourselves; we have a lot of smart people here, but we don’t have all the smart people we need. So we had to turn to vendors. We were talking to everyone that had a cloud solution. Lots of vendors have lots of solutions. Some are robust, and some are not so robust.

When it came down to it, there were only a couple of vendors that we felt were smart enough, able enough, and real enough to deliver the things to us that we felt we needed to get started. I'm sure we will progress over time, and there will be other people who will include the picture.

Top of the list

But VMware was at the top of that list of technologies that we have been using internally for several years, been very happy with. Based on our historical relationship with VMware and the offerings that VMware have in the traditional VMware space, plus the cloud offerings, things like Cloud Director and other things, that we felt that those were good cornerstone technologies to make sure we have the greatest chance of success with few surprises.

And we needed partners to push the envelope, because we view ourselves as being innovative and groundbreaking, and we want to do things that are first in the industry. In order to do those with better certainty of outcome, you have to have good partners, and I think that’s what we found at VMware.

Gardner: We’re almost out of time but now that you've had this experience with building out this cloud in a fashion where, if you could do it your way, you can probably apply this to many other industries in terms of performance and security.

What did you learn? Is there any 20-20 hindsight or Monday morning quarterback types of insights that you could offer to others who are considering such cloud and/or vertical specialty cloud implementations?

Rubinow: It goes back to the comments I just made in terms of choosing your partners carefully. You can’t afford to have a whole host of partners, dozens of them, because it would get very confusing. There's a lot of hype in the marketplace in terms of what can be done. You need people that have abilities, can deliver them, can service them, and can back them up.

You can’t afford to have a whole host of partners, dozens of them, because it would get very confusing.

Every one of us who’s trying to do something a little bit different than the mainstream, because we have a specific need that we’re trying to service, has to go into it with a careful eye towards who we’re working with.

So I would say to make sure that you ask the right questions. Make sure you kick the tires quite a bit. Make sure that you can count on what you’re going to implement and acquire. It’s like implementing any new technology It’s not unique to cloud.

If you're leading the charge, you still want to be aggressive but it’s a risk management issue You have to be careful what you’re doing internally. You have to be careful who you’re working with. Make sure that you dot your I’s and cross your T’s. Do it as quickly as you can to get to market, but just make sure that you keep your wits about you.

Gardner: Excellent. We’ve been talking about advanced adoption of specialized cloud delivery models and how they’re changing the game for IT in such vertical industries as finance. Also, I imagine that this is really going to be changing your business model So congratulations on that.

Rubinow: Thanks.

Gardner: We’ve been talking with Steve Rubinow, the Executive Vice President and Chief Information Officer at NYSE Euronext. I appreciate your time, Steve.

Rubinow: Thank you.

Gardner: And thanks to our audience for joining this special podcast, coming to you from the 2011 VMworld Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host throughout this series of podcast discussions. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from the VMworld 2011 Conference focusing on NYSE Euronext's use of cloud in making a foray into providing customer services in a vertical market. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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HP's Liz Roche on Why Enterprise Technology Strategy Must Move Beyond the 'Professional' and 'Consumer' Split

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how rapid changes in consumer technology use are finding their way into enterprise IT.

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

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 some deep rumblings of change in how IT provides services and value to its many types of users.

The past several years have spurred a changing set of expectations from users as they engage with technology and services, as both consumers and workers. The sense is that they want to get as much ease of use and productivity from enterprise technology as from their smartphones, social networks, tablets, and cloud-based offerings. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

That means that IT needs to rethink things a bit, to develop a "prosumer" strategy, whereby both the applications and services they provide to internal employees and their end-user customers increasingly bear the hallmarks of modern consumer services.

Their applications may need to behave more like apps. Their provisioning may need to be more like app stores. And self-service and intuitive adoption of new features need to be built in as primary requirements. Ease in social collaboration has become a must.

So how can IT adjust to this shift? What must they do differently, or more importantly, how must they think differently? This is the type of problem that a product or technology itself cannot address. It requires a comprehensive and methodological perspective, one that impacts consumers, business goals, and behaviors around technology use and adoption.

We're here now with an innovator and leader in HP’s Technology Consulting group to learn how enterprises can tackle and exploit such complex challenges as developing a prosumer strategy.

Please join me now in welcoming Liz Roche, a Director in the HP Technology Consulting organization. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Liz.

Liz Roche: Thanks, Dana. Great to be here. [To connect further with Liz Roche, visit her at her micro site.]

Gardner: It seems that, not that long ago, corporations and businesses were adopting cutting-edge technology and then it would slowly trickle into homes and consumer use, usually in some sort of a watered down approach. You might remember the Bob Interface that Microsoft had. What’s changed since then, Liz?

Roche: A couple of things. First of all, when we look at the velocity of IT innovation, we look at Moore’s Law, which originally described integrated circuits, and that the number of transistors that can be placed on these integrated circuit boards would double approximately every two years.

It has been common for us in IT to take a single data point and apply it across a broad spectrum of disciplines, but if you take that Moore’s Law notion and apply it to technology, it's unbelievably clear that the velocity of innovation continues to double and triple.

Technological singularity

In fact, there are futurists out there who believe that, at some point, this exponential improvement described in Moore’s Law will lead to something that folks are calling a technological singularity, where progress in technology occurs almost instantaneously and is rolled out to the general population.

Cutting-edge technology is no longer limited to the particular geography or location in which it’s going to be used. It’s now focused on the user and the role, and we are going to see that continue.

Gardner: We've seen some mega-trends too with mobile and ubiquitous wireless connectivity. It seems that the adoption of technology now seems to be moving at the volition of the savvy consumer, and the younger folks are growing up in ways in which they are savvy from the get-go. So there seems to be some very large cultural, global trends that are also supporting this.

Roche: Absolutely. If we look at some of the economic trends, you'll start to see that folks who went to college 20 or 30 years ago got out of school with the expectation of working their way up a corporate ladder and adopting technology and tools that were provided by the corporation. The folks who are coming up these days have been weaned on technology.

A really big mega-trend is that our workers of today and tomorrow, not us who are already in the workplace, those folks coming up, are going to not just demand technology that will enable their work and their life, but they will expect it and indeed may not be able to function as well without it.

Mega-trends include the consumerization of IT. At HP, we're calling it the Instant-On Enterprise, where everything and everyone is connected. Immediate gratification and instantaneous results are mandatory. There is this notion of 24×7, always-on commerce. We could go on and on, but I think the big trends are in that general category, at least as pertains to the prosumer.

Gardner: Then, of course, there are also economic shifts. There's been a lot of venture capital directed at applications and services that are consumer-oriented. We've certainly seen tremendous uptake on the social networks by consumers.

So, the application becomes a business for many of these newer companies, and they can move very quickly. They want to be first to market. They want to carve out large market share, and that also accelerates things like social networks, sharing of photos, entertainment streams, and so on.

How do you see the economics of this shifting and pushing the adoption patterns that enterprises need to try to catch up to?

Roche: It's funny, because in many ways it has become a numbers game. Some of these applications or businesses price their products at low or no cost -- with the objective being conversion to paid, either subscriptions or paid services and advertising, but also the value of the connection, the value of the social network as part of the business model.

Shared knowledge

Organizations or enterprises today are going to be taking philosophies like that and applying it to more traditional goods and services in the marketplace, where the value isn't necessarily on the initial transactions. It’s not about a 99-cent Angry Birds [app]. It's about what happens once you're using the technology, the product, the service, the relationships that you form, the advertising, and the knowledge that can be shared.

Gardner: So we have this cauldron of bubbling and churning change, and of course shifts like this can offer terrific opportunity, as we have seen from some companies that have come into markets and been very successful very quickly. Facebook certainly comes to mind. There's also, of course, challenges, and perhaps peril, when shifts happen and you don't react to them properly.

We have now enterprises looking at these shifts, looking at how consumer and business technology adoption patterns are merging, melding, or at least certainly have a more complex relationship than in the past. What is it that you think organizations need to try to do in order to be on that advantageous side of shifts, rather than at a disadvantage?

Roche: A bunch of things. Let's start with the big picture. Organizations that are truly instant-on enterprises are those that serve their constituents, customers, employees, partners with whatever they want and need instantly, at any point in time, through any channel. So organizations that are instant-on, and those are the kinds of organizations that we need to evolve to, are going to explore better ways to run business and government by designing new process and methods, by building flexible systems that interact with greater personalization.

I think back to 10 or 15 years ago, when we were talking about mass customization and the science fiction world that was all about personalization of every transaction and every purchase. Companies are going there. I think companies will also need to look at frameworks for transacting efficiently and securely.

Creating a framework for this instant-on enterprise will enable this whole idea of everybody on, and the prosumer, the professional, and the consumer coming together as one person, one view, with two different sides to them, two worlds.

Governance is going to become ever more important. There are certainly legal and ethical goals and constraints. Creating a framework for this instant-on enterprise will enable this whole idea of everybody on, and the prosumer, the professional, and the consumer coming together as one person, one view, with two different sides to them, two worlds. That's going to have to be where organizations move to support.

Gardner: I suppose as we see these two worlds, consumer and business or professional, we certainly don't want to have to create distinct infrastructures to support those activities. It's certainly a time for convergence and consolidation as well. So we look for a more common and extensible infrastructure to support all of these activities.

The other thing that struck me by what you are saying is that this needs to be inclusive. It's not just a technology equation. It's business, culture, behavior, demographics, and localization -- really a complex undertaking. Help me understand about how you at HP are looking at this. It seems to be a terrific opportunity.

Roche: HP has a long, very cool history of being really innovative, but at HP today, our vision is to provide seamless and context-aware experiences for this connected world.

We're in a particularly interesting time and place to provide this to our customers, because we are going through it ourselves, both internally -- as an employee I can see it -- but also in how we interact with our customers, our partners, and all our constituents. [To connect further with Liz Roche, visit her at her micro site.]

Not just about prosumers

Just by way of example, at HP it's not just about prosumers, folks like me doing personal activities during work hours and work during personal hours. It's about these personal activities evolving into becoming work activities.

I'm not just messing around on YouTube because I like looking at the latest videos. I'm working You Tube, because that's where our HP Channel is. It’s one of the places where our HP Channel lives and it's one of the ways that I communicate with my clients. The same thing with Twitter and Facebook, and indeed even this podcast, speaking with you. These are prime examples of things that we at HP place a very high value on and our technology infrastructure has been overhauled to support that.

The other interesting thing about HP being well-positioned to do this is that we have a depth and breadth of both services and products that meet almost every requirement of this new instant-on enterprise.

Certainly, we would never expect to see an HP-only environment. We are very, very focused on what's right for our clients and our customers. But, the fact that I can reach back into my toolkit of HP brain power and HP Labs and our various products and service units and gain access to the information and the mind share that my clients need, is a hugely valuable tool to have at my disposal.

Gardner: Clearly, HP has a large portfolio, terrific global reach, lots of technology, and as you point out, crosses the boundary and barrier between consumer activities and business activities. But, what about the technology consulting organization, how does that come to bear on these sorts of problems, on making a shift to a more prosumer thinking and approach to IT?

The way our services are structured, we're designed to meet the various needs of transforming to an instant-on enterprise.

Roche: Let's talk a little bit about what all clients should look for in a consulting organization.

The way our services are structured, we're designed to meet the various needs of transforming to an instant-on enterprise, I mean that is the entire backbone of how we have structured ourselves.

If you look at our Converged Infrastructure team, for example, we have folks who are not only designing services to support a converged infrastructure, but we have folks who are looking at helping organizations create a transformation vision for what it means, how to get there, what your roadmaps need to look like, or how mature are you as an organization.

One of the things that we like to do a lot and, in fact, anyone considering working with a consulting partner should look for this as well, is to help folks understand their own maturity. I'm not talking about the traditional capability maturity model. We certainly we can do that, but we like to look at things in a slightly different way. We like to look at organizational culture and the risk profile of that organization. That’s unique to how we work at HP.

If I look at an organizational maturity model, we're looking at where culturally folks are going to be placed in terms of how they want to take a risk. Are they a science-fiction type organization where they're comfortable being on the bleeding edge, extremely early adopter organizations.

I've got this taxonomy in my brain from way back when I was an industry analyst and we used to talk about future organizations, which are these early adopter IT organizations, not bleeding edge, but willing to be early adopters.

Broker of services

There are the folks that are in the mainstream, and then there are the stalled IT organizations that look to deliver IT support, rather than moving to enable the business with IT and to have a seat at the table and to be not just a provider but an actual broker of services.

When you're a broker of IT services, which is what we teach our clients to be, you are providing not just IT support, but you're also providing new cost models for business process enablement. You're looking at things like service delivery in one of three ways: traditional, which is in-house or outsourced, private cloud, public cloud.

At HP Consulting, we believe that you're driving to create a service portfolio that drives a value chain. And the value chain delivers these services to the consumer, customer, citizen, via whatever channel is most appropriate -- web, chat, IM, etc.

Gardner: I suppose too, Liz, when you focus this problem set through a consultative solution or methodology, you're also going to gain the experience of what those consultants have found in other regions of the world, or industry to industry, or from having worked in a consumer environment, to then taking that into a business environment.

That’s something you don’t get from technology alone. It’s really experiential, a tribal knowledge. It seems to me that the consultative function is perhaps more important when we come into this period of change that we are facing now than almost any other.

We've been working really hard to make sure that we share our experiences, and to capture that tribal knowledge, to systematically input it into places where others can access it.

Roche: It’s one of the things that is pervasive throughout HP Consulting, that it really takes a village to deliver services and top-notch innovation to our clients.

Every time I walk into a client site with a team of consultants, it’s not just one of us working independently in our area of specialty. It’s about all of us working together. It’s about that tribal knowledge.

We've been working really hard to leverage the innovation in the field. So we need a really strong knowledge management capability. We've been working really hard to make sure that we share our experiences, and as you say, through tribal knowledge, to capture that tribal knowledge, to systematically input it into places where others can access it. And, of course, all while respecting the privacy and the non-disclosures we have with our clients.

When I walk into a healthcare organization to start working on a digital hospital activity, let's say, I've got the knowledge of all the folks who have come before me, including our long history of innovations.

The bottom line is that if someone says to me, what's very different and special about your team walking in versus someone else's team walking in, I'm going to say it is the depth and breadth of HP that's behind me, including the way that we work with our customers and partner with our clients to bring the depth and breadth of HP to bear in every engagement.

Gardner: So we're crossing chasm of consumer to business. We're crossing chasms of sourcing with cloud versus on-premises, and we're certainly looking at the difference that a consultative understanding of the processes and the technology, so crossing the chasm of business issues and IT issues.

That's nothing new. We've seen that, but it just seems to me that the stakes are higher now, and that people need to be treated as people. This is not a matter of throwing a data center over the wall and saying, "Here, good luck with that." You really need to have almost a behavioral, empathetic, sympathetic approach to bringing people into change. It's not easy to change.

Resistance to change

Roche: No, it's not. And while it may seem a little trite to say it, if anything is going to derail a project, it's going to be resistance to change, lack of a good change management strategy, and lack of executive support and governance.

The cool thing about this whole instant-on enterprise approach that we are taking is that we do actually have a taxonomy for change, and the taxonomy is both social and technology, and it basically is a way to connect all these different constituents to meet their needs.

The taxonomy itself says, if you're going to transform to an instant-on enterprise, the first level of the taxonomy is looking at the business and government requirements. Within IT, the best practice today seems to be all about alignment, business IT alignment.

We think that it's really not about alignment, but it's about taking that next step towards empowerment and empowering the business with IT. That means becoming a strategic service broker. That's the third level of this taxonomy.

To be a strategic service broker, you need to look at disciplines like converged infrastructure, security, information optimization, application and infrastructure transformation, and look to deliver those through those three service delivery mechanisms we spoke of earlier -- public cloud, private cloud, or traditional delivery, which includes outsourcing. Build those up into a service portfolio and roll it out in terms of services that are delivered.

We do actually have a taxonomy for change, and the taxonomy is both social and technology.

If you group this whole thing together, you're looking at a hybrid delivery capability, where there is no one-size-fits-all for every organization, but the taxonomy acts as a map and a rallying point to get to this idea of everybody on and supporting the prosumer. [To connect further with Liz Roche, visit her at her micro site.]

Gardner: How about some examples of how this can work when it's pulled together properly, when you have the alignment of services, consulting, technology, business buy-in, and so forth? I know that you've had experience within HP doing this yourselves, but what about outside examples? Maybe you can’t name the companies, but maybe the industries or at least the use case scenarios where this is working?

Roche: We actually have several great success stories with clients and I'm going to start with one client, Black & Veatch. We worked with them recently to deploy a unified communications solution from Microsoft that, for them, is going to pay for itself in 18 months, which is pretty amazing when you consider that we did this, basically creating a virtual environment to help Black & Veatch solve their client’s problems.

We worked with the client to design a unified communications solution and configure the architecture. We set up an infrastructure, including servers and load balancers and the like. We tested our Unified Communications software and voice, and we obviously are using voice over IP (VoIP).

We did all sorts of enhanced service desk and helpdesk implementations. And we also provided our own helpdesk -- or we set one up for them that was staff by HP to resolve issues during the cut-over. We did lots of training to help the users adapt to the new systems.

Reduced risk

After we put in place new converged technologies like IM and Mobile Access and desktop sharing, we replaced their phone system, and we gave them integrated fax and voicemail and email. We ended up reducing the risk of their outages through lots of built-in redundancies. We did this all in about 20 weeks.

As I said, they expect this project will pay for itself in 18 months, and essentially we gave Black & Veatch the ability to communicate and collaborate internally and with their customers around the world.

We worked with another client recently as well to provide them digital healthcare and digital hospital capabilities, that included things like video, telemedicine, that included the converged infrastructure to support voice and IM and other things like that.

We also worked with them to provide automated client case-management technology. I'm speculating a little bit, because some of the decisions haven’t totally been made, but imagine nurses walking into patient rooms carrying HP TouchPads, for example, rather than lugging the big heavy carts that nurses today do when they are doing automated medical records. It's really cool stuff like that, but again speaks to the whole nature of the prosumer.

We're working with education, a couple of education organizations, and in one instance working with some speech therapists to use tablet devices and handheld devices to help students with speech problems throughout their therapy. Rather than use flash cards, they're using specially built software that students can touch and listen to and things like that. Again, it's this integration of consumer and professional capabilities.

The idea that you have is provisioning that might look like app stores. Applications might look like apps on your device.

Gardner: Those are some really concrete examples of what’s happening and how the user is sort of empowered. I think we're going to see more of this of course.

Are there any harbingers of where you see the trends pointing us in terms of how technology and methodology consulting come together? One of the big things of course with the economy still being tough in many regions is how to do more with less. Is there a continuing economic incentive or I suppose even an engine of adoption that we should expect in the future, Liz?

Roche: Absolutely. In fact, I might even go so far as to call it an economic imperative. You talk about a harbinger of things to come, and I would say look at this whole reemergence of this prosumer trend. When I say reemergence, I'm talking about back in the '80s when Alvin Toffler first made up the idea that there is a convergence. He wasn’t calling it a professional, but he was calling it a producer and a consumer.

If we take that and look at how it has evolved into this notion that one person with a separate consumer and professional life is over and that we are looking for convergence, that’s the harbinger. The idea that you have, as you said in your introduction, provisioning that might look like app stores. Applications might look like apps on your device.

But as we see technology continue to increase in its velocity, as we see more and more technology adopted into our homes earlier and more deeply embedded into everything we do. That’s where we are going to see the future go.

Tight integration

Just think for a minute about our pets. We're embedding our pets with microchips that have not just their name and their address, but maybe if they have got some medical risks, they are on there.

I think we are going to start seeing things like that, that tight integration, maybe not embedded in our bodies, but certainly medical records, certainly integrated payment devices, the idea that paper money goes away and we have one card that does every thing. Organizations that aren’t at least thinking in that direction are really going to miss the boat.

Gardner: In any event, it certainly sounds like whatever steps you take today will have a greater impact because this is an ongoing effect. I don’t see any end in sight to the tremendous amount of change that we're facing. I'm sure that these are going to be ongoing discussions.

I want to thank our guest today. We have been here with Liz Roche, a Director in the HP Technology Consulting Organization. Thanks so much, Liz.

Roche: Thanks, Dana. It was an absolute pleasure to be here.

Gardner: And I want to thank our audience for joining us for this sponsored podcast discussion. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've listening to BriefingsDirect. Thanks, and come back next time.

To connect further with Liz Roche, visit her at her micro site.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how rapid changes in consumer technology use are finding their way into enterprise IT. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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Why Data and Information Management Remain Elusive After Decades of Deployments and How to Fix It

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from The Open Group Conference in Austin on the growing role and importance of the information architect.

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

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 in conjunction with the latest Open Group Conference in Austin, Texas.

We’ve assembled a distinguished panel to update us on the state of data and information management strategies. We’ll examine how it remains difficult for businesses to get the information they want in the way they can use, and why this has been a persistent problem. We’ll uncover the latest in the framework approach to information and data and look at how an information architect can make a big difference.

Here to help us better understand the role and impact of the information architect and also how to implement a successful data in information strategy is our panel, Robert Weisman, CEO of Build The Vision Inc. Welcome to BriefingsDirect, Robert.

Robert Weisman: Thank you.

Gardner: We’re also here with Eugene Imbamba, Information Management Architect in IBM's Software Group. Welcome, Eugene.

Eugene Imbamba: Thank you very much.

Gardner: And we’re here with Mei Selvage, the Lead in the IBM Community of Information Architects. Welcome to the show, Mei.

Mei Selvage: Thank you for having us.

Gardner: Tell me, Robert, why it is that it's so hard for IT to deliver information access in the way that businesses really want.

Weisman: It's the general insensitivity to information management concerns within the industry itself, which is very much becoming much more technology and tool-driven with the actual information not being taken into consideration.

As a consequence, a lot of the solutions might work, but they don’t last, and they don’t, generally speaking, get the right information to the right person at the right time. Within The Open Group, we recognized this split about four years ago and that’s one reason that in TOGAF 9 we redefined that information technology as “The lifecycle management of information and related technology within an organization.” We didn’t want to see an IM/IT split in organizations. We wanted to make sure that the architecture addressed the needs of the entire community, especially those requiring information and knowledge.

Gardner: Eugene, do you think if we focus more on the lifecycle management of information and the architecture frameworks like TOGAF, that we'll get more to this requirement that business has that single view of reality?

Imbamba: Definitely, focusing on reference architecture methodologies are a good way to get going in the right direction. I don’t think it's the end of all means to getting there. But, in terms of leveraging what's been done, some of the architectures that have been developed, whether it's TOGAF or some of the other artifacts out there, would help organizations, instead of spinning their wheels and reinventing the wheel, start building some of the foundational capabilities needed to have an enterprise information architecture.

Getting to the finish line

As a result, we’re seeing that each year with information management, projects starting up and projects collapsing for various reasons, whether it's cost or just the process or people in place. Leveraging some of these artifacts, methods, and reference architectures is a way to help get started, and of course employing other areas of the information management disciplines to help get to the finish line.

Gardner: Mei, when it comes to learning from those that have done this well, what do we know about what works when it comes to data and information management? What can we point to and say, "Without question, moving in this direction is allowing us to be inclusive, move beyond just the data and databases, and get that view that the business is really looking for?"

Selvage: Eugene and I had a long debate over how we know that we've delivered a successful information architecture. Our conclusion comes out three plus one. The first piece is just like any strategy roadmap. You need to have a vision and strategy. To have a successful information architecture vision you really have to understand your business problem and your business vision. Then, you use applicable, proven referenced architecture and methodology to support that.

Once you have vision, then you come to the execution. How do you leverage your existing IT environments, integrates with them, keep good communication, and use the best practices? Finally, you have to get implemented on time and on schedule within the budget -- and the end-user is satisfied.

Those are three parts. Then, the plus part is data governance, not just one time project delivery. You’ll have to make sure that data governance is getting consistently implemented across the projects.

Gardner: How about in the direction of this organizational definition of what works and what doesn’t work? How important is it rather for an information architect role to emerge? Let's start with you, Robert. Then, I’d like to take this to all of you. What is it about the information architect role that can play an important element here?

Weisman: The information architect will soon be called the knowledge architect to start realizing some of the promise that was seen in the 1980s and in the 1990s. The information architect’s role is essentially is to harmonize all manner of information and make sure it's properly managed and accessible to the people who are authorized to see it.

It's not just the information architect. He has to be a team player, working closely with technology, because more and more information will be not just machine-readable, but machine-processable and interpretable. So he has to work with the people not only in technology, but with those developing applications, and especially those dealing with security because we’re creating more homogenous enterprise information-sharing environments with consolidated information holdings.

The paradigm is going to be changing. It's going to be much more information centric. The object-oriented paradigm, from a technical perspective, meant the encapsulation of the information. It's happened, but at the process level.

When you have a thousand processes in the organization, you’ve got problems. Whereas, now we’d be looking at encapsulation of the information much more at the enterprise level so that information can be reused throughout the organization. It will be put in once and used many times.

Quality of information

The quality of the information will also be addressed through governance, particularly incorporating something called data stewardship, where people would be accountable, not only for the structure of the information but for the actual quality of the informational holdings.

Gardner: Thank you. Eugene, how do you see the role of the information architect as important in solidifying people’s thinking about this at that higher level, and as Robert said, being an advocate for the information across these other disciplines?

Imbamba: It's inevitable that this role will definitely emerge and is going to take a higher-level position within organizations. Back to my earlier comment about information really becoming an issue, we have lots of information. We have variety of information and varied velocity of information requirements.

We don’t have enough folks today who are really involved in this discipline and some of the projections we have are within the next 20 years, we’re going to have a lot more information that needs to be managed. We need folks who are engaged in this space, folks who understand the space and really can think outside the box, but also understand what the business users want, what they are trying to drive to, and be able to provide solutions that really not only look at the business problem at hand but also what is the organization trying to do.

The role is definitely emerging, and within the next couple of years, as Robert said, the term might change from information architects to knowledge architects, based on where information is and what information provides to business.

A lot of new folks come from data modeling backgrounds. They really have to understand business language, business process, and their roles.

Gardner: Mei, how far along are we actually on this definition and even professionalization of the information architect role?

Selvage: I’d like to share a little bit of what IBM is doing internally. We have a major change to our professional programs and certification programs. We’ve removed IT out of architect as title. We just call architect. Under architect we have business architecture, IT architecture, and enterprise architecture. Information architecture falls under IT architecture. Even though we were categorized one of the sub components of IT architecture.

Information architect, in my opinion, is more business-friendly than any other professionals. I'm not trying to put others down, but a lot of new folks come from data modeling backgrounds. They really have to understand business language, business process, and their roles.

When we have this advantage, we need to leverage those and not just keep thinking about how I create database structures and how I make my database perform better. Rather, my tasks today contribute to my business. I want to doing the right thing, rather than doing the wrong things sooner.

IBM reflects an industry shift. The architect is a profession and we all need to change our mindsets to be even broader.

Delivering business value

Weisman: I’d like to add to that. I fully agree, as I said, that The Open Group has created TOGAF 9 as a capability-based planning paradigm for the business planning. IM and IT are just two dimensions of that overall capability, and everything is pushed toward the delivery of business value.

You don’t have to align IM/IT with the business. IM and IT become an integral part of the business. This came out of the defense world in many cases and it has proven very successful.

IM, IT, and all of the architecture domains are going to have to really understand the business for that. It’ll be an interesting time in the next couple of years in the organizations that really want to derive competitive advantage from their information holdings, which is certainly becoming a key differentiator amongst large companies.

Gardner: Robert, perhaps while you’re talking about The Open Group, you could update us a bit on what took place at the Austin Conference, particularly vis-à-vis the workgroups. What was the gist of the development and perhaps any maturation that you can point to?

Weisman: We had some super presentations, in particular the one that Eugene and Mei gave that addressed information architecture and various associated processes and different types of sub-architectures/frameworks as well.

The vision paper is right now in the final review. Following that, we're preparing a consolidated request for change to the TOGAF 9 specification.

The Information Architecture Working Group, which is winding down after two years, has created a series of whitepapers. The first one addressed the concerns of the data management architecture and maps the data management body of knowledge processes to The Open Group Architecture Framework. That whitepaper went through final review in the Information Architecture Working Group in Austin.

We have an Information Architecture Vision paper, which is an overall rethinking of how information within an organization is going to be addressed in a holistic manner, incorporating what we’d like to think as all of the modern trends, all types of information, and figure out some sort of holistic way that we can represent that in an architecture.

The vision paper is right now in the final review. Following that, we're preparing a consolidated request for change to the TOGAF 9 specification. The whitepapers should be ready and available within the next three months for public consultation. This work should address many significant concerns in the domain of information architecture and management. I'm really confident the work that working group has done has been very productive.

Gardner: Now, you mentioned that Mei and Eugene delivered a presentation. I wonder if we can get an overview, a quick summary of the main points. Mei, would you care to go first?

Selvage: We’ve already talked a lot about what we have described in our presentation. Essentially, we need to understand what it means to have a successful solution information architecture. We need to leverage all those best practices, which come in a form of either a proven reference architecture or methodology, and use that to achieve alignment within the business.

Eugene, do you have anything you want to specifically point out in our presentation?

Three keys

Imbamba: No, just to add to what you said. The three keys that we brought were the alignment of business and IT, using and leveraging reference architectures to successfully implement information architectures, and last was the adoption of proven methodology.

In our presentation, we defined these constructs, or topics, based on our understanding and to make sure that the audience had a common understanding of what these components meant. Then, we gave examples and actually gave some use cases of where we’ve seen this actually happen in organizations, and where there has been some success in developing successful projects through the implementation of these methods. That's some of what we touched on.

Weisman: Just as a postscript from The Open Group we’re coming with an Information Architecture and Planning Model. We have a comprehensive definition of data and information and knowledge; We've come up with a good generic lifecycle that can be used by all organizations. And, we addressed all the issues associated with them in a holistic way with respect to the information management functions of governance, planning, operations, decision support and business intelligence, records and archiving, and accessibility and privacy.

This is one of the main contributions that these whitepapers are going to provide is a good planning basis for the holistic management of all manner of information in the form of a complete model.

Gardner: We’ve heard about how the amount of data is going to be growing exponentially, perhaps 44 times in less than 10 years, and we’ve also heard that knowledge, information, and your ability to exploit it could be a huge differentiator in how successful you are in business. I even expect that many businesses will make knowledge and information of data part of their business, part of their major revenue capabilities -- a product in itself.

With respect to the projected increase of information available, I actually see a decrease in information holdings within the enterprise itself.

Let's look into the future. Why will the data and information management professionalization, this role of the information architect be more important based on some of the trends that we expect?

Let's start with you, Robert. What's going to happen in the next few year that's going to make it even more important to have the holistic framework, strategic view of data information?

Weisman: Right now, it's competitive advantage upon which companies may rise and fall. Harvard Business School Press, Davenport in particular, has produced some excellent books on competitive analytics and the like, with good case studies. For example, a factory halfway through construction is stopped because they didn’t have timely access to the their information indicating the factory didn’t even need to be constructed. This speaks of information quality.

In the new service-based rather than industry-based economic paradigm, information will become absolutely key. With respect to the projected increase of information available, I actually see a decrease in information holdings within the enterprise itself.

This will be achieved through a) information management techniques, you will actually get rid of information; b) you will consolidate information; and c) with paradigms such as cloud, you don’t necessarily have to have information within the organization itself.

More with less

So you will be dealing with information holdings, that are accessible by the enterprise, and not necessarily just those that are held by the enterprise. There will also be further issues such as knowledge representation and the like, that will become absolutely key, especially with demographics as it stands now. We have to do more with less.

The training and professionalization of information architecture, or knowledge architecture, I anticipate will become key. However, knowledge architects cannot be educated totally in a silo, they also have to have a good understanding of the other architecture domains. A successful enterprise architect must understand all the the other architecture domains.

Gardner: Eugene, how about you, in terms of future trends that impact the increased importance of this role in this perspective on information?

Imbamba: From an IBM perspective, we’ve seen over the last 20 years organizations focusing on what I call an "application agenda," really trying to implement enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, supply chain management systems, and these systems have been very valuable for various reasons, reducing cost, bringing efficiencies within the business.

But, as you know, over the last 20 years, a lot of companies now have these systems in place, so the competitive advantage has been lost. So what we’re seeing right now is companies focusing on an information agenda, and the reason is that each organization has information about its customers, its products, its accounts like no other business would have.

Where I see a lot of trends is that many outsource basic database administration, kind of a commodity or activity out to a third-party where they keep the information architects in-house. That’s where we can add in the value.

So, what we're seeing today is leveraging that information for competitive advantage, trying to optimize your business, gleaning the information that you have so that you can understand the relationships between your customers, between your partners, your suppliers, and optimize that to deliver the kinds of services and needs, the business wants and the customer’s needs.

It's a focus from application agenda to an information agenda to try and push what’s going on in that space.

Gardner: Mei, last word to you, future trends and why would they increase the need for the information architecture role?

Selvage: I like to see that from two perspectives. One is from the vendor perspective, just taking IBM as an example. The information management brand is the one that has the largest software products, which reflects market needs and the market demands. So there are needs to have information architects who are able to look over all those different software offerings in IBM and other major vendors too.

From the customer perspective, where I see a lot of trends is that many outsource basic database administration, kind of a commodity or activity out to a third-party where they keep the information architects in-house. That’s where we can add in the value. We can talk to the business. We can talk to the other components of IT, and really brings things together. That’s a trend I see more organizations are adopting.

Gardner: Very good. We’ve been discussing the role and impact of an information architect and perhaps how to begin to implement a more successful data and information strategy.

This comes to you as a sponsored podcast in conjunction with The Open Group Conference in Austin, Texas in the week of July 18, 2011. I’d like to thank our guests. We’ve been joined by Robert Weisman, CEO of Build The Vision Incorporated. Thanks so much, Robert.

Weisman: You’re very welcome. Thank you for inviting.

Gardner: And we’ve been here with Eugene Imbamba. He is Information Management Architect in IBM Software Group. Thank you, Eugene.

Imbamba: Thank you for having me.

Gardner: And Mei Selvage, she is Lead of the IBM Community of Information Architects. Thanks to you as well.

Selvage: You’re welcome. Thank you too.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks to our viewers and listeners as well, and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast from The Open Group Conference in Austin on the growing role and importance of the information architect. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.

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