Tuesday, July 07, 2009
Part II - Beware the Wolf in Blue Clothing
Narinder Singh
In Part I of our blog we shared our thoughts on the debate between public and private clouds. Here we want to share what to expect when entrenched vendors muddy the waters in the cloud (and reissue our offer to a public webinar to debate the topic).
The Legacy Vendor Playbook
The effort for a giant to play catch up on cloud computing (or other disruptive technology innovation) normally involves three main components.
Step 1 - Name everything the same
Step 2 - Claim progress through standards
Step 3 - Build a few real, innovative solutions, but use them as a part of many existing strategies
All the while, the center of these organizations still sound like the advocates of the previous paradigms so insightfully described in Clayton Christensen's "Innovator's Dilemma."
Step 1 - Name everything the same
At one point IBM had more than a dozen (maybe 20+) products that were called DB2. SAP has similarly pulled everything into their suite whether integrated and relevant or not. This enables vendors to ensure that statements that their "product (e.g. DB2) can do X" is inevitably true.
Step 2 - Claim progress through standards
As we have noted before, a search for web services standards returns IBM as the top result with a page with over 30 WS* standards. On average a very small number of those standards are being used within enterprises to allow two systems from different vendors to inter-operate. The open cloud manifesto from IBM followed a similar pattern, it allowed them to jump closer to the center of the discussion around cloud computing without having a single proven offering related to it. The most proven demonstrable cloud innovations have come from vendors like Amazon, salesforce.com and Google. They have used proven web standards to promote interoperability without slowing innovation.
Step 3 - Build a few real, innovative solutions, but use them as a part of many existing strategies
IBM has the ability to and will deliver true, innovative, multi-tenant solutions. We have seen it before with other standards and areas of development. Yet rather than being disruptive, this innovation is cornered and primarily used to make less relevant, non-cloud based solutions appealing to enterprises and to demonstrate technology leadership in the market. Similarly, Microsoft will certainly provide interesting capabilities through Azure to allow existing .NET solutions to plug into cloud services. But their motivation is primarily to protect their investments, not their customers.
How should enterprises respond?
Now that we know what tens of millions of marketing dollars will promote, how should enterprises respond?
1. Use technology advancement from legacy vendors where it makes sense - as we mentioned, IBM (and others) will deliver some real innovation, and many of the technologies are applicable to helping you create a more efficient IT environment. In those scenarios, continue to explore offerings old and new to help reduce costs and increase flexibility. At the same time, expect incremental improvements to your current solutions - not giant leaps forward.
2. Don't believe the hype - it's one thing to use technologies where they make sense, its quite another to use them to accelerate your path towards the wrong destination. Continue to invest in exploring and deepening the understanding of the real cloud computing solutions and ecosystems (obviously we think salesforce.com, Google and Amazon are great starting points). Even if you are currently skeptical of (public) cloud computing, it will allow you to draw the right contrasts and clarify what is really different.
3. Use pure plays to increase knowledge, get real benefit and put pressure on legacy vendors - We have had many prospects and customers begin to explore public cloud
apps like Google simply to place pressure on their legacy vendors (Microsoft Exchange or Lotus Notes). In some cases, this resulted in dramatically lower renewal costs of those products; in others it led to a deeper understanding of and eventual selection of Google Apps. Either way, it's a clear benefit to the enterprise. And over time it inevitably increases the rate of adoption of the solutions delivering superior value (i.e. the cloud).
While legacy vendors take steps to participate in the next generation of technology, they will often do so while belittling it. SAP in the past weeks has simultaneously aggressively promoted the cloud and then deemed it mostly inadequate for enterprise solutions. To cut through this alternative approach to holding on to the past, enterprises can ask a few simple quations. Is the cloud more or less capable than it was three years ago in handing our needs; will it be more or less capable three years in the future of handling our needs? Regardless of your evaluation of where it stands today, answering these questions for yourself will indicate where you should invest going forward.
Labels: CloudComputing, IBM, Lotus Notes, SAP
Monday, June 29, 2009
Structure 09: Cloud Computing is Changing the World, But My Old Products Will Still Work
Balakrishna Narasimhan
Last week, I attended GigaOM's Structure09 conference, which was an interesting and well-run conference. It was fun to see industry thought-leaders like Werner Vogels, Marc Benioff, Chuck Hollis, James Urquhart and many others. For me, the conference confirmed many of the things we've written about recently:
1) Broad acceptance that enterprises are interested
There's absolutely no question that cloud computing has moved into the mainstream of enterprise technology. Everyone from Microsoft to Accenture to HP to IBM to SAP admitted as much. With the worsening economic conditions and the maturation of cloud computing services, enterprises are actively investigating cloud computing. The main differences of opinion between the legacy vendors and companies like Salesforce and Amazon lie in how quickly and broadly companies will adopt cloud computing.
2) Big vendors still at conceptual level, and trying to constrain the cloud
Large vendors like HP, IBM, SAP and Microsoft are still grappling with cloud computing at a conceptual level. It's clear that they recognize the importance of the profound shift that's happening in the industry but are not sure what to do about it.
Russ Daniels, HP's CTO of Cloud Services, talked about cloud computing as the brain that sits above the nervous system of the internet, and HP's vision of "everything-as-a-service". While interesting conceptually, there was little beyond abstract concepts in Russ' talk. If you were listening closely, there were also hints of how HP wants to preserve the status quo. While saying that the cloud was transformational, Russ made a point of saying that the cloud is best for solving new problems rather than for business automation, which current systems and processes do very well. I agree that the cloud can help solve new problems or enable new processes but it's also very disruptive to the status quo. Current approaches to business automation are expensive, brittle and leave CIOs managing the entire stack. Cloud platforms and applications change this completely and enable nimbler, faster processes.
Microsoft's Yousef Khalidi admitted that every enterprise he's talked to recently wants to move to the cloud but are held back by concerns about trust, performance and availability. He went on to say that enterprises have a variety of workloads, many of which will stay on-premise for a long time. It's hard to disagree with that premise but the question is whether Microsoft is really going to accelerate the movement of the majority of workloads to the cloud, given what that would mean to their revenues and profits.
SAP's Vishal Sikka continued along the themes he used in a recent CIO.com interview. He acknowledged the importance of cloud computing, but at the same time said that it's best suited to "simple transactions" and edge process within enterprises. Japan's largest employer would beg to differ with Vishal.
IBM's Willy Chiu talked about how IBM is approaching cloud computing from the ground up. They're partnering with universities to improve education on the topic and creating global innovation centers to explore use cases. I was impressed by the comprehensiveness and ambition of the approach. However, I was disappointed by the conclusion - companies can adopt cloud computing by purchasing a "Cloudburst" appliance, then having IBM build them a private cloud, and eventually by moving to IBM's public cloud. This sounds an awful lot like a "cloudwashing" of IBM's current offerings.
3) Too much discussion of clouds at the infrastructure rather than platform layers
The entire cloud conversation at Structure was very focused on infrastructure. As Daryl Plummer of Gartner has noted, Cloud computing is not about infrastructure. It's about a new delivery and consumption model for IT services that are elastic, metered and abstract away the SW stack. The conference was mostly focused on the lowest layer of the stack and didn't really talk about how the cloud enables transformation at the business process level. Greg Papadopoulos of Sun was one of the few people to talk about this, although he didn't dwell on it.
The thing that excites us most about cloud computing is its ability to help companies achieve the impossible. A great example of this is Starbucks' Pledge5 campaign. 21 days before the inauguration, Starbucks decided that they wanted to launch a national campaign (online, in stores and on Facebook) to drive community service across the nation. They needed to build a massively scalable infrastructure and application to do this. Before the cloud, this would've been hard to pull off even in time for the next inauguration. With Salesforce's Force.com platform, we were able to quickly build an application that performed flawlessly in supporting over 1M transactions across 10,000 store locations and millions of Facebook and Twitter fans.
The danger with just talking about infrastructure is that we miss the broader opportunity to engage the business and turn this into a conversation about achieving business outcomes faster and cheaper, rather than conversations about bits and bytes, which causes every business owner's eyes to glaze over. The cloud enables IT to change the conversation and it was unfortunate that this was rarely mentioned during the day.
4) Little mention of customers until Marc Benioff
The highlight of the day was Om Malik's interview with Marc Benioff. Marc brought not only brought his trademark humor to the event but brought a much-needed pragmatism and focus on what really matters. Customers. Marc was literally the first person all day to mention customers. He gave the room, which was largely composed of vendor marketing types, the best advice that we'll get - "Customers have been sold to by vendors for 30 years and they're tired of it. Customers want to talk to other customers and learn from them." Great advice and something we should take to heart.
In fact, we're turning that idea into action in the coming weeks when we'll start a new series of posts with our customers. If you're interested in being featured, leave us a comment below.
5) A few fun highlights of the day
Marc on Larry Ellison
Larry said something really zen on the earnings call - without on-demand, there's no on-premise and without on-premise, there's no on-demand.
Marc on Microsoft
I hear Microsoft is coming out with an Azune cloud.
and finally, Om's fly threads
Labels: IBM, Private Clouds, salesforce.com, SAP
Monday, June 22, 2009
Part I - Beware the Wolf in Blue Clothing
Narinder SinghIts not unexpected, a look back only a few years tells a similar story. When left trailing in disruptive innovation, large legacy vendors muddy the market while trying to play catch up. IBM's push of the private cloud concept is analogous to their and other providers 'leadership' in 'helping' develop web services standards, In reality they created substantial complexity until they could catch up. This led to a bottoms up revolution that brought about alternatives like REST. We are now seeing a dangerous repeat of this pattern, with an even bigger set of stakes - the rate of the cloud computing revolution.
Before examining how forces like how and why its dangerous for the market, we want to lay out our core beliefs on how enterprise CIOs can actually pragmatically view hybrid cloud models (view a great intro video on what cloud computing is).
Private Clouds make as much sense a having a private Internet. Leveraging concepts, standards and technologies from the Internet makes complete sense for enterprises large and small. However that is not equivalent to creating a private Internet; nor could it be a substitute for the real Internet. Similarly, technologies like virtualization, elastic infrastructure, interoperability between internal systems and public clouds all make sense. Yet, these are not the same as being a cloud provider or a substitute for public clouds.
This is not simply a matter of semantics. Companies that pursue primary strategies of attempting to replicate the approach of public clouds for purpose of bypassing them may gain some cost advantages and perhaps even some business benefits (quicker scaling) but it's an incremental change. Moving to public infrastructure/platforms is transformational from a cost and activity/focus perspective - especially at higher levels of the cloud stack. Improving the performance of your fleet of horses is no substitute for exploring the benefits of a car.
We strongly encourage companies to pursue improvements to their own IT capabilities through concepts and technologies from cloud computing - but without looking at it as a long term substitute for what real clouds can deliver. It will always be important to make sure public clouds work seamlessly with existing IT infrastructure and applications. The danger lies in falling prey to focusing on private clouds and letting IT teams and organizations preserve the status quo (for the most part) while telling leadership that they're doing something about cloud.
Private Clouds, Public Clouds - Is there anything in between?
At the same time, not all clouds will be "open to the public". We do expect very large, unique special cases to exist. At the MIT CIO forum we heard how DISA was providing certain cloud services only to government agencies. Hearing them describe the processes, policies, technologies, independence, and challenges - it was clear they were a cloud provider.
Over time, we could see very large groups or collectives pushing the creation of cloud providers that serve more specific segments (pricing models alone could be one such segmentation). However, a successful cloud provider must have a large, diverse base of customers, massive scale, and a unique angle. We expect this scale and expertise to be beyond all but the very largest organizations, only be focused on narrow threads of what is available in public clouds, and require technology expertise that rivals the best commercial technology providers.
Even where this edge case nuance applies, the reality is that the fastest route to benefit, that also aligns with the long term industry direction, will be to take advantage of what true cloud platforms like Amazon, salesforce.com and Google provide today - after years of refinement. Enterprise architects will quickly see that clouds will operate at different levels (infrastructure, platform and applications), should be analyzed accordingly, and have a substantial set of benefits it would be costly and less effective to try to replicate with private clouds.
In Part II we will discuss how large entrenched vendors like IBM and SAP go about creating confusion in the market and how enterprise CIOs should react.
PS - At Appirio we are genuinely excited about the innovation occurring in our industry and believe that vigorous, candid debate (vs. massive promotion) helps accelerate information dissemination and results in technology professionals making better decisions. To that end, I'd like to issue an open invitation to relevant executives from IBM to participate in an unscripted public webinar to directly share their perspective and debate its merits with us. We look forward to hearing from you !
Labels: IBM, Private Clouds
Thursday, January 15, 2009
2009 Prediction - Rise and Fall of the Private Cloud
#6 in our series of 2009 predictions
2008 saw massive hype around the concept of a “private cloud,” roughly defined as a adopting the technology and practices from public cloud providers for a single company behind the firewall. “Private clouds are the future of corporate IT” declared Gartner. “Private Clouds Take Shape,” gushed InformationWeek, citing the funding of companies like Elastra and Parascale. “Get off my cloud” said eWeek, questioning the security of public cloud environments compared to private clouds.
2009 Prediction
Here’s the rub: Private clouds are just an expensive data center with a fancy name. We predict that 2009 will represent the rise and fall of this over-hyped concept. Of course, virtualization, service-oriented architectures, and open standards are all great things for every company operating a data center to consider. But all this talk about “private clouds” is a distraction from the real news: the vast majority of companies shouldn’t need to worry about operating any sort of data center anymore, cloud-like or not.
- Private clouds are sub-scale: There’s a reason why most innovative cloud computing providers have their roots in powering consumer web technology—that’s where the numbers are. Very few corporate data centers will see anything close to the type of volume seen by these vendors. And volume drives cost—the world has yet to see a truly “at scale” data center.
- You can’t teach an old dog new tricks: What do you get when you move legacy applications as-is to a new and improved data center? Marginal improvements on your legacy applications. There’s only so much you can achieve without truly re-platforming your applications to a cloud infrastructure… you can’t teach an old dog new tricks. Now that’s not entirely fair…. You can certainly teach an old dog to be better behaved. But it’s still an old dog.
- On-premise does not equal secure: the biggest driver towards private clouds has been fear, uncertainty, and doubt about security. For many, it just feels more secure to have your data in a data center that you control. But is it? Unless your company spends more money and energy thinking about security than Amazon, Google, and Salesforce, the answer is probably “no.” (Read Craig Balding walk through “7 Technical Security Benefits of Cloud Computing”)
- There’s no secret sauce: There’s no simple set of tricks that an operator of a data center can borrow from Amazon or Google. These companies make their living operating the world’s largest data centers. They are constantly optimizing how they operate based on real-time performance feedback from millions of transactions. (check out this presentation from Jeff Barr and Peter Coffee at the Architecture and Integration Summit). Can other operators of data centers learn something from this experience? Of course. But the rate of innovation will never be the same—private data centers will always be many, many steps behind the cloud.
There’s also something very suspicious in all this discussion of private clouds…. private clouds are advocated mainly by companies who make their money from selling or operating data centers, and risk losing their shirts as real cloud computing drives more and more computing onto shared infrastructure. I understand why these companies are reluctant to embrace true cloud computing: Imagine being the junior partner in IBM Global Services pitching a client to develop an application on Amazon, Google, or Salesforce. Not only are you taking money out of the pocket of your colleagues in hardware and software….. you are also taking money out of the pocket of your colleagues in professional services, since integration and app development are so much easier using on-demand platforms.
- Cloud Providers: This is an easy one… companies that plan on being in the business of providing cloud computing capabilities to others need to think about how to effective provide their own cloud. But we’d argue that very few companies actually need to be in this business (e.g., we believe most on-demand BI vendors should be running on public cloud infrastructure).
- Highly regulated industries: Government regulation will always lag behind commercial application of technology. There will inevitably be instances where nervous politicians or policy makers write up requirements that can only be met through a private cloud.
- Companies in the process of moving to a public cloud: Of course, no company of any significant size can move its IT infrastructure to the cloud all at once. In fact, Appirio specializes in helping companies figure out what the right first step is away from their on-premise infrastructure. For the IT infrastructure that hasn’t yet moved, it definitely makes sense to think about how to use “private cloud” technology. But that means the private cloud is a temporary stop-gap, not the “future of enterprise IT.”
Of course any customer with a data center should be thinking about how to use the technologies behind “private clouds” to improve their efficiency. But this should be a minor element of your long-term IT strategy. The most important thing any IT department can do in 2009 is chart out a thoughtful plan to migrate significant portions of your IT infrastructure to the public cloud. Don’t let “private clouds” be a distraction from that goal.
Labels: 2009-Predictions, Amazon S3, BI, Cloud Computing, Force.com, Google, IBM, On Demand, PaaS, remove, SaaS
