Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada the week of June 16, 2008.
Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to a special BriefingsDirect podcast recorded live at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference in Las Vegas. We are here in the week of June 16, 2008. This sponsored HP Software Universe Live podcast is distributed by BriefingsDirect Network.
We now welcome to the show, Dan Rueckert. He is the worldwide practice director for service management and security practices in HP's Consulting Integration Group. Welcome to the show, Dan.
Dan Rueckert: Thanks, Dana, it's good to be here.
Gardner: We're going to talk about the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) version 3 and the methodologies used for managing the IT function. One thing that struck me as I have been reading about ITIL and how people are using it, is this notion of "what is IT?"
ITIL almost fundamentally rechecks that, and it begs the question of whether IT is a product or a service within an enterprise and to its constituents and users. How do you react that? What's your answer to that question?
Rueckert: It's really emerged now as a service, as far as how you provide services from an IT function to a business as a service provider. You start to get into internal, external, and shared services as a whole. The other thing is that a year later with v3, you are starting to break out of the data center. That's one of these key drivers of the service lifecycle, which is a key concept that has come out of ITIL v3. Also, the involvement of strategy is involved with the true operation side. So, you really start to look at how to align business with IT on an ongoing basis.
Gardner: For those of our listeners who might not be familiar with ITIL, why don’t you give us a quick overview of what it is and where the state of ITIL's evolution is?
Rueckert: ITIL is a standard best practices out of the Office of Government and Commerce (OGC) in the U.K., and has been around almost 20 years now. As of May 27, 2007, v3 was released, but it's one of these standards that has really been accepted from a customer user base globally.
It made lot of sense in the fact that it truly reflects best practices, from a customer perspective, in what has been going on over the years. Version 3 really is working with how the evolution of IT has gone. If you go to v2, it was very service centric around the data center, but v3 has now taken on the business alignment piece -- how does IT provide value to the business on an ongoing basis?
For me, it has been exciting in the fact that it's breaking down these barriers or silos across IT and within the businesses. We've have seen that a lot. Also, acceptance of v3 is far greater, because it has reached out from the traditional IT-centric view to the business.
Gardner: And so, a lot of IT organizations are siloed functionally and technologically, in many cases. If the end goal becomes customer satisfaction and being able to represent the business goals of the organization better through IT -- be it as a product or a service -- how does an organization start on this path of bringing these silos inside their organizations into more of a concerted effort toward a common services goal?
Rueckert: Actually, one of the new areas, as far as the v3 goes, is around service strategy. It's truly driven how to bring together and look at the business values or metrics that are needed in aligning from a service perspective.
It brings together the key metrics and values that need to come out of that, taking a customer through this service lifecycle from strategy to design, transition, operations, and a continuous service improvement cycle. In a lot of cases over the years, that's made sense. A lot of people worked with Deming and some other methodologies and have been getting into these lifecycles that now have been adopted, and it just makes good business sense. It isn't something that is to me IT centric, but it just makes good business sense.
And the neat thing about ITIL v3 is that it isn't just about IT. Business people could take up service strategy and use that in other ways in their business as a whole. It's truly one of the more exciting books coming out.
Gardner: I've also heard it said, when it comes to IT services, that these services have a lifecycle, and that organization should think of them in the context of a lifecycle. Software Universe relates to the notion of IT operation's lifecycle and data center modernization and transformation. It seems like an awful lot going on, a lot of moving parts. Do you need to do the data center first and then do ITIL, or you do ITIL and then the data center and other transformation? What's the right order, do you have any sense for this?
Rueckert: What started to happen within HP is using the processes or the ITIL as a foundation, meaning, as you start to grow, ITIL and service management become enablers for data center transformation, as a whole. You can take those components, and say, "I am working on core things around provisioning, or incident problem," start to build that around those areas, and grow from there.
Within our key initiatives, service management becomes an enabler for data center transformation, consolidation, and some virtualization. Also, the processes become a baseline to say, “How am I doing from the point of view of that business outcome?” If I know what I am doing today, and how I automate or virtualize things, I know I can measure that delta on an ongoing basis to provide value back to the business.
Gardner: Okay, we also spoke today with Ben Horowitz in the Business Technology Optimization group. How does the design develop requirement phase of IT relate to ITIL? Is ITIL more focused on operations, or how does application development, as a set of functions, fit in?
Rueckert: That really gets into the design and transition pieces now within design -- how requirements are accumulated by working with your customers or the business itself -- compiling those, understanding not just about pure business, but understanding other aspects of where I am going from needed scalability issues or strategy, and then getting into transition as I start to build and implement. What is the back end as far as acceptance and tests? So, it has an immediate applicability from an application perspective.
Gardner: The whole must be greater than sum of the parts.
Rueckert: Correct.
Gardner: I have also been seeing more information on how ITIL can help manage complexity, and, of course, there are many different types of complexity organizations are facing -- virtualization, services-oriented architecture (SOA), and so forth.
A recent study by Summit Strategies found that, for the folks they talked to, having done ITIL early and adopted some of the methodologies and approaches allowed them to then progress into SOA with more success. Tell us a little bit of what you think about SOA and ITIL, and whether ITIL approaches also might ameliorate other complexities?
Rueckert: It's a very good example, Dana. as you start to break down these into components and service lifecycles. When you talk about SOA and some of the aspects there, you are really saying, "How am I defining some type of service?" You start to say, "What are those foundation services that I need," and you start to build off of that.
It's just like concepts around configuration management services, or the configuration management database (CMDB) as far as that. You want to start wide and shallow to get a good feel, and then build into these areas that are pain points, as you move forward. You don't want to try to automate or design the world, really just align it with your business as a whole.
Gardner: How do companies and IT departments more specifically rationalize this from a business case? Are there financial paybacks? Are there qualitative paybacks? When an organization is evaluating ITIL, and they need to make a business case for it, what do you usually tell them?
Rueckert: We are really seeing maturity. The nice thing about going from v2 to v3 is that we have lot of historical basis now as far as the core IT skills and the building of ROI off of that. We are really expanding that into greater cost-benefit analysis upfront.
We don't just wait until the end to define the metrics of our values for success. It's really being done upfront, and saying, "Here is our vision and here are the metrics we are going measure as we move towards going into production on end state," and seeing those things as far as a continuous service improvement cycle.
Gardner: Are there any aspects to ITIL that reflect compliance or regulatory impacts? Are there certain verticals or companies that have to do this, in a sense, don't have a choice?
Rueckert: Right now we are seeing the alignment. When v3 came out, this was another exciting part where they really worked with some of the other standards. So, when we talk about the IC or ISO 20001 and 27001 around security, the COBIT, as far as a compliance perspective, they were working together.
They knew that these standards existed and started to incorporate those types of terminology. They hit key points by saying, "You need to be thinking about this as you're designing some of your services as a whole and understanding that moving forward." Then, as you get into more prescriptive methods, like with what we are doing around some of our processes, we are building these controls into defined best-practice processes within some of our reference models. So, it combines both.
Gardner: We've now seen lots of studies and evidence that 70 or 80 percent, certainly the lion's share, of spending on IT goes to maintaining existing systems, and investment and innovative new technologies don't always get the funding that many folks would want. Is there something about ITIL that helps shift that? Is part of it designed to make more efficient the processes that then would reduce the cost around maintenance and upkeep that might, in fact, provide more money for advancing technology?
Rueckert: That's a piece of the strategy, and you start to understand your demand and how you're allocating budgets and priorities against this. As I get more optimized or efficient on current day-to-day processes, and also as I combine technology to automate those, I am seeing the payback that then can fuel that innovation on an ongoing basis.
Gardner: We have seen some product announcements here at Software Universe, change management and problem resolution enhancements to products. Is there is something about those capabilities in the BTO group that dovetails well with ITIL from your perspective?
Rueckert: Definitely. It gets back to further automaton. In some cases -- those areas that might include labor-intensive activities or checks or compliance activities, further automation and audit trails -- efficiencies in the day-to-day operations allow other things to be done from an innovative perspective.
Gardner: Great. We have been discussing ITIL and how IT departments can better organize and manage themselves and provide IT as a set of services to their constituencies and their users inside of large enterprises. We have been speaking with Dan Rueckert, he is a worldwide practice director for service management and security practices, inside of HP's Consulting and Integration (C&I) group. Thanks for your time Dan.
Rueckert: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: This comes to you as a sponsored HP Software Universe live podcast recorded at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. Look for other podcast from this HP event at hp.com website, under "Software Universe Live Podcasts," as well as, through the BriefingsDirect Network. I would like to thank our producers on today’s show, Fred Bals and Kate Whalen, and also our sponsor Hewlett-Packard.
I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening, and come back next time for more in-depth podcasts on enterprise software infrastructure and strategies. Bye for now.
Listen to the podcast. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast recorded live at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference in Las Vegas. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2008. All rights reserved.
Tuesday, July 08, 2008
HP's BTO Chief Ben Horowitz on How Application Lifecycle Optimization Enhances Next Generation Data Centers
Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada the week of June 16, 2008.
Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to a special BriefingsDirect podcast recorded live at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference in Las Vegas. We are here in the week of June 16, 2008. This sponsored HP Software Universe live podcast is distributed by BriefingsDirect Network.
Today, we welcome Ben Horowitz. He is the vice president and general manager of HP's Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software unit. Welcome to the show.
Ben Horowitz: Thanks very much, Dana, it's exciting to be here.
Gardner: I really enjoyed your presentation on the main stage this morning. As we are in Vegas, I thought you had a good stand-up comedian style. You had the audience in the palm of your hand.
Horowitz: Well, I appreciate that, but I'll try to leave the jokes on stage.
Gardner: Well, we try to make these podcasts entertaining too. One of the things that's a recurring theme here is, of course, data center transformation, helping enterprises move their data centers to a higher level of efficiency and also cut costs. Part of that equation requires that your applications are built well, too.
So, I want to talk a little bit about this whole notion of better practices and standard methodologies around good application development, testing, and deploying, more towards the lifecycle approach. One of the things that I have heard described from the BTO organization is this notion of application lifecycle optimization. I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit for us.
Horowitz: Sure, when you look at the history of applications, and Web applications in particular, originally it was great. There was this new way to develop the applications, it was much easier than the old way, and people developed a lot of applications quickly. Then, they put them out there, and the applications didn't work too well.
So, the first thing that companies went to tackle was testing, functional testing, and performance testing. Of course, HP owns the most famous product line in that space, the franchise that was Mercury, with our great quality center and performance center products, and those have been terrific.
We have heard from customers, as they have got more and more sophisticated, that what they'd really like to do is be able to map very, very precisely everything that they are doing with that application, from the point that they set the business priority.
So, there is something in the business that says, "We have to solve this problem. We have to provide the service, and therefore, we are going to create some functionality and build an application, test it, understand its performance characteristics, make sure it's secure, and then put it out in the environment. The question that we asked ourselves was, "How do you do that, and how do you make sure that you are aligned?"
Gardner: That raises this issue about boundaries. There have been boundaries between elements within application development, which application management techniques and products help fix, but there is a larger boundary between what happens on the application side and what happens on the operational side.
Now that we are in the era of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and virtualization, these boundaries no longer can stand. What is it that you are doing with your products and your announcements here at Software Universe that can help organizations overcome these inefficient boundaries?
Horowitz: First, we have done a great, new integration of our Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) software, which understands all of the business requirements and their priorities and the overall project status and project resourcing.
Then, we have taken that information and we have mapped it directly into quality center, into our requirements management module. So now, for every technical requirement that we go to test, we know exactly what the business driver for that was, and that becomes very, very powerful.
Then, those requirements feed in parallel into the quality organization, as well as into the development organization. By doing that, we support a much more agile project process where the quality guys are coming up to speed, on point with the developers.
And then, on the back end, we've then integrated our new Application Security Center, an offering that we acquired with SPI Dynamics, into Quality Center. So, in a single place you can test -- you can do functional testing, quality testing, as well security testing.
So, at the end of the cycle, you have a completely tested product where you have a total understanding of where you are, versus the business requirements, and in fact, we enable you to generate a contract with the business that declares an understanding of the level of quality that you have achieved at the point of release.
Gardner: So, ameliorating the boundaries means bringing more people in earlier in the process, but doing it in a way that doesn't create chaos, that is organized through a workflow. Everyone's ultimately on the same page, but early enough in the process, where you can have an impact on the overall application.
Horowitz: Right, exactly. What we were doing is saying, "All these things that used to be conversations that may or may not have happened, and were never recorded, now become a part of a very simple work flow that basically ensures that you have alignment from end to end. So whatever you wanted to build, that's what you actually end up building.
And, having everyone in the organization in the same page is it just tremendous -- not only a time saver, but also building the right thing in software development is probably the biggest thing that distinguishes good organizations from bad. The ones that solve the right problems are generally the ones who are successful.
Gardner: Another thing we are seeing in the market is the need for a lifecycle for applications that almost leave them in perpetual development mode. Increasingly with agile and with services, an application doesn't just go out into production and stay there for years at a time. How do the feedback loops work between requirements, deployment, and then refinement?
Horowitz: One of the great things that we have in the new integration that we have between PPM and Quality Center is that, when we go to manage the many, many incoming requests for changes (RFCs), we do that in the context of the business priorities.
So, by knowing and having right there all of the overall business priorities in conjunction with all of the change requests, and all the technical risk assessments, what is it going to cost us? How important is it to the business? And how many request we have on it all go into the picture. Then, we are able to quickly figure out, "Okay, here are the changes that we ought to make to the application that are low enough risk and high enough pay off, that we think they make sense."
Then, once we have developed that, and we are ready to release, we have tight integration with our operational software. So, all of the things that we know at the time that we tested that change go into operation. So if you know, "Gee, once we get a million users, this change is going to cause the application to break," that's known on the operational side, so that they can be proactive in managing the consequences.
Gardner: One of the announcements that you've made here at the event that caught my attention was the move towards a federated configuration management capability, that uses connectors and modules, and basically brings more information about the systems into a place where it can be viewed, I guess, moving towards greater visibility. Tell us a little bit about how greater visibility into what's going on within these systems ultimately helps with the total lifecycle benefits?
Horowitz: This is a very interesting and important question. There are lots of parts to the answer, but the first thing that people need to know about it is in HP Business Availability Center (BAC) we can tell you "Gee, this application is getting slow. Something about it is slow." And, that's good to know. But, the next thing that you might want to know is, "Did Opsware change anything in that application, that might have caused it to get slow?"
In order to answer that question, Opsware has to have the same view, i.e. have the same definition of what BAC thought was slow as BAC does. With the configuration management database (CMDB), that's the kind of thing that we are able to do. Similarly, if you want to open an incident on that application, the service manger has to have that same definition.
That's the kind of high-level problem that we are trying to solve. Now, the way that we have done it with a federated configuration management system is unique in the industry.
We have seen approaches from certain competitors for certain products, whose names will go unmentioned, who have come up with the idea that, "If we just had all of the data in the same place, then the customer could do whatever they wanted with it." That seems like a good idea, but it turns out to be quite a bad idea.
The reason is that all of the data and all of the products have been optimized over many, many years for performance -- tons and tons, hours and hours, and probably hundreds of man-years -- into making that data very easy to retrieve for the people who need to use it in that context.
What the competitors do is say, "Well, that performance optimization will be an exercise for our customers. They will have to figure how to make the data perform." That has proven to be pretty much an everlasting job. Gartner reports that only 4 percent of these CMDB implementations have succeeded, and that those 4 percent probably were not trying to do anything too ambitious.
With our federated approach, we say, “Let the data live where the data lives. Let the products do what they know how to do. Get the benefit of all that performance engineering that's been done over all the years." What we provide is essentially a map or a directory to all of the bits of information in a reconciled fashion about, for example, a server.
In our product line we have server information stored in Opsware, stored in BAC, stored in HP OpenView, stored in Service Manager, and the CMDB is able to get those data sets from all those locations and reconcile them, so that you have a single notion of that server.
Gardner: This strikes me as something that can open up even wider federation. Think about all the information for governance, for example, in a registry/repository. Think about the information that's available through service level agreement policy engines. We can maybe start to break down the boundaries at yet another abstraction, another level. Does that make sense?
Horowitz: Yes, definitely. What we really have is the "master join," for those who know relational databases, amongst all of the data and all of the products. Here is a way that's very high performance, where we have done a tremendous amount of work on making it really easy to integrate. That can be a central way to get all of the data about the various things -- everything from a service level agreement (SLA), to a server, to a network device, to an application -- that you have running in your environment. That's something that nobody has and everybody would like. So, it's great to able to ship that.
Gardner: Another announcement today was an alignment with VMware on some products. Tell us a little bit about first the market opportunity for the virtualization space and how management is an important element for people to actually attain the goals that they now fully understand with virtualization, and then how that relates back into our discussion about breaking down boundaries and finding more of the lifecycle benefit across development and design time into runtime in operations.
Horowitz: Virtualization is probably the most important mega trend in the data center right now. All the customers that we talk to are moving pretty aggressively towards a virtualized environment. That environment provides a ton of benefits, which is why everybody is going there, but it also creates a whole set of new challenges around management. Now, you've got another layer of abstraction. You've got another really complex piece of software to manage in the hypervisor, in that the software needs everything from patches to configuration changes and to upgrades.
You have to understand how all of that works together. By working with VMware, which really is the product leader in the space, we are able to bring all of the value of HP software to the virtualized environment.
So, it's great for the VMware customers, in that they get a real first-class management system that seamlessly moves across virtual and physical environments, and servers and network and storage. It's great for us, because it means that our customers, as they add VMware into their environment, have a solution that already works.
We think that everybody is going to be really excited about it. It's an R&D relationship, it's not a marketing relationship, so we think that we are going to get really good product results out of it, and it will be terrific for our customers.
Gardner: Well great. We really appreciate your time. We've had a conversation with Ben Horowitz, the vice president and general manager of HP's BTO software unit. You've had a busy schedule. I appreciate you taking some time.
This comes to you as a sponsored HP Software Universe live podcast recorded at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas Nevada. Look for other podcast from this HP event at www.hp.com, under "Software Universe Live Podcasts," as well as, through the BriefingsDirect Network. I would like to thank our producers on today’s show, Fred Bals and Kate Whalen, and also our sponsor Hewlett-Packard.
I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening. and come back next time for more in-depth podcasts on enterprise software infrastructure and strategies. Bye for now.
Listen to the podcast. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference, in Las Vegas. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2008. All rights reserved.
Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to a special BriefingsDirect podcast recorded live at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference in Las Vegas. We are here in the week of June 16, 2008. This sponsored HP Software Universe live podcast is distributed by BriefingsDirect Network.
Today, we welcome Ben Horowitz. He is the vice president and general manager of HP's Business Technology Optimization (BTO) software unit. Welcome to the show.
Ben Horowitz: Thanks very much, Dana, it's exciting to be here.
Gardner: I really enjoyed your presentation on the main stage this morning. As we are in Vegas, I thought you had a good stand-up comedian style. You had the audience in the palm of your hand.
Horowitz: Well, I appreciate that, but I'll try to leave the jokes on stage.
Gardner: Well, we try to make these podcasts entertaining too. One of the things that's a recurring theme here is, of course, data center transformation, helping enterprises move their data centers to a higher level of efficiency and also cut costs. Part of that equation requires that your applications are built well, too.
So, I want to talk a little bit about this whole notion of better practices and standard methodologies around good application development, testing, and deploying, more towards the lifecycle approach. One of the things that I have heard described from the BTO organization is this notion of application lifecycle optimization. I wonder if you could unpack that a little bit for us.
Horowitz: Sure, when you look at the history of applications, and Web applications in particular, originally it was great. There was this new way to develop the applications, it was much easier than the old way, and people developed a lot of applications quickly. Then, they put them out there, and the applications didn't work too well.
So, the first thing that companies went to tackle was testing, functional testing, and performance testing. Of course, HP owns the most famous product line in that space, the franchise that was Mercury, with our great quality center and performance center products, and those have been terrific.
We have heard from customers, as they have got more and more sophisticated, that what they'd really like to do is be able to map very, very precisely everything that they are doing with that application, from the point that they set the business priority.
So, there is something in the business that says, "We have to solve this problem. We have to provide the service, and therefore, we are going to create some functionality and build an application, test it, understand its performance characteristics, make sure it's secure, and then put it out in the environment. The question that we asked ourselves was, "How do you do that, and how do you make sure that you are aligned?"
Gardner: That raises this issue about boundaries. There have been boundaries between elements within application development, which application management techniques and products help fix, but there is a larger boundary between what happens on the application side and what happens on the operational side.
Now that we are in the era of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and virtualization, these boundaries no longer can stand. What is it that you are doing with your products and your announcements here at Software Universe that can help organizations overcome these inefficient boundaries?
Horowitz: First, we have done a great, new integration of our Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) software, which understands all of the business requirements and their priorities and the overall project status and project resourcing.
Then, we have taken that information and we have mapped it directly into quality center, into our requirements management module. So now, for every technical requirement that we go to test, we know exactly what the business driver for that was, and that becomes very, very powerful.
Then, those requirements feed in parallel into the quality organization, as well as into the development organization. By doing that, we support a much more agile project process where the quality guys are coming up to speed, on point with the developers.
And then, on the back end, we've then integrated our new Application Security Center, an offering that we acquired with SPI Dynamics, into Quality Center. So, in a single place you can test -- you can do functional testing, quality testing, as well security testing.
So, at the end of the cycle, you have a completely tested product where you have a total understanding of where you are, versus the business requirements, and in fact, we enable you to generate a contract with the business that declares an understanding of the level of quality that you have achieved at the point of release.
Gardner: So, ameliorating the boundaries means bringing more people in earlier in the process, but doing it in a way that doesn't create chaos, that is organized through a workflow. Everyone's ultimately on the same page, but early enough in the process, where you can have an impact on the overall application.
Horowitz: Right, exactly. What we were doing is saying, "All these things that used to be conversations that may or may not have happened, and were never recorded, now become a part of a very simple work flow that basically ensures that you have alignment from end to end. So whatever you wanted to build, that's what you actually end up building.
And, having everyone in the organization in the same page is it just tremendous -- not only a time saver, but also building the right thing in software development is probably the biggest thing that distinguishes good organizations from bad. The ones that solve the right problems are generally the ones who are successful.
Gardner: Another thing we are seeing in the market is the need for a lifecycle for applications that almost leave them in perpetual development mode. Increasingly with agile and with services, an application doesn't just go out into production and stay there for years at a time. How do the feedback loops work between requirements, deployment, and then refinement?
Horowitz: One of the great things that we have in the new integration that we have between PPM and Quality Center is that, when we go to manage the many, many incoming requests for changes (RFCs), we do that in the context of the business priorities.
So, by knowing and having right there all of the overall business priorities in conjunction with all of the change requests, and all the technical risk assessments, what is it going to cost us? How important is it to the business? And how many request we have on it all go into the picture. Then, we are able to quickly figure out, "Okay, here are the changes that we ought to make to the application that are low enough risk and high enough pay off, that we think they make sense."
Then, once we have developed that, and we are ready to release, we have tight integration with our operational software. So, all of the things that we know at the time that we tested that change go into operation. So if you know, "Gee, once we get a million users, this change is going to cause the application to break," that's known on the operational side, so that they can be proactive in managing the consequences.
Gardner: One of the announcements that you've made here at the event that caught my attention was the move towards a federated configuration management capability, that uses connectors and modules, and basically brings more information about the systems into a place where it can be viewed, I guess, moving towards greater visibility. Tell us a little bit about how greater visibility into what's going on within these systems ultimately helps with the total lifecycle benefits?
Horowitz: This is a very interesting and important question. There are lots of parts to the answer, but the first thing that people need to know about it is in HP Business Availability Center (BAC) we can tell you "Gee, this application is getting slow. Something about it is slow." And, that's good to know. But, the next thing that you might want to know is, "Did Opsware change anything in that application, that might have caused it to get slow?"
In order to answer that question, Opsware has to have the same view, i.e. have the same definition of what BAC thought was slow as BAC does. With the configuration management database (CMDB), that's the kind of thing that we are able to do. Similarly, if you want to open an incident on that application, the service manger has to have that same definition.
That's the kind of high-level problem that we are trying to solve. Now, the way that we have done it with a federated configuration management system is unique in the industry.
We have seen approaches from certain competitors for certain products, whose names will go unmentioned, who have come up with the idea that, "If we just had all of the data in the same place, then the customer could do whatever they wanted with it." That seems like a good idea, but it turns out to be quite a bad idea.
The reason is that all of the data and all of the products have been optimized over many, many years for performance -- tons and tons, hours and hours, and probably hundreds of man-years -- into making that data very easy to retrieve for the people who need to use it in that context.
What the competitors do is say, "Well, that performance optimization will be an exercise for our customers. They will have to figure how to make the data perform." That has proven to be pretty much an everlasting job. Gartner reports that only 4 percent of these CMDB implementations have succeeded, and that those 4 percent probably were not trying to do anything too ambitious.
With our federated approach, we say, “Let the data live where the data lives. Let the products do what they know how to do. Get the benefit of all that performance engineering that's been done over all the years." What we provide is essentially a map or a directory to all of the bits of information in a reconciled fashion about, for example, a server.
In our product line we have server information stored in Opsware, stored in BAC, stored in HP OpenView, stored in Service Manager, and the CMDB is able to get those data sets from all those locations and reconcile them, so that you have a single notion of that server.
Gardner: This strikes me as something that can open up even wider federation. Think about all the information for governance, for example, in a registry/repository. Think about the information that's available through service level agreement policy engines. We can maybe start to break down the boundaries at yet another abstraction, another level. Does that make sense?
Horowitz: Yes, definitely. What we really have is the "master join," for those who know relational databases, amongst all of the data and all of the products. Here is a way that's very high performance, where we have done a tremendous amount of work on making it really easy to integrate. That can be a central way to get all of the data about the various things -- everything from a service level agreement (SLA), to a server, to a network device, to an application -- that you have running in your environment. That's something that nobody has and everybody would like. So, it's great to able to ship that.
Gardner: Another announcement today was an alignment with VMware on some products. Tell us a little bit about first the market opportunity for the virtualization space and how management is an important element for people to actually attain the goals that they now fully understand with virtualization, and then how that relates back into our discussion about breaking down boundaries and finding more of the lifecycle benefit across development and design time into runtime in operations.
Horowitz: Virtualization is probably the most important mega trend in the data center right now. All the customers that we talk to are moving pretty aggressively towards a virtualized environment. That environment provides a ton of benefits, which is why everybody is going there, but it also creates a whole set of new challenges around management. Now, you've got another layer of abstraction. You've got another really complex piece of software to manage in the hypervisor, in that the software needs everything from patches to configuration changes and to upgrades.
You have to understand how all of that works together. By working with VMware, which really is the product leader in the space, we are able to bring all of the value of HP software to the virtualized environment.
So, it's great for the VMware customers, in that they get a real first-class management system that seamlessly moves across virtual and physical environments, and servers and network and storage. It's great for us, because it means that our customers, as they add VMware into their environment, have a solution that already works.
We think that everybody is going to be really excited about it. It's an R&D relationship, it's not a marketing relationship, so we think that we are going to get really good product results out of it, and it will be terrific for our customers.
Gardner: Well great. We really appreciate your time. We've had a conversation with Ben Horowitz, the vice president and general manager of HP's BTO software unit. You've had a busy schedule. I appreciate you taking some time.
This comes to you as a sponsored HP Software Universe live podcast recorded at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas Nevada. Look for other podcast from this HP event at www.hp.com, under "Software Universe Live Podcasts," as well as, through the BriefingsDirect Network. I would like to thank our producers on today’s show, Fred Bals and Kate Whalen, and also our sponsor Hewlett-Packard.
I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening. and come back next time for more in-depth podcasts on enterprise software infrastructure and strategies. Bye for now.
Listen to the podcast. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference, in Las Vegas. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2008. All rights reserved.
HP SOA Products Director Tim Hall on New Business Drivers and Efficiency Benefits From SOA
Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference in Las Vegas, Nevada the week of June 16, 2008.
Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to a special BriefingsDirect podcast recorded live at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference in Las Vegas. We are here in the week of June 16, 2008. This sponsored HP Software Universe live podcast is distributed by BriefingsDirect Network.
We now welcome to the show Tim Hall. He is the director of HP's SOA Center products. Welcome to the show.
Tim Hall: Thanks, Dana.
Gardner: We are going to talk about, fittingly enough, service-oriented architecture (SOA), the products, the market, some of the underlying trends, both from the business viewpoint and technologies that are driving SOA adoption.
I suppose SOA is at somewhat of a crossroad. We have seen a lot of pilot and project-based adoption. People were expecting to see more holistic, deep and wide SOA methodologies brought into play, but there has been an awful lot on the plate of CIOs and architects these days.
They are now thinking about data-center transformation and next-generation adoption for virtualization, higher utilization, and lower costs. They are also dealing with some of the issues around energy and power. They are being asked to modernize legacy applications. There's an awful lot going on, but SOA can be an enabler and an aid to that. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about, how you see SOA moving into the mainstream?
Hall: From our perspective, we think SOA is an application-development philosophy, and that philosophy is really the backplane, or an enabler, of lots of different and interesting trends.
You mentioned that modernization is a key one. Lots of old mainframe programmers like myself are retiring, and we've got lots of customers now looking to migrate to more modern architectures, Java platforms, Microsoft technologies, and maybe replacing with updated packaged apps from Oracle or SAP -- those are the two major package players these days. You know, both of those vendors, are building custom software, and SOA is the way in which they are doing this.
It also is an enabler for things like Web2.0 or mashups that are created from the information and the capabilities that are exposed through those services. SOA is, as I said, a philosophy about how we are building applications. We want to be service-oriented in those services that are consumed across a wide variety of composite applications that can be built. So, when you think about things like virtualization at the hardware level, SOA allows you to do that at the software level.
Other trends that are intersecting here include software-as-a-service (SaaS). They have service in the name. The question is how much of it are you consuming. And, are they also exposing services that you can actually integrate with things you have in house. All of these things are connected, but I think SOA is really this backplane to enable all of these pieces. Whether we are talking about it as a first-class citizen, or just the way in which the work is being done now, is the point of view about it coming into the mainstream.
Gardner: A lot of the discussion here at Software Universe has centered around the need to bring together what happens in design time, with what happens on the operation side, in run time, and in production. And, it seems to be one of the key assets of SOA methodology in adoption is a creation of registry/repository, a really powerful information source for policies, SLAs, and use patterns.
When you start looking what they are doing with federated configuration management database (CMDB) on the ops side, when you look at policy engines, you start to see how some of these federated data sources can be brought together to create more of that lifecycle approach. Tell us a little about the registry/repository, and how key it is for people in a IT role, not just for SOA, but perhaps for more?
Hall: I think that's a great topic, especially from HP's perspective. You know, there are lots of different information sources that you have in IT. There isn't just one, and if you think you are only going to have one, we think that's the wrong approach, and customers have played this out.
I think what you are getting at to a certain degree is to looking at the adoption of two different trends that are going on. One trend that's impacting the operation teams is the establishment of configuration management database, and the adoption of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and IT service management on top of that information. That's one trend.
By the way with ITIL version 3, all of those processes now are oriented around the notion of service delivery, which now fits very nicely with the notion of the application teams building these next-generation applications that are also service oriented.
And, you know what? Most enterprise architects and most operations folks don't normally get along. But, maybe with these two converging trends, we have an opportunity for these folks to understand each others' motivation. We are talking about the same kinds of terminology. Suddenly, there is this shared understanding that we might actually get some work done.
So, there are these different authoritative sources of information that we see being established, some within ops, some within app development, quality management repositories, enterprise directories with identities, and they are all related, all stitched together.
The point on the application side is the more and more structured information that we are creating and putting around applications, the more automation that you can drive through the entire lifecycle. This includes enriching information like what's in the CMDB, by providing federated access to all of these different information sources. So from the SOA perspective, having a SOA-centric artifact repository as an authoritative source for those documents, is absolutely critical.
The registry is yet another place to discover and point you to where those two different authoritative sources actually live. So, in some respects, the registry can become the federation master, if you will, telling me, if I want to find the configuration management database, where is that? If I want to find the SOA artifact repository, where is that? They can point you in all those different directions.
Gardner: I suppose also, in aligning with SOA, approaches and methodologies, the enterprise service bus (ESB) becomes a way in which some of these policies can be instantiated. A messaging bus is not only the way in which the information is available. There is federation. There is a relationship between these different repositories, but then the actual execution of that can happen.
I think the point what we are trying to get to here is that SOA may have been given short shrift in terms of its role for cost efficiency and productivity, if you think it only in terms of application services reuse and compositing. When you look at in the context of IT lifecycle, and the full opportunity to create much more efficiency in the IT operations, it looks a little bit prettier.
Hall: Absolutely right, and I think if you look at what HP is assembling in terms of our software portfolio, there are some logical connections you can draw. First, as you are building more of these structured artifacts and linking them together in terms of the lifecycle, what can we do in terms of things like automated deployment? And, if I've captured information about the environment that the service is going to deploy in, the policy, the run time policies and the associated policy enforcement points are going to be responsible for executing those policies, be they hardware or software based.
Clearly, we have a leg up in understanding all of those elements, bringing Opsware into the fold and looking at how we can take the whole stack soup to nuts and automate both the deployment, as well as enriching the information in CMDB. Those are sort of the conclusions that you can draw from all the different elements that we have in the portfolio.
I actually think it's a discussion you can have about application architecture in general. You can say, "What are the best practices that we are learning out of the SOA approach that we might want to apply to other types of applications that we are deploying? What other structured artifacts shall we will we be creating to help us drive that kind of automation?"
Gardner: And, of course, the major trend that people are talking about and starting to move toward is virtualization. It's another layer of complexity, but if you've got those assets in place, the backplane ESB is doing management on a automated basis through policies and governance criteria that are already embedded in these data repositories. The whole notion of scaling virtualization for very dramatic cost savings becomes a bit more or less scary.
Hall: That's absolutely right, and, again, these trends are all collected, they support each other, and they can be composited and built on each other. I mean, virtualization is not a new topic. I was having a conversation with some folks yesterday about shouldn't we take the OSI seven-layer stack and talk about each layer of that stack. Put the word virtualization next to it, and then describe at that layer, network layer, application layer, operating system layers, what does this mean? What capabilities you are getting out?
I think, what you are alluding to is that customers have some confusion about what am I virtualizing at what layer and what do I get as a result of doing that? But I think it would be a very powerful discussion topic or a discussion slide to have with customers as they are trying to decide what the benefits are in each one of those layers?
Gardner: As we started out saying, there is an awful lot for IT departments to bite off and chew these days. A few years ago, I had customers come and say, "Okay, what we do first to get ready for SOA?" The big thing to do is get your data act together. Get a data service's layer, because it's data services that will be probably most important and beneficial to consume through your SOA infrastructure.
Well, now I am thinking that at even higher abstraction, you've got to get your whole SOA infrastructure and approach going, so that you can then be in a position to take advantage of this larger IT lifecycle.
Hall: I'll be a little controversial. We actually don't think that that's the right approach -- for SOA adoption, at least. After seven years of kind of playing in the space, we have seen most customers be successful, when the first thing they do is decompose their business, and not worry about the technology.
Actually for most customers that we talk to their first problem in terms of SOA adoption is when they've driven it from the bottom up, meaning, they try to have the technologists drag the decisions about data services or selecting ESB without even understanding the requirements to drive that kind of decision.
The most successful adoption that we have seen and the highest number of benefits is when they take a business-focused approach. Let's decompose a business. Do we really understand what it means in the IT world to be a service provider? When I say service provider, I mean in the classic sense of a telecom. Somebody once asked me if you are successful with SOA, what is my IT shop going to look like? I said, you are going to look a lot like a telecom provider, and they looked at me very puzzled. Then I said, you are becoming the dial tone of the business by providing all of these services, and that means you have to be available 24X7.
Think about what that means to be a truly carrier-grade IT service provider and that's a catchphrase that I like to use to get that conversation going.
Gardner: Sure, and then to bring that into some of the newer hype curve of activity lately around cloud computing. What you are describing is where people are beginning to identify as a private cloud.
Hall: Yes, that's absolutely correct.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit about what you think a private cloud and SOA do together?
Hall: Cloud is the next new, new thing. There was a blog I was reading the other day, that said, SOA was the boring cousin of Web 2.0. Now, I am thinking, after seven years, of doing this for the boring cousin. Very interesting, but cloud is the next new thing that people are talking about.
How can I get these compute resources and how can I get access to them from wherever I am in the world? I think there is some very interesting models being put together, such as Amazon's S3 model, and now I see businesses tapping into that, and using that as the means for scaling up and scaling out their environment, without ever having to have touched the hardware infrastructure operating systems.
Gardner: And, developers using it to put their apps through their paces on a performance-testing basis before they ever put in production. They try it on Amazon Web Services.
Hall: Absolutely, and performance validation, by the way, is one of those things for SOA, which I believe is absolutely critical, and yet, who is involved in that? Is it architects? Is it your quality management professionals?
Normally, there is a performance validation team that's absolutely world class within organizations to understand how to do that kind of scale up of individual apps? Now they are applying those means and methods to services. So, cloud is really one of those cool, new buzz words that we are hearing about. Private cloud? Sure. I definitely see that it's an evolution of how do we turn all of the assets in IT into services, and now we are saying, hardware is a service.
Gardner: Okay, so what's interesting is the relationship between these trends and how it really starts to point to a larger goal for business transformation and IT service management in the transformative implications with that. It seems that IT is becoming more a fabric of a company, rather than a second thought or a supplier. It's not really a supplier -- it doesn't really do IT justice anymore.
How do IT professional in these IT departments begin to think of themselves, actually recast their role and their position, their culture, to take on perhaps a much larger role in these companies?
Hall: I think one of the messages you see from HP software is that we are not talking about information technologies any more. You know, back in the day, it was data processing, right? We are now talking about business technology, and we are saying, "How do we optimize the outcomes of applying technologies in the context of business?" And, our message is, IT is a strategic weapon. The folks that were in IT, we are transforming them to be in BT now, and the more their companies are able to look at applying technologies in new and unique ways, this is absolutely their strategic differentiator in the market.
Gardner: Well great. I think we have covered quite a bit, and all the pieces are not quite in place, but once people see the vision, and they've got a stake in the ground. It really helps rally the troops and put together your requirements of how to get to where you want to be. So, we are going to thank Tim Hall, he is the director of HP's SOA Center Products. We appreciate your time.
Hall: Thanks very much, Dana.
Gardner: This comes to you as a sponsored HP Software Universe live podcast recorded at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. Look for other podcast from this HP event at www.hp.com, under "Software Universe Live Podcasts," as well as, through the BriefingsDirect Network. I would like to thank our producers on today’s show, Fred Bals and Kate Whalen, and also our sponsor Hewlett-Packard.
I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening, and come back next time for more in-depth podcasts on enterprise software infrastructure and strategies. Bye for now.
Listen to the podcast. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference in Las Vegas. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2008. All rights reserved.
Listen to the podcast here. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're listening to a special BriefingsDirect podcast recorded live at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference in Las Vegas. We are here in the week of June 16, 2008. This sponsored HP Software Universe live podcast is distributed by BriefingsDirect Network.
We now welcome to the show Tim Hall. He is the director of HP's SOA Center products. Welcome to the show.
Tim Hall: Thanks, Dana.
Gardner: We are going to talk about, fittingly enough, service-oriented architecture (SOA), the products, the market, some of the underlying trends, both from the business viewpoint and technologies that are driving SOA adoption.
I suppose SOA is at somewhat of a crossroad. We have seen a lot of pilot and project-based adoption. People were expecting to see more holistic, deep and wide SOA methodologies brought into play, but there has been an awful lot on the plate of CIOs and architects these days.
They are now thinking about data-center transformation and next-generation adoption for virtualization, higher utilization, and lower costs. They are also dealing with some of the issues around energy and power. They are being asked to modernize legacy applications. There's an awful lot going on, but SOA can be an enabler and an aid to that. Why don’t you tell us a little bit about, how you see SOA moving into the mainstream?
Hall: From our perspective, we think SOA is an application-development philosophy, and that philosophy is really the backplane, or an enabler, of lots of different and interesting trends.
You mentioned that modernization is a key one. Lots of old mainframe programmers like myself are retiring, and we've got lots of customers now looking to migrate to more modern architectures, Java platforms, Microsoft technologies, and maybe replacing with updated packaged apps from Oracle or SAP -- those are the two major package players these days. You know, both of those vendors, are building custom software, and SOA is the way in which they are doing this.
It also is an enabler for things like Web2.0 or mashups that are created from the information and the capabilities that are exposed through those services. SOA is, as I said, a philosophy about how we are building applications. We want to be service-oriented in those services that are consumed across a wide variety of composite applications that can be built. So, when you think about things like virtualization at the hardware level, SOA allows you to do that at the software level.
Other trends that are intersecting here include software-as-a-service (SaaS). They have service in the name. The question is how much of it are you consuming. And, are they also exposing services that you can actually integrate with things you have in house. All of these things are connected, but I think SOA is really this backplane to enable all of these pieces. Whether we are talking about it as a first-class citizen, or just the way in which the work is being done now, is the point of view about it coming into the mainstream.
Gardner: A lot of the discussion here at Software Universe has centered around the need to bring together what happens in design time, with what happens on the operation side, in run time, and in production. And, it seems to be one of the key assets of SOA methodology in adoption is a creation of registry/repository, a really powerful information source for policies, SLAs, and use patterns.
When you start looking what they are doing with federated configuration management database (CMDB) on the ops side, when you look at policy engines, you start to see how some of these federated data sources can be brought together to create more of that lifecycle approach. Tell us a little about the registry/repository, and how key it is for people in a IT role, not just for SOA, but perhaps for more?
Hall: I think that's a great topic, especially from HP's perspective. You know, there are lots of different information sources that you have in IT. There isn't just one, and if you think you are only going to have one, we think that's the wrong approach, and customers have played this out.
I think what you are getting at to a certain degree is to looking at the adoption of two different trends that are going on. One trend that's impacting the operation teams is the establishment of configuration management database, and the adoption of the Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL), and IT service management on top of that information. That's one trend.
By the way with ITIL version 3, all of those processes now are oriented around the notion of service delivery, which now fits very nicely with the notion of the application teams building these next-generation applications that are also service oriented.
And, you know what? Most enterprise architects and most operations folks don't normally get along. But, maybe with these two converging trends, we have an opportunity for these folks to understand each others' motivation. We are talking about the same kinds of terminology. Suddenly, there is this shared understanding that we might actually get some work done.
So, there are these different authoritative sources of information that we see being established, some within ops, some within app development, quality management repositories, enterprise directories with identities, and they are all related, all stitched together.
The point on the application side is the more and more structured information that we are creating and putting around applications, the more automation that you can drive through the entire lifecycle. This includes enriching information like what's in the CMDB, by providing federated access to all of these different information sources. So from the SOA perspective, having a SOA-centric artifact repository as an authoritative source for those documents, is absolutely critical.
The registry is yet another place to discover and point you to where those two different authoritative sources actually live. So, in some respects, the registry can become the federation master, if you will, telling me, if I want to find the configuration management database, where is that? If I want to find the SOA artifact repository, where is that? They can point you in all those different directions.
Gardner: I suppose also, in aligning with SOA, approaches and methodologies, the enterprise service bus (ESB) becomes a way in which some of these policies can be instantiated. A messaging bus is not only the way in which the information is available. There is federation. There is a relationship between these different repositories, but then the actual execution of that can happen.
I think the point what we are trying to get to here is that SOA may have been given short shrift in terms of its role for cost efficiency and productivity, if you think it only in terms of application services reuse and compositing. When you look at in the context of IT lifecycle, and the full opportunity to create much more efficiency in the IT operations, it looks a little bit prettier.
Hall: Absolutely right, and I think if you look at what HP is assembling in terms of our software portfolio, there are some logical connections you can draw. First, as you are building more of these structured artifacts and linking them together in terms of the lifecycle, what can we do in terms of things like automated deployment? And, if I've captured information about the environment that the service is going to deploy in, the policy, the run time policies and the associated policy enforcement points are going to be responsible for executing those policies, be they hardware or software based.
Clearly, we have a leg up in understanding all of those elements, bringing Opsware into the fold and looking at how we can take the whole stack soup to nuts and automate both the deployment, as well as enriching the information in CMDB. Those are sort of the conclusions that you can draw from all the different elements that we have in the portfolio.
I actually think it's a discussion you can have about application architecture in general. You can say, "What are the best practices that we are learning out of the SOA approach that we might want to apply to other types of applications that we are deploying? What other structured artifacts shall we will we be creating to help us drive that kind of automation?"
Gardner: And, of course, the major trend that people are talking about and starting to move toward is virtualization. It's another layer of complexity, but if you've got those assets in place, the backplane ESB is doing management on a automated basis through policies and governance criteria that are already embedded in these data repositories. The whole notion of scaling virtualization for very dramatic cost savings becomes a bit more or less scary.
Hall: That's absolutely right, and, again, these trends are all collected, they support each other, and they can be composited and built on each other. I mean, virtualization is not a new topic. I was having a conversation with some folks yesterday about shouldn't we take the OSI seven-layer stack and talk about each layer of that stack. Put the word virtualization next to it, and then describe at that layer, network layer, application layer, operating system layers, what does this mean? What capabilities you are getting out?
I think, what you are alluding to is that customers have some confusion about what am I virtualizing at what layer and what do I get as a result of doing that? But I think it would be a very powerful discussion topic or a discussion slide to have with customers as they are trying to decide what the benefits are in each one of those layers?
Gardner: As we started out saying, there is an awful lot for IT departments to bite off and chew these days. A few years ago, I had customers come and say, "Okay, what we do first to get ready for SOA?" The big thing to do is get your data act together. Get a data service's layer, because it's data services that will be probably most important and beneficial to consume through your SOA infrastructure.
Well, now I am thinking that at even higher abstraction, you've got to get your whole SOA infrastructure and approach going, so that you can then be in a position to take advantage of this larger IT lifecycle.
Hall: I'll be a little controversial. We actually don't think that that's the right approach -- for SOA adoption, at least. After seven years of kind of playing in the space, we have seen most customers be successful, when the first thing they do is decompose their business, and not worry about the technology.
Actually for most customers that we talk to their first problem in terms of SOA adoption is when they've driven it from the bottom up, meaning, they try to have the technologists drag the decisions about data services or selecting ESB without even understanding the requirements to drive that kind of decision.
The most successful adoption that we have seen and the highest number of benefits is when they take a business-focused approach. Let's decompose a business. Do we really understand what it means in the IT world to be a service provider? When I say service provider, I mean in the classic sense of a telecom. Somebody once asked me if you are successful with SOA, what is my IT shop going to look like? I said, you are going to look a lot like a telecom provider, and they looked at me very puzzled. Then I said, you are becoming the dial tone of the business by providing all of these services, and that means you have to be available 24X7.
Think about what that means to be a truly carrier-grade IT service provider and that's a catchphrase that I like to use to get that conversation going.
Gardner: Sure, and then to bring that into some of the newer hype curve of activity lately around cloud computing. What you are describing is where people are beginning to identify as a private cloud.
Hall: Yes, that's absolutely correct.
Gardner: Tell us a little bit about what you think a private cloud and SOA do together?
Hall: Cloud is the next new, new thing. There was a blog I was reading the other day, that said, SOA was the boring cousin of Web 2.0. Now, I am thinking, after seven years, of doing this for the boring cousin. Very interesting, but cloud is the next new thing that people are talking about.
How can I get these compute resources and how can I get access to them from wherever I am in the world? I think there is some very interesting models being put together, such as Amazon's S3 model, and now I see businesses tapping into that, and using that as the means for scaling up and scaling out their environment, without ever having to have touched the hardware infrastructure operating systems.
Gardner: And, developers using it to put their apps through their paces on a performance-testing basis before they ever put in production. They try it on Amazon Web Services.
Hall: Absolutely, and performance validation, by the way, is one of those things for SOA, which I believe is absolutely critical, and yet, who is involved in that? Is it architects? Is it your quality management professionals?
Normally, there is a performance validation team that's absolutely world class within organizations to understand how to do that kind of scale up of individual apps? Now they are applying those means and methods to services. So, cloud is really one of those cool, new buzz words that we are hearing about. Private cloud? Sure. I definitely see that it's an evolution of how do we turn all of the assets in IT into services, and now we are saying, hardware is a service.
Gardner: Okay, so what's interesting is the relationship between these trends and how it really starts to point to a larger goal for business transformation and IT service management in the transformative implications with that. It seems that IT is becoming more a fabric of a company, rather than a second thought or a supplier. It's not really a supplier -- it doesn't really do IT justice anymore.
How do IT professional in these IT departments begin to think of themselves, actually recast their role and their position, their culture, to take on perhaps a much larger role in these companies?
Hall: I think one of the messages you see from HP software is that we are not talking about information technologies any more. You know, back in the day, it was data processing, right? We are now talking about business technology, and we are saying, "How do we optimize the outcomes of applying technologies in the context of business?" And, our message is, IT is a strategic weapon. The folks that were in IT, we are transforming them to be in BT now, and the more their companies are able to look at applying technologies in new and unique ways, this is absolutely their strategic differentiator in the market.
Gardner: Well great. I think we have covered quite a bit, and all the pieces are not quite in place, but once people see the vision, and they've got a stake in the ground. It really helps rally the troops and put together your requirements of how to get to where you want to be. So, we are going to thank Tim Hall, he is the director of HP's SOA Center Products. We appreciate your time.
Hall: Thanks very much, Dana.
Gardner: This comes to you as a sponsored HP Software Universe live podcast recorded at the Venetian Resort in Las Vegas. Look for other podcast from this HP event at www.hp.com, under "Software Universe Live Podcasts," as well as, through the BriefingsDirect Network. I would like to thank our producers on today’s show, Fred Bals and Kate Whalen, and also our sponsor Hewlett-Packard.
I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. Thanks for listening, and come back next time for more in-depth podcasts on enterprise software infrastructure and strategies. Bye for now.
Listen to the podcast. Sponsor: Hewlett-Packard.
Transcript of BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe Conference in Las Vegas. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2008. All rights reserved.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)
