A Tale of Two IT Departments, or How Cloud Governance is Essential in the Bimodal IT Era

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the role of cloud governance and enterprise architecture and how they work together in the era of increasingly fragmented IT.
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Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect thought leadership panel discussion, coming to you in conjunction with The Open Group's upcoming conference on July 20, 2015 in Baltimore.

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host and moderator as we examine the role that cloud governance and enterprise architecture play in an era of increasingly fragmented IT.

Gardner

Not only are IT organizations dealing with so-called shadow IT and myriad proof-of-concept affairs, there is now a strong rationale for fostering what Gartner calls Bimodal IT. There's a strong case to be made for exploiting the strengths of several different flavors of IT, except that -- at the same time -- businesses are asking IT in total to be faster, better, and cheaper.

The topic before us is how to allow for the benefits of Bimodal IT or even multimodal IT, but without IT fragmentation leading to fractured and even broken businesses.

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Here to update us on the work of The Open Group Cloud Governance initiatives and working groups and to further explore the ways that companies can better manage and thrive with hybrid IT are our guests. We're here with Dr. Chris Harding, Director for Interoperability and Cloud Computing Forum Director at The Open Group. Welcome, Chris.

Dr. Chris Harding: Thank you, Dana. It’s great to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with David Janson, Executive IT Architect and Business Solutions Professional with the IBM Industry Solutions Team for Central and Eastern Europe and a leading contributor to The Open Group Cloud Governance Project. Welcome, David.

David Janson: Thank you. Glad to be here.

Gardner: Lastly, we here with Nadhan, HP Distinguished Technologist and Cloud Adviser and Co-Chairman of The Open Group Cloud Governance Project. Welcome, Nadhan.

Nadhan: Thank you, Dana. It’s a pleasure to be here.

IT trends

Gardner: Before we get into an update on The Open Group Cloud Governance initiatives, in many ways over the past decades IT has always been somewhat fragmented. Very few companies have been able to keep all their IT oars rowing in the same direction, if you will. But today things seem to be changing so rapidly that some degree of disparate IT methods are necessary. We might even think of old IT and new IT, and this may even be desirable.

But what are the trends that are driving this need for a multimodal IT? What's accelerating the need for different types of IT, and how can we think about retaining a common governance, and even a frameworks-driven enterprise architecture umbrella, over these IT elements?

Nadhan: Basically, the change that we're going through is really driven by the business. Business today has much more rapid access to the services that IT has traditionally provided. Business has a need to react to its own customers in a much more agile manner than they were traditionally used to.

Nadhan

We now have to react to demands where we're talking days and weeks instead of months and years. Businesses today have a choice. Business units are no longer dependent on the traditional IT to avail themselves of the services provided. Instead, they can go out and use the services that are available external to the enterprise.

To a great extent, the advent of social media has also resulted in direct customer feedback on the sentiment from the external customer that businesses need to react to. That is actually changing the timelines. It is requiring IT to be delivered at the pace of business. And the very definition of IT is undergoing a change, where we need to have the right paradigm, the right technology, and the right solution for the right business function and therefore the right application.

Since the choices have increased with the new style of IT, the manner in which you pair them up, the solutions with the problems, also has significantly changed. With more choices, come more such pairs on which solution is right for which problem. That's really what has caused the change that we're going through.

With more choices, come more such pairs on which solution is right for which problem.

A change of this magnitude requires governance that goes across building up on the traditional governance that was always in play, requiring elements like cloud to have governance that is more specific to solutions that are in the cloud across the whole lifecycle of cloud solutions deployment.

Gardner: David, do you agree that this seems to be a natural evolution, based on business requirements, that we basically spin out different types of IT within the same organization to address some of these issues around agility? Or is this perhaps a bad thing, something that’s unnatural and should be avoided?

Janson: In many ways, this follows a repeating pattern we've seen with other kinds of transformations in business and IT. Not to diminish the specifics about what we're looking at today, but I think there are some repeating patterns here.

There are new disruptive events that compete with the status quo. Those things that have been optimized, proven, and settled into sort of a consistent groove can compete with each other. Excitement about the new value that can be produced by new approaches generates momentum, and so far this actually sounds like a healthy state of vitality.

Good governance

However, one of the challenges is that the excitement potentially can lead to overlooking other important factors, and that’s where I think good governance practices can help.

For example, governance helps remind people about important durable principles that should be guiding their decisions, important considerations that we don’t want to forget or under-appreciate as we roll through stages of change and transformation.

At the same time, governance practices need to evolve so that it can adapt to new things that fit into the governance framework. What are those things and how do we govern those? So governance needs to evolve at the same time.

There is a pattern here with some specific things that are new today, but there is a repeating pattern as well, something we can learn from.

Gardner: Chris Harding, is there a built-in capability with cloud governance that anticipates some of these issues around different styles or flavors or even velocity of IT innovation that can then allow for that innovation and experimentation, but then keep it all under the same umbrella with a common management and visibility?

Harding: There are a number of forces at play here, and there are three separate trends that we've seen, or at least that I have observed, in discussions with members within The Open Group that relate to this.

Harding

The first is one that Nadhan mentioned, the possibility of outsourcing IT. I remember a member’s meeting a few years ago, when one of our members who worked for a company that was starting a cloud brokerage activity happened to mention that two major clients were going to do away with their IT departments completely and just go for cloud brokerage. You could see the jaws drop around the table, particularly with the representatives who were from company corporate IT departments.

Of course, cloud brokers haven’t taken over from corporate IT, but there has been that trend toward things moving out of the enterprise to bring in IT services from elsewhere.

That’s all very well to do that, but from a governance perspective, you may have an easy life if you outsource all of your IT to a broker somewhere, but if you fail to comply with regulations, the broker won’t go to jail; you will go to jail.

So you need to make sure that you retain control at the governance level over what is happening from the point of view of compliance. You probably also want to make sure that your architecture principles are followed and retain governance control to enable that to happen. That’s the first trend and the governance implication of it.

In response to that, a second trend that we see is that IT departments have reacted often by becoming quite like brokers themselves -- providing services, maybe providing hybrid cloud services or private cloud services within the enterprise, or maybe sourcing cloud services from outside. So that’s a way that IT has moved in the past and maybe still is moving.

Third trend

The third trend that we're seeing in some cases is that multi-discipline teams within line of business divisions, including both business people and technical people, address the business problems. This is the way that some companies are addressing the need to be on top of the technology in order to innovate at a business level. That is an interesting and, I think, a very healthy development.

So maybe, yes, we are seeing a bimodal splitting in IT between the traditional IT and the more flexible and agile IT, but maybe you could say that that second part belongs really in the line of business departments -- rather than in the IT departments. That's at least how I see it.

Nadhan: I'd like to build on a point that David made earlier about repeating patterns. I can relate to that very well within The Open Group, speaking about the Cloud Governance Project. Truth be told, as we continue to evolve the content in cloud governance, some of the seeding content actually came from the SOA Governance Project that The Open Group worked on a few years back. So the point David made about the repeating patterns resonates very well with that particular case in mind.

I think there's a repeating pattern here of new approaches, new ways of doing things, coming into the picture.

Gardner: So we've been through this before. When there is change and disruption, sometimes it’s required for a new version of methodologies and best practices to emerge, perhaps even associated with specific technologies. Then, over time, we see that folded back in to IT in general, or maybe it’s pushed back out into the business, as Chris alluded to.

My question, though, is how we make sure that these don’t become disruptive and negative influences over time. Maybe governance and enterprise architecture principles can prevent that. So is there something about the cloud governance, which I think really anticipates a hybrid model, particularly a cloud hybrid model, that would be germane and appropriate for a hybrid IT environment?

David Janson, is there a cloud governance benefit in managing hybrid IT?

Janson: There most definitely is. I tend to think that hybrid IT is probably where we're headed. I don’t think this is avoidable. My editorial comment upon that is that’s an unavoidable direction we're going in. Part of the reason I say that is I think there's a repeating pattern here of new approaches, new ways of doing things, coming into the picture.

Janson

And then some balancing acts goes on, where people look at more traditional ways versus the new approaches people are talking about, and eventually they look at the strengths and weaknesses of both.

There's going to be some disruption, but that’s not necessarily bad. That’s how we drive change and transformation. What we're really talking about is making sure the amount of disruption is not so counterproductive that it actually moves things backward instead of forward.

I don’t mind a little bit of disruption. The governance processes that we're talking about, good governance practices, have an overall life cycle that things move through. If there is a way to apply governance, as you work through that life cycle, at each point, you're looking at the particular decision points and actions that are going to happen, and make sure that those decisions and actions are well-informed.

We sometimes say that governance helps us do the right things right. So governance helps people know what the right things are, and then the right way to do those things.

Bimodal IT

Also, we can measure how well people are actually adapting to those “right things” to do. What’s “right” can vary over time, because we have disruptive change. Things like we are talking about with Bimodal IT is one example.

Within a narrower time frame in the process lifecycle, there are points that evolve across that time frame that have particular decisions and actions. Governance makes sure that people are well informed as they're rolling through that about important things they shouldn’t forget. It’s very easy to forget key things and optimize for only one factor, and governance helps people remember that.

Also, just check to see whether we're getting the benefits that people expected out of it. Coming back around and looking afterward to see if we accomplish what we thought we would or did we get off in the wrong direction. So it’s a bit like a steering mechanism or a feedback mechanism, in it that helps keep the car on the road, rather than going off in the soft shoulder. Did we overlook something important? Governance is key to making this all successful.

Gardner: Let’s return to The Open Group’s upcoming conference on July 20 in Baltimore and also learn a bit more about what the Cloud Governance Project has been up to. I think that will help us better understand how cloud governance relates to these hybrid IT issues that we've been discussing.

Nadhan, you are the co-chairman of the Cloud Governance Project. Tell us about what to expect in Baltimore with the concepts of Boundaryless Information Flow, and then also perhaps an update on what the Cloud Governance Project has been up to.

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Nadhan: When the Cloud Governance Project started, the first question we challenged ourselves with was, what is it and why do we need it, especially given that SOA governance, architecture governance, IT governance, enterprise governance, in general are all out there with frameworks. We actually detailed out the landscape with different standards and then identified the niche or the domain that cloud governance addresses.

After that, we went through and identified the top five principles that matter for cloud governance to be done right. Some of the obvious ones being that cloud is a business decision, and the governance exercise should keep in mind whether it is the right business decision to go to the cloud rather than just jumping on the bandwagon. Those are just some examples of the foundational principles that drive how cloud governance must be established and exercised.

Subsequent to that, we have a lifecycle for cloud governance defined and then we have gone through the process of detailing it out by identifying and decoupling the governance process and the process that is actually governed.

So there is this concept of process pairs that we have going, where we've identified key processes, key process pairs, whether it be the planning, the architecture, reusing cloud service, subscribing to it, unsubscribing, retiring, and so on. These are some of the defining milestones in the life cycle.

We've actually put together a template for identifying and detailing these process pairs, and the template has an outline of the process that is being governed, the key phases that the governance goes through, the desirable business outcomes that we would expect because of the cloud governance, as well as the associated metrics and the key roles.

Real-life solution

The Cloud Governance Framework is actually detailing each one. Where we are right now is looking at a real-life solution. The hypothetical could be an actual business scenario, but the idea is to help the reader digest the concepts outlined in the context of a scenario where such governance is exercised. That’s where we are on the Cloud Governance Project.

Let me take the opportunity to invite everyone to be part of the project to continue it by subscribing to the right mailing list for cloud governance within The Open Group.

Gardner: Just for the benefit of our readers and listeners who might not be that familiar with The Open Group, perhaps you could give us a very quick overview -- its mission, its charter, what we could expect at the Baltimore conference, and why people should get involved, either directly by attending, or following it on social media or the other avenues that The Open Group provides on its website?

Until an Open Group standard is published, there is no official Open Group position on the topic, and members will present their views at conferences.

Harding: The Open Group is a vendor-neutral consortium whose vision is Boundaryless Information Flow. That is to say the idea that information should be available to people within an enterprise, or indeed within an ecosystem of enterprises, as and when needed, not locked away into silos.

We hold main conferences, quarterly conferences, four times a year and also regional conferences in various parts of the world in between those, and we discuss a variety of topics.

In fact, the main topics for the conference that we will be holding in July in Baltimore are enterprise architecture and risk and security. Architecture and security are two of the key things for which The Open Group is known, Enterprise architecture, particularly with its TOGAF Framework, is perhaps what The Open Group is best known for.

We've been active in a number of other areas, and risk and security is one. We also have started a new vertical activity on healthcare, and there will be a track on that at the Baltimore conference.

There will be tracks on other topics too, including four sessions on Open Platform 3.0. Open Platform 3.0 is The Open Group initiative to address how enterprises can gain value from new technologies, including cloud computing, social computing, mobile computing, big data analysis, and the Internet of Things.

We'll have a number of presentations related to that. These will include, in fact, a perspective on cloud governance, although that will not necessarily reflect what is happening in the Cloud Governance Project. Until an Open Group standard is published, there is no official Open Group position on the topic, and members will present their views at conferences. So we're including a presentation on that.

Lifecycle governance

There is also a presentation on another interesting governance topic, which is on Information Lifecycle Governance. We have a panel session on the business context for Open Platform 3.0 and a number of other presentations on particular topics, for example, relating to the new technologies that Open Platform 3.0 will help enterprises to use.

There's always a lot going on at Open Group conferences, and that’s a brief flavor of what will happen at this one.

Gardner: Thank you. And I'd just add that there is more available at The Open Group website, opengroup.org.

Going to one thing you mentioned about a standard and publishing that standard, is there a roadmap that we could look to in order to anticipate the next steps or milestones in the Cloud Governance Project? When would such a standard emerge and when might we expect it?

Nadhan: As I said earlier, the next step is to identify the business scenario and apply it. I'm expecting, with the right level of participation, that it will take another quarter, after which it would go through the internal review with The Open Group and the company reviews for the publication of the standard. Assuming we have that in another quarter, Chris, could you please weigh in on what it usually takes, on average, for those reviews before it gets published.

I want to step back and think about what are the changes to project-related processes that new approaches require.

Harding: You could add on another quarter. It shouldn’t actually take that long, but we do have a thorough review process. All members of The Open Group are invited to participate. The document is posted for comment for, I would think, four weeks, after which we review the comments and decide what actually needs to be taken.

Certainly, it could take only two months to complete the overall publication of the standard from the draft being completed, but it’s safer to say about a quarter.

Gardner: So a real important working document could be available in the second half of 2015. Let’s now go back to why a cloud governance document and approach is important when we consider the implications of Bimodal or multimodal IT.

One of things that Gartner says is that Bimodal IT projects require new project management styles. They didn’t say project management products. They didn’t say, downloads or services from a cloud provider. We're talking about styles.

So it seems to me that, in order to prevent the good aspects of Bimodal IT to be overridden by negative impacts of chaos and the lack of coordination that we're talking about, not about a product or a download, we're talking about something that a working group and a standards approach like the Cloud Governance Project can accommodate.

David, why is it that you can’t buy this in a box or download it as a product? What is it that we need to look at in terms of governance across Bimodal IT and why is that appropriate for a style? Maybe the IT people need to think differently about accomplishing this through technology alone?

First question

Janson: When I think of anything like a tool or a piece of software, the first question I tend to have is what is that helping me do, because the tool itself generally is not the be-all and end-all of this. What process is this going to help me carry out?

So, before I would think about tools, I want to step back and think about what are the changes to project-related processes that new approaches require. Then secondly, think about how can tools help me speed up, automate, or make those a little bit more reliable?

It’s an easy thing to think about a tool that may have some process-related aspects embedded in it as sort of some kind of a magic wand that's going to automatically make everything work well, but it’s the processes that the tool could enable that are really the important decision. Then, the tools simply help to carry that out more effectively, more reliably, and more consistently.

We've always seen an evolution about the processes we use in developing solutions, as well as tools. Technology requires tools to adapt. As to the processes we use, as they get more agile, we want to be more incremental, and see rapid turnarounds in how we're developing things. Tools need to evolve with that.

Once you've settled on some decisions about evolving those processes, then we'll start looking for tools that help you automate, accelerate, and make consistent and more reliable what those processes are.

But I'd really start out from a governance standpoint, thinking about challenging the idea that if we're going to make a change, how do we know that it's really an appropriate one and asking some questions about how we differentiate this change from just reinventing the wheel. Is this an innovation that really makes a difference and isn't just change for the sake of change?

Governance helps people challenge their thinking and make sure that it’s actually a worthwhile step to take to make those adaptations in project-related processes.

Once you've settled on some decisions about evolving those processes, then we'll start looking for tools that help you automate, accelerate, and make consistent and more reliable what those processes are.

I tend to start with the process and think of the technology second, rather than the other way around. Where governance can help to remind people of principles we want to think about. Are you putting the cart before the horse? It helps people challenge their thinking a little bit to be sure they're really going in the right direction.

Gardner: Of course, a lot of what you just mentioned pertains to enterprise architecture generally as well.

Nadhan, when we think about Bimodal or multimodal IT, this to me is going to be very variable from company to company, given their legacy, given their existing style, the rate of adoption of cloud or other software as a service (SaaS), agile, or DevOps types of methods. So this isn’t something that’s going to be a cookie-cutter. It really needs to be looked at company by company and timeline by timeline.

Is this a vehicle for professional services, for management consulting more than IT and product? What is n the relationship between cloud governance, Bimodal IT, and professional services?

Delineating systems

Nadhan: It’s a great question Dana. Let me characterize Bimodal IT slightly differently, before answering the question. Another way to look at Bimodal IT, where we are today, is delineating systems of record and systems of engagement.

In traditional IT, typically, we're looking at the systems of record, and systems of engagement with the social media and so on are in the live interaction. Those define the continuously evolving, growing-by-the-second systems of engagement, which results in the need for big data, security, and definitely the cloud and so on.

The coexistence of both of these paradigms requires the right move to the cloud for the right reason. So even though they are the systems of record, some, if not most, do need to get transformed to the cloud, but that doesn’t mean all systems of engagement eventually get transformed to the cloud.

There are good reasons why you may actually want to leave certain systems of engagement the way they are.

There are good reasons why you may actually want to leave certain systems of engagement the way they are. The art really is in combining the historical data that the systems of record have with the continual influx of data that we get through the live channels of social media, and then, using the right level of predictive analytics to get information.

I said a lot in there just to characterize the Bimodal IT slightly differently, making the point that what really is at play, Dana, is a new style of thinking. It's a new style of addressing the problems that have been around for a while.

But a new way to address the same problems, new solutions, a new way of coming up with the solution models would address the business problems at hand. That requires an external perspective. That requires service providers, consulting professionals, who have worked with multiple customers, perhaps other customers in the same industry, and other industries with a healthy dose of innovation.

That's where this is a new opportunity for professional services to work with the CxOs, the enterprise architects, the CIOs to exercise the right business decision with the rights level of governance.

Because of the challenges with the coexistence of both systems of record and systems of engagement and harvesting the right information to make the right business decision, there is a significant opportunity for consulting services to be provided to enterprises today.

Drilling down

Gardner: Before we close off I wanted to just drill down on one thing, Nadhan, that you brought up, which is that ability to measure and know and then analyze and compare.

One of the things that we've seen with IT developing over the past several years as well is that the big data capabilities have been applied to all the information coming out of IT systems so that we can develop a steady state and understand those systems of record, how they are performing, and compare and contrast in ways that we couldn’t have before.

So on our last topic for today, David Janson, how important is it for that measuring capability in a governance context, and for organizations that want to pursue Bimodal IT, but keep it governed and keep it from spinning out of control? What should they be thinking about putting in place, the proper big data and analytics and measurement and visibility apparatus and capabilities?

Janson: That’s a really good question. One aspect of this is that, when I talk with people about the ideas around governance, it's not unusual that the first idea that people have about what governance is is about the compliance or the policing aspect that governance can play. That sounds like that’s interference, sand in the gears, but it really should be the other way around.

Good governance has communicated that well enough, so that people should actually move faster rather than slower. In other words, there should be no surprises.

A governance framework should actually make it very clear how people should be doing things, what’s expected as the result at the end, and how things are checked and measured across time at early stages and later stages, so that people are very clear about how things are carried out and what they are expected to do. So, if someone does use a governance-compliance process to see if things are working right, there is no surprise, there is no slowdown. They actually know how to quickly move through that.

Good governance has communicated that well enough, so that people should actually move faster rather than slower. In other words, there should be no surprises.

Measuring things is very important, because if you haven’t established the objectives that you're after and some metrics to help you determine whether you're meeting those, then it’s kind of an empty suit, so to speak, with governance. You express some ideas that you want to achieve, but you have no way of knowing or answering the question of how we know if this is doing what we want to do. Metrics are very important around this.

We capture metrics within processes. Then, for the end result, is it actually producing the effects people want? That’s pretty important.

One of the things that we have built into the Cloud Governance Framework is some idea about what are the outcomes and the metrics that each of these process pairs should have in mind. It helps to answer the question, how do we know? How do we know if something is doing what we expect? That’s very, very essential.

Gardner: I am afraid we'll have to leave it there. We've been examining the role of cloud governance and enterprise architecture and how they work together in the era of increasingly fragmented IT. And we've seen how The Open Group Cloud Governance Initiatives and Working Groups can help allow for the benefits of Bimodal IT, but without necessarily IT fragmentation leading to a fractured or broken business process around technology and innovation.

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This special BriefingsDirect thought leadership panel discussion comes to you in conjunction with The Open Group’s upcoming conference on July 20, 2015 in Baltimore. And it’s not too late to register on The Open Group’s website or to follow the proceedings online and via social media such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

So, thank you to our guests: Dr. Chris Harding, Director for Interoperability and Cloud Computing Forum Director at The Open Group; David Janson, Executive IT Architect and Business Solutions Professional with the IBM Industry Solutions Team for Central and Eastern Europe and a leading contributor to The Open Group Cloud Governance Project, and Nadhan, HP Distinguished Technologist and Cloud Advisor and Co-Chairman of The Open Group Cloud Governance Project.

And a big thank you, too, to our audience for joining this special Open Group-sponsored discussion. This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator for this thought leadership panel discussion series. Thanks again for listening, and do come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Get the mobile app for iOS or Android. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect discussion on the role of cloud governance and enterprise architecture and how they work together in the era of increasingly fragmented IT. Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2015. All rights reserved.

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Platform 3.0 Ripe to Give Standard Access to Advanced Intelligence and Automation, Bring Commercial Benefits to Enterprises

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how The Open Group is working to stay ahead of converging challenges organization face with big data, mobile, cloud and social.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect Thought Leadership Interview series, coming to you in conjunction with The Open Group Conference on July 15, in Philadelphia.

Gardner

I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator throughout these discussions on enterprise transformation in the finance, government, and healthcare sector. Registration to the conference remains open. Follow the conference on Twitter at #ogPHL.

We're here now with a panel of experts to explore the business implications of the current shift to so-called Platform 3.0. Known as the new model through which big data, cloud, and mobile and social -- in combination -- allow for advanced intelligence and automation in business, Platform 3.0 has so far lacked standards or even clear definitions.

The Open Group and its community are poised to change that, and we're here now to learn more how to leverage Platform 3.0 as more than a IT shift -- and as a business game-changer.

With that, please join me in welcoming our panel: Dave Lounsbury, Chief Technical Officer at The Open Group. Welcome, Dave.

Dave Lounsbury: Hi, Dana, happy to be here.

Gardner: We're also here with Chris Harding, Director of Interoperability at The Open Group. Welcome, Chris. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of this and other BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Chris Harding: Thank you, Dana, and it's great to be on this panel.

Gardner: And also Mark Skilton, Global Director in the Strategy Office at Capgemini. Welcome, Mark.

Mark Skilton: Hi, Dana, thanks for inviting us today. I'm very happy to be here.

Gardner: A lot of people are still wrapping their minds around this notion of Platform 3.0, something that is a whole greater than the sum of the parts. Why is this more than an IT conversation or a shift in how things are delivered? Why are the business implications momentous?

Lounsbury: Well, Dana, there are lot of IT changes or technical changes going on that are bringing together a lot of factors. They're turning into this sort of super-saturated solution of ideas and possibilities and this emerging idea that this represents a new platform. I think it's a pretty fundamental change.

Lounsbury

If you look at history, not just the history of IT, but all of human history, you see that step changes in societies and organizations are frequently driven by communication or connectedness. Think about the evolution of speech or the invention of the alphabet or movable-type printing. These technical innovations that we’re seeing are bringing together these vast sources of data about the world around us and doing it in real time.

Further, we're starting to see a lot of rapid evolution in how you turn data into information and presenting the information in a way such that people can make decisions on it. Given all that we’re starting to realize, we’re on the cusp of another step of connectedness and awareness.

Fundamental changes

This really is going to drive some fundamental changes in the way we organize ourselves. Part of what The Open Group is doing, trying to bring Platform 3.0 together, is to try to get ahead of this and make sure that we understand not just what technical standards are needed, but how businesses will need to adapt and evolve what business processes they need to put in place in order to take maximum advantage of this to see change in the way that we look at the information.

Gardner: Chris Harding is there a time issue here? Is this something that organizations should sit back, watch how it unfolds, and then gauge their response? Or is there a benefit of being out in front of this in some way?

Harding: I don’t know about in front of this. Enterprises have to be up with the way that things are moving in order to keep their positions in their industries. Enterprises can't afford to be working with yesterday's technology. It's a case of being able to understand the information that they're presented and make the best decision to reflect that.

Harding

We've always talked about computers being about input, process, and output. Years ago, the input might have been through a teletype, the processing on a computer in the back office, and the output on print-out paper.

Now, we're talking about the input being through a range of sensors and social media, the processing is done on the cloud, and the output goes to your mobile device, so you have it wherever you are when you need it. Enterprises that stick in the past are probably going to suffer.

Gardner: Mark Skilton, the ability to manage data at greater speed and scale, the whole three Vs -- velocity, volume, and value -- on its own could perhaps be a game changing shift in the market. The drive of mobile devices into lives of both consumers and workers is also a very big deal.

Of course, cloud has been an ongoing evolution of emphasis towards agility and efficiency in how workloads are supported. But is there something about the combination of how these are coming together at this particular time that, in your opinion, substantiates The Open Group’s emphasis on this as a literal platform shift?

Skilton: It is exactly that in terms of the workloads. The world we're now into is the multi-workload environment, where you've got mobile workloads, storage and compute workloads, and social networking workloads. There are many different types of data and traffic today in different cloud platforms and devices.

Skilton

It has to do with not just one solution, not one subscription model, because we're now into this subscription-model era, the subscription economy, as one group tends to describe it. Now, we're looking for not only just providing the security, the infrastructure, to deliver this kind of capability to a mobile device, as Chris was saying. The question is, how can you do this horizontally across other platforms? How can you integrate these things? This is something that is critical to the new order.

So Platform 3.0 addressing this point by bringing this together. Just look at the numbers. Look at the scale that we're dealing with -- 1.7 billion mobile devices sold in 2012, and 6.8 billion subscriptions estimated according to the International Telecommunications Union (ITU) equivalent to 96 percent of the world population.

Massive growth

We had massive growth in scale of mobile data traffic and internet data expansion. Mobile data is increasing 18 percent fold from 2011 to 2016 reaching 130 exabytes annually.  We passed 1 zettabyte of global online data storage back in 2010 and IP data traffic predicted to pass 1.3 zettabytes by 2016, with internet video accounting for 61 percent of total internet data according to Cisco studies.

These studies also predict data center traffic combining network and internet based storage will reach 6.6 zettabytes annually, and nearly two thirds of this will be cloud based by 2016.  This is only going to grow as social networking is reaching nearly one in four people around the world with 1.7 billion using at least one form of social networking in 2013, rising to one in three people with 2.55 billion global audience by 2017 as another extraordinary figure from an eMarketing.com study.

It is not surprising that many industry analysts are seeing growth in technologies of mobility, social computing, big data and cloud convergence at 30 to 40 percent and the shift to B2C commerce passing $1 trillion in 2012 is just the start of a wider digital transformation.

These numbers speak volumes in terms of the integration, interoperability, and connection of the new types of business and social realities that we have today.

Gardner: Dave Lounsbury, back to you. Why should IT be thinking about this as a fundamental shift, rather than a step change or a modest change? It seems to me that this combination of factors almost blows the whole IT definition of 10 years ago, out of the water. Is it that big a deal for IT? It also has an impact on business. I'd like to just focus on how IT organizations might need to start rethinking things?

There's no point giving someone data if it's not been properly managed or if there's incorrect information.

Lounsbury: A lot depends on how you define your IT organization. It's useful to separate the plumbing from the water. If we think of the water as the information that’s flowing, it's how we make sure that the water is pure and getting to the places where you need to have the taps, where you need to have the water, etc.

But the plumbing also has to be up to the job. It needs to have the capacity. It needs to have new tools to filter out the impurities from the water. There's no point giving someone data if it's not been properly managed or if there's incorrect information.

What's going to happen in IT is not only do we have to focus on the mechanics of the plumbing, where we see things like the big database that we've seen in the open-source  role and things like that nature, but there's the analytics and the data stewardship aspects of it.

We need to bring in mechanisms, so the data is valid and kept up to date. We need to indicate its freshness to the decision makers. Furthermore, IT is going to be called upon, whether as part of the enterprise IP or where end users will drive the selection of what they're going to do with analytic tools and recommendation tools to take the data and turn it into information. One of the things you can't do with business decision makers is overwhelm them with big rafts of data and expect them to figure it out.

You really need to present the information in a way that they can use to quickly make business decisions. That is an addition to the role of IT that may not have been there traditionally -- how you think about the data and the role of what, in the beginning, was called data scientist and things of that nature.

Shift in constituency

Skilton: I'd just like to add to Dave's excellent points about, the shape of data has changed, but also about why should IT get involved. We're seeing that there's a shift in the constituency of who is using this data.

We've got the Chief Marketing Officer and the Chief Procurement Officer and other key line of business managers taking more direct control over the uses of information technology that enable their channels and interactions through mobile, social and data analytics. We've got processes that were previously managed just by IT and are now being consumed by significant stakeholders and investors in the organization.

We have to recognize in IT that we are the masters of our own destiny. The information needs to be sorted into new types of mobile devices, new types of data intelligence, and ways of delivering this kind of service.

I read recently in MIT Sloan Management Review an article that asked what is the role of the CIO. There is still the critical role of managing the security, compliance, and performance of these systems. But there's also a socialization of IT, and this is where  the  positioning architectures which are cross platform is key to  delivering real value to the business users in the IT community.

Gardner: So we have more types of users, more classes of individuals and resources within a enterprise starting to avail themselves more of these intelligence capabilities more ubiquitously, vis-à-vis the mobile and the cloud delivery opportunity.

This is where The Open Group can really help things along by being a recipient and a reflector of best practice and standard.

How do we prevent this from going off the rails? How is it that we don’t start creating multiple fire hoses of information and/or too much data, but not enough analysis? Chris Harding, any thoughts about where perhaps The Open Group or others can step in to help make this a more fruitful, rather than chaotic, transition?

Harding: This a very important point. And to add to the difficulties, it's not only that a whole set of different people are getting involved with different kinds of information, but there's also a step change in the speed with which all this is delivered. It's no longer the case, that you can say, "Oh well, we need some kind of information system to manage this information. We'll procure it and get a program written" that a year later that would be in place in delivering reports to it.

Now, people are looking to make sense of this information on the fly if possible. It's really a case of having the platforms be the standard technology platform and also the systems for using it, the business processes, understood and in place.

Then, you can do all these things quickly and build on learning from what people have gone in the past, and not go out into all sorts of new experimental things that might not lead anywhere. It's a case of building up the standard platform in the industry best practice. This is where The Open Group can really help things along by being a recipient and a reflector of best practice and standard.

Lounsbury: I'd like to expand on that a little bit if I could, Dana. I agree with all the points that Chris and Mark just made. We should also mention that it's not just the speed of the analysis on the consumption side. We're going to see a lot of rapid evolution in the input side as well.

New data sources

We're starting to see lot of new data sources come on line. We've touched on the mobile devices and the social networks that those mobile devices enable, but we’re really also on the cusp of this idea of the "Internet of things," where there is a vast globe full of network connected sensors and actuators out there, all of which produce their own data.

Part of the process that Chris alluded to and the best practices Chris alluded to is how you run your business processes so that you keep your feeds up to date, so that you can adapt quickly to new sources of information, as well as adapt quickly to the new demands for information from the lines of business.

Gardner: It seems to be somewhat unprecedented that we have multiple change agents playing off of one another with complexity, scale, and velocity all very much at work. It's one thing to have a vision about how you would want to exploit this, but it's another to have a plan about how to go about that.

Mark Skilton, with your knowledge of Capgemini and the role that they play in the market, it seems to me that there's a tremendous need for some examples or some sense of how to go about managing the ability to exploit Platform 3.0 without getting tripped up and overwhelmed in the process.

Skilton: That’s right. Capgemini has been doing work in this area. I break it down into four levels of scalability. It's the platform scalability of understanding what you can do with your current legacy systems in introducing cloud computing or big data, and the infrastructure that gives you this, what we call multiplexing of resources. We're very much seeing this idea of introducing scalable platform resource management, and you see that a lot with the heritage of virtualization.

Companies needs to think about what online marketplaces they need for digital branding, social branding, social networks, and awareness of your customers, suppliers, and employees.

Going into networking and the network scalability, a lot of the customers have who inherited their old telecommunications networks are looking to introduce new MPLS type scalable networks. The reason for this is that it's all about connectivity in the field. I meet a number of clients who are saying, "We’ve got this cloud service," or "This service is in a certain area of my country. If I move to another parts of the country or I'm traveling, I can't get connectivity." That’s the big issue of scaling.

Another one is application programming interfaces (APIs). What we’re seeing now is an explosion of integration and application services using API connectivity, and these are creating huge opportunities of what Chris Anderson of Wired used to call the "long tail effect." It is now a reality in terms of building that kind of social connectivity and data exchange that Dave was talking about.

Finally, there are the marketplaces. Companies needs to think about what online marketplaces they need for digital branding, social branding, social networks, and awareness of your customers, suppliers, and employees. Customers can see that these four levels are where they need to start thinking about for IT strategy, and Platform 3.0 is right on this target of trying to work out what are the strategies of each of these new levels of scalability.

Gardner: Dave Lounsbury, we're coming up on The Open Group Conference in Philadelphia very shortly. What should we expect from that? What is The Open Group doing vis-à-vis Platform 3, and how can organizations benefit from seeing a more methodological or standardized approach to some way of rationalizing all of this complexity? [Registration to the conference remains open. Follow the conference on Twitter at #ogPHL.]

Lounsbury: We're still in the formational stages of  "third platform" or Platform 3.0 for The Open Group as an industry. To some extent, we're starting pretty much at the ground floor with that in the Platform 3.0 forum. We're leveraging a lot of the components that have been done previously by the work of the members of The Open Group in cloud, services-oriented architecture (SOA), and some of the work on the Internet of things.

First step

Our first step is to bring those things together to make sure that we've got a foundation to depart from. The next thing is that, through our Platform 3.0 Forum and the Steering Committee, we can ask people to talk about what their scenarios are for adoption of Platform 3.0?

That can range from things like the technological aspects of it and what standards are needed, but also to take a clue from our previous cloud working group. What are the best business practices in order to understand and then adopt some of these Platform 3.0 concepts to get your business using them?

What we're really working towards in Philadelphia is to set up an exchange of ideas among the people who can, from the buy side, bring in their use cases from the supply side, bring in their ideas about what the technology possibilities are, and bring those together and start to shape a set of tracks where we can create business and technical artifacts that will help businesses adopt the Platform 3.0 concept.

Gardner: Anything to offer on that Chris?

Harding: There are some excellent points there. We certainly need to understand the business environment within which Platform 3.0 will be used. We've heard already about new players, new roles of various kinds that are appearing, and the fact that the technology is there and the business is adapting to this to use technology in new ways.

For example, we've heard about the data scientist. The data scientist is a new kind of role, a new kind of person, that is playing a particular part in all this within enterprises. We're also hearing about marketplaces for services, new ways in which services are being made available and combined.

What are the problems that need to be resolved in order to understand what kind of shape the new platform will have?

We really need to understand the actors in this new kind of business scenario. What are the pain points that people are having? What are the problems that need to be resolved in order to understand what kind of shape the new platform will have? That is one of the key things that the Platform 3.0 Forum members will be getting their teeth into.

Gardner: At the same time, The Open Group is looking to enter into more vertical industry emphasis with its activities. At the Philadelphia Conference, you've chosen finance, government and healthcare. Dave or Chris, is there something about these three vertical industries that make them excellent test cases for Platform 3.0? Is there something about going into a vertical industry that helps with the transition to 3.0, rather than a general or one-size-fits-all approach? What's the impact of vertical industry emphasis on this transition?

Lounsbury: First, I'll note that the overarching theme of The Open Group Conferences is about business transformation -- how you adapt and evolve your business to take better advantage of the efficiencies afforded by IT and other developments. So as a horizontal activity, Platform 3.0 fits in very well with that, because I believe these transformational drivers from the evolution of Platform 3.0 are going to affect all industries.

To get back to your question, the benefit of Platform 3.0 will be most immediately and urgently felt in vertical industries that deal with extremely large volumes of data and need to filter very large volumes of data in order to achieve their business objectives and run their businesses efficiently.

For example, one of the things that healthcare is struggling with right now is a mass of patient records that need to be done. How do care givers or care providers make sense of those, make sure that everybody is up-to-date, and make sure that everybody is simply working off of the same data? It's a core question for them.

Today's problem

That’s today's problem which some of the infrastructure of Platform 3.0 will undoubtedly help with. When you come to looking at care not only as an individual topic, how my doctor or nurse gives care to me, but in terms of the larger trends in healthcare, can we look at how certain drugs effect certain diseases, it's a perfect example for the use of data and strong analytics to get information. We couldn’t have actually gotten that before, simply because we couldn’t bring it together and understand it.

In some sense, the biotech industry has been leading this trend. Genomics have really seeded a lot of the big data capabilities.

That will be a very exciting area for healthcare. If you go into any Apple Store, you'll see a whole retail rack of gadgets that you wear on your body that tell you how fit you are, or how fit you aren’t in some cases. It will tell you what your pulse is, your heart rate, and your body mass index. We're getting very close to a time when we will have things that might even measure and report bits of your blood chemistry. We're very close to that, for example, with blood sugar.

That data might, through the concepts of Platform 3.0, provide a really personalized and much more immediate healthcare loop in the patient care. Again, these are all things a few years out. The Open Group is deliberately choosing to get in early, so we and our members can be informed about these trends, how to take advantage of them and what standards are going to be needed to do it.

We can go on about finance too, but it's also another area where this massive data that will need to be correlated and analyzed.

Gardner: You are saying that not only are we facing an internet of things, we're going to be facing an internet of living things as well. So, there's a lot of data to come.

The Open Group is deliberately choosing to get in early, so we and our members can be informed about these trends.

One of the great things about The Open Group that I've been observing over the years is that it really provides a super important environment for different types of organizations to collaborate and share their stories and understand what others are doing, both in their own vertical industries, but also another types of business.

I expect that’s really going to be a huge benefit to organizations as they transition towards Platform 3.0, to learn from how others are doing it and even how others have stumbled along the way? But do you have any early indicators, either examples or use cases that would illustrate just how important this is, how instrumental this can be in helping companies?

Let's go across our panel. Mark Skilton at Capgemini, any examples that we could point to that would indicate that when you do this well, when you transition, when you take advantage of all these changes in tandem, you get pragmatic and even measurable benefit.

Skilton: Identifying business value is the key and builds on what David was talking about in terms of having new types of data, sensors, and capabilities. What we’re finding is clients are dealing with this in eHealth, eGovernment and eFinance.  

Cost of health care

In the health sector the rising cost of health care and the increasing life expectancy and longevity of the population is increasing pressure on the cost of health care in many countries. eHealth initiatives, use of new technologies such as mobile patient monitoring, and improved digital patient record management and care planning will aim to drive down the cost of medical care while improving the quality of life of patients.

In the federal government sector the eGov initiatives seek to develop citizen services and value for money of public spend programs. Open data initiatives aim to develop information and marketing sharing of services.

What can we do there to accelerate the adoption of services across markets. How can we actually bring mobile services to customers quickly? How can we grow growth of different vertical and horizontal markets?  They're looking for convergence of Platform 3.0 services where I can offer portal services.

In the finance sector we see adoption of new technologies to scale to multiple consumer markets with rapid insight and large scale data analytics to profile financial behavior and credit risk profiles for example.

A recent seminar that I was involved in was about cost avoidance of the future cost of investing in more infrastructure. How can you bring big data and social capabilities together, bring new experiences and improve quality of life, and improve the citizens' value of services from their government? How can you drive new financial processes and services? There are many similar case studies across multiple industries.

But it's really early days yet. The idea of Platform 3.0 is only just crystallizing.

Gardner: Chris Harding, being involved with interoperability so deeply, are there any examples or use cases that you can point to where not only are organizations looking internally for better efficiency and productivity gain, but perhaps are expanding the capabilities of Platform 3.0 outside of their organizations into a ecosystem or even greater? What are some of the divisions around extending 3.0 benefits into a wider, collaborative environment?

Harding: If you want a practical but historical example of how shared information, analytics, collection, distribution can empower a whole industry, you only have to look at the finance industry, where it's been commonplace actually for some time. Shared information is collected in real time, various companies analyze it, and it's distributed and made available in graphical form. You can probably get it on your mobile phone if you want.

Imagine how that kind of information processing ability could be translated into other areas, such as healthcare, so that on a routine basis, medical people could get up-to-the-minute information on critical patients wherever they are. You can see what possibilities we are looking at.

But it's really early days yet. The idea of Platform 3.0 is only just crystallizing, and the point of it is, to pick up on Mark's point, that enterprises everywhere are constantly under pressure to do more and more with fewer and fewer resources. That’s why some kind of standard platform that will enable industries across the board to take advantage of this kind of possibility is something that we really need.

Lounsbury: We all know the Gartner hype cycle. We get out on the early edge of things. We see the possibilities, and then there is the trough of disillusionment. Chris has touched on something very important that I think is necessary for there to be a successful transition to this Platform 3.0 world we envisioned.

Data growth

One of the big risks here is that we see figures that say the amount of data produced doubles every 1.2 years. Well, the rate of growth of people who can deal with that data, data scientists and whatever, is pretty much a linear growth. Maybe it's 5 percent a year or 10 percent a year, or something like that, but it's not doubling every 1.2 years.

One of the reasons that it's very important for people to come in, get engaged, and start bringing in these use cases that you've mentioned is because the sooner we get to have common understandings and common approaches, the more efficient our industrial base and our use of the big data will be.

The biggest challenge to actually attaining the value of Platform of 3.0 will be having the human processes and the business processes needed to deal with that volume and velocity that Mark alluded to right at the beginning. To me that's a critical aspect that we've got to bring in -- how we get the people aware of this as well.

Gardner: We're getting close to the end, but looking to the future, Dave, we think about the ability of the data to be so powerful when processed properly, when recommendations can be delivered to the right place at the right time, but we also recognize that there are limits to a manual or even human level approach to that, scientist by scientist, analysis by analysis.

When we think about the implications of automation, it seems like there were already some early examples of where bringing cloud, data, social, mobile, interactions, granularity of interactions together, that we've begun to see that how a recommendation engine could be brought to bear. I'm thinking about the Siri capability at Apple and even some of the examples of the Watson Technology at IBM.

In the future, we'll be talking about a multiplicity of information that is not just about services at your location or your personal lifestyle or your working preferences.

So to our panel, are there unknown unknowns about where this will lead in terms of having extraordinary intelligence, a super computer or data center of super computers, brought to bear almost any problem instantly and then the result delivered directly to a center, a smart phone, any number of end points?

It seems that the potential here is mind boggling. Mark Skilton, any thought?

Skilton: What we're talking about is the next generation of the internet.  The advent of IPv6 and the explosion in multimedia services, will start to drive the next generation of the internet.

I think that in the future, we'll be talking about a multiplicity of information that is not just about services at your location or your personal lifestyle or your working preferences. We'll see a convergence of information and services across multiple devices and new types of “co-presence services” that interact with your needs and social networks to provide predictive augmented information value.

When you start to get much more information about the context of where you are, the insight into what's happening, and the predictive nature of these, it becomes something that becomes much more embedding into everyday life and in real time in context of what you are doing.

I expect to see much more intelligent applications coming forward on mobile devices in the next 5 to 10 years driven by this interconnected explosion of real time processing data, traffic, devices and social networking we describe in the scope of platform 3.0. This will add augmented intelligence and is something that’s really exciting and a complete game changer. I would call it the next killer app.

First-mover benefits

Gardner: Chris Harding, there's this notion of intelligence brought to bear rapidly in context, at a manageable cost. This seems to me a big change for businesses. We could, of course, go into the social implications as well, but just for businesses, that alone to me would be an incentive to get thinking and acting on this. So any thoughts about where businesses that do this well would be able to have significant advantage and first mover benefits?

Harding: Businesses always are taking stock. They understand their environments. They understand how the world that they live in is changing and they understand what part they play in it. It will be down to individual businesses to look at this new technical possibility and say, "So now this is where we could make a change to our business." It's the vision moment where you see a combination of technical possibility and business advantage that will work for your organization.

It's going to be different for every business, and I'm very happy to say this, it's something that computers aren’t going to be able to do for a very long time yet. It's going to really be down to business people to do this as they have been doing for centuries and millennia, to understand how they can take advantage of these things.

So it's a very exciting time, and we'll see businesses understanding and developing their individual business visions as the starting point for a cycle of business transformation, which is what we'll be very much talking about in Philadelphia. So yes, there will be businesses that gain advantage, but I wouldn’t point to any particular business, or any particular sector and say, "It's going to be them" or "It's going to be them."

Pick your industry, and there is huge amount of knowledge base that humans must currently keep on top of.

Gardner: Dave Lounsbury, a last word to you. In terms of some of the future implications and vision, where could this could lead in the not too distant future?

Lounsbury: I'd disagree a bit with my colleagues on this, and this could probably be a podcast on its own, Dana. You mentioned Siri, and I believe IBM just announced the commercial version of its Watson recommendation and analysis engine for use in some customer-facing applications.

I definitely see these as the thin end of the wedge on filling that gap between the growth of data and the analysis of data. I can imagine in not in the next couple of years, but in the next couple of technology cycles, that we'll see the concept of recommendations and analysis as a service, to bring it full circle to cloud. And keep in mind that all of case law is data and all of the medical textbooks ever written are data. Pick your industry, and there is huge amount of knowledge base that humans must currently keep on top of.

This approach and these advances in the recommendation engines driven by the availability of big data are going to produce profound changes in the way knowledge workers produce their job. That’s something that businesses, including their IT functions, absolutely need to stay in front of to remain competitive in the next decade or so.

Gardner: Well, great. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. There will be lots more to hear at the conference itself. Today we've been talking about the business implications of the shift to Platform 3.0. They're coming about, and we can start to plan for transitions. We've seen how Platform 3.0 provides a potential game-changing opportunity for companies to leverage advanced intelligence and automation and heighten productivity in their businesses.

This special BriefingsDirect discussion comes to you in conjunction with The Open Group Conference this July, in 2013, in Philadelphia. It’s not too late to register or to follow the proceedings online and also via Twitter. You'll hear more about Platform 3.0 as well as enterprise transformation and how that’s impacting specifically the finance, government, and healthcare sectors. [Registration to the conference remains open. Follow the conference on Twitter at #ogPHL.]

I'd like to thank our panel for joining us today. It has been very interesting. Thank you Dave Lounsbury, Chief Technical Officer at The Open Group.

Lounsbury: Thank you, Dana, thank you for hosting the discussion, and we look forward to seeing many of the listeners in Philadelphia.

Gardner: We've also been here with Chris Harding, Director of Interoperability at The Open Group. Thanks so much, Chris.

Harding: Thank you, Dana, it's been a great discussion.

Gardner: And lastly, thanks to Mark Skilton, Global Director in the Strategic Office at Capgemini. Thank you, sir.

Skilton: Thank you, Dana, and to Dave and Chris. It's been an interesting, very topical discussion. Thank you very much.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host and moderator throughout these thought leader interviews. Thanks again for listening, and come back next time.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast on how The Open Group is working to stay ahead of converging challenges organization face with big data, mobile, cloud and social. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2013. All rights reserved.

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SOA Provides Needed Support for Enterprise Architecture in Cloud, Mobile, Big Data, Says Open Group Panel

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect panel discussion on how SOA principles are becoming cheaper and easier to implement as enterprises move to the cloud.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

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

Today, we present a sponsored podcast discussion on the resurgent role of service-oriented architecture (SOA) and how its benefits are being revisited as practical and relevant in the cloud, mobile, and big-data era.

We've gathered an international panel of experts to explore the concept of "architecture is destiny," especially when it comes to hybrid services delivery and management. We'll see how SOA is proving instrumental in allowing the needed advancements over highly distributed services and data, when it comes to scale, heterogeneity support, and governance.

Here to share his insights on the back-to-the-future role and practicality of SOA is Chris Harding, Director of Interoperability at The Open Group. He's based in the UK. Welcome, Chris. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Chris Harding: Hi, Dana. It's great to be on this panel.

Gardner: We're also here with Nikhil Kumar, President of Applied Technology Solutions and Co-Chair of the SOA Reference Architecture Projects within The Open Group, and he is based in Michigan.

Nikhil Kumar: Hello, Dana. I'm looking forward to being on the panel and participating.

Gardner: We're also here with Mats Gejnevall, Enterprise Architect at Capgemini and Co-Chair of The Open Group SOA Work Group, and he's based in Sweden. Thanks for joining us, Mats.

Mats Gejnevall: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: All right, Chris, tell me little bit about this resurgence that we've all been noticing in the interest around SOA.

Harding: My observation is from a slightly indirect perspective. My role in The Open Group is to support the work of our members on SOA, cloud computing, and other topics. We formed the SOA Work Group back in 2005, when SOA was a real emerging hot topic, and we set up a number of activities and projects. They're all completed.

I was thinking that the SOA Work Group would wind down, move into maintenance mode, and meet once every few months or so, but we still get a fair attendance at our regular web meetings. In fact, we've started two new projects and we're about to start a third one. So from that, as I said, indirect observation, it's very clear that there is still an interest, and indeed a renewed interest, in SOA from the IT community within The Open Group.

Larger trends

Gardner: Nikhil, do you believe that this has to do with some of the larger trends we're seeing in the field, like cloud Software as a Service (SaaS), and hybrid services? From your perspective, is this what's driving this renewal?

Kumar: What I see driving it is three things. One is the advent of the cloud and mobile, which requires a lot of cross-platform delivery of consistent services. The second is emerging technologies, mobile, big data, and the need to be able to look at data across multiple contexts.


The third thing that’s driving it is legacy modernization. A lot of organizations are now a lot more comfortable with SOA concepts. I see it in a number of our customers. I've just been running a large enterprise architecture initiative in a Fortune 500 customer.

At each stage, and at almost every point in that, they're now comfortable. They feel that SOA can provide the ability to rationalize multiple platforms. They're restructuring organizational structures, delivery organizations, as well as targeting their goals around a service-based platform capability.

So legacy modernization is a back-to-the-future kind of thing that has come back and is getting adoption. The way it's being implemented is using RESTful services, as well as SOAP services, which is different from traditional SOA, say from the last version, which was mostly SOAP-driven.

Gardner: Mats, do you think that what's happened is that the marketplace and the requirements have changed and that’s made SOA more relevant? Or has SOA changed to better fit the market? Or perhaps some combination?

Gejnevall: I think that the cloud is really a service delivery platform. Companies discover that to be able to use the cloud services, the SaaS things, they need to look at SOA as their internal development way of doing things as well. They understand they need to do the architecture internally, and if they're going to use lots of external cloud services, you might as well use SOA to do that.

Also, if you look at the cloud suppliers, they also need to do their architecture in some way and SOA probably is a good vehicle for them. They can use that paradigm and also deliver what the customer wants in a well-designed SOA environment.

Gardner: Let's drill down on the requirements around the cloud and some of the key components of SOA. We're certainly seeing, as you mentioned, the need for cross support for legacy, cloud types of services, and using a variety of protocol, transports, and integration types. We already heard about REST for lightweight approaches and, of course, there will still be the need for object brokering and some of the more traditional enterprise integration approaches.

This really does sound like the job for an Enterprise Service Bus (ESB). So let's go around the panel and look at this notion of an ESB. Some people, a few years back, didn’t think it was necessary or a requirement for SOA, but it certainly sounds like it's the right type of functionality for the job. Do you agree with that, Chris?

Loosely coupled

Harding: I believe so, but maybe we ought to consider that in the cloud context, you're not just talking about within a single enterprise. You're talking about a much more loosely coupled, distributed environment, and the ESB concept needs to take account of that in the cloud context.

Gardner: Nikhil, any thoughts about how to manage this integration requirement around the modern SOA environment and whether ESBs are more or less relevant as a result?

Kumar: In the context of a cloud we really see SOA and the concept of service contracts coming to the fore. In that scenario, ESBs play a role as a broker within the enterprise. When we talk about the interaction across cloud-service providers and cloud consumers, what we're seeing is that the service provider has his own concept of an ESB within its own internal context.

If you want your cloud services to be really reusable, the concept of the ESB then becomes more for the routing and the mediation of those services, once they're provided to the consumer. There's a kind of separation of concerns between the concept of a traditional ESB and a cloud ESB, if you want to call it that.

The cloud context involves more of the need to be able to support, enforce, and apply governance concepts and audit concepts, the capabilities to ensure that the interaction meets quality of service guarantees. That's a little different from the concept that drove traditional ESBs.

That’s why you're seeing API management platforms like Layer 7, Mashery, or Apigee and other kind of product lines. They're also coming into the picture, driven by the need to be able to support the way cloud providers are provisioning their services. As Chris put it, you're looking beyond the enterprise. Who owns it? That’s where the role of the ESB is different from the traditional concept.

Gardner: Do you think there is a security angle to that as well or at least access and privilege types of controls?

Kumar: Absolutely. Most cloud platforms have cost factors associated with locality. If you have truly global enterprises and services, you need to factor in the ability to deal with safe harbor issues and you need to factor in variations and law in terms of security governance.

The platforms that are evolving are starting to provide this out of the box. The service consumer or a service provider needs to be able to support those. That's going to become the role of their ESB in the future, to be able to consume a service, to be able to assert this quality-of-service guarantee, and manage constraints or data-in-flight and data-at-rest.

Gardner: Mats, it sounds as if the ESB, as Nikhil is describing it, would be more of an intermediary between the internal organization and external services. Does that jibe with what you're seeing in the market, or are there other aspects of the concept of ESB that are now relevant to the cloud?

Entire stack

Gejnevall: One of the reasons SOA didn’t really take off in many organizations three, four, or five years ago was the need to buy the entire stack of SOA products that all the consultancies were asking companies to buy, wanting them to buy an ESB, governance tools, business process management tools, and a lot of sort of quite large investments to just get your foot into the door of doing SOA.

These days you can buy that kind of stuff. You can buy the entire stack in the cloud and start playing with it. I did some searches on it today and I found a company that you can play with the entire stack, including business tools and everything like that, for zero dollars. Then you can grow and use more and more of it in your business, but you can start to see if this is something for you.

In the past, the suppliers or the consultants told you that you could do it. You couldn’t really try it out yourself. You needed both the software and the hardware in place. The money to get started is much lower today. That's another reason people might be thinking about it these days.

Gardner: It sounds as if there's a new type of on-ramp to SOA values, and the componentry that supports SOA is still being delivered as a service. On top of that, you're also able to consume it in a pay-as-you-go manner. Do you agree, Chris Harding, that there's a new type of on-ramp to SOA now that might be part of this resurgence?

Harding: That's a very good point, but there are two contradictory trends we are seeing here. One is the kind of trend that Mats is describing, where the technology you need to handle a complex stack is becoming readily available in the cloud.

One of the reasons SOA didn’t really take off in many organizations three, four, or five years ago was the need to buy the entire stack of SOA products

And the other is the trend that Nikhil mentioned: to go for a simpler style, which a lot of people term REST, for accessing services. It will be interesting to see how those two tendencies play out against each other.

Kumar: I'd like to make a comment on that. The approach for the on-ramp is really one of the key differentiators of the cloud, because you have the agility and the lack of capital investment (CAPEX) required to test things out.

But as we are evolving with cloud platforms, I'm also seeing with a lot of Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) vendor scenarios that they're trying the ESB in the stack itself. They're providing it in their cloud fabric. A couple of large players have already done that.

Gardner: I guess we could rethink that as Integration as a Service. Does that make sense?

Kumar: Yes. For example, Azure provides that in the forward-looking vision. I am sure IBM and Oracle have already started down that path. A lot of the players are going to provide it as a core capability.

Pre-integrated environment

Gejnevall: Another interesting thing is that they could get a whole environment that's pre-integrated. Usually, when you buy these things from a vendor, a lot of times they don't fit together that well. Now, there’s an effort to make them work together.

But some people put these open-source tools together. Some people have done that and put them out on the cloud, which gives them a pretty cheap platform for themselves. Then, they can sell it at a reasonable price, because of the integration of all these things.

Gardner: There seem to be a couple of different approaches in the market. One would be the à-la-carte approach, perhaps most popularized by Amazon Web Services (AWS), where you can just get discrete Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) componentry or granular approaches.

There's also the move toward a fuller stack of integrated services that would work in total, perhaps even across a lifecycle of software, from development, to deployment, to advancement, into integration and process.

Any thoughts from the panel on these two approaches? Will there be more à la carte or more integration? I guess it depends on the organization how they want to consume this. Chris?

Harding: There are two different approaches for the architect to choose between. You can go for the basic IaaS from Amazon. You can put stack onto it. Maybe you can get open-source products and put them onto that stack. That will give you the kind of platform on which you're going to deploy your services.

You need to make sure that the stuff that you're using out there are things that you can actually bring home and use at home as well.

Or you can go for PaaS with a platform ready there and integrate it. If you go for the PaaS already there and integrate it, then you should watch out for how far you're locked into that particular cloud provider, because you're using special services in that platform.

Gejnevall: It's an important issue there, because what happens if you buy the whole stack in the cloud somewhere? It's done by very specific tools that you can't move into your own environment later on, and that cloud supplier goes under, and suddenly you're in a pretty bad shape. You need to make sure that the stuff that you're using out there are things that you can actually bring home and use at home as well.

Gardner: Nikhil, it sounds as if the cloud model might be evolving toward what is all-inclusive, at least a lot of people would like to provide that. But SOA, I think by its nature and its definition, advances an ocean of interoperability, and being able to plug and play across existing, current, and then future sets of service possibilities. Are we talking about SOA being an important element of keeping clouds dynamic and flexible?

Kumar: We can think about the OSI 7 Layer Model. We're evolving in terms of complexity, right? So from an interoperability perspective, we may talk SOAP or REST, for example, but the interaction with AWS, Salesforce, SmartCloud, or Azure would involve using APIs that each of these platforms provide for interaction.

Lock-in

So you could have an AMI, which is an image on the Amazon Web Services environment, for example, and that could support a lab stack or an open source stack. How you interact with it, how you monitor it, how you cluster it, all of those aspects now start factoring in specific APIs, and so that's the lock-in.

From an architect’s perspective, I look at it as we need to support proper separation of concerns, and that's part of [The Open Group] SOA Reference Architecture. That's what we tried to do, to be able to support implementation architectures that support that separation of concerns.

There's another factor that we need to understand from the context of the cloud, especially for mid-to-large sized organizations, and that is that the cloud service providers, especially the large ones -- Amazon, Microsoft, IBM -- encapsulate infrastructure.

If you were to go to Amazon, Microsoft, or IBM and use their IaaS networking capabilities, you'd have one of the largest WAN networks in the world, and you wouldn’t have to pay a dime to establish that infrastructure. Not in terms of the cost of the infrastructure, not in terms of the capabilities required, nothing. So that's an advantage that the cloud is bringing, which I think is going to be very compelling.

The other thing is that, from an SOA context, you're now able to look at it and say, "Well, I'm dealing with the cloud, and what all these providers are doing is make it seamless, whether you're dealing with the cloud or on-premise." That's an important concept.

From an SOA perspective, the cloud has become very compelling.

Now, each of these providers and different aspects of their stacks are at significantly different levels of maturity. Many of these providers may find that their stacks do not interoperate with themselves either, within their own stacks, just because they're using different run times, different implementations, etc. That's another factor to take in.

From an SOA perspective, the cloud has become very compelling, because I'm dealing, let's say, with a Salesforce.com and I want to use that same service within the enterprise, let's say, an insurance capability for Microsoft Dynamics or for SugarCRM. If that capability is exposed to one source of truth in the enterprise, you've now reduced the complexity and have the ability to adopt different cloud platforms.

What we are going to start seeing is that the cloud is going to shift from being just one à-la-carte solution for everybody. It's going to become something similar to what we used to deal with in the enterprise context. You had multiple applications, which you service-enabled to reduce complexity and provide one service-based capability, instead of an application-centered approach.

You're now going to move the context to the cloud, to your multiple cloud solutions, and maybe many implementations in a nontrivial environment for the same business capability, but they are now exposed to services in the enterprise SOA. You could have Salesforce. You could have Amazon. You could have an IBM implementation. And you could pick and choose the source of truth and share it.

So a lot of the core SOA concepts will still apply and are still applying.

Gardner: Mats, it sounds that with this vision of a cloud of clouds and increasingly services being how you manage that diversity, getting competency at SOA now will put you in a much better position to be able to exploit and leverage these cloud services as we go forward. Does that make sense?

Governance issue

Gejnevall: Absolutely, but the governance issue pops up here all the time as well, because if you are going to use lots of services out there, you want to have some kind of control. You might want to have a control over your cloud suppliers. You don't want to start up a lot of shadow IT all over your enterprise. You still want to have some kind of control.

An idea that is popping up now is that, instead of giving the business direct access to all these cloud suppliers, you probably have to govern those services and look at governance features. You can measure the usage of all these external SaaS things, and then if you don't like the supplier and you can't negotiate the right price, you just move to another supplier that supplies a similar type of service.

This works fine in SOA and SaaS context, but it's much harder to do that from a PaaS or IaaS. From the SaaS point of view, you really need to get control over those services, because otherwise the business is going to go wild. Then, you buy new stuff all over the place, and suddenly they die out and then the business stops working, and there is no control over that.

Gardner: Chris Harding, another pillar of SOA traditionally has been the use of registry and repositories to help manage some of that chaos that Mats was referring to. We've also seen a lot of interest in the concept of the app store, popularized by Apple with its iOS interfaces and its application buying and managing. Are we seeing a need for app stores in the enterprise that are, in a sense, the registry and repository of SOA?

Harding: The app store concept is coming in, in several forms and it seems to be meeting a number of different needs.

From the SaaS point of view, you really need to get control over those services, because otherwise the business is going to go wild.

Yes, you have the app stores that cloud vendors have to let people pick from their product. You have the government app stores organized to enable government departments to get a good choice of cloud services. In some ways, they're taking over from the idea of the registry and the repository, or doing some of the functions.

In particular, the idea that you used to have of service discovery, of automatically going out and discovering services, is being replaced by the concept of selecting services from app stores. But, of course, there is a fundamental difference between the app store, which is something that you get your service from, and the registry that you keep, which is the registry of the services that you have got from wherever.

Gardner: It does seem important for the governance.

Gejnevall: I also think that the concept of the app stores has taught a lot of business people to use this kind of thinking. I have this huge list of things that I can do within my business. Now with the smartphones, they used to go and search for that and see what kind of stuff can I do with the IP I've got in my business. By providing similar kinds of things to the business people, they can go and search and see that these are other things I can do within my business. You can download them on your laptop, your phone, or whatnot.

That will change the relationship a bit between the business side and the IT side of things.

Another on-ramp

Gardner: Perhaps yet another on-ramp to the use of SOA types of models and thinking, the app store allowing for discovery, socialization of services, but at the same time, providing governance and control, because the organization can decide what app store you use, what apps get in the store, or what app stores are available.

Kumar: I have a few comments on that, because we're seeing that with a lot of our customers, typically the vendors who support PaaS solution associate app store models along with their platform as a mechanism to gain market share.

The issue that you run into with that is, it's okay if it's on your cellphone or on your iPad, your tablet PC, or whatever, but once you start having managed apps, for example Salesforce, or if you have applications which are being deployed on an Azure or on a SmartCloud context, you have high risk scenario. You don't know how well architected that application is. It's just like going and buying an enterprise application.

When you deploy it in the cloud, you really need to understand the cloud PaaS platform for that particular platform to understand the implications in terms of dependencies and cross-dependencies across apps that you have installed. They have real practical implications in terms of maintainability and performance. We've seen that with at least two platforms in the last six months.

Governance becomes extremely important. Because of the low CAPEX implications to the business, the business is very comfortable with going and buying these applications and saying, "We can install X, Y, or Z and it will cost us two months and a few million dollars and we are all set." Or maybe it's a few hundred thousand dollars.

When you deploy it in the cloud, you really need to understand the cloud PaaS platform for that particular platform.

They don't realize the implications in terms of interoperability, performance, and standard architectural quality attributes that can occur. There is a governance aspect from the context of the cloud provisioning of these applications.

There is another aspect to it, which is governance in terms of the run-time, more classic SOA governance, to measure, assert, and to view the cost of these applications in terms of performance to your infrastructural resources, to your security constraints. Also, are there scenarios where the application itself has a dependency on a daisy chain, multiple external applications, to trace the data?

In terms of the context of app stores, they're almost like SaaS with a particular platform in mind. They provide the buyer with certain commitments from the platform manager or the platform provider, such as security. When you buy an app from Apple, there is at least a reputational expectation of security from the vendor.

What you do not always know is if that security is really being provided. There's a risk there for organizations who are exposing mission-critical data to that.

The second thing is there is still very much a place for the classic SOA registries and repositories in the cloud. Only the place is for a different purpose. Those registries and repositories are used either by service providers or by consumers to maintain the list of services they're using internally.

Different paradigms

There are two different paradigms. The app store is a place where I can go and I know that the gas I am going to get is 85 percent ethanol, versus I also have to maintain some basic set of goods at home to make that I have my dinner on time. These are different kind of roles and different kind of purposes they're serving.

Above all, I think the thing that's going to become more and more important in the context of the cloud is that the functionality will be provided by the cloud platform or the app you buy, but the governance will be a major IT responsibility, right from the time of picking the app, to the time of delivering it, to the time of monitoring it.

Gardner: It's a very interesting topic. Chris Harding, tell me a little bit about how The Open Group is allowing architects to better exercise SOA principles, as they're grappling with some of these issues around governance, hybrid services delivery and management, and the use and demand in their organizations to start consuming more cloud services?

Harding: The architect’s primary concern, of course, has to be to meet the needs of the client and to do so in a way that is most effective and that is cost-effective. Cloud gives the architect a usability to go out and get different components much more easily than hitherto.

There is a problem, of course, with integrating them and putting them together. SOA can provide part of the solution to that problem, in that it gives a principle of loosely coupled services. If you didn’t have that when you were trying to integrate different functionality from different places, you would be in a real mess.

The Open Group’s real role is to support the architect and help the architect to better meet the needs of the architect client.

What The Open Group contributes is a set of artifacts that enable the architect to think through how to meet the client’s needs in the best way when working with SOA and cloud.

For example, the SOA Reference Architecture helps the architect understand what components might be brought into the solution. We have the SOA TOGAF Practical Guide, which helps the architect understand how to use TOGAF in the SOA context.

We're working further on artifacts in the cloud space, the Cloud Computing Reference Architecture, a notational language for enabling people to describe cloud ecosystems on recommendations for cloud interoperability and portability. We're also working on recommendations for cloud governance to complement the recommendations for SOA governance, the SOA Governance Framework Standards that we have already produced, and a number of other artifacts.

The Open Group’s real role is to support the architect and help the architect to better meet the needs of the architect client.

Gardner: Very good. And perhaps just quickly Chris, you could fill us in as a recap of some of the SOA activities at your recent Washington D.C. Conference.

New SOA activities

Harding: We're looking at some new SOA activities. In fact, we've started an activity to look at SOA for business technology. From the very early days, SOA was seen as bringing a closer connection between the business and technology. A lot of those promises that were made about SOA seven or eight years ago are only now becoming possible to fulfill, and that business front is what that project is looking at.

We're also producing an update to the SOA Reference Architectures. We have input the SOA Reference Architecture for consideration by the ISO Group that is looking at an International Standard Reference Architecture for SOA and also to the IEEE Group that is looking at an IEEE Standard Reference Architecture.

We hope that both of those groups will want to work along the principles of our SOA Reference Architecture and we intend to produce a new version that incorporates the kind of ideas that they want to bring into the picture.

We're also thinking of setting up an SOA project to look specifically at assistance to architects building SOA into enterprise solutions.

So those are three new initiatives that should result in new Open Group standards and guides to complement, as I have described already, the SOA Reference Architecture, the SOA Governance Framework, the Practical Guides to using TOGAF for SOA.

We're also thinking of setting up an SOA project to look specifically at assistance to architects building SOA into enterprise solutions.

We also have the Service Integration Maturity Model that we need to assess the SOA maturity. We have a standard on service orientation applied to cloud infrastructure, and we have a formal SOA Ontology.

Those are the things The Open Group has in place at present to assist the architect, and we are and will be working on three new things: version 2 of the Reference Architecture for SOA, SOA for business technology, and I believe shortly we'll start on assistance to architects in developing SOA solutions.

Gardner: Very good. I'm afraid we'll have to leave it there. We're about out of time. We've been talking about how SOA is proving instrumental in allowing the needed advancements over highly distributed services and data, especially when it comes to the scale, heterogeneity support, and governance requirements of cloud computing.

Please join me now in thanking our panel. Chris Harding, Director of Interoperability for The Open Group. Thanks so much, Chris.

Harding: Thank you very much, Dana.

Gardner: We're also here with Nikhil Kumar, President of Applied Technology Solutions and Co-Chair of the SOA Reference Architecture Project within The Open Group. Thank you so much.

Kumar: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: And Mats Gejnevall, Enterprise Architect at Capgemini and Co-Chair of The Open Group SOA Work Group. Thanks, Mats.

Gejnevall: Thanks, Dana. It was an interesting discussion.

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

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Download the transcript. Sponsor: The Open Group.

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect panel discussion on how SOA principles are becoming cheaper and easier to implement as enterprises move to the cloud. Copyright The Open Group and Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2012. All rights reserved.

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