Confluence of Global Trends Ups Ante for Improved IT Governance to Prevent Costly Business 'Glitches'

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingDirect podcast on the growing danger from faulty software and how to overcome it.

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

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 nature of, and some possible solutions for, a growing parade of enterprise-scale glitches. The headlines these days are full of big, embarrassing corporate and government "gotchas."

These complex snafus cost a ton of money, severely damage a company’s reputation, and most importantly, can hurt or even kill people.

From global auto recalls to bank failures, and the cyber crime that can uproot the private information from millions of users, the scale and damage that technology-accelerated glitches can inflict on businesses and individuals has probably never been higher. So what is at the root?

Is it a technology run amok problem, or a complexity spinning out of control issue -- and why is it seemingly worse now?

A new book is coming out this summer that explores the relationship between glitches and technology, specifically the role of software use and development in the era of cloud computing.

It turns out the role and impact of governance over people, process, and technology comes up again and again in the new book.

We have with us here today the author of the book as well as a software expert from IBM to delve into the causes and effects of glitches and how governance relates to the problem and fixes.

Please join me in welcoming our guests, Jeff Papows, President and CEO of WebLayers, and the author of Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software. Welcome to the show, Jeff.

Jeff Papows: Thanks, Dana. Thanks for having us on.

Gardner: We're also here with Kerrie Holley, IBM fellow and Chief Technology Officer for IBM’s SOA Center of Excellence. Welcome to the show, Kerrie.

Kerrie Holley: Thank you, very much.

Gardner: Jeff, let me start with you. Now, the general trends around these complex issues are affecting business and probably affecting just about everyone’s lives. How do these seem to be something that’s different? Is there an inflection point? Is there something different now that 20 years ago in terms of the intersection of business with technology?

Papows: There is. I’ve done a lot of research in the past 10 months and what we're actually seeing is the confluence of three primary factors that are creating an information technology perfect storm of sorts. Some of these are obvious, but it’s the convergence of the three that’s creating problems on the scale that you are describing here.

The first is a loss of intellectual capital. For the first time in our careers -- the three of us have all been at this for a long time now -- we saw, between 2000 and 2007, the first drop in computer science graduates. That's the other side of the dot-com implosion.

Mainframe adoption patterns

While it’s not always popular or glamorous to talk about, 70 percent of the world’s critical infrastructure still runs on IBM mainframes. Yet, the focus of most of our new computer science graduates and early life professionals is on Java, XML, and the open and more modern development languages.

For the first time in our lifetimes and careers, the preponderance of that COBOL-based analytical community is retiring and/or -- God forbid -- aging and dying. That’s created a significant problem, concurrent with a time where the merger and consolidation activity -- the other side of the recession of 2008 -- have created this massive complexity in these giant mash-ups and critical back-office systems. For example, the mergers between Bank of America and Countrywide, and on and on.

The third factor is just the sheer ubiquity of the technological complexity curve. It’s the magnitude of technology that’s now part of our social fabric, whether it’s literally one million transistors that now exist for every human being on the planet or the six billion network devices that exist in the world today, all of which are accessing the same critical, in many cases, back-office structures.

It's reached the point, Dana, from a consumer standpoint, where 60 percent of the value of our automobiles now consists of networked electronic components -- not the drive trains, engines, and the other things. Look at the recent glitches you have seen at places like Toyota.

You take those three meta-level factors and put them together and we're making the morning broadcast news cycles now on a daily basis with, as you said, more and more of these embarrassing things coming to light. They're not just inconvenient, but there are monumental economic consequences -- and we're killing people.

Gardner: Kerrie Holley, we've looked at some of these issues -- society issues, organizational issues, and the technology behind them -- but technology has also been part of the solution or the ability to scale and manage and automate. I think service oriented architecture (SOA) has a major impact on that.

So, are we at a point where the ability of technology to keep up with the rate of growth is out of whack? What do you sense is behind some of this and why hasn't the technology been there to fix it along the way?

Holley: Jeff brought up some excellent points, which are spot-on. The other thing that we see is that we've had this growth of distributed computing. The easy stuff we've actually accomplished already.

If we look at a lot of what businesses are trying to accomplish today, whether it’s a new business model, differentiation, or whatever they're trying to do compete, what we are finding is that the complexity of that solution is pretty significant.

It's something that we obviously can do. If we look at a lot of technologies that are out in the market place, unfortunately, in many cases they are siloed. They repair or they help with a part of the problem, but perhaps they're not holistic in dealing with the whole life-cycle that is necessary to create some of this value.

Secondly -- this is a point-in-time statement -- we're seeing rapid improvements in the technology to solve this. With Jeff's company and other organizations, we are seeing that today. It hasn’t caught up, but I think it will. In summary, Jeff brought up several points in terms of the fact that we have ubiquitous devices and a tremendous amount of computing power. We have programming available to the masses. We have eight-year-olds, grandmothers, and everyone in between, writing software.

Connecting devices

We have a tremendous need to connect mobile devices and front-ends. We have 3D Internet. We just have an explosion of technologies that we have to integrate. Along with that comes some of the challenges in terms of how we make this agile, and how we make it such that it doesn't break. How do we make sure that we actually get the value propositions that we see? Clearly, SOA is a part of the solution, but it's certainly not the end-all in terms of how we repair and how we get better.

Gardner: One of the things that intrigues me about SOA is the emphasis on governance. To get the best out of a distributed services-orientation, you need to think at the very beginning and throughout the process about how to manage, automate, and reuse, as well as the feedback loops into the process -- all on an ongoing basis.

It strikes me that if that works for SOA, it probably also works for management and organizations, and it works for the relationship between workers and customers. Let me take this back to you, Jeff. Is governance also in catch-up mode? Do we have a sense of how to govern the technology, but not necessarily the process? Is that what's behind some of it?

Papows: You're right, Dana. There's a cultural maturation process here. Let's look at a couple of the broad economic planks that have affected how we got here, because I've been in the software industry for 30 years now. Remember that the average computer scientist, at least in North America, on average, makes 32 percent more than the mean average in the U.S. economy. And, software, computer services and infrastructure has accounted for about 37 percent of the growth in the gross domestic product in the United States and Asia in the last decade.

So the economic impact and success of our industry almost can’t be overstated. Because of that, we've grown up for decades now where we just threw more and more bodies at the problem, as
the technological curve grew.

All that means is automating those best practices and turning them inward, so that we’re governing ourselves as an industry the way that we would automate or govern many things.

There was always this never-ending economic rosy horizon, where you would just add more IT professionals and you would acquire and you’d merge systems, but rarely would you render
portions of those workforces redundant.

In 2008, the economic malaise that we’re managing our way through changed all of that. Now, the only way out of this complexity curve that we’ve created, to use Kerrie's terms, is turning the innovation that has been the hallmark of our industry back on ourselves.

That means automating and codifying all of the best practices and human capital that’s been in-place and learning for decades in the form of active policy management and inference engines in what we typically think of as SOA and design-time governance.

Really, all that means is automating those best practices and turning them inward, so that we’re governing ourselves as an industry in the same way that we would automate or govern many things. But now it’s no longer a "nice to have." I would argue that it’s critical, because the complexity curve and the economics have crossed and there is no way to put this genie back in the bottle. There is no way to go backward.

Gardner: Kerrie, any thoughts about what’s perhaps now a critical role for governance, perhaps governance up and down the technology spectrum, design time, runtime, but also governance in terms of how the people and processes come together?

Holley: Absolutely. One of the nice things that the attention to SOA has brought to our marketplace is the recognition that we do need to focus on governance. I don’t know of a single client who’s got an SOA implementation who has not, as a minimum, thought about governance. They may not be doing everything they want to do or should be doing, but governance is clearly on the attention span of everyone in terms of recognizing that it needs to be done.

So, when we look at governance and when we look at it around SOA, IT governance is something that we’ve had for a long time. SOA governance is a subset, you could say. It complements, but at the same time, it focuses our attention on, what some of the deltas have brought to the marketplace that require improved governance.

Services lifecycles

That governance is not only around the technology. It’s not only around the life-cycle of services. It’s not only around the use of addressing processes and addressing application development. Governance also focuses on the convergence that’s required between business and IT.

The synergistic relationship that we seek will be promoted through the use of governance. Change management specifically brings about a pretty significant focus, meaning that there will be a focus on the part of the business and the IT organizations and teams to bring about the results that are sought.

Examples of problems

Gardner: Jeff, in your book you identify some examples. Are there any that really stand out I that we can trace back to some root cause in the software lifecycle?

Papows: There are, and it’s unfortunate. The ones that make the greatest memory points and often the national headlines, characteristically are the ones that affect the consumer broadly as opposed to the corporate ones.

Obviously, Toyota is in the headlines everyday now. Actually, there was another news cycle recently about Toyota’s Lexus vehicles. The new models apparently have a glitch in the software that controls the balance system.

The ones that make the greatest memory points and often the national headlines, characteristically are the ones that affect the consumer broadly as opposed to the corporate ones.

One of the most heartbreaking things in the research for the book was on software that controls the radiation devices in our hospitals for cancer treatment. I ran across a bunch of research where, because of some software glitches and policy problems in terms of the way those updates were distributed, people with fairly nominal cancers received massive overdoses in radiation.

The medical professionals running these machines -- like much of our culture, because something is computerized -- just assume that it’s infallible. Because of the problems in governance or lack of governance policy, people were being over-radiated. Instead of targeting small tumors in a very targeted way, people’s entire upper torsos, and unfortunately, in one case, head and neck were targeted.

There are lots of examples like that in the book that may not be as ubiquitous as Toyota, but there are many cases of widespread health, power, energy, and security risks as a consequence of the lack of policy management or governance that Kerrie was speaking to just a few minutes ago.

Gardner: Well, these examples certainly are very poignant and clearly something to avoid. I wonder if these are also perhaps just the tip of the iceberg. In addition to things that are problematic at a critical level, is there also a productivity hit? Are large aspects of work in process not nearly as optimal as they could be or are plagued by mistakes that drag down the process?

I want to take this over to Kerrie. IBM has its Smarter Planet approach. I think they're talking about the issue that we're just not nearly as efficient as we could be. What makes the headlines are these terrible issues, but what we're really talking about is a tremendous amount of waste. Aren’t we?

Things we could do better

Holley: We are. That’s exactly what inefficiency is. It speaks to a lot of waste and a lot of things we could do better. A lot of what we’ve been talking about from a Smarter Planet standpoint is actually the exact issues that Jeff has talked about, which is that the world is getting more instrumented. There are more sensors. There is a convergence of a lot of different technology, SOA, business process management, mobile computing, and cloud computing.

Clearly, on one end of the spectrum, it’s increasing the complexity. On the other end of the spectrum, it’s adding tremendous value to businesses, but it mandates this attention to governance.

Gardner: Jeff, in your book do you offer up some advice or solutions about what companies ought to be doing in this governance arena to deal with these glitches?

Papows: We do. We talk about what I call the IT Governance Manifesto, for lack of another catchy phrase. I make the argument that it’s almost reached the point now where we need to lobby for legislation that requires more stringent reporting of software glitches in cases where there is human health and life at stake. Or, alternately, that we impose fines upon individuals or organizations responsible for cover-ups that put people at risk. Or, we simply require a level of IT governance at organizations that produce products that directly affect productivity and quality of life issues.

Kerrie said this really well, Dana. Remember that about 70 percent of our computer scientists in a given year are basically contending with maintaining the existing application inventories that run all of our financial transactions in core sub-systems and topologies. So, 70 percent of our human capital is there to basically keep the stuff that’s in place running.

So, 70 percent of our human capital is there to basically keep the stuff that’s in place running.

Concurrently, we have this smarter planet, where we’ve got billions of RFID tags in motion and 64-bit microprocessors have reached a price point where they are making the way into our dishwashers. We’ve got this plethora of hand-held devices and applications that’s exploding.

All of that is against the backdrop of this more difficult economy, where we can’t just hire more people without automation. We haven't a prayer keeping our noses about water here.

So, God forbid that we ask the federal government, which moves at a dinosaur’s pace relative to Internet speed, to intercede and insist on some of the stuff. But, if we don’t police our own industry, if we don’t get more serious about this governance, whether it’s IBM or WebLayers or some other technological help, we run the risk of seeing the headlines we’re seeing today become completely ubiquitous.

Gardner: Kerrie, I understand that you’re also penning a book, and it’s focused on SOA. First, could you tell us about it, but then are there any aspects of it that address this issue of governance, maybe from a self-help perspective and of not waiting for some legislation or external direction on it.

Holley: The book that’s going to be out later this year is 100 SOA Questions: Asked and Answered. What my co-author [Ali Arsanjani] and I are trying to accomplish in the book, which distinguishes us from other SOA books in the marketplace, is based on thousands of questions that we’ve experienced over the decade in hundreds of projects where we’ve had first-hand roles in as consultants, architects, and developers. We provide the audience with a hands-on, prescriptive understanding of some of the more difficult questions, and not just have platitudes as answers, but really give the reader an answer they can act on.

We’ve organized the content in a way that you can go by domain. If you’re a business stakeholder, you can go to particular areas. That gets back to your question, because business clearly has a big role to play here. The convergence or the relationship between business and IT has a big role to play.

You can go directly into those sections. We do talk about governance. The book is not about governance, but a good percentage of the questions are on governance. What we try to do is help organizations, clients, practitioners, and executives understand what works what doesn’t work.

Always a choice

One of the examples, a small example, is that we always have a choice when we do a project. We can do it in multitude of ways, but we have a lot of evidence that when governance is not applied, when it’s not automated, when it’s not thought about upfront, the expense on the back-end side is enormous. That expense could be the cost of not having the agility that you foresaw.

The expense could be not having the cost reduction that you foresaw. The expense could be the defects that Jeff has spoken about -- the glitches. There is a tremendous downside to not focusing on governance on the front-side, not looking at it in the beginning. The book really tries to ask and answer the toughest SOA questions that we’ve seen in the marketplace over the last decade.

Gardner: We’ll certainly look forward to that. Back to you Jeff. When we think about governance, it has a bit of a siloed history itself. There's the old form of management, the red-light, green-light approach to IT management. We’ve seen design-time governance, but it seems to be somewhat divorced from, even on a different plane than, runtime or operational governance.

What needs to happen in order to make governance more holistic, more end-to-end?

Papows: It’s a good question, Dana. It’s like everything else in our industry. We’re sometimes our own worst enemy and we get hung up on language, and God forbid, we create yet another acronym headache.

There's an old expression, "Everybody wants governance, but nobody wants to be governed." We run the risk, and I think we’ve tripped over it several times, where we get to the point where developers don’t want to be slowed down. There is this Big Brother-connotation at times to governance. We’ve got to explore a different cultural approach to it.

Governance, whether it’s design time or run time, is really about automating and codifying best practices.

Governance, whether it’s design-time or run-time, is really about automating and codifying best practices, and it’s not done generically as was once taught. It can be, in my experience, very specific. The things we see Ford Motor Co. doing are very different. They're germane to their IT culture and organization, and very different than what we see the Bank of America do, as an example.

To Kerrie’s point about the cost of a lack of automated best practices, if we can use the new verb, it isn’t always quantitative. Look at the brand damage to a bank when they shut customers out of their ATM network, the other side of turning the switch when they merged back-office systems. Look at the number of people whose automated payment systems and whatnot were knocked out of kilter.

The brand damage affecting major corporations is a consequence of having these inane debates about whether SOA is alive or dead, whether you need design-time governance or run-time governance. What you need is a way to automate what you are doing, so that your best practices are enforced throughout the development lifecycle.

Kerrie answered your question well when he said it really is about waste. It’s not just about wasted human capital or wasted productivity or cycles. It’s about wasted go-to-market opportunity. Remember, we're now living in the era of market-facing systems. For almost every major business enterprise, our digital footprint is directly accessible in the marketplace, whether it’s an ATM network or a hand-held device. The line between our back-office infrastructure and our consumer experience is being obliterated.

I'd argue that rather than making distinctions between design and run-time governance, companies simply, one way or another, need to automate their best practices. The business mandates of the corporations need to be reflected in an automated way that makes it manageable across the information technology life-cycle -- or you exist at your own peril.

Gardner: Kerrie, any thoughts on this concept of governance and how we make it more ubiquitous and more enforced as the pain and the problems grow evident? The solution at a high level seems pretty clear. It seems to be the implementation where we stumble.

Governance mindset

Holley: You hit it on the head, and Jeff made the point as well. A lot of people think governance is onerous, that it’s a structure that forces people to do things a certain way. They look at it as rigid, inflexible, unforgiving. They think it just gets in the way.

That’s a mindset that people find themselves in, and it’s a reason not to do something. But when you think about the goals that you're seeking, most goals have something to do with efficiency, lower cost, customers, and making the company more agile. When you think about this, pretty much everybody in the marketplace knows that you don’t get those goals for free. There is some cultural change that’s often necessary to bring those goals about, some organizational change.

There's automation. You don’t start with automation. You actually start with the problem, the processes, and picking the right tool. But, automation has to be a part of that solution. One end of the spectrum, we’ve got to address this mindset that governance gets in the way, that it’s overhead, and that it’s unnecessary.

We know that organizations that are very successful, that are achieving many of their goals, when we peel the onion back, we see them focused on governance. One advice that we all know is that you shouldn’t boil the ocean, that you should do incremental change. We also need to do this in governance.

We need to have these incremental successes, where we are focused on automation holistically and looking at the life-cycle, not just looking at the part-of-the-problem space.

Looking for automation as a way out of the hole that has been created is a consequence of the industry’s own success.

Gardner: Jeff, it sounds like governance needs a makeover. Is there an opportunity? You are going to be discussing this book at the IBM Impact Conference 2010, their SOA conference? Is this a good opportunity? You have a lot of IT executive and software executives from the variety of enterprises on hand, but what would you tell them in terms of how to make governance a bit more attractive?

Papows: We all need to say, "I am a computer science professional. We have reached a point in the complexity curve where I no longer scale." You have to start with an admission of fact. And the reality is that the demands placed on today's IT organizations, the magnitude of the existing infrastructure that needs to continue to be cared for, the magnitude of application demands for new systems and access points from all of this new technology, simply is not going to correlate without a completely different highly automated approach.

Kerrie is right. You can't boil the ocean and you can’t do it at once, but you have to start with an honest self-assessment that, as an industry, we can't continue to go forward at the rate and pace that we have grown, given everything we know and that we see, without finally eating our own cooking.

Looking for automation as a way out of the hole that has been created is a consequence of the industry’s own success. We didn't get here because we failed to be fair to all of those developers in the audience. They're going to listen to this and say, "Why am I the bad guy?" They're not the bad guys.

The reality is, as I said, that we're responsible for the greatest percentage of growth in the gross domestic product. We're responsible for the greatest percentage workforce productivity. We've changed the way civilization lives and works. We've dealt with a quantum leap -- and the texture of human existence is a consequence of this technology.

It's time that we simply admit that we need to turn back on ourselves in order to continue to manage this or we, literally, I believe, are on the precipice of that digital equivalent of a Pearl Harbor, and the economic and productivity consequences of failing are extreme.

Gardner: Well, we'll have to leave it there. We're about out of time. We've been discussing how glitches in business have highlighted a possible breakdown in the continuity of technology and that governance is an important factor in making technology continue on its productivity curve, without falling at some degree under its own weight.

I want to thank our guests. We have been joined today by Jeff Papows, President and CEO of WebLayers, and the author of the new book, Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software. Thank you so much, Jeff.

Papows: Thank you, Dana, and thank you, Kerrie.

Gardner: And, we have been joined also by Kerrie Holley, an IBM Fellow as well as the CTO for IBM’s SOA Center of Excellence. Thanks for your input, and we will look forward to your book as well.

Holley: Thank you, Dana, and thank you, Jeff.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingDirect podcast on the growing danger from faulty software and how to overcome it. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2010. All rights reserved.

Proper Cloud Adoption Requires a Governance Support Spectrum of Technology, Services, Best Practices

Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the productivity growth potential for cloud computing and how companies can prepare effectively for properly using cloud models.

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

View a free e-book on HP SaaS and learn more about cost-effective IT management as a service.

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 importance of performance monitoring and governance in any move to cloud computing. Most analysts expect cloud computing to become a rapidly growing affair. That is, infrastructure, data, applications, and even management itself, originating as services from different data centers, under different control, and perhaps different ownership.

What then becomes essential in moving to cloud is governance, and the use and characteristics of these services to manage the complexity and relationships in order to harvest the expected efficiencies and benefits that cloud computing portends. [UPDATE: More cloud activities are spreading across the "private-public" divide, as VMware announced this week, upping the need for governance ante.]

To learn more on accomplishing such visibility and governance at scale and in a way that meets enterprise IT and regulatory compliance needs -- with a full spectrum of governance technologies, services, best practices, and hosting options guidance -- we're joined by two executives from Hewlett-Packard's (HP's) Software and Solutions Group.

Please welcome with me, Scott Kupor, former vice president and general manager of HP's software as a service (SaaS) operations. We're also joined by Anand Eswaran, vice president of Professional Services. Welcome to you both.

Anand Eswaran: Glad to be here.

Scott Kupor: Great, thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We can't begin any meaningful discussion about cloud without defining what we mean. We've had lots of different discussions. We've seen quite a variety of different expectation in the market. When HP talks about services and cloud, and bringing some governance and manageability, what is the box that you tend to put around this term "cloud computing," Scott?

Kupor: We really think about cloud having a couple of components. Number one, using the public Internet to access services that may live either inside a corporate firewall or potentially outside a corporate firewall.

Secondly, a business model that allows you to pay as you go, to expand or decrease your usage of that application, as the business sees fit. There is a whole other thing, of course, from a technology perspective around virtualization and other components that go along with it, but when we talk about cloud, that's what we hear our customers discussing.

Gardner: Anand, from a professional services perspective, do you define cloud differently?

Eswaran: No, cloud is pretty much defined the same way. Scott said it all. The only thing I would add is that if I try to take a step back, I think of this as an evolution toward getting to the ultimate goal of offering "everything as a service" to the customer or to an organization.

In the context of that, cloud is going to be one of the principal enablers, where the customer or the organization can forget about technology so much, focus on their core business, and leverage the cloud to consume a service, which enables them to innovate in the core business in which they operate.

Gardner: Now, who within the organization typically would be concerned with cloud? I suppose if I'm an end user and I'm accessing an application, I might not care whether it's coming from a cloud or a traditional data center. But, within the IT hierarchy, who are the folks who are going to need to be concerned with this new phenomenon of cloud computing, Scott?

Running the gamut

Kupor: You hit on it exactly. The end user quite frankly shouldn't care, and doesn't have to care, about where that application sits. Within the IT organization, it really runs the gamut, all the way from individual systems administrators, all the way up through C-level executives.

This is partly from a technology perspective at the more day-to-day transactional level people care about, being able to manage service levels. How do I access that technology? But, at the more senior levels in companies, the big driving factors toward cloud -- which are ease of use, ease of adoption, lower cost, and things of that sort -- are very high end agendas today that we're hearing from most of our enterprise customers.

Gardner: Scott, when we talk about HP's Cloud Assure, is this something that's targeted to applications coming off the cloud, or are we looking at being able to look at the certification, trust, and risk reduction across the full panoply of what we expect to come from third-party clouds?

Kupor: Yeah, it really covers the full gamut of things. You hear people use lots of terms today about infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS), platform-as-a-service (PaaS), or SaaS. Our idea is that all these things ultimately are variants of cloud-based environments. Maybe I can illustrate with kind of a simple example.

Lots of customers are looking at things like Amazon EC2 or Microsoft's Azure as environments in which they might want to deploy an application. When you use one of those infrastructure environments, essentially you're getting compute power on-demand from those providers.

But when you put your application out there you still care about how that application is going to perform. Is it going to be secure? What does it look like from an overall management and governance perspective? That's where, in that specific example, Cloud Assure can be very helpful, because essentially it provides that trust, governance, and audit of that application in a cloud-based environment.

Gardner: I suppose from a purchasing perspective, you want to look at products, if you're implementing a private-cloud infrastructure, or the governance to manage across third-party or publicly facing clouds, as they're sometimes referred to. But, this seems as well to be a matter of people and process. So, who might be an organizational manager or decision maker who should be concerned about this, Anand?

Takes focus off maintenance

Eswaran: Building on what Scott said, I would just add one context here. If you look at today's IT environments, we hear of 79-85 percent of costs being spent on managing current applications versus the focus on innovation. What cloud does is basically take away the focus on maintenance and on just keeping the lights on.

When you view it from that perspective, the people who are bothered about, worried about, or excited about the cloud span the whole gamut. It goes from the CIO, who is looking at it from value -- how can I create value for my business and get back to innovation to make IT a differentiator for the business -- all the way down to people in the IT organization. These are the apps leaders, the operations leaders, the enterprise architects, all of them viewing the cloud as a key way to transform their core job responsibilities from keeping the lights on to innovation.

It spans the whole gamut. Each person brings a different perspective and focus, but this is one of those interesting phenomena, which actually cuts across the entire IT organization.

Gardner: What about outside the IT organization? If I'm a business leader and I'm also looking to transform my business, I'm looking for agility and an opportunity for IT to react to my needs and marketplace changes more rapidly. Should they be thinking about cloud?

Eswaran: Absolutely. Once the IT organization is free to think about innovation, to think about

The whole focus shifts, and that is the key. At the heart of it, this allows organizations to compete in the marketplace better.

what cutting edge services can they provide to the business, the focus then transforms from “how can I use technology to keep the lights on,” to “how can I use technology to be a market differentiator, to allow my organization to compete better in the marketplace.”

So given that, now the business user is going to see a lot better response times, and they are going to see a lot of proactive IT participation, allowing them to effectively manage their business better. The whole focus shifts, and that is the key. At the heart of it, this allows organizations to compete in the marketplace better.

Kupor: This is really what's interesting to us about cloud. We're seeing demand for cloud being driven by line-of-business owners today. You have a lot of line-of-business owners who are saying, "I need to roll out a new application, but I know that my corporate IT is constrained by either headcount constraints or other things in this environment, in particular."

We're seeing a lot of experimentation, particularly with a lot of our enterprise customers, from line-of-business owners essentially looking toward public clouds as a way for them to accelerate, to Anand's point, innovation and adoption of potentially new applications that might have otherwise taken too long or not been prioritized appropriately by the internal IT departments.

Gardner: We've set some fairly high expectations for cloud computing, from the business side and the IT side -- agility, costs, and flexibility. Now, we're down to the fine print, to the terms and conditions. How do we get there? What are the problems that typical users that you're talking to encountering as they say, "How do we get going?" Scott?

Fear of losing control

Kupor: The thing that people are worried about from an IT perspective in cloud is that they've lost some element of control over the application. In a traditional deployment, that application sits inside a corporate data center inside a firewall. I can touch and feel the application, and all the performance, availability, and security things that I care about are within the domain of what I can see and feel.

In cloud now, what you've done is you've disintermediated the IT administrator from the application itself by having him access that environment publicly. They're the same types of things that he used to care about internally, but now he has to worry about brokering a relationship between his own organization and the other third-party cloud provider whose environment he is accessing.

Things like performance now become critically important, as well as availability of the application, security, and how I manage data associated with those applications. None of those is a new problem. Those are all same problems that existed inside the firewall, but now we've complicated that relationship by introducing a third-party with whom the actual infrastructure for the application tends to reside.

Gardner: So, we're down to governance. How do I govern and manage? How do I provide

The heart of that problem is that you used to be able to create and manage private applications for your line of business. What the cloud does is get you back to thinking about a shared service for the entire organization.

insight into what is occurring with cloud, versus what was occurring inside, comparing and contrasting how valuable the cloud approach or solution might be to an internal one?

Anand, help us understand better what this problem set is from organizational culture shifting people's thinking around how to access IT.

Eswaran: The heart of that problem is that you used to be able to create and manage private applications for your line of business. What the cloud does is get you back to thinking about a shared service for the entire organization. Whether you think of shared service at an organizational level, which is where you start thinking about elements like the private cloud, or you think about shared applications, which are offered as a service in a publicly available domain including the cloud, it just starts to create exactly the word Scott used, a sense of disintermediation and a loss of control.

The other thing that I think most organizations start thinking about is also data and information, because the cloud is on an evolution path right now, which also means that people are quite unsure about who are the mature cloud vendors and who are going to be offering the mature cloud services and applications. Who is here to stay? What does it mean if one of the cloud vendors or partners they work with is going to go out of business? How are they going to transfer and transition all their applications and data to a different cloud vendor or partner?

They want to make sure that it doesn't get to a point where adopting a technology, that makes sense or adopting a service that makes sense doesn't come back and cause more pain and cause a downturn that they haven't thought about right now.

Gardner: Scott, this sounds a little bit like a certification for trust process. We went through something like that several years ago when open-source software started coming into vogue and people were using it. Do you think we'll go through a similar process with the move toward cloud?

Similar evolution

Kupor: I absolutely think that's the case, and I think your open-source example is a very good one. New vendors came into the open-source space and said, "We bless this version of the software. We'll support it. We'll make sure it works appropriately." We think there's going to be a similar evolution in the management space for cloud-based environment.

Whether I'm deploying in a Microsoft environment or an Amazon environment, what I want to know, as an end user, is how do I holistically manage that service level to make sure that application is up and running, secure, and all the things that I care about?

Your point is a very good one. We need to figure out how we create that level of governance around the application and how we ensure security and availability independent of the environment in which that application sits.

Eswaran: Scott, that's at the heart of HP Cloud Assure, so maybe it's worthwhile for you to talk about the first steps that we've taken as HP, which drives to the heart of the problem Dana just talked about.

Kupor: That's a really good point. HP Software has traditionally been a management vendor.

. . . we've taken all of that knowledge and expertise that we've been working on for companies inside the firewall and have given those companies an opportunity to effectively point that expertise at an application that now lives in a third-party cloud environment.

Historically, most of our customers have been managing applications that live inside the firewall. They care about things like performance availability and systems management.

What we've done with Cloud Assure is we've taken all of that knowledge and expertise that we've been working on for companies inside the firewall and have given those companies an opportunity to effectively point that expertise at an application that now lives in a third-party cloud environment.

So the three main components that we've heard from our customers that they worry about are: If I deploy an application in an external cloud environment, will that application perform at the level that I care about? When my end users hit that application, is it going to give them again the kind of data and integrity that they're worried about? Then, is the application itself secure?

What Cloud Assure does is allow them to, as a service, point that set of tests against an application they're running in an external environment and ensure the service levels associated with that application, just as they would do if that application were running inside their firewall. It gives them that holistic service-level management, independent of the physical environment, whether it's a cloud or non-cloud the application is running in.

Gardner: Anand, you had some recent news about taking this toward skills, understanding, and the ability to implement these processes. You want to get your financial return on moving to the cloud, but you don't want to get bitten by unforeseen risk. Tell us a little bit about how a professional-services value can help mitigate that.

Taking a step back

Eswaran: We were actually taking a step back. Scott talked about helping customers who have already made the decision to get in the cloud, but are worried about a few things in terms of security, performance, availability, governance. What can you do about it? What we are doing from a professional-services standpoint is taking a step back.

The first thing is, as we went through the different customers we already worked with, we got a lot of questions on what the cloud means, the point you started this conversation with. People are still struggling to touch and feel what it means. So, the first step of what we're doing as a services organization is educating the customers.

The first portfolio offering is a workshop to educate the customers and to help them understand what the cloud means, what has the evolution of the cloud been to get from where it was to where it is today? What are the different ramifications of the cloud? What are viewed as possible bottlenecks or things to be concerned about and watched when you think about the cloud?

Based on the fact that HP is a thought leader, if you think about the elements of the cloud in terms of hardware and SaaS applications all coming together, HP is the absolute market leader in having the full spectrum of things that need to come together to offer a viable cloud service.

So, we want to use our thought leadership to not just talk about the past and where we are today, but to talk about gazing at the crystal ball, where do we think the cloud is going to go? Do we think its real? What do we think are the different manifestations that will come about in the cloud? Helping the customers get educated about it is the first step.

The second step, from a service offering perspective, is a planning session. We sit down with the

This is an instance where we want to listen to them, bring our expertise in thought leadership, and create a roadmap based on our thought leadership and their profile.

customers, and, at that point, it's not just about the cloud and the services which comes about the cloud, but about the maturity level of the customer and the risk profile of the customer. Are they an early adopter? Are they people who want to see a service or a technology element mature before they adopt it? Where are they in that maturity cycle?

Based on our understanding of their infrastructure, processes, applications, the IT organization, their risk profile, and our understanding of where the cloud will go, can we create a roadmap for them -- whether it's a six-month roadmap or a three-year roadmap -- on what it means for them to adopt the cloud?

Learn more about HP professional services for Cloud Computing, Business Technology Optimization, and Information Management.

What components does it make sense to create a private cloud for? What components does it make sense to jump on and leverage the services available in the public cloud? What components should they still be doing as they do today? The second step is a workshop to create a plan and a roadmap for them, based on an assessment of where they are in their maturity cycle and where they have been in the organization.

The third step, finally is, if it makes sense, help them execute the roadmap. The key underlying tenet of this is that we don't want customers to think that they are pressured to move onto the cloud right now. This is an instance where we want to listen to them, bring our expertise in thought leadership, and create a roadmap based on our thought leadership and their profile.

This is an evolution

Kupor: That's a critical point. You used the term "evolution." If you read the popular press and the media today, there's plenty of talk about cloud and hype. One of the thing that's really important, what we hear from our customers, and certainly the viewpoint that HP is taking toward the market is, we do think this is an evolution.

We don't expect customers to throw out existing implementations of successfully developed and running applications. What we do think that will happen over time is that we will live in kind of this mixed environment. So, just as today customers still have mainframe environments that have been around for many years, as well as client-server deployments, we think we will see cloud application start to migrate over time, but ultimately live in the concept of mixed environments.

Also, to your point earlier, this creates a new management challenge for companies, because they have to deal with legacy environments that are traditional in-house environments, and, at the same time, they're actually starting to roll out applications in the cloud.

Gardner: It seems important also to set expectations properly. Through HP Cloud Assure and

So, at the heart of it, we believe this is a huge inflection point, which will get us out there.

through your Professional Services and workshops what are you telling people about what they should meaningfully expect from this -- how much of a silver bullet or how much of a modest, but impactful, improvement?

Eswaran: Good question, Dana. We've seen a lot of these technologies come and go. Open source is gaining in momentum. Client-server is on its way down. From an opinion point of view, we expect cloud to be a very big inflection point in technology. We think it's powerful enough to probably be the second, after what we saw with the Internet as an inflection point.

This is not just one more technology fad, according to us. We've talked about one concept, which is going to be the biggest business driver. It's utility-based computing, which is the ability for organizations to pay based on demand for computing resources, much like you pay for the utility industry.

The ability to create shared and distributed services enabled that. You have the ability to focus on your core business and not worry about the amount of focus, money, and energy you spend on the existing technologies in an IT organization. So, at the heart of it, we believe this is a huge inflection point, which will get us out there.

In line with that, Scott, do you have any perspectives from an infrastructure perspective? How do you think this is going to get us to the next level?

Appropriate expectations

Kupor: We want to set expectations appropriately. If you look at expenditures today on cloud-based environments, they're still very small in terms of overall IT spend. It's probably single-digit type dollars we're talking about as a percentage of overall IT spend.

What we believe, and if you look at the analyst community and what we're hearing from our enterprise customers is, over the next five years, cloud spend will certainly be closer to something like 25 or 30 percent of overall IT spend. We think that's a pretty reasonable indication of the kind of opportunity that cloud provides.

But, we do need to be careful. We in the industry need to make sure that we don't hype this to the point where we set the wrong expectations with customers. This is going to have to be a measured and managed approach. Customers will deploy applications on an incremental basis, as it makes sense to go into the cloud, and not wholesale throw out things that have been successful for their environment.

Eswaran: So, at the heart of it, it's not just what outcomes you achieve in terms of savings. You actually can get to a more scalable and flexible and adaptable model, but you don't have excess capacity, whether it's hardware, software, or licenses. You actually are able to get your organization to a point where you pay for what you consume.

Your real need for capacity is a very difficult exercise from a planning standpoint. Whether it's

One of the silver linings of the difficult financial environment that we're all struggling through is that this gives us an opportunity to look at the costs associated with maintenance of applications, as opposed to actual innovation.

different components of the IT organization you're buying today, you're forecasting growth, you're forecasting expense, and you're forecasting capacity. This allows you to just forget about all of that and worry about consuming services based on demand. That's at the heart of what this gets us to.

Gardner: Clearly, folks need to consider education and getting prepared as they move toward this. But, I suppose there are also a lot of questions. I'm getting them. Where do we start first in terms of areas of applications or function? Is this a data problem? Where do we help people begin this process, perhaps the crawl before they walk and run? Scott?

Kupor: What we're suggesting is that people should be very pragmatic. One of the silver linings of the difficult financial environment that we're all struggling through is that this gives us an opportunity to look at the costs associated with maintenance of applications, as opposed to actual innovation.

To Anand's point, what we ought to do is selectively look at applications and ask how much it costs to run that, maintain it, and develop it in-house, including both labor and infrastructure costs. Then, we ought to do that comparison with whether you could save money and achieve the same level of quality and performance by deploying that application in the cloud?

That's how we think customers, particularly in this environment, will approach it. We also think that we can add a lot of expertise with our services organization, but it's really going to be a financially driven and a performance driven move of these applications.

Quality and testing

Eswaran: Let me expand that. Let me give a couple of examples, simple things to think about. Quality and testing is at the heart of what you need to think about from an IT organization standpoint, quality in everything you do across the stack -- applications, process, networks, routers, everything you do.

A natively simple application we're rolling out, which can be consumed over the cloud, is testing as a service. It will allow you now to standardize your entire portfolio and not worry about which tool and how you're going to go about doing it, but just worry about the outcome of getting to a certain level of quality by leveraging testing-as-a-service, which comes in from HP.

For us, it internally leverages our entire stack, the fact that we've been doing testing as a service from a SaaS standpoint for a long time, the fact that we have thought leadership from a professional services standpoint, and the fact that we have capacity from an EDS standpoint. We leverage all of that to bring unified service, delivered over the cloud, for a customer.

That's what we're trying to get to. In the near future, we're going to be rolling out specific services, which readily use the cloud to create a business outcome for the customer.

Gardner: Looking to the future briefly, before we close out, it seems that in order to take

So, absolutely vendor neutrality and a concept of trust and governance are going to be the big driving factors for adoption.

advantage of this across multiple clouds, a significant amount of neutrality and standardization is important. If you want to be able to test and use different tools or move applications and data around, it seems to require someone in the middle to arbitrate neutrality and openness. Do you see that, Scott, as part of what Cloud Assure can offer?

Kupor: Absolutely. I think the simplest historical analogy is that this is exactly what happened in the overall systems and network-management market many years ago. You had lots of individual vendor-based solutions for managing a particular environment, and those always exist and will live, but the real winners in that space -- HP obviously among them -- were the players who took a neutral stance, whether it was towards operating system support, hardware device support, or network support.

We think we'll see the same thing in the cloud environment, which is what you want is a vendor who is neutral from an infrastructure perspective, who is going to equally support a platform that might be run by any number of third parties, and who's going to basically give you that assurance that you can manage service levels holistically and consistently.

Whether you're running in a private cloud, a public cloud, or inside your data center wall, it allows you that potential mobility of applications. So, if you find better, cheaper, and faster ways to deploy that application, you can move that application without having to worry about starting from scratch. So, absolutely vendor neutrality and a concept of trust and governance are going to be the big driving factors for adoption.

Gardner: Anand, from that perspective of planning your move to cloud with a lot of neutrality or portability in mind, it seems to me that would allow you to recover your economic benefits. What do you project for people in terms of their positioning around neutrality?

Eswaran: From a consulting standpoint, we almost view ourselves as the Switzerland of cloud, where we don't have a vested interest in any particular technology. We obviously have a lot of products and applications that enable a service to be created for the customer from an HP standpoint, but the way we have always approached consulting in the HP domain is that we work with the technology investments a customer already has.

For cloud, we help them figure out the best sourcing model for them to create the best value from an efficiency standpoint, whether that is an on-premise hosted application or whether that is creation of a private cloud to create a shared service within the organization. Having gone through the analysis of the infrastructure and the applications and everything they do within the IT organization, we give them our recommendation on what should be leveraged from the cloud to create better efficiencies.

Our goal is to make sure that we enable the customers to make the best business decision for them, which will enable them to get to the long-term or within view of the long-term.

Gardner: We've been discussing the future benefits and expectations around cloud computing, steps that you can take in the meantime as you pursue and educate yourselves on the opportunities for cloud from a business, technical, operations, and cost savings perspective. Also, we've discussed how to move forward as a crawl-walk-run process with Cloud Assure from HP and other services that they're delivering across an application life cycle spectrum.

We appreciate the input from two executives from Hewlett-Packard's Software and Solutions Group. We've been joined by Scott Kupor, former vice president and general manager of SaaS offerings at HP, and also, Anand Eswaran, vice president of Professional Services. Thanks guys.

Eswaran: Pleasure was mine.

Kupor: Thank you Dana.

Gardner: This is Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks, and come back next time.

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Transcript of a sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast on the productivity growth potential for cloud computing and how companies can prepare effectively for properly using cloud models. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.

In 'Everything as a Service' Era, Quality of Services and Processes Grows Paramount, Says HP's Purohit

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas the week of June 15, 2009.

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

Dana Gardner: Hello, and welcome to a special BriefingsDirect podcast series coming to you on location from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas. We’re here in the week of June 15, 2009 to explore the major enterprise software and solutions trends and innovations that are making news across the global HP ecology of customers, partners and developers.

I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and I'll be your host throughout this special series of HP Sponsored Software Universe live discussions.

Please now join me in welcoming Robin Purohit, vice president of software products for HP Software and Solutions. Welcome to the show.

Robin Purohit: Thanks, Dana.

Gardner: We’ve heard so much about the external forces that are buffeting the IT department. With the economy, of course, and now with cloud computing, folks are examining a fluid sourcing option future for themselves. This seems to be forcing change. We’re looking at how applications and services are developed, tested, and then deployed. Do you think we’re at a major inflection point in IT?

Purohit: I think there are multiple inflection points, and flexible outsourcing is definitely one of those. Just like the last downturn, severe restrictions on IT budgets force you to rethink things.

One of those things is, what are you really good at, and do you have the skills to do it? Where can you best leverage others outside, whether it’s for a particular service you want them to run for you or for help on doing a certain project for you? How do you make sure that you can do your job really well, and still support the needs of the business while you go and use those partners?

We believe flexible outsourcing is going to really take off, just like it did back in 2001, but this time you’ll have a variety of ways. We can procure those services over the wire on a rateable basis from whatever you want to call them -- cloud providers, software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers, whatever. IT's job will be to make sure all that stuff works inside the business process and services they’re responsible for.

Gardner: We’ve heard this concept of "everything as a service." When we start moving across boundaries and looking at infrastructure, data, and applications, perhaps being separated at some level, a loosely coupled world if you will, the quality of these services goes from "nice to have" to "must have." How do you think the mentality needs to shift in terms of this quality assurance aspect?

Quality is not an option

Purohit: Quality is no longer going to be an option. That’s for sure. I think most customers have started to get that, and they use our quality assurance solutions today to make sure that the production environment is much more rigorous. Do quality better upfront. It's much cheaper to maintain the well-functioning operating environment.

If you think of it as marketplace of services that you're doing internally with maybe many outsource providers, making sure every one of those folks is doing their job well and that it comes together some way, means that you have to have quality in everything you do, quality in everything your partners do, and quality in the end process. Things like service-enabled testing, rather than service-oriented architecture (SOA) is going to become a critical mainstream attribute of quality assurance.

Gardner: What is the role of governance? We’ve heard that word bandied around quite a bit. There is IT governance. There is SOA governance. Perhaps we're going to start to see cloud governance. What’s its role?

Purohit: The role is essentially making sure things work the way you want them to, that you can trust people, or you can put informal service level agreements (SLAs). But, there is nothing like measurement, and what IT governance or cloud governance is going to be about is to make sure that you have a clear view of what your expectations are on both sides.

Then, you have an automatic way of measuring it and tracking against it, so you can course correct or make a decision to either bring it back internally or go to another cloud provider. That’s going to be the great thing about the cloud paradigm -- you’ll have a choice of moving from one outsource provider to another.

Gardner: It may be a cliché, but we hear about "people, process, and products," and the need for all three to be addressed. Looking at the people and the process aspect of that,

As you put in governance, you bring in outside parties -- maybe you’re doing things like cloud capabilities -- you're going to get resistance. You’ve got to train your team to how to embrace those things in the right way.

IT departments, if they’re going to be able to make some of these adjustments we’ve been talking about, perhaps themselves need to adjust. What are we bringing to the table, in order to facilitate a change in how to do business as an IT organization?

Purohit: First of all, I absolutely agree that the most important things to get right are the organizational dynamics. As you put in governance, you bring in outside parties -- maybe you’re doing things like cloud capabilities -- you're going to get resistance. You’ve got to train your team to how to embrace those things in the right way.

What we’re trying to do at HP is step up and bring advisory services to the table across everything that we do to help people think about how they should approach this in their organization, and where they can leverage potentially industry-best practices on the process side, to accelerate the ability for them to get the value out of some of these new initiatives that they are partaking in.

Gardner: Well, people and process have to adjust, and we’re going to apparently bring some tools to allow them to get greater visibility into how they operate -- cost-benefit analysis types of benefits. I also want to plumb a little bit into the products.

At HP, you have quite a wide portfolio. There is test and quality assurance (QA), application lifecycle management, governance as we’ve mentioned, traditional IT management, configuration management databases (CMDBs), and associated tools, project and portfolio management (PPM), asset manager, SOA management, and now IT financial management. Can you help me understand how there is a unifying concept, the glue that ties these together?

Running the business of IT

Purohit: We think that what’s been missing in IT is just thinking about of the way that they construct the systems to run the business. For the last 20 years, IT organizations have been building enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems and business intelligence (BI) systems that help you run the business. Now, wouldn’t it be great if there were a suite of software to run the business of IT?

This is what we call Business Technology Optimization (BTO). It’s all about allowing the CEO and their staffs to plan and strategize, construct and deliver, and operate services for the business in a co-ordinated fashion, and link all the decisions to business needs and checkpoints. They make sure that what they do is actually what the business wanted them to do, and, by the way, that they are spending the right money on the right business priorities. We call that the service life cycle.

Gardner: In addition to our process, people and products, there’s the environment. There's a marketplace. It seems to me that HP is at a certain advantageous point. It has a lot of partners, but, as we move towards fluid sourcing, as we become an "everything as a service" world -- certainly not overnight, but perhaps over time -- the way that these ecologies develop becomes important.

In your keynote address, you mentioned a number of partners -- Accenture, Capgemini, SAP, TIBCO, VMware. How does this work, with what you’ve just described, that HP brings to the table from products. How does that relate to a partner ecology?

Purohit: Okay. Well, the first thing is that our partners in the industry are expecting is for us to lead. What we’ve been working on and reinforcing this last year is that we have a blueprint for how to go do this "ERP for IT" concept -- or BTO.

That’s a good thing for the customer, and the vendors like it because it puts them in a bigger context in terms of what we’re all trying to accomplish to the customers, so we look coherent in someway.

We’ve been bringing our products together to fulfill that, and we’ve been trying to articulate to the industry that this is how IT has to change.

What we’ve been doing is saying, "Well, most customer environments have a plethora of different vendors and consultants that are helping them. So, anytime we can help bring one of those consultants or those vendors into this environment, the customer can get to that vision faster." That’s a good thing for the customer, and the vendors like it because it puts them in a bigger context in terms of what we’re all trying to accomplish to the customers, so we look coherent in some way.

There are things that we're doing with Accenture, for example, in helping on the strategy planning side, whether it’s for IT financial management or data-center transformation. We're doing things with VMware to provide the enabling glue for this datacenter of the future, where things are going to be very dynamically moving around to provide the best quality of service at the best cost.

Gardner: Another slide that you presented, which caught my attention, projects a progression that IT is now perhaps accelerating along. It starts with IT financial management. Some news that you’ve made here at the conference is application modernization, which is, I suppose, bringing more platforms, applications, and data into an environment where they can be used, consumed, and propelled forward as services.

Then, there's next-generation data center, cutting the cost, making that more economical and with higher utilization. Then, there's a closed-loop incident and problem management so that app dev can deploy a continuum that's compressed and improved. Lastly, cloud computing. What would come next on this progression?

The unified concept

Purohit: What’s next is making all of that work in that unified concept we were talking about before. We found in talking to the customers that every one of those things that you just mentioned, and that we articulated, is perfectly in line with where they’re trying to go. So we feel pretty good. We’re on the same page as our customers.

We know that they’re trying to do all of that really well and really fast, because they think it all will lead to significant and sustainable cost transformations, and change how they run the business of IT. But, they want one plan. They don’t want seven plans. If there’s one thing they’re asking us to do more, faster, better, and with all of those ecosystem providers is to show them how they can get from their current state to that ideal future state, and do it in a coherent way.

Gardner: You’ve laid all of this out here at the conference. Several thousand people had a chance to chew it over for a few days. What’s been the response? What have you heard?

Purohit: There are a couple of things that we’re really excited about that. We've just seemed to have hit right to the heart of where our customers are trying to go.

Certainly, the IT financial management announcement was a huge hit. Everybody is under a tremendous cost visibility pressure right now. Everybody is gearing up for the FY10 budgeting cycle already, and they think it’s going to be another brutal one. Being able to come to the table with well-informed, accurate financial information, so they can go fight for what they know is right for the business, is just perfect timing.

The other big theme is automation, automation, automation, automation. Basically, everybody wants to talk about it. They know that’s the way they

When we talk about things like requirements, we talk about the requirements that business people have and what they expect of the application, not the functional requirements.

are going to take cost out really quickly.

The last thing, over half the people here at the user conference are application developers, testers, and architects. So, there's a lot of discussion on Agile development, and how they can work with us to accelerate the way they can get these new Agile processes in place, but doing it in a way that they have a great result, and not just move faster.

Gardner: I suppose it’s important if we have a class of developer -- a class of tester and architect, as you mentioned -- that they act in concert in some way.

Purohit: That’s right, and that’s where our focus has always been -- to get those three constituents working together in the center of excellence concepts. Now, it's increasingly around the lifecycle of the application itself, from design to development to delivery, and most importantly, looking at application life cycle linked to the needs of the business.

When we talk about things like requirements, we talk about the requirements that business people have and what they expect of the application, not the functional requirements. That way, you're going to make sure that all of your energy is focused on the right thing, and to get to the end of the project is actually a success. You don’t have to restart, which is not a good thing, especially right now when budgets are so tight. You can’t afford to be wasting money.

Gardner: No margin for error, right?

Purohit: No margin for error anymore.

Gardner: Well, great. Thanks very much. We've been discussing some of the announcements and the conceptual framework that they fall into here at Software Universe. We’ve been joined by Robin Purohit, vice president of software products for HP Software and Solutions. Thanks so much.

Purohit: Thank you, Dana.

Gardner: Thanks for joining us for this special BriefingsDirect podcast, coming to you on location from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas.

I'm Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions, your host for this series of HP-sponsored Software Universe Live Discussions. Thanks for listening and come back next time.

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

Transcript of a BriefingsDirect podcast recorded at the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas the week of June 15, 2009. Copyright Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2009. All rights reserved.