BPM-EAI

There is one objective for IT operations - reduce the existing operations cost and ensure a good sense of predictability on discretionary spending towards growth and scalability. All the initiatives whether it be SAAS, Public Cloud, Private Cloud, Virtualization are all aimed towards the same basic objectives. But enterprises still clamor for the right fit, fail in many of the initiatives and reducing the cost becomes a challenge. The IT vehicle hits the brakes on the road towards its supposed destination
It seems as if Cloud solutions could provide the mix of reducing the cost as well as provide tools and accelerators for new development. Sometimes it becomes a risk when the information transacted is part of the cloud and not “in” the Enterprise Infrastructure.
Some questions posed to the IT leaders are whether and when to go for cloud? Next is what all should go in the cloud? Should one have multiple clouds or single cloud? Should you have a mix of Private and Public clouds? and so on…
The theme of this write up is whether the “Enterprise Integration Services” could serve as the tipping point for the cloud and pave the way for exponential growth in usage of Cloud across the enterprise technologies.

Continue reading "Tipping Point for Enterprises towards Cloud..." »

Posted by Narayanan Chathanur at 8:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In the place where I live on this planet, monsoons come twice. However, in the virtual world of IT services, it has been raining all through the year, due to the “clouds”. The concept of “cloud” based provisioning is not new to mankind. During the Agricultural civilizations - clouds from vapors of water ensured that consumption needs of the humans are met. During digital civilization - “clouds” are provisioning digital consumption needs of people today.

The foundation for contemporary cloud based computing takes us back to early 20th century where the world was witnessing the “first war of the cloud” between Tesla and Edison- for the best model of transmitting “electric power” in a “cloud” model [Grid-based-AC vs. Short-distance-DC]. At the same time, in Cambridge UK, Alan Turing, proposed a model of computing, later called ‘Turing Machine’ which has infinite memory [tape], infinite computation capability. Grid based supply of electric current has always been compared with the Cloud-based computing facility.

Continue reading "Clouds in my coffee!" »

Posted by Anil Prasad Kurnool at 11:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Why Private Clouds are not the most ideal choice ..." »

Posted by Maloy Patnaik at 2:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This write up is a continuation from the blog titled 911. When these different cases are dealt with, they are pseudo named as “fire-fighting” even in technology world because they are fires trying to engulf the IT infrastructure and if not stopped will burn up a lot of $$$. The operations cost of IT today range between 50% to 75% of the overall IT budget and to reduce this cost overhead and optimize IT resources, it is important that many such sporadic issues and cases are not masked with tactical solutions and allow the ‘fires’ to turn up again and again. The loses due to such issues are not directly accounted but surely affects.
In the world we live, any fires that occurs at a home or an industry is dealt by Fire fighting department and they don’t stop by just stopping the fire, they investigate till they find the root cause and advises steps to ensure it doesn’t happen again.

Continue reading "Enterprise Fire Fighting Cell" »

Posted by Narayanan Chathanur at 9:24 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Back in 1900, any purchase by consumers had limited choices; he could visit the store and pick the product from a select few available. In this era, consumer is aware of the numerous choices he can pick from, check on reviews and then finalize the delivery date and time at his door step. Today, 2011, the digital consumer an essential part of any business, where being able to select and choose from a given set of products and offerings is trend that is sure to change the enterprises of tomorrow and how they engage with their consumers. This engagement with the consumer also allows the business to work with them in order to identify and match up to their needs, consult and personalize the products for them. Where face of a bank was a teller with long wait time for simple activity such as deposit or withdrawing the money, today bank's website provides personalized products and services with limited visits to the bank location!

There have been bigger role of modes of communication with the consumers, real-time helpline, feedback, analysis of data received by surveys etc. And only to enhance this is social networking that constantly works on understanding the consumer with the perspective of his likes, dislikes and creates a digital intelligence of the consumer. For example, a hospital that patient visits irrespective of whether it is the local hospital or not, the patient information is provided to doctors with the awareness of the allergies he has as complete of data is already available with detailed medical information. Websites like TripAdvisor can select the preferences and provide the details on which destination, and which package to pick from numerous available options.

Businesses see this as an opportunity to enhance the consumer experience they provide and today with help of technology they can build the enterprise of tomorrow. This change in consumer perspective will bring in a huge shift in the way organizations have been working in the past. Organizations are being asked to provide personalized products and services. At the same time, consumers are also collaborating with organizations to create a greater understanding.

In my opinion the businesses exploring the social networking and working towards co-creating their businesses with consumers will be lost in the run to future proof their businesses! The future of this kind of association and of personalization lies in seamless integration. Technology being the key enabler for a future such as this!

Posted by Raksha Kadam at 7:22 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Uncle Sam is on the Cloud" »

Posted by Maloy Patnaik at 5:03 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Charles Darwin's "Survival of the Fittest" phrase is old but still powerful and is very much true in today's competitive market place. Every company tries to grab the market share and gain competitive advantage. With the advent of information technologies and frameworks, the gap between competitors has been reducing considerably and every company seeks innovative ways and means to broaden this gap. The Cloud BPM and SOA are some of the hot trends which every company embraces for improving its service capabilities and reach thereby reducing the costs and time to market.

According to Porter, Organization should adopt to one of the three strategies namely Cost Leadership, Differentiation and Market Segmentation to gain competitive advantage. Let's analyze how each of these strategies is achieved. Cloud enables an organization to achieve Cost leadership through its economic efficiency by avoiding capital expenditures on software and services. Business Intelligence achieves differentiation through real-time data mining and predictive analytics by offering intelligent value added services.

Continue reading "ACA = Cloud+BPM+BI" »

Posted by Saravanan Balaraj at 9:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

In a fictional drama based on characters of the great epic Mahabharatha, a Telugu poet/dramatist Mr. Chilakamarthi Lakshmi Narasimham, talks of a great war, which was averted at the last moment due to intervention of Gods. The story goes this way Gaya, a Gandharva King (Gandharvas can be considered “being of heaven”) was moving across the skies and spat the pan. It fell into the open palms of Sri Krishna (An Avatar of Lord Vishnu), praying to the sun god Surya. Sri Krishna gets very angry and vows to kill him. Then the Gandharva king, being a great devotee of Krishna, begs him for mercy and Krishna doesn’t concede.

Narada (Son of Lord Bramha, a divine sage) advises Gaya to approach Arjuna (one of the Pandava brothers of epic Mahabharatha) and first seek his assurance of protecting him and only then reveal the name of person out to take his life. The king does the same and after taking Arjuna’s promise to protect him, he reveals that Krishna has set out to kill him. Arjuna is surprised and yet sticks to his vow. It might be noted that the friendship and relation between Arjuna and Krishna is supposed to that of ideal relation between Nara (human) and Narayana (God).

Any number of dialogues between Arjuna and Krishna make no dent to their respective vows, Arjuna to protect Gaya and Krishna’s to kill Gaya, resulting in an impending war between the both. Those days, unlike now, word given by self was considered paramount than life of self.

Almost when they are out for a head on collision, Lord Siva (an important Hindu Deity, and one of the Trinity) appears before them and averts a possible disaster to the world. This is later explained by the Lord Krishna as a test for Arjuna before the impending Mahabharata war. [For details about Mahabharatha etc. please Google.]

Continue reading "Vendor Lockin" »

Posted by Anil Prasad Kurnool at 6:24 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Charles Dodgson (Lewis Carroll - was his pen name) a mathematics professor in Oxford University, wrote in his famous book “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland“[1] some strange occurances in curious places.

To reassure herself that she understood the strange happenings, Alice says: “I’ll try if I know all the things I used to know. Let me see: four times five is twelve, and four times six is thirteen, and four times seven is - oh dear! I shall never get to twenty at that rate.”

In his notes to Carroll’s book, The Annotated Alice[2], a mathematician Martin Gardner provides a nice explanation for Alice’s bizarre multiplication table. He proposes that Alice is simply using bases other than 10. For example, if we use base 18, then 4 X 5 = 20 will indeed be written as 12, because 20 (base 10) is 1 Unit of 18 and 2 Units of 1. [1X18(1) + 2X18(0)].

Continue reading "Future of Computing" »

Posted by Anil Prasad Kurnool at 5:21 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The cloud computing concept cuts across verticals. And another one which goes along in utilities is Smart Grid. What do they have in common? Cloud computing being consumer focused at this time and even though smart grid aspires to be a consumer focused technology it is likely to get onto the cloud to get into mainstream.

Today, there is no visibility on the chain of power generation to determine how and where it's being used and whether its delivery is as efficient as possible. Like today's data center for computing purposes there is no equivalent in Utilities to effectively manage power. The data level / technical implementation include real-time alerts and other notifications based on the urgency of the event and require attention immediately, whereas bulk transactions can be process at higher time intervals. With the shift to cloud computing as an upcoming change in the industry, part of this shift attributes to the opening of cloud platforms. This means managing demand better, participation by consumers, which means better analysis and management of power demand; giving consumers higher control such as being able to generate their own energy, being able to sell the extra energy by sending it back to the grid. Optimizing assets and operating efficiently that can control the players of the grid to save un-used electricity meaning more distribution of power generated. One of the main features for the grid is self-healing that can be achieved on the cloud. If anything goes wrong at one place, network should be able to route through other sources. Moreover, making the grid hacker-proof as much as possible and ensuring innovation through new products, markets and services. The idea is how much can the cloud be leveraged than only using web services. However, cloud computing not only provides more computing resources based on demand but also provisions new services and capabilities as needed by individual customers. Implementation of smart grid will mean utilities needing to store much more data about customer usage, meter information, readings etc. than now.

Not forgetting the customer, getting them involved, provide them access to the data that is being captured by the utility, that too real time is essential for the entire solution to be effective. If it's for a "Smart" cloud it would dynamically manage the capacity as it relates to power, just the same way when user demand changes. This capability provides both the customer and the utility with benefits. These issues all point to the greater need to understand how we're using our valuable resource. I believe that the future strength is the ability to maintain the level of growth which depends on successful adoption of Grid.

Posted by Raksha Kadam at 11:36 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

The reputed analyst group Gartner has released its 2010 'Hype Cycle' graph for emerging technologies, which lists Cloud Computing as having reached the peak of its hype cycle and thus poised for moving into user disillusionment (Link).

For the uninitiated, a hype cycle (a term coined by Gartner) is a graphic representation of the maturity, adoption and social application of specific technologies.

According to Gartner reps, Cloud computing has "tipped over the peak and will soon experience disillusionment among enterprise users..".

The next phase on the cycle following the peak of Hype is of course the Trough of Disillusionment where they fail to meet expectations and quickly become unfashionable. This is usually accompanied by lower interest in the press and mass media thus leading to the veritable through in the interest in the technology.

Those familiar with the Hype Cycles in the past will note that most technologies usually drop off the the emerging technologies hype cycle after a year or two.

As an analyst and practitioner of Cloud Computing, I believe that it might be a bit pre-mature to place Cloud Computing on the wrong side of the peak on the hype cycle. Let me explain why.

Continue reading "Cloud Computing in the Trough of Disillusionment??" »

Posted by Maloy Patnaik at 2:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Will Cloud Computing bring a major change in the way System Integrators (SI) provide services especially in implementation of  BPM, EAI and B2B Packages?

In my opinion a typical SI  is normally engaged to configure a B2B-BPM-EAI package on hardware and provide a solution that meets the business requirement of the organization. This part of the business may not have a major impact especially where the SI is involved in the package implementation as the expectation is the package and hardware utilized will eventually be cloud compliant. Hence with a minor changes to its service offering an SI is already compliant to provide package implementation service on cloud.

Continue reading "Impact of Cloud Computing on Package implemention Services from SI." »

Posted by Dinesh Johri at 5:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Cloud computing today has become the buzz word in the IT industry and being seen as the big thing to address IT's ROI pain. However being involved with Integration, SOA and BPM for years I am constantly trying to see the value of Cloud in Integration or SOA or BPM space for the customers who already have invested heavily on a stack integration, SOA and BPM platform or on different individual platform to address all these areas.

Continue reading "Delivering Integration Platform as Private cloud - Part 1" »

Posted by Manas Kumar Sarkar at 1:01 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Are we growing on a fundamentally doomed DNA for tomorrow's IT eco-system?" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 9:19 AM | Permalink | Comments (6) | TrackBacks (0)

I believe, in the next-generation view of the ICC, a key area of focus will be  'adoption of lean methods to reduce eco-system fat'.  Let me talk about this ‘eco-system fat’. This is just a terminology that I use to represent the ‘undesired’ elements in the ecosystem of people, processes and technology fabric, similar to ‘undesired’ fat in our body. So even though organizations might have an ICC already in place and operating (in whatever capacity), over period of time processes tend to become difficult and ineffective, people seem to be getting stuck in a pattern of activities and hence become difficult to change etc etc. At the same time, context of what ICC does for the organization changes over period of time, need of the organization changes, environment changes. While all of that changes, things in ICC typically do not change in the same proportion and pace and hence what happens here that a layer of fat starts growing on various capabilities of the organization. By capabilities, I mean processes, knowledge, operations, contribution from staff, technology performance etc. Over a period of time, this fat makes the entire organizational system of the ICC  slower and less effective (in terms of delivering results) which basically means burning lot of dollars to improve anything in the eco-system.

With the current acute economical cost pressures, a shared system like ICC will need to reduce this fat significantly. One of the most successful ways to reduce this fat, (or better called non-performing elements of the ecosystem) is to adopt lean methods.

Continue reading ""What's next" for Integration Competency Centers? - Part 4" »

Posted by Rakesh Mishra at 7:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Continue reading "Cloud BPM - All Thunder, No Rain ?" »

Posted by Arup Raha at 10:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)