Cloud

At one of the recent conferences that I attended, I heard on how technology is disrupting and changing traditional business models. I could not help but resonate.

Today, traditional business models are completely being disrupted by technologies in "Cloud", "Big Data" and "Mobility". The traditional business models have been very mature for the last several decades and any deviation was considered implausible. Yet, with the advent of Cloud technologies and deployment models, with the new ability to extract, process large amounts of data cheaply (from "structured" and "unstructured" sources) on a real time basis and with the ability to easily to consume & visualize the processed information on a plethora of mobile devices, a perfect storm has been created in disrupting the traditional and existing "mature" business models.

The case is not just with a particular industry. In fact, any industry that you look to is facing this disruption.

Let's take a look at what has happened with the music industry.  For the last six decades or so, music has been produced and consumed in a typical model - the music company would hire an artist, they would produce the music, then the media and then market, distribute and sell the media to the consumer. For the consumer there was relatively little choice or rather limited access. If you wanted a popular song, it was usually out of stock and if you wanted an obscure song it was never on stock. Of course, the format of the media changed over the years - from LP records, to tape cassettes and to CDs, but the so called "mature" business model remained the same.

But then something dramatic happened and in less than a decade everything changed. In 1995, MP3 was born - it was the raw data for music, the simplification of data and compression of data at-least by 10 times in a digital format. A few years later, in 1999, Napster went live which allowed for illegal peer-to-peer file transfers that resulted music companies to file several lawsuits. Two years later, Apple created iPod where you to store large number of songs onto a small device and then two years later, it created iTunes that allowed for online legal download of music. For the first time in the history of the music industry you could download a song for 99 cents. Today an iPod can hold 40 thousand songs and iTunes has crossed 20billion downloads.

So, what really happened? MP3 resulted in "simplification of data", Napster was the "simplification of value-chain" and the iPod was the "simplification of consumption" which created a perfect storm in an existing business model.

This was a technology led disruption of a major kind. For the consumer, this led to a tremendous increase in value creation - not only you have online access to all the music in the world at your fingertips but you could follow the playlists of your friends with great taste in music and give you much more and varied options, interacting and sharing music, than you've ever done before (think Spotify). The music company no longer had to produce the media, distribute the media and incur costs in storing the music. The marginal costs to bring a new piece of music to millions of customers became zero. This gave a dramatic higher value to the customer at a dramatic lower cost, driven by a technology led disruption to the existing business model.

The same technology led disruption is happening in every other industry - Retail, Manufacturing, Fashion, Healthcare, Life sciences and others, and changing traditional business models. Big Data technologies are bringing in "simplification of data", Cloud is simplifying the value-chain and Mobility is simplifying the consumption of information. Industries cannot afford to miss the opportunity of dramatically adding more value to consumers (and at significantly lower costs) and are looking at Cloud, Big Data and Mobility technologies towards remaining competitive in the market.

It is fascinating to watch the trajectory of technologies. Some, like mobile banking, make a false start before staging a spectacular comeback; others such as social technologies hit the ground running and never look back, whilst others like the Itanium processor are destined for oblivion.

The progress of cloud computing so far bears a strong resemblance to the human life-cycle: the excitement of birth, the wonder of discovery, the halting first steps and then stability. Come adulthood, and there's the pressure of expectation. Will it reach 200 billion dollars? 500 billion? Or more perhaps?
Organizations' first steps, like nervous first time parents, have taken diffident steps, experimenting with a stray application or non-critical processes on the cloud, until they've grown in confidence about what works for them, or doesn't.. Read More

Continue reading "Looking for results? Look at the Cloud" »

A recent IDC study claims that "private cloud is [the] current flavor but hybrid cloud is fast becoming a reality." This makes sense, because it is the hybrid model that exploits cloud potential to the fullest. It's the golden mean between private, public and on-premise, enabling enterprises to fulfill all their ambitions--from plain-vanilla aspirations like cost efficiency, scalability, productivity and "on demand" to strategic business priorities like innovation, market expansion and business model reinvention. Of course, there's a catch. Read More

Within the various communities of people that I interact with, including colleagues, clients, domain experts, technical architects, sales executives, and others, I've often seen that cloud computing is predominantly linked to infrastructure and availability of infrastructure (servers, storage, etc.) as-a-service, even though there is enough evidence that it can be both "hardware and software" as-a-service.

In fact, cloud computing can be "anything IT" as-a-service, be it infrastructure-as-a-service, platform-as-a-service, software-as-a-service, storage-as-a-service, security-as-a-service, data-as-a-service, business process-as-a-service, dev/test environment-as-a-service, desktop-as-a-service, or API-as-a-service.

This brings up an interesting overlap with traditional IT.

Cloud computing can replace the traditional and manual methods of downloading, installing, and configuring development software (IDEs, app servers, and plug-ins) with an automated workflow based process, enabled via an unified Web interface/portal that will provide complete development environments as-a-service and on demand to software developers, bringing in efficiency and consistency. At the same time, it can integrate architecture repositories along with the various project and quality management tools and processes, including tracking tools, charts, and reporting dashboards via the same unified Web interface/portal, to provide well-rounded development/test environments on an "as-a-service" basis.

It provides a compelling alternative to the traditional EAI (Enterprise Application Integration) and ESB (Enterprise Service Bus) architecture patterns with a "Cloud Integration Gateway" that can not only integrate on-premises applications but also on-premises applications with SaaS applications/platforms in the cloud, and even integrate SaaS applications to other SaaS applications in the cloud, via a common orchestration layer that can abstract an enterprise from the lack of interoperability and lack of standardization in the industry.

Cloud computing provides innovative options to collaborate at work with social networking, micro-blogging evolving from a traditional theme of enterprise portals, identity, and content management.

It opens up newer options on how data is handled with ability to mine sources of data previously not feasible to provide "business intelligence, analytics, and data warehousing" as-as-a-service. It provides cheaper options for high performance computing leveraging the commoditization of Infrastructure. With the automation that it brings in, it provides better efficiency and cost savings on application maintenance and infrastructure management.

Cloud-based computing is the end state when developing or evolving an enterprise's architecture and cuts across various spheres of IT architectures. It is taking service orientation of applications and infrastructure to the next level.

Of course, all this is possible with an underlying layer of infrastructure that is virtualized and automated to be available on an on-demand basis, but cloud computing is not only about infrastructure or just an infrastructure deployment model. A holistic approach is required to realize the full benefits cloud computing has to offer.

A study of cloud economics conducted, a year ago, concluded that by switching to cloud computing, organizations could save half to two thirds of the total cost incurred on a 1,000 server setup across its lifecycle. But to view the cloud as one more cost reduction mechanism is to miss the forest for the trees. Because, I believe, the really big leverage that the cloud brings to enterprises is innovation acceleration - driving the execution of viable ideas.

Read more..  

Much has been said about Cloud and on how 2012 will be the year that the Cloud will become real. But having worked with Cloud practitioners, listened to industry analysts, and spoken to CIOs and IT decision makers in IT, I can confidently tell you that the Cloud is already real and as a CIO, there are different questions you ought to be dealing with.

The year 2012 will also be the year the CIO reinvented himself or herself. Even 12 months ago, when I used to speak with clients, there was an air of experimentation and curiosity about Cloud. It no longer is so. CIOs, IT decision makers realize that Cloud is very much part of their agenda for the year and if by 2012, they do not do something on the Cloud, their own relevance is going to diminish.

But as has been the case with every major transition point in the history of IT, the cloud brings with it, its own set of challenges. For one, CIOs suddenly have to deal with an IT that is more complex than ever before. For a CIO on a cloud journey, the realities that they have to deal with are many. If you are a CIO or an IT decision maker, your success and making yourself relevant to the business will depend on if you can come to terms with the inevitable truth of a heterogeneous Cloud environment. Your success will depend on if you will be able to stitch a Cloud Ecosystem together.

So what are the challenges that you will have to deal with? To start with, you manage and control your own on-premise IT today and that is going to continue. You will still have, say nearly 40% of your IT that will still reside in the traditional systems. You still have to deal with it as you always have, but how would you manage this in the context of a large looming Cloud (both private and even public) that is also certainly becoming part of your IT? Your Hybrid IT?

Secondly, you might have a Private Cloud, having consolidated your existing IT to create greater value through infrastructure consolidation, virtualization and an internally available elastic compute capability, though with a limit. These may be on your own homegrown IT or possibly using the VMware, HP, IBM stacks or the even more recently launched Microsoft Systems Center 2012. And from my client conversations, it is quite clear, that CIOs are still figuring out how to deal with Cloud adoption, leveraging it for IT and eventually business advantage. While the Private Cloud has been the preferred path to start the Cloud journey, it is quite frankly a big challenge in terms of having to deal with what apps to migrate to the Private Cloud, what applications to develop on it? Some deal with more basic problems like, how do you ensure adoption and maximum utilization of the Cloud? How to get more bang-for-the-buck spent on Cloud?

Thirdly, more importantly, whether you have a Public Cloud for yourself or not, you are going to have to deal with the public cloud setups like Amazon and Windows Azure from Microsoft, sooner or later in your Cloud journey.  Now this is when the Cloud can get really tougher to control, to integrate and to manage. Who will manage your Public Cloud? How will you deal with the various commercial, legal, service-level contracts? You will need one with each Cloud Provider. Are you prepared for this new reality?

As a CIO, are you truly prepared for Hybrid IT? You are going to have a Hybrid IT, that has in its wake, an on-premise IT where your core systems reside, a private Cloud (or sometimes multiple), a Public Cloud (or frankly many) that will often make the demand to be a seamless intermediation.  And, in spite, of seeing these challenges repeatedly across clients across the Globe, I strongly believe the response that puts the CIO in command of his Cloud Ecosystem and Hybrid IT is the opportunity for transformation that Cloud provides. It is in creating an enterprise wide strategy, Cloud roadmap and embracing the reality of a heterogeneous Cloud Ecosystem, can you gain control of your Ecosystem and become more relevant to your own business.  

So the CIOs who will succeed are the ones who view Cloud as an opportunity for transformation and build out a sound Cloud strategy and implement a way to setup and manage a Cloud Ecosystem of multiple providers, but with a seamless way of governance. Will speak more on that in my next blog, till then think about it.

Microsoft cloud offering,Windows Azure, provide cloud-ready service capabilities that allow enterprise architects and developers to build large scale applications faster and better. Here I would like to share a paper on one such enterprise scenario, where PaaS capabilities offered by Windows Azure can be leveraged to develop a custom BI solution that expands Enterprise BI to the cloud.

Continue reading "Expanding Business Intelligence to Cloud" »

The July 4^th 2012 announcement from CERN on the possible evidence of the existence of the God particle or the Higgs Boson has sent ripples through the physics community. This is not just fundamental to explain the existence of gravity but a validation of the Standard Model of particle physics. It holds the possibility of opening up new frontiers in physics and a new understanding of the world we live in.

While we marvel at these discoveries, our physicist brother-in grapple with trying to understand if this discovery is truly a Higgs Boson or an imposter?  It is however very interesting to look at the magnitude of the data analysis and the distributed computing framework that was required to wade through the massive amounts of data produced by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC).

The Big Data problem that the scientists at CERN and across the world had to contend with was sifting through over 800 Trillion (you heard that right ...) proton to proton collisions looking for this elusive Higgs Boson.  Additionally this particle has a large mass but is extremely unstable and lasts for less than a billionth of a second.  It cannot be detected directly and is identified through its footprint or the particles that it splits into. This results in over 200 Petabytes of data that needs to be analyzed.

 Right from the beginning CERN had set this up as a distributed cloud based tiered data processing solution. There were three tiers identified T0 being the tier that collects the data directly from LDH, there were 11 T1 nodes across the world getting the data from CERN and a number of T2 nodes (for e.g. there are 8 in the US) based on the areas of the data that particular groups of physicists were interested in analyzing.  From the T2 nodes people could download the data to their personal T3 nodes for analysis. This resulted in a massive highly distributed data processing framework that collects data spewed out by the LHC detectors at a phenomenal rate of 1.25GB/sec. The overall network can rely on a computation capability of over 100,000 processors spread over 130 organization in 34 countries.

From a technology perspective it is interesting that people have used some of the open source technologies that we use for big data processing in enterprises for e.g. the file system with the Hadoop echo system, HDFS (Hadoop Distirbuted File System) was the candidate for storing these massive amounts of data, ROOT another open source tool which is also used by financial institutions as well is used to analyze this data.

It is amazing that the analysis tools used to find the God particle is commonly available to be used by the enterprise to solve smaller Big Data problems.

To paraphrase Galelio "All truths are easy to understand once they are discovered; the point is to discover them and Big Data can help"

In the last twenty years in this industry, I have seen quite a few faces of IT operations in many organizations. From being considered as a back room operation to leading change and business integration. But the truth is, most IT organizations in enterprises are struggling to stay in the front line and constantly battling to find ways of quantifying the "value of IT". This has not been easy to say the least. 

 

In my view, the two big issues that are contributing to the woes of most IT organizations. They are ..

1.       Time to Market

2.       Innovation

 

There is no doubt that IT has transformed to be the backbone of all enterprises. Most organizations IT capabilities have evolved and we have done a 'good job' in bringing  the engineering discipline, process, methodologies and more importantly,predictability, in this industry. Now, where has that left IT in any organization. It is considered more often than not a bottleneck in bringing new ideas to the market. Let's look at it from a business leaders standpoint. How many times have we heard " we do not have an environment to start the work, develop and test", " this cannot go into this release cycle", " it is too time consuming to try things out"," We need to have all requirement and design ready" etc. Truth of the matter is that it takes too long to get a business idea from a concept to production. More often than not , IT is the bottleneck. 

 

It is true that 85 percent of IT budgets world over are to keep the lights on. So where is the room for innovation? Most investments are engaged in keeping lights on and the other 15 to 20 percent is used up in delivering "strategic programs". There is generally no room available to try new ideas or engage in any sort of R&D activity. This has resulted in formation of shadow IT groups outside of then IT depts with limited success and most certainly resulting in a "mess" to be cleaned up. 

 

I am very excited about the opportunity the Cloud offers. I am also very confident that this can be as big a disruption or an opportunity to IT as the Internet was, or a phenomenon close to heart, the Global Delivery Model. The Cloud offers a bright future for the industry, one in which IT can ensure greater agility, simplicity, scalability, efficiency, innovation, and cost-effectiveness for businesses.  Boy, does it provide enough room! And lots of it. It has the power to address the issue of time to market as well as bring in significant opportunities and construct for innovation.

 

As I sign off, I would like to leave you all with one thought: The sky is the limit on the Cloud. So What would limit CIOs in leveraging it to it's potential ? More on that in my next blog..

 

 

The inevitability of the cloud has led many enterprises to embark on their cloud journeys. However, in transforming their IT and datacenters, enterprises seem to be pushing more of their IT onto private clouds than public clouds.

This trend essentially is driven by the value drawn out of IT investment maximized through the private cloud. Private clouds offer greater stability in terms of localized control, security, and closer adherence standards. Additionally, private clouds make it easy for seamless cloud adoption and set the stage for setting up and managing a hybrid cloud ecosystem as the organization attains scale and is eventually prepared to make this transition. It is important to note that the private cloud is more often than not the first step in an enterprise's journey to cloud adoption.

So the business case for cloud cannot be built on short-term gains of cost but on long-term vision and opportunity of what the cloud as a capability can deliver to the business. The value from cloud is truly transformational in nature, and an excellent example is in the case of our client Ricoh and what we are doing for it in Europe.

Ricoh wanted to essentially create a scalable, flexible, and agile platform for itself and wanted to rationalize its datacenters across Europe while contributing to reducing carbon footprint and energy optimization.

 

The Ricoh Private Cloud, delivered by the project team comprising Ricoh's and Infosys's cloud experts, is a part of the company's move to centralize its IT infrastructure for all its operations across Europe, with the aim of creating a more efficient IT environment. It is a critical building block in enabling Ricoh employees and clients to access applications and data securely from wherever they are in Europe with any device.

The project is another contributor to Ricoh's overall environmental strategy, where, by 2050, it plans to reduce energy consumption by 87.5 percent. It will remove more than 1,000 servers across EMEA and will result in a reduction of 16.8k tonnes of CO2, which is equivalent to emissions from 3,350 cars. For our efforts we were awarded the Green IT award for this project.

 

So while the truth is that we are helping Ricoh bring down the cost of infrastructure by almost 30 percent, the business impact of contributing to an environmental initiative makes the case of cloud adoption more compelling in the case of Ricoh. Such is the way business cases of cloud need to be built -- be it for infrastructure, platform, applications, or even data on the cloud.