Apps and Desktops and Clouds - Oh My!

A bunch of people have asked me about my new gig with Citrix.  "You're doing VDI and XenApp now? I thought you were a Cloud guy?" Yes, it's true...  and it’s due in part to today's announcements by Citrix about Project Avalon, the explosion of the Mobile Enterprise, and the Path to the Cloud. And it’s about helping corporate IT think and operate more like Service Providers do.

Mobility: A Perfect Use Case for the Cloud

Consider the use case to deliver huge numbers of applications and desktops across hundreds, thousands, or tens-of-thousands of mobile clients – Challenging for IT due to configuration, set-up, monitoring, management, network optimization and scaling.  Doubly challenging when you consider the different topologies of virtual servers, licensing servers, provisioning servers and more, all scaling at different rates to maintain service levels.

What better use-case than to apply a cloud operations model within which to deploy such a solution?

With appropriate cloud management and orchestration, much of the guesswork of infrastructure sizing, machine provisioning and network adjustments can be obviated. Management of heterogeneous apps, VMs and OS’s is a breeze.   Serving-up mobile apps – and even entire virtual desktops – out of a cloud infrastructure is a natural.  And therein lies beauty in this new technology.

A Perfect Technology Next-Step

To accomplish this, Citrix – partnered with customers and Service Providers – is embarking on a 2-stage journey called Project Avalon. This will let enterprises and/or service providers deliver Windows apps and desktops as a true cloud service from private, public and hybrid clouds for users on any device, anywhere.

In the first stage of the journey, the approach to installation, management and monitoring of the base infrastructure for virtual desktops & apps will be massively simplified (Get the Tech Preview here). Also, features such as the visual experience will be extended. Then in the second, this infrastructure will be fitted with the ability (a) to mix-and-match any underlying cloud platform (b) mix-and-match different Citrix and Windows platforms, and (c) integrate with sophisticated management and orchestration to provide scaling, fail-over and cloud platform migration.

Consider the possibilities – the ability to stand-up a complete mobile enterprise solution either on your private cloud, and/or public cloud. Think: CloudStack, Amazon, Azure. Or a combination.

Goal: Help SPs Be More Efficient / Help IT Operate Like an SP

The point of all of this is to deliver mobile desktops and mobile apps from any cloud to any device.  Some Citrix service providers (CSPs) are doing this now and Project Avalon will further simplify their effectiveness to deliver from their public clouds. They’ll be able to stand-up massively scalable mobile desktop and mobile application environments (think 0,000’s and more). This will allow corporate IT – whether SMBs or global enterprises – to source global mobility solutions to any device more effectively than ever before.

For the enterprise wishing to use their own private cloud for mobility services, Project Avalon will permit this too.  In fact, using this new architecture, one could even burst (or fail-over) from a private cloud to a public instance.

Corporate IT has always had what I term “SP envy” that SP’s already run IT like an efficient business and IT would like to be more like them. With Project Avalon, IT really can operate like an SP on an internal cloud. As I’ve said before, the worlds of IT and SPs are merging, and IT will be delivered "as a Service" rather than as an engineered offering. Project Avalon will help accelerate Bringing the Enterprise to the Cloud.

I'm excited to be part of the Citrix family, to be part of this important mix of cloud and mobility, and to help use the cloud paradigm in an applied way: To help people work and play from anywhere.

The CIO as The (IT) Supply Chain Manager

Guest blog on GigaOm...

The Rise of the Cloud Service Bus

In my recent GigaOm guest blog, I posited that the advent of hosted cloud services (particularly PaaS and SaaS) will slowly morph the role of the CIO into that of an IT Supply Chain Manager.

Technologically, I believe this move to a "Buy-and-Integrate" mentality (vs. a "Build-Everything" mentality) will open the door to a new class of products to assist with services integration. And, if you agree that the importance of leveraging external services will be elevated for the CIO, then I believe a significant enabling technology will be a rebirth of the need for a robust "service integration bus".

Why?  As I mention in my blog, enterprises integrating external services require:

 - Identity and access management for each provider
 - Data compliance, legal and regulatory audit access across each provider
 - Security compliance systems
 - Provisioning, including capacity forecasting
 - Performance (e.g. SLA) monitoring
 - Cost and budget tracking (i.e. for billing, showback and/or chargeback)
 - Disaster Recovery / Redundant service sources where needed

Some would call the above integration functions "Glue Logic." Indeed in the past, many of these functions were hand-integrated across the few external services that were leveraged, and custom-engineered into each internally engineered stack. But time is changing the model. With more turnkey services  sourced from cloud (IaaS/PaaS/SaaS) providers, the need for a more efficient integration function will escalate. Integration will need to be standardized and replicable, scalable and responsive to the business' needs.

You may recall one component integration approach has been the Enterprise Service Bus, primarily associated with SOA leveraging SOAP protocols. This Integration Bus was originally to orchestrate access and workflow between component services within the enterprise. (By the way, Microsoft offers a great overview of ESBs - albeit BizTalk centric - here on MSDN).

I believe that the "2.0" Integration Bus will be one which brokers higher-level services generated from external, public cloud providers - not just internal component services. And it will use more generalized interactions than SOAP, since the providers and their environments will be less standardized.

To this end, there are some great current/upcoming thoughts suggested by Mike Ponta of the notion of a "Cloud ESB", and can't wait to hear more.  A quick survey of the market also yielded what looks to be potentially promising integration technology coming out of Mulesoft called their CloudHub.

Conceptually, the "mashed-up" service was the 1.0 version of this integration concept. But as enterprise IT begins to regularly tap and integrate multiple external services, the 2.x integration busses will need a more structured, standardized and rapid approach to integration.

I can't wait to see what else the market will generate. Stay tuned.

Other resources/Blogs:

•  The CIO as a Business Service Conductor Blog by Andi Mann
•  Is today’s CIO really just another supply chain manager? Blog by Charlie Betz

Enablers for Transformed IT - Placing My Bets

It's an odd time of the year to be making predictions. But recent conversations with start-ups, CEOs, CIOs and others have suggested areas in Enterprise IT that I  bet will be "hot" over the near/medium term.

Some of the areas are "Sexy" (high on the Hype Cycle) - and others are not. But in my opinion all are worth betting on. They are all interrelated and all are critical enablers to the goal of a transformed IT ecosystem.

Already Sexy: Integrated Cloud Infrastructure Management
Of course you expected this one... But the betting opportunity isn't exactly what you think.

There are currently hoards of point-products professing "cloud management" - including the OpenStack/Cloudstack alternatives - but surprisingly, these still lack in providing a comprehensive solution that a reasonably sophisticated SP or CIO needs to buy.

In other words, I don't just mean a product that offers an automated virtualization (server, storage, networking) layer.... No: The real opportunity I expect to see here is an integrated comprehensive solution, that includes security, compliance, monitoring, financial metering, end-user provisioning portals, etc.  The winners in the space will either integrate these features too, or offer a pre-integrated bundle of best-of-breed point-products. And it's going to happen soon.

Not Yet Sexy: The Integration Bus
If you believe that most of IT's infrastructure is "going cloud" and that many 3rd-party services will be SaaS, then the role of the CIO will begin to shift from being a technologist (who builds things from ground-up) to being a Supply-Chain manager (who integrates multiple services from multiple sources).

To execute on its new role in the enterprise, IT will therefore become an integration point for internally- and externally-generated services. It will need to provide core identity, compliance, data exchange, security, and access infrastructure to properly "broker" all of these diverse services, providers and APIs.

It seems to me that the notion of an integration bus will become crucial. Such a bus will provide the "glue logic" between all services, and avoids tedious hand-coded integration points. In many ways this bus is a core intersection point between the internal and external cloud - the hybrid nexus, if you will.

Remember, it's not enough to have a service in a cloud. There will be a huge need for coordinating the interactions into/out-of (and between) cloud-sourced services. The need for such a service bus will quickly elevate to that of a critical IT enabler. A good bet to take.

Getting Sexy: IT Business Management
Building on the concept of IT as a "supply chain manager" is the concept of IT as a Service Provider to the business. This is sometimes termed IT-as-a-Service, where IT begins to run itself as a "business". While it may not literally have a profit motive, it will be forced to become functionally competitive with external services, to market itself, and to price itself competitively.

As I've written before, in order to think like a business, one critical enabler is to know fixed and variable costs, as well as cost allocations and cost sensitivities.

Thus, the segments known as IT Financial Management (ITFM), IT Business Management (ITBM) and/or Technology Business Management (TBM) will necessarily have to expand in importance.  This segment looks at the granular cost basis of infrastructure (including cloud service costs) and assembles a composite cost structure at the application and even service level. This permits IT to understand cost sources, provide decision support and forecasting for infrastructure changes, and provide a "bill of IT" showback/chargeback to internal service customers.  All critical in the new Transformed view of IT.

Too Sexy: Big Data Business Models

Careful here... I'm not speaking about Big Data infrastructure or analytics products per se. I'm referring to the business models that will soon be based on mashing-up and analyzing large quantities of structured/unstructured data to uncover new revenue opportunities.

As I recently mentioned, data-based business models will begin to complement existing product/service based businesses.  While adoption of Big Data technology is already penetrating the infrastructure market, the real opportunity is when it penetrates the lines-of-business people such as marketers, sales, and business development.

Companies that employ marketing professionals paired with "data scientists" are the ones to watch. The new business opportunities presented by the promise of cracking big data will be the driving force behind the infrastructure and technology purchases.

When will this transition happen?  I predict when companies begin to hire "Big Data product managers" and team them with BizDev and data scientists. Now that's disruptive and sexy.

The next generation business: Data is the new platform

Guest blog on GigaOm....

Follow IT's Money: A Survey of IT Financial Management Vendors

With all the talk of Cloud Computing and the transformation of IT, conversations mostly center on technology. But core to real IT transformation is the financial transformation of IT as well.

I've recently written about IT's need for financial metrics and financial transparency (a recent blog of mine has a great set of resource pointers on this very topic) but haven't done a deep dive into the companies - and products - that enable this change. In the course of researching I've found that the market is getting increasingly crowded with players... and indicator to me that this segment is beginning to become more important to IT leaders.

At its core, IT finances are based on capturing and monitoring fixed vs. variable costs, use and utilization of assets, and then blending-in operational costs. Other more sophisticated IT finance tools then allocate those costs to projects and/or organizations across the enterprise, and some even integrate that data into other finance applications (See this Blog by Paulo Prazeres on the topic). Still other tools extend out into the public cloud, monitoring usage and cost - even making recommendations regarding other pricing options and even other cloud providers.

Overall, in my opinion, these tools should be used with one goal in mind: Running IT more like a business. To do so, you need to know your sources of fixed and variable costs, costs of alternative sourcing, per-unit service costs, and who costs are allocated to. (Note: knowing costs is a requirement, actually charging-back is not).  So, when choosing tools, consider what you might need for your basic here-and-now requirements, also consider where you want to be in a few years, and what vendors are likely to offer those features as well.

Disclaimer - I may have unintentionally omitted some vendors... if so, please let me know so I can add them in. ~ KO

Subscription Billing
This class of players provide approaches to manage online subscription services, be they recurring SaaS or perhaps even other cloud-based infrastructure services. Many have flexible policy engines to support a variety of recurring revenue models.  This group of vendors isn't necessarily core to providing IT financial transparency, but may provide important services for specific IT business models.

Aria Systems - (San Francisco, CA) SaaS based service providing subscription billing and recurring revenue management; flexible billing/metering on any metric within the data center. Multiple connectors into many types of accounting systems

Monexa -  (Vancouver, BC) A very comprehensive suite of tools for billing automation for the entire subscription lifecycle of the business from initial offer to revenue to renewals.

Zuora - (Redwood City, CA) With an impressive set of customers, they provide enterprise-class, cloud-based tools to launch and scale any subscription service, quickly and affordably.

IT Accounting, Charge-back, Show-back
This next set of companies is by far the broadest, with all vendors providing at least basic products for monitoring, allocating and (most of the time) charging-back variable IT costs. This is all a foundation for providing basic IT cost transparency.

Cloudability - (Portland, OR) The platform aggregates our customers’ cloud costs into accessible and comprehensive reports to help manage spending, reduce waste, and identify opportunities for cost savings.

CloudRows - (Israel) Provides cost control for Amazon Web Services (AWS) accounts; enables you to be sure you are operating within your IT budget, and notifies you before a budget exception is about to occur. Works by constantly monitoring AWS activity logs in the background, and producing cost analytic reports for budget tracking.

Cloudyn - (Israel) Yields a deep view of application use of cloud resources, and actionable solutions for cost optimization; continually collects utilization, consumption, availability, capacity, and cost metrics for monitored cloud resources i.e. Compute (e.g, AWS EC2), Database (e.g, AWS RDS) etc.

Costnomics - (Fremont, CA)  SaaS based tool providing IT Financial Management; Service Cost Management; IT Investment Management; IT Charge Management. The resulting value is to provide Cost Transparency, optimized IT Spend, and better business alignment.

Newvem - (Israel) Newvem tracks and analyzes cloud resources usage, especially as they sprawl, identifying sub-optimal and vulnerable use of cloud resources with regards to security, availability, utilization, cost effectiveness and more. Then, recommends what needs to be done. Newvem does this by combining powerful data analytics of cloud usage data and curating crowd-sourcing knowledge and expertise from active cloud users, the community and experts for each specific issue that arises.

Nicus Software - (Salem, VA) Provides enterprise-wide IT financial management application used for IT chargeback, cost visibility, budgeting and forecasting. Suite is a comprehensive set of chargeback functions to support many different chargeback methodologies including resource-based, subscription-based, fixed cost, distributions, allocations, pass-thru and adjustments.

Pace Applied Technology - (Warrenton, VA) Offers accounting for IT resources, user chargeback, financial analysis and reporting. Provides the means to identify resource use, determine the cost of utilization, and charge the appropriate system users and/or business activities.

uptimeCloud -  (Toronto, ON) a cloud cost monitoring service that will help you measure, monitor and manage the cost of all your cloud based infrastructure in AWS (Amazon Web Services). Provides Cloud cost monitoring, Cloud cost forecasting, and Cloud cost showback. From Uptime Software.

IT Finance and Technology Business Management
I've chosen to break this out from the section above due to the more comprehensive features that appear to be provided by the vendors. These products play a more strategic role to manage and forecast costs, evaluate overall value, and assist in IT/business decision-making.

Apptio - (Bellevue, WA) Enables IT leaders to manage the cost, quality and value of IT Services by providing deep visibility into the total cost of IT services, communicating the value of IT to the business through an interactive "Bill of IT"; strategically aligns the planning, budgeting and forecasting processes

BMC - (Houston, TX)  Business Service Management Delivers comprehensive transparency into resources and associated costs required to provide IT services to the business; process for capturing demand, as well as a means by which it can be prioritized and managed based on business goals and objectives;  Enables IT to budget and forecast expenses from the perspective of IT resources, activities, and their associated costs.

Claritia - (Fort Worth, TX) Provides solutions aimed at delivering complete transparency into the total cost of IT ownership and delivery so executives can easily optimize and forecast their budgets. Products for IT cost transparency, IT financial management and IT cost optimization.

CloudCruiser - (Roseville, CA) Provides cost visibility and optimization across heterogeneous internal/external cloud environments. Offers a comprehensive suite of applications to map and measure resource usage independent of computing environment, allocating costs based on IT-defined criteria, and providing flexible and in-depth reporting of that usage.

Comsci - (Iselin, NJ) Establishes product and unit costing metrics for benchmarking and/or chargeback; quantifies and presents the TCO for all IT applications and solution; provides actionable metrics and analytics for cost reduction opportunities and comparison to alternative solutions

Cube Billing (Dallas, TX)- a cloud-based application with two service offerings: An Internal Billing/Chargeback System and an External Billing System. ability to easily understand cost information via a cost allocation and chargeback application. We help make financial data transparent across sales, delivery, account teams, and external clients.

Other Resources & References

• IT Financial Management Association
• Gartner's IT Financial, Procurement & Asset Management Summit 
• IT Financial Management tools from major vendors
• HP IT Financial Management
• VMware IT Finance Manager (Formerly Digital Fuel)
• BMC Financial Planning and Budgeting

Cloud: What's a Service? Who Are SPs?

My perspective of Cloud Computing has been rocked a bit.

Simplistically, I assumed I knew what IaaS, PaaS and SaaS meant, and I thought I knew who the logical public providers of these services would be.

However, there have been a number of interesting new services - and providers - that show signs of breaking the stereotypes.

BTW, when I speak of services, I'm specifically meaning Component Services. Think of that as a mapping service;  a brokering service; a credit card clearing service; a datamart.

And in an increasing number of cases, I am seeing these services  being sourced from providers that are not the traditional hosting or SaaS providers you might expect. This leads me to believe that there will be a number of business models which the cloud makes possible that we've not yet considered. And these models will come from startups and established companies alike.

The first set of services that got me thinking comes from PayPal, and is X.commerce. Somewhat analogously to Amazon, eBay has observed that its mainstay businesses of auctioning and payments could be extended by making infrastructure and component services available separately to online merchants. X.commerce is their attempt to make service products such as credit card payment processing, cataloging, auctioning etc. available as a la carte APIs outside of the eBay/PayPal site.  We all think of eBay as an online "SaaS" platform, but they now need to be re-thought of as a cloud services provider as well.

Wall Street Exchange, or Cloud Service Provider? I'm referring to NYSE Capital Markets Community Platform (CMCP) that I blogged about back in June.  In an attempt to capture more customers such as hedge funds, NYSE took quite a step to launch its own special-purpose cloud-computing (IaaS) platform, right across the Hudson from Wall Street. Not only does is it intended to host high frequency trading apps, but it also houses a Big Data repository of historic exchange trading ticks, against-which trading algorithms can test their effectiveness.  Much like the example above, we have a business that turns itself inside-out to expose internal services (and data) creating an entirely new business model.

Next, I tripped over ifttt (If This, Then That). On the surface, this looks like a simple hosted scripting site.  Anybody can set up a simple decision/action...  i.e. IF I'm mentioned on Twitter, THEN text me; IF I'm tagged on Facebook, THEN post a message... and so on.  Ifttt goes further by allowing others to create combined "recipes" that you can use.  In some sense, this is an ultra-simple service mash-up that's hosted on the web for you.  And, if you adhere to the theory that very simple actions can be combined and nested to form more complex actions, there might be some pretty sophisticated personal automation features that Ifttt will enable in the future.  Ifttt is a pure online decision service.  Not sure what I'd call them, but this is a frame-breaker.

It's a Store! It's a Streaming Service Provider! Yes, even Walmart Entertainment is arguably now in the cloud Services game, with Disc-to-Digital which (using Vudu, a video streaming acquisition) allows users to stream videos from the web, assuming they've already purchased a DVD (read: Digital Rights) in the store.  Like Barnes and Noble, Amazon, iTunes, Netflix and others, the rush toward becoming a digital media distributor is blurring the lines between brick-and-mortar vendors and digital streaming Service Providers.

I'll be keeping my eyes out for other examples of new forms of IP disguised as cloud services. I'm sure I'll keep being surprised.