Continuing the 100-day cloud watch, I’m working through my list of cloud computing surveys and papers. Given my background and primary readership, I’m starting with the enterprise architecture focused research. First up is the Forrester Report: EAs Are Seeing the Beginning of Cloud’s Impact On IT by Gene Leganza. The paper stemmed from a recent Forrester Leadership Board (FLB) teleconference:
“A recent Forrester Leadership Boards (FLB) teleconference, attended exclusively by Enterprise Architecture Council members, focused on the impact of cloud computing on EA and the traditional IT structure. We polled the 75 attendees, all enterprise architects, to determine their level of familiarity with cloud concepts and terminology, the degree to which these enterprise architects are engaging with the business and IT community to make decisions about cloud deployments, and the motivation for looking to the cloud for solutions.”
The report offers good information about why organizations are adopting cloud computing – include the different drivers of enterprise architecture and infrastructure professionals – along with enterprise architecture’s involvement in cloud computing adoption and implementation. I’d like to focus on this last point:
“Of the 54 session attendees who responded to this question, 20% said they were aware of no cloud deployments in their enterprise. Of the 43 who knew of cloud use, 26% said enterprise architects were involved in all cloud decisions, 58% said they were pulled in for guidance on possible cloud deployments some of the time, and 16% said their business or IT staff had licensed cloud services without EA’s involvement.”
Forrester surmises: “The ease of procuring cloud resources makes it likely that business project sponsors or IT development and support staff will acquire cloud services without engaging the standard technology governance processes where architects typically become engaged.”. At the Gartner AADI conference, Eric Knipp referred to this phenomenon as the rise of “Citizen Development”.
In the report, Leganza suggests that instead of “falling victim to an end run by the business”, enterprise architects need to embrace the role of business advisor. Specifically, Leganza recommends:
“Get proficient in cloud-related issues and terminology. If IT in general and architects in particular are to position themselves as trusted advisors to the business — thus playing a role in the IT-to-BT transition rather than being a victim of it — architects should be the ones to recommend cloud services when they are appropriate rather than let the business position cloud as a way to get IT services without the IT department. To be in a position to advocate cloud-based solutions, architects must have a thorough understanding of the facts, subtleties, hype, and misinformation surrounding cloud computing, and they must develop a practical model for which of their workloads are appropriate for the cloud and which must be deployed internally…”
“Look for ways to improve IT services with cloud-based offerings. Work with subject matter experts in infrastructure and application engineering to see where cloud-based services can provide hosted solutions that are more cost-effective and flexible than in-house scenarios without introducing undue risk…"
“Consider cloud services when brainstorming business solutions. Create a cloud cheat sheet — your own customized guide listing criteria that identify a workload appropriate for the cloud — for use in early-stage architecture reviews or when discussing possible solutions to business problems. Any flexible and cost-effective hosting arrangement that does not introduce risk can translate to technology-enhanced business capabilities with no increased support burden on internal IT, which is a win-win for both IT and its business stakeholders.”
“Provide a context for solution decisions with an integrated view of architecture. …Providing an easy-to-understand high-level graphical view of business, information, and applications — such as in a capability map — can enable informed discussions about possible cloud-based solutions that don’t ignore integration requirements.”
Todd Biske, a seasoned enterprise architect and renowned SOA Governance expert, also speaks to the EA as Business Advisor in a recent post.
Tagged as:
enterprise architects,
enterprise considerations,
Forrester,
Gene Leganza,
Todd Biske
Posted by brenda michelson at 2:07 pm in 100-days, Cloud Watch, adoption, analyst positions, enterprise architecture, enterprise integration | Permalink
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Cross posted from elemental links. Commentary on Event Processing and Cloud Computing about midway through the post. Personally, I see a big tie (opportunity) at the intersection. I’ll share more on that another time. Original post follows.
Session Abstract: Roy Schulte and Dr. Chandy released a new book on Event Processing in October 2009, aimed at business and system analysts, architects, application managers, CIOs, and technically-oriented business managers. This session will highlight the key points of the book and explain why and how mainstream IT departments will ramp their use of event processing up during the next ten years.
Dr. Chandy is the Simon Ramo Professor at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California. He has received numerous awards including the CMG Michelson Award, the IEEE Kobayashi award, and the Babbage Award.
W. Roy Schulte is Vice President and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner. He was the lead author of the 1996 Gartner report that introduced the term SOA to the industry. Mr. Schulte originated the research in the field of message brokers, coined the term business activity monitoring (BAM), and wrote the first analyst reports on the zero-latency enterprise and the enterprise service bus (ESB).
Yesterday, Roy did a rapid-fire session on Event Processing. more >>
Tagged as:
eventclouds,
GartnerAADI,
live coverage,
ManiChandy,
RoySchulte
Posted by brenda michelson at 1:10 pm in Blog, analyst positions, data, enterprise integration, event processing | Permalink
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Session Abstract: Customers, prospects, and partners use the Web to connect to enterprise applications at an increasing rate, underscoring the need for high developer productivity that achieves superior time-to-market relative to rivals. Cloud computing provides a powerful combination of value and cost drivers, and a growing number of Web-facing enterprise applications will find a home there, heralding a new era in enterprise Web development and execution.
Key Issues:
- What’s driving the convergence of Web and cloud AD, and what does the market offer today?
- How will future enterprise-developed solutions be architected, and how will the software development life cycle evolve?
- How should this be factored into near-term AD decisions on development environments, tools, methodologies and staff/skill planning?
Eric opens: By 2014, about a 1/3 of new web applications will be developed on platforms in the cloud. Platform that is horizontally scalable, designed for multi-tenancy.
Drivers of this enterprise shift: developer productivity, time to market, cost of ownership. more >>
Tagged as:
EricKnipp,
Gartner,
GartnerAADI,
live coverage
Posted by brenda michelson at 8:48 pm in Blog, PaaS, analyst positions | Permalink
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This week, Gartner is holding a Data Center Conference in Vegas. A press release from this morning is on private vs. public cloud spend by IT organizations:
“Despite the economies of scale offered by public cloud providers, private cloud services will prevail for the foreseeable future while public cloud offerings mature, according to Gartner, Inc. Through 2012, IT organizations will spend more money on private cloud computing investments than on offerings from public cloud providers.
Gartner defines public cloud computing as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to external customers using Internet technologies. Private cloud computing is defined as a style of computing in which scalable and elastic IT-enabled capabilities are delivered as a service to internal customers using Internet technologies.”
Compared dollars to dollars, this statement is pretty much a no-brainer. Private cloud computing requires investments in hardware, software and operations. Consuming public cloud computing offerings is essentially pay-as-you-go. I say essentially, because an organization may deploy licensed software to a public cloud computing environment (CCE), and may invest in application and software management tooling to facilitate/orchestrate cloud computing. Both models require process, and possibly, portfolio changes.
Aside from the dollar base comparison, I do agree with the sentiment of the release, that organizations will employ a hybrid (private-public CCE) adoption pattern.
““The hype of cloud computing is that existing IT architectures and processes can be simply replaced by the cloud," said Tom Bittman, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “The reality of the future IT organization, however, is somewhat a combination. Larger enterprises will continue to have an IT organization that manages and deploys IT resources internally, some of which will be ‘private clouds.’ IT organizations will also take on IT service sourcing responsibility, determining when to leverage external providers, when to deploy internally, and when to leverage both for specific services.”
Private cloud services will be a stepping stone to future public cloud services and, over time, will span both private and public cloud resources in a hybrid manner. For many large enterprises, private cloud services will therefore be required for many years, perhaps decades, as public cloud offerings mature.
Gartner analysts said appropriate investments in private cloud computing will also make it easier for enterprises to gradually use public cloud services in the future. For services destined to be cloud at some point in time, enterprises should evaluate the return on investment from developing private cloud services, while waiting for external offerings to mature.
“Many of the investments in private cloud computing will prepare the enterprise for public cloud computing. These investments are not just technology changes — they are also process, cultural and business interface changes,” said Mr. Bittman. “Making these changes sooner rather than later will help enterprises to take better cloud sourcing decisions and potentially make for an easier transition to public cloud computing.””
The release continues with recommendations around organization models and a “three-point action plan for CIOs and infrastructure and operation leaders”. Read the release.
Tagged as:
Gartner,
hybrid,
private cloud,
public cloud,
Tom Bittman
Posted by brenda michelson at 10:37 am in Cloud Watch, adoption, adoption patterns, analyst positions, cloud computing environment (cce) | Permalink
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