Future Ready: The Business of Tomorrow - Today - Business Agility & Resp...

Participated on this panel at the Bloomberg / Dell conference at the fantastic Bloomberg offices in NYC.



In addition to the panel I was on, I really enjoyed the Michael Bloomberg / Michael Dell interview at the end of the event.

Cloud-first strategy

Nice interview on my cloud-first strategy on IBM THINK Exchange: https://www.think-exchange.com/pacesetters/yuvi-kochar…. Also like the graphic-effects on my picture!

My Interview on CIO Insight

Link to the article: Washington Post CTO Yuvi Kochar Wants Cloud Vendors to Give Him an Exit Strategy

My wide-ranging discussion with Jim Nash touches on where we are with the use of cloud services. We also talked about my strong desire to see the industry deliver more flexibility for us to make from one solution to the next. Integration, Vendor lock-in and security continue to top the list of things I worry about when I look at new SAAS solutions.

IT as a Service

Information Technology now plays a central role in the functioning of any business. Most, if not all, projects in a modern business have tasks related to technology. As product lifecycles have shortened and more and more business is conducted on-line, the volume of IT work has grown exponentially. IT departments have become a bottleneck in most companies. Business leaders are frustrated by the lack of agility and scalability of IT services and by the constant increase in cost.

Recent advances is Cloud services provide IT with a solution to deploy and scale technology infrastructure quickly and linearly with demand. Further, SAAS solutions like SalesForce and others have demonstrated that high-end technology solutions can be acquired as a subscription and deployed quickly. Further, these solutions are constantly updated with minimal additional cost. Given these experiences with IAAS and SAAS, business now expects internal IT solutions to be delivered in a similar manner. IT as a Service is a hot topic.

Over the past several years, we have developed a model to deliver Enterprise technology solutions as a service. We now have an organizational blueprint and an architecture template that allows us to develop and deliver new services quickly with no capital investment. I will share our experiences over the next several posts.

pic: our backyard, a couple of days ago!

Cloud Forecast 2015 @ CIO Insight
I was interviewed by Tony Kontzer of CIO Insight for this article. We had a broad discussion about the state of cloud services and how services need to evolve in the areas of management, monitoring, portability and security.

TM Forum Management World Americas - Cloud Summit
I delivered a Summit Keynote at this conference on Nov 9, 2010: Lessons from an Early Cloud Adopter – How the Washington Post Company has Developed its Cloud Strategy

My talk is very well covered in David Carr's blog posting on Forbes.com.

Pic: Fall sunset scene I captured as I walked our dog.

My Podcast
I was recently interviewed by Peter High of Metis Strategy. We covered several topics that are front and center for me. I enjoyed my conversation with Peter a lot. Here is a link to the podcast. We discussed:

• Cloud Computing
  
• Collaboration (Enterprise 2.0) in a decentralized organization
• Leveraging the digital media environment
• Skills IT professionals need for the future
  
• The future of mobile technologies’ impact on media

I checked out a few other interesting podcasts on the Metis website.

Enterprise 2.0 Conference
The conference agenda is really interesting. I will be on a panel on June 14th - here is the link. It is IBM-centric but I expect a broader discussion on leveraging on-demand collaboration solutions within the Enterprise.

Cloud Computing

Here is how I defined Cloud Computing in a survey I was filling earlier today:

IT Applications or Infrastructure delivered as a utility from a shared environment. The key attribute of Cloud Computing is that it provides and option to easily and rapidly (not essentially in real-time) provision and de-provision resources based on demand. Cloud Computing completely abstracts IT Infrastructure and application management from a user.

Comments?

(My wife took this picture of the street in the front of our house during the mega-storm last week)

Pricing the Cloud
Tony has captured a lot of my thoughts on how cloud computing needs to be priced and consumed in this article. Read the main CIO Insight article on Cloud's Sky High Hype here.

Me on Cloud Computing
I am third in this short video that Tony Kontzer shot for CIO Insight at the 451 Group ICE Summit on Cloud in Context.

The coolest part was that the video is shot using Cisco Flip - Video Camera for the internet age!

Units of Measurement for Storage in the Cloud
I strongly believe that a key ingredient in our effort to achieve true utility computing is the adoption of simple and standard units of measurement. In general, all commodities are bought and sold in easy to measure units - kilograms (or pounds), liters (or gallons) of milk, barrels of oil, etc. A unit of any commodity is easily understood and measured. We must develop simple units for all cloud computing services. I will try and propose units of measurement for the various cloud services.

A good place to start is Storage as, I believe, it is one of the simplest to measure. Most of the pricing for cloud storage is in the GB of storage used by data at rest and a few other metrics. For example, one of the most popular service, Amazon S3, is measured and sold in GB of storage, amount data transfer and number of requests. At the face of it, these seem reasonable. However, it is very hard to budget for storage if you have to estimate the number of requests you will make. The number of requests is determined by the application you develop, and applications change with time. The units for S3 storage are not application agnostic and thus their service is not that of a real commodity. We do not expect the price of flour to change based on the fact that it is used to make muffins instead of bread!

I believe that better and simpler measures would be:
- Size of storage used at rest (GB)
- Amount of data transferred - read and write - (GB)

The definition of the service should specify: Security, Availability and Minimum Transfer Rate (GB/s) that the vendor will guarantee. The S3 SLA includes nothing on Transfer Rate or Security.

Further, the industry must develop a standard interface for storage. This will allow customers to easily move applications from one provider to another.

I will love to get your feedback on what I am proposing. Please take a moment to leave a comment.

Standards for Clouds - Unit of Compute Power
Cloud or utility computing has been frequently compared with electricity. Nick Carr, in his very popular book Big Switch: Rewiring the World, from Edison to Google, painted a very compelling picture of large utility-like computing centers built to host applications and data and compared it with power utilities. The comparison resonated with the readers and his book became a big hit. A significant reason for the creation and the success of power utilities was standardization.

There is a strong consensus on the fact that to deliver to true value of cloud computing, we need standards. However, most people assume that standards imply portability. While that is clearly an ideal state, looking at how clouds are evolving using multiple virtualization technologies, I find the task of achieving true portability daunting and potentially impossible.

I propose that one of the first goals should be creation of a standard unit of computing power - something comparable to KWHr in electricity. This, in conjunction with bandwidth (MBPS) as applied to data transfer rates between the consumer, cloud compute units and storage will provide a simple way to compare, acquire, consume and bill cloud infrastructure. It will also immediately simplify software product licensing.

My initial thought is that this will be a TPC like benchmark that each cloud provider will have to specify and meter.

IAAS: Creating a Private Cloud
I am seriously considering creating an on-demand private Storage and Compute service as a part of our Shared IT Services. The idea is to wrap a vendor's service raw service in an Extended Management Framework incorporating security, monitoring, governance etc. and offer it to our internal customers. Obviously, I would prefer the vendor to provide the entire Management Framework as well. However, I am not convinced if the service offerings are sufficiently mature and robust.

I am hoping to work on developing an RFI over the summer and early fall. Any inputs on the topic will be appreciated. Please provide it as a comment on this post.

Portable Virtual Machines
Having recently moved all our servers to a Virtualized environment, I have started fleshing out the next steps in our drive towards a "true" Private Cloud environment. I am convinced that all our servers should be portable from one Virtual infrastructure to another running the same Hypervisor.

The idea is that moving an application from one provider to another should not be a major application re-configuration effort. All management and monitoring services should be external to the application servers. This will allow the app to migrate to a better cheaper environment much more easily than today and will significantly increase innovation and competition. Infrastructure below the application tier should be open and commodity with cost and services being where providers compete.

GovCloud
Interesting article on Vivek Kundra's plan to lead the government agencies towards a shared cloud. My team has developed a strategy to migrate our shared IT systems to a private cloud. We took the first significant step last week by moving all our system to a shared virtual environment running (primarily) Linux.

PAAS: Salesforce opens up to Google App Engine
Saw this interesting news on Salesforce allowing applications built on the Google App Engine to access Force.com applications and data. This is a good way for Salesforce to support the more open Java development platform supported by Google. I believe that people are very concerned about moving to a properietary development platform. We have been burned in the past by proprietary tools like Notes.

Google App Engine Prices
Saw this article on Infoworld about pricing beyond the basic free account for App Engine users:

• 10 cents per CPU core hour
• 10 - 12 cents per GB of data transferred in our out of an application
• 15 cents per GB / month of storage (including files and structured data)
• 2,000 e-mails a day free + 10,000 e-mails per day for $1

WOW!

Whorunsgov.com covered on Amazon Web Services Blog
Here is a link to the post.

Amazon is now targeting Enterprise Infrastructure and I expect them to release new products and services to address our needs in that area.

Amazon EC2 runs Whorunsgov.com
Amazon has built an amazing product that allows new technology products to innovate and scale with minimal capital investment. We have come a long way from when only big money could buy the infrastructure required to launch a new technology product.

On July 25, 2008 I was asked to architect and solution the technology infrastructure for a new Wiki we were planning to develop and launch coinciding the Inauguration of the new president. The site, WhoRunsGov.com, provides detailed profiles of the folks who matter in Washington DC. I term it as a Wiki 2.0 site because it allows for submission of content and updates by users to be vetted and edited before it is posted on to the site.

Cost: The fact that it was an R&D project, we needed to keep the initial investment as low as possible. To meet that goal, I was convinced that we should build the site with open source technology and host it on the cloud. Having closely following the evolution of Amazon Web Services since 2007, it was the obvious choice for hosting the site. Jeff Barr of AWS kept me up to date on all the cool stuff they were doing. Thanks Jeff!

Time to Market: Our dev and prod sites were up and running in days. Incredible!

Scalability: We initially built the site on a medium server and then upgraded to a large server before launch. The flexibility of scaling the infrastructure up or down at will is of incredible value when one just does not know what the traffic will look like.

For now, I am convinced that I could not have made a better decision! I will write another post about our experience after a few months have passed.