Cloud Computing in Plain English

rPath put together a brief, informative and entertaining overview of cloud computing in the video “Cloud Computing in Plain English”. Take five, and watch the video below.

Top 10 Strategic Technologies for 2009

Gartner held a Symposium/ITxpo back in October which highlighted the top 10 strategic technologies for 2009. Gartner defines a strategic technology as one with the potential for significant impact on the enterprise in the next three years. Factors that denote significant impact include a high potential for disruption to IT or the business, the need for a major dollar investment, or the risk of being late to adopt.

These technologies impact the organization’s long-term plans, programs and initiatives. They may be strategic because they have matured to broad market use or because they enable strategic advantage from early adoption.

“Strategic technologies affect, run, grow and transform the business initiatives of an organization,” said David Cearley, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “Companies should look at these 10 opportunities and evaluate where these technologies can add value to their business services and solutions, as well as develop a process for detecting and evaluating the business value of new technologies as they enter the market.”

The top 10 strategic technologies for 2009 include:

Virtualization. Much of the current buzz is focused on server virtualization, but virtualization in storage and client devices is also moving rapidly. Virtualization to eliminate duplicate copies of data on the real storage devices while maintaining the illusion to the accessing systems that the files are as originally stored (data deduplication) can significantly decrease the cost of storage devices and media to hold information. Hosted virtual images deliver a near-identical result to blade-based PCs. But, instead of the motherboard function being located in the data center as hardware, it is located there as a virtual machine bubble. However, despite ambitious deployment plans from many organizations, deployments of hosted virtual desktop capabilities will be adopted by fewer than 40 percent of target users by 2010.

Cloud Computing. Cloud computing is a style of computing that characterizes a model in which providers deliver a variety of IT-enabled capabilities to consumers. They key characteristics of cloud computing are 1) delivery of capabilities “as a service,” 2) delivery of services in a highly scalable and elastic fashion, 3) using Internet technologies and techniques to develop and deliver the services, and 4) designing for delivery to external customers. Although cost is a potential benefit for small companies, the biggest benefits are the built-in elasticity and scalability, which not only reduce barriers to entry, but also enable these companies to grow quickly. As certain IT functions are industrializing and becoming less customized, there are more possibilities for larger organizations to benefit from cloud computing.

Servers — Beyond Blades. Servers are evolving beyond the blade server stage that exists today. This evolution will simplify the provisioning of capacity to meet growing needs. The organization tracks the various resource types, for example, memory, separately and replenishes only the type that is in short supply. This eliminates the need to pay for all three resource types to upgrade capacity. It also simplifies the inventory of systems, eliminating the need to track and purchase various sizes and configurations. The result will be higher utilization because of lessened “waste” of resources that are in the wrong configuration or that come along with the needed processors and memory in a fixed bundle.

Web-Oriented Architectures. The Internet is arguably the best example of an agile, interoperable and scalable service-oriented environment in existence. This level of flexibility is achieved because of key design principles inherent in the Internet/Web approach, as well as the emergence of Web-centric technologies and standards that promote these principles. The use of Web-centric models to build global-class solutions cannot address the full breadth of enterprise computing needs. However, Gartner expects that continued evolution of the Web-centric approach will enable its use in an ever-broadening set of enterprise solutions during the next five years.

EnterpriseMashups. Enterprises are now investigating taking mashups from cool Web hobby to enterprise-class systems to augment their models for delivering and managing applications. Through 2010, the enterprise mashup product environment will experience significant flux and consolidation, and application architects and IT leaders should investigate this growing space for the significant and transformational potential it may offer their enterprises.

Specialized Systems. Appliances have been used to accomplish IT purposes, but only with a few classes of function have appliances prevailed. Heterogeneous systems are an emerging trend in high-performance computing to address the requirements of the most demanding workloads, and this approach will eventually reach the general-purpose computing market. Heterogeneous systems are also specialized systems with the same single-purpose imitations of appliances, but the heterogeneous system is a server system into which the owner installs software to accomplish its function.

Social Software and Social Networking. Social software includes a broad range of technologies, such as social networking, social collaboration, social media and social validation. Organizations should consider adding a social dimension to a conventional Web site or application and should adopt a social platform sooner, rather than later, because the greatest risk lies in failure to engage and thereby, being left mute in a dialogue where your voice must be heard.

Unified Communications. During the next five years, the number of different communications vendors with which a typical organization works with will be reduced by at least 50 percent. This change is driven by increases in the capability of application servers and the general shift of communications applications to common off-the-shelf server and operating systems. As this occurs, formerly distinct markets, each with distinct vendors, converge, resulting in massive consolidation in the communications industry. Organizations must build careful, detailed plans for when each category of communications function is replaced or converged, coupling this step with the prior completion of appropriate administrative team convergence.

Business Intelligence. Business Intelligence (BI), the top technology priority in Gartner’s 2008 CIO survey, can have a direct positive impact on a company’s business performance, dramatically improving its ability to accomplish its mission by making smarter decisions at every level of the business from corporate strategy to operational processes. BI is particularly strategic because it is directed toward business managers and knowledge workers who make up the pool of thinkers and decision makers that are tasked with running, growing and transforming the business. Tools that let these users make faster, better and more-informed decisions are particularly valuable in a difficult business environment.

Green IT. Shifting to more efficient products and approaches can allow for more equipment to fit within an energy footprint, or to fit into a previously filled center. Regulations are multiplying and have the potential to seriously constrain companies in building data centers, as the effect of power grids, carbon emissions from increased use and other environmental impacts are under scrutiny. Organizations should consider regulations and have alternative plans for data center and capacity growth.

“A strategic technology may be an existing technology that has matured and/or become suitable for a wider range of uses,” said Carl Claunch, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “It may also be an emerging technology that offers an opportunity for strategic business advantage for early adopters or with potential for significant market disruption in the next five years. Companies should evaluate these technologies and adjust based on their industry need, unique business needs, technology adoption model and other factors.”

Additional comments from Mr. Cearley are available on the Gartner YouTube channel at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-yglJUxqSCM. Additional videos are available at http://www.youtube.com/gartnervideo.

Follow news, photos and video coming from Symposium/ITxpo on FriendFeed at http://friendfeed.com/rooms/gartner and on Twitter at http://twitter.com/Gartner_inc.

More from the Microsoft Cloud..

Still thinking that taking advantage of online services entails a trade-off between the rich features of an on-premise client and the convenience of a cloud-based browser application? It might be time for another look. Check out the new software-plus-services offering from Microsoft Online Services: the Business Productivity Online Suite (BPOS), which includes Exchange Online, SharePoint Online, Office Live Meeting, and Exchange Hosted Filtering – enterprise-class software delivered as a subscription service. Here’s a great Technical Overview of the Business Productivity Suite from Microsoft Online Services (Level 200) delivered via a webcast.

Next, read what some third-party assessments of Windows Azure and Windows 7 had to say:

•	Microsoft’s Cloud Vision Redmond Developer, November 18, 2008 Why Windows Azure and Windows 7 will change the way you work.
•	Windows 7 In-Depth Review and Video: This Time Microsoft Gets It Right Computerworld, November 12, 2008 In his hands-on review of the Windows 7 pre-beta, Preston Gralla decides that Microsoft’s upcoming operating system shows great promise.
•	Windows 7: The Five Most Talked-About Features CIO, November 17, 2008 A look at the five features of Windows 7 generating the most discussion and what they’ll mean to you.

Finally, there’s a new guide, available as part of the complete Infrastructure Planning and Design file: the Exchange Online: Evaluating Software-plus-Services guide provides a clear comparison of e-mail technologies across on-premises, standard hosting, and dedicated hosting scenarios. Check it out.

What is Cloud Computing?

I get asked that question alot.  Like web 2.0, cloud computing means different things to different people.  The vanilla answer is “software delivered over the Net.”  According to Google, consumer cloud computing is the web, but when people talk of the brewing cloud battle among Amazon, Microsoft and Google; it takes a slightly different form.

The first is operating internet-based services in the cloud, everything from web-based programs such as GMail and Hotmail to the model used by enterprise software such as SalesForce.com, which hosts and runs high-end business applications for corporations.  The other is the idea of offering an internet based platform to developers who want to create services but don’t have their own cloud to run them on.  So they rent storage, computation, and maintenance from someon else, currently Amazon ang Google, but soon Microsoft (enter Azure!)

Cloud companies assume that consumers will embrace the idea that much of what was once crunched on their PCs and stored on their hard drives will now live in some vague, faraway place, trusting that it will always be there when they need it.

Needless to say, it’s a controversial subject that is getting alot of attention.  It plays nicely with the virtualization movement and helps to bring the promise of the “web desktop” a little closer to reality.  It’s still early to predict how the cloud will ultimately impact markets, but it’s surely something to watch.

If I were to make a bold prediction, borrowing heavily from my understanding of Ray Ozzie’s vision (Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect) we’ll see a whole new marketplace created for consumption by business and consumers alike.  I personally credit Saleforce.com and Software as a Service (SaaS) for pioneering the notion (or arguably others prior, such as application service providers [ASP] models) which together have been pushing the boundaries ever slow slowly away from the desktop and making the “platforms” themselves more ubiquitous, enabling developers to target platforms where marketplaces already exist, vs. trying to create it themselves.  Imagine Facebook Dev Platform + OpenSocial + Apple iPhone Apps, Amazon Services, Google App Engine and now Azure – each with offer unique capabilities and distribution channels, yet they all share one tenet, empower the developer to create value-added applications for their respective platform(s). Think Slide for the enterprise, or the realization of Mark Zuckerberg’a vision for a whole new computer marketplace, trumping that of the “OS” itself – which could spur the next round of technology giants!  Pretty cool stuff.

Software reminds me a lot of Michigan weather, if you don’t like it, just wait five minutes and it will change!