The Cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) – a new disruptive model for IT

The Cloud and Software as a Service (SaaS) – a new disruptive model for IT

The Cloud or Software as a Service – a new disruptive model for IT.  A second topic covered by Paul Strong, VMWare CTO and a few others at the recent 2014 Gartner conference.

Obviously, cloud infrastructure is a big topic and I don’t propose to cover it much here but a couple of points were made at the Gartner Symposium that are worth thinking about.  I’ve lumped in SaaS in with the discussion. 

The first point?  That Cloud based infrastructure and SaaS are here to stay and will be disruptive to central IT

Cloud, some argue, is more of a marketing umbrella term than a product or technology and more of an evolution from what we had before i.e. external hosting.  Peter Thiel (founder of Paypal, first external investor Facebook) made that specific point during the Gartner conference.  Well, that might be right but I’m not sure the fact that it is more evolutionary than revolutionary will stop Cloud services being massively disruptive to traditional IT – like us.  Paul Strong asserts, like many others, that cloud is a new consumption model for IT.  People are and will be enticed by the consumption model – the experience of buying commodity and relatively cost effective IT infrastructure and SaaS will be attractive.   If central IT don’t get on board then business units (Faculties, Services) and everyone else will go straight to cloud providers.  The central IT barrier, whether it’s security or some other obstacle will be moved around.  So, this is a challenge that central IT teams need to respond to.  Again, remember, that's us.  Actually, we’re seeing this last bit already.  In the last few months there have been at least two proposals to purchase Cloud based systems made by our customers.  Suppliers, because it can be in their interest, tend to gloss over and simplify issues that a Cloud based solution might have.  And, we can think of quite a few potential issues like integration with our other systems, data exchange (it’s really not as easy as they say), security, reliability and lots more.

The second point?  That Cloud based infrastructure and SaaS will be beneficial and allow us to do more with less

The cheap(ish) and scalable resources offered by Cloud services could be transformational in providing effective IT for our University – so, it’s about getting the approach right with Cloud adoption rather than really questioning the eventual destination; at least for some of our IT services.

Dave Aron (Gartner Fellow) made the following point.  We need to watch out for disruptive change like Cloud.  Remember Encyclopaedia Britannica? $600m revenue in 1990.  Down to $195m revenue in 1995.  Now, they are effectively gone.  Obviously, Wikipedia pretty much took over most of what they did.

So, central IT – we don’t want to be another Encyclopaedia Britannica.

Amazon, as you are probably are aware, kick-started the Cloud agenda – after disrupting and transforming book selling and supply chain.  Paul argues that the same disruption and transformation is happening in Cloud, again driven by Amazon and Amazon Web Services.  Perhaps, looking back in five years – we will only really understand how disruptive cloud has been.   It is worth noting that not everyone entirely agrees with this assessment.     Most analysts seem to be a bit more nuanced.

So, Central / Enterprise IT, the challenge is to engage positively and work with SaaS and the Cloud to provide value.  Soon.

Gregor Waddell, Assistant Director

IT Agility, what on earth that means and what the CTO of VMWare thought.

Some of us attend various conferences and I had the opportunity to get to a couple recently – the Gartner Symposium and Educause (https://www.educause.edu/).  There was lots of good stuff and my intention is to cover a few topics in our newsletters going forward.  Hopefully, we can stimulate a bit of positive debate and discussion.  In part, what we learn at these conferences will help make our new 2015/16 strategic plan as good as it can be - incidentally, this is due by the end of December 2014.  So, we need to get cracking.

We also need to update our current three year IT strategy to take into account our new corporate plan fairly soon.  Our new strategy needs to be cognisant of any technology advances or anything else on our 'landscape' that might have changed.

So, first up on the topic list is IT agility.

How can we cultivate IT agility? In other words, how can we respond quickly to customer demand without getting stuck in bureaucratic treacle?  Or being hamstrung by an overflowing and demanding project portfolio? But, it's a bit more than that.  How can we get ahead of the game and be a supportive and positive partner to our University?  Our knowledge and expertise ought to put us in a great place to understand how technology can be leveraged to push us (our University) collectively forward.  So, what's stopping us?  Is anything stopping us?

Well, I attended an interesting presentation by Paul Strong, Chief Technology Officer at VMWare.  I also managed to speak to Paul after his Gartner presentation.  While he didn't address the whole IT agility question, he did address a small part - which mostly revolves around IT process automation.  And, it did contain a call to action for central / enterprise IT - that's us by the way.  For those of you who don't know - and apologies to those who do - VMWare is the virtualisation technology underpinning most of what hums and creaks in our data centres adeptly managed and soothed by Rob Spalding and his team.

So, what did Paul have to say?  Paul reckons we’ve got it a bit wrong over the last 30 years.  Concentrating on infrastructure and ‘spinning rust’* rather than ‘Innovation Technology’ – as he says IT should really represent.  (*IT infrastructure joke for spinning magnetic disk.  No, it doesn't get any better in infrastructure comedy land)

What does he mean by this?  Organisations typically use the application lifecycle – with an operational process framework to help.  The framework we use, of course, is ITIL and Joe McIntyre and his team have put a lot of time into its adoption - with some of us getting certified to different levels.

ITIL is a common approach for operational management of services and provides the necessary processes to run our IT service.  We all have supporting tools such as a service desk system - we use Supportworks.  Almost everyone uses ITIL in some form.  So far, so good.  But, ITIL and other frameworks obfuscate and get in the way of agility.  People in these processes often act as gatekeepers – preventing change.  Security specialists are often particularly obstructive to speedy adoption of anything new.  Sorry guys - this isn't to say security and processes aren't necessary.  Far from it. But…this is not necessarily the way to agility.   As with everything, it's a balance Paul argues - we probably all agree.

Paul suggests that organisations have too many applications and therefore complexity.  This is the primary reason why IT has not brought the expected economies of scale and actually holds back innovation.  It’s far too complicated.  We’re far too busy managing too much technical complexity to have much time to think innovative thoughts.  Cloud providers are much better at this.  Why should this be the case?  Cloud providers only provide a small number of architectural blueprints that they refine and run efficiently.  With fewer blueprints, you can automate like crazy and economies of scale are possible.  It’s all about simplification.

How do we get better at this?  Standardise, standardise, standardise.  Not a great mystery.  The complexity is not about the number of servers*; it’s the number of server variants.  *Insert any technology for server.  This is one of the primary principles we use when looking at technical architectures at our IT Architecture Board.  But, the emphasis on a limited number of simple technical choices perhaps needs to be greater.  Compromise functionality to gain greater simplicity.  I do agree, and it’s hard to argue really, that we need to simplify.  Action point for us here is to think harder about how we can do this successfully.

I asked Paul afterwards about the “we’ve got it a bit wrong for the last 30 years” suggestion.  The main issue I had with his presentation was probably that it was pretty infrastructure-centric.  I guess that’s what you might expect from an infrastructure vendor – but, did he really believe the biggest thing around IT agility was about automation?  Turns out his opinion is a bit more nuanced.  Yes, VMWare (and other virtualisation technology) could help us to automate – once we simplify first.  But, yes, all the other stuff around Enterprise Service Buses, Service Orientated Architecture and much more besides is pretty important too.

So, as I said before, the key action point here is about introducing simplicity wherever we can.  It’s fine to appropriately compromise on functionality.  A second key action is to look at the specifics of our server automation – which might include automatic provisioning of servers for our production environment but for development and test too.

More here:

http://gregoredu.blogspot.co.uk/2014/10/gartner-2014-how-does-vmware-cto-paul.html

Gregor Waddell, Assistant Director