Do you think this is the case? Share your thoughts in the discussion below.

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By Brian Gracely (@bgracely)

While rapid technology changes are commonplace in enterprise IT, being able to shift IT processes or adjust IT skills is much more difficult. CIOs would love to be able to adapt their use of technology to keep up with every new business opportunity, but internal processes are often bottlenecks to that success. Finding new ways to increase the pace at which IT can keep up with business demands is always at the top of CIOs’ goals.

For the last few years, we’ve heard many technology companies talk about how enterprise IT will evolve to deliver cloud computing services for their business. In most cases, these journeys to cloud evolution begin by modernizing internal data centers through virtualization and automation, creating a private cloud environment. Over time, as the need for new applications or business models emerge, a combination of private cloud and public ploud (Amazon AWS, Rackspace, Google, Microsoft Azure, etc.) services could be combined to create a hybrid cloud environment for the business.

While this model for cloud evolution has been favored by many organizations that want to continue to leverage existing skills and assets, a new wave will soon be coming at them as cloud providers (Amazon AWS, Rackspace, Virtustream, VMware, etc.) are all preparing offerings that would place their technology within enterprise data centers.

• Amazon AWS – Virtual Private Cloud (VPC) connects internal Data Center resources with public Amazon AWS resources via VPN technologies.
• Rackspace – Rackspace Private Cloud delivers similar OpenStack technology that is used in the Rackspace public offerings in a packaged bundle that can be operated within a private data center.  Rackspace provides deployment blueprints and optional support services.
• Virtustream – xStream Enterprise Cloud delivers a software/appliance for enterprises to run in existing data centers. This technology aligns to their public Cloud services offering.
• VMware – vCloud Connector – VMware currently offers the ability to connect vCloud instances from enterprise to cloud provider. In addition, at VMworld 2012, the company announced that it would soon begin shipping a version of its CloudFoundry PaaS platform that can be deployed and operated within an enterprise.
• Microsoft – Microsoft has made several announcements over the last two years regarding an on-premise version of its Azure platform, but actual details of how and when this will be available have yet to materialize.

All of these offerings are attempting to create hybrid cloud environments that can be consistently operated, regardless of where the application workload resides.  Being able to adjust from existing, siloed IT operational models to more dynamic cloud operational models has been one of the challenges for many organizations.

The public cloud offerings have gained the attention (and revenues) of development groups looking for greater agility and availability of infrastructure resources. But these moves highlight that IT organizations (as a whole) are still more comfortable with on-premise resources in this stage of their cloud evolution. Cloud providers are attempting to capture that sentiment with these on-premise offerings, and all of these offerings could significantly increase the pace at which customers move their IT organizations to adopt cloud operating models.

These new offerings will not only offer more choice, but they may significantly disrupt how the underlying technology is acquired. VARs, SIs and traditional service providers must now re-evaluate their roles in providing value to IT organizations that once looked to them to help navigate the technology and process transitions within IT.

Will these new, hybrid operational models be the tipping point for CIOs that have previously struggled to evolve their internal processes to the faster pace of public cloud computing?

Brian Gracely is Director of Technical Marketing at EMC. He is a 2011/2012 VMware vExpert, holds CCIE #3077, and has an MBA from Wake Forest University. Brian’s industry viewpoints and writings can also be found on Twitter (@bgracely), his blog “Clouds of Change,” and the weekly podcast “The Cloudcast”.

Green technology image via Shutterstock

Data centers are inefficient, unrepentant energy-sappers, and our obsession with cat videos is to blame.

That’s one way to read James Glanz’s recent New York Times article, “Power, Pollution and the Internet,” the first in the paper’s new series, “The Cloud Factories.” The piece, based partly on a year-long McKinsey & Company study on the environmental impact of a “secretive” industry without much regulation, includes plenty of startling statistics (30 billion watts of electricity!) and provocative quotes (“If we were a manufacturing industry, we’d be out of business straightaway,” says one unnamed exec).

According to the article, these offenses to efficiency are mostly driven by fear — fear of downtime, fear of failing to meet user demands, and by extension, fear of job loss.  As data processing requirements continue to mount, says the Uptime Insitute’s Bruce Taylor,  ”no one, absolutely no one, wants to go in that room and unplug a server.” Of course, it could all be solved by the cloud — maybe.

The story has predictably inspired a flurry of reactions over the past day or so, with some supporting its basic premise, but many faulting it for misleading or incomplete reporting. Here are a few choice quotes:

Forbes contributor Dan Woods thinks that the article simply doesn’t define its scope well enough. There needs to be a distinction made between Internet companies, which have made strides in energy efficiency, and traditional, risk-averse IT departments:

The bottom line is that the Internet companies are dying to save power. Their data centers are in effect the clouds that are referred to as a potential solution. Their data centers will be the first to have new, higher levels of utilization because it makes sense and saves money.

Rich Miller, of Data Center Knowledge, agrees that the article failed to tell the positive side of the data center energy story:

The last five years have seen dramatic changes in the way the largest data centers are designed and operated, as companies like Google, Yahoo, Facebook and Microsoft have vastly improved the energy efficiency of their server farms by overhauling their power distribution systems, using fresh air instead of power-hungry chillers (“free cooling”) to cool their servers, and running their facilities at warmer temperatures.

Diego Doval (former CTO of Ning) worries about how the general public will respond (he breaks down all the incorrect assertions in a mammoth 5,000-word post):

There is one thing that the article covers that is absolutely true: data centers consume a hell of a lot of power. Sadly, the rest is a mix of half-guesses, contradictions, and flat-out incorrect information that creates all the wrong impressions, misinforms, and misrepresents the efforts and challenges that the people running these systems face everyday.

On The Verge, Tim Carmody suggests the article doesn’t give enough credit to the genuine importance of the Internet in modern life. Uptime is essential not because users want to watch videos or play fantasy football, but

It’s because that infrastructure powers our businesses, our schools, our police and fire stations, our banks and stock exchanges, and yes, our media. It’s because those zippy data transfers help drive our economy, in the same way that the boom in turnpikes, canals, and railroads did 200 years ago.

On Slate’s future tense blog, Will Oremus acknowledges the criticisms, but praises the piece for drawing attention to an important issue:

“[T]he cloud” is not some magical ether, but rather a network of big, power-hungry, polluting, and often wasteful physical data warehouses that store a lot of stuff we need but also tons of stuff we don’t need. That may be obvious to those in the tech industry, but for much of the general public—a majority of which apparently thinks cloud computing has something to do with the weather—it’s a point worth hammering home.

And then there are the Slashdot commenters.

What did you think of the article? Was it a fair assessment of the data center industry, or a simplistic view on a complex issue? Where do we go from here? Let’s hear your thoughts. (Be sure to check out further thoughts from Taylor and other tech and energy experts in the Times’ opinion section).

Cost-benefit image via Shutterstock

By Brian Gracely (@bgracely)

Somewhere in the last two or three years, between various industry definitional debates about “cloud computing,” we seem to have forgotten how to think about costs for this emerging operational model.

Initially, there were two discussions that focused on cost savings. The first was focused on server virtualization and cost-savings from consolidating applications on under-utilized server resources. The immediate savings came from reduced spend on rackspace, power, cooling and infrastructure. This discussion tended to focus on internal data centers, or what evolved to be called ‘private cloud.’ The second looked at the on-demand costs of public clouds (e.g. Amazon AWS) and how developers didn’t have to wait for new infrastructure to be provisioned before their could create new applications. Savings for this use-case came from the elimination of capital expense (CAPEX) for internal data center resources.

Then as competition between vendors intensified, the cost discussions began to blur between CAPEX, operating expense (OPEX) and opportunity costs. Some vendors claim that costs could be reduced with private cloud but not public cloud. Other vendors claimed the exact opposite. How could this be possible?

As experience and usage of cloud computing evolves, we’re beginning to see a much clearer cost picture emerge. Cloud costs tend to follow these guidelines:

• It’s possible to reduce CAPEX and OPEX costs by deploying virtualized and converged technologies, along with the ability to automate the operations of those technologies.
• Those CAPEX and OPEX savings often return to normal levels as the delivery of optimized IT services tends to create more demand for new IT services, as business users see faster response times to new requests.
• As businesses begin to expect technology to deliver greater advantages in the market, and require IT services, it is expected that IT costs will rise over time, in some cases significantly. The additional costs are focused on impacting the topline (revenues) of the business.
• The cost to deploy new IT services on public cloud resources are often significantly lower (CAPEX and OPEX) over short periods of time (days, months).
• When compared over longer timeframes (2-3 years), the costs to deploy applications on private cloud (internal) vs. public cloud (external) are often fairly equal.

When viewed holistically, cloud computing has the greatest potential to impact opportunity costs for the business, delivering increased agility when new market opportunities arise. These opportunities may be short-term or long-term, so it’s important for business leaders and IT organization to create technology strategies that can respond to both types of new opportunities. Failure to be prepared will negatively affect the business’ ability to compete in a given market.

While many companies are looking to deploy operating models that resemble the largest cloud computing environments to reduce costs (CAPEX or OPEX), I would suggest that the more important ROI they should measure is the one based on opportunity costs from potentially missed business opportunities. Access to available IT resources, either via public cloud or private cloud is just to plentiful to miss a great business opportunity because the IT organization can’t properly manage ALL the available resources.

Brian Gracely is Director of Technical Marketing at EMC. He is a 2011/2012 VMware vExpert, holds CCIE #3077, and has an MBA from Wake Forest University. Brian’s industry viewpoints and writings can also be found on Twitter (@bgracely), his blog “Clouds of Change,” and the weekly podcast “The Cloudcast”.

Much of the IT action was in San Francisco this week as VMworld 2012 was in full swing, but there’s a whole other world out there, and plenty of cloud and big data hype to fill it. Here are some of the week’s best quotes from around the industry.

 “Is this an honest maneuver? Do they want to drive OpenStack forward? Or is it a Trojan horse?”
- Piston Cloud Computing CEO Joshua McKenty, assessing VMware’s surprise move to join the open-source cloud service as a Gold Member this week. OpenStack has long been seen as a competitor to VMware, but some think the company has realized its less than ideal standing in the cloud market.

“I don’t even know what the ballpark number for a server is — for me, it would be like knowing what the price of a sword is.”
- Daniel Gross, co-founder of Cue, one of many companies using Amazon Web Services for its computing needs and apparently saving a lot of money in the process. The company got some major love for its cloud services from the New York Times this week, and recently introduced reserved instances to add to its established on-demand model.

“The reality is that people’s expectations of what is needed are rapidly maturing.”
- Outgoing VMware CEO Paul Maritz, talking about how the virtualization game has changed (and Microsoft is still behind) during VMworld 2012. See more of what he had to say about why his company is still the leader in this VMworld video – and read more meaty virtualization quotes from the show over at SearchVirtualDesktop.com.

“It’s like asking people in 1995 if they think that this newfangled ‘Internet’ thing is inflated or not.”
- Laura Teller, chief strategy officer for Opera Solutions, LLC, on whether the hype around big data is justified. Her take: That’s the wrong question to ask.

Disclaimer: All videos presented in the “YouTube IT Video of the Week” series are subjectively selected by ITKnowledgeExchange.com community managers and staff for entertainment purposes only. They are not sponsored or influenced by outside sources.

So let’s talk about some of that messaging and some of the ideas and what they mean for CA’s customers and prospects – as well as the industry as a whole because, clearly, the concepts that were discussed here this week have broad implications for all businesses and technology professionals around the globe.

IT’s About the Cloud

If you’d spent four minutes here rather than four days you’d still walk away with the clear unmistakable commitment CA Technologies is making to cloud computing. In all of the keynotes starting with the opening comments from CEO Bill McCracken, the company talked about the cloud in terms of a “transformative technology” and referred to cloud computing time and again as a new computing generation. The path they described is a shorter than the one I posted the other day: They talk about computing transformations as Mainframe to Distributed to Cloud.

Regardless of the language, the message is clear: If you are a technology professional and you are charged with moving your business forward you must begin embracing the cloud, whether private, public or hybrid. The reason was articulated in the theme of the event: IT At the Speed of Business.” Businesses now and forever more must be agile and they must quickly be responsive to the needs of customers, prospects, employees and partners. As McCracken noted more than once, IT’s about transforming the entire supply chain.

IT’s About the Consumerization of IT

Another major theme was consumer driven IT. The Techster had an enlightening conversation on this topic with George Watt, who is VP of Strategy, Enterprise & Cloud Solutions at CA Technologies. In his role at the company, Watt led the development of the company’s own private cloud initiative. One of the things Watt sees is a new paradigm in the skills, knowledge and values of people driving decisions. In past transformative technologies the drivers were often technophiles, who were driving technology for technology’s sake. Now, however, we have a generation of people who are comfortable with using technology and also capable of understanding the value of what technology can do – for them and for their businesses.

While the cloud is an enabling technology for consumer driven IT, it is also being driven by social media, new handheld devices and new expectations on the type of value and agility businesses must be able to deliver. We’d talked a little about IT overcoming some of the cultural barriers that can impact deployments, and he expressed three key points IT professionals should keep in mind:

1. It’s about the business model. You have to understand the business and what value the technology can bring to the business.
2. It’s here whether you like it or not.
3. Understand that it can be done.

Watt pointed us to a very nice and informative Web site set up by CA Technologies on Consumer Driven IT. It’s worth checking out and has everything you’d want on the topic, including infographics, IDC research, blogs and interactive polling.

IT’s About Speed and Agility

As noted, in case you missed the message, it was posted all over the place and articulated by just about every CA Technologies executive and employee: IT at the Speed of Business. David Dobson, Executive VP and Group Executive of the Customer Solutions Group at CA Technologies, talked about a couple of customers that have been able to use CA Technologies solutions to achieve dramatic results. When Sprint realized it was about to take on the Apple iPhone 4S it knew it would result in activation levels at least three times higher than any it had ever experienced. The business teams needed to improve the customer experience and minimize churn – while at the same time cutting costs. The company was able to virtualize thousands of applications, save $20 million a year in lower infrastructure and double utilization rates. At the same time, customer interfacing was improved.

Over the course of the few days, we heard many more similar stories. There is a CA Technologies partner called Skygone Inc. that provides cloud-based services for the geo-spatial location-based services industry, commonly referred to as GIS. By taking a cloud approach to GIS using CA’s AppLogic platform, Skygone was able to dramatically cut down the time required to deploy solutions for disaster recovery efforts. In a recent emergency situation involving flooding in North Dakota, it was able to set up a system in three to six hours using the cloud – rather than three to six weeks using premises-based technology. To say that the potential speed and agility engendered by the cloud can be used to save lives is not an understatement at all and, in fact, I think we will hear of many instances and circumstances where cloud technology has this type of dramatic impact. For its groundbreaking work, Skygone received a Partner Agility Award for Innovative Solutions from CA Technologies.

IT’s About An Integrated Strategy and Approach

OK, so it’s one thing to talk about transformative technology: It’s another to deliver it. I was definitely impressed with the way CA Technologies was able to create a framework for its solutions that actually made sense. There was a time when it seemed the company was doing a lot of acquisitions without a clear plan or strategy. Now, however, they are able to articulate an overall framework that puts each of its acquisitions in perspective and describes a much more holistic approach to helping customers make the transition to the cloud.

As described by Dobson during Monday’s keynote, the idea is not to eliminate complexity, but to simplify management of IT by taking it to a higher level. Customers are not going to want to get rid of all of their legacy apps and they are not going to all of a sudden go to a homogenous environment. The world doesn’t work today. So CA Technologies has created what it describes as a “Business Service Innovation Value Roadmap” that consists of these primary functions:

1. Model
2. Assemble
3. Automate
4. Assure
5. Secure and Manage

When you think about approaching next-generation services-centric computing, this type of model makes a lot of sense and it provides a strong rationale for the way in which CA Technologies has constructed its portfolio. One of the recent acquisitions that got a lot of buzz on the show floor was a company called ITKO. ITKO focuses on application lifecycle optimization and provides a solution for the “model” part of the CA Technologies framework. ITKO’s solution, now called the CA LISA solution, creates a virtualization capability that allows developers to simulate all of the dependencies they require during development. Application developers can dramatically speed to time market, reduce costs and improve performance. This is a technology to watch. Likewise, there were also a lot of very satisfied customers of AppLogic, which fits squarely into the “assemble” aspect of the framework.

Beyond the technology solutions and the framework, there are important considerations for companies moving in the direction of the cloud – which should be all companies, whether through private clouds, public clouds or, more frequently, hybrid environments. Standardization is critical. So is virtualization. And so is finding solutions that support multi-vendor environments while delivering real integration and real connective tissue among apps, infrastructure and business initiatives.

The Techster has been there before, though major paradigm shifts in technology. It can be disruptive, it can be scary, it can be accompanied by the usual predictions of gloom and doom and mass confusion. In the end, the right solutions always get their due and always win out over the prior way of doing things. If not, I’d be sitting in my hotel room writing this blog post on an Osborne portable computer or TRS-80 or something of that ilk. Or, I’d not be writing a blog post at all.

Anyway, it’s been a fun, exciting and highly informative four days and I’m glad I’ve been able to share my experiences with you. As always, if you have any comments, suggestions or questions, please, please, please feel free to post them here on this post. See you soon.

P.S. – If you’d like to catch up on any aspect of CA World 2011, you can do so virtually. The company just announced that a lot of the great content is available to experience from their virtual CA World 2011 event center powered by ON24. If you stop by now, you’ll see areas you can visit such as session, exhibition center and resource library. You may also want to visit the Broadcast Center here at the show in the Exhibition Center. They are conducting live interviews of CA Technologies leaders, partners and customers. Who knows, you may even catch a glimpse of The Techster himself.

Follow me at @The_Techster and follow @CAWorld2011 on Twitter for all the latest #CAWorld buzz.

On gaining buy-in when speaking to a non-technical CEO:

The first thing, according to Capellas, is to establish the agenda of the company and find those two or three things that will drive the basic mission of the company: Defining the sweet spot of what the business is trying to do. “Prioritize what’s important and then do it with incredible speed.” Also, innovate and try to be at the leading edge. “No one ever said, ‘Gee, I’m glad you brought me yesterday’s technology.’”

On security, policy and the cloud:

One of the big challenges, Kundra noted, is the difficulty of managing a cloud that spans a global grid, particularly for the U.S. government. Different nations have different laws. Complicating that is the reality is that there are countries and organizations out there using the technology for malevolent purposes. McCracken noted that security is a pre-cursor to successful cloud deployments and pointed to the use of cryptographic intelligence.

On private clouds, public clouds or hybrid:

McCracken and Kundra noted that the cloud – private or public – potentially has the ability to be even more secure than traditional enterprise applications. How it is used will largely depend upon what applications and workloads your organization will want to run. Mission-critical apps, Capellas said, will likely be private, but many organizations will use public clouds to balance workloads and for backup. “Security policy will define what’s inside or outside the firewall,” Capellas said.

On the role resellers will play in the cloud:

Partners and resellers already have a large majority of the skills necessary to deploy new applications, McCracken said, and without the partner community the cloud market wouldn’t be anywhere near where it is today. Channel partners have the opportunity to take applications from end to end and can manage multiple platforms, which are critical skills in today’s environment, according to McCracken.

On the role of professional services providers:

The cloud will significantly disrupt the professional services market, Kundra said, and will force professional services companies to raise their game to a higher level. They must be thinking about the user experience, seamless applications and fundamentally re-engineering and re-architecting systems. They will also have to work at the speed of business: “The days of waiting five years to get any value from a professional services contract are over,” Kundra said. “This will be a painful transition for the professional services industry.”

On what keeps you up at night:

“I’m very concerned about the role of global terrorism as it relates to technology,” Capellas said. He said that, at some point, there is no doubt the Internet will get shut down and could create a “catastrophic disruption.” Kundra said he is concerned with three things: (1) Cyber warfare; (2) The potential use of technology for oppression, and (3) The growing gap in use of technology by developed and underdeveloped nations. McCracken said that the biggest challenge is keeping up with the growing demand in our businesses and marketplaces.

There you have it, live once more from CA World. What are some of the big issues on your mind? Post them here and we’ll see if we can answer them.

Follow me at @The_Techster and follow @CAWorld2011 on Twitter for all the latest #CAWorld buzz.

That was one of the clear messages from the opening round of keynotes and panel discussions at this year’s CA World 2011 in Las Vegas last night. One of the great benefits of getting out in the world and attending events such as these is the opportunity to step back from the day-to-day routine and think about the bigger picture. Not just think about the bigger picture, actually, but to listen to and talk to very smart people about the major trends affecting us all.

In his opening keynote presentation last night, CA Technologies CEO Bill McCracken talked in terms of another major shift in the computer industry. He didn’t specifically define the previous seismic shifts, so I’ll fill that in: From mainframe to mini to PC to network to Internet. And now to cloud. Having participated in the previous transformations, McCracken noted that there are always three important conditions that must be in place for the industry to change. They are:

1. Technology
2. The Economy
3. A Strong Business Need

Given the state of all three of these conditions today, McCracken said we’re “standing on the edge of a perfect storm.” I’ll save the technology piece for last. As for the economic conditions, we all know what’s going on and how things are tightening up. The underlying pressure point that is helping the shift to the cloud is the constant need to do more with less. On the business side, the demand is even stronger to change the model for the way businesses have to be run. In many cases, McCracken noted, CEOs and company executives have wanted to change – indeed have demanded change – but have been limited because their IT infrastructure and organization couldn’t change fast enough. That’s why the overarching theme of this year’s CA World 2011 is “IT at the speed of business.”

Want examples? McCracken cited a few that really bring the point home: Zipcar creating a new model and forcing market leader Hertz to make an acquisition to try to keep up; the whole category of e-books helping to drive Borders out of business; and, closest to home, he recalled the time when he was at IBM in the 1980s and Michael Dell created a whole new model for manufacturing and delivering PCs. “If we were not IBM, we probably would have gone bankrupt,” McCracken said.

So what are the technology drivers that are disrupting the status quo and creating this next great shift in the computing environment? McCracken cited five of them:

1. The growth in networks and bandwidth, specifically 4G broadband wireless networks.
2. Thousands of downloadable apps
3. The proliferation of inexpensive handheld devices
4. Social media
5. GPS devices

The confluence of these technologies, as McCracken noted, is “changing the world.” It’s changing the way we talk to one another, the way businesses talk to customers and the way businesses will deliver goods and services. The power is so great, in fact, that we’ve already seen these technologies being used as a mechanism to change governments.

What do you think? Are you ready for the next transition? What will it mean for you? What will it mean for your company? Stay tuned. We’ll have plenty more about that this week as we continue to blog live from CA World 2011.

Follow me at @The_Techster and follow @CAWorld2011 on Twitter for all the latest #CAWorld buzz.