A well-executed API brand strategy helps your API stand out from the crowd, encourages API adoption, and increases business growth.
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Category Archives: IT Business
New IT model
A New IT model is required to reduce delivery time and accelerate business agility. The New IT Delivery model strives to achieve open collaboration, micro-iterations, no wait states, and streamlined processes.
How are you building a pragmatic, open source driven game plan that incorporates New IT approach vectors?
The path to New IT requires incrementally moving away from traditional application platforms, traditional team structure, and traditional information flows. The New IT architecture underlying Responsive IT intelligently incorporates Cloud Platforms, BigData Analytics, Enterprise DevOps, and API first development.
Open Source Business Conference Impressions
At Open Source Business Conference 2013, conversations on innovation, disruption, and open source leadership dominated the sessions. The conference chair, Matt Assay, crafted a program where each presentation and conversation reinforced how traditional business strategies are being disrupted by new market dynamics. The dynamics are shifting power away from closed, proprietary corporate leadership towards open collaboration and user-led innovation. The shift is disrupting traditional business strategies, IT operation practices, and market dominance.
Open Source startups (e.g. HortonWorks, 10gen, Appcelerator, GitHub, Netflix, SUSE, and WSO2) are leading their respective technology domains by encouraging open collaboration, micro-iterations, and user-led innovation.
New Enterprise Drivers
The Breakup of the Corporation, Connected Business Strategies, The Now Generation, and The Long Tail are driving organizations towards a New Enterprise Future.
Traditional corporate structure is dissolving into flexible value-webs of business participants. The business participants dynamically band together on a project, disperse, and reform around new business opportunities. Because new discovery and connectivity mechanisms lower interaction cost, group formation and participation is fostered. Figure 1 below illustrates how organizational dynamics are changing and a New Enterprise is being born. Instead of all corporate functions being performed in-house, offshoring, outsourcing, temporary contractors, and dynamic partnerships drive today’s agile New Enterprise business.
Figure 1: The Breakup of the Corporation
DevOps Ticket Reduction
A reduction in DevOps tickets not only drives IT efficiency, but also creates a cultural shift where teams look forward to rapidly achieving accomplishments. Business stakeholders operate in an agile environment where no change request is too small, and rapidly testing business ideas is the new normal.
As a techie, I like to focus on the technology and IT process side of DevOps; bouncing around terms like ‘infrastructure as code’, ‘automated provisioning’, ‘continuous deployment’, and ‘continuous integration’. The value-prop is self-evident to me and many of my peers. Yet, for us to change corporate culture and rally around a New IT Plan, the main message focus must not be ’DevOps for DevOps Itself’, but to create a Responsive IT team that changes business-IT dynamics and accelerates business agility.
A New IT Plan: Enterprise DevOps PaaS, APIs, and Ecosystems
Open source PaaS, Open APIs, and Open Ecosystems are accelerating agility, empowering developers, and enabling innovative business strategies. In a recently published white paper, I describe how adopting a New IT plan can create a responsive IT team.
The path to New IT requires moving away from traditional application platforms, traditional team structure, and traditional information flows. Responsive IT teams are adapting their infrastructure, processes and tooling to re-invent the application platform and re-think application delivery. The New IT architecture underlying Responsive IT intelligently incorporates Cloud Platforms, BigData Analytics, Enterprise DevOps, and API first development.
How are you building a pragmatic, open source driven game plan that incorporates New IT approach vectors, Open DevOp PaaS, Open APIs, and Open Ecosystems?
A Path to Responsive IT
IT teams desire to gain an edge and improve their ability to grow business revenues, improve customer retention, and deliver timely and cost effective solutions. Often, outdated IT infrastructure, processes, and tooling impede efficient IT delivery; increases project delivery times, and inhibits business model flexibility. With disruptive New IT technologies (i.e. Cloud, mobile, social, Big Data, APIs), IT teams have a solid technology foundation that can transform business agility and build a more responsive organization. The path to a responsive organization requires empowering business teams to safely recognize business opportunity, adapt processes, and respond. A responsive IT team enables on-demand self-service, ticketless IT, a low cost structure, and widespread participation.
Accelerating Business Agility with App Factory DevOps PaaS
Queuing, waiting, and the status quo doesn’t fit well with today’s “now generation’. Business stakeholders, who drive revenue growth and customer retention, desire to rapidly seize opportunity and market share. They often view IT timeframes and capabilities as a poor match for today’s fast business-pace. A New IT model is required to reduce delivery time and accelerate business agility. DevOps PaaS brings no waits, faster phase execution, widespread accessibility, rapid grassroots innovation, and increased resource availability to IT projects.
Actions To Take: Gartner’s SaaS Predictions for 2013
Robert Desisto recently posted Gartner’s 2013 Software as a Service predictions, and an IT professional asked me for my opinion. Here are my thoughts on how the SaaS predictions impact enterprise IT strategies and tactics:
Key findings from the Gartner predictions include:
- [SaaS] Service-level agreements (SLAs) will continue to lag behind customer needs.
My Take: Most likely true for enterprise organizations that require significant availability, reliability, and performance. Inserting a gateway/proxy in between the enterprise users and the SaaS application can help organizations monitor SaaS compliance with SLAs.
- Platform as a service (PaaS) will become a must-have for enterprise-class software as a service (SaaS) applications.
My Take: I would moderate this statement and propose “Teams developing SaaS applications will gain greater productivity by building on top of PaaS platforms that internally manage multi-tenancy, tenant-aware and service-aware load balancing, resource pooling, and elastic scalability. SaaS applications built as cloud-aware applications on multi-tenant, shared container PaaS will maximize scalability while reducing cost per tenant. what is your evaluation criteria for selecting an appropriate PaaS platform?
- The role of Internal Cloud Service Brokers will become more important for Enterprise SaaS intiatives.
My Take: Internal Cloud Service brokers can overlay identity provisioning, security and service level management on external Enterprise SaaS offerings. An internal cloud service broker can be implemented in-house by deploying an API manager product that will monitor usage, enforce access policies, enforce subscription policies, and provide a single user provisioning console.
What are your SaaS predictions that impact application service adoption?
PaaS Performance Metrics
What PaaS performance metrics are you using to measure the success of your Cloud platform initiative? Adopting a few PaaS performance metrics can help you avoid the high-expectations, low-benefit trap that befalls many IT transformation initiatives. Rather than measuring for measurement sake, PaaS performance metrics can help you benchmark benefits, encourage adoption across the organization, and justify continued investment.
DevOps meets ALM in the Cloud – Cloud DevOps Factory
Since teams started creating applications and services, significant challenges have continually hindered effective delivery and diminished development team’s reputations. Common challenges include:
- Long IT solution lead times leading towards an inability to capitalize on business opportunities
- Complex and disjointed development processes hindering IT agility and degrading ability to meet business demand
- Inaccurate project forecasts, non-repeatable processes, and rudimentary performance metrics leading to a persistent Business-IT perception gap
- Perennial tension between management compliance mandates and development approach, which prevents improving app delivery
How do we change development processes, development tooling, and run-time infrastructure to decrease time to market, streamline development processes, deliver on-time and budget, and meet compliance mandates?
API integration with no meetings
Can organizations perform API integration with no meetings? Moving at agile, startup speed requires auto-operations (auto-ops) and reducing human negotiations.
Use Business Activity Monitoring and Gain Business Visibility
Many organizations struggle to understand how their business performs. In an attempt to gain operational visibility and situational awareness, teams have created multitude reports, spreadsheets, key performance metrics, portals, and dashboards. Business analytics attempts to increase event correlation, enhance presentation, and increase business insight, but analytics often does little to increase real-time visibility. In between weekly, monthly, or quarterly analytic execution cycles, business managers guestimate how to increase supplies, adjust marketing campaigns, offer sales discounts, or hire additional resources.
Create a Comprehensive Business Visibility Environment
Business Activity Monitoring (BAM) and Complex Event Processing (CEP) augments business analytics by contributing a high performance data capture framework, in-stream event correlation, alerts and notifications, knowledge mapping, flexible data storage, scalable Big Data processing, and real-time dashboards. By readily composing advanced middleware capabilities into a unified solution, teams are able to enhance information relevance and improve informational delivery. The middleware enables filtering, aggregating, mapping, and reducing large, multi-faceted datasets over greater temporal ranges with analytical processes composed using statistical languages, event correlation languages, and MapReduce script languages.
Deploy ESB as a Service
In today’s business environment, increasing agility and lowering cost is a business imperative. Forward thinking development teams are deploying shared services (e.g. ESB-as-a-Service) instead of traditional middleware silos. Our total cost of ownership calculation indicates organizations can save significant software subscription cost, operations management effort, and infrastructure expense when deploying multi-tenant, shared container based application platform middleware services.
Many WSO2 clients run several WSO2 Enterprise Service Bus instances in production today, and we encourage our clients to evaluate how implementing ESBs within a Cloud Platform-as-a-Service environment reduces time to market and decreases ownership cost.
Moving eGovernment to Cloud
For any Government organization needing to do more with less, eGovernment is the answer. eGovernment solutions cost effectively deliver information and enable transactions among citizens residing within a local geography. An eGovernment solution may also link various governmental groups supporting constituents. However, the role of eGovernment has been traditionally limited by the inherent cost and complexity of developing, integrating, and managing traditional server-based systems. To overcome these hurdles, government agencies are looking to cloud solutions as a way to radically scale service delivery while simultaneously minimizing the expenses related to IT infrastructure, application development and deployment, and operations. WSO2 has published a white paper examining demands faced by government agencies and how the cloud-native WSO2 eGovernment solution provides a powerful, highly flexible, and extensible platform that addressing eGovernment requirements in a cost effective manner.
For more information, download the paper at http://wso2.com/whitepapers/
Cloud Native PaaS or Cloud Washed PaaS
With mainstream vendors (e.g. RedHat OpenShift, IBM Cloud Application Services, Oracle Public Cloud, ActiveState Stackato) promoting quickly pushing bits into the Cloud, smart development teams have established a clear Cloud Platform comparison criteria and a process to determine if the run-time PaaS will exhibit cloud characteristics and offer a Cloud Native instead of a Cloud Washed experience.
Re-invent Software Delivery and Offer Your Business as a Service
As business leaders focus on growth during 2012, they are identifying business expansion and transformation opportunities. The resulting IT mandate to rapidly evolve mobile and social interactions is forcing CIOs to re-invent their software delivery. By following a straightforward four-step plan, CIOs can improve productivity, enhance agility, deliver timely solutions, and help fulfill strategic business growth goals.
PaaS TCO and PaaS ROI: Multi-tenant, shared container PaaS
When investing in technology infrastructure, organizations commonly desire a positive return on investment (ROI) within six to twelve months and a lower PaaS TCO over the investment lifespan. Does deployment topology sizing, tenant count, tenant density, and service mix significantly impact expense and influence ROI timeframe?
What is WSO2 AppFactory?
Application development organizations continue to undergo a structural shift towards business enablement and away from technical debt. Teams desire to re-invent software delivery into an agile, on-demand application environment and change the business-IT dynamic. WSO2 platforms enable IT to solve mundane technical plumbing and focus on business-oriented personalization, self-service, monetization, and analytics. When changing the business-IT dynamic, we see leading clients:
- Share infrastructure and improve internal software delivery
- Enable on-demand digital disruption via ecosystem platforms
Related Reading: DevOps Meets ALM in the Cloud – Cloud DevOps Factory
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Pinterest API and the Money Board
Pinterest is being touted as a web ecosystem platform that may potentially rival FaceBook. To be a web ecosystem platform, an online website property publishes an API enabling an ecosystem of 3rd developers. Once Pinterest publishes an API, 3rd party developers could extend core Pinterest functionality, enrich the user experience, and accelerate user adoption. According to recent reports, Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors are ready to ride user interest in Pinterest:
“When the API is available, Adam Ludwin at RRE, says he’s interested in entrepreneurs who can build on top of the platform, who can “close the loop” and figure out a way to monetize the interest around products on Pinterest. He’s interested in startups that will provide tools to facilitate transactions on and through Pinterest.”
But exposing an API can lead other companies capturing revenue otherwise directed to Pinterest. As reported recently by Jay Yarow, Pinterest
“might not release it [API] for a while, says an industry source familiar with Pinterest’s plans. This source says that Pinterest fears having a ‘Twitter problem.’”
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WSO2 API Management Platform Re-invents Software Delivery
Ten years after the rise of Service Oriented Architecture, many organizations have identified and published services as shared assets, however teams and partners often continue to invest considerable time and resources when building new solutions. Many teams experience rapid portfolio proliferation and sprawl, but not enhanced portfolio efficiency or business agility. Achieving business agility requires the growth of development partnerships and interactions, which should span both internal and external teams.
Traditional SOA and integration platforms enable rapid development, but they provide little business partnership support. Teams commonly operate independently and autonomously. Hundreds of people write new APIs and services; few people know:
- who is consuming APIs and services,
- who is writing re-usable APIs and services, or
- how APIs and services are being used.
Value Openness
I have recently met a few individuals who do not ascribe positive value to open source. I had thought the open software versus closed software argument was decided circa 2005. Unfortunately, a few renegade individuals are holding out, and believe in the goodness of autocratic companies who operate without transparency. It took me awhile to dig into the bias and understand the root concern; an organizational need for competent technical support, high usability, and a viable roadmap. Corporate sponsored open source solves these concerns.
SOA Portfolio Review
You may have invested significant time and effort creating services. Have you reached maximum service agility, adaptability, adoption? Are applications now easier to build? Is it time for a SOA portfolio review?
Building a Platform as a Service Business Model
Are you tasked with building a Cloud business model to properly monetize your Platform as a Service investment? WSO2 has created a PaaS Business Model framework to help you establish service tiers and an appropriate chargeback/showback model.
Will IT culture kill Cloud?
The doctors are circling. My Gartner colleague Lydia Leong has an interesting Cloud prescription, ‘to become like a cloud provider, fire everyone here,’ and industry watchers are picking up the message.
In her post, Lydia describes a Cloud conversation with corporate IT stakeholders and diagnosing:
“If you’re going to operate like a cloud provider, you will need to be willing to fire almost everyone in this room.”
Are you developing an infrastructure cost optimization strategy?
As global economic developments increase market uncertainty, is your organizations facing reduced revenue and re-assessing their 2012 IT budgets? Are you interested in building an IT cost optimization strategy?