Tag Archives: IT Business

New IT model

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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.

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Open Source Business Conference Impressions

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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.

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New Enterprise Drivers

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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.

The Break Up Of The Corporation

Figure 1:  The Breakup of the Corporation

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DevOps Ticket Reduction

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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.

 

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A New IT Plan: Enterprise DevOps PaaS, APIs, and Ecosystems

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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?

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A Path to Responsive IT

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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.

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Accelerating Business Agility with App Factory DevOps PaaS

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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.

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PaaS Performance Metrics

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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.

Use Business Activity Monitoring and Gain Business Visibility

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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.

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ESB Comparison

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Can an eight year old product category, which is hotly contested by every middleware vendor, deliver unique and differentiating product offerings?   When performing an ESB comparison, you will notice almost all Enterprise Service Bus products support enterprise integration patterns, deliver all required ESB features (i.e. web services, message transformation, protocol mediation, content routing), and offer a graphical development workbench.   When technical evaluations focus on core performance and quality of service (i.e .reliability, availability, and scalability), proof of concept workloads must closely mirror expected production profiles and the evaluation effort ideally includes vendor participation.

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Re-invent Software Delivery and Offer Your Business as a Service

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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.

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PaaS TCO and PaaS ROI: Multi-tenant, shared container PaaS

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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?

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Pinterest API and the Money Board

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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:http://www.amity.uk.com/Products/Details/702478

“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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SCIM Simple Cloud Identity Management Interop

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WSO2 Identity Server supports many leading identity management specifications, and work is underway to support interoperable Simple Cloud Identity Management.  The Simple Cloud Identity Management (SCIM) specification is designed to make managing user identity in cloud based applications and services easier.

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WSO2 API Management Platform Re-invents Software Delivery

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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.

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Selecting Platform as a Service (PaaS)

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This blog post describes the Selecting a Cloud Platform White Paper.

Cloud benefits are compelling, and your peers are starting to demonstrate successful test projects, but you realize slick product demonstrations often do not mirror real world complexity.  You find your personal Cloud experience challenged by disconnected platform silos, complicated application architecture, diverse infrastructure technologies, and cloud washed services.  How can Cloud and Platform as a Service (PaaS) improve a development team’s ability to rapidly deliver high value business applications and meet user demand?

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Will IT culture kill Cloud?

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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.”

 

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PaaS Evaluation Framework for CIOs and Architects

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An evaluation framework can help enterprise architects and solution architects evaluate and select PaaS offerings.  The evaluation framework can be used to shortlist PaaS providers, build questions posed in a Request for Proposal (RFP) document, or generate use case scenarios.   This blog post provides an overview of the PaaS Evaluation Framework published in the Selecting a Cloud Platform White paper.

At QCon International Software Development Conference 2011 and Gartner’s Application Architecture Development Integration Summit 2011, WSO2 will be distributing evaluation matrixes comparing Platform as a Service offerings.   We compiled scores of detailed requirements and attributes relevant to developers and project architects, and then we distilled the evaluation criteria into seven categories:

  • Cloud Characteristics
  • Cloud Dimensions
  • Production Ready
  • DevOps Activities and Phases
  • Cloud Architecture
  • Platform Services
  • Programming Model