The Future of IT

IT systems and how we use them is changing rapidly. In one of my previous blogs, I already referred to the consumerization of IT. Each day new ‘gadgets’ appear on the market. Take for example this ‘android’ watch  which is an extension of your mail and calendar or the ‘intelligent’ nest  thermostat  which combines smart intelligence with design.  All of these, If well thought out and engineered,  are made to make our life’s more comfortable and enjoyable.

This is one of the facets cloud computing can bring to your ‘business’ IT. Instead of static, difficult to manage and complex system which demand a lot of operational costs and effort, cloud computing can bring you an agile and intelligent Business  solution, if it is well thought and engineered.

As I already posted in previous blogs, the key to a well thought and engineered Cloud computing solution is not only a bunch of servers in one or more datacenters but an intelligent system which communicates and integrates with all components of a cloud solution and automates the business and operational processes which will make our work more comfortable and enjoyable.

At Thinfactory we try to build such systems, even as we are a small company compared to others we can differentiate by our design and intelligence, just as the ‘nest’ thermostat, which differentiates by looking different towards a solution, addresses current topics such as ‘energy saving’ and simplifies the control of it.

By using clever design and intelligent systems, each day, we deliver IT systems to customers through our partners without any human intervention from our engineers. This is a dream come true…

This opens new perspectives for us and our customers, which can profit from more agile computing systems, simplified IT, more efficient and at lower cost.

As the economic climate in Europe suffers from one crisis to another these solutions will help us to differentiate and make more clever and intelligent solutions which will support us in a new way of working and living increasing quality life for all of us.

The Green Cloud

The Green Cloud

When you ask people if Cloud computing is an ‘eco’ solution, you get Pro’s and Con’s. Some say that most cloud solutions run in energy inefficient datacenters spending a lot of unnecessary energy power, which must always be ‘on’. The others camp says that cloud computing delivers important energy savings thanks to the consolidation possibilities of virtualization technology, which is used on a large scale in cloud computing.

But what if you do as Colt does ? Make a modular datacenter and ship it to island. Island has unique power sources  based on  geothermal and hydropower. Cooling is just for free with fresh air from outside, the whole year long. 

Combined with a cloud computing solution where it does not matter where your data resides, your organization could really benefit from a dual source energy and cost saving solution.

This is one of the advantages of cloud computing. Cloud computing allows a true eco partnership where datacenters can be most efficient used in Island, development of new technologies in emerging countries such as Serbia or Roemenia and teams can work around the globe.

http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2011/10/building-a-data-center-that.ars?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=rss

The Consumerization of IT

Organization such as Citrix are talking on their Synergy event about the ‘Cosumerization of IT, but what does it really mean ?

Up to a few years ago, IT was used to optimize all business processes and to optimize and simplify the work of employees. So IT automated about all business processes, except IT processes itself.

As a result, it is not so strange that IT has been seen for a long time as ‘a thing’ for geeks, which no one could understood what they actually where doing to make IT work.

If we look for example at the telecom industry, than we see that telecom services are already some decades a ‘commodity’ for all of us. Who is thinking what’s behind the 333 Hz tone when you pick up your phone and wants to dial a number ? Or what happens when you by a new SIMM card for a mobile phone and less than 1 hour later you can phone everyone in the world and everyone can reach you using your unique number and at the end of the month you receive a detailed invoice ?

I guess no one is thinking about the complexity of the systems behind the scenes, we all find it evident. It just works out of the box, that’s what we can call ‘Consumerization of technology’. It just works…

If people talk about the ‘Consumerization of IT’ it’s just that. You activate an IT service and it’s immediate available. To achieve this goal you need to build even a more complex system than current OSS/BSS* systems which are used in the Telecom industry to turn the telecom service into a commodity. It’s much more than installing technical systems by some geeks. It’s about building service oriented systems which are extreme scalable and have automated business logic allowing self service provisioning of the services.

This is what we have been building for the last couple of years allowing people to activate and use IT services, just as activating and using a mobile phone, or tapping water from the tap.

Using these services Anywhere, Anytime and allowing people to choose there own device, no matter if it’s a PC, Mac, IPAD or IPhone.. It just Works…

* OSS/BSS : Operational and business support systems

What does an IT Cloud Take ?

I hear some people say, "Cloud computing, it’s just a new buzzword for Internet servers, no?" - Wrong! The Internet, of course, is an important element of cloud computing, but cloud computing is much more than that. You can compare the Internet with the electrical distribution grid connecting all businesses and homes, but without the power plants, you cannot deliver energy (or, in the cloud computing scenario, a service) to the many connected businesses and homes.

This is an easy to work with metaphor, one can compare cloud computing with these power plants. Power plants provide you with ‘electricity as a service’, cloud computing, in turn, provides you with IT as a Service. The Internet, in turn, acts as a distribution grid. This concept is eloquently described by Nick Carr in his book ‘The Big Switch’.

To build such an ‘IT’ power plant, it takes more than just staging a set of servers into a datacenter somewhere around the globe. In fact, the metaphor of a power plant provides many convenient analogies for comparison to cloud computing. Both must be scalable and flexible so that they can respond to peaks in demand which evolve rapidly. The users of both demand little or no up-front investment, they wish to simply connect and begin using the infrastructure, billed on the basis of usage, paying monthly fees which may vary depending on the consumption pattern and engagements.

During the Industrial revolution power plants and distribution systems were competitive differentiators; the more power you had, the more machines you could run, and the more you could produce. Today, these power systems and distribution systems are just a commodity for most companies. The same transition is well on its way in IT as well, and is especially visible in cloud computing. Computing resources are becoming commodities, with the Internet assuring transparent and universal delivery of these resources to businesses and homes.

Some companies may indeed still generate power in some small way - typically as backup in the event of outages or as part of a co-generation setup, but you will find little argument that mainstream power requirements are best met by the electric utility. ‘The Big Switch’ argues that computing is on a similar trajectory.

Another fundamental requirement to build a cloud computing service is the existence of a platform. A platform which allows you to provide, automate, provision and bill in real time the services you will offer on to the market. This platform must be able to support multiple technologies, offer them as a ‘service catalog’ and provision these service in real-time to its users, offering them elasticity and flexibility to scale up and down with their requirements. The platform should be able to support different contract and billing options, such as a flat subscription based model and a ‘usage based’ model.

Such platforms should also allow interconnection between them, much in the same way the distribution grids and power plants today, across countries, deliver electricity to each other in order to cope with peaks and cover maintenance windows. Cloud service providers find themselves in the same place, having to interconnect with each other in order to deliver the necessary peak capacity their users might require and orchestrate introduction of cross-service offerings to the market.

These requirements, in turn, necessitate the existence of a powerful business and automation platform. Such a platform is the only mandatory element in order to survive in the ‘cloud computing’ industry. Without such a platform, all the infrastructure elements of cloud computing are commodities. Without such a platform, you are not going to survive in the marketplace. Imagine, for instance, an electricity supplier without a platform to measure the load on the grid, the production capacity of the plants, without an automated billing system - even if power generation and distribution elements are in place, without a platform through which to monitor, provision, and bill for those services - the entire ecosystem collapses.

That’s why, over the last few years, we have invested heavily in our CloudFactory, serving as the true heart of a vibrant cloud computing marketplace offering, and allowing us to provide real value. And with the recent introduction of initiatives such as CloudFoundry by major vendors, in this case VMWare, its encouraging to see that the industry as a whole is beginning to agree with our vision.

Is the cloud about CAPEX or OPEX ?

Is the cloud  about OPEX or CAPEX ?

As many of you will think it's of course about CAPEX. One of the basic principles about cloud computing is that cloud-services are typically monthly based per user or another unit and avoid for an organization capital expenditure. A welcome gift in difficult economic times for an organization.

Imagine you can use an enterprise ERP system including all functionality in no matter of time and only paying a small amount per user per month ? Before an organization needed to invest heavily in software licenses and server infrastructure before it could. Even start using the solution. So for small organization with limited financial. Means the cloud is definitely about reduction of CAPEX.

But what about large organization, which have the proper means to invest in software licenses and Datacenter infrastructure ? Why would they benefit from the cloud ?

Well large organization are interested in reducing their recurring (operational) costs. they want to optimize their costs as much as possible and they are also looking towards cloud solutions for that. Not to avoid capital expenditure but to optimize their daily support by using standardized and automated Ict services from the cloud with self-service capabilities for their employees. So for large organizations the cloud is about reducing OPEX !

Conclusion is that the cloud is about OPEX AND CAPEX ! And shows that it can be a benefit for all types of organizations.

Everyone is equal !

The cloud changes the way we do business… One or two decennia ago, it was almost impossible to think that a small company could compete against his major competitors in the market, simply because information access was limited an the small company did not have the financial means comparable to his big competitor.

Today this gap is as good as vanished, thanks to the Internet and the cloud !

Information Access

Via the Internet everyone has access to almost unlimited resources of information at no cost. I remember the days that we need to login into Bulleting Board systems (BBS) using analogue modems to download a manual or software patch. Now you find the most divers information about a topic with dozens of people sharing the same experience, saving you lost of time and allow you to learn new stuff in hours instead of weeks.

Unlimited resources !

Another phenomenon of the last years is the upcoming cloud industry, delivering the powerful collaborative tools, applications and computing power without the need of large CAPEX investments, but rather pay for what you are consuming. This means that you can setup a complete professional business with limited financial means with comparable infrastructure as you biggest competitor in the market !

For young entrepreneurs, these evolutions are maybe the most important democratic events happened in the last years. It allows creative people with smart ideas to compete with the same means into the real world. Your background or culture do not matter anymore.

As Information Technology is getting more and more dominant, I see the evolution of the Internet and Cloud industry as a very positive evolution for the world we live in.

Just look at some recent success stories such as facebook, twitter but also what happened in Tunisia and Egypt where young people found each other via the Internet and cloud tools to came up for their rights.

If I look to my children, I know they will be able to compete with the same means into this competitive world, this makes me very confident !

The cloud is there to stay !

Besides the fact that since beginning 2010, each day, a number of articles and press releases are published about the cloud we can expect that the cloud is here and will stay.

So what makes ‘the cloud’ to stay ?

The cloud is not about the technology but it’s about the way we do business today and how we (will) use IT.

Today we live in a global world where distances are becoming relative due to the internet and by that, cultures get mixed. Business do not have to compete anymore with their neighbors but with every competitor around the globe.

Speed to deliver is everything in this economics and IT needs to adapt. The ‘IT cloud’ plays an important role in this change.

"Braking the circle"

IT departments where used to each 3 or 4 years roll out massively a new version of a desktop towards their employees. Depending the size of the organization this job could take weeks or even months, not mentioning the preparation and aftercare of such a rollout. As a result IT departments don’t have time left for new tools applications which are needed to support the organization through the globalization…

Organizations are realizing that they need to break this circle and look for better solutions. Using an IT Cloud solution is one of them. An IT Cloud solution allow organizations to roll-out an IT service in a fraction of time they are used to, at a know cost and without overloading their IT department. Instead the IT department can again take the time to select the proper business tools and Apps to support their business and it’s expansion.

"OPEX instead of CAPEX"

Another important reason for the success of the ‘IT Cloud’ is that organization do not need to invest in purchasing hard- and software to be able to use new tools or Apps. Using an IT Cloud solution organizations have an alternative to use the same tools and Apps, typically based on a price per month per user. This is certainly a benefit in difficult economic times for organizations but also a perfect solution for small organizations that now have the opportunity to use the same tools as their bigger competitors without the need for large investments.

"Speed of Delivery"

As mentioned before, the way we do business is changing rapidly. Organizations need to adopt quick to be able to compete, and therefore IT needs to follow… The classic way of doing IT is not capable to achieve this demand.

Last i had one of our customers saying the need to be able to boot-up a large number of servers for a calculation job during a demo at one of their clients, just to convince them they can handle the job. Without an IT Cloud solution that customer would be unable to give this demo and convince his client...

These arguments are just some examples why the cloud will stay... As you see it’s not about technology, but about the way we deliver IT.

If ‘the cloud’ as we know it today is also ‘The Cloud of tomorrow’, I am not sure, in fact I doubt it. It’s like the clouds in nature, you look at the sky and see a cloud pattern at the horizon, if you look up 15 minutes later, the cloud pattern looks completely different. It’s maybe the best comparison between the ‘IT cloud’ and natural clouds I can make for the moment…

Stay in Tune with CloudPlaza

Hi all,

Welcome to my CloudPlaza blogsite !

With this blogsite, i will inform you with hot breaking news, personal experiences, upcomming events and many more ...

As a Survivor and firm believer in the cloud industry, my expertise in the Server-based-Computing industry and later on in the Cloud industry are a great asset in my current position.

With Thinfactory we have the ambition and potential to become an important player in the cloud marketspace. Last Year we launched an exiting project called CloudPlaza !

CloudPlaza is a reseller Cloud supporting the whole sale channel

Discover our reseller Cloud on http://www.cloudplaza.eu/

Stay tuned and come back to find out more about CloudPlaza !