What’s next? Glad you asked. After a quiet period, I emerged with an “ah-ha� that connected the dots of my varied research interests, real-world experiences, published research and whiteboard doodles.
I’m pretty excited about this idea and will focus my non-client time on related research, development and writing. Given this [thing] is central to my on-going business and brand, I’ll be writing about it exclusively at elemental links.
To see what unfolds, stop over at elemental links, or follow my stream on Twitter.
Thanks for reading and conversing,
Brenda
"...a time for some soul searching in IT, a time to learn from past lessons and create a better way. Forrester calls this new mandate business technology (BT), where every business activity is enabled by technology and every technology decision hinges on a business need."
The goal of the conference is to enable a real-world transformation to Business Technology. Forrester breaks this transformation into five interrelated efforts:
"Connect people more fluidly to drive innovation. You serve a more socially oriented, device-enabled population of both information workers and customers. You want to empower both groups without losing control of costs or hurting productivity.
Infuse business processes with business insight. You support structured business processes but lose control as they bump heads with a multitude of unstructured processes. You want to connect both forms of process to actionable data, but you struggle with data quality and silos.
Simplify always and everywhere. You have the tools to be more agile, but you face a swamp of software complexity and unnecessary functionality. You want technologies, architectures, and management processes that are more fit-to-purpose.
Deliver services, not assets. You want to speak in terms that the business understands, but you find your staff confined to assets and technologies. You want to shift more delivery to balance-sheet-friendly models but struggle to work through vendor or legacy icebergs.
Create new, differentiated business capabilities. Underpinning all of these efforts, you want to link every technology thought -- from architecture to infrastructure to communities -- to new business capabilities valued by your enterprise."
Given your and my broad perspectives, I'll be attending sessions from all tracks to get the big picture. My detailed live-blog posts will be at elemental links. I'll post some summaries here.
To follow the entire conference conversation on twitter, use hashtag #ITF10. Follow me on twitter @bmichelson.
]]>Are you communicating the vision, business value and delivery capabilities of enterprise architecture? Or just talking at people?
]]>Hoque set the stage with the startling fact that only 74 of the original 500 firms remain in the S&P index just 40 years later. The frenetic pace of business has reduced the enterprise life expectancy. The response has been a call for agility. Referencing research of the BTM Institute, Hoque stated that agility is achieved through repeatable management processes.
The components of agility are flexible organizational constructs and behaviors, standards for enterprise architecture, including business architecture, a portfolio investment approach that is structured to balance between stability and agility, and a governance model that facilitates horizontal and collaborative decision making processes.
Of the flexible organizational constructs and behaviors, Hoque focused on business-technology convergence. Unlike business-IT alignment, which is essentially communicating silos, business-technology convergence features intertwined business and technology activities, dedicated to driving superior financial performance.
With the agility and business-technology convergence context set, Hoque walked through the BTM management practice framework, including the 17 capabilities required to achieve convergence.
In addition to discussing the practices, Hoque shared metrics and trends from the hundreds of organizations who have utilized the BTM measurement tools over the past 7 years. A critical finding is a correlation of management practice maturity and corporate growth and financial returns – stock price, earnings and margins.
Click here to listen to an audio recording of Hoque’s presentation and view the slides.
[Disclosure: The Business Ecology Initiative is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]
]]>Moderator: Dr. Michael Chui, Sr. Fellow McKinsey Global Institute
Panelists:
Sanjay Sarma – Started in 1998, vision similar to Internet of Things today. Given early stage of internet, ambition was to replace barcodes with RFID. Problem was price point. Barcode is a few cents. RFID target was 5 cents. Brought cost of tags down. Made the tags cheap by not putting data on tag, but only a number. The data would be on the Internet, accessible through cell phones. This brought about the Internet of Things.
For example, redo HVAC on this building (MIT Kresge). Lots of resistance, jobs at risk. However, big sustainability gain. The people are most affected by Internet of Things.
Mark Roberti – Heard about RFID accidently. Was covering supply chain tech, Manugistics and i2. Software wasn’t delivering value. Why? Data in was bad. Forecasts ended up bad.
Heard about RFID at a conference, DoD was using on battleships. Energized about space. Began RFID Journal.
Now, tremendous innovation going on. Most impactful application: main application is asset tracking. Applications are exploding: tracking babies to prevent SIDS.
Robert LeFort, Ember – company provides chips and software to actualize vision. RFID value for last 10 years. Now, innovation such as clean tech. “Unbelievable the power of convenience� – Shell Executive.
Utilize RFID for energy, utility usage controls in way that is simple and convenient. Use the proper amounts of energy at the best savings. Get big payback. Don’t want notification to turn off appliance. Want smartness in appliances and reduced energy bill.
Bob Metcalfe – Now an investor. One investment is Ember. Looking for opportunities: education, energy and healthcare. Embedded (Internet of Things) is space across those.
10 – 15 billion microcontrollers being shipped every year. Not tags. Most are not networked. Humorously infers to Metcalfe’s Law. Needless to say, there’s an opportunity here.
Invested in node and tag companies, including Sticky Bits.
Mark – Term Internet of Things is very valuable, but has outlived usefulness. Allows us to see track and manage things we haven’t been able to see, track and manage previously.
Sanjay – dealing with the data deluge – enterprise systems today, such as RFID, aren’t designed to receive feedback. What happens when have wrong number of pallets of toothpaste?
Most important thing to do with RFID data is “use it or lose it�. Data rots. Short shelf-life. Can fix pallet before truck leaves. Otherwise, data is forensics.
Robert LeFort – Role of CIO and IT in Internet of Things. Convergence on Internet is a good thing. CIOs know how to manage, exploit Internet.
From here, the discussion went into a lightening round. Next areas of opportunity are health, vehicle, and managed home. See big uptake in US and China. Of existing companies, only Cisco mentioned as having opportunity to lead/exploit RFID. See RFID as both B2B and B2C play.
The audience Q&A is focused on implementation characteristics (data processing and passive tag range), use cases (food lineage) and future advances.
For more insights from MIT CIO Forum, check out the twitter stream #mitcio.
]]>The challenge was to more efficiently manage the dedicated fleet. The cost of carrying the dedicated fleet during the downturn was exorbitant. However, the cost (and risk) of not having a dedicated fleet during good economic times in untenable.
Showing a manual, labor intensive, decision making process to decide how to allocate shipment to either dedicated fleet or company fleet.
PepsiCo needed a way to communicate automatically with dedicated and company fleet carriers. Needed a real-time business fact cost valuation for DF and CF trips, for financial comparisons. Needed real-time feedback from carriers on trip and load modifications. Needed a way to dynamically configure business rules. Needed to automate the decision tree. Needed to capture metrics for performance measurement.
Transition from PepsiCo presenter to Infosys. [Little pitch here]
Tibco products used: BusinessWorks, General Interface, BusinessEvents and DecisionManager (business rule management).
Transition to another PepsiCo presenter.
Why BusinessEvents?
Provided capability to identify and quantify events and then take appropriate action. Also, provided the ability to correlate events or create alerts based on events. Provided ability to separate rule base from code base (BusinessWorks).
PepsiCo defines simple events and time events. Talking about the event processing network: Event –> Channel –> Rule –> Action.
Now, he’s walking us through an event flow: New Trip Event from BusinessWorks source, dropped on JMS channel, rule checking capacity, another checking miles, another checking savings. The savings rule is met, generates an action to offer load to carrier.
Walking through physical implementation now. Components are Apache, Web Logic, BusinessWorks and Database Server, BusinessEvents, Tibco Decision Manager.
Transition to PepsiCo opening speaker, on business benefits.
Business Process Optimization:
Operational Efficiency:
Key Learning
In the business benefit discussion, the PepsiCo speaker kept referencing “Managing with Events�. That’s a great mantra and way to view event processing.
If you manage with events, automate known conditions, correlations and actions, then the people in your organization shift to only managing exceptions. In management theory parlance, Event Processing is a technique to Manage by Exception.
]]>Rosen is walking us through the Container Shipment Lifecycle. OOCL tracks milestones throughout the lifecycle. Associates rules with those milestones to articulate when milestones (and therefore events) are relevant, or when milestones (and therefore events) are unimportant.
In addition to milestones, events and rules, other key OOCL constructs are activities and business scorecards. Bringing the concepts together, OOCL has activity plan. Milestone Plan + Activity Definition. Monitor milestones reached, and absence of milestone.
This provides shipment and tracking framework. Types of events: domain state change, milestone reached, timed events (milestone not reached).
Milestones being reached, or not, trigger activities. Activities are simple interactions or complex. Simple interactions are one system, or a human activity (via an operations dashboard). Complex interactions involve multiple systems, might require compensating transactions, coordination etc. OOCL uses Oracle tool to orchestrate complex activities. [I think he said Oracle BPEL].
The scorecard is under development. The scorecard can be a real-time display or a rule. A scorecard rule can then trigger downstream activities.
Scaling math: 8k shipments, 100 average shipment lifecycle days, 2 containers per shipment, 64 milestones per container = 54 million active milestones.
First attempt at this solution was homegrown. All development was in J2EE, complexity of event sequencing [so true], developed in 8 months. Why replace? A change in a rule required an engineering release.
Second attempt was in Oracle BPEL. Did a pilot with 3 of the milestones. Ran in parallel. Trouble with BPEL was exception handling. Not really predictable processes. Plus, scale issue. Hardware costs beyond pilot would be too high.
Third attempt is Tibco BusinessEvents. Initial POC up in 3 weeks. Production version up in 2 months. Deployment, reliability, performance tuning completed over 4 months with assistance from Tibco Quantum Leap team.
Benefits of BusinessEvents approach:
- Increased agility, new milestones added without technical release, elegance of declarative programming model
- Scalability and performance of solution
- [something else]
Tibco provided a lot of assistance in this effort. OOCL was early adopter of a caching technology.
Rosen has a physical deployment diagram up now. Load balancing. Sun boxes. OOCL is using SL RTView and OCM for production monitoring.
Benefits are IT efficiencies, business operations efficiency, automation vs. manual process, customer convenience, cost savings and agility.
Tips:
- Declarative programming is not procedural, do some training
- Most of the BE work is back-end, work beyond POC
- Define logging and exception handling up-front
- [more, missed them]
This is one of those great sessions for practitioners to hear challenges, success and tips from a leading practitioner. It’s obvious Rosen has been deep in OOCL’s implementation. Rosen mentioned how they learned from other Tibco customers, including SouthWest and Allstate. Community interaction is critical to everyone’s success.
]]>OfficeMax is the combined entities of OfficeMax retail and Boise Cascade Office Supplies business. Burdick opened with some background on OfficeMax and the challenges of the current retail environment. These include declining sales & margins, changes in shopping habits (cross channel engagement, social media, Red Laser on the iPhone, etc) and green initiatives.
OfficeMax challenges in 2005, when Burdick joined the organization, included supply chain efficiencies, cross-channel customer behavior and interactions, lack of real-time information, compliance and risk management (PCI, fraud, confidential data), revenue growth and margin enhancement. And of course, the spaghetti IT diagram slide.
IT Approach to these challenges:
- Educate and upgrade IT staff
- Establish and Mature an SOA Practice
- Establish business investment practices – strategic use of IT
The SOA slide, Tibco bus in the middle, ties core systems, customer systems, reporting etc.
Establishing the SOA Practice: Strategies for versioning, testing, monitoring, service design, security, deployment, performance tuning, capacity planning, backup and recovery. Frameworks for testing, business metrics, error handling, deployment. Processes: estimating, repository, service definition, etc. People: training, offshore partnering and more…
Burdick said Tibco was ESB #2. First attempt, prior to his tenure, was purely integration based. [Resource vs. Business-driven] This was failure.
Architecture included business events and business process management. EP examples: store sales, distributing item information.
Key: Prioritize by Business Value, not IT Value
Benefits: Accelerate development timeline, improved availability and performance, reduced costs, enabled business capabilities that in the past were cost prohibitive, real-time business metrics for any information flowing through Tibco, project teams now see value of bus, ask to use it.
Beyond the Basics
- Order out of stock items from POS
- Predictive monitoring of core business processes – order fulfillment
- Real-time analysis of business transactions – product affinity, hot sellers, proactive inventory response, price error check
- Cross Channel analysis
In closing, “Be Prepared – You get one chance�.
Audience Q&A
1. What Products? Just the service bus. [Not sure how that ties to BPM, then. Definitely can do simple EDA with just a bus.]
2. What were the major changes to people and process? Started in IT. Established architecture. Brought in outside people to form a core team. Started with central team, throttled back demand, tested concepts, established frameworks.
After 18 months, opened practice to other projects. Had innovation and reuse rewards. Lastly, frameworks on automated testing, repositories really allowed momentum gain. Now, SOA has taken off organically. Two to three year process to get people (IT) excited about SOA and value.
3. Business value? Business responsiveness is the big driver, more so than cost savings.
]]>A silicon valley secret, Vivek shares, is that the most innovative, high growth companies – Google, Facebook, Amazon – are not using relational databases. The future is “in-memory� information stores. He mentions events and event processing. He implies Big Data, and NoSQL.
Now, he’s giving some examples of real-world business interaction/operations issues that can be resolved and/or turned to advantage, using events: lost baggage, dropped calls, out-of-stock (complimentary offers), smart power grids, etc.
Vivek is further describing his Enterprise 3.0 vision, and the differences from 2.0. In 2.0, the focus was transactions, we searched for data. In 3.0, the focus is events, information will find us.
For 3.0, we need to rethink data and data storage. We need to move beyond 2 dimensional thinking – Rows and Columns – names and values, isn’t enough. Need to “go to 3rd dimension� to meet opportunities, challenges and threats of 21st century. The 3rd dimension, according to Vivek, is “context�. Vivek refers to this concept as “triple store�.
In parting, Vivek leaves us with parting question; “what is your 2-second advantage"?�. [Guess I was right-on with my marketing message tweet yesterday].
In a transition, we are watching an Interpol video on cyber and non-cyber crime and terrorism. Lots of scary looking characters in this video. The video was a lead-in to a special guest, Ronald K. Noble, Secretary General of Interpol. He’s pretty funny.
Onto business, Secretary Noble’s talk is entitled “When Speed Matters: Using Technology to Stay a Step Ahead of Criminals�. Noble amplifies Vivek’s “2-second advantage� message. You can immediately visualize that power in crime-fighting.
What does 2-seconds mean for Interpol? The difference between catching a criminal and them slipping away. The difference between safety and tragedy. In speaking of NY Times Square failed bombing, says combination of luck, terrorist incompetence and law enforcement vigilance. Arrest of suspect within 3 days was impressive. Even if suspect had boarded plane, would have been stopped at next event, plane landing.
Highlighting power of networks, information alerting and connectivity between law enforcement organizations within and between countries. Speaks to having the 2-second advantage versus being disconnected.
Wow – 500,000,000 passenger arrival events where passports were not screened against database of lost or stolen passports. Because they aren’t connected. There are almost 12 million passport records in the stolen and lost travel document database.
Secretary Noble is describing a story of chasing a sexual predator for years to no avail. Issued a global appeal for assistance via the internet. Within hours, the person had been identified. Couldn’t be arrested because passport was not scanned as he fled. Eventually, the person was recognized by a family member of a victim. However, this time period could have been greatly compressed had his passport been screened.
Now, Secretary Noble’s comments are taking a political tone. Socializing the concept of INTERPOL Passport & Travel Id program. Definitely not in my “coverage area�. Secretary Noble closes by sharing some preparations for the FIFA World Cup, and (good naturedly) lectures us on “Football� vs. soccer.
Continuing the heavy-hitters, the next speaker is Wolfgang Gaertner, CIO and Member of the Executive Committee PBC, Deutsche Bank. Gaertner is going to give a more traditional talk, describing a business problem and solution. The scenario is customer on-boarding. Before 2008, this was a paper based progress. Orinoco is the name of their new environment. The tagline “process intelligence applied�.
Gaertner describes the solution as “2.0�. Deutsche Bank met their business objectives on time, automation, accuracy etc. In a layered diagram, shows: resource layer, EAI, services, BPM, and Eclipse UI.
Once the environment was in place, started looking for re-use and business innovation opportunities. An example cited is post-merger integration of Berliner Bank, using workflow. A practice for the merger was “light integration�. Automate the majority of business, however, use manual processes for special accounts, exception handling and customer interactions. This provided tremendous cost savings. Automate the mainstream, skip (automating) the complicated exceptions. Leveraging the new environment saved 50% in cost, and sped up project by 60% [I think].
Now, Deutsche Bank is replacing the back-end banking system. Replacing the core systems, versus changing the edges. Gaertner equates this change to the work going on at Deutsche Bank’s twin towers, redoing the buildings for safety, greenness and savings, but keeping the uniqueness and brand identity of the towers.
On the systems replacement, the new picture has SAP at the center, Tibco in a workflow and integration ring, and an outer ring of homegrown (custom) product and channel applications for advisory, investments and (something I didn’t see). [My initial reaction to “ripping out the core�, smart, but “Wow!�].
The next scheduled speaker was HP’s Mark Hurd. In place of a live talk, we are watching a video conversation of Hurd and Vivek. They are talking increasing data volumes, the 2-second advantage, providing their customers competitive advantage, closing the 3 Com deal, blah blah.
]]>Each organization represents a different use case, and product set, for Tibco. The panelists were asked to give brief introductions, I captured the following:
World Economic Forum - Challenge: provide a forum for Davos constituents to collaborate throughout the year, at the physical events, and in day-to-day context. Adopted tibbr as part of collaboration forum. Use tibbr to identify information on collaboration platform that should be shared, and who it should be shared with, in a real-time and/or digest mode. Right now, in the first step of a long journey. There are 6,400 people on the collaboration platform. The audience is the top echelon of business and world leaders. Gearing up to use tibbr at the 2011 WEF.
Colt Technology Services - Use DataSynapse to provide cloud computing services to their customers. Needed to create a platform for customers to use in an on-demand model. Chose DataSynapse because they could combine platform, computing and data resources. Their first service will be around Grid Extension. Next, a managed grid environment. Customers are pharma, digital production (rendering). Essentially, building a cloud service delivery platform using the DataSynapse software.
Colt did try using another product for resource management. However, there was a concern (issue) for scale. To use the first chosen product (un-named) they would have to rewrite many of their services. This was not required with DataSynapse. [hmm.]
Interesting point, "customers don't want cloud". They want improved operational model. But, they still want control. To be able to "touch the implementation". And of course, comply with all regulations, especially around data and processing location.
Energy Australia - Tibco enterprise license. 10 year client of Tibco. Speaking on two initiatives. The first is SOA, evolved from an EDI implementation. Have grown with the product set. One of first organizations to implement BusinessWorks.
New regulation required information exchange and SLAs. Adopted BusinessEvents to manage SLAs, outage reporting and management. Link information from control systems to management systems to scheduling systems. Implemented an ESB. The ESB allowed for ease of implementation of new services, such as customer facing web applications.
Now, undergoing $6 billion (yes, billion) infrastructure change for a Smart Grid. This is a five year program. From an IT perspective, scalability, mobile computing, scalability, and program management requirements. Implemented ActiveMatrix. Gains in provisioning time, ease of scale, virtualization. Describe this as EESB, extended ESB.
Electrical network, biggest human control system in the world. Introduces incredible risk for failure, and customer outages. Smart Grid - with intelligent devices and instrumentation -- takes much of this risk out. Plus, energy efficiency, higher customer service levels, etc.
The Smart Grid project is still underway.
Q: Difference between ActiveMatrix and AppServer implementation? Easy to manage multiple versions of the same service. Don't have to change the endpoints. Another, is managing (translating) protocol impedance.
Defense Intelligence Agency - Use Spotfire. Have applied Spotfire to 120 types of analysis. Once "dump data into Spotfire", have "2-second advantage" in that next answer is 2 seconds away. Does give briefings from Spotfire.
Lots of good insights, but not many I can actually share. Unless of course, I want to be deemed "an adversary". One I can share, picked over other tools, such as Business Objects, because "it's so easy, an executive can use it".
]]>One thing I’ve always liked about Tibco is they understand, and exploit, the connections between technology strategies. Tibco has been linking SOA and Event-Driven Architecture for years. And now, with Silver, they link SOA (services & composite applications) and event processing (sense and respond elasticity) in their cloud computing strategy.
I’ll cover the conference via my blogs and Twitter. I believe the twitter tag is #TUCON. As disclosure rules allow, I’ll share interesting information from today’s analyst day.
[Disclosure: Tibco is not a client of Elemental Links. However, they did provide travel and accommodations for TUCON.]
]]>Similar to the SOA Consortium’s contests in 2008 - 2009, the goal of the BPM/SOA Case Study Competition is to highlight business success stories and lessons learned to provide proof points and insights for other organizations considering or pursuing BPM, SOA or combined BPM-SOA adoption. To qualify for the competition, the project must be complete with demonstrated business results.
Entries will be judged on the complexity of the business problem addressed, the ROI/Business Value achieved (Agility/Innovation/Flexibility/Optimization/Resilience/Service Delivery), the level and sophistication of the cross-organizational collaboration (Business/Technical) and the usage of BPM/SOA approaches and supporting technology. In addition to one overall winner, organizations will be recognized by industry/government.
Case Study Competition winners will be announced at the BPM/SOA CoP meeting in Cambridge MA on September 21, 2010 and will be featured on the BPM/SOA CoP website and in October publications by BPTrends and TechTarget.
Visit the contest homepage to learn about the guidelines, peak at the application, and meet the judges. Submissions will be accepted through June 29, 2010.
[Disclosure: The BPM/SOA Community of Practice is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]
]]>As you may recall, Con-Way was a winner in the 2008 SOA Consortium Case Study Contest. Con-Way has a great business transformation story, powered by SOA and Event Processing.
After Maja delivered the SOA in Transportation presentation, I gave a new 30-minute talk on “6 Secrets to Successful SOA�. The secrets all pertain to standing up and managing a successful, sustainable program. The discovery of these secrets was through my work with the SOA Consortium and Elemental Links (workshops, consulting).
I’ve posted the presentation to slideshare. Take a look. And yes, you can use the slides, with attribution to me.
Steve Chaffee opened quoting the Forrester paper by Gene Leganza on Enterprise Architects and Cloud Computing Adoption. He also mentioned the citizen development aspect of cloud, as familiarized by Gartner.
First up is Chris Rafter, Logicalis is an IT Services Company. Chris is starting with some Cloud Computing fundamentals. After some What is Cloud? Chris is talking about how cloud computing isn’t just an IT topic. It’s also a business topic and finance topic. The overall value prop: “Deliver the same application, with “good enough� quality of experience, for dramatically lower cost.�
He’s going over some cost savings details now. Cites small companies moving over to Google Apps, and companies without dedicated data centers, getting IaaS services from Amazon. So, not completely “moving� to cloud computing. But, utilizing cloud services.
Chris says “amazing deals� right now. The low price is all about a land grab. He infers this won’t last. Many people speak to the eventual race to zero. Chris sees this differently. More laws of supply and demand, versus just economies of scale. [I agree with Chris. I don’t see zero as an efficient (market) end goal for providers. At least those providers with shareholders.]
Now, the requisite Private | Hybrid | Public cloud slide. He’s giving good information. For many here, this is an initial exposure. In general, trucking and logistics organizations are not early adopters.
[Interesting note, while this session is well attended, the SOA session was fuller. In other industries, or at Analyst conferences, I see the opposite trend. More people in Cloud Computing sessions, as SOA is well underway.]
Next up is Dave Teszler of Oracle. Dave is a Sun guy, datacenter, cloud computing and HPC background.
Dave has Oracle’s Logistics IT Services Footprint up now. Talks about the potential need for high performance compute with the “traveling salesman problem�. What happens when the planned route is interrupted. How do you re-route with least impact on subsequent appointments.
Dave is going over a Private PaaS Lifecycle:
Private Cloud Evolution:
silo’d –> grid –> private cloud (self service, policy based) –> hybrid solution, spanning private & public clouds. Hybrid includes virtual private cloud, SaaS, PaaS and IaaS
Dave is giving some examples of Cloud Computing within Oracle. First, Oracle Development is self-service private cloud. [Sounds like early Amazon AWS driver]. Second, Oracle University.
In closing, Dave does point out there are both “compelling benefits as well as serious concerns�.
Finally, Jackie Barretta, CIO of Con-Way. Her brief definition: A standardized IT capability (services, software, or infrastructure) delivered via internet technologies.
Real promise, especially in transportation, is public cloud. The reason, the spikes of transportation. Not carrying high cost burden just to meet spikes. Leverage the public cloud for those spikes.
Biggest benefit, “Cloud Computing allows us to concentrate on our differentiators�.
Strategic Value compared to Internal vs. External Efficiency. Differentiators: Business Unit Application design, Integration, Business Intelligence and Enterprise Architecture. Focus on these things. Commodities: Help Desk, Development & Support, Infrastructure.
Mapped application categories to 2x2 box, strategic value (X), Internal vs. External proficiency (Y). High Strategic, Low Internal –> External Novelties. (Salesforce.com) Upper right box, stays within Con-Way.
SWOT Diagram: Platforms from the Cloud (development platforms). Only one viable for them, is Force.com. Con-Way is Java shop.
S: Rapid Ramp Up for developers, rapid application delivery
W: No SLA’s, Will not run existing code (proprietary Java, hopeful of new Force.com release)
O: Faster time to market, rapid scalability
T: Data & Apps may not be secure, Vendor Lock-in (biggest concern)
Moving on to Infrastructure. Mix of co-location, cloud computing, managed infrastructure and on-premise. Not confident in cloud computing infrastructure (right now) to fully “move� to the cloud.
Business functions that are core competencies and differentiators are NOT in, or moving to, the cloud.
Con-Way has always controlled own infrastructure. Just signed agreement with HP for 6 year outsourcing deal. There are “shades of cloud� in that agreement. Co-location, managed services, and SaaS on public cloud (such as email).
Also pursuing a pilot on Amazon EC2 for one of their “spikiest� applications. Deal structure allows for movement to public cloud without penalty, if public cloud offers better deal (cost, performance, etc).
Jackie is addressing the renegade (citizen) cloud adoption threat. Advice: Embrace cloud computing.
Q&A has started.
Jackie on Security in the cloud. In many ways, cloud computing providers are more secure, because they have more funds to put towards security. This is a general (industry) statement, not Con-Way specific.
Chris: Encryption. Insist on encryption: data in flight, PII data at rest.
Good question on application response (latency). How long do users need to wait for response from cloud. General agreement from panel of criticality of network architecture as moving to cloud. Might be big concern for shops with thick client applications. Shops with “thin client� or “web based architecture� are probably better positioned.
]]>You asked. We answered. On June 7, 2010, the Event Processing Community will run the first Event Processing Symposium as a free, virtual conference.
The virtual conference features event processing luminaries, early adopters and experts:
• W. Roy Schulte, Vice President and Distinguished Analyst, Gartner
• Opher Etzion, IBM Senior Technical Staff Member and chair of the Event Processing Technical Society
• Christopher Bird, Chief Architect at Sabre Airline Solutions
• Paul Vincent, CTO Business Rules and CEP, TIBCO Software
• Colin Clark, Chief Technology Officer, Cloud Event Processing, Inc.
Learn how Event Processing enables agencies and corporations to profit from continuous intelligence.
Hear from industry pioneers, leading vendors, and early adopters on Event Processing technologies and techniques that increase mission and business visibility and responsiveness.
Interact with industry experts, leading adopters, and peers via question and answer segments, and follow-on community discussion.
Influence, participate in, and benefit from the rise of event processing as we launch the Event Processing Community.
Visit the program website for more information and to register.
[Disclosure: The Event Processing Community is a client of my firm, Elemental Links.]
]]>