Archive for December, 2010
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas and this blog
By Linh C. Ho
Last week I put on my blue suede shoes and spent the week in viva Las Vegas! I was attending Gartner’s 29th annual data center and IT operations conference—of course. To no one’s surprise, the main theme of the conference was around cloud computing and virtualization. Over 2000 IT professionals marched up and down the Caesars Palace between sessions, analyst one-on-ones, and perhaps a round of black jack by the dancing dolls 
Without a doubt, trends to watch were on the horizon – some of the top trends I picked up from one of the keynotes are:
- Virtualization is just starting: it is not a one-time project, it’s a process! the number of virtualized PCs will grow from less than 5 million in 2007 to 660 million by 2011.
- Big data – big elephant or was it gorilla in the room? Storage continues to grow at an average of 50% to 60% CAGR in most enterprises.
- Energy efficiency and monitoring: data centers can consume 40 to 100 times more energy than offices they support! Big need to measure and report on consumption!
- Unified communication and collaboration: incorporate mobile devices into the enterprise!
- Staff retention and retraining: how do you keep staff from leaving? The US department of labor estimates that today’s labor force will have 10-14 jobs by the age of 38!
- Social networks: don’t band Facebook, Youtube or Twitter from your staff! Did you know more video was uploaded to youtube in the last 2 months than ABC, CBS, NBC had been airing new content since 1948?? (OpTier uploaded 4 in the last month!) check em’ out!
- Cloud computing: it reduces operating expenses, improves agility –yes great hype but focus on results!
While the name of the game was to count how many times the word ‘cloud’ gets mentioned in a session, I was keeping an ear out for ‘OpTier’. The topics of interest were application performance management, end-user experience, ITILv3, CMDB/CMS, business service management, virtualization and (drum roll) cloud.
Few additional things I’ve picked up from the sessions:
- User defined transaction flow or Business Transaction Management (BTM) is the most popular inquiry in application management area in 2010. (DING! For OpTier!)
- Warning of small niche deep-dive vendors in Java/.NET claiming to do BTM! –they don’t!
- Application Performance Management (APM) continues to be a hot area:
- 2009 APM inquiries: 650
- 2010 APM inquiries to date: 700+
- 2009 APM market size: $1.5B
- 2010 APM market size ~$2B (with 10% annual growth going forward – only virtualization management is growing faster)
- End-user Experience management continues to be a hot priority (DING! For OpTier!)
- A lot more emphasis on ITIL and process improvement from Gartner this year. I believe they even hired a new analyst to cover ITIL. This must be a reflection of the US adoption. While Gartner shows that over 30% are 3-5 years into ITIL, the majority of the audience is at maturity level 2 or 3. This means that enterprises are becoming more process-centric and proactive rather than reactive.
- Investment in managing cloud is mostly in private cloud only, very little <5% investment in managing public cloud.
All and all, I have found the conference very informative and worthwhile! I have been going to this conference for many years, this was by far the biggest datacenter show I’ve seen. Viva Las Vegas!
Cloud Requires a New IT Employee (Hint: MBA May Be Required)
We've come a long way since the IBM 3270. Or have we?
By Russell Rothstein
December 6, 2010
In today’s economy with sluggish job creation, there’s much talk about the change in skills required in today’s workforce. Drill down into the world of IT operations management, and there is an even greater shift happening, related not to the economy, but to cloud computing. The rapid adoption of private cloud architectures is creating ripple effects, not only on the way IT delivers services to its customers, but also on the types of skills IT requires to support these new architectures.
Cloud computing is heralding the most significant shift in IT skill sets since we displaced the armies of punch card operators with the IBM 3270. Cloud is a realization of utility computing, where whereby shared resources, software, and information are provided to computers and other devices on demand. As Gartner says in a recent report, private cloud services “will require a cultural and political change inside of IT to see the role of operations move to being more proactive — requiring predefined policies, service levels and automated actions to take on the runtime environment, as opposed to the manual initiation of scripts or workflows. This requires very different skills over time — a shift away from rote work toward more planning, service analysis and a better understanding of service users in order to continually improve how the service is ultimately delivered.” (Source: Gartner “Key Considerations in the Development of a Private Cloud Architecture”, August 23, 2010).
The key phrase used by Gartner is that IT personnel will require “a better understanding of service users”, which means a better understanding the business which is what’s driving the users to consume those IT services. In essence, cloud will necessitate IT to be more business focused. We have been talking about Business/IT alignment for too long now without sufficient progress; with the emergence of cloud models, this is no longer a choice – either IT upgrades to a business-centric service delivery function, or is ultimately to be replaced by outsourced cloud service providers that can provide utility computing services with greater cost efficiencies. That’s why Business Transaction Management, or BTM, must be at the center of your cloud management capabilities, in order to effectively plan for and manage cloud services from a business perspective. In an upcoming blog post, we’ll get the opinions from CIOs in the industry to understand their plans to address this rapidly changing environment.
To close up, it’s interesting to understand the new roles in IT that Gartner sees as emerging in order to support the delivery of new private cloud services:
- Cloud service architect (new role): Designs and documents the end-to-end cloud platform
- Portal developer: Develops interfaces that cloud consumers use to requisition services
- Workflow specialist: Defines requirements for instantiating automated processes
- Configuration management specialist: Develops consistent packaging and policy-conflict-free service deployment methods
We trust you are already filling these roles in your IT organization. And while these may not be the best the job in the world, but they most certainly beat a career as a roustabout.
December 6, 2010 at 3:14 pm Russell Rothstein Leave a comment
OpTier
Assaf Amit
Andy Wetzel
Russell Rothstein
Motti Tal
Linh C. Ho
Diego Lomanto
iddoav
