IBM’s CloudBust may not be as innovative as it claims to be

IBM announced the release of its new offering, WebSphere CloudBurst, this month with much pomp and circumstance.

The new product allows firms to make use of “private” cloud computing, and, according to IBM, speed up the process of testing and then rolling out new business applications. IBM’s general manager for Application and Integration Middleware division Tom Rosamilia, explained the advantages of the product in details: “About a year ago we started talking with customers about where the pain points were around cloud, and this is the resulting product," he began.

"You're doing development or modelling on someone else's cloud and making use of their services. The usage cases will be those you're willing to allow outside your environment. With the private cloud, you're doing the same thing but inside your firewall.

“Traditionally you've had to provision for peak use so your servers can stand up. With CloudBurst, you can dispense images so you can quickly bring up capacity and bring it back down again," he concluded.

This all sounds cutting edge, but, according to Inatech’s Simon Ellis, it is an approach that has already been used at length before now. “IBM’s latest announcement is in my opinion a small evolutionary step for clients either currently using virtualisation or cloud solutions."

“IBM takes elements of both and allows IT departments to provide cloud services internally through the deployment of their appliance. However, most tech savvy organisations are already following this approach: using virtualisation for provisioning on demand in their datacentres. Adding the word ‘Cloud’ doesn’t mean it really is new, but is perhaps a re-branding or evolution of something that already exists today."

“The use of an appliance means that it may be easier for some customers to get started as they can effectively buy it off the shelf, but in essence it’s nothing that most vendors and savvy IT organisations can do today, potentially for less cost.”

Future of cloud computing looks positive

The release of a report by analyst Gartner puts the timeframe for the take-off of cloud computing at seven years, but Inatech’s Ravindra Krishnappa has a more positive take on the future of the technology.

Gartner claims that, although there has been immediate excitement and development surrounding cloud computing, it will be at least seven years until it is adopted in mainstream IT. Gartner predicts that in the next three years cloud computing will be adopted by a select group of vendors, but will take a further four to be taken up by application development organisations.

Ravindra Krishnappa, Director of Inatech Infosolutions Pvt. Ltd, India, has different ideas:

“I disagree with Gartner’s timeframe. I expect the adoption of cloud computing to leap-frog in the next three years just as webmail did, as compared to owned or operated mail accounts.”

Having said this, Krishnappa went on to explain that some vendors will be quicker on the uptake than others. “All application vendors who are adept at integrating or interfacing with external applications are likely to adopt cloud computing early,” he said.

“This is primarily true from a vendor perspective. Examples of applications supporting theses are ‘point’ solutions that cover independent areas like campaign management to third party logistics. The reason they are best suited for this is because most of the already have some component of SOA in place.

“The best candidates to get onto the cloud computing structure within the business today, are the ones that are ‘collaborative’ in nature. The ‘backbone’ of business communication, including email, workflow, intranet components, workflow-enabled applications, calendaring and appointments; these would be the first set of candidates.

“In some cases, these can also be extended to the various communications channel of Voice, Video, File Share or Information share. The applications that will follow IMHO are the ones that are reliant on the above, such as time and expense management, issue tracking, customer service, and ticketing.”

Offshore is no threat to talented individuals

Much has been said about outsourcing offshore; first it was the language and culture misunderstanding, which was soon washed out with the growth of UK and US businesses. Second was security, however development in offshore development centres (ODC) proved quicker and more sustainable than previous solutions. Thirdly – jobs.

There is fear that the decline of the economy has sparked a cut in budgets and the reduction of jobs in the western world – while in part this is the case, in reality cost cutting measures have occurred since time-began. Utilising the skills and resources of other regions and individuals to further the existing economies is nothing new.

Take farming, much now is from outside the UK, this country used to be covered in farms and farmers each competing for the better produce. Now it’s time for the IT industry to evolve. Similar to the developments of marketing and publishing industries in Dubai, ODCs may take a significant proportion of the IT services required in the West, however talented and skilled individuals are happy to relocate. The vast majority (81 per cent) of techies would happily up sticks and move abroad if a job or work opportunity landed in their lap, according to research by IT jobs site The IT Job Board.

More than a third of respondents are upbeat about domestic IT job prospects - saying they believe Blighty will continue to see strong growth in demand for IT professionals. For techies choosing the good life elsewhere, braining up on the language is a must - more than a third said the language barrier is the main challenge when moving to a foreign country. However in reality most IT professionals worldwide need to speak English due to the demand from English-speaking businesses.

According to some, offshore services have a negative impact on the skill level of the UK workforce. Almost half (48 per cent) of respondents to Silicon’s Skills Survey agree or strongly agree offshoring is undermining the skill sets of UK techies.

However any outsourcing company should in fact be taking advantage of the local talent and developing a model that mixes skills and roles with efficiency, travel and cost – in so doing reducing the CO2 footprint.

It’s about offering the right mix for businesses between personal service and technical ability. Projects do not necessarily need to be deployed locally but if managed on location relationships and direct line of thought can improve the end-project and increase the speed for which it is completed.

Many IT companies have built to such an extent that the service provision is misunderstood between the customer and provider meaning costs escalate. It is essential service providers are small enough to be nimble but large enough to work effectively as a partner to customer’s changing needs.

The industry should forget about being Off-or-On-shore – with business becoming all about virtualisation and maximising remote working no company is necessarily based here or there. The only differentiator is cost of living and quality of life. Industry leaders should take the ‘Right-shore’ approach to truly spread the net to becoming a global organisation.

Keith Rock
Sales Director, Continental Europe & Africa

HP-Oracle DB assessment

About 2 months ago, at the Oracle Open World conference, I watched Larry Ellison announce the HP-Oracle DB machine. During the presentation, I was both bemused (with the idea that this was Larry’s / Oracle’s second venture into the hardware territory post NC) and the fact that for Oracle and HP to come up with this meant there was a real issue with the proliferating data.

As most of the readers would be aware, the last few quarters have seen a tremendous number of activities related to Virtualisation, Grid computing, Cloud computing and High volume data management. What are the options?

Hardware Options: Generally handled with Virtualisation and Grid computing effort as is also Custom Built machines (e.g: HP-Oracle DB machine). While it is a clean way to get to an array structure (CPU slices + Storage Array etc), I am not really sure if this is “efficient” – simply because, the core software / application was never written to take advantage of this.

Software Options : For a “pure” software option to work – there has to be two important components; A mechanism for Caching (In memory caches) and a mechanism for load balancing / splitting into parallel processing threads.

In my opinion, there is going to be a push for a combination of the two with distributed service architecture to manage the growing SOA / message structures inherently with a combination of GRID and CACHE (in memory).

I see three major players in the market today with fairly similar / competing offerings;

1. Oracle with it’s COHERENCE offering (Object oriented in memory DB cache) which is actually a product / company acquisition – Tangosol.
2. Gemstone with it’s GEMFIRE offering (again OODB / in memory DB cache) and
3. Gigaspaces with it’s XAP offering

The only issue I see with these offerings is that all the I/O needs to be re-configured / re-written using specific API’s to make use of the new features. This is a big issue, the questions to ask are; what is going to force the developers of COTS data access / reporting / application product suppliers (eg. Oracle, IBM-Cognos, SAP-BO etc) to provide this API access? Why would they invest in these during a downturn when no “new” product licenses are visible?

Ravindra Krishnappa

Microsoft invests in skills while UK battles recession

While Oracle’s OUG held their annual conference this week, Microsoft has been pushing out new products and investing in European skills. On Tuesday, Microsoft announced its investment of a further £4million in NGOs running community skills training projects in 30 countries across Europe. The investment is part of the company’s drive to create employment opportunities for young unemployed people, the older generation and people with disabilities.

Following on from this, Microsoft have backed the housing of a £20million cloud computing datacentre in Inverness, run by Scottish IT firm Alchemy Plus.

Also this week, Microsoft has launched the latest beta of Windows Vista Service Pack Two (SP2), which became available on Thursday. The code will be available to who join Microsoft’s Customer Preview Program (CPP).

Mike Nash, Microsoft’s corporate vice president for Windows Product Management, said: "The CPP is intended for technology enthusiasts, developers and IT pros who would like to test SP2 in their environments and with their applications prior to final release." On Wednesday, Microsoft released Open XML Document Viewer, a plug-in working within Firefox to allow open XML documents to be viewed within the browser, and which can be used on Windows and Linux plaforms without installing Office.

On the same day, Microsoft announced that it has halved the number of criteria LARs must meet to hit rebate targets, meaning that partners will earn less on volume licensing deals. The new programme will come into effect on 1 January 2009. Simon Aldous, UK partner group manager at Microsoft. “We are simplifying the scheme, halving the number of metrics on which rebates are paid.”

Outside of Microsoft, investment in IT is proving to be a popular choice amongst some businesses in an effort to beat the credit crunch. Red Hat, the IT services provider, reports that it has had a high demand for Linux since the recession began, with its revenues growing 30% year-on-year. Chief executive Jim Whitehurst said: "The downturn is good for open source software. We have an embarrassment of opportunities. In a difficult economy our message sells well."

It isn’t just IT firms reporting the financial benefits of investing in IT. Insurance firm Kennedys and Rowanmoor Pensions are now using the cloud computing model of online services to virtualise its IT operations, and claiming to have saved £350,000 in the process.

All this in one week just makes you realise that even during an economic downtown industry development and the IT market is still going strong. CIO magazine said that now is the time for CIOs to prove their worth which means there really will be some winners in a recession.

Inatech has been working with businesses to find these solutions; CIOs struggling to identify core IT needs for their company should explore the priorities to maximise customer relationships and increase efficiency.