Scroll through the agenda to view/download host presentations shown at this event.
The value of consumerized services, available to anyone, delivered from ‘the cloud’, is no longer in doubt. Millions of people and thousands of businesses are already on board. It is no longer a matter of if you will make use of them, but of when and for what.
However, for large enterprises encumbered by regulatory and other requirements, the questions of when and for what can be quite tricky. And they are trickier still to explain to business management.
We need answers to questions such as:
- Which cloud-based services do we use: Software as a Service (SaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS), Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) – or all three?
- When we go to a cloud vendor, how do we understand the full system price?
- How do we integrate local and remote systems?
- How do we avoid vendor lock-in and obtain portability?
- How much security is enough?
- How can we identify and then mitigate risks?
- What kind of performance do we really need?
- Should we insist on written service level agreements, or is a good track record more important?
On this study tour, we will visit a variety of vendors, large and small, start-ups as well as familiar names. We will also hear from companies now taking their first steps into the cloud. One of our goals is to develop a scorecard for consumerized services available in the cloud, to serve as both a report on where things stand today and a framework for future evaluation.
Firms providing consumerized services are starting to be much more aware that they must meet requirements for security and reliability. For example:
- Google has purchased Postini to add audit measures to Gmail.
- Start-up Sonian Networks uses Amazon EC2 and S3 to provide large-scale email archiving.
- Amazon processes vast numbers of credit card transactions, all meeting the Payment Card Industry standard.
A related set of concerns arise from the explosion of social networking sites such as Facebook. Within every company there is a need to know ‘who knows whom’ and ‘who knows what’. As work increasingly involves more than one company, there is a need for partners and customers to have this information about each other. Making use of a consumerized product that is already on the web and available to all – such as Facebook – seems to make sense. But there are very real concerns that in blending personal and professional lives, company-sensitive information might be inappropriately shared. Companies are starting to address these concerns – for example, MyWorkLight provides security through an add-on to the Facebook platform. Nevertheless, the best security often lies in the education of your employees.
Then there are questions of authentication: who are you and what are you authorized to do? The mobile phone is set to become the token for the future, as it is one thing people always carry with them. In Japan, Near Field Communications chips (a kind of short range RFID) make it possible to use your phone as a payment token, which can be linked to your credit card. Nokia is running a similar pilot in the UK with O2, providing a mobile-phone-based Oyster card for travelling on public transport in London.
Risk clearly goes up when employees have to remember multiple user IDs and passwords. Too many put sticky notes on their monitors or re-use the same passwords. But can single sign-on be reliable with consumerized technologies? Where does OpenID fit? What about OpenSocial, OpenAuth, DataPortability and Open Source, such as Google’s Android software for mobile devices? What about the SemanticWeb?
How do you choose? How do you create a roadmap? How do you know what to look for along your path? These are not just technical decisions.
Businesses want strategic guidance on what, when and how to move to the cloud
How do we start a dialogue with the business? Our recent workbook on Consumerization andWeb 2.0 offers a framework for discussing how the business can harness consumerized technology. This study tour will provide new material for driving discussions about moving to the cloud.
This year’s tour will take place in Seattle, San Francisco and Silicon Valley, from 19 to 24 October. Please contact Jane Kingston at jkingsto@csc.com, or complete and return the registration form, if you are interested in joining us.
Saturday 18 October
Delegates arrive.
Sunday 19 October
Join us for a tour of some of the fascinating sights of Seattle including a visit to the Boeing museum. After a leisurely lunch, the afternoon is left free for you to do some sightseeing of your own, or perhaps some shopping. In the evening, at the hotel, John Taylor will share with us ETS’s experiences in understanding and deploying consumerized technology.
Following this presentation there will be a drinks reception and informal buffet dinner – your chance to talk to other delegates and exchange views on this year’s theme.
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Monday 20 October
Leading Edge Forum
www.lef.csc.com
Doug Neal will discuss LEF’s latest research into consumerization and Web 2.0. Doug will also set the scene for the week’s visits and in particular he will build a framework that positions Software as a Service, Platform as a Service, and Infrastructure as a Service – all of which will be addressed by companies we will visit during the week.
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Liberty Alliance
www.projectliberty.org
We have come a long way from the contention between Microsoft’s Passport and Liberty’s federated ID management standard. Now Microsoft offers Identity Life Cycle Management, and OpenID has been added to the mix. It seems to get harder and harder to thread a way through the identity management maze.
Brett McDowell is the Executive Director of the Liberty Alliance, a first-of-its-kind standards organization with global membership, created to provide a holistic approach to digital identity. Brett has been involved in all aspects of the industry’s effort to address the Identity Management challenge. He will explain what ID management is all about – and why we should care!
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Amazon
aws.amazon.com
The giant online retailer has shaken up the IT world by introducing an array of exciting remote computing services, starting with the S3 storage offering – so inexpensive that people didn’t believe it. When that was followed by the ECC computing in the cloud offering, the scepticism could have been cut with a knife. A year or so later, the scepticism is gone. Amazon has changed the face of IT.
The success of AmazonWeb Services has created a demand for extensions and improvements, and Amazon has responded with a stream of innovations. High performance compute instances in EC2 provides a new way to support compute-intensive applications; OpenSolaris and MySQL technical support have been introduced in cooperation with Sun Microsystems; and the range of Flexible Payment Services provided has been extended. We will hear about Amazon’s success, and get a peek at what is coming down the line.
Microsoft
www.microsoft.com
The focus of our discussion with Microsoft will be on its response to the emergence of cloud computing as a vehicle for applications and services. Ray Ozzie knows as much as anyone about replication and collaborative computing. He is a unique authority on networked computing, and his mark is clearly stamped on Microsoft’s technology strategy.
We will discuss Microsoft’s vision of the cloud with one of Ray’s staff and explore what Live Mesh is all about. Why has Microsoft put 200 man-years (and counting) of development effort into it? How will it change what we do?
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Tuesday 21 October
Flight to San Jose
Facebook
www.facebook.com
The runaway success of Facebook and other social networking sites has seen tens of millions of people sign up to them every day to communicate and share information with each other efficiently and effectively.
Everyone belongs to one or more of these sites, but where do you draw the line between personal and business? Does your company embrace social networking? What are the pros and cons of allowing their use for work? How could tools like Facebook improve communication in the enterprise?
Rohati Systems
www.rohati.com
A start-up specifically addressing the problems of access control, Rohati Systems has just announced a suite of products. Rohati’s concept is that of network-based entitlement control – the hardware is in the data centre, and access control is based upon entitlement. No changes are required to applications or the network topology, enabling rapid broad-scale deployment. Speedy provisioning and de-provisioning of application and resource entitlements for all classes of users makes for obvious operational efficiencies.
Shane Buckley, CEO of the company, will discuss Rohati’s vision of access control and the evolution it expects to see as we move further into cloud computing.
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Wednesday 22 October
BP
www.bp.com
BP is experimenting with Amazon’s web services. It has successfully implemented a modelling programme across 40 virtual servers and is now trying some other applications. Rick Pittard of BP’s CTO’s Office will describe what they have been doing, and will discuss the lessons they have learned and where they will take the work from here.
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Ribbit
www.ribbit.com
As telephony opens up, many companies are looking to take advantage of the new possibilities telecoms offers. One example is Ribbit, which bills itself as Silicon Valley’s first phone company.
To facilitate this new way of looking at telecoms, Ribbit developed APIs that let you interface telephony into applications. For example, its service is interconnected to Salesforce.com and you can make calls from within Salesforce.com which go out through Ribbit’s network.
The company also has an agreement with PhoneTag so that your voicemails can be transcribed and sent to you in email/SMS.
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Appistry
www.appistry.com
For many IT practitioners, cloud computing means IT services and infrastructure delivered by providers outside the enterprise via the Internet. But many enterprise applications must remain within the firewall, so the true opportunity of cloud computing is not simply the outsourcing of infrastructure, but the transformative effect the cloud model will have within the organization. Every IT shop will become a cloud computing provider in its own right, operating a private cloud for its own applications. Today’s stove-piped application delivery models will give way to the cloud-based models of tomorrow. The rapid adoption of virtualization in the data centre is only the first step.
Bob Lozano, Chief Strategist and Founder of Appistry, will discuss the implications of enterprise cloud computing from both an application and an infrastructure perspective, as well as the steps enterprises must take to prepare for it. He will also give us a glimpse of the likely evolutionary path of these important new enterprise application platforms, including how companies can use Appistry’s Enterprise Application Fabric to combine private computing and public cloud computing – for example, to handle peak loads. This should include a progress report on Appistry’s plans to make use of Amazon EC2.
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3Tera
www.3tera.com
We first heard 3Tera describe its grid operating system AppLogic, which enables utility computing for deploying and scaling online applications, on our 2006 Study Tour.
Scaling online applications is an enormously difficult problem. Successful online services have millions of users, and serving so many users means scaling applications to hundreds – and often thousands – of servers. They in turn require at least as many networking and storage devices, adding to the challenge.
3Tera has solved this problem by harnessing the power of grid computing. AppLogic is the first grid operating system that runs and scales existing real-world web applications on grids of commodity servers. Partnering with leading hosting providers, this breakthrough technology enables true utility computing. AppLogic makes it possible to visually assemble existing software directly into portable applications that run on any grid, and scale from a fraction of a server to hundreds of servers with a single command.
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Workshop
At this point in the tour, we will take the opportunity to spend some time discussing what we have heard from participants so far, and what we feel the implications are for us. Be prepared to share what you have learned. There is huge value in hearing what others have picked up or are troubled by.
Time to relax, reflect and recuperate
Drinks Reception and Dinner
Thursday 23 October
VMware
www.vmware.com
VMware’s heady stock price has come down to earth – more or less – but its impact on data centre productivity around the world remains profound. It took a very old idea and made it current. It has competitors, but none so serious as Microsoft’s Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V. How does the company plan to respond?
Perhaps one of the most intriguing capabilities of virtualization is provided by VMotion: the ability to aggregate systems’ CPUs, storage and networks – for better utilization, and of course to form a ‘cloud’! Where is this going? Who is using it and what results are they achieving? What about things like disaster recovery automation? Can VMware demonstrate the reality of such a concept?
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Google
www.google.com
The two of Google’s current activities that are of most interest to this tour are Google Apps and Android – its mobile phone software platform.
Who is using the Google App Engine and for what? What can we reasonably expect of it? Where is it going and what will it offer to ensure competitiveness? In general, what are the arguments that get enterprises to make the switch, not just to Google Apps, but to Google Mail, Google Docs and the rest of the company’s portfolio?
When it comes to Android, we need to get a feel for how real it is. If we are convinced of this, then what will it do that competing platforms such as the iPhone,Windows Mobile and Symbian do not? Will it have enhanced security measures for identification and authorization? Why should we see Android as the preferred platform for our enterprises? These are the kind of questions we will be asking Google’s representatives.
Friday 24 October
Cisco
www.cisco.com
Cisco always has lots to tell us! We will be interested in how its IT organization is usingWeb 2.0 and, in particular, what concerns it has had regarding risk and security, and how it has addressed them.
Perhaps of greater significance is Cisco’s position at the heart of the net and consequently at the nub of the cloud computing concept. Cisco’s recent announcement of the Nexus 7000 switch shows that it is actively developing its position as the provider of the physical infrastructure for the cloud.
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Workshop
The tour will conclude with an intensive discussion among the delegates of what has been learned and what actions they expect to take. Real-time notes will be taken of delegate comments. These are extremely useful in assembling trip reports upon your return. Following such a workshop at the end of previous Study Tours, delegates reported that it was great to put the whole week into context, and highlight those issues that still needed research.
For those delegates flying out on Friday evening, transportation to San Francisco Airport will be provided. Arrival time at the airport will be approximately 3pm.