While it is easy to dismiss the idea of cloud computing as just another IT industry buzzword, this would be unwise. Just as previous generations of technology have triggered profound business and economic changes, cloud computing enables new ways for organisations to operate faster and more creatively, often at sharply lower costs.
Over the last year, the Leading Edge Forum has been researching both the business implications and technical evolution of the cloud computing phenomenon. In this 1½ day event, LEF researchers, leading customers and key suppliers will discuss how cloud computing is being used today in large organisations to make their operations more scalable, virtual, and agile, while simultaneously shifting to on-demand and variable cost models. As more and more business activity moves to the cloud, companies are adopting new management and security practices, while embracing ongoing cultural change.
We are particularly excited to have W Brian Arthur, from the prestigious Santa Fe Institute, as our keynote speaker. Brian’s upcoming book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, explores how new technologies and new arrangements of use disrupt the current order, and are often led by players who view the world differently. Brian will discuss these ideas and their implications for the cloud computing ecosystem which is both a technology domain and a driving force in the modern economy.
For further information and to register for this event, please contact Victoria Gristwood by email at
vgristwo@csc.com
or by telephone at +1 (703) 641 3479.
Wednesday 4 November
07:30 – 08:30
Registration and Continental Breakfast in the Executive Briefing Center
08:30 – 08:45
08:45 – 09:00
09:00 – 10:30
Technology, Innovation and Cloud Computing
W Brian Arthur, Santa Fe Institute
Brian Arthur’s new book, The Nature of Technology: What It Is and How It Evolves, has recently been stirring much excitement in the technological community. Brian will draw from it to answer a number of questions: How exactly do new technologies arise? What constitutes innovation and how is it achieved? Why are certain regions — such as Silicon Valley — hotbeds of innovation, while others languish? Does technology, like biological life, evolve? Brian will use cloud computing to illustrate many of the key ideas. Cloud is currently redefining the meaning of computing, and Brian will discuss its (r)evolutionary potential to alter business and the economy.
10:30 – 11:00
11:00 – 11:45
Business/IT Co-Evolution — The Role of the Cloud
David Moschella, Global Research Director — Executive Programme, Leading Edge Forum
Once a mere adjunct to the organisation, information technology is now increasingly inseparable from the organisation it serves. We are used to thinking about the many ways that IT has changed business (e-commerce, e-mail, databases, etc), but we don’t usually think as much about the ways that business and societal forces — such as advertising, property rights and governments — are shaping the course of information technology. The LEF believes the phrase business/IT co-evolution provides a powerful metaphor with which to describe and anticipate this two-way process of change. Cloud computing will prove to be the single, biggest step in this co-evolutionary process thus far, as — through virtual and variable resources — it increasingly supports a unified model for business/IT agility and change. David Moschella will discuss the importance of business/IT co-evolution, and why we think cloud computing is such an unprecedented and important industry tipping point.
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11:45 – 12:45
Cloud rEvolution: Improving Agility, Cutting Costs and Accelerating Business Innovation
Yale Esrock, Business Process Architect; Rick Muñoz, Senior Technology Architect
Doug Neal, Research Fellow — Executive Programme, Leading Edge Forum
Cloud is a rEvolution: an evolution in technology and a potential revolution in business. In over a year of research, the LEF has examined cloud with an eye towards the enterprise. How do we use the cloud for agility, efficiency and innovation? To get to the heart of this, the LEF examined five research areas: 1) IT foundations of cloud computing; 2) abstraction, a core building block of cloud that provides efficiency and flexibility; 3) the 'cloud effect' on IT as products morph to services; 4) the 'cloud effect' on business to revolutionise cost structures, time-to-market and innovation; and 5) transitioning to the cloud, as cloud is a matter of when and how, not if.
Yale Esrock, Rick Muñoz and Doug Neal, chief researchers for the Cloud rEvolution report series, will provide an overview of their research findings and lead a panel-based discussion with attendees.
12:45 – 14:00
Lunch in the Executive Briefing Center Dining Room
Optional Lunch Session: Overview of CSC’s Trusted Cloud Services Program
Ron Knode, Director, CSC, and Yogesh Khanna, Vice President, CSC
Ron Knode will outline CSC’s corporate Trusted Cloud Services strategy, plans and progress. Yogesh Khanna will highlight a specific direction of that strategy that brings Trusted Cloud Services to the North American Public Sector (NPS) using CSC’s partnership with Terremark.
14:00 – 14:30
A Bolt from the Blue
Steve Schmidt, General Manager, Amazon Web Services
When retailer Amazon became a serious competitor in the IT arena, it was as if bolt from the blue had struck; Amazon introduced serious competition from an unexpected source. The growing Amazon Web Services suite (AWS) changed the rules by providing highly scalable IT services on demand that were paid for as used. Amazon needed these services itself, at enormous scale, and parlayed its understanding of how to deliver them into a growing business. Steve Schmidt will describe how AWS is currently being used, where AWS is headed, and the outlook for enterprises and entrepreneurs alike. He will describe how Amazon has helped clients deal with security, regulatory and international data challenges. Steve will discuss how firms are taking advantage of the recently announced Amazon Virtual Private Cloud and Multi-Factor Authentication.
14:30 – 15:00
Situation Normal, Everything Must Change
Simon Wardley, Software Services Manager, Canonical
In today’s computing world, it can often feel like we are drowning in wave after wave of new trends such as mash-ups, service oriented architecture and cloud computing. This sea of concepts is simply the manifestation of an underlying change in IT. Our industry is moving from a product to a service-based economy.
This shift is a result of the commoditisation of IT. But then again, not all IT is being commoditised — some is still an innovation, isn’t it?
Simon Wardley will introduce the main concepts behind commoditisation and innovation before explaining what is going on in IT. Focusing on the field of cloud computing, he will examine its benefits and downsides before examining how standardisation can create more innovation, not less. He will use as an example Canonical’s Ubuntu-Eucalyptus partnership to create open source private clouds that match the interface of Amazon’s EC2.
15:00 – 15:30
15:30 – 16:00
On the Horizon: The Formation of the Intercloud
Christofer Hoff, Director, Cloud and Virtualization Solutions, Cisco Systems, Inc
Looking to the future, Cisco cloud evangelist Christofer Hoff sees the formation of the 'intercloud', a global network of clouds delivering a cohesive, elastic, flexible mesh of ondemand processing power (for example, delivered from the lowest-cost cloud service at a given point in time). Hoff will describe how he sees the intercloud playing out: In the short term, we’ll need the innovators to push with their own APIs. Then the service brokers will abstract them on behalf of consumers in the mid-stream. Ultimately we will arrive at a common, open and standardised way of solving the problem longer term with a semantic capability that allows fluidity and agility in a consumer being able to take advantage of the model that works best for their particular needs.
The intercloud shifts the balance of IT power from centralised to distributed architectures because it gives enterprises a wider range of IT delivery options. Overall, the intercloud advances the concept of computing power being rendered in the cloud.
16:00 – 16:30
Desktops as a Service
Mick Hollison, Vice President, XenApp Product Group, Citrix Systems
Delivering a complete desktop experience to every user in an organisation should be easy. However, today this is a complex and costly task for IT. Through virtualisation technology, IT can now transform static data centres into highly dynamic delivery centres, optimising the delivery of applications and desktops as an on-demand service to any device with a rich, high-definition experience. Mick Hollison will discuss how IT can become a strategic business enabler, giving users ultimate flexibility with an enterprise app store that lets them choose what they need, when they need it - apps, desktop or any IT service.
16:30 – 17:15
Cloudonomics: Business Value and Costs of Cloud Computing
Mark Masterson, Enterprise Architect, Financial Services Sector, CSC
Why are people excited about cloud computing? What are the business drivers? How can an enterprise leverage these new capabilities? In what ways are the cloud providers doing something fundamentally new in economic and business terms, not just technological terms? What can enterprises do to exploit these new capabilities, and why aren’t costs the primary driver?
Mark Masterson will offer answers to these and similar questions, and shed some light on the secretive and increasingly important world of cloud computing providers like Amazon, Google and Microsoft. He will explore the difference between 'fine china' and 'paper plates' IT, the importance of workload diversity, and the secret of getting personnel costs to be less than 10 per cent of overall data centre costs. Mark will examine strategies that can lead enterprises to shorter time-to-value and enable innovation and business agility, while also reducing costs — strategies that make the entire value chain inside an enterprise leaner and faster.
17:15 – 18:30
18:30
Bus departs from the Executive Briefing Center for reception and dinner.
Thursday 5 November
08:00 – 09:00
Continental Breakfast in the Executive Briefing Center
09:00 – 09:45
Doing Business in the Cloud
Douglas Neal, Research Fellow — Executive Programme, Leading Edge Forum
The questions about cloud computing have moved on from last year’s questions about the possibilities and the feasibility of cloud computing to this year’s questions about implementation. What should I move to the cloud? When should I do it? What layers of the cloud stack should I use? And how should I do it?
Doug Neal will share lessons learned from early cloud adopters, as well as describe the findings of this year’s LEF Study Tour on cloud computing, with special focus on the issues of cost, agility, and collaboration.
09:45 – 10:25
Reaching for the Clouds — ETS’s Experience with Public Cloud Application Deployment
Bob Foy, Solution Architect, ETS
Public clouds, the Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) model, provide short- and long-term, utility-based, on-demand computing capability unavailable in most managed data centre offerings today. Given that a significant portion of ETS’s business processing is not only cyclical in nature, but also involves dynamic peaking, the public IaaS model is very attractive to ETS for the following reasons:
- Significantly reduces ETS infrastructure costs by paying only for what we use or need, thereby allowing us to avoid paying for idle computing resources.
- Allows ETS to quickly ramp up to meet variable or dynamic peaking demand, as provisioning of additional hardware happens in minutes rather than weeks.
- Allows ETS to reduce overall processing time by adding temporary resources to complete a task.
ETS has learned much on its journey into cloud computing. While there have been some successes, adoption of this technology has been slower than desired because of a number of challenges. Bob Foy will describe ETS’s experiences, including real and perceived business and technology benefits, the challenges in realising those benefits, and ways that ETS has addressed these challenges. He will share lessons learned as a result of moving forward with public cloud computing.
10:25 – 10:55
10:55 – 11:35
BP’s Experience with Hosting Applications with Amazon EC2
Rick Pittard, Senior Enterprise Architect, BP
Over the last three years, BP has conducted a number of pilots and proofs-of-concept using Amazon EC2. Use cases have ranged from simple Web sites, to more integrated systems, sand boxes, and the running of SAP. Rick Pittard will focus on BP’s experiences in implementing SAP using EC2 and other Amazon Web Services. BP has a large implementation of SAP systems, with many ongoing development projects. While the BP installed server base is large, there is often a need for additional SAP servers, whether for a few weeks or a few months. Rick will focus on what BP has put in place to meet this need by expanding into the cloud, as well as lessons learned from this experience and other Amazon experiences.
11:35 – 12:15
Journey Beyond the Cloud: Keeping it Real
Tom Soderstrom, Chief Technology Officer, NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
The cloud promises many benefits but also risks. This talk addresses the approach taken by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory to discover which aspects of the cloud will provide the biggest net benefits. Tom Soderstrom will examine questions such as: Which part of the cloud should I do first? Where’s my biggest ROI at the lowest risk? What are the real obstacles encountered so far? How do I get started? How do I keep it real? He will also discuss lessons learned and ongoing plans.
12:15 – 13:30
Lunch in the Executive Briefing Center Dining Room
13:30