Nearly 20 years ago, a main topic of conversation at IT conferences was something called unified network management. Definitions differed by vendor, but the gist was this: Software was urgently required to unify and manage burgeoning distributed networks, which threatened to multiply out of IT's control.
Despite lots of progress, the problem never went away. It just emerged over and over in different scenarios, and an announcement today from IBM Corp. (NYSE: IBM) showcases its latest battleground: the hybrid cloud.
IBM's offer of hybrid cloud software based on its May 2010 acquisition of Cast Iron Systems points to the specific enterprise problem. When a company chooses a "public cloud" for [fill in the blank]-as-a-service, IT loses control over the management of the data and applications associated with that service. Meanwhile, back at the datacenter, IT continues to struggle with a growing roster of disparate systems and applications associated with its "private cloud."
The problem is how to integrate and unify the management of private clouds. Mary Johnston Turner, research vice president at
IDC , says the problem is growing:
IDC's research indicates that the majority of enterprise IT organizations expect to operate hybrid datacenter environments spanning private cloud, legacy, and public cloud resources for a number of years. As a result, IT management staff will increasingly need tools to help optimize not only the provisioning, but the capacity planning, service level, and security management of workloads across these varied resources. Cloud service providers will have similar needs.
Tom Nolle, CEO of the consultancy
CIMI Corp. , said in a lecture last August, "Hybrid cloud is to me the critical issue in cloud computing." He noted that integration of hybrid clouds depends on the specific setup chosen and can usually be achieved with the use of "SOA [service oriented architecture] principles."
IBM and other big vendors have been improving on that approach. They've anticipated the challenges and have acquired as much integration technology as possible to meet them. Back in 2007, SAP acquired Business Objects. In 2008, Oracle bought BEA Systems, and last year, IBM snapped up Cast Iron Systems.
At the same time, vendors such as Tibco and Verizon's Terremark say business in hybrid cloud integration is booming, and they're not alone.
"HP Cloud Service Automation 2.0 has some similarities, as does the BMC Cloud LifeCycle Manager," says IDC's Turner. "Also, a number of startups such as Nimbula or Gale Technologies are targeting this need."
IBM cites analyst figures showing that over a third of enterprises using cloud services have hybrid clouds as part of their strategy, and Big Blue expects that number to nearly double in the near term.
Its latest release is focused on "connecting, managing, and securing public and private clouds," according to a company statement. Big Blue is talking about high-end enterprise staples such as CRM and ERP, along with "homegrown" apps. To unify management, security, application integration, and provisioning of these resources in hybrid clouds, IBM has combined Cast Iron technology with its own Tivoli cloud software in a hybrid cloud add-on to its SmartCloud portfolio of products and services.
Details are sparse. In the past, Cast Iron offered integration appliances and competed with a range of "enterprise application integration" vendors. IBM continues to offer these appliances, but it's not exactly clear how they'll be offered as part of the new hybrid cloud solution.
Nevertheless, IBM is clear that it's offering a vital element of hybrid cloud integration: instant access to applications from a range of devices. IBM's prepared statement quotes customer Randy Berger, senior application architect at Siemens: "IBM's hybrid cloud offering not only easily integrates our on-premises and cloud-based applications, but also allows us to provide live feeds of order data changes to our sales reps on any device, including mobile phones, tablets, and laptops."
At least one analyst says IBM's wide-ranging capabilities will serve it well in what will likely be a big market for a long time to come.
"The need to integrate and manage hybridized environments will be a many-billion-dollar opportunity every year just in the US alone. There’s no shortage of competitive providers from both a software aspect and a services aspect; it’s a huge and growing opportunity for cloud-based providers and traditional SIs," Bruce Guptill, senior vice president and head of research at Saugatuck Technology, wrote in an email today.
And that's the name of the game, it seems -- helping IT to unify and manage the hybrid cloud looming on the horizon.
You hit on a key point, I think, jgonalezm: As the market unfolds, public cloud providers will differentiate themselves based on their ability to offer integration with private applications, using their own or other vendors' tools. So Cloud Service Provider A just might win a contract over Cloud Service Provider B by offering something like IBM's SmartCloud Cast Iron solution as part of the deal -- or offering another vendor's, who knows?
Antonis, I think hope springs eternal. But vendors will be vendors, I always say. That means, in my jaded view, that they will probably resist any effort at standardization that they a) don't have a major hand in creating; and b) don't favor their wares.
SunitaT, I'm no expert, but my sources indicate the main issue with hybrid clouds is the integration required to link public and private apps and resources. That's the crux of the issue. Adopting a hybrid cloud model calls for careful design work. It's not for the faint-hearted.
Great point, Gigi, and right on. I think IT managers will never be totally easy with the handing-over of important data. We'll always see solutions that have their "claw marks."
This subject is really interesting and most of providers have not found yet a full solution to it, specially when instead of looking to the private - public integration we widen the scope a little bit to include the public - public - private cloud syndication.
So in addition, to have one single public cloud vendor, probably we will see several IaaS / SaaS public cloud providers which need to be integrated with our private cloud solution or even several private clouds if some LoBs are capable to arrange some new fancy BPaaS into their budget out of IT control.
In summary, solutions as CastIron should truly became the next generation Enterprise Application Integration solution capable to handle both regular and cloud based applications with standards that there are not set yet for the cloud.
At least one analyst says IBM's wide-ranging capabilities will serve it well in what will likely be a big market for a long time to come.
Mary, Just curious to know if all the companies would prefer hybrid clouds in future? We know the advantages of hybrid clouds but are there any disadvantages of hybrid clouds ?
Hi Mary, excellent article, it would make a good proposal for a research grant! Your last comment is spot-on. Looking back in time, we can now see more clearly how and why management standards carry a heavy fragmentation legacy. And yet, even today things haven't changed much.
My view is that we may be approaching a tipping point where fragmentation is no longer financially viable, and this could be the real push for interoperable solutions. Could this be the case?
Mary, I think most of the companies are preferring hybrid cloud because of security issues. Nobody wants to share their critical datas with third part because of saftey purposes. In such cases, hybrid clouds can isolate such critical data or resource from the public cloud and maintains it as private cloud. Hybrid cloud is a combination of public private cloud.
I'll never forget, too, the many management standardization efforts of the 1990s -- you know, the ones that were routinely derailed by the big suppliers intent on keeping their stuff as inaccessible to other vendors' management tools as possible.
Mary, of course you're right. The nightmares! We had an industry-specific application designed for customers seeing reps in the office. Along came the web, but the vendor would not give us any information about their software. They were planning their own web app, but they'd also been saying they were going to release it "in a month" for six years (1999 - 2005), so I set a programmer to digging...He found that the app's tables were not labeled in any human-readable pattern, but that underneath the app was an open-source db...Anyway, we finally wrote a bridge to our web site, it worked beautifully for two years -- until the app vendor "upgraded" their software -- still no release of web module.
Anyway, back to your point. I will amend my prediction to include that the war between vendors and IT departments will also never end...
The ThinkerNet does not reflect the views of TechWeb. The ThinkerNet is an informal means of communication to members and visitors of the Internet Evolution site. Individual authors are chosen by Internet Evolution to blog. Neither Internet Evolution nor TechWeb assume responsibility for comments, claims, or opinions made by authors and ThinkerNet bloggers. They are no substitute for your own research and should not be relied upon for trading or any other purpose.
Facebook and Twitter are great for posting cat pictures. But are people really using social media for life-changing communications? Like, if a hurricane comes by and blows down their house?
In a standout presentation at the Jefferies 2013 Global Technology, Media & Telecom Conference in New York this week, the UK government talked about becoming a "very intelligent client."
A consumer business would have to be crazy or desperate to change call-center software in December, the peak of the holiday season. But that was exactly Positec's position.
To help enterprises deploy software faster for mobile, social, big-data, and cloud applications, IBM this week acquired development tools vendor UrbanCode.
Internet Explorer seems like a relic of the 90s, like parachute pants and Friends. But that's just me. I'm a Chrome guy, and before that I used Firefox.
Multi-tenant clouds assure security for clients, but not necessarily for their ideas. Here's one thing you should discuss with your cloud provider before you sign on.
New tools like laptops, tablets, smartphone, and wireless connectivity let us work from San Diego to Katmandu, and anywhere in between. But time management remains a problem.
A survey by JD Powers found that customer interest in product features is lessening as phones evolve. Rather than features, price is driving purchases, and that change could have a dramatic impact on how IT departments secure these devices.
The bring-your-own-device approach isn’t suited to monitoring of enterprise equipment and processes. In these cases, it is up to IT to come forward with gear suited to the task.
Enterprises are discovering that using social networking within the secure setting of a SaaS provider's network gives them an unusual opportunity to freely collaborate with partners, suppliers, and even competitors.
All the recent hoopla about cloud security overlooks an important point, which is that it's not strictly a cloud problem. The linkage of online services into cooperative chains creates the risk, and only biometrics and federation of providers can save us.
Microsoft's recent decision to bundle its Office software with business partner offerings indicates that cloud software may be in the news, but licensed packages are still in demand for failover.
New York's Metropolitan Transit Authority is conducting a pilot test of digital kiosks to guide subway users to where they want to go more efficiently and at lower cost.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
While NFC's original goal was to enhance mobile commerce applications, it is finding its way into a number of other uses, which is creating both opportunity as well as challenges for IT departments.
Enterprises would like to move to cloud computing but are hesitant because they are concerned about providers’ ability to secure company data. Here are some tips that help to ensure that if breaches occur, the business is not left holding the bag.
Edmunds separates customers into segments based on the info it collects on its site and from partners, and uses that to push out custom content, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
The automotive website uses propensity modeling to target ads and customer registration forms, said Brian Baron, director of business analytics for Edmunds.com, at Predictive Analytics Innovation Summit.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
Expert Integrated Systems: Changing the Experience & Economics of IT In this e-book, we take an in-depth look at these expert integrated systems -- what they are, how they work, and how they have the potential to help CIOs achieve dramatic savings while restoring IT's role as business innovator. READ THIS eBOOK
your weekly update of news, analysis, and
opinion from Internet Evolution - FREE! REGISTER HERE
Wanted! Site Moderators Internet Evolution is looking for a handful of readers to help moderate the message boards on our site – as well as engaging in high-IQ conversation with the industry mavens on our thinkerNet blogosphere. The job comes with various perks, bags of kudos, and GIANT bragging rights. Interested?
To save this item to your list of favorite Internet Evolution content so you can find it later in your Profile page, click the "Save It" button next to the item.
Email This
