Before moving back to my regularly scheduled Cloud Computing blog, I wanted to take a brief look back at VMworld 2009.

One thing that stood out to me, and I’ve been noticing this over the past few years, is the change in attendee demographics. Three to four years ago, the audience was mostly QA and application developers. Today, the crowd is more diversified, with an emphasis on IT operations. It’s satisfying to see this shift because it means greater variety in of customer sessions, and it means we’re talking to customers and prospects who are actually involved the production phases of virtualization and cloud computing.

As I mentioned, the customer content was particularly good this year, with lots of dialogue around management challenges associated with virtualization and cloud. Interestingly, three years ago virtualization was much more homogenous in terms of how IT organizations planned to use it. Now you have customers at different stages of maturity and adoption. I met with some organizations that were 8% virtualized and wanted to get to 30-40%. At the other extreme, I spoke to companies who were 80% virtualized and looking to extend to clouds.

The VMworld atmosphere was electric and perhaps a bit over the top. Unlike in years past, vendors enticed attendees to their booths with tchotchkies and booth babes. It was like I had traveled back in time and wound up at Comdex.

Speaking of time travel, what was up with the evening entertainment? When I heard VMware was bringing in a chart-topping musical act, I assumed they lined up a band that was more relevant than Foreigner. The last time Foreigner had a hit the movie,”TRON” was the considered the gold standard for virtual reality.

One last point I want to highlight. I was so proud to see the Cisco Unified Computing System in action, powering the VMworld lab environment. BMC worked very closely with Cisco, VMware, NetApp, Intel and a host of other partners, in a short period, to get the largest install to date up and running in a very short time frame. Check out this cool time lapse video to see how it all happened. And if you haven’t read the BMC-Cisco case study, you really should. Here’s the link.

Here’s the view from a recent from flight westward to San Francisco. A lot of clouds outside my window are reminding me that I need to update my blog.

By now we all know the benefits associated with cloud – pay-as-you-go model, greater agility, reduced complexity – and we’ve also heard some discussion on perceived risks such as vendor “lock in”, data security and reliability.

While these concerns are well founded, I strongly believe they will all be overcome in time. We’ve certainly been here before.

Competition has fueled an industry revolution over the last 30 years. Competition has been a catalyst for innovation, and that innovation has given us – the user – the power to choose.

Helping speed innovation and adding to the myriad choices across the technology stack are interoperability and standards. These concepts are prevalent in the hardware space and are good for suppliers and consumers.

For example, I can buy a laptop and extend its life by adding memory and hard drive, while manufacturers can find the best supplier for the best price. None of this would be possible without interoperability.

Unfortunately on the software side we have not made enough progress in this area. All too often vendors wrestle each other on the standards bodies as a way to promote their corporate agenda or market their brand or platform as opposed to prioritizing the work based on key use cases and customer representation. What I often hear from IT organizations, is that they fear choosing an external supplier for a SaaS or PaaS offering will result in vendor lock in. That’s a very real concern for customers and an issue that BMC is taking seriously.

More work has to be done to ensure the customer retains the right to choose. As I mentioned in a previous blog, the right to choose is essential to a successful cloud implementation.

Concerns about data security and reliability are genuine but not unsolvable. In fact most of us use off-premise services for mission critical and confidential collaboration or communication all the time.

Millions of very confidential meetings are hosted on Web conferencing services like Cisco’s WebEx or Microsoft Live Meeting every day. Whether it’s a customer support call or demonstrating our latest products, we rely on Web conferencing for many aspects of our business, and the reliability of the service is critical part of our business.

We trust Web conferencing to work when we need it and often take it for granted. And like all critical business services, when something goes wrong, it can result in a fire drill or even lost revenue.

Now for a shameless plug on a related topic. Please join me for an on-demand webinar on cloud, compliance and virtualization. We’ll be discussing some of the topics in this post and many others, alongside industry leaders from InstallFree, Global Data Systems, and Infinite Group.

Please click the link below to register:

http://www.bmc.com/events/on-demand/Cloud-Compliance-and-Virtualization-Industry-Panel-Webinar.html

The postings in this blog are my own and don't necessarily represent BMC's opinion or position.

- by Kia Behnia, Chief Technology Officer

As CTO at BMC Software, I spend a lot of time flying around the world talking to customers about their IT and business priorities right now and over the next couple years. Whether I’m plunking down $25 to check a bag or getting a 2-ounce bag of peanuts instead of a meal, it’s easy to see the dramatic changes the airline industry has made to adjust to new global economic realities. BMC’s customers are going through the same evolution: Do more with less – but hopefully without sacrificing quality of service. 

It’s an interesting parallel to draw, and it becomes clearer with each customer conversation.

A large Swiss bank recently told me they wanted their IT organization to operate more like a commercial airline than a chartered jet fleet. As a large financial intuition, IT used to look at every business request as if it were chartering a flight to go to a specific destination with two passengers. They custom built every server often picking the most expensive options and then customized the software stack. While picking from the top shelf satisfied the business in the short term, the bank’s IT organization was left with a complicated, underutilized and heavily customized infrastructure. This wound up hurting the business in the long run, because while top line revenues dropped, the infrastructure costs actually grew due to transaction volume. That’s when they understood in order to compete in this new world they need to operate differently.

Think about this. When you book flights, the airlines don’t start out by asking whether you want a 747 or 777 or prefer an Airbus or a Boeing plane. They give you choices on price, times and destinations and allow you to choose based on needs and priorities. If you need to get to Denver by 2 p.m. for a customer meeting, you would make destination and time a priority over price. But if you’re looking for a cheap weekend getaway, you might be more flexible on departure and arrival times and even on destination. It’s a self-service model that allows customers to buy tickets anytime and anywhere.

In the same way, the bank worked with BMC to align their IT to a commercial jet model. Managing IT based on the needs of the business – with well-defined service levels – enables organizations to focus on driving efficiencies and productivities that meet larger corporate goals. When someone in the business needs a new application or additional capacity on an existing application, he or she can reserve a seat. The service catalog provides different classes of service, prioritizes requests and minimizes costs just like airlines size their planes according to the demand for flights and fly full planes to be most efficient.

This idea dovetails perfectly with the top three themes that we are hearing from IT organizations:

Standardization: It is critical to establish a standard set of IT service offerings and associated standard infrastructure components and processes to fulfill those services similar to how an airline offers different classes of seats and different routes. Think of it like a menu or catalog with a standard set of IT offerings (like compute services, or email). These services are defined and even priced in a service catalog, providing IT with a storefront. The standard processes then are used to fulfill requests from this catalog. Standard configurations are used in the fulfillment process to reduce the need for one-off configurations.

Simplification: Standardization goes a long way in simplification, but the key is to identify duplication of function and reuse.  The objective here is all about reducing the number of steps required while giving customers better service.  Self-service check -n process for the airline simplified the airlines processes but also benefited customers by not forcing them to stand in long lines.

Automation: The key to cost reduction. Most repetitive IT tasks can be automated. This allows organizations to become much more efficient with their staff and manage a greater number of resources.  Automation also improves responsiveness and agility. In most organizations provisioning a new instance of an application and supporting infrastructure can take days or weeks. With automation this can be done in minutes.

While we’re on the subject of planes, now seems like as good a time as any to transition to those fluffy white objects outside the window. We’ll explore the topic of clouds in my next post.