If you're interested in learning more about BMC's Cloud Computing vision, offerings, partnerships, and customers, I'd encourage you to attend one of these two upcoming events.

• If you're in the Boston area, please join us for a free half-day Cloud Computing seminar, on Feb 3. For details and registration, click here

• For those of you in the Public Sector, BMC is hosting a forum specificially for you, with a heavy emphasis on Cloud Computing. This free event is Feb 4 in Washington DC -- for details and registration, click here

We hope to see you there, and look forward to speaking with you about Cloud!

Ah, Lego®: a toy that has captivated kids of all ages, and across generations.  With its assortment of colors, sizes and fun accessories like windows and people, there was no limit to what one could do with a bucket of Lego® pieces and an aptitude for mechanical engineering.

I personally loved building houses, complete with rooms and furniture, with mine.  One of the coolest things about these blocks, I thought, was that, regardless of the function of each piece, they all snapped onto one another by adhering to a standard design on top and bottom.  Additionally wonderful was that, any time I needed one of those really long pieces but had run out, I could easily use a couple of shorter ones to achieve the same effect.  In the end, multiple combinations could achieve the same result – a beautiful example of fine Lego® architecture.

So, what does this have to do with the cloud?  Well, like the Lego® product, in an ideal cloud you will be able to easily fit its pieces together.  Whether dropping in monitoring and alerts, or provisioning and deploy, each piece should have a common way of fitting in with the others.  A solution like BMC BSM for Cloud Computing™ is a great example of component parts coming together easily and seamlessly.

Also, think of the managed services within the cloud.  Much like sitting ten kids in a room and asking each one to build a Lego® house, the details of a service such as “New Production Server” could look completely different from one enterprise to another, one business unit to another, even one administrator to another.  But the flexibility to use the equivalent of any length, color or type of building block to deliver the service should also exist in a cloud solution.

And of course – let’s now consider Phurnace, a very exciting acquisition and a really cool product.  Where do they fit in?  Requirements for Java application deploy exist across every organization, but few products on the market can manage the automation and administration of this process, and Phurnace is one that does it superbly.  In the world of Lego®, this is more than just a simple building block.  This is akin to when they added electricity to their sets.  Suddenly, cars drove, trains steamed, and – voila! – lights turned on in the houses.

With a strong cloud management solution already in place, BMC is capable of delivering even more powerful products with the Phurnace acquisition.  We’ll electrify the cloud!

In the meantime, as for myself…I’m going to Legoland®. 

At 3:30 this morning, as I fed my ten-day-old son and dreamt of lost sleep, it occurred to me that managing a cloud can be compared to managing an infant.  Mind you, I’m not making a direct link between infantile behavior and those who work in a data center, but having experienced firsthand what it takes to roll out a private cloud, the process is much like the care of a new child. 

With newborns, the life of parents can be bewildering and even a bit cruel on the psyche.  There are a lot of requirements streaming in and, for the uninitiated, a big learning curve.  And if you fail to satisfy the demands of your progeny, a lot of screaming and general fussing ensues.  But, after some time goes by, parents learn enough about the needs and moods of their child to begin to anticipate those needs and moods.  And, by using this quintessentially human capability, we can begin to take steps to minimize the crying and sleepless nights.

But, in a cloud environment, it is software and not always people who must learn the personality of their charges – servers, applications, storage, and so on.  The raising of a cloud requires IT solutions to mimic the anticipatory function of man, and to translate this into an action or a resolution that makes sense for the environment. 

So, why is this important?  Imagine an environment with a distributed application that periodically dips in performance or even causes a crash due to heavy load.  Without analytics, your cloud is like a thermostat, responding to events that have already occurred like a dip in temperature prompts the heat to turn on.  You don’t actually avoid the performance hit.  Now consider what you could achieve if your system were proactive instead of reactive?  What if it could look at environmental data over time and begin to predict that the resource overload would happen at particular times of the day, or in particular components of the application, and then take steps to provide more capacity at those specific points to preempt the problem?

The ideal cloud is self-governing and efficiently automated, which is not possible without anticipation.  In fact, managing a cloud is a lot like managing many other things for which anticipation is a key ingredient for success.  Like an excellent butler, or iTunes Genius, or even Furby – that chattering relic of toys gone by – a cloud management solution must learn from its surroundings and become smarter over time so that its capability for anticipating the needs of the cloud environment is real-time.

Any cloud management solution, therefore, should include strong analytics with ability to correlate historical data with future events.  If you’re working toward true autonomy in the cloud, predictive, or anticipatory, capability of such a tool will soothe even the most fussy of clouds.

Now we have turned the corner to a new decade are we finally going to see increased evaluation and subsequent adoption of cloud computing? I think so. I firmly believe that this will be the year that the CIO will become the Cloud entrepreneur as he or she finally gets to grip with the fundamental technologies and business cases, and to address the outstanding challenges that have held them back from cloud implementations for the last 24 months. From what was thought of as being overhyped and even had some naysayers even calling it a fad, cloud computing is now being taken quite seriously and certainly going to prevail as the next evolution in IT computing.

We have seen a number of enterprise IT organizations start with limited evaluation and small deployments of both cloud use cases and the technologies required to manage and deploy them. Several key items are still outstanding and require resolutions before mainstream adoption will be garnished. Specifically the majority of these relate to the Public cloud type and centers around security, sizing, chargeback, application performance, software licensing and a few others. Overtime, as with any challenge, these will be overcome.

But for many enterprises, safety today comes from building out their own Private cloud type which is still transforming internal IT  with its automating and dynamic provisioning of catalogued and scalable end-user services. This will help transform an IT department into more service-centric and service-enabled organization. Building internal (Private) clouds will help companies obtain highly virtualized, on-demand services delivered in a seamless way. One where the customer, not IT, places the business need and priority decision.

Whatever unfolds for the CIO in 2010 it will mark an exciting and interesting time as they continue to balance a fragile budget, a bruised business from the economic situation, the stabilization and management of IT and the embracing of Cloud Computing to create an entrepreneurial atmosphere within IT to either do more with less, or to do more with the right strategic investments. During our lingering economic challenge, visionary CIO’s will rise to the top as they adopt a Cloud focus. After that, it won't be long before CIOs are serving as cloud computing entrepreneurs to their business.

Is this the year of the CIO Entrepreneur in the Cloud? What do you think?

At a FedScoop Cloud Computing Shoot Out held in Washington D.C. this week, representatives from major computing companies shared their views on the cloud and its benefits for government users. The group included;

·        Mike Donovan, chief technologist at HP enterprise services;

·         Yousef Khalidi, a distinguished engineer working on Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform;

·        Werner Vogels, chief technology officer at Amazon.com;

·         Prasad Rampalli, vice president of the Intel Architecture Group and director of end-user platform integration at Intel;

·         Mike Hill, vice president of enterprise initiatives at IBM;

·         Eran Feigenbaum, director of security for Google Enterprise;

·         Daniel Burton, senior vice president of global public policy at Salesforce.com.

The event highlighted some of the cost savings and efficiencies that adoption of cloud computing was to bring along with some of the risks, concerns and advantages. It also turned into passionate discussions and sometimes a slight disagreement.

Now in the world of references I can, and will, always tell you how good the BMC solutions are. I believe in the solutions, our strategy and vision having been one of the founders of BMC’s BSM architecture and strategy. I’ve worked with, and sometimes for, many of the major vendors in the enterprise management space. I’ve seen the space evolve since my early days in computing from the late 70’s and I was right there in the middle of the ‘framework’ wars of the mid-90’s. But for me, the best reference comes from customers with their own reputation on the line, or from fairly independent third parties. Amazon CTO Werner Vogels is one of those, and he gave a tremendous shout-out to BMC Software during the FedScoop;

The Intel representative turned the conversation to cloud federation, cloud bursting and specifically around VM Sprawl being an issue, and core pain points that need to be overcome.

When he was finished Amazon CTO Werner Vogels jumped into the conversation saying that he “strongly disagrees with the fact that management tools are not ready (for the cloud) yet."

At 32m11s in to the video Vogels continued, “BMC has a lot of good products that manage the enterprise at the moment. The integration of these cloud services into existing enterprise management frameworks is happening. BMC with their Bladelogic  and other cloud lifecycle products are a good example as to how you can integrate your existing management practices and integrate cloud into that.”

You can watch the video here. Advance the time to approx. 32minutes

Recall in our previous posting, we introduced the notion of an Enterprise Cloud, comprised of a combination of private, public, and hybrid cloud services.  Many enterprises will want to exclusively offer private services (meaning they are operating, by definition, a “private cloud”) for a variety of reasons (a topic of a future posting in this series).  However, more realistically, and more commonly  moving forward, IT will need to manage all three types of services.

Thus, the question is that of how IT wants to approach the design and management of the mixture of cloud services in its environment – whether the service types are blended together in a single cloud offering, or separated.  There is no single right answer to this, as it’s entirely dependent on the organization’s priorities, infrastructure, needs, and context.  Nonetheless, it’s clear to me that there’s a need and a demand for an overall management  platform that can handle all three variety of services in a unified fashion.

For example,  imagine that you’re a developer who needs a server OS temporarily provisioned for some development work. You make the request, and a few minutes later you have a new VM, which you access across the network via some sort of remote login. Does it *really* matter where that VM physically resides?  Much of the time, it doesn’t…it can just as easily and productively be in a remote cloud as in the server room down the hall.  That is, the policies and factors that determine where this particular VM is provisioned should be embedded in and executed by the management platform, which can make the best placement decision at the time of request.  There would need to be a compelling reason to instead have the requester make this decision, by explicitly choosing which cloud platform to use.

A related question, applicable to organizations operating only private cloud services, is whether to manage one cloud environment, or have distinct cloud infrastructures to serve different purposes. The answer is that there is no single answer…people will need to balance their technical and business needs with the financial, technical, and organizational constraints, and make an informed decision that’s right for them.  Nevertheless, I think that many organizations will want the option of managing disparate service types, as well as all their clouds, from a common management platform.  Even if an organization is running multiple, distinct private clouds, it makes sense to embrace a common management platform, to leverage shared policies, processes, and people.

Our next topic in this series – using external Cloud Service Provider offering definitions as a model for internal cloud service types.

Living in New England, we are blessed with a large variety of ice cream shops, offering a sometimes bewildering selection of flavors – regional selections such as Moose Tracks and Cranberry Bog, or, if we’re at Christina’s in Cambridge, more interesting flavors such as Ginger, Corn, or Kaffir Lime.  But, the old standbys of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry still outsell all others. Faced with the difficult choice between these three flavors, Neapolitan ice cream was invented in the late 1800’s – a single container with sections of vanilla, chocolate, and strawberry.  Properly dispensed, each serving contains a portion of each flavor. Delicious!

Speaking about Cloud with so many different people from different organizations, backgrounds, and perspectives, I often discuss the different styles of cloud computing, and categorize them as Private, Public, and Hybrid.  But, much like our ice cream, we shouldn’t necessarily think of this an either/or choice.  When an organization envisions what sort of services it wants to run in a cloud, and how they want to manage it, it turns out that reality is complex.  A given enterprise’s cloud is likely to have a wide variety of services, and these services will be private, hybrid, or public.  That is,  we need to think about these as private cloud services, hybrid cloud services, and public cloud services – all of which are services offered by IT within an enterprise’s cloud, with different characteristics.
That is:

• A private cloud service is a service that runs entirely on the organization’s own infrastructure
• A hybrid cloud service is a service that runs partially on the organization’s own infrastructure, and partially on an external service provider – typically for handling peak “overflow” work loads
• A public cloud service is a service running entirely on an external service provider

(An interesting sidebar is that these distinctions, while highly important for IT, should actually be transparent to the internal customer. If I obtain a service from IT, it shouldn’t really matter to me where it runs, as long as it works, and meets the SLAs).

Typically, IT wants to expose all these styles of services through a single, common request management interface, with standard and common policies, processes, and tools.   That is, a single management layer operating multiple service infrastructures, acting as a single platform with all three service flavors deployed together.  Implemented properly, this can be as appealing to the organization as a dish of the aforementioned Neapolitan ice cream (although not quite as refreshing).

Note that I say IT typically wants a single, common management platform, because there are valid considerations and situations where IT would want or need to run operate multiple clouds, separate and distinct from one another. That discussion, One Cloud or Many, is the topic of my next posting in this series.

Organizations around the world and in every industry are using BMC’s BSM unified platform to reduce the cost of running IT, increase business impact, improve quality of service, manage risk, and provide transparency to business stakeholders.

Since launching the first comprehensive vision of BSM, BMC has been a driving force in the adoption of today’s IT management standard. Last week BMC took the next big step forward in the future of enterprise IT management with the introduction of Dynamic BSM. Dynamic BSM is the next evolution of BMC's management architecture where the goal is to not only address the core requirements of IT management but also support the on-demand provisioning and management of services that leverage new computing platforms, such as virtualization and cloud computing infrastructures.

Consequently, Dynamic BSM leverages the strengths in BMC's BSM platform while enabling customers to deploy and manage a more agile, responsive and efficient IT computing environment. As Forrester research recently noted, BMC has successfully positioned itself as the thought leader in IT management software. It was also stated that our alliances with firms such as Cisco, Dell, and VMWare position BMC as the most valuable player in IT management software.

One of the keys to our ESM strategy and to our success is our continued ability to anticipate changes in the technology landscape and to capitalize on areas of higher growth potential. This includes extending our BSM offerings to virtualization and cloud computing environments.

While customers will aggressively explore these new computing paradigms, it is important to understand that they will retain significant parts of their existing computing environment. As a result, BMC's distinct competitive advantage is to provide customers the ability to seamlessly manage their heterogeneous physical, virtual, and cloud computing environments with one comprehensive management platform.

Large organizations that are considering moving applications and infrastructure to a cloud environment must first implement and address the management challenges of highly virtualized IT infrastructures. In a highly virtualized environment, the management challenge is exacerbated on two fronts -- one, there is a dramatic increase in the rate of change for both applications and the underlying infrastructure, and two, there is far more complexity associated with the configurations of those virtualized infrastructures.

BMC’s BSM platform delivers a proven and service-centric approach to the deployment and ongoing management of virtualization technology. With new capabilities that address virtual life cycle management, essentially the ability to manage the creation, ongoing use, and decommissioning of virtual machines, as well as performance and compliance management of virtual machines, our customers can rapidly take control of their virtual infrastructures.

BMC's BSM for Cloud Computing™ and BSM for Virtualization™ help customers enable cloud computing environments and harness the power of virtualization and at their own pace. With capabilities that address virtual life cycle, performance and compliance management, BMC customers can rapidly take control of their virtualized infrastructures.

The attraction to cloud computing, including both private, hybrid and public cloud environments is powerful, particularly in today’s cost-sensitive, service-oriented IT organization. BMC is already helping enterprise customers and service providers realize this potential.