The analysts paired up today:
Antonio Piraino (Tier1 Research)
William Fellows (The 451 Group)

My usual disclaimers on live-blogging: doesn’t include everything covered (just what was most interesting to me) and had to paraphrase some answers because I simply cannot type that fast.

Quick definition of Cloud Computing
WF: The cloud is a continuum of grid, virtualization and utility done right. It is about provisioning services instead of servers; flexible computing instead of fixed assets. Done right, the cloud abstracts users from the complexity of grid. Cloud computing is IT as a service. Cloud computing is the Third Way – not entirely in-house or outsourced, but an optimized hybridized version of both. In light of the Goldman Sachs report out resetting IT spending forecast from up 6% to down 1%, don’t underestimate the ability for enterprises to move from capex to opex by buying cloud computing instead of building it themselves.

The 451 Group conducted a survey on cloud computing in March, and then revisited it a month ago. Some interesting results:

• 84% have no plans to develop an internal cloud. 5% had no answer to this question. And for the 10% who did answer – the uses for a private/internal cloud were the same as those for a public cloud.
• Top 6 vendors they look to help them develop an internal cloud: Microsoft, IBM, Cisco, HP, Oracle, VMware

Is it all “upside” when it comes to cloud computing?

WF: Watch out for the Trojan horse, the red flag. What about the software needed to manage all this stuff? Any management software needs to take a holistic approach to solve the problem.

AP: Increased management requirements and capability – this is actually a great story for managed hosters who can hold your hand while getting you up into the cloud. Hosters alleviate the pain points, and this is why we’re going to see continued growth and focus in the managed hosting sector.

WF: I would argue that they’re too expensive. Look at Amazon – 10 cents a hit adds up.

AP: It’s almost impossible to do an apples-to-apples comparison between cloud providers. One reason is that they charge differently. I’d say that when you’re talking about the big cloud providers, you are right – that they are expensive over the long-term, but for use in the short-term, they can be optimal.

WF: The cloud is setting big expectations. Can IT deliver? It’s nice to talk about “shared resources for the greater good” but in any organization, you will still run into issues of power and control! Plus it’s still early days for resolution of regulatory issues and compliance around the cloud.

Final Thoughts

AP: Think of the opportunities of using cloud computing resources in the areas of testing and pre-production – short-term use/environment (quick up/quick down), inexpensive, opex not capex. We’re already seeing the cloud fostering much innovation.

WF: “It’s okay to fall in love with the term.” It is real but keep the expectations lower and realistic.

AP: I agree with you. The reality is that the cloud is driving a very fundamental underlying platform change. This is not just a term or something that will fall out of fashion. There’s a real need to build trust in the cloud and leveraging shared resources in this way – so use the cloud computing term cautiously; don’t abuse it and make the cloud seem like IT’s new toy.

We have been conducting polls of our customers and of IT professionals at technology trade shows for the past two years and the results are in: Pulling together all of the management pieces and processes is even more crucial in a virtualized environment.

So what does this mean for you? You will need to refine your incident and problem management processes with new technologies in order to reduce downtime and maintain end user performance. But of course even the most basic technologies are not well integrated even in today’s world.

I recently participated in a Gartner Conference and watched to my amazement a real-time electronic survey of the audience. To my disbelief, the audience, filled with 300+ people from Fortune 2000 companies provided real-time responses to the question:

What level of integration does your IT org have between event management and service desk applications?

• None: 10%
• Manual Phone call from IT ops to IT service desk staff member: 46%
• Manual click button on event manager to open trouble ticket: 20%
• Automated event management system automatically opens trouble ticket without requiring human oversight or approval: 24%

Unbelievable… still very few of the survey respondents have yet to formalize problem management systems with event management systems. For 56% of the audience the process is still manual!

Another interesting real-time survey question at the Gartner Conference was:

Who in your organization is responsible for critical problem processes and resolution?

• IT Service Desk 13%
• IT Operations 49%
• Process Team 12%
• Other 9%
• Responsibility not formalized 17%

Virtualization adoption and the speed with which things change in a virtualized environment require automation and will transform Incident and Problem Management. Clearly with this new technology we are required to re-think Organizational, Behavioral and Cultural Challenges required to take advantage of the opportunities that virtualization provides.

Incident and problem management processes and metrics must bridge organizational silos that have been the norm within IT. With virtualization, people have to work more closely together in the different silos than ever before. IT leaders need to break down the walls between the technology-centric silo mentalities.

Business Imperative Action Plan:

1. What can you do today? –Understand the impact of virtualization on incident and problem mgt. workload, provide technology training for helpdesk/service desk staff.
2. What can you do in the next 12 months?

Formalize problem management processes, metrics and personnel.
Invest in tools and processes for systems on virtualized servers.
Long term: On the Radar Screen!
Instill teamwork into all groups responsible for the virtualized environment service and support. Map components and configuration items directly to end user services.

Final Thoughts: Know the management pieces and ensure that they fit together. It’s great to buy new technology, but be demanding to ensure that your vendors show you have they will help to link all these pieces together - Change, Inventory, Incident, Problem, Server, Capacity, Performance, Configuration, Event, and Integrated Workflow.

Finding Zune-Fi: Ina Fried of News.com wanders the polite streets of San Francisco in search of Zune connections over Wi-Fi. She finds a few, and has a good experience. One cafe owner sees the ease with which she can stream music and calls it cool. She can't connect at the long-running Google-sponsored free Wi-Fi at Union Square, however, which means the Wi-Fi likely has an accept button that must be pressed. Surely Microsoft could insert a little technology that would allow a browser-free acceptance of terms? Probably involves Yet Another Protocol: the Wi-Fi Terms Browser-Free Presentation Protocol (WTBFPP).

Kodak adds interesting Wi-Fi enabled all-in-one: The new Kodak ESP 9 is a multi-function printer (fax, scan, print, copy) that connects to a network via Wi-Fi or Ethernet. The $300 device spits out 30 pages per minutes in color, 32 ppm in black only. Kodak claims that the model line to which the ESP belongs uses ink in a vastly more efficient manner than the "average of comparable consumer inkjet printers."

1-meter simulated resolution from aerial imagery of Colorado Capitol and Downtown Denver

.5-meter simulated resolution from GeoEye

PaperBack is a free application that allows you to back up your precious files on the ordinary paper in the form of the oversized bitmaps. If you have a good laser printer with the 600 dpi resolution, you can save up to 500,000 bytes of uncompressed data on the single A4/Letter sheet. Integrated packer allows for much better data density - up to 3,000,000+ (three megabytes) of C code per page.

You may ask - why? Why, for heaven’s sake, do I need to make paper backups, if there are so many alternative possibilities like CD-R’s, DVD±R’s, memory sticks, flash cards, hard disks, streamer tapes, ZIP drives, network storages, magnetooptical cartridges, and even 8-inch double-sided floppy disks formatted for DEC PDP-11? (I still have some). The answer is simple: you don’t. However, by looking on CD or magnetic tape, you are not able to tell whether your data is readable or not. You must insert your medium into the drive (if you have one!) and try to read it.

Paper is different. Do you remember the punched cards? EBCDIC and all this stuff. For years, cards were the main storage medium for the source code. I agree that 100K+ programs were… unhandly, but hey, only real programmers dared to write applications of this size. And used cards were good as notepads, too. Punched tapes were also common. And even the most weird codings, like CDC or EBCDIC, were readable by humans (I mean, by real programmers).

Read the whole thing here.