First of all, I'm not necessarily advocating that you look to a single vendor to help you make the move to cloud (public/ private/ hybrid, etc.), although there are a lot of vendors whose marketing would invite you to trust them to do just that. And I’m not just talking about the larger platform vendors, but many vendors of various sizes who claim to have mastered the “journey to the cloud” – a rather horrid phrase if you ask me because it implies that cloud is an endgame rather than a mosaic of resources.
Nevertheless, some new offerings are emerging that may suggest value in leaning on a single vendor — assuming your investments, expertise and comfort levels are all a fit. The advantages here are primarily in overarching management and services capabilities, along with what I might call “public cloud resource awareness.”
This still won’t mean that you do everything cloud related with a single vendor. That's sort of an uncloudy thing to do, given that cloud is all about choice, flexibility and an increasingly fluid set of options for creating, provisioning and delivering IT services.
But a strong core alignment with the right vendor can potentially help to prepare you for both the cultural and the technical challenges inherent in cloud with some level of cohesiveness. This can be of especial value in an environment where the glimmer and glitter of new technology and service options can sometimes create train wrecks as IT organizations are pulled apart into fragmented sets of experiments that never come together in the end.
So here are a few things — in a master check list – if you are seeking a Virgil to lead you through Dante’s Cloudy Inferno.
Software and Services
The value of strong service management software offerings in assimilating cloud is not only a logical statement, current EMA research Optimizing Cloud for Service Delivery showed that those IT organizations who felt they were "very successful" in assimilating the benefits of cloud valued virtually all service management capabilities at least twice as much as the general population. And in a number of cases the valuation was three to four times as much!
Rather than offering a paradise free from management concerns, even public cloud offerings demand uniquely astute forms of governance if they are to be evaluated, selected, delivered and optimized effectively. Cloud may change the nature of the management gravitational field, but it doesn't do anything to change the fact that service management issues allowed to drop through neglect will fall to earth with a dizzying thud.
Services can also be especially valuable for cloud as best practices in achieving cross-domain efficiencies are slowly beginning to emerge. This being a topic in itself worthy of a blog or column, all I'll say here is I am beginning to see the glimmers of meaningful intelligence applied to process and organizational issues when it comes to taking on cloud from a small but growing number of vendors.
Managed Services
If cloud is a shopping mall of options, what better then to have a vendor with some managed services capabilities that, of course, may reside in the cloud themselves? Ideally these "partnerships" should be broad enough and open enough in options to allow you to navigate across "comfort" and "discomfort" zones within your own IT organizations so that you're not locked in as you mature towards more cloud-readiness internally.
But this shouldn't be a dogmatic statement about cloud uber alles - good, old-fashioned on-premise support should ideally be on the menu of options as well.
A Public Cloud Offering?
Some platform vendors, most notably HP and IBM, have or are introducing public cloud offerings in addition to their management and services capabilities. This might seem like a nice-to-have at best, and in general it is, as most public cloud selections will be targeted SaaS, Storage-as-a-Service and other offerings. However, a strong plus can occur when the public cloud offering works as an extension of the vendor's overall service management umbrella - in other words, a public cloud offering with a ready-made fully integrated set of insights about the performance and dependencies of your public cloud investment as well.
User Experience Management (UEM) and SLM
My last two blogs have been about User Experience Management - The Many Dimensions of UEM and Insight from the User Experience Management Panel - so I won’t spend much time on it here, except to repeat that no matter what your implementation of cloud (public/private, SaaS, IaaS, PaaS), if it fails with your service consumers it fails categorically. UEM is effectively redefining SLM as the ultimate point of governance for service management — a transition that's been in process for nearly ten years, back when UEM was called “QoE”.
Cross-Domain Application Management Capabilities
Both for internal cloud and for balanced capabilities in monitoring across private and public investments, dynamic, relevant cross-domain insights into application performance and its infrastructure interdependencies in a world of Vmotion and pre-packaged, blueprinted applications – is a must have for any mid-tier or enterprise IT shop.
Advanced Application Dependency, Configuration Management Systems and Service Modeling
Speaking of application-to-infrastructure-to-application-ecosystem-to-owner-to-customer-to-service-provider interdependencies ... service modeling is the ONLY way out of this mess. Modeling that can be dynamically relevant to physical and logical interdependencies is on the rise, happily, though still slogging through a transition between science project and true, real-world-ready functionality in most cases. This is one of the reasons why even classic CMDB deployments show striking advantages in assimilating the benefits of cloud across private, but also across a private/public cloud mosaic.
Service Desk and Service Catalog
The role of the service desk is becoming redefined in part as IT becomes more a broker of services. Its centrality as a point of process control and governance is in many respects increasingly important. And Service Catalogs, often associated with service desks – are both critical extensions of this in terms of publishing services outwards to consumers, as well as being critical extensions of the investments in service modeling reflected in the paragraph above.
Conclusion
OK, I didn’t mention support for virtualized infrastructure and security. Not because these don't apply, they most certainly do, but because, to be honest, I took them for granted. Both probably deserve more space than I can give them here in any case.
So, if you’re looking for a single vendor to help lead you into the cloud so that you can harvest its benefits, rather than suffer the tortures of the damned – this is a short check list. Or conversely, if you're seeking to piece together your own cloud management strategy across a balanced mix of different vendors – this can serve as an initial checklist for that, as well.
The good news is that, at least to some degree, all of these things are available today. And in fact I will predict that within five years, some of these areas will supersede cloud as "buzz" and industry attention getters — once the monolithic glitter of cloud fades for a more mature deconstruction of its virtues and options.
Related Links:
Dennis Drogseth's Blog: The Many Dimensions of User Experience Management (UEM)
Dennis Drogseth's Blog: Insight from the User Experience Management Panel
