Cloud Computing is Maturing

With the dog days of summer 2011 upon us and the US debt ceiling negotiations in Washington DC seeming to be going nowhere, it is refreshing to be able to report that cloud computing is having a really great 2011 so far:

- The big IT providers are making progress building up their Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) offerings.

- Our favorite players such as Apple and Microsoft are beginning to make their moves with offerings such as iCloud and Azure.

- The whole concept of multi-tenancy and virtualization is beginning to become part of the mainstream discussion (i.e. 18 months ago only us techies even knew what those terms meant).

- Although there were some security bumps early this year with Amazon and Sony, the market seems to be getting comfortable with the notion of a public cloud.

- The Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) providers are beginning to close some big deals and therefore the previously radical idea of running a global 2000 enterprise in the cloud is no longer a “wild” idea.

- Global 2000 CFOs are ecstatic with the new economic realities of  cloud computing.

- Global 2000 CEOs are beginning to understand the strategic business benefits of cloud computing.

- The idea of Information Governance and eDiscovery in the cloud is beginning to take shape as some of the big IT providers are realizing that these components need to be a standard part of any IaaS/PaaS offering.

- Consolidation is enabling the market to begin to cull itself down to a more manageable number of players with the financial legs to provide the stability that the market is demanding.

So, the cloud computing market is maturing pretty much on schedule.  As such, the next five (5) years should be very exciting.  And,  as is the case with any new markets, there will be some big bumps along the way and maybe even some really unexpected turns.  However, under any circumstances, it will be fun to be able participate and watch.

In a blog posting by James Staten on the Forrester website on July 12, 2011 titled, “The Cloud Computing Market Grows Up”, Mr. Staten does an excellent  job listing the industry highlights and indicating that cloud computing is indeed growing up very nicely.

The full text of Mr. Staten’s Blog Posting is as follows:

Mark this date. While it isn't an anniversary of anything significant in the past, it is a day where our beloved cloud computing market showed significant signs of maturing. Major announcements by VMware, Citrix, and Microsoft all signaled significant progress in making cloud platforms (infrastructure-as-a-service [IaaS] and platform-as-a-service [PaaS]) more enterprise ready and consumable by I&O professionals.

* VMware updates its cloud stack. The server virtualization leader announced version 5 of its venerable hypervisor and version 1.5 of vCloud Director, its IaaS platform atop vSphere. Key enhancements to vCloud include more hardening of its security and resource allocation policy capabilities that address secure multitenancy concerns and elimination of the "noisy neighbor" problem, respectively. It also doubled the total capacity of VMs service providers can put in a single cloud to 20,000. VMware also resurrected a key feature from its now defunct Lab Manager — linked clones. This key capability for driving operational efficiency lets you deploy new VMs from the image library and the system will maintain the relationship between the golden image and the deployed VM. This does two things; it minimizes the storage footprint of the VM, much as similar technology does in virtual desktops, and second it uses the link to ensure clones maintain the patch level and integrity of the golden master. This alone is reason enough to consider vCloud Director.

To help both virtualization and cloud environments, VMware also made a significant change to its licensing model, moving away from CPU core entitlements (VMware will still count processor sockets, though) to pooled vRAM entitlements. This change ties licensing more to the use of the product and encourages greater VM consolidation as it counts VMs by size, rather than per physical server. This incents packing lots of VMs on a single system and even lets you share vRAM entitlements across physical systems to accommodate more seamless growth of your environment and management of the pool, a key operational change called out in our Virtualization Maturity Model. Basically, now you can entitle your virtual environment in total, based on its capacity, and fill it up as much as you want. This is much more consistent with their service provider pricing model; and if your goal is to build a private cloud, isn't that the point?

All in all, this shows that VMware gets it and is taking an active role in helping educate its customers that virtualization and cloud operations are two different things and making these distinctions clear is critical to their and your success. Well done, VMware.

* Citrix's acquisition of its OpenStack doppelganger, Cloud.com comes just months after Citrix announced its intention to commercialize an OpenStack solution for enterprises and service providers. Now they can stop that work. Cloud.com has successfully penetrated the service provider market with its OpenStack-based solution and racked up some solid wins in the enterprise to boot. This buy accelerates Citrix' IaaS efforts and gives solid financial backing to CloudStack. Sadly, though, it also reduces the number of commercial distributions of OpenStack by one.

Enterprise I&O pros should note that CloudStack is hypervisor agnostic, so this isn't a Xen-only play. And the synergies between CloudStack and the rest of its application and desktop virtualization portfolio aren't lost on the company or its service provider partners and prospects. Look to see more combined solutions that help you vend apps and desktops from a cloud in the future.

* Microsoft, here at its Worldwide Partner Conference in Los Angeles, stepped up its cloud game as well by showing the beta of System Center 2012, which adds a self-service portal for using Hyper-V as a private cloud platform and better orchestration for workload deployment. It also demonstrated new public cloud services from Boeing and General Mills plus a commissioned report by Forrester attesting to the differentiated economics of cloud platforms, something I talk about with CIOs in a report published this past spring.

For ISVs, Microsoft also announced commercial opportunities on Windows Azure for its massive software partner ecosystem. The Azure Marketplace can now vend commercial applications, meaning that any software application built for Windows (using the VMrole) or through Visual Studio (using the worker role) theoretically can be offered through Windows Azure as well.

Together, these announcements are strong milestones to the continuing progress and solid traction cloud platforms are having with the market. While the private cloud market is still very, very young, moves like these put it on more solid footing and should lead to expanded options for I&O professionals.

Labels: CEO, CFO, Cloud Computing, Compliance, eDiscovery, ESI, Forrester, Fujitsu, IBM, Information Governance

posted by Charles Skamser @ 3:50 PM 0 Comments

Bringing eDiscovery In-house: What Corporate Counsel Wants Versus What They Need

2011 will be the year that a significant percentage of eDiscovery technology and services moves “in-house”.  Historically, Corporate Counsel collaborated with outside counsel, litigation service providers, computer forensic companies and litigation technology consulting organizations to have this work completed.  I would suspect that the reasoning or justification behind this outsourcing mentality was a byproduct of the days when litigation required thousands and thousands of boxes of documents to be scanned, digitized and reviewed  using one of the document review technologies.  And, this had always been done by third parties.  This outsourcing partnership was part of the cultural fabric of “how things are done”  and therefore most corporate legal staff didn’t and probably still don’t believe that it is something that should be or needs to be changed.  After all, if its not broke…  However, many casual observers think that it is broke and therefore does need to change.  But, does that mean if you are an attorney / litigator that you need to do all of this eDiscovery technical stuff yourself?

Practicing Law not Technology Aside from the practice of medicine, practicing the art of law has risen to the very top of the intellectual food chain.  However, having many friends that fit neatly into both categories, I have always found my doctor friends to be much more technically savvy and “up-to-date” on available technology than my lawyer friends (please note that I have identified gross exceptions on both sides of the isle).  It may be that the technology demands of practicing medicine have advanced much more quickly than those of the legal profession.  Or, it may be that the healthcare industry has already gone through the technology paradigm shift.

At any rate, and for the most part, this whole new world of eDiscovery, computer forensics, semantic search, automated coding and identifying  Electronically Stored Information (ESI) / potential evidence on Facebook and Twitter has come as a huge cultural shock to most within the legal profession.  After all, this is not something that was taught or required in law school and it not something that the previous generations of lawyers had to know much about.  Well, things have changed!  And so, I get back to my original questions and that it is,  “what eDiscovery stuff does Corporate Counsel want brought in house versus what they need to have brought in-house?”

Cost In the perfect Corporate Counsel world and in an effect to maintain status quo and not tip the proverbial apple cart, I would guess that most Corporate Counsel would just as soon leave things the way that they are and pick up the phone and call outside counsel, their service providers, and their litigation consulting partners to deal with all of this eDiscovery when the need arises.  However, I would further guess that over the past 24 months that corporate counsel has been under intense budgetary scrutiny from the Chief Financial Officer (CFO), the Chief Executive Officer (CEO) and maybe even the Board of Directors (BOD) to slash the cost of eDiscovery.  And, unfortunately, upon further review, most Corporate Counsel have found that “outsourcing” eDiscovery work is needlessly expensive and outsourcing it through your outside counsel is outrageously expensive. With markup minimums of 100%, it doesn’t take a financial wizard to figure out that doing it yourself in-house is going to be much less expensive.  At least from a direct cost standpoint.  So, even though Corporate Counsel may not want to bring eDiscovery in-house, if they want to stem the cost, they really need to.

Technology So, given the fact the Corporate Counsel has to bring eDiscovery in-house to reduce the cost, that doesn’t mean that they even know where to begin from a technology standpoint.  It’s probably one of those classic situations that they “don’t even know what they don’t know.”  However, not to fear because within that very same corporation is another C level executive with the title Chief Information Officer (CIO) and I would bet that there is very little about eDiscovery technology that the CIO and his/her Information Technology (IT) group won’t understand.  In fact, they (the CIO and IT) already have control over most of the Electronically Stored Information (ESI) that the Corporate Counsel may need to meet the demands of litigation.  And, I would also suspect that they (the CIO and IT) have not been particularly pleased over the  past few years as teams of outsiders, under the general order of Corporate Counsel, have descended upon their  “turf” extracting, harvesting and just generally being a nuisance.  Further to this, I would also suspect that they (the CIO and IT) believe that if just given the chance and the budget, that they could do a much better job fulfilling eDiscovery requirements at a significantly reduced cost.  However, that may mean that the Corporate Counsel and the CIO may actually have to talk to each other  and figure out how to cooperate and collaborate.

Cooperation and Collaboration Historically, no one in the legal department really wanted to venture down to the IT department and make an effort to figure out exactly what they did.  Likewise, the last thing that anyone in the IT department wanted was to get a call from the legal department about anything.  I contend that in the spirit of what is best for the corporation and the stockholders that this historically dysfunctional behavior needs to change.   Corporations need to form new multi-stakeholder tasks forces and create new liaison positions to develop and formalize new lines of communication between the legal departments and the IT departments.  It may not be what Corporate Counsel wants to do but it is definitely what they need to do.

I will admit that I have been overly aggressive with my sweeping generalities about the state of the entire industry.  There are in fact numerous case studies of successful cooperation and collaboration of the legal and IT departments in the Global 2000.

I just think that we need to see more of it.  And, despite what some may want, its what the the industry needs to reach the next level of success.

Labels: Best Practices, CFO, CIO, Cooperation, Corporate Counsel, eDiscovery, eDiscovery Costs, Outside Counsel

posted by Charles Skamser @ 3:01 PM 1 Comments