Perceptive Information Strategies

“Steve Jobs is my best friend,” said Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, early in his Oracle OpenWorld keynote on September 23. “I love him dearly, and he’s someone I watch very closely, watch what he does over at Apple.” While it’s unlikely that we’ll see iPod or iPad-like billboards featuring silhouettes of IT managers rocking out to their Oracle Exadatas, Ellison is unabashed in expressing his desire to emulate what Jobs has done. “We believe that if you engineer the hardware and software pieces to work together, the overall user experience – the product – is better than if you do just part of the solution.”

Exadata and the new Exalogic Elastic Cloud, which Oracle announced at OpenWorld: Do they represent commoditization or innovation? The answer is both. For obvious reasons, vendors tend not to market their ability to provide commodity products. IT buyers are consumers, too, and “commodity” has that word “common” in it – not too inspiring. In the consumer market, however, Apple has been highly effective at turning mass-produced machines into objects that symbolize innovation. While it’s certainly possible to imagine devices engineered to produce sound that is superlative to an iPod, Apple was the first to create the right package at the right time for the broader market.

Perhaps someday, just like an iPod, you’ll be able to buy an Exadata or Exalogic box from a dispensing machine at the airport. Ok, perhaps not. But Oracle seems convinced that mainstream IT buyers are similarly ready for a “commodity” package. They are weary from the pressure of supporting complex and costly existing systems that give them little room for discretionary spending. Configuration and change management are two of the most time-consuming tasks; it has also been difficult for IT developers to adapt software applications to parallel hardware platforms to make it easier to scale up and out. Plus, having boxes hanging off intelligent networks and existing out in the cloud appears to be the approach taken by architects of many newer systems.

Successful but relatively exotic products exist, such as Netezza (just recently acquired by IBM) and Teradata. In fact, the database market is teeming with more exotic products than at any time in the past 20 years or so. But Oracle is betting that the mainstream market will only adopt the advanced and esoteric stuff if it is inside the box. “The car industry delivers complete cars,” Ellison observed in his keynote. “There are a lot of computer systems involved in running a modern car, but it’s all been engineered and tested to work together – whether it’s a Prius or my favorite commuting car, the Bugatti.”

Given the number of software suppliers that Oracle has acquired in recent years, it’s no surprise that Oracle would be obsessed with product consolidation and integration. However, it was interesting to see how this objective is affecting strategies throughout the company. Business intelligence, for example, “should not be separate,” Ellison said. “The core of the system should be intelligence; it should be everywhere.”

This sort of consolidation and integration can be innovative, in that it will propel the majority of IT buyers into feeling that they are enabling innovation in their businesses by buying packaged machines such as Exadata and Exalogic. But time will tell, and competitors will respond. Early adopter sessions at OpenWorld that I attended made migration to Exadata sound straightforward, with considerable benefits accruing from reductions in cost and time-to-deployment compared to traditional systems. It won’t be on the bleeding edge that Oracle’s success will unfold; it will be in the mainstream.

When Graeme McDowell tapped home his putt to seal a championship at the U.S. Open on Sunday (June 20), spectators who packed the stands and stood shoulder-to-shoulder around the green roared their approval. Tiger Woods and Phil Mickelson, the Open’s superstars, were humbled by the Pebble Beach course and its famously changeable weather. The little-known McDowell “survived,” as several commentators put it. But that doesn’t really give him enough credit. He played a smart, safe game that adapted well to course conditions.

(Photo credit: Lance Iversen, The Chronicle)

The same might be said about IBM’s technology operations, which in partnership with the U.S. Golf Association’s Digital Media team stood the test of a massive number of virtual fans visiting online and mobile U.S. Open sites. IBM and the USGA said that over four million visitors came to the U.S. Open’s Web site, about 8 percent more than last year. This was the first big year for the mobile site, which had nearly two million visits. A major attraction was the “Playtracker” application, which enabled users to fly over the course and get visualizations of how the course was playing through heat maps based on scoring feeds. You can imagine the potential for future data-driven visualizations based on historical data about courses, players, pin positions on the greens and much more.

IBM’s technology management of the U.S. Open site offered a case example of how virtualization and workload management are becoming the essential ingredients of scalability, availability and agility, certainly for consumer Web sites like the Open’s. The USGA is no stranger to IBM’s virtualization technology; IBM has a close services partnership with the USGA, which includes running a variety of cloud services for the Association from its data center in North Carolina. When I visited the trailer near the Pebble Beach course where Web site and scoring services technicians were holed up, I couldn’t help but be amazed at the simplicity of the dashboards that offered real-time views of workload performance on a virtual platform of servers located across the country.

As John J. Kent, IBM Program Manager for Worldwide Sponsorship Marketing explained, virtualization is critical to utilization efficiency, enabling IBM to combine several workloads onto a single platform. “Virtualization basically makes the distributed environment into a mainframe, which has had this virtualization capability forever,” he said. Kent heads up IBM’s technology partnerships with other events, including this week’s Wimbledon Championships tennis event. Kent said that tennis is actually the more data-rich game, with fans already interested in analysis of “all the potential data points – such as unforced errors and rally counts – that can help you understand the strength of a player’s performance.”

In distributed environments, scaling up has always meant adding more hardware; with virtualization and cloud computing, organizations can avoid the long “cap x” procurement process and simply request more of what they need, and it can be made available rapidly over the network. What’s key, then, is to understand and monitor their workloads so that they can be optimized as demand rises and falls; then, organizations don’t have to spend on procuring enough servers to match peak workloads – but otherwise let them sit idle.

The other performance throttle IBM needed during the Open was to regulate content flow. Bandwidth is now the chief bottleneck; the explosion of advanced mobile devices in particular has moved users ahead of what networking providers are able to offer. IBM and the USGA’s Digital Media team needed the ability to make dynamic decisions about regulating content flow. “We needed to understand content demand well,” said Kent. “We were able to slow scoring updates, for example, if we were reaching a threshold in demand for content access and live streaming.” Thus, workload intelligence is critical to managing unstructured content as much as it is for data.

The USGA needs to provide a rich virtual experience on mobile devices to capture a younger demographic, which is important not only for the continued success of professional golf but also for attracting advertising on its Web site. However, as fans grow more dependent on the experience delivered by their mobile devices, it will be interesting to see if the USGA responds to pressure to allow those who attend the Open to bring them, which they are currently prohibited from doing. While there are good reasons not to have onsite fans working their mobile devices and interrupting the lovely hush before a player takes a swing, I wonder if the USGA will have to bow to the inevitable. Otherwise, fans might prefer to stay outside, where they can enjoy a rich, virtual experience.

But in any case, from an IT perspective, the key to victory in the U.S. Open and similar high performance events is clear: Know the workload and optimize it through the virtualized infrastructure. The victorious Graeme McDowell set a good example.

I wrote a column, linked here, for Intelligent Enterprise – InformationWeek, reporting on developments at Lawson Software’s CUE-10 in San Antonio, Texas.

It was a very interesting conference, although my movements were limited by the fact that I’d thrown out my back not long before I headed out. I appreciate everyone’s concern and patience at the event regarding my hobbling around rather slowly. I did get to see a bit of the River Walk area of San Antonio, thanks to a nice dinner with Lawson executives and industry analysts, and it looked like the locale for a lot of fun. I wonder how many people fall into the San Antonio River though; I nearly did a couple of times!

As I kick off this blog from my hotel room in Las Vegas, there are few clouds in the sky. The morning sun radiates through the desert dust kicked up by the activities of a million people. The pale yellow sky sits above the tall wings of the casinos and the dark, flat shadows they cast on the shorter buildings below them. Thus, without any physical clouds drifting by to offer themselves as models, I’ll have to use my imagination to think virtually…which, of course, makes perfect sense.

“In the cloud” has become a term of art tossed about perhaps a little too easily by vendors, VC-backed start-ups, IT information strategists and lately journalists in the non-IT, mainstream business media. In a sense, the idea is to connect the unknowing with the all knowing: Users and/or developers can execute whatever they need to do – on mobile, laptop or other devices – while up there on some cloud the necessary computing power, scalable software and expert professionals respond without users or developers having to know how it’s getting done.

The business arrangement may remind the grizzled veterans among us of timesharing, but keep in mind that this is 2009, not 1969. Today, few have even heard of green screens. Users expect rich interfaces and some ability to personalize and customize the services; and to succeed, the computing environment in the cloud can’t waste any of its precious resources. Providers of the cloud computing services will have less and less tolerance for sloppy software that doesn’t use resources efficiently. At the same time, we will surely see a spike in demand for tools that enable real-time performance monitoring, analysis and response to problems inside and outside the clouds.

In other words, most of today’s systems can’t just be put inside a mass of water vapor or frozen crystals (thanks, Wikipedia) and called “cloud computing.” And there’s more to cloud computing that simply “pay as you go” models, aka software as a service (SaaS). For this reason, cloud computing could spur innovation even beyond the important developments centered on virtualization. To satisfy users’ demands, database architectures, for example, may have to make more creative use of memory-based and near-line storage as well as search or other programs that are different from the query style of SQL. As well, organizations will have to devote greater attention to business rules, policies and governance issues related to information sharing, privacy and quality.

Cloud computing is changing the vendor landscape. We now have “coopetition” arrangements between the likes of Amazon and IBM, with the latter recently announcing that DB2 works in the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. IBM’s recent announcements from its Blue Cloud Initiative focused on Tivoli for managing data centers set up as “private” clouds; John Foley of InformationWeek offers a nice analysis here. Other vendors big and small are adjusting their strategies based on how strongly they believe the market will be for cloud computing and where they can take advantage: in other words, the marketing pieces are still in motion at Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, SAP and elsewhere.

Many bloggers have referenced the useful analysis recently published by researchers in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences Department at the University of California, Berkeley. I recommend reading this document, even though it won’t be the final word on this still-developing phenomenon. I will be using my vantage point in this blog to explore and examine where the clouds are going, particularly as they relate to information management, business intelligence, analytics and policy directions for information governance. Yes, even on a cloudless day in Las Vegas.