It looks like the financial crisis will help to clean not only financial markets, but also puts some pressure on top 2009 IT issues.

After breaking news in 2008 that Novell is extending their stand in IT Service Managment and Data center automation with acquiring Platespin and Managed Objects <HERE>,  these days SUN is shifting gears by buying QLayer <READ_HERE>. Sure, they lost ground in recent months and they had to move. Let’s wait and see how other big competitors like Cisco respond. Not to ask what Big Four will pull out of their hats. And there are other minor albeit open conquerors which are quite successful.

To me clouds in all their facets and IT Automation (in different disguise – <READ_HERE>) are tight close together, because they scale IT Operations to dimensions far from beeing able to be handled manually. Maybe it’s a good time for digging out old (and new) autonomic computing concepts and to put flesh on the bones.

2009 will be an interesting year, possibly bringing some groundbreaking advances to IT and business.

So let’s tell everyone to stop whining about recession but rather to look forward.

Roland

In the keynote at the Gartner Data Center Conference in Las Vegas, Gartner VP Thomas Bittman predicted that ‘cloud computing will eventually support thousands of specialized providers, with services being put together like Lego blocks’ <READHERE>. My guess is that Mr. Bittman tried to say, that cloud computing will intrinsically tied to Saas. But is that true? Let’s first discuss what the point with cloud computing is. Is it just a new buzzword for modern service providers with very flexible provisioning features and/or highly distributed high capacity datacenters? Or is it a new computing paradigm, enabling users to write applications capable dealing with thousand times higher computing capacity, like Google asks students promoting their cloudy mindset <HERE>. So whats the point?

The close relationship between Clouds and SOA is common sense (see interview with IBM Autonomics director <HERE>). That may be the reason, why all big IT vendors like IBM, HP, Microsoft, Novell and thelike  have broadened their portfolios in the past few years and will be able to not only offer platforms for building service enabled applications, but are also providing/buying technology for automating data center management and provisioning.

So managing clouds is the new Infrastructure paradigm (vs. on-premise or ’serverhugging’), while SOA might be the new application development paradigm (vs. ERP dinosaurs)? If it was that simple, then we probably will have thousands of providers, providing 2nd Tier service offerings and several large scale 1st Tier infrastructure providers offering cheap and enormous computing power.

Even if I haven’t looked into topics like security or IAM, the paradigm shift may be a long way, thinking of todays heterogenous computing landscape. Key to success might be the possibility to be able to provision, manage and support large scale (utility) systems. For that reasons I’m really glad to work in the interesting area of ITSM, BSM and Automation <RELATED_READING>, which definitly will be the key to the future.

Ever thought about the relationship of Software-as-a-Service and Cloud computing? Some say, cloud computing is a evolution of SaaS, which from my perspective is not true. As far as my research goes, both developments aim at the same goal – to make computing services available on-demand:

• No need for hardware and software on premise
• Reduced efforts for administration and governance
• No idle hardware consuming electricity

While Software-as-a-Service

covers the application part, cloud computing is more about the hardware topics covering cpu, storage and network. I see both as the two extremes with several other buzzy things in between like Platform-as-a-Service

, Mash-Ups and Next-Generation-Hosting. The baseline seems to be quite clear and the multitude of offerings is immense. So no one needs to question Gartner top ten predictions for IT organization <LINK> earlier this year. One question from my side is: Isn’t this a little bit too conservative? Is this only true for IT-organizations? Doesn’t other industries have margin pressure as well?

Especially predictions No 4

By 2012, at least one-third of business application software spending will be as service subscription instead of as product license.[...]

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and No 5

By 2011, early technology adopters will forgo capital expenditures and instead purchase 40 per cent of their IT infrastructure as a service.[...]

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are really compelling – just image the market size we are talking about….

Just to give you some brainfood: Salesforce meets GoogleApps

Roland