The pragmatic view of the Cloud for large enterprises is far from straight forward. In practice these businesses will need to manage a wide range of different supply models so that they can co-exist with each other. There will, for example, still be dedicated on-premise resources, there may be some outsourcing, some shared services, and some services from the Cloud that probably contribute to a mixed internal/external private Cloud. In this model, the role of IT management is to be the broker of efficient IT services needed to meet business requirements.
To help this process, HP has introduced the final component of a three-part model aimed at helping enterprises identify the components of such a mix, why they are needed, and how they fit together. The company is targeting three primary areas – telecoms and services providers that want to set themselves up as public clouds, enterprise organisations that want to consume cloud services, and thirdly companies that want to set up internal or private Cloud services.
That third component is a Design Service. The other two introduced during last year, are a Discovery Workshop and Roadmap Service. According to Chris Coggrave, who heads up HP’s Datacentre infrastructure practice in EMEA, “The Cloud is not a revolution of the `what’ but an evolution of the `how’. There are a number of things that have come together to create a style of computing but it’s not the be all and end all – it is a new option in a range of options available to users.”
Together, the package builds a three-stage process that Coggrave sees as helping enterprises overcome most of the Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, about the cloud with many of them feel.
A day of discovery
The one-day Discovery Workshop is aimed at enterprise C-level executives and senior IT managements and addresses the question of whether they need to do something about the cloud. The objective is to create a shared understanding of the issues of both the business case and the technical, managerial and financial implications. It also addresses the hype surrounding the Cloud, covering the concepts, the business models and the journey the business sees itself taking. It also looks at current IT facilities and management structures.
“It’s not a solution to world hunger,” Coggrave observed, “but they come out feeling they have got to an answer of why they should be doing something.”
The Roadmap Service is basically a consulting process HP has built a capability model that can position businesses across a range from dedicated infrastructure through to where IT has moved from being just a cost centre to being a broker of services. The capabilities of the business are then mapped against domains such as people, process, architecture and technology. It addresses the issues of where business are now and where they want to get to, and uses an open-access tool to answer questions about what then needs to be done, what steps need to be taken, and what is the real business case.
It then helps define some bite-sized projects that can be undertaken to help businesses move from A to B. “By feeding various parameters in, it will drive an overall business case down to the level of the number of people needed in a particular project,” Coggrave said.
The new Design Service addresses the question of how users go about it. Coggrave is very clear on the point that this is not intended as a selling tool for HP products. “Each customer is different, so we have developed a Functional Reference Architecture, which maps the characteristics of business functions against the legacy systems they already have and can’t pull out,” He said . “They need to position those systems on the functional architecture so that gaps can be identified. It is an aid for moving from the current state to the planned new state. This gives a flexible approach.”
Such a process is seen as necessary for large enterprises because of the complexity of the business processes that go to make them up. “I use an analogy of Formula 1 racing,” Coograve said. “You may have the best technology and the best car, but if you haven’t got the right driver and the right team around him in terms Governance, infrastructure and processes, he’s not going to win the race.”
Coggrave does believe that companies are starting to make the necessary steps needed to move from a dedicated infrastructure to service-based environment, particularly in terms of the organisational and governance mind-set that is needed, but is a little concerned at some of the reasons driving current moves towards the cloud. “The hype about the Cloud has helped accelerate this change but it has added a degree of urgency, and it is adding fear. There is now a lot of pressure on businesses to answer the question `what are we doing?’. They are having to accelerate their journey.”
He also agrees that economic pressures are now one of the big levers. “A big question from businesses for the last couple of years is how they reduce costs. As you go into a recession the pressure is all about reducing costs and mitigating risk, with growth a poor third. As we come out of the recession the balance between cost, risk and growth starts to change, and growth comes back into the equation.”
Most businesses still spend around 70% of their IT budgets on keeping the systems going, and the spend on innovation is much less, about 10-15%. So he feels there is still a lot of scope to take cost out of the process and put the resources into the innovation side.
When it comes to deciding which tasks and processes should be run in what environment Coggrave suggests the key is to look at what is core and what is context. What are the core processes that make an enterprise what it is and are its key differentiators? These are the ones that the business should seriously consider continuing to run on on-premise systems. Beyond these are the contextual processes and application that help the business generally but can achieve the same result whether run on-premise or out in the cloud as a service.
New business
The Cloud is also an excellent environment in which to develop new lines of business and the processes associated with them, as they can be kept isolated from the current core processes and are not restrained by them in the way they are developed.
In practice, Coggrave sees the end result being that most enterprises will run a portfolio of services. Some – both services and well-established applications - will be run on-premise, some will run on an internal shared model, some will be outsourced, and some will be out in the cloud. “So the question is where is the most effective place to run any particular service,” he observed.
Some customers may not need to go through the workshop process, though HP would probably want to validate in some way that the business managers understand what they want to achieve and why. So as the Discovery Workshop is only a day in duration this will usually be the best option anyway. It is seen as minimum risk for a company.
“One of the warning signs we look for is where a company has a high level of technology expertise but is very low down in the governance and organisation areas. You need all three areas operating at similar levels. Without that any move to work with cloud architectures is likely to fail.
“A lot of companies have reasonable technology skills but there governance and organisational skills are still quite low. If you ask companies if they have implemented ITIL three-quarters of them will say yes. When you ask them what they have implemented, usually less than 10% can say they have done a full implementation. The focus now has to be on how to use and deploy the technology to deliver the organisation and processes that then deliver the services the business needs. It is this that companies have to get right.”
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