What Will Cloud Look Like When It Matures?

May 14, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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cloudComputingCloud computing, especially Private PaaS is still maturing and going through its formative years, but it’s not so embryonic that you can’t have a good business conversation about it. You know any business proposition is maturing when you can have a conversation about return on investment, and customers can openly talk about their experience and benefits in the public domain.

Cloud Talk

Cloud computing and Private PaaS come into focus only when you think about what IT always needs: a way to increase capacity or add capabilities on the fly without investing in new infrastructure, training new personnel, or licensing new software. Being able to make changes in the moment and have the agility to adjust to problems as they occur is why there shouldn’t just be conversations around cloud and Private PaaS, but also corporations trying to incorporate it into their business plan.

To give an example of how the private cloud can help improve a business, QUALCOMM recently said that they “Lowered Capital Costs by 50%,” reduced infrastructure requirements by optimizing the use of resources and eliminated the need for redundant systems to support high availability and disaster recovery requirements. Conversations about the cloud are not just for talk because companies can really benefit from what it has to offer. [Read more...]

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Forecast for Business is Cloudy: Whether You’re Ready or Not

April 24, 2013 by Leave a Comment
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Cloud computing is rapidly pushing companies for new models to virtualize physical resources, allow for more efficient use of servers and networks, and provide an ability to scale resources based on demand. Gone are the days of building infrastructure for the moments of highest demand, which then sits unused at off-peak times. We’re moving into the age of elastic computing that can happen on-premise as private cloud, off-premise as public cloud, or as a hybrid cloud mixture of the two.

Once the buzz for the bright, shiny object wears off (as it always does), we’re left with the reality that any new way of managing information technology comes with a different set of challenges we’ve ever faced before. With cloud computing, the challenge is squarely centered around integration.

It has to be faster and better

The world doesn’t stand still, and simply integrating to stay abreast of new deployment models won’t cut the mustard. There needs to be a way of integrating that takes into account increased and more complex connectivity, big data’s volume, velocity and variety, complex event processing, and driving it all, real-time analytics that are business-user friendly. Each of those requirements is a sizable challenge unless companies find cleaner, faster, streamlined, and flexible ways to integrate. [Read more...]

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Stop Using “Cloud” Wrong and Find Out What it Really Means

March 11, 2013 by 6 Comments
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cloud question“The Cloud” sounds like a mysterious and mystical place beyond reach and for that reason, and like so much business jargon, it is an overused term. People throw the term around without actually specifying what they mean. There are actually many types of clouds, in the sky and in computing. For private cloud computing, people need start defining exactly what service they are talking about. Even within the private cloud, there are different categories and Platform as a Service (PaaS) is one such sub-cloud. No longer will anyone look to the sky and see white fluffy cotton floating around.

The PaaS layer of the private cloud provides an agile, self-service, consumption-based resource which allows for sharing on an internal customer data center. This platform provides templates and tools which companies use to automate many processes that are usually done manually. Development and operations (DevOps) and administrators are then able to move quickly and more efficiently with fewer errors in creating custom applications or making changes. As previous methods have only resulted in wasted resources and a lack of centrality, DevOps is in need of a fresh approach. [Read more...]

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Simplifying Operations – The “How” Matters

December 10, 2012 by Leave a Comment
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I just got off with the phone with a customer discussing how TIBCO Silver® Fabric could impact their environment. The discussion started like most, where there was interest in cloud enabling their operations. They stated the reason they were looking at cloud computing was because they are under continued pressures to examine new avenues of simplification and streamlining tasks. They shared some details about the alternatives they are looking at. While I was explaining the TIBCO approach, I discovered a simple truth about vendor solutions. All too often, DNA of the vendor dictates how solutions are designed. At TIBCO, we have many years delivering sophisticated middleware and complex architectures in heterogeneous environments. In other words, TIBCO is highly accustomed to adding value while not being able to control the rest of the ecosystem.

When it comes to delivering value through streamlining operations, the question is: “Whose perspective are you streamlining?” Infrastructure operators? Middleware operators? Developer operators? The TIBCO solution, Silver Fabric, looks at streamlining from the perspective of middleware operations. As a middleware operator, there are a number of things to consider: What is the runtime architecture of the platform I am supporting? How does it scale? How does it restart? How do I deploy application code to the platform? How do I determine if the platform is healthy? The combination of these details creates a number of challenges toward streamlining operations across a heterogeneous middleware environment. This is a key differentiator for Silver Fabric, where we effectively allow operations manage vastly different middleware architectures in a consistent streamlined framework. By doing this, we’ve created the ability for middleware operations to create greater value for the organization such as: delivering a developer self-service portal, create multi-purpose environments and create a foundation to become a Cloud Service Broker.

 

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Example of Events in the Cloud… tibbr

December 9, 2009 by 2 Comments
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A few months ago we speculated that events (and event processing) “in the cloud” would probably appear best suited to some social networking type of application (in addition to the usual Platform-As-A-Service remote “systems center” use case). Lo and behold, TIBCO has introduced a corporate “twitter-type” service called tibbr for distributing messages across an organization, deployed into the cloud, and based on the TIBCO Silver cloud product. Soft of antithesis of MS Sharepoint…

For those wondering on the relevance of tibbr to TIBCO CEP technologies, note that TIBCO Silver exploits TIBCO BusinessEvents CEP technology under the covers. tibbr also exploits  TIBCO ActiveSpaces. As for tibbr potentially being used as an event channel for direct processing of tibbr messages in BusinessEvents – well this should certainly be possible, but finding some good use cases might be a challenge.

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Cloud Governance – a CEP Application?

November 25, 2009 by 2 Comments
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EBizQ had an article on cloud governance that raised the issue of the particular needs for governance in cloud applications: if you are to delegate application operational control to a third party, you sure what to make sure there are appropriate SLAs in place.

The article referenced services firm OpenCrowd‘s Cloud taxonomy – which covers technologies related to TIBCO like DataSynapse, but seemingly missed TIBCO Silver and a few others. TIBCO Silver, of course, exploits TIBCO CEP technology to provide aspects of governance and control of cloud applications.

Of course, “non-cloud” applications require governance too, and the challenge is to find methods that enable governance with minimal runtime or development costs… some TIBCO offerings here are:

With Silver, ActiveMatrix, and ASG exploiting CEP in this area, I think we have a (small but discernible) trend here.

Filed Under: BPM, Cloud, Complex Event Processing (CEP), SOA Tagged With: , ,

BRF09: Stephen Hendrick says State is at the center of future Decision Platforms

November 5, 2009 by 1 Comment
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IDC’s Stephen Hendrick gave the keynote on the 2nd day of BRForum, titled “BRMS at a Crossroads”. The gist of Stephen’s talk was the need for BRMSs to evolve to the next level. Interestingly this seemed to be the first conference mention of “cloud computing” – a welcome respite from the hype about remote deployment platforms – as “cloud” was one of the future trends that businesses needed to exploit, along with open source, visualization platforms, and, naturally, decision management…

Stephen started with an overview (based on IDC research) of the BRMS market: in 2008 this was worth $285M with a “10.5%” annual growth, with the 2 leading BRMS vendors taking 40% of that market. Of the 7 BRMS vendors he mentioned, TIBCO was rated as being joint 2nd due to its “strong legacy in rules and being well positioned to execute”…

He then introduced the “IDC Decision Framework”: measuring the “scope of decision” vs “degree of automation” vs “no of decisions” vs “level of collaboration” for any application area.

Onto the vision of a future Decision Management platform: this  needs better “data preparation” (which maybe means MDM)  and “decision refinement” (covering predictive analytics). But CEP events needed to drive the decisions, whose decisioning context was defined as handled by “state“. All these management constructs obviously mapped to a runtime platform for “active decisioning” / “always on” behavior…

Justifying the CEP connection, Stephen mentioned that in 2008 at least 20% of BRMS/decisioning deals had some kind of “real time” orientation which was expensive to handle in the “passive BRE” environments.

The key concept Stephen described was the move from the “process centric to information centric” approach. Sharp intake of breath from the BPM community present… however Stephen explained that fine-grain rule and event control and parallel processing were key, and useful, features of the CEP world.

Stephen ended with the comment that “cloud computing” will also be event-driven – so decision management platforms that are event-based will makes sense in the cloud deployment world. [And funnily enough, CEP certainly plays a role in TIBCO's Silver cloud offering].

From a TIBCO perspective, clearly the concept of state management and modeling, with event processing, decision management, MDM and analytics are all part of the “best practice” decision platform. Probably the “information centric” world will not replace the “process centric” world any time soon, but for those customers want to take this route, its good to know there are already vendor solutions…

Meanwhile, Sandy’s view of the talk can be found on her blog…

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Community and Cloud Event Processing…

August 30, 2009 by Leave a Comment
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A post on exploiting (in this case for air quality monitoring) the ultimate live sensor grid – the world’s cellphone population – reminded me of some discussions on CEP for social / community uses (as described by Prof Mani Chandy at the recent ISS09) and also some dicussions with TIBCO colleagues on the role of CEP in the cloud (e.g. supporting such large scale sensor nets without particularly low latency needs). The big question with either – who will pay for it – which translates to – who will it make / save money for?

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TIBCO, CEP and DataSynapse

August 24, 2009 by Leave a Comment
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TIBCO has announced its acquisition of DataSynapse – a grid/cloud infrastructure company. Although clearly this acquisition is more pertinent to the TIBCO SOA and Cloud stack (ActiveMatrix and Silver), it nonetheless is yet-another-source-of-events to be monitored by something like TIBCO Service Performance Manager (an operations application built on TIBCO BusinessEvents). There is an increasing market for such IT operational intelligence applications – indeed a quick search found this one plugging Esper into DataSynapse, for example.

No doubt there will be more news on DataSynapse later :)

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Hi Ho Silver, Away!

June 4, 2009 by 1 Comment
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And with that, TIBCO’s newest offering, Silver is off and running. 

Announced yesterday at the NOWonline show, it seems to be getting a good bit of attention in the press, analyst and blogosphere communities.  eBizQ picked up on the announcement and commented on its use of CEP in the automation of cloud-app-balancing. As for me, my head is a bit cloudy at the moment, from all the fuss.

So what is Silver, and what does it have to do with CEP? 

Everything. 

TIBCO Silver is new software infrastructure for “cloud” computing.  A “Silver” lining for the clouds you might say. 

And why is this important for CEP? 

Because it’s an infrastructure product that embeds a CEP engine in order to solve problems related to governance (managed access, security, privacy and adherence to regulations), and scalability (uses SLAs to automatically scale up / or down as needed).  The kicker is that it’s automatic, so both the governance and the scaling is accomplished inherently through embedded monitoring, management and event-decision-action rules rather than manual intervention and programming -which AFAIK, is an achilles heel for current cloud products being introduced. 

This should be an interesting announcement for developers of different types of Business2Consumer or Consumer2Consumer apps that are likely to vary widely in resource requirements. The embedded governance allows for various levels of authorization, authentication and encryption policies to be dynamically configured. This is important because some services should be open to everyone and some services, well, just shouldn’t.

As in most cloud architectures, and not counting those who simply put the cloud moniker in front of their latest software product, there is no software to install or hardware to procure or provision, which reduces the barrier to develop and deploy rapid IT solutions (whether that’s infrastructure, platform or applications)

TIBCO Silver is currently in Beta. It will be interesting to see the deployments when they start rolling out.

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