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Operations Above the Level of a Single Device

Operations Above the Level of a Single Device

Damon Edwards / 

Tim O’Reilly has another excellent post about the concept of “software above the level of a single device”. While most of his post is dedicated to famous consumer-oriented client/services offerings like itunes, if you glance around our industry it’s quickly apparent that the concept of “software above the level of a single device” is the predominant vision amongst leading business strategists and software architects. But once that thinking is translated into actual code, the care and feeding of those innovative services tends to look a like like decades old box-by-box thinking. Lots of hand-editing of configs, lots of manually maintained procedural scripts, lots of jumping from log file to log file looking to divine the root cause of a problem or outage, lots of pain and inefficiency everywhere.

As the elegance and distributed nature of business ideas and their resulting software has improved, the the prevalent thinking about how you support it surprisingly has not. Sure there are projects like ControlTier, SmartFrog, Puppet, CFEngine, etc. that deliver on the promise of a better way, but the collective thinking of the industry has a long ways to go before these kinds of solutions become standard. Maybe we need a catchy tagline to close that gap…. “Operations Above the Level of a Single Device” anyone?

Sun and IBM virtualization announcements are more than just a move on VMware

Sun and IBM virtualization announcements are more than just a move on VMware

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Damon Edwards / 

Both Sun (launched with Oracle’s PR help) and IBM have been making big waves in the virtualization space. On the surface these are clear moves on VMware/EMC, the current collector of the the vast majority of revenue around virtualization. But under the surface there are some other interesting things going.

First, does anyone else agree that this is a way to give the “on-premisis” ecosystem (including hardware sales, services groups, and partners) a way to fight back against the scalability and manageability promises of SaaS alternatives? It’s a safe bet that some form of a “do-it-youself SaaS is good” message will be hoisted upon the industry in the upcoming year.

Second, both initiatives talk a lot about “data center management”, which is generally code for deployment automation and monitoring. I’m glad to see increasing recognition of this problem space. But I am surprised that very little has come down the pipe in terms of new development on true deployment or configuration management tooling. The default answer still seems to be to let Global Services (or one of Sun’s services partners) come in and build a custom solution from a grab bag of tools.

Of course their are open source tools like ControlTier (service provisioning targeted at developers and deployment engineers ) and Puppet (system provisioning targeted at systems administrators), but you hear little from the industry titans about the need for these types of tools. Follow the money for the answer why.

Hey internal IT, you’re a SaaS provider too

Hey internal IT, you’re a SaaS provider too

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Damon Edwards / 

If you don’t provide service to external users are you still a “Software as a Service” (SaaS) provider?

As the term SaaS becomes increasingly popular, I hear this question more and more. Here is my $0.02:

Yes. Saas is about the relationship between the service provider and the service consumer. The physical characteristics of service delivery are almost inconsequential.

In any SaaS relationship there is a service provider and a service consumer. In my opinion, the defining feature of SaaS is that the business contract between the two parties is the sole recourse the service consumer has to manage the service (aside from in-application config options). The service consumer has no hand in running or maintaining the service other than what they request via the contract.

Over the past few years there has been a major push inside enterprises towards being “service-oriented” (and ensuring clear lines of demarcation between business units and IT units). The end goal has always been for business users to be able to establish a business contract on which IT delivers a service. From the both the internal IT and end user point of view, SaaS is just another acronym on this service-oriented path on which they have already been traveling.

So internal IT, congratulations you’re a SaaS provider too. In defining a SaaS world, focus on the relationships… physical characteristics of service delivery and who signs who’s paycheck are just distractions.

Knowing Where You Are Going: Identifying ITSM Requirements and Maturity

Knowing Where You Are Going: Identifying ITSM Requirements and Maturity

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Damon Edwards / 

Charles Betz’s ERP4IT blog has an interesting post on what Betz calls “The Four Pillars of ITSM”. It is an interesting read because not only is he spot on, but his “pillars” also appear to reflect implicit stages of maturity

The “pillars” (see his post for the details):
1. A service-focused view of IT
2. Process orientation
3. Master data management (business and internal IT data)
4. Well-architected internal IT

The maturity levels I see in this would progress something like this:

First you wake up and realize that you operate software as a service. This often results in a bit of an upper management hand-wave, but none the less, it’s a critical step because it means you recognize that you have to change how your organization runs. (Pillar #1)

Then you realize that the service lifecycle actually cuts across many different disciplines and you need coherent processes that span them all. Once you have those processes defined you also need to know how to measure their effectiveness. (Pillar #2 and #3)

Finally you need to bake those processes and methods of measurement into your IT systems (Pillars #3 and #4)

Note: Pillar #3 is the linch pin between #2 and #4.

Hard Reality: SaaS – Efficiency = Failed Business Model

Damon Edwards / 

As consultants we often see situations where software as a service (SaaS) and e-commerce companies’ business model expectations are felled by cold hard technical realities.

The naive business point of view usually goes something like this (with obvious simplification for illustrative purposes): Revenues will rapidly grow at an exponential rate (either through organic growth, traffic acquisition, or adding new business lines) and costs will slowly grow at a steady linear rate. Sounds great, doesn’t it? Despite protests from the technology group that those aren’t sound fundamentals, executives will surprisingly forge ahead with this kind of thinking when drawing up their business plans and forecasts.

But as things unfold they face the reality that costs are growing just as rapidly as revenue and operational complexity is bogging down the business. In some situations the compounding complexity actually gets so bad that they hit an inflection point where costs and complexity can block further growth. In a few situations, such as companies who are lucky enough to have the “oversized” economics of a hit service, this surprising growth in costs can be masked by tremendous profit margins. But for the rest of world, this inability to get (or widen) that separation between those revenue and cost curves ends up taking much of the sheen off of the SaaS and e-commerce business models.

The knee jerk reaction is the obvious one, tell the technology group to cut its costs! If they haven’t already done so, the first move tends to involve strategies like migrating to open source software on commodity hardware or moving their expensive “resources” (i.e. their people) off-shore. These moves often provide the big slashing cuts that give a CFO instant gratification. However, their weakness lies in the fact that they are essentially a one shot weapon. It doesn’t fix the fundamental problem. Costs are still on the wrong trajectory.

To get to the heart of the problem the focus needs to be placed on making efficiency of operations a core competency. Without these efforts, including the extensive implementation of formalized automation, the long-term success of most SaaS and e-commerce business models will fall into question. And this effort, which doesn’t come without expense, needs to be applied upfront. We see too many cases where automation and efficiency are mere afterthoughts to development and marketing…. until its too late and the business is already under dangerous strain.

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