Mike Walker's Blog

Open Group Conference Presentation–Why EA’s Must Drive Cloud Strategy and Planning

First and foremost, a big thank you to the attendees of my session.  We filled the room! All the interaction and questions were top notch. I really enjoyed presenting to all of you.

 

In my session,  Why EA's Must Drive Cloud Strategy and Planning I drove the core message around why the EA should lead Cloud Strategy efforts but then quickly diving into how EA’s can drive this. I use a real world example and show a framework and method I created to provide a repeatable and predictable set of outcomes.

For those that would like to view my presentation you can find it below:

Why EA's must drive cloud strategy

View more presentations from Mike Walker.

 

I will continue to provide more detail in future posts.

 

 

Technorati Tags: Cloud,Enterprise Architecture,Open Group Conference,Open Group,TOGAF

Come see me present Why EA’s Must Drive Cloud Strategy and Planning at the Open Group Conference

For those that are attending the Open Group conference in San Francisco here in the next few weeks from now I wanted to let you know that I will be presenting. My presentation is within the Cloud Strategy and SOA Governance track entitled “Why EA’s Must Drive Cloud Strategy and Planning” .

If this is a topic of interest to you or your organization, please stop by. It would  be great to see you there and answer any questions you may have.

Additionally, if you are at the conference or in the San Francisco area and would like to get together please let me know.

 

More

• My Session and Others: http://www3.opengroup.org/events/timetable/628
• Conference Home Page: http://www3.opengroup.org/sanfrancisco2012 

 

Technorati Tags: Cloud,Strategy,Enterprise Architecture,EA,TOGAF,Open Group Conference,Open Group

Enterprise Social Player Emerge with Differentiators

A colleague from my former days with the Microsoft Architecture Strategy Team, Simon Guest,  just joined a company called Neudesic. I just read an interesting article on his blog entitled “Feeling the Pulse at Neudesic!” which triggered a few thoughts on how social will transform cloud providers into the next stage of the web for enterprises.

We are already seeing this from vendors like Salesforce.com with Chatter, released June 22nd this year. They have pioneered this usage for enterprises. Salesforce has really shown thought leadership here in baking this into their core platform in a real way. Directionally they see Chatter as the center of the Salesforce world. Hoping to reduce the dependency on technologies such as email and IM in the form of “living” feeds that describe the activities of enterprise. Additionally, this can be viewed across the company so information has no boundaries. I really like this direction and I too see this as the future.

This brings us to the news of the Pulse solution. Neudesic’s Pulse started by partnering with  Microsoft  to integrate social features into Microsoft Dynamics CRM but now it extends both platform and functional support. Supporting not only Microsoft CRM but also SharePoint and Salesforce.com. Like Chatter, Pulse was inspired by popular social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, Pulse is an enterprise social networking product that creates an interconnected network of people and systems throughout the organization to help keep information fresh an relevant.

Simon describes Pulse as:

In essence, Pulse is Facebook for the enterprise. If you’ve ever used Facebook or another social networking site, the feeds, profiles, walls, likes, follows, etc. will all feel very similar.

One of the main differences however is that because the social network is inside the walls of an enterprise, the possibilities for extending become so much more interesting. Not only can you “friend” other colleagues, but you can also “friend” systems. Like to know when business is won or lost? “Friend” the CRM system, and if someone updates an opportunity, you get a pulse notification. Similarly, if someone joins or leaves the company, the HR system “pulses” about the change. Are the IT Systems going down for routine maintenance? You’ve guessed it… another pulse! I’m sure there are many additional directions that this could be taken – just think of the countless internal systems that we habitually visit every day. What if each of them could send push notifications into a central social network?

While the above statements provide the “cool factor” to this technology I think there is more to the story here to highlight. What is really great about this technology over SalesForce.com’s offering are these core differentiators:

• Potential – This is by far the most important aspect here. The potential of integrating a range of solutions rather than just one primarily is a huge differentiator. The information is king, not the enabling technologies. So if there are cloud platforms that lock you into just there information sets and not others it demishes the potential greatly. So solutions that embrace multiple information sets by other vendors like Microsoft will prevail.
• Platform Independence – I have the freedom to choose which platform I want to make social. Combination of vendors, platforms and repositories on premise or cloud based can be chosen. Just like with development technologies, we live in a hybrid world of a variety of different solution enabled technologies. While companies could make big bets on CRM solutions in the cloud we have to ask ourselves if we are going to put all of our socially aware capable solutions there? If not (and I believe this is the case), then we should chose solutions like Pulse that deliver that platform independence. 
• Avoidance of Vendor & Platform Lock-In – With technologies like Chatter, you are locked-in to the Force.com platform. While you can integrate to it there is a great deal of flexibility that is lost. Additionally, if one day your organization chooses to move on to the next big technology solution that replaces this capability your feeds, functionality and data are locked in Chatter. Salesforce does have API’s to retrieve the raw data but context and all the application logic you have built will be lost. 
• Total Cost of Ownership – Investment for a solution like Pulse is significantly lower if enabled across the enterprise and solutions. I don’t have to make a enterprise license agreement with one vendor to see the benefits of making my enterprise socially aware. This can be a multimillion dollar investment for an organization and is a tough sell for social capabilities, especially if it is the first foray into social.
• Salesforce Inclusive Partnerships – Salesforce just doesn’t have much love for Microsoft or any other vendor not part of the Salesforce buddy system. While this isn’t  a reason not to choose a vendor it should be a strong warning sign. Like it or not Microsoft owns the enterprise productivity desktop market today. I can’t count how many business folks I talk to that live by Excel, Word and PowerPoint.  As a vendor with such large potential impact on companies it is their ethical responsibility to be aware of this and to reduce the  loss of productivity by acknowledging solutions in the MSFT productivity stake and not working against it.

In my mind those are the primary differentiators that really make this solution exciting. This post isn’t to do a formal comparison or to disprove the merits of the Chatter solution but rather highlight new solutions and their unique value proposition in making solutions socially aware.

Further Reading

• About Pulse
• Pulse Web Cast
• Pulse Resources
• Salesforce Chatter
• Salesforce Chatter Demo

 

Technorati Tags: Social,Pulse,Salesforce.com,Chatter,Enterprise 2.0,SaaS,PaaS,Cloud,Trends

Misys CIO discusses the role of the CIO as a business leader, innovator, and enabler of growth

Microsoft was recently at Sibos, an event facilitated and organized by SWIFT, for the SWIFT community, which creates the stimulus for learning, collaborating, developing new business, defining future strategies and taking collective action that shapes the future of the Financial Services industry. At the event, we caught up with Al-Noor Ramji, Executive Vice President and General Manager for Microsoft partner Misys.

Misys, an application software and services company, has formed a new strategic alliance with Microsoft to deliver the former's banking and capital markets applications via the Windows Azure cloud platform.

Misys said cloud computing, and specifically Windows Azure, enables banks to move from a capital intensive cost model to one which is based on the consumption of technology.

The scale of the Azure platform allows high volume workloads such as end-of-day processing to be consumed on demand.

The company said that its offering is built on BankFusion technology, which makes it possible to run the offering in the cloud.

Misys EVP and general manager Al-Noor Ramji said by making their offerings available in the cloud, they are enabling their clients to benefit from increased agility with lower TCO and risk, while simultaneously providing them with unprecedented speed and flexibility with access to the latest solutions.

At the event, Al-Noor Ramji took some time out to discuss the role of the CIO as a business leader, innovator, and enabler of growth. This discussion was timely given Steve Ballmer’s announcement of the Global Alliance with Misys to extend financial services applications to the Cloud.

12/02/2010

See the video here: http://www.microsoft.com/servers/missioncritical/CIOBlogs.aspx

 

Technorati Tags: Leadership,Financial Services,SWIFT,MiSys,Cloud,Microsoft

Force.com vs Windows Azure - From Setup to Hello World

Lately I have been doing an evaluation of Cloud Platforms from a variety of providers. I ran across this interesting video that walks through the setup process and the creation of a simple hello world web application from beginning to end. 

The configuration, setup and provisioning steps are often overlooked and it was really good to see someone put this together.  

Take a look, I think you will be surprised.

I tried to look for a similar comparison to Amazon, Google and IBM but came up short. If anyone has these I would really like to see a balanced evaluation across the cloud providers. 

Architecture Journal – Service Orientation Today and Tomorrow

A good friend of mine Diego Dagum just published the latest Architecture Journal some time back. I am just now getting to reading it. It's a great issue and would recommend taking a look. Great work to all the authors!

To download the full pdf go to the http://www.architecturejournal.net or you can get updates on the Architecture Blog (RSS) at Microsoft 

Contents

Design Considerations for Software plus Services and Cloud Computing By Jason Hogg et al.  Design patterns for cloud-computing applications.

Model-Driven SOA with “Oslo” By César de la Torre Llorente  A shortcut from models to executable code through the next wave of Microsoft modeling technology.

An Enterprise Architecture Strategy for SOA By Hatay Tuna.  Key concepts, principals, and methods that architects can practically put to work immediately to help their organizations overcome these challenges and lead them through their SOA- implementation journey for better outcomes.

Enabling Business Capabilities with SOA By Chris Madrid and Blair Shaw  Methods and technologies to enable an SOA infrastructure to realize business capabilities, gaining increased visibility across the IT landscape.

Service Registry: A Key Piece for Enhancing Reuse in SOA By Juan Pablo García-González, Veronica Gacitúa-Décar, and Claus Pahl  A strategy for publishing and providing facilities to access services information.

How the Cloud Stretches the SOA Scope By Lakshmanan G and Manish Pande.  An emerging breed of distributed applications both on-premises and in the Cloud.

Event-Driven Architecture: SOA Through the Looking Glass By Udi Dahan.  Looking back on the inherent publish/subscribe nature of the business and how this solves thorny issues such as high availability and fault tolerance.

Is SOA Being Pushed Beyond Its Limits? By Grace Lewis.  Challenges for future service-oriented systems.  This Article is copyrighted by Carnegie Mellon University and is subject to the Software Engineering Institute’s Terms of Use found at http://www.sei.cmu.edu/.

Azure CTP Released

In this release both the Windows Azure Tools & the SDK was updated

• Windows Azure Tools for Microsoft Visual Studio
• Windows Azure SDK

What's hot in the new refresh?

1. The problem with VS hanging when you hit F5, this is a huge fix.
2. Fix regarding the limitation of using special characters in entities, which affected some update or delete operations.
3. There have also been a bunch of performance fixes, so the overall user experience feels a lot nicer compared to the PDC release.

If you need to brush up Azure below are some great videos to get you up to speed.

• Windows Azure PDC 2008 Videos:
  • A Lap Around Windows Azure
  • Deploying Your First Windows Azure Application
  • Windows Azure Storage
  • Windows Azure Tables
  • Windows Azure Fabric
  • Under the Hood of the Windows Azure Fabric
• Video: Manuvir Das: Inside Windows Azure
• Video: Steve Marx: Windows Azure for Developers

Technorati Tags: Cloud Computing,Azure

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Ray Ozzie's Azure Keynote Overview

In case you missed it, you can see a clip of Ray Ozzie giving an overview of Azure.

If you want more recorded sessions you can see all the keynote videos here:

http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/events/pdc/default.mspx

Technorati Tags: Azure,Cloud Computing,S+S,SaaS

Office Web Applications

There hasn't been a shortage of announcements this year at PDC. The next big one besides Windows 7 is the new "Office Web Applications" live services. The Office team will be delivering the five most popular Office applications as light weight browser based versions that include Word, Excel, PowerPoint, and OneNote.

Folks at PDC got a sneak peak at a demo and screenshots, see below:

        

So what does this mean for architects? Is this just consumer black box services? I don't think so. The Office team is trying to move away from the Software as a Service (SaaS) model and focus on solutions that expose rich integration capabilities with not only the browser environment but what ever form factor is appropriate for a specific scenario. This is the software plus services (S+S) theme that has been delivered all through PDC with Azure, Windows 7 and now Office.

Existing solutions in the web based productivity space such as Google Docs and Zoho offer a very limitted and black box solution. It makes it tough to have rich collaboration as you can see below in the interview with Antoine Leblond, Senior VP of Office Productivity Apps and Chris Bryant of General Program Manager.

 

First Look: Office 14 for Web

 

I haven't gotten completely briefed on the architecture of the solution but what I do know is that the technologies that enable Office Web is a mixture of Silverlight, AJAX and HTML. It is great to see a mixture of technologies used for this implementation because there is a variety of web technologies that are right for particular aspects of the architecture.

From a browser perspective it looks like Office Web will also be compatible with IE8, Firefox (used in the interview above) and Safari.

One could imagine the possibilities here and what it could mean for customers that have built Office Business Applications (OBA). The story get much richer now that you can introduce the cloud into the mix.  It is still too early to tell how much of the API will be available but more details are forth coming.

Office Web Applications will be released to a limited set of partners and customers at the end of this year. The release date will closely align with Office 14 and Windows 7 which will be sometime in late 2009 or early 2010.

Resources

• Interview with Chris Capossela (SVP of Business Division)
• Video Overview (above as well)
• E-Weeks Take on Office Web
• Microsoft Watch Review

Technorati Tags: Office,Cloud Computing,Office Web,OBA

Microsoft Azure Services Platform

Another announcement at PDC today from Ray Ozzie was the Azure Services Platform. This is an Internet-scale cloud services platform hosted in Microsoft data centers, which provides an operating system and a set of developer services that can be used individually or together. Azure’s flexible and interoperable platform can be used to build new applications to run from the cloud or enhance existing applications with cloud-based capabilities. Its open architecture gives developers the choice to build web applications, applications running on connected devices, PCs, servers, or hybrid solutions offering the best of online and on-premises.

Key components of the Azure Services Platform include the following:

• Windows Azure for service hosting and management, low-level scalable storage, computation and networking
• Microsoft SQL Services for a wide range of database services and reporting
• Microsoft .NET Services which are service-based implementations of familiar .NET Framework concepts such as workflow and access control
• Live Services for a consistent way for users to store, share and synchronize documents, photos, files and information across their PCs, phones, PC applications and Web sites
• Microsoft SharePoint Services and Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services for business content, collaboration and rapid solution development in the cloud

Windows Azure is a cloud services operating system that serves as the development, service hosting and service management environment for the Azure Services Platform. Windows Azure provides developers with on-demand compute and storage to host, scale, and manage internet or cloud applications. Windows Azure supports a consistent development experience through its integration with Visual Studio. In the early stages of CTP, .NET managed applications built using Visual Studio will be supported. Windows Azure is an open platform that will support both Microsoft and non-Microsoft languages and environments. Windows Azure welcomes third party tools and languages such as Eclipse, Ruby, PHP, and Python. This further solidifies Microsoft's wiliness to open up the developer platform.

As you can see below, the Azure Services Platform aligns quite well with the Microsoft vision of Software-plus-Services and overall services strategy by offering customers, developers, and businesses a transformation in connecting devices, business, productivity, and software. Azure provides the backbone for Microsoft's cloud based computing platform.

Azure is a platform that will complement your existing IT environments or data centers by providing services in the cloud. the cloud based processing runs in Microsoft's data centers and is optimized for cloud computing scenarios. You may be asking, "will Microsoft continue to innovate and invest in Server products"? Of course, the Windows Server tram addressed this right away on the Windows Server blog. They say:

We will continue to innovate and ship Windows Server for both on-premise application and infrastructure scenarios and will ensure that customers continue to have choice in choosing the platform that best meets their need, whether on-premise or in the cloud. - Bill Hilf, General Manager, Windows Server

http://blogs.technet.com/windowsserver/archive/2008/10/27/pdc-2008-azure-services-platform-and-windows-server.aspx

 

Overview Video

If you want some more information there are some initial source out there:

• Azure Services Home Page
• Azure's Customer Technology Preview
• Issues and Constraints of Azure (MSDN)
• Demo videos
• Frequently Asked Questions
• PC Magazine Coverage
• Windows Server blog

 

Technorati Tags: Cloud,Azure,S+S,Services,Cloud Computing,SaaS,Datacenter