Tech.Days Online 2012: Day 1 (#TechDays2012)

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 12 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

For the last couple of years, I’ve been concentrating on IT Strategy but I miss the hands-on technology.  I’ve kind of lost touch with what’s been happening in my former world of Microsoft infrastructure and don’t even get the chance to write about what’s coming up in new releases as the powers that be have decided my little blog is not on their RADAR (to be honest, I always suspected they had me mixed up with another Mark Wilson, who writes at Gizmodo!).

Anyway, I decided to dip into the pool again and see what Microsoft is up to in its latest releases, with two day-long virtual events under the Microsoft Tech.Days Online banner.

Presented by members of the UK evangelist team, Simon May (@simonster), Andrew Fryer (@DeepFat) and Steve Plank (@plankytronixx), day 1 focused on Windows Server and Azure, whilst day 2 will be about Windows 8 and System Center.

So, what did I learn?  Far too much for a single blog post, but here are the highlights from day 1…

Windows Server 2012

Windows Server 2012 looks to be a significant step forward from 2008 R2. The full list of what’s new is extensive but the main focus is on Microsoft’s “next generation” file server, management, virtualisation and networking:

  • “Next generation” file server. Ignore the next generation part – after all, it’s just marketing speak to make a file server sound interesting (some of us remember the early battles between Novell NetWare and Windows NT!) – but there are some significant improvements in Windows Server’s file capabilities.
  • When it comes to management:
    • Windows can be used to manage non-Windows environments and vice versa.  The details were pretty sketchy in yesterday’s event, but apparently Microsoft now understands that we all run heterogeneous environments!
    • Automation continues to be at the heart of the management story, with both DISM and PowerShell.
    • There’s a new version of PowerShell (v3), which promises to be more intuitive as as result of the Integrated Scripting Environment with IntelliSense as well as adding robust sessions that persist across connection dropouts and even reboots, together with simple creation of parallel workflows.  The good news (although you wouldn’t know it from yesterday’s session) is that PowerShell 3 is also available for Windows 7 and Server 2008 (SP2 or later).
    • Remote management is enabled by default.
    • Server Core is still there, but MinShell is another attempt to reduce the attack surface of Windows Server, providing GUI management tools, without a GUI, as described by Mitch Garvis.
  • Virtual machine mobility provides new scenarios for migrating resources around the entreprise:
    • Using shared storage with live migration now supporting VMs on non-clustered hosts (just on an SMB share).
    • By live migrating storage between hosts, moving the virtual disks attached to a running virtual machines from one location to another.
    • With shared-nothing live migration.
    • Using new Hyper-V replica functionality to replicate virtual machines between sites, e.g in a disaster recovery scenario.
    • There’s also a new VHDX format for larger virtual disks, released as an open specification.
  • Enhanced networking:
    • Windows Server now has built-in NIC teaming (load balancing/failover, or LBFO), described by Don Stanwyck in Yegal Edery’s post.
    • Network virtualisation allows the creation of a multi-tenant virtual network environment on top of the existing infrastructure, decoupling network and server configuration.

Windows Server 2012 is already available but an evaluation edition is also available as an ISO or a VHD.

Windows Azure

Windows Azure has been around for a while, but back in my days as an MVP (and when running the Windows Server User Group with Mark Parris), I struggled to get someone at Microsoft to talk about it from an IT Pro perspective (lots of developer stuff, but nothing for the infrastructure guys). That changed when Steve Plank spent an entire afternoon on the topic today.

In summary:

  • Windows Azure has always provided PaaS but it now has IaaS capabilities (although they don’t sound to be as mature as Amazon’s offerings, they might better suit some organisations).
  • When deploying to the cloud, the datacentre or affinity group is selected. Azure services are available in eight datacentres around the world, with 4 in the US, 2 in Europe and 2 in Asia.
  • Applications are deployed to Azure using an XML service model.
  • Virtual machines in Azure differ from the cloud platform services in that they still require management (patching, etc.) at the operating system level.  They may be deployed using a REST API, scripted (e.g. using PowerShell), or created inside a management portal.
  • Virtual hard disks may be uploaded to Azure (they are converted to BLOB storage), or new virtual machines created from a library and it’s possible to capture virtual machines that are not running as images for future deployment.  Virtual machine images may also be copied from the cloud for on-premise deployment.
  • If two virtual machines are connected inside Azure, both are on the  same network, which means they can connect to the same load balancer.
  • Virtual networks may be used to connect on premise networks to Windows Azure, or completely standalone Azure networks can be created (e.g. with their own DNS, Active Directory, etc.)
  • When using a virtual network inside Azure, there is no DHCP but DIPs (dynamic IPs) are provided and the operating system must be configured to use DHCP. Each service has a single IP address to connect to the Internet, with port forwarding used to access multiple hosts.
  • Inside Azure, operating system disks are cached (for performance) but data disks are not (for integrity). Consequently, when installing data-driven operating systems (such as Active Directory), make sure the database is on a data drive.
  • Applications on Azure may be federated with on-premise infrastructure (e.g. Active Directory). Alternatively, a new service is currently in developer preview called the Windows Azure Active Directory. This differs significantly from the normal Active Directory role in Windows Server (which may also be deployed to a virtual machine on Azure) in that: it has a REST API (the Graph API), not an LDAP one; it does not use Kerberos; and it is accessed as an endpoint – i.e. individual instances are not exposed. Windows Azure Active Directory is related to the Office 365 Directory (indeed, logging on to the Windows Azure Active Directory preview shows me my Office 365 details).  Single sign on with Windows Azure Active Directory is described in detail in a post by Vittorio Bertocci.
  • Microsoft provides service level agreements for Azure availability, not for performance. These are based around fault domains and update domains.

A Windows Azure pricing calculator is available, as is a 90-day free trial.

Photograph of Steve Plank taken from the TechNet UK Facebook page.

Journey through the Amazon Web Services cloud

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 12 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Working for a large system integrator, I tend to find myself focused on our own offerings and somewhat isolated from what’s going on in the outside world. It’s always good to understand the competitive landscape though and I’ve spent some time recently brushing up my knowledge of Amazon Web Services (AWS), which may come in useful as I’m thinking of moving some of my computing workloads to AWS.  Amazon’s EMEA team are running a series of “Journey to the Cloud” webcasts at the moment and the first two sessions covered:

The next webcast in the series is focused on Storage and Archiving and it takes place next week (23 October). Based on the content of the first two, it should be worth an hour of my time, and maybe yours too?

 

Personal cloud: call it what you want, ignore it at your peril!

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

For about 18 months, one of the items on my “to do” list has been to write a paper about something called the “personal cloud”. It’s been slipping due to a number of other priorities but now, partly due to corporate marketing departments abusing the term to make it mean something entirely different, I’ve started to witness some revolt against what some see as yet another attempt at cloudwashing.

On the face of it, critics may have a point – after all, isn’t this just another example of someone making something up and making sure the name includes “cloud”? Well, when you look at what some vendors are doing, dressing up remote access solutions and adding a “cloud” moniker, then yes, personal cloud is nonsensical – but the whole point about a personal cloud is that it is not a one vendor solution – indeed a personal cloud is not even something that you can go out and buy.

I was chatting about this with a colleague, David Gentle (@davegentle), earlier and I think he explains the personal cloud concept really simply. Fundamentally, there are two principles:

  1. The personal cloud is the equivalent of what we might once have called personal productivity – the consumption of office applications, file storage and collaboration tools in a cloud-like manner. It’s more of a B2C concept than B2B but it is, perhaps, the B2C equivalent of an organisation consuming SaaS or IaaS services.
  2. Personal clouds become really important when you work with multiple devices. We’re all fine when we work on one device (e.g. a corporate laptop) but, once we add a smartphone, a tablet, etc. the experience of interacting and sharing between devices has real value. To give an example, Dropbox is a good method for sharing large files but it has a lot more value once it is used across several devices and the value is the user experience, rather than any one device-specific solution.

Personal cloudI expect to see personal cloud rising above the (BYO) mobile device story as a major element of IT consumerisation (see my post from this time last year, based on Joe Baguley’s talk about the consumerisation of IT being nothing to do with iPads) because point solutions (like Dropbox, Microsoft OneNote and SkyDrive, Apple iCloud) are just the tip of the iceberg – the personal cloud has huge implications for IT service delivery. At some point, we will ask why do we need some of the enterprise IT services – what do they actually do for us that a personal cloud providing access to all of our data and services doesn’t? (I seem to recall Joe exclaiming something similar to that corporate IT provides systems for timesheeting, expenses and free printing in the office!)

As for the “personal cloud” name – another colleague, Vin Hughes, did some research for the first reference to the term and he found something remarkable similar (although not called the personal cloud) dating back to 1945 – Vannevar Bush’s “Memex”. If that’s stretching the point a little, how about when the BBC reported in 2002 on Microsoft’s plans for a personal online life archive? So, when was the “personal cloud” term coined? It would seem to be around 2008 – an MIT Technology Review post from December 2007 talks about  how cloud computing services have the potential to alter the digital world (in a consumer context) but it doesn’t use the personal cloud term. One month later, however, a comment on a blog post about SaaS refers to “personal cloud computing”, albeit talking about provisioning personal servers, rather than consuming application and platform services as we do today (all that this represents is a move up the cloud stack as we think less about hardware and operating systems and more about accessing data).  So it seems that the “personal cloud” is not something that was dreamed up particularly recently…

So, why haven’t IT vendors been talking about this? Well, could it be that this is potentially a massive threat (maybe the largest) to many IT vendors’ businesses – the personal cloud is a very big disruptive trend in the enterprise space and, as Dave put it:

@ Personal Cloud. Call it what you want, ignore it at your peril!
Thursday 15 March 2012 13:13 via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@davegentle
davegentle

 

Raspberry Pi: a case study for using cloud infrastructure?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

In common with many thousands of geeks up and down the country, I set my alarm for just before 06:00 today for the big Raspberry Pi “announcement”.

The team at Raspberry Pi had done a great job of keeping the community informed – and I was really impressed that they gave everyone a chance to hear where to buy their miniature computers at the same time. Unfortunately the Raspberry Pi announcement didn’t quite have the intended result as it effectively “slashdotted” the websites for both of the distributors (RS Components and Farnell).

Whilst Raspberry Pi had moved their site to a static page in anticipation, the electronics retailers probably aren’t used to their products being in such demand and both buckled under the load.  Which left me wondering… I know Raspberry Pi’s goal is to support the UK electronics industry (hence the choice of distributors and not simply selling via Amazon.co.uk or similar) but surely this is a case study for how a cloud-based solution could have scaled to cope with demand? Perhaps by redirecting Raspberry Pi purchasers to a site that could scale (e.g. on Amazon Web Services), still fulfilled by RS and Farnell?

Grumpy with RS and Farrell for not taking #raspberrypi traffic warnings seriously. @ must be gutted, but stoked by interest!
Wednesday 29 February 2012 7:41 via Twitter for iPhoneReplyRetweetFavorite
@edgillett
Ed Gillett

It didn’t help that the links given were to the main pages (not deep links). I got in during the first 5 minutes at RS and followed the instructions (“Search for Raspberry Pi, and then follow the normal shopping and checkout process.”) only to find that there was a “register your interest” page but no purchase option. A few minutes later, Raspberry Pi said on Twitter that was the wrong page, and I couldn’t find the right one from a site search. Later in the morning, reports on Twitter suggested that RS are not putting Raspberry Pi on sale until the end of the week…

RS *not* sold out of Raspberry Pis - not opening sales until the end of the week. Hope they beef up their servers before then!
Wednesday 29 February 2012 8:31 via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@ghalfacree
Gareth Halfacree

[It now seems that doesn’t fit with RS Components’ Raspberry Pi press release]

With the mainstream news sites and even breakfast TV now running Raspberry Pi stories, the interest will be phenomenal and I’m sure Raspberry Pi can sell many more devices than they can manufacture, but I can’t help feeling they’ve been badly let down by distributors who didn’t take their warnings seriously.

We're so frustrated about the DDOS effect - and apparently some of you are VERY ANGRY. We're really sorry; it's out of our hands.
Wednesday 29 February 2012 7:45 via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@Raspberry_Pi
Raspberry Pi

Or, as one open source advocate saw it:

Absolutely fantastic! @ sale brings down #RS & #Farnell. Shows there's massive demand for computers for learning. #opensource
Wednesday 29 February 2012 8:24 via HototReplyRetweetFavorite

With any luck, my success at registering interest from RS at about 06:03 this morning will have worked. Failing that, I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer…

[Update 07:49 – added link to RS Components press release]

Is there such a thing as private cloud?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I had an interesting discussion with a colleague today, who was arguing that there is no such thing as private cloud – it’s just virtualisation, rebranded.

Whilst I agree with his sentiment (many organisations claiming to have implemented private clouds have really just virtualised their server estate), I do think that private clouds can exist.

Cloud is a new business model, but the difference between traditional hosting and cloud computing is more that just commercial. The NIST definition of cloud computing is becoming more and more widely accepted and it defines five essential charactistics, three service models and four deployment models.

The essential characteristics are:

  • “On-demand self-service. A consumer can unilaterally provision computing capabilities, such as server time and network storage, as needed automatically without requiring human interaction with each service provider.
  • Broad network access. Capabilities are available over the network and accessed through standard mechanisms that promote use by heterogeneous thin or thick client platforms (e.g., mobile phones, tablets, laptops, and workstations).
  • Resource pooling. The provider’s computing resources are pooled to serve multiple consumers using a multi-tenant model, with different physical and virtual resources dynamically assigned and reassigned according to consumer demand. There is a sense of location independence in that the customer generally has no control or knowledge over the exact location of the provided resources but may be able to specify location at a higher level of abstraction (e.g., country, state, or datacenter). Examples of resources include storage, processing, memory, and network bandwidth.
  • Rapid elasticity. Capabilities can be elastically provisioned and released, in some cases automatically, to scale rapidly outward and inward commensurate with demand. To the consumer, the capabilities available for provisioning often appear to be unlimited and can be appropriated in any quantity at any time.
  • Measured service. Cloud systems automatically control and optimize resource use by leveraging a metering capability at some level of abstraction appropriate to the type of service (e.g., storage, processing, bandwidth, and active user accounts). Resource usage can be monitored, controlled, and reported, providing transparency for both the provider and consumer of the utilized service.”

and NIST’s private cloud definition is:

“Private cloud. The cloud infrastructure is provisioned for exclusive use by a single organization comprising multiple consumers (e.g., business units). It may be owned, managed, and operated by the organization, a third party, or some combination of them, and it may exist on or off premises.”

If anything, the NIST definition is incomplete (it doesn’t recognise any service models beyond infrastructure-, platform- and software-as-a-service – I’d add business process as a service too) but the rest is pretty spot on.

Looking at each of the characteristics and comparing them to a simple virtualisation of existing IT:

  • On demand self service: virtualisation alone doesn’t cover this – so private clouds need to include another technology layer to enable this functionality.
  • Broad network access: nothing controversial there, I think.
  • Resource pooling: I agree, standard virtualisation functionality.
  • Rapid elasticity: this is where private cloud struggles against public (bursting to public via a hybrid solution might help, if feasible from a governance/security perspective) but, with suitable capacity management in place, private virtualised infrastructure deployments can be elastic.
  • Measured service: again, an additional layer of technology is required in order to provide this functionality – more than just a standard virtualised solution.

All of this is possible to achieve internally (i.e. privately), and it’s important to note that it’s no good just porting existing applications to a virtualisaed infrastructure – they need to be re-architected to take advantage of these characteristics. But I’m pretty sure there is more to private cloud than just virtualisation with a new name…

As for, whether there is a long term place for private cloud… that’s an entirely separate question!

Is technology at the heart of business, or is it simply an enabler?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

I saw a video from Cisco this morning, and found it quite inspirational. The fact it’s from Cisco isn’t really relevant (indeed, if I showed it without the last few seconds you woudn’t know) but it’s a great example of how IT is shaping the world that we live in – or, more precisely, how the world is shaping the direction that IT is taking:

In case you can’t see the video above, here are some of the key statistics it contains:

  • Humans created more data in 2009 alone than in all previous years combined.
  • Over the last 15 years, network speeds have increased 18 million times.
  • Information is moving to the cloud; 8/10 IT Managers plan to use cloud computing within the next 3 years.
  • By 2015, tools and automation will eliminate 25% of IT labour hours.
  • We’re using multiple devices: by 2015 there will be nearly one mobile-connected device for every person on earth;
  • 2/3 of employees believe they should be able to access information using company-issued devices at any time, at any location;
  • 60% believe they don’t need to be in an office to be productive;
  • This is creating entirely new forms of collaboration.
  • “The real impact of the information revolution isn’t about information management but on relationships; the ability to allow not dozens, or hundreds, but thousands of people to meaningfully interact” [Dr Michael Schrage, MIT].
  • By 2015 companies will generate 50% of web sales via their social presence and mobile applications.
  • Social business software will become a $5bn business by 2013.
  • Who sits at the centre of all this? Who is managing these exponential shifts? The CIO.

Some impressive numbers here – and we might expect to see many of these figures cited by a company selling social collaboration software and networking equipment but they are a good indication of the way things are heading.  I would place more emphasis on empowered employees and customers redefining IT provisioning (BYO, for example); on everything as a service (XaaS) changing the IT delivery model; on the need for a new architecture to manage the “app Internet”; and on big data – which will be a key theme for the next few years.

Whatever the technologies underpinning the solution – the overall direction is for IT to provide business services that add value and enhance business agility rather than simply being part of “the cost of doing business”.

I think Cisco’s video does a rather good job of illustrating the change that is occurring but the real benefits come when we are able to use technology as an enabler for business services that create new opportunities, rather than responding to existing pressures.

I’d love to hear what our customers, partners and competitors think – is technology at the heart of the digital revolution, or is it simply an enabler for new business services?

[This post originally appeared on the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog and was written with assistance from Ian Mitchell.]

Cloudwashing

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 13 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Cloud this, cloud that: frankly I’m tired of hearing about “the cloud” and, judging from the debate I’ve had on Twitter this afternoon, I’m not alone.

The trouble is that the term “cloud” has been abused and has become a buzzword (gamification is another – big data could be next…).

I don’t doubt the advantages of cloud computing – far from it – it’s a fantastically powerful business model and it’s incredibly disruptive in our industry. And, like so many disruptive innovations, organisations are faced with a choice – to adopt the disruptive technology or to try and move up the value chain. (Although, in this case, why not both? Adopt the disruptive tech and move up the value chain?)

My problem with cloud marketing is not so much about over-use of the term, it’s about the mis-use of it. And that’s confused the marketplace. There is a pretty good definition of cloud from the American National Institute of Science and Technology (NIST) but it’s missing some key service models (data as a service, business process as a service) so vendors feel the need to define their own “extensions”.

My point is that cloud is about the business model, about how the service is provided, about some of the essential characteristics that provide flexibility in IT operation. That flexibility allows the business to become more responsive to change and, in turn, the CIO may more quickly deliver the services that the CEO asks of them.

It’s natural that business to business (B2B) service providers include cloud as a major theme in their marketing (indeed, in their continued existence as a business).  That’s because delivery of business services and the mechanisms used to ensure that the service is responsive to business needs (on demand self-service, broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, and measured service) are crucial. Unfortunately, “the cloud” has now crossed the divide into the business to consumer (B2C) space and that’s where it all starts to turn bad.

At the point where “the cloud” is marketed to consumers it is watered down to be meaningless (ignoring the fact that “the cloud” is actually many “clouds”, from multiple providers). So often “the cloud” is really just a service offered via the Internet. Consumers don’t care about “the cloud” – they just want their stuff, when they want it, where they want it, for as little financial outlay as possible. To use an analogy from Joe Baguley, Chief Cloud Technologist, EMEA at VMware – “you don’t market the electricity grid, you market the electricity and the service, not the infra[structure]”.

I’d like to suggest that marketing cloud to consumers is pointless and, ultimately, it’s diluting the real message: that cloud is a way of doing business, not about a particular technology. What do you think?

As Amazon fuels the fire, where are the networks to deliver our content?

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week saw Amazon’s announcement of the Kindle Fire – a new tablet computer which marks the bookstore-turned-online-warehouse-turned-cloud-infrastructure-provider‘s latest skirmish into the world of content provision and consumption. It’s not going to be available in the UK and Ireland for a while (some of the supporting services don’t yet exist here) but many technology commentators have drawn comparisons with the Apple iPad – the current tablet market leader (by a country mile). And, whilst there are comparisons (both are tablets, both rely on content) – they really do compete in different sectors.

Even as an iPad user, I can see the attractiveness of the Kindle Fire: If Amazon is able to execute its strategy (and all signs suggest they are), then they can segment the tablet market leaving Apple at the premium end and shifting huge volumes of low price devices to non-geeks. Note how Amazon has maintained a range of lower-price eInk devices too? That’s all about preserving and growing the existing user base – people who like reading, like the convenience of eBooks but who are not driven by technology.

At this point you’re probably starting to wonder why I’m writing this on a blog from a provider of enterprise IT systems and services. How is this really relevant to the enterprise? Actually, I think it is really relevant. I’ve written about the consumerisation of enterprise IT over and over (on this blog and elsewhere) but, all of a sudden, we’re not talking about a £650 iPad purchase (a major commitment for most people) but a sub-£200 tablet (assuming the Fire makes it to the UK). And that could well mark a tipping point where Android, previously largely confined to smartphones, is used to access other enterprise services.

I can think of at least one former CIO for whom that is a concern: the variety of Android platforms and the potential for malware is a significant security risk. But we can’t stick our heads in the sand, or ban Android devices – we need to find a way forward that is truly device and operating system agnostic (and I think that’s best saved as a topic for another blog post).

What the Apple iPad, Amazon Kindle Fire, and plethora of Google Android-powered devices have in common is their reliance on content. Apple and Amazon both have a content-driven strategy (Google is working on one) but how does that content reach us? Over the Internet.

And there stands a problem… outside major cities, broadband provision is still best described as patchy. There are efforts to improve this (including, but not exclusively, those which Fujitsu is taking part in) but 3G and  4G mobile networks are a part of the picture.

UK businesses and consumers won’t be able to fully benefit from new cloud-based tools until the UK has a nationwide reliable high speed mobile data network and a new paper, published today by the Open Digital Policy Organisation suggests that the UK is at least 2 years behind major countries in its 4G rollout plans. Aside from the potential cost to businesses of £732m a year,  we’re all consumers, downloading content to our Kindles, iPads, watching TV catch-up services like BBC iPlayer and 4oD, as well as video content from YouTube, Vimeo, etc. Add to that the networks of sensors that will drive the future Internet – and then consider that many businesses are starting to question the need for expensive wide area network connections when inexpensive public options are available… I think you get my point…

We live in a content-driven society – more and more so by the day… sadly it seems that the “information superhighway” is suffering from congestion and that may well stifle our progress.

[This post originally appeared on the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog.]

The future Internet and the Intelligent Society

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Last week, I spent an evening with the British Computer Society’s Internet Specialist Group, where I’d been asked to present on where I see the Internet developing in future – an always-on, connected vision of joined-up services to deliver greater benefit across society.

The Internet – Where Next?

View more presentations from Fujitsu UK

I started out with a brief retrospective of the last 42 years of Internet development and at look at the way we use the Internet today, before I introduced the concept of human-centric computing and, in particular, citizen-centric computing as featured in Rebecca MacKinnon’s TED talk about the need to take back the Internet. This shows how we need any future Internet to evolve in a citizen-centric manner, building a world where government and technology serve people and leads nicely into some of the concepts introduced in the Technology Strategy Board‘s Future Internet Report.

After highlighting out the explosion in the volumes of data and the number of connected devices, I outlined the major enabling components for the future Internet – far more than “bigger pipes” – although we do need a capable access mechanism, infrastructure for the personalisation of cloud services and for machine to machine (M2M) transactions; and finally, for convergence that delivers a transformational change in both public and private service delivery.

Our vision is The Intelligent Society; bringing physical and virtual worlds into harmony to deliver greater benefit across society. As consumerisation takes hold, technology is becoming more accessible, even commoditised in places, for on delivery of on-demand, stateless services. Right now we have a “perfect storm” where a number of technologies are maturing and falling into alignment to deliver our vision.

These technologies break down into: the devices (typically mobile) and sensors (for M2M communications); the networks that join devices to services; and the digital utilities that provide on demand computing and software resources for next-generation digital services. And digital utilities are more than just “more cloud” too – we need to consider interconnectivity between clouds, security provision and the compute power required to process big data to provide analytics and smart responses.

There’s more detail in the speaker notes on the deck (and I should probably write some more blog posts on the subject) but I finished up with a look at Technology Perspectives – a resource we’ve created to give a background context for strategic planning.

As we develop “the Internet of the future” we have an opportunity to deliver benefit, not just in terms of specific business problems, but on a wide scale that benefits entire populations. Furthermore, we’ve seen that changing principles and mindsets are creating the right conditions for these solutions to be incubated and developed alongside maturing technologies that enabling this vision and making it a reality.

This isn’t sci-fi, this is within our reach. And it’s very exciting.

[This post originally appeared on the Fujitsu UK and Ireland CTO Blog.]

Why “cloud” represents disruptive innovation – and the changes at HP are just the tip of the iceberg

Posted on By Mark Wilson
This content is 14 years old. I don't routinely update old blog posts as they are only intended to represent a view at a particular point in time. Please be warned that the information here may be out of date.

Yesterday, I wrote a post about disruptive innovation, based on a book I’d been reading: The Innovator’s Dilemma, by , by Clayton M Christensen.

In that post, I asked whether cloud computing is sustaining or disruptive – and I said I’d come back and explain my thoughts.

In some ways, it was a trick question: cloud computing is not a technology; it’s a business model for computing. On that basis, cloud cannot be a sustaining technology. Even so, some of the technologies that are encompassed in providing cloud services are sustaining innovations – for example many of the improvements in datacentre and server technologies.

If I consider the fact that cloud is creating a new value network, it’s certainly disruptive (and it’s got almost every established IT player running around trying to find a new angle). What’s different about the cloud is that retrenching and moving up-market will only help so much – the incumbents need to switch tracks successfully (or face oblivion).

Some traditional software companies (e.g. Microsoft) are attempting to move towards the cloud but have struggled to move customers from one-off licensing to a subscription model. Meanwhile, new entrants (e.g. Amazon) have come from nowhere and taken the market for inexpensive infrastructure as a service by storm. As a consequence, the market has defined itself as several strata of infrastructure-, platform- and software- (data- and business process- too) as-a-service. Established IT outsourcers can see the threat that cloud offers, know that they need to be there, and are aggressively restructuring their businesses to achieve the low margins that are required to compete.

We only have to look at what’s happened at HP recently to see evidence of this need for change. Faced with two quarters of disappointing results, their new CEO had little choice but to make sweeping changes. He announced an exit from the device space and an aquisition of a leading UK software company. Crucially, that company will retain its autonomy, and not just in name (sorry, I couldn’t resist the pun) – allowing Autonomy to manage its own customers and grow within its own value network.

Only time will tell if HP’s bet on selling a profitable, market-leading, hardware business in order to turn the company around in the face of cloud computing turns out to be a mistake. I can see why they are getting out of the device market – Lenovo may have announced an increase in profits but we should remember Lenovo is IBM’s divested PC division, thriving in its own market, freed from the shackles of its previous owner and its high margin values. Michael Dell may joke about naming HP’s spin-off “Compaq” but Dell needs to watch out too. PCs are not dying, but the market is not growing either. Apple makes more money from tablets and smartphones than from PCs (Macs). What seems strange to me is that HP didn’t find a buyer for its personal systems group before announcing its intended exit.

If HP spins off their PC business....maybe they will call it Compaq?
Thursday 18 August 2011 20:01 via webReplyRetweetFavorite
@MichaelDell
Michael Dell

So, back to the point. Cloud computing is disruptive and established players have a right to be scared. Those providing technology for the cloud have less to worry about (notice that HP is retaining its enterprise servers and storage) but those of us in the managed services business could be in for a rough ride…