Growth of IT Operations and Automation

35 years ago when I was getting my degree in Industrial Engineering and Operations Research I liked manufacturing, and realized that going into automotive was not were I wanted to go. I focused on distribution logistics and going to a high tech firm.  My first company was HP.  At HP I got really good at distribution logistics which got me recruited by Apple.

When I started my degree it was in the early days of computers and automation.  The PC was just getting going with Apple II and commodore 64.  The PC is not nearly as interesting as mobile and the data centers where I spend my time now.  But, some things come back like Operations.  What is a big topic that continues to grow is IT Operations and Automation.  I like IT operations as it is the same type of problems as manufacturing operations and distribution logistics.

And, one benefit I have over many others is I have been through lots of different stuff in 35 years working at HP, Apple, Microsoft and being independent.

One of the ski friends I know said he has a new job at company X starting in a week.  “Have you heard of them?”  Yep.  Know the co-founders, VP of marketing, CTO.  IT Automation is a hot topic and will get bigger.  My wife even chimed in she knew the company as she sees the t-shits all the time.

IT Operations and Automation is a necessity if you are building a cloud.  

IBM comments on buying Softlayer

GigaOm’s Derrick Harris has a post on IBM and the acquisition of Softlayer.

On buying SoftLayer for $2 billion

“[W]e bought a company. … I’ve bought 120 companies,” Mills said matter of factly, noting that in this case IBM realized it wasn’t capturing certain segments of the cloud market and wasn’t delivering certain capabilities that customers wanted. You can either build those capabilities or buy them, he added, and “at the end of the day you run out of money [to build everything].”

Mills did defend IBM’s cloud legacy, though, going back to then-Google CEO Eric Schmidt calling IBM in 2006 and asking if it would help set up a web-accessible developer cloud “because we had dynamic provisioning and scheduling technology and they did not.”

Cloud is going to get interesting watching Amazon Web Services compete against IBM

I saw this post that Om Malik reposted.

CIO Magazine: IBM Will Win the War With Amazon

Posted at cio.com

21 hours ago

Rob Enderle has been analyst for too long and has mostly been wrong about his favorite target, Apple. And now he has turned his guns on Amazon (Web Services) and points out that IBM is going to win the war with AWS. I think we all have a different definition of winning,  especially considering the troubled cloud effort by IBM. Anyway read the piece, if nothing, for a chuckle!

 

via Om Malik

Talk about two different approaches.  IBM’s business is built on relationships with the CxO to deliver IT services.  Amazon.com is retailer who uses technology the way no other retailer does.  Departments are pulling out their credit cards to use AWS to build IT services that are assumed to be at a lower cost and faster time to market.  In this rush to push out IT services, there are probably many mistakes made from a compliance perspective.  The types of mistakes that can get you fined or in the middle of a lawsuit.

Amazon offsets this by bypassing IT and selling directly to employees. However, IT retains the responsibility for compliance; given enough ammunition, IT generally can block access to any vendor seen as unreliable or unsecure. Expect IBM to start providing IT with the evidence to provide this block and with cost-effective alternatives that IT can use instead.

The CIO article says IBM is ready for a fight.

Don't Bet Against the Old Dog in the Fight

IBM learned early on that fights in any market are often won and lost on perception. The company allocates staff and resource accordingly. In these battles it comes down to who has the most resources and knows the battlefield best. On all vectors, this should be IBM. Amazon may, as the first mover, have the tactical advantage, but IBM has the strategic advantage. At the end of the day, this is IBM's battlefield. It has the best weapons and the appropriate skills.

Here is the current state of IBM’s Cloud website. 270,000 more websites than amazon is on IBM’s cloud.

AWS is not always the right answer for a startup

There is a flawed belief that the Cloud which many times is AWS is the right answer for a startup.  Here is a post friend sent me of someone who went through the numbers and came up with a non-AWS solution.

First, we simply wanted to reduce the number of variables when we needed to troubleshoot this critical layer. For us, audio quality is a top priority, and the fewer layers of virtualization and their parties between us and the user, the better.

Second, and more technically, we were having syncing issues between the time clock on the physical Amazon machines and the time clocks on the OS and virtual layers, which was causing additional delays. Moving to our own physical servers in a data center instantly solved this problem.

Third, the audio/voice layer of our system scales fairly predictably, giving us a fair amount of lead time to order new physical servers. The elasticity of cloud hosting was thus not a priority for us.

Finally, in our own financial analysis we found that when it came to our audio/voice component, our own physical servers would be cheaper than any of the cloud providers we were considering. For our API layer and Web interface, we found the opposite to be true, and so we host these across a few different cloud providers for the sake of redundancy.

That brings up a secondary point: Being open-minded means remembering that it is fine to mix-and-match. Not only is one server solution the best across all startups, it may not even be the best acrossall components of one startup. By thinking of these components’ needs separately, considering all your options, planning for the near future and not for forever, and finding the best fit for you, you can vastly improve the odds that you’ve made a good decision.

Hybrid as a Cloud choice, Webinar on Oct 31, 2013

I am on a webinar on Oct 31, 2013 10a PT on Hybrid Clouds.  Hope you can join in the discussion that David, Ted, and I will have with Paul Miller as moderator.

Balancing performance and cost in hybrid clouds

October 31, 2013
10:00am — 11:00am PDT

SPONSORED BY

FEATURED PANELISTS

David S. Linthicum SVP, Cloud Technology Partners

Dave Ohara Founder, GreenM3

Ted Chamberlin Vice President Market Development, Coresite

MODERATED BY

Paul Miller

A hybrid cloud strategy is not a destination. It is an ongoing balancing act in which enterprises weigh a shifting landscape of cost, security, and performance against business needs.

Decision criteria have never been murkier. What used to be “showstopping” issues such as regulatory requirements for private connectivity or a need for real-time data access can now be overcome through secure, low-latency secure interconnections–for a price. The challenge for IT is pairing applications, services, and data sets with the right balance of public and private cloud services, at the right price.