As we come up on FOSE next week, we can’t help but wonder what changes we will see in how government agencies are approaching IT Operations management. With all of the talk about the cloud and data center consolidation, we expect cloud computing initiatives to be at an all-time high.
Each year, we travel to FOSE in the spring and Interop New York in the fall to compare government IT and industry IT viewpoints on a variety of subjects. We track different topics from virtualization to ITIL to green IT in order to compare what’s hot or not and check adoption rates. We have been tracking virtualization for a few years, and just last year saw that it has come of age. This year we expect to see cloud computing continue its upward trend, particularly among creating a government cloud.
We compared our survey from FOSE in 2009 to Interop New York in 2009, and found that there was already an uptick just from last March to November.
In 2009, more than 90% of FOSE survey respondents worked for a federal government agency, or government contractor. The top concern on their mind was budget constraints with 53% worried about how to make ends meet. This may have been due in part to when the surveys were taken: FOSE was held six months after the Wall Street meltdown and two months into the Obama presidency. Interop New York took place a full year after the start of the financial crisis and10 months into the new administration.
In New York, the industry’s biggest challenges were around compliance and new technology and innovation. We think that FOSE attendees may have a new challenge this year, and see their challenge now as compliance around new technology. Consider the impact that cloud computing and virtualization has on FISMA compliance and reporting alone. In fact, we hope to see an increase in the importance of FISMA compliance among this year’s FOSE attendees. Last year only 87% of respondents said that FISMA and security information management are important to their operations, which was down slightly from 2008 where 91% cited FISMA as important. With all the impending changes to government IT operations on the horizon from 2010-2011, we hope that FISMA compliance remains a high priority for government agencies.
Green IT and virtualization also saw a nice increase from FOSE to Interop New York, with 76% at FOSE saying virtualization is important or very important, and 86% at Interop. 70% at Interop New York said that green IT was important to their business, while only 61% of agency IT personnel said that green IT was important to their organization. This year, I think we can expect another increase of importance for virtualization, particularly at FOSE where data center consolidation will be at an all-time high.
But seriously, given all of the non-stop media around cloud computing, we fully expect the cloud to take over our survey this year, especially at FOSE. And this is exciting for us as a company as well, because more and more government agencies are going to be seeking solutions that provide effective monitoring and management of public clouds, private clouds, and hybrid clouds. Companies like CA are snapping up management and monitoring tools faster than you can say “Nim…”. It’s an exciting time for our industry, and we’re looking forward to the new technologies ahead.
We will be at FOSE this year, so please stop by our booth (#2620) next week to complete our survey and receive a free t-shirt! We will also be there to showcase a special preview of our EM7 G3 Integration Server, which will provide a way for government agencies to monitor their public, private and hybrid clouds. Moving towards a government cloud? We’ll show you how to manage it all.
As any entrepreneur will tell you, it began with a dream. Three guys in a basement, trying to determine how to solve many of the challenges and pressure points that service providers were facing every day. We want to share with you over the coming days a little bit more about our story, the highlights and hilarity that go into building a company from the ground up.
First, the product.
EM7 was born out of necessity and passion for a solution that worked for service providers. Below are some videos that provide insight into why EM7 was created, and why an enterprise would choose EM7 G3 to monitor their entire network infrastructure. EM7 G3 considers other elements that are influencing the market such as ITIL and Gartner ITOM into the cloud.
From ScienceLogic Founder, Partner and CTO Chris Cordray:
The types of tools and best practices that are applied in the service provider world are incorporated into EM7. In most products that exist today, (they) don’t have have these types of tools, and those that do are usually expensive add-on modules or require more costly integration with other third party products which get very costly and untimely to try to implement. By building into the same repository, we thought efficiencies could be established from the workflow perspective that you don’t get from other tools. Plus you streamline some of the metadata that goes between some of these tasks including event information, workflow, help desk and asset information etc. This provides a richer IT management experience than disparate IT solutions that are siloed. That’s a major difference with our product.
Why would an enterprise choose EM7 G3? As large enterprises continue to evolve, they’re being run more and more as if they were an internal service provider for their constituents. They’re looking at best practices that have long been established by service providers in the market who have had to deal with thousands of customers. It helps with management, allocation, and justification of budget. As they do that, they need tools that can scale and that are proven in the field to help them scale and provide the types of services and reporting that EM7 G3 can provide. EM7 can work for enterprises as small as 200 servers or as large as 10,000 or even 100,000+ servers with multiple stacks.
Tomorrow, we’ll take a look at the founders of the company, where they came from and where they are headed.
NASA has postponed its $1.5 billion data center RFP to give it time to address be sure it takes advantage of opportunities to reduce energy costs and utilize innovations like cloud computing, green IT, virtualization and federal data center guidance in addition to meeting its business requirements. The announcement came on the same day federal CIO Vivek Kundra sent out a data center consolidation memo to agency CIOs. In 2008, it was reported that NASA had 15,000 servers and 75 data centers.
Other new data center news…the GSA is building a $62 million, 110,000 square-foot data center on 11 acres in Lakewood, Colorado. The project is funded by the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act and is scheduled to be completed by October 2011.
“It’s a hybrid world and it’s going to continue to be a hybrid world.” So says Cast Iron, a company that helps organizations integrate on-premise applications with cloud offerings. They cut through the debate about private vs. public cloud to get to the reality that most organizations will have a hybrid cloud – some combination of the two.
As organizations ponder their cloud strategies, IT operations is forewarned to ensure their cloud management strategy is also in place for their private, public or hybrid cloud environments. This week’s acquisition news is testament to the fact that some companies have to acquire and integrate tools to manage the cloud while some (hint, hint) were engineered from the start to manage the cloud.
Forrester Research predicts that not only will IT management software become financially aware and mature, but IT departments overall will more directly address the needs of the business as independent operational entities, not just cost centers.
The government is having a hard time finding candidates with the right mix of experience and skills for cybersecurity jobs. Sixty-one percent said they are looking for candidates skilled in certification and accreditation, a key aspect of FISMA.
Google introduced Google Apps Marketplace, its online store for developers of business apps. The site launched with apps from 50 companies and extends Google’s own online apps.
Wow, CA bought Nimsoft. So many thoughts swirled around in my head after hearing about this – from “what about all the product overlap?” to “CA? Really?”
I shouldn’t be so surprised. If you’ve been following the news in the last few months about CA’s recent acquisitions – 3Tera, NetQoS, Oblicore and kinda Cassatt – they’ve been positioning themselves to finally have a cloud story. Buying their way into a cloud story – the Big 4 way. (By the way, where is BMC in all of this? We, along with many others, joke about just calling it the Big 3 and getting it over with.) Or I should say their marketing folks have been positioning (and repositioning) these acquisitions for a cloud play. I can just see the Larry Ellison rant now…
So taken that way, the Nimsoft buy makes a lot of sense. Nimsoft has some probes for AWS and Salesforce and some nice app monitoring/end-user experience monitoring – and voila a cloud story.
When CA first suggested a conversation, I admit I had a brief moment of hesitation, but I quickly realized that this could be the perfect partner for Nimsoft and our customers.
And that’s it. After all the talking about eating the Big 4’s lunch – one sentence and a “brief moment of hesitation”. No mention of that “Big 4 alternative” in their many press releases. No mention of the new motto they had after buying Indicative,
The Big 4 promise. Nimsoft delivers.
What will their new new motto be? Perhaps “The Big 4 promise. Nimsoft – part of CA but not really because we’re independent – delivers.” It’s kinda long.
The whole reason ScienceLogic and our EM7 products exist is because of the first-hand frustration the founders had with Big 4 tools IT management tools. Do not underestimate the frustration of these Big 4 customers. Many of our customers specifically bought us because we weren’t the Big 4 – they had had such a bad experience. And now, no matter how you slice it, Nimsoft is now a part of the Big 4 which has to translate to Big Problem. You have only to read the comments on Nimsoft CEO Gary Read’s blog post on it to see the reaction is not great. BTW, look at the comments from Nimsoft customers, not the ones by CA employees – as if I had to tell you that. And also, why are there so many defensive comments by CA employees? Gary Read has a response about CA not being the company that it was 10 years ago. Thank goodness for that, but Gary, you were bashing CA a month ago, not 10 years ago.
So I will be watching this 3-card monte game with interest going forward. Where is Nimsoft now? Upstart Big 4 alternative? Division (still not integrated) of CA? Or the third option which is TBD.
Last note: Full disclosure – selling out to a Big 4 company in particular is probably the most realistic exit for a company in our space. You have only to look at all the acquisitions. But did it have to be CA? A lot of people have referred to CA as ”where good companies go to die”. Concord. Wily. Spectrum….Nimsoft…
Wow, what a surprising news story as CA purchased Nimsoft yesterday evening. It is a very good news story for our industry. I admire CA’s strong acknowledgment that the IT Management industry is in the midst of a significant shift. History is repeating as we must look at the past 1960 – 1980’s when Mainframes were the dominant computing model to the late 1980’s – today as Moore’s law drove a huge shift to the distributed client server computing model. During that period, a new group of emerging tools grew around the need to model and manage a different set of operational challenges that Client Server computing demanded.
We heard from experts Phil Horvitz of Apptis and Tim Silk from Cisco Systems. The session focused on: the economics of cloud computing; how companies of all sizes and government agencies are benefiting from cloud computing; best use cases for cloud computing; private vs. public clouds; and, are whether or not security concerns about cloud computing were valid. We had some technical difficulties, so both presented on the fly minus their prepared powerpoint presentations. They did a great job!
Tim works at Cisco Federal and manages the data center team for the federal government and also works with the intelligence community. Phil is the CTO at Apptis and runs their advanced technology group to look at market trends. Cloud computing was identified as a mega-trend a few years ago, and Phil has been analyzing it ever since.
TIM SILK, CISCO
Tim kicked off by asking, “What are some things that come to mind with cloud computing?” Responses included: Salesforce, Webex, Google and Facebook.
We all relate to the services we use whether it’s collaboration, CRM, or email. From a technology perspective, virtualization has helped drive the cloud computing market. However, one distinction is that cloud computing provides cloud services (such as email, CRM, conferencing).
There are different service models for cloud computing. There are SaaS (Software as a Service) models like Salesforce, Webex’s Go-to-meeting and Gmail. There are also PaaS (Platform as a Service) such as Google, Microsoft, and Amazon EC2. Those are services where you have more customization and freedom. The last is IaaS (Infrastructure as a Service). These are companies that are like service providers, with large companies and large data centers that provide services (storage, bandwidth) to different organizations.
How do we deploy the cloud? What about private and public clouds? What about hybrid clouds? Community clouds are also looking at shared services between clouds. On-demand resources, scalable resources, security and privacy are all pros and cons of cloud computing.
Why would you or would you not use cloud computing? Cost is a big factor, you can subscribe to a cloud service without paying a lot. Flexibility is another factor, you can build your own infrastructure and allow yourself to be more flexible and do more with less.
Barriers to cloud computing. Security – is your data safe? Can others access it? Service Management and SLA’s are important from a service provider standpoint and offers more complexity to your cloud solution.
Interoperability will continue to be more important as more people step into the cloud. Having multiple clouds and sharing data will become a big issue as more companies and services utilize the cloud.
There are many barriers to leveraging cloud services. Security is a huge concern, but there is also the concept of building trust. There are four aspects to trust: security, control, compliance and service-level management. For security, we think of things like encryption and access control. Which leads to a need for overall control and the ability to know where, when and how data is stored. Compliance means meeting regulatory requirements as well as developing regulations that fit into a cloud paradigm. Think about NASA’s cloud, Nebula, as an example of a government agency that is building its own cloud because of the requirement to be FISMA compliant. SLA’s are always important in trusting that you are getting the services you expect. Sometimes though, a lot of government agencies are their own worst enemy when it comes to leveraging cloud services. The National Archives has very stringent data storage and record keeping requirements that may preclude it from using cloud services.
Data center consolidation is a trend that is becoming more popular. Data centers have grown out of control, and now need to be consolidated. Whether your goal is to save power and cooling or to control larger devices, implementing virtualization provides a solution for you to scale further. You can now have a virtual environment, but provide more flexible
Ever heard this story? The New York Times has an IT problem. They have 11 Million articles from 1845 to present that have to be scanned and put on the website. How did they do it efficiently? They used Amazon and commissioned multiple servers to handle the uploads, and the articles were up and running within 48 hours. That’s the power of the cloud. Efficiencies are at stake here. Cost is one, but also how quickly something can be up and running.
Phil considers cloud a mega-trend, something that comes along every ten years or so. The 2009 Gartner Technology Hype Cycle puts cloud computing at the top of its list for emerging technologies.
Some of his key points included:
What’s really pushing it and why is the government interested?
The 70/30 rule. In a normal IT shop, 70% of your time is spent on maintaining and 30% is spent on innovation. With cloud, this is switching.
Amazon’s Cloud Computing offering has now exceeded the bandwidth used from all their retail operations. In Q3 of 2009, Amazon’s S3 Storage growth reached 82 billion, with peak requests of 100,000 per second.
Forecast of federal IT spending from 2010-2015: 26 billion will be spent on the cloud. By 2015, that’s about $7M/year or about 10% of the federal IT Budget.
Challenges to cloud adoption? Security. The problem isn’t that you can’t secure it, it’s that the government guidelines were written before cloud computing came along. If you’re a CIO, the old way is easier. But now, OMB and the CIO are forcing agencies to be more efficient.
Procurement is another challenge. How do you buy cloud? Now you have to predict what your demands are going to be. How much bandwidth and storage will you need? What happens if you go over? GSA took a big step with apps.gov to answer those questions.
Overall, my takeaway was this: Cloud is here to stay. There are a lot of benefits, and it works to well not to take notice.
What are some of the factors you should consider when deciding whether to run your applications in-house, in a private or public cloud or on a hybrid cloud (a combination of private and public)? Some factors to consider:
Characteristics & processing requirements of the apps, like requirements for performance, storage, security, availability requirements, and SLAs
The mission-critical nature of the applications
The resource capacity available in the data center
Desired cost savings
Politics
Organizations are also warned to take into account the many ways that cloud computing, a technology designed to save IT resources, can unintentionally waste them.
The General Services Administration has cancelled its initial RFQ for cloud infrastructure (issued in July 2009) and is taking time to take a fresh approach. Dave McClure, associate administrator for GSA’s Office of Citizen Services and Communications, said 11 months in cloud computing time is really 11 years.
“The cloud market and services are dramatically changing at a very rapid pace. So, we thought it was prudent to kind of step back and see whether there were significant changes in the vendor and industry community, both in terms of the companies that are in the space now, the offerings — which are increasing — and the experience.”
Dave McClure
Meanwhile, former National Security Agency technical director Brian Snow, commenting at the RSA Conference said that while cloud infrastructure can deliver services customers can access securely, the shared nature of the cloud leaves doubts about attack channels through other users in the cloud. “You don’t know what else is cuddling up next to it,” he says. Funny that another panelist at the conference said he doesn’t trust clouds either, but his reluctance was based upon worry about what NSA might be up to.
You can get a quick update on the trial of Terry Childs. We’ve been following the trials and tribulations of the rogue network administrator who has been in jail a year and a half for locking co-workers out of critical IT systems.
Virtualization has come of age this year with more and more companies using the technology for server consolidation (and cost cutting) projects. The federal government is taking that a massive step forward with plans to consolidate more than 1,100 data centers, and cloud computing will have a major role in how this is achieved. Federal CIO Vivek Kundra is asking federal agencies to prepare an inventory of their assets before April 30. Kundra targets having a consolidation plan due by June 30 which will then be finalized by the end of the year. This is a major IT initiative for 2011 set forth by the Obama administration earlier this year, and the OMB will be working with agencies to reduce the size and cost of current data centers.
As for enterprises, this move makes sense on many different levels. Consolidating data centers will greatly decrease high costs of keeping up over 1,000 data centers and enable the government to act in a more efficient manner when it comes to their IT operations management. Running all these data centers requires over six billion kilowatt hours of energy (estimated to reach 12 billion kwH by 2012), and as is too often the case, the data centers are heavily underutilized. Some estimates by Kundra state that the data centers are using only 15-20% of their capacity. With virtualization and cloud computing, that’s a lot of room for improvement.
…in a smaller survey carried out last year, OMB discovered that the number of data centers has ballooned more than 150% in the last dozen years from 432 in 1998 to 1,100 in 2009. According to Kundra, agencies are only using 15 to 20% of the capacity of many of their data centers.
This initiative has large implications for service providers of data centers to the government- in particular it signals a major shift of IT investments to public and private clouds. Some agencies are already utilizing private clouds.
We’ll be interested to see what our own survey results say at FOSE about this new initiative. Will agencies be compliant and work towards a better goal? How will cloud computing impact agencies’ plans to consolidate their resources? And how fast will this happen? Our survey last year showed that cloud computing was at the very bottom of the list of important technologies; stay tuned for this year’s survey results because we’re betting they will be very different.
While it’s hard to gauge how much money private cloud providers are making, here are revenue numbers from some of the public companies that offer cloud computing services:
Salesforce.com – $1 billion in 2009
Amazon Web Services – less than $735 million (AWS revenue is clumped in the “other” category)
Microsoft is targeting the federal government with a new suite of productivity services offered via the cloud. The suite that includes email, calendar, collaboration and communication software has obtained a number of security and privacy certifications, but needs additional security mechanisms for agencies like DoD and NASA. Federal Vivek Kundra weighed in saying, “This is a huge opportunity to apply best practices from the private sector.”
Is EMC backing away from the IT management market? VMware is buying portions of EMC’s (its parent company) Ionix software business for up to $200 million. This latest twist is raising eyebrows and re-opening wounds surrounding Diane Greene’s ouster in July 2008.
As cloud computing arrives in the government space, the National Archive and Records Administration (NARA) is reminding agencies to consider the requirements around data retention and records transfer. NARA is concerned with the lack of formal technical standards about how data is stored and used in the cloud. Regulations include maintaining records so their functionality and integrity remain constant and that links between records and their metadata are maintained.
The Veterans Administration’s IT accountability program has saved $54 million from the budget for fiscal year 2010 by flagging problem projects and suspending them or getting them back on track. The Program Management Accountability System (PMAS) has proven so successful that it is being extended to all of its IT projects. While the VA is getting one of the government’s biggest budget increases, IT spending will remain flat.
IPv6 will be making its appearance on government networks soon and the National Institute of Standards and Technology is advising network engineers and administrators to familiarize themselves with the challenges of IPv6. According to NIST’s Guidelines for the Secure Deployment of IPv6, “IPv6 is not backwards-compatible with IPv4, which means organizations will have to change their network infrastructure and systems to deploy IPv6.”
What are some of the pitfalls to avoid when considering moving to the cloud?
Governance and security – don’t wait until deployment to consider
Big consulting – not knocking the big guys, but this is “newer” for everyone.
Keep your eye on the solution, not the technology – don’t be overwhelmed by the hype
Congratulations to our customer, CBTS (a division of Cincinnati Bell Inc.), for their recent launch of a new Enterprise Network and Operations Center (ENOC) in Mason, Ohio.
This state-of-the-art ENOC monitors and manages over 100,000 technology infrastructure devices and uses EM7 for integrated system, network and application management. CBTS has also been able to take their network monitoring solution global by using a centric location to support existing clients in the United States, Europe, Canada, Mexico, and Puerto Rico.
“We are extremely excited about the expansion of our operations and the ability to support our clients both domestically and globally. The organization will continue to invest based on our customers’ needs and objectives, as we are committed to having one of the most comprehensive support models in the market,” said John Burns, President of CBTS.
We love good news stories – especially ones about fast-growing customers that use EM7 to make sure they can grow just as fast as the business needs to.
As we come up on FOSE next week, we can’t help but wonder what changes we will see in how government agencies are approaching IT Operations management. With all of the talk about the cloud and data center consolidation, we expect cloud computing initiatives to be at an all-time high.
In New York, the industry’s biggest challenges were around compliance and new technology and innovation. We think that FOSE attendees may have a new challenge this year, and see their challenge now as compliance around new technology. Consider the impact that cloud computing and virtualization has on FISMA compliance and reporting alone. In fact, we hope to see an increase in the importance of FISMA compliance among this year’s FOSE attendees. Last year only 87% of respondents said that FISMA and security information management are important to their operations, which was down slightly from 2008 where 91% cited FISMA as important. With all the impending changes to government IT operations on the horizon from 2010-2011, we hope that FISMA compliance remains a high priority for government agencies.
Wow, CA bought Nimsoft. So many thoughts swirled around in my head after hearing about this – from “what about all the product overlap?” to “CA? Really?”
So I will be watching this 3-card monte game with interest going forward. Where is Nimsoft now? Upstart Big 4 alternative? Division (still not integrated) of CA? Or the third option which is TBD.
Virtualization has come of age this year with more and more companies using the technology for server consolidation (and cost cutting) projects. The federal government is taking that a massive step forward with plans to 
Congratulations to our customer, CBTS (a division of Cincinnati Bell Inc.), for their recent launch of a new Enterprise Network and Operations Center (ENOC) in Mason, Ohio.
