Views from Around the World

I had a great conversation with Jason Dea of Platespin recently. Jason is a self-described (darn accurately I think) evangelist for all things from this important part of Novell. We were talking about the directionality of the whole virtualization space and came up with a metaphor I want to share with you.

Jason has a nice chart that ties together three gears, Transformation, Optimization and Protection around a larger central gear that contains three business values. They are Cost, Risk and Performance. In our conversation we concluded that what is meant here is Cost Management and Reduction, Risk Mitigation and Reducing Complexity thereby improving Performance. So his thoughts on workload management bind exactly to the value proposition we elocute around Making IT Work As One.

The metaphor is one of a train going from city to city, where each city brings new challenges and opportunities. So sit back and let me tell you a story.

We boarded a train that has departed Transformationville. There was a giant billboard in Transformationville that proclaimed the values of Partitioning, Isolation, Encapsulation and Hardware Independence. It had wonderful resonance and virtualization became commonplace and accepted, the process of transformation became highly commoditized with market leaders such as VMWare offering basic transformation service at no cost to the client. Customers in Transformationville soon discovered that virtualization itself didn’t solve business problems. They now had both physical and virtual workloads in place, and while they had saved some money on physical architecture, management costs were the same and both risk and complexity had increased. Transformationville was an interesting place to visit, but it was only the first stop on the line to value.

Our train has entered the eastern suburbs of Optimizationburg. There’s plenty of awareness of the need to optimize our Data Center environments and numerous solutions are leaping out in front of us. At our first stop in Optimizationburg we enter a crowded marketplace where lots of vendors are hawking their wares, but most of them lack dimensionality and many are one trick ponys. As we shop the market we find only a couple of answers that really focus on the business issues. One of the vendors has a storefront called Novell, and inside we see some very innovative and cost effective solutions with the label Platespin on them that help customers who’ve already bought big pieces from the VMWare store just up the block. There are other smaller stores as well that we remember from Transformationville. They include KVMeverywhere, the XENshoppe and VirtualBoxStore. They carry interesting wares but don’t seem yet to have the hooks to really make it in Optimizationburg, although the XENshoppe is carrying many products from a variety of providers that deliver similar services and seems to be getting some real world traction. There’s another storefront under renovation marked with an old MS Virtual Server sign, but no one seems to be going in although many are looking at it.

We re-board the train and as we travel through to the western boundary of Optimizationburg we stop at another marketplace that is only just being completed. There are fewer stores in this market. Many of the small point sellers are nowhere to be found but VMWare continues to have a big store, the Novell store is larger carrying more inventory with more scope and scale and also now sells appliances to make disaster recovery simpler. There’s a new store on the block as well with a sign that says Microsoft. Mostly it contains the kind of things that have been successful in Transformationville, but there is a great deal of promise of new solutions to come that will be very valuable to the citizens of Optimizationburg as well as those environs that don’t have local data centers, instead needing to transform to and optimize in a growing town called Cloud. One older fellow with white hair and small round glasses keeps referring to this new town as Bespin, but no one seems to understand.

We’re here now, but we also know that our train will depart soon on a journey of some length to Protection City. We’ve never been there but the news we read tells us that there will be another mall to shop in there with a large VMWare store, a very large Microsoft store and a number of smaller stores selling wares that improve the experience of the products in the other store. The people at the Novell store show us items that would sell very well today in the giant mall of Protection City, and encourage us to think about them well in advance of arriving there, because by then, the risk of insufficient protection will have become very great, and the impact of the growing Regional Municipality of Cloud will be enormous. They also encourage us to think about the power of Orchestration, the ability to provide automation and policy orientation to the ideas that will grow Protection City.

I hope you enjoyed the story, and like many stories there is a moral to it. When we look at the Data Centers our customer’s are building, they will be even more heterogeneous than what we see today. VMWare, Microsoft, XEN, Citrix and Novell will all have a place there. More importantly, it will be evident that the Novell Platespin brand will have enormous credibility because it will bridge the physical and virtual needs of VMWare, Hyper-V and XEN with comprehensive tools to deliver real business value. Some folks think that Virtualization is as disruptive a force as the Internet. What I do know is that it has enormous momentum and that by getting on the wave generated we can move faster and with more impact.

Some people choose to think that the future is already made. I invite you to choose to make the future by engaging in the present.

Until next time, peace.

Last post, I wrote that this is the year for Compliance and Governance.  No surprises in the premise and no arguments from readers.  Since then, I’ve had the opportunity to represent Novell in a series of roundtables around Compliance.  We promised attendees confidentiality so I won’t name names, but in each of the sessions there was consistency that I would like to share with you.

Compliance is viewed mostly still in the form of a threat.  This is not surprising.  In fact, Kevin Coppins our VP of Identity and Security Sales for the Americas has shared in chats and messages that this is normal.  In the book SAP GRC for Dummies (good primer despite the title), the authors refer to three phases for compliance implementation.

In phase one, it’s comply at any cost.  Historically this has been done manually with people figuring things out as they go along and really making best efforts.  It’s the sense of threat that drives the organization.

In phase two, the organizations start to rationalize the approach from a cost and control perspective.  This is where most organizations are beginning today.  The clear message is that “we no longer have the people capacity we used to have, and the rules and regulations change”.  The new US administration has already announced that they will be creating new compliance regulations that have “teeth”.  The challenge facing these organizations is that if they lose the people, they haven’t created an intellectual respository of what they do, how they respond, and made it easy for someone to come in green and be up to speed very quickly.

In phase three, the burdens on the organization are reduced through automation.  We are ideally positioned to deliver at this level.

Our opportunity is to understand that the sample audiences we talk to are likely indicative of where the market we attach with is living.  If this is true, and I believe it is, our ability to step in at the beginning of phase two and accelerate the passage through it to phase three has tangible value.  The rationale for this is what I see when talking to customers and prospects, which is another three phase process that maps to the process documented in the GRC book I have referenced.  When we get down to brass tacks, the phases are manual threat response, documentation and policy creation and acceptance and third, and most powerful, using compliance as a value to the business, effectively leveraging the ability to take compliance and make it a business value proposition both internally and externally.

I don’t see messaging of this type from the other vendors, yet it’s what customers and prospects want to hear, that someone can get them to value faster, with less cost and less pain.

Novell can do this.  So let’s do so.

Until next time, peace.

Ross