the way we see it
Changing The Game:
Monthly Technology Briefs
March 2008
Cloud Computing
Rethinking the role of Infrastructure
Read the Capgemini Chief Technology Officers’ Blog at
www.capgemini.com/ctoblog
Cloud Computing – Rethinking
the role of Infrastructure
IBM has just announced RESERVOIR—Resources and Services Virtualization without
Barriers—a 17 million Euro research contract with the EU to determine how “Cloud
Computing” will enable cross-border economic business. Meanwhile, the Amazon
Elastic Compute Cloud, also known as EC2, allows businesses to run their IT
systems—and in particular the online element of their IT infrastructure that does
business through Amazon—on what Google calls the “Operating System for Web-based
business” in Google provisioned Cloud Computing services at certain American
campuses. Steve Ballmer describes Cloud Computing as the basis for the soon to come
Microsoft Software as a Service (SaaS) products, referring to SaaS plus Cloud
Computing as “Software plus Services.” So what is Cloud Computing and is it linked to
Sun offering Grid Computing, and HP deploying its capabilities as Utility Computing?
Wikipedia offers the practical explanation that Cloud Computing is a general label for
many different approaches to the use of shared computing resources rather than having
local or personal devices handling users’ applications. This explanation therefore covers
both Grid and Utility Computing and could be said to be inclusive of Virtualization as
well, whereas in fact there are several different approaches as to how Cloud Computing
capability is built and operates. It is easier to start with what requires this type of shared
computing resources approach.
Originally, researchers at universities needing to complete massive computational tasks
dreamed of parceling the work among many different computers at different
universities to effectively create a super computer of pooled resources. The concept was
called a Grid and was based on visualizing electrical distribution and supply with
connections to both users and generators in the pooled capacity. From this early start
came the Globus Consortium which offers the Globus Toolkit based on Open Source
development. It provides a standard way for both major computational devices and
users to be interfaced to the Grid of Internet connections. Grid Computing is therefore
alive and well in areas such as physics and 3D modeling, both at universities and at
certain industry research centers. Sun continues to support its extensive user base,
offering Grid Computing services to allow users to pay for computational power “on
demand” by the MIPS, reinforcing its slogan that the Network is the Computer.
The rise of Web Services and Web 2.0 reverses the requirement from one big task
shared over many machines to many small tasks running in an unpredictable demand
pattern, often across multiple sites on the Internet. The Cloud Definition is most widely
used to explain how to resource rapidly rising demand, with early pioneers such as
Google and Amazon designing their own solution to a previously unforeseen scaling
problem. Having found a solution, they (as well as other players in this segment) have
gone on to offer their facilities to others, particularly to those who are trading with
them as partners. In Amazon’s case, Cloud Computing facilities ensure that merchants
selling through Amazon can support trading surges for their products without
overloading and failing. In Google’s case it wants to offer Cloud Computing services to
drive more usage of its capabilities such as Google Earth and Google Maps in mashups
used by transport companies, emergency services, etc.
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the way we see it
Cloud Computing architecture is a massive network of interconnected servers
running in parallel, sometimes with virtualization employed to optimize each
individual server, and often including storage facilities known as Cloud Storage.
This is front ended by a separate software layer that receives requests from users
via a services catalog, which in turn invokes the provisioning tool to find the
requested service or the capacity to run the service (if it also provides a deployed
image to establish the service). This entire process is supervised by a set of
services that monitor, meter and manage, allowing individual servers to be
autonomic and self managing in terms of their own internal operation, or allowing
clusters of services to be managed as a common unit in a pool.
The final test that defines Cloud Computing is whether these services are
managed automatically and without human intervention, supporting any number
of changes in accepting and understanding parameters like “Who?” “How?” and
“For what?” If it qualifies, it can then be described as a “cloud.” If manual change
management is still required then it is nothing but a data center! The current
trend towards “agile” computing, meaning the ability to support more calls for
change, more often from the business side, is now increasingly shifting towards a
new generation of “Services,” which can be re-orchestrated by users via “drag and
drop” interfaces. This shift is making Cloud Computing a very necessary change
in how Infrastructure is provisioned.
There is much in terms of standards for Web Services that exists for this reason,
with core technical specifications such as: WS-DL defining how a set of messages
interact with a service, WS-Security covering secure access, and further a group
whose titles are self explanatory; WS-Addressing, WS-Resource Framework, WS
Notifications, etc. Taken together with Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), they
are all designed to change the computing environment from “vertical” silo stacks
to horizontal processes linking loosely coupled services together. Hence, the
comment from Steve Ballmer that it is (functional) software plus services that have
to be supported and hence the reason why a cloud computing environment is
required. Capgemini defines this as the “Hidden Infostructure” that is different
and more complex than the current largely hardware-based infrastructure, but at
the same time is effectively invisible, as it handles changes in both volumes of
users and types of requirements automatically. The same reasoning leads HP to
call it a “Utility Computing” model.
The impact of this and other technologies are discussed in the Capgemini CTO blog
Changing The Game: Monthly Technology Briefs (March 2008) 2
Leading Company Results (Revenues)
Leading Company Results (Revenues)
Full Sybase 17% @ $1.03bn Yahoo! 8% @ $6.6bn EMC 19% @ $3.23bn
Year: VMware 88% @ $1.33bn Atos Origin 8.5% @ Euro SAS 15% @ $2.15bn
SAP 10% @ Euro 10.23bn 5.8bn
EDS 3% @ $22.1bn Capgemini 17% @ $8.7bn
Q4: Sybase 15% @ $295.2mn Yahoo! 8% @ $1.7bn VMware 80% @
Google 56% @ $16.6bn Vodafone 15.8% @ $9.2bn $412mn
EDS 2% @ $5.83bn
Q3: Lenovo 15% @ $4.6bn CSC 14% @ $4.16bn Tata 37% @ $1.5mn
CA 10% @ $1.1bn
Q2: Microsoft 30% @ $16.37bn
Q1: Apple 35% @ $9.6bn Siemens 10% @ Euro
18.4bn
Movements by Industry Leaders
Cisco has introduced its highest performance Adaptive Security Appliance—the
ASA 5580—as well as a “next generation platform” for data centers in its new
Nexus 7000 series to fulfill the Cisco Data Center 3.0 vision. www.cisco.com
Oracle Self Service E-Billing 6.0 has been released adding more functionality to
the Oracle capability for electronic bill paying. Oracle Database Vault is now
certified for use with the E-Business suite to provide best practices in managing
secure information used in online environments. JD Edwards EntepriseOne Tools
8.97 has been released to broaden customers’ choice of how they can choose and
use different platforms. 49 new Oracle Accelerate Solutions have been added to
bring the total to nearly 100, covering 16 industries and 41 industry segments.
Oracle Identity Manager Version 9.1 updates capabilities to comply with
regulations and conduct audits, and adds features to improve integration of
identity with processes. www.oracle.com
Sun is to purchase desktop virtualization vendor Innotek, saying this would
extend the Sun xVM platform range on to desktops using the Innotek VirtualBox
technology. www.sun.com
HP is acquiring Exstream, a software vendor of print and online communication
products, and is adding it to its Imaging and Print Group. HP and Intel have
shown two new PCs, DC 5800 and DC 7800, designed for maximum energy
effectiveness including auto shutdown as well as solid state drives for storage.
Three new thin client terminals provide access for users requiring virtual or web-
based desktops with a mobile laptop version, the HP 6720t, a first from HP. HP
ProCurve range gains five new enterprise edge switches, all giving 10/100Mbit
plus gigabit connectivity; two with Power over Ethernet (PoE), two without, and
one unit is fanless. www.hp.com
Intel Dual Socket Extreme Desktop Platform, code named Skulltrial, with two
Intel quad cores providing eight processing engines with a choice of multi-card
graphics is now available as the ultra high-end gaming PC. www.intel.com
IBM has a new beta SaaS called Bluehouse, a web-delivered service that provides
extranet services to SMEs to allow them to collaborate securely. Lotus Mashups is a
commercial product aimed at allowing a non-technology user to create their own
enterprise quality mashups without needing any help from the IT department.
Lenovo is to manufacture IBM x86 servers under license, though IBM was quick to
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the way we see it
point out that it is not quitting the server business. IBM is to add a new SME-targeted
server line called PowerVM Express to replace conventional servers with a fully
virtualized environment. A range of new joint IBM–Cognos products have been
released to offer users—ranging from SMEs to large enterprises—the benefit of an
integrated environment to improve their Business Intelligence capabilities.
www.ibm.com
Microsoft has made an offer to buy Yahoo! at a premium price, offering cash or
Microsoft shares in a move that would provide a search engine competitor to
challenge Google and boost Microsoft’s position in the smart phone market where
Yahoo! is the dominant player. Yahoo! rejected the offer and Microsoft has
committed to a hostile takeover. MSN Video has new video content deals with
MTV and Sony BMG as part of a new strategy to increase its offerings. A sixth
research lab is to be opened in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in July to “interact”
with the large community of scientists in the area. A standalone version of
Outlook with a Business Contact Manager will be available to small businesses to
avoid them having to buy and maintain an entire Office 2007 suite. The release of
Dynamics CRM 4.0 takes Microsoft into Web-based business applications, though
currently without a directly hosted SaaS option. Mobile Software vendor Danger
has been acquired to add its Web-based personal services to the Microsoft mobile
phone suite. Microsoft has stated it will make a massive shift in its position on
interoperability with a major program to open up and document its APIs and
Communication protocols, with an intention to support open standards more
widely. www.microsoft.com
SAP is partnering with IBM to integrate Lotus Suite in a project codenamed “Atlantic”
that will allow Lotus clients to access and work within SAP workflow, reporting and
analytics in a native manner, similar to the partnership with Microsoft which
produced the Duet products. The release of Business Objects XI 3.0 brings
information and people together in a fully integrated manner with the SAP emphasis
of process linked in as well. www.sap.com
Google has added a Social Graph API to help social network software developers
to build in such a way that social networkers can use their applications when they
join a new site without having to reregister and set up their applications again.
Three new online email security and archiving packages have been added to the
Google Apps platform using the technology acquired from the Postini acquisition.
A new version of the SDK for the Android mobile phone platform adds a new
user interface, more media and animations, as well as location-based GeoCoder
functions. Google is offering three experimental search modes to allow users to try
different ways to use searches and returns: Mode 1 only returns searches if there is
a Google map location; Mode 2 groups results on a timeline and is designed for
historical research; Mode 3 called InfoView adds to a normal search page a box
with dates, measurement and images from the results. A new pilot in Healthcare
allows 10,000 patients of the Cleveland Clinic in the USA to own, administer and
share their health records with their physician using software services developed
by Google. www.google.com
What’s Happening with Standards
The World Wide Web consortium (W3C) has published a draft of HTML5, a first
revision to the widely used specification since 1997 created by more than 500
participating companies. The aim of the new version is to make “an open royalty
free specification for rich web content and web applications.”
http://www.w3.org/html/wg/html5/
A Web 2.0 security forum is being launched by ten major companies including
Credit Suisse, Reuters and Standard Chartered, stating that this is a necessary step
in the adoption of the new technology. Microsoft and IBM already have deployed
social networking as an internal support function for their businesses.
http://www.continuitycentral.com/news03745.htm
Changing The Game: Monthly Technology Briefs (March 2008) 4
Open Source Update
openSUSE Build Service framework has been extended to support Red Hat
Enterprise Linux and CentOS, proving that its aim to encourage developers to
compile packages to cover multiple Linux distributions is working.
http://en.opensuse.org/Build_Service
Sun is offering $1 million in prizes in six competitions of $175,000 each in an
attempt to encourage more open source developers to work with Sun.
www.sun.com
Novell has acquired open source team collaboration provider SiteScape, founder
of the ICEcore project that helps developers to manage projects including Web
2.0 and IM capabilities. www.novell.com
Red Hat JBoss Enterprise SOA Platform is claimed as the first Open Source SOA
built by combining software from all other open source projects that Red Hat
considers part of a SOA environment into a single distribution. In addition,
tighter integration with the SeeWhy Software event Intelligence platform is being
provided to help with real time event tracking. www.redhat.com
Mozilla Foundation Messaging Subsidiary is now officially launched and has taken
over responsibility for the development of the Thunderbird 3 email platform,
which is based on the Mozilla Firefox web browser. Mozilla Firefox beta 3 has
been released adding a more secure environment, some technical improvements,
as well as user benefits. www.mozilla.org
AMD is making its performance library with 3200 routines that developers can
use to take advantage of the advanced multi-threading and core capabilities of
AMD chips available as open source. www.amd.com
More Noteworthy News
Gartner CIO report “The 2008 CIO Agenda” based on surveying 1500 CIOs
globally, says 85% expect “significant change” in the next three years, with
innovation being the third highest interest after Business Intelligence and Business
Process Improvement. www.gartner.com
Adobe has previewed Flash Server 3.0, offering two versions with a low-end SME
version called Flash Media Streaming Server, and a high-end version, Flash Media
Interactive Streaming Server, which adds Digital Rights Management (DRM); both
support the Flash Lite mobile plugin and Adobe Air software which supports
offline use of Web-based Flash applications. www.adobe.com
Amazon is to make Amazon MP3 music sales without DRM limitations available
on a worldwide basis, claiming the support of big music companies and 33,000
independent labels to provide the content for download sales. www.amazon.com
Nokia has acquired Trolltech whose QT technology for cross-platform application
frameworks and development tools is used widely with customers including
Adobe, Google, Motorola and the Open Source community. www.nokia.com
Vodafone Internet Services has been set up as a new division to focus on
consumer Web services taking over the current Vodafone Web products, as well as
developing new products and services under Senior Vice President Pieter Knook
who joins from Microsoft. Trials of 28Mbits hotspot next generation HSPA
wireless technology will be starting in London in a pilot with Ericsson, Huawei,
and Qualcomm. www.vodafone.com
CA Mainframe Suite updates capabilities for managing all aspects of mainframes
with particular emphasis on new uses where the Mainframe controls multiple
Operating Systems and images. www.ca.com
The World Economic Forum after the DAVOS event has published its report
stating “User-centric technologies, crowd-sourcing, shared working practices:
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the way we see it
next-generation collaboration tools such as these may be in their infancy, but they
will change the business of business forever.”
http://www.weforum.org/en/index.htm
MySpace Developer Platform is now up and running providing developers with
APIs and testing tools including the OpenSocial API standards to challenge the
increasing dominance of Facebook. www.facebook.com
Yahoo! board said initially it would consider (but later rejected) the unsolicited
bid of $44bn from Microsoft stating they would “evaluate this proposal carefully
and promptly in the context of Yahoo!'s strategic plans and pursue the best course
of action to maximize long-term value for shareholders.” In a planned series of
moves started last year to consolidate operations, Yahoo! is to end its Music
Unlimited service and transfer existing customers to RealNetworks Rhapsody
offering. Yahoo Web Hosting Services for small businesses will now offer
unlimited disk space, data transfers, and e-mail storage for a single flat fee.
www.yahoo.com
Dell is adding Equalogic PS5000 series, a new mid-market storage range based on
products gained from its acquisition of Equalogic. www.dell.com
Workday, a provider of SaaS, has acquired CapeClear, provider of Enterprise
Service Bus software, for integration of SOA services in a move described as
overcoming the major barrier to SaaS which is integration to whatever the client
already has in place. www.workday.com
Apple is upping the memory in iPhones and iPod Touch ranges to 16GB in the
iPhone and 32GB in the iPod Touch. www.apple.com
BEA has a new assessment tool to rate Business Process Management (BPM) in the
form of a five page, twenty-two item questionnaire. www.bea.com
Salesforce.com will be moving into Content Management, offering a SaaS service
for searching, managing and versioning unstructured data based on Web 2.0 style
tagging and folksonomy methods as opposed to traditional taxonomy approaches.
http://www.salesforce.com/
Tibico ActiveMatrix 2.0 aims to provide a new collaborative approach to SOA, by
allowing all participants from business to technology—internal as well as
external—to manage the design, policy management, registry, and general
governance. www.tibco.com
SCO is back as a private company supporting its UNIX and other products,
following an injection of cash from private equity that takes it out of Chapter 11
and back to being a technology software vendor. www.sco.com
Unisys is moving to a “services-led” strategy focusing on the provisioning and
management of “real time infrastructure” as a major departure from its hardware
and outsourcing focus in the past. www.unisys.com
Sybase has released Adaptive Server Cluster (ASC) to provide savings in
infrastructure by running Sybase database in a more efficient clustered format.
www.sybase.com
Changing The Game: Monthly Technology Briefs (March 2008) 6
www.capgemini.com/ctoblog
About Capgemini and the
Collaborative Business Experience
Capgemini, one of the —and through a global delivery model
world’s foremost providers called Rightshore®, which aims to offer
of consulting, technology and the right resources in the right location at
outsourcing services, enables its clients to competitive cost. Present in 36 countries,
transform and perform through Capgemini reported 2007 global revenues
technologies. Capgemini provides its of EUR 8.7 billion and employs over
clients with insights and capabilities that 83,000 people worldwide.
boost their freedom to achieve superior
results through a unique way of working More information is available at
—the Collaborative Business Experience www.capgemini.com.
Andy Mulholland
Global Chief Technology Officer, Capgemini
Tel: +44 (0)207 434 2171
andy.mulholland@capgemini.com