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BPM 2010 in North America For The First Time

The past couple of years, I’ve been attending the academic/research BPM conference – BPM 2008 in Milan, BPM 2009 in Ulm – where BPM researchers from corporate research facilities and universities present papers and findings all about BPM. This is BPM of the future, and if you’re interested in where BPM is going, you should be there, too. This year, for the first time, it’s in North America, hosted by the Stevens Institute in Hoboken, NJ, which provides an opportunity to participate for those of us on this side of the pond with little travel budget. Before you look at my coverage from previous years and cringe in horror at the descriptions of papers rife with statistical analysis, keep in mind that this year there will also be an industry track in addition to the educational paper track, showcasing some of the more practical aspects.

If you’re a BPM vendor, you should be sending along people from your architecture and development labs who are thinking about future generations of your product: they will definitely come away with valuable ideas and contacts. You might even find yourself a smart young Ph.D. candidate with research that specifically matches your interests. If you have your own research that you’d like to share, there’s still time to submit a paper for one of the pre-conference workshops.

Vendors, you should also consider sponsoring the conference: this is a prestigious place to have your name associated with BPM, and is likely to have more lasting benefits than sponsoring your standard BPM dog-and-pony show. You can find out more about sponsorship opportunities here. Tell Michael that I sent you. 🙂

PegaWORLD: Medco’s Business Transformation

Kenny Klepper, president of Medco Health, gave a keynote on their business transformation, and how Pega has played a part in that. Personalized medicine is at the core of their strategy; that concept, plus their rapid change and growth through acquisition makes business agility a critical competency. They are looking at how to make medicine smarter through delivering pharmaceutical care as well as ongoing genetic research, particularly for patients with chronic and/or complex conditions. Since poor management of chronic and complex diseases leads to $350B in excess healthcare costs each year in the US, getting a better handle on this is important for the patients, for healthcare providers and ultimately (given the new healthcare bill in the US) on everyone in the country via tax burden. This isn’t about reducing care: it’s about making sure that the right people are getting the right care in order to prevent future problems.

Shifting focus to agile enterprises, he talked about the necessity of agility in order to address changing requirements, and to reduce operating expenses. He sees high operational expenses as an indicator of lack of agility in an enterprise, and hence agility as a primary way to drive down operating expenses. An agile enterprise needs to have a strong underlying technology platform to allow new applications to be built and deployed with a minimum of new investment: their architecture includes a data warehouse, a data management layer, data “fabric”, a service bus, and application frameworks on top of all of that. That provides wide access to information – no one needs to reinvent data access protocols, for example – and allows business applications to be built easily and quickly (using Pega) on top of the stack. As their business becomes more complex, expanding across lines of business and new markets, they are focusing on the common core processes across those lines, and aligning centers of excellence with those horizontal business processes, not just on lines of business or technologies. This shifts the “hot spot” issues from those processes into the CoEs (e.g., an order processing CoE), providing a single source for resolving problems in similar processes across the entire organization. This, plus the fact that they allocate budgets to the joint control of business and IT (redeploying many IT people to the business-focused CoEs), enables real business-IT alignment.

Klepper noted that the more legacy-bound that your organization is, the harder it is for individual operating units to achieve their goals, and the more conflict there is within IT for competing resources. Their focus, however, is on productivity: he considers that they get Agile methods for free by focusing on the ROI of reducing operational costs through the business applications that they create. To achieve this, however, a key focus for any change agent is on sustaining sponsorship: you can’t keep these initiatives going unless you can successfully sell them internally.

This wasn’t at all a technical talk on how Medco uses Pega; rather, it was a call to arms for the agile enterprise. I hope that some of the attendees, mired in legacy-bound conservative industries, got the message.

Conference Season Begins

It’s been quiet for several months for conferences, but things are heating up again for the next four weeks. Here’s my upcoming schedule:

This week, I’m at PegaWorld in Philadelphia, including chairing a workshop on Wednesday morning on case management
The week of May 3rd, IBM Impact in Las Vegas
The week of May 10th, TIBCO’s TUCON in Las Vegas
The week of May 17th, SAP SAPPHIRE in Orlando

If you’re attending any of these events, be sure to look me up. I’ll be blogging from all of them. You can find these, and many other BPM-related events, at the BPM Events calendar. If you have an event to add to the calendar, just let me know.

Disclosure: each of the vendors pays my travel expenses for me to attend their user conference. They do not, however, have any editorial control over what I write while at the conference.

Not Dead, Just Resting

Thanks to all who have noticed my lack of online participation this week and wondered if all is okay. I was downed by a nasty headcold/flu/plague, and have spent most of the week either coughing or sleeping. I appear to be on the mend, since I’ve been able to remain vertical for a couple of hours to return urgent emails and voice mails, but don’t expect me back to usual form until next week since I plan to be horizontal again really soon.

Unfortunately, this meant that I missed out on Monday’s Toronto Girl Geek Dinner, Tuesday’s CloupCamp, dinner last night with the good folks from the Business Rules Forum who were in town this week, and the talk about social BPM that I was scheduled to give today on Craig Cmehil’s Friday Morning Report 24-hour marathon. 🙁

Blogging and a Knowledge Scarcity Model Don’t Mix

I recently swapped around my office space, and found some old (paper) notebooks that I browsed through before shredding. One of them, from 2006, contained a page of notes that I jotted down about why consultants don’t blog:

Not enough time
Too few “outside” interests (aside from proprietary customer work), hence nothing interesting to blog about
Knowledge scarcity model

Taking these points one at a time, I consider the time that I put into blogging as part of my marketing budget (if I had such a thing), since most of my new business comes to me because someone reads my blog and thinks that I have something to add to their projects. I also consider it a valuable part of my business social networking, providing a way for me to connect with others to exchange opinions or just build those weak ties that come in handy when you least expect it. It’s also, in some cases, a public version of my note-taking – especially the conference posts – that I often refer back to when I know that I wrote about something, but can’t recall when or where. For all of these reasons, the time that I have spent blogging has paid for itself many times over in revenue, relationships and research.

On the second point, there’s always something that you can write about that has nothing to do with the proprietary work that you do for your customers, but would serve you in the ways that I mention above. Generic technology or management research or readings that you’ve done are always a good place to start; product reviews; links to and comments on interesting posts in your fields; even topics that aren’t directly related to your work but that you find interesting. If your customer has a great case study that they’d like to brag about, you can even include that. The important part is to write about what you’re passionate about, those little things that make you love your job.

The most common reason that I hear from consultants on why they don’t blog – and what clearly drives the mostly content-free blogs that we see from the big analyst firms – is that they’re afraid of people stealing their ideas, especially if they think that they can sell those ideas. To quote my friend Sacha:

If the thought of people stealing your ideas is what’s stopping you from thinking out loud on a blog, you’re not alone. It’s a valid fear. If you’re afraid of your ideas being stolen, your mindset is probably that of knowledge scarcity – that you should hoard knowledge because that’s what gives you power. That makes sense to a lot of people.

Another mindset is that of knowledge abundance. There are plenty of ideas to go around, and sharing knowledge gives you power. That makes sense to a lot of people, too.

She goes on to discuss the value of openly sharing ideas: practice in communicating those ideas, questions and challenges that help you refine those ideas, and the networking and reputation effects.

What I see happening with people who operate in a knowledge scarcity model is that they tend to blog about things on which they don’t place much value, since they don’t want to “give away” their really good stuff. However, this results in a negative feedback loop: your audience knows that you’re feeding them crap, and they tune out. In other words, if you think of knowledge as scarce, then your blog is not going to be very successful. It doesn’t mean that your business won’t be, but failure to share makes for an unpalatable blog.

I tend to operate in a knowledge abundance model: there are a lot of people out there with great ideas too, so let’s share them and make something even better. More importantly, however, my knowledge isn’t some limited bit of intellectual property that I invented in the past and have to horde only for my paying customers: I generate new knowledge every day, every time that I talk to someone or read something interesting or have a new experience. In other words, although I might be judged on the basis of what I’ve done in the past, the real value that I bring is the ability to create new knowledge going forward.

OpenApps at DemoCamp 26: Easy Functional Extensions of Your Website

Last night was DemoCamp 26: a forum for people to show off whatever they have to demo. It’s a good way to network with the tech community in Toronto, and see emerging new applications often before they even launch. We started with a keynote from April Dunford on lean marketing, a topic that many of the startups attending were taking to heart, before we moved on to the demos.

The first demo was by Krispy, a long-standing member of the TorCamp community (and a serial presenter at DemoCamp), announcing the beta launch of his latest project, OpenApps. OpenApps is a platform for you to add applications to your website without writing code, or even having to edit your site at all. Their app store has both free and paid (monthly subscription) apps, and an open model to allow developers to add their own apps.

In the beta release, there is a fairly small set of apps – Bing and Yahoo search, comparison shopping with Shopping.com, news/topic search with Daylife.com, Oodle Classifieds, and Twitter user/topic searches – but they list a number of other potential apps such as zip/postal code lookups. The best way to understand it, however, is to try it out. I did this in about 3 minutes (although, to be fair, I had seen Krispy demo this last night).

First, go to OpenApps and sign up for a free account, which requires only your email address and a password:

Next, go to the App Store to see the list of available apps; you can click on one to see more details about it, such as the Daylife app for adding news and other relevant content based on keywords:

Click on “Try this app” to fill in the parameters for adding this app to your site. Shown below, I changed the “App Name” field to “BPM news”, specified the keyword “BPM” and – this is the magic part – told it to adopt the look and feel of www.column2.com:

I clicked on “Preview”, and this is what was generated:

Click through for the full-size image, and you’ll see that OpenApps has replicated the look and feel of Column 2 (which is built on WordPress), including my header, sidebar and styles, and inserted the Daylife page based on the BPM keyword into the content portion of the page. Very, very cool.

To be able to publish this, I filled out the subdomain section of the application parameters, and changed my DNS to create a CNAME record “news” to point that subdomain to OpenApps, but they even provide links to step-by-step instructions from some of the popular domain registrars on how to do this. That took me another minute. I also had to sign up for a Daylife API key so that I could publish their content. There went another minute. That produced a page, news.column2.com, publishing Daylife content based on the BPM keyword, that appears to be part of my site, all done in about 5 minutes (plus wait time for DNS propagation and Daylife API account approval).

The page, of course, isn’t really on my site. The DNS change means that that URL redirects to OpenApps for the presentation, with the app content section redirected to Daylife. Still, it’s all pretty seamless. The magic part of OpenApps, where they make it look like my existing site, has to do with their technology to auto-locate the injection point for content for a number of common web content management systems, including WordPress, Joomla, Typepad, Movable Type, Drupal and Blogger; there are also methods to use a more complex manual detection process based on the page elements if you’re not using one of those platforms, or are using them in a non-standard way.

OpenApps is free to use; Krispy told us that developers who create apps for their app store retain 70% of the revenue, meaning that OpenApps is monetizing on the 30% commission that they charge to the app developers.

Wiki Tuesday: Wikis at RBC

Yes, I know that today is not Tuesday, but this is about our previous Toronto Wiki Tuesday, a monthly meetup where we have a presentation on wikis, lift a few pints and hobnob with wiki specialists such as Martin Cleaver (who also organizes Wiki Tuesdays) and Mike Dover (responsible for the research behind Wikinomics, and co-author of the upcoming Wikibrands).

The presenter at this session was Tim Hanlon from Royal Bank of Canada, talking about RBC’s journey and future plans with wikis inside the bank. He’s part of the Applied Innovation team, who are tasked with identifying and applying emerging technologies: a sort of center of excellence for technology innovation. They’re within the Technology and Operations area, but half of their team is technical and half business, with a collection of skills that is very similar to a typical CoE.

First, a short lesson on Canadian banks: we only have five, they’ve been around since before Canada was a country, they don’t take a lot of risks, they own all aspects of our financial life, and RBC is the biggest. As you can imagine, wiki adoption in a large, conservative enterprise that’s been around for 150 years poses a few cultural challenges. I did a near full-time contract in part of RBC in 2003-4, and spent some time pushing the use of SharePoint (the only thing available internally) to get people collaborating, so I can appreciate some of the struggles that they’re having with the same culture and bit newer technology.

Hanlon outlined their progress to date:

In 2006, wiki functionality was enabled in SharePoint, but there was no widespread education about its use or benefits, hence no widespread adoption. Around this time, however, people started to accept Wikipedia as a reference source, which validated the use of wikis in general: in other words, it wasn’t that the RBC users didn’t believe that wikis could work, they just saw themselves as consumers rather than contributors. From my experience, this is a classic large enterprise attitude: many people don’t have the time or the inclination to take that first step to being a wiki author.
Over 2007-8, the SharePoint wiki attempts in RBC were seen, in general, as a failure. This was blamed on the technology, although that was only part of the problem. During that time period, a Confluence pilot was started.
In 2009, Confluence was rolled out as part of the corporate standard technology infrastructure: what the RBC architecture review committee that I used to sit on there referred to as the “bricks”, which are products that any department can select and implement without special approval.
Currently, they have 66 active instances of Confluence (paid version), mostly focused around projects. There are 1,000-1,500 total creators and participants across these instances, with a potential viewing audience of 10,000 internal users. Users are primarily at head office, with very little branch involvement. There is no external access to the wikis.

We spent some amount of time discussing the issues that they had with SharePoint. Some of these were cultural, due to the document-oriented nature of SharePoint: the standard wiki edit functionality looked very much like editing a Word document, and people were conditioned not to edit other people’s “completed” documents. Instead, they would email their changes to the wiki team, which really defeats the purpose of a wiki. Confluence has a very different user interface for editing, which allowed people to disassociate the idea of editing a wiki page from editing someone else’s document. As Hanlon pointed out, they could have customized SharePoint to make it look and feel more like Confluence, potentially avoiding these problems, but they didn’t even know that was the problem until they moved from SharePoint to Confluence.

Since RBC’s Confluence use is mostly for projects, it’s used for things such as meeting agendas and minutes. Last year, I wrote a post based on some research that I was doing with a few clients and around the web, covering the topic of when to use ECM versus a wiki: opinions ranged from “use a wiki only if there are no security requirements and you need to maximize accessibility, an ECM for everything else” to “use wikis for internal content by default, and ECM only for specific cases”. It would be interesting to see if RBC’s experiences with splitting content between ECM and wikis have matched what I’ve seen in other organizations. RBC is using SharePoint as their main document repository, and provide some easy functionality for linking to these documents from Confluence, but project documents are still often imported directly to Confluence. They’ve also found wikis useful for event calendars.

Adoption within the enterprise continues to be a struggle: Hanlon pointed out that they’re out trying to evangelize about wikis to people who just got good intranet search, so may not be ready for the idea of user-generated content. However, they’ve had a lot of success with tagging within Confluence, since many people don’t equate tagging with creating content. He said that they’re getting fairly good participation, but that the slow uptake on content creation is happening at typical “bank speed”. They’re still working on defining where wikis are appropriate, and how to educate the masses on what they are and how to use them: it’s important that wikis are not seen as just some extra thing that people need to do, but as a way of making their job easier. Although Hanlon and many others in the room saw the use of wikis as “creative” and therefore something that people will just want to do, I’ve spent too many hours with back-office workers to think that they’re going to be swayed by the argument that this lets them be more creative in their work. They’re finding that most people will still comment rather than edit, then email responses or requests for changes to the wiki team.

There’s a lot that they haven’t done yet: they haven’t yet started to work with plugins, such as ones that I’ve seen for content approval workflow. There is no federated search that includes the Confluence content, although they do have enterprise search that covers their intranet, shared drives and SharePoint content. They have an internal community of practice (Hanlon’s group), but no real training to roll out across the potential user base. There’s no single sign-on, and about half of the Confluence instances require a login. There’s little customization in terms of appearance, and they’re considering more of an RBC-specific skinning, although this could backfire if people then become confused over what’s part of the (uneditable) intranet versus a wiki. They’re still working out what to put in a wiki versus SharePoint (which is their document repository). In other words, lots of work for the RBC wiki team in the future.

So what does RBC need to do in order to push forward with wikis? They are starting to see value from wikis in content creation, but accept that Word and Outlook still rule in that area; in my experience, most content creation isn’t even making it into an ECM system (if one exists), but is on network drives and in email attachments. They need to balance the corporate need for control with the bottom-up wiki usage and folksonomy, likely by involving some wiki gardeners to help curate the content without controlling it. They need to push past the regulatory and information security mindset that exists within financial institutions, since regulations and privacy don’t apply to much of the information that would likely be stored on internal wikis. They need to understand the long-term value proposition for updating wiki content: what’s in it both for the individual and the company. Lastly, they need to make the long-time RBC employees see themselves as content creators, not just content consumers.

At the end of it all, a very informative talk on the struggles and successes with wiki adoption within a large enterprise. And, at the end of the night, I somehow ended up volunteering to speak at the June event, on using wikis with ECM and BPM. Hope to see you there.

Five Years of Column 2

As of today, I’ve been writing this blog for five years. My first post was on BPTrends’ 2005 BPM Suites Report, and I’m still pretty focused on BPM, although have branched out to cover a wider variety of Enterprise 2.0 and collaboration topics as well. In the beginning, it was just labeled as my business blog and hosted on a subdomain under my corporate domain, although within the first month, I talked about how I’m a “column 2” sort of girl, and a month later, rebranded as Column 2.

Since then, I’ve written about 2,000 posts: that’s more than one per day on average, although that includes about 550 posts consisting of links and my comments on those links, auto-generated from whatever I save on Delicious that day. Not considering those posts, I’ve still managed to post more than once per weekday on average: a count that is badly skewed by my live-blogging at conferences, where I post several times per day. I’ve had over 2,000 comments on posts, or about one per post: not a great level of conversation overall, although we’ve had some lively discussions. In total, I’ve written over 600,000 words.

I average 400-500 unique visitors (600-700 page views) per weekday, with peaks of two or three times for events such as the Oracle BEA strategy briefing and IBM layoffs. Posts can remain popular over time: the Oracle BEA post totaled 4,500 page views (although not on the same day). I also have another 1,800 readers who are subscribed to the RSS feed, likely not visiting the site directly since I publish full feeds. That doesn’t make Column 2 exactly a prime internet destination, but most people are a bit surprised that I have 2,200+ daily readers on a relatively niche topic.

My presence on Twitter (which has just passed the 3-year mark) may have slowed my blogging a bit, but a broad spectrum of social media participation is a must for independent consultants these days. In fact, Twitter has probably increased my blog readership since FeedBurner auto-tweets each blog post when it publishes: Twitter is my second-largest referrer site, after Google.

I don’t get paid to blog, except for the small fee that Intelligent Enterprise pays me when they republish some of my posts, and the bit from the Google ads on the site that just covers my hosting fees. Vendors who invite me to their conferences (and pay my expenses while I’m there) obviously get more coverage while I’m blogging at the conference, as do vendors who are my clients since I’m more familiar with their products, but the opinions written here are my own, and no one has any editorial review or control over my content. In fact, it’s pretty common for me to see the PR/AR/marketing people at a vendor conference checking their mobile devices to see what I just wrote about their company, since they don’t see it in advance.

Blogging has given me the best soapbox ever on which to stand and voice my opinions: as an extroverted introvert, it’s the perfect blend of public discourse and private contemplation for me. As an independent working mostly from my home office, blogging provides me with a way to engage with BPM vendors and practitioners that would just not be possible face-to-face. I am asked to speak at conferences and review products because of what I write here; in fact, most of my professional engagements start with someone saying “I read your blog, and I’m interested in working with you”. I’ve also had the opportunity to meet many of my readers and fellow bloggers at conferences; these are opportunities that I would have missed were it not for blogging. My blog also serves as an online portfolio and history of my ideas, so that I can show, for example, that I was talking about social BPM and process wikis in 2006, a few years ahead of those who claim to have first written about it.

Writing a blog is not for everyone – in fact, some days it’s not even for me 🙂 – but blogs have become an essential part of online reading for any business or technology professional, rather than just seen as rants from the fringe. And although I sometimes resort to a bit of ranting, I like to believe that I’m adding value to your research on a variety of enterprise technology topics.

IBM Cloud Strategy: Collaboration, Dev/Test Environments, and Virtual Desktops

Today, IBM announced their cloud strategy and roadmap; I was at the analyst update last week and had a chance to hear about it first-hand from IBM execs, a customer and a partner.

Erich Clementi, who heads enterprise initiatives at IBM, started the briefing by showing their cloud evolution over the past year, and plans for the remainder of 2010. Last year saw the launch of LotusLive collaboration services and the Test Cloud for hosted test environments. By the end of 2009, cloud offerings had expanded to include analytics, storage and email plus cloud consulting services, and the beta for cloud-based development and test environments had opened up. That beta has evolved so that today we’re hearing about the launch of Smart Business Dev/Test on IBM Cloud: an enterprise-class environment for provisioning virtual machines on demand for software development and testing. By the end of this year, there will be more cloud offerings, and a variety of security, resiliency, capacity and compliance options, and an ecosystem of partners.

He discussed what they’ve learned from their clients: there is a universal interest in cloud computing, but that there won’t be a “Big Switch fantasy” happening in large enterprises any time soon. Instead, this is part of a transition from owning IT assets to sourcing IT solutions as part of an organization’s enterprise IT delivery mix, where cloud complements on-premise, and these often coexist in integrated hybrid services. Although cost is a factor, speed of deployment is also a key driver, since that drives time to value. And, since IBM always has a large services component, they have a suite of services around moving to and maintaining cloud services. To be clear, there is a predominant focus on private clouds, or what some would not consider cloud at all: fast provisioning (after you install all the hardware and infrastructure software), but everything is on the customer’s site, making this virtualization rather than true hosted cloud.

For hosted cloud, they see the initial sweet spot as the collaboration space, where they’re targeting the LotusLive brand, including the web conferencing tool which we were using for the briefing, email suite (Lotus Notes lives!) and even social networking, such as the BPM BlueWorks community. Altogether, IBM has 18 million users on LotusLive, including their own workforce and some large customers such as Panasonic.

Targeting both public and private cloud is their Smart Business Desktop, where the entire desktop environment – OS and applications – is virtualized rather than installed on the actual desktops, allowing for access from anywhere, and also providing desktop remote control and other IT service functions. This has long been used for VPN access to networks, but is a newer concept for full-time internal desktops. Coincidentally, eWeek just published an article on virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI), discussing the benefits in terms of reduced maintenance and hardware costs (reduce desktop TCO by 15-35%) as well as business continuity, but also the relatively high startup costs and complexity; the author ultimately states “I hesitate to recommend VDI across the board”.

The third part of their cloud strategy is for virtual hosted server environments for ISVs – what appears to be a direct competitor to Amazon’s EC2 – providing development and test infrastructure through developerWorks Cloud Computing Resources, but apparently also production hosting (I think – the presentation was a bit vague here).

For my regular BPM readers, if you’ve made it this far, consider how you could use cloud development and test servers for BPM deployments, where some of the multiple environments required (usually at least four, sometimes as many as six) could be moved out of your own data centers, and provisioned at will.

Pat Toole, CIO of IBM, was up next to discuss how they are using their own products internally, speaking as a customer of the cloud offerings. They started with hosted development and test environments, and have half of their new development in the US happening on the dev/test cloud; this has reduced their server provisioning time from five days down to about an hour for both Power and x86 environments. Next, they looked at BI and analytics, with the dual aim of reducing costs and making the data more readily available to users. They consolidated 100 data warehouses into a single Cognos environment for 80,000 internal users in their Blue Insight initiative, and expect to add another 30 applications and double their users over the next year.

On the collaboration front, they turned on LotusLive web conferencing for all employees to use for internal and external meetings, logging 200 million minutes last year. They’ve recently added Engage for 6,000 users initially; although this seems to provide full social networking capabilities, Toole mentioned file sharing as the primary use case.

They’ve implemented Smart Business Desktop at one center in China in order to reduce TCO by more than 40% and improve security and control, and plan to roll this out to their call centers in US and India. Echoing the eWeek article, he said that this is not for everyone in the organization, but makes sense for certain classes of users and desktops. They’re also about to launch their first pilot on the storage cloud, and have identified about 1,000 applications for deployment in the production cloud.

In “eating their own cooking”, IBM is doing what any of their customers would be doing: trying to make their computing environment more efficient and less expensive.

Mike McCarthy, who heads the cloud computing group, gave the the details of today’s announcement:

Smart Business Development and Test environments on the IBM (public) cloud, initially within North America, on a pay-as-you-go or reserved capacity basis. Although hosted on their public cloud, this is intended to support enterprise clients in that it’s not an open community, but a platform for hosting your development and test environments as securely as if they were on premise; in fact, they plan to offer dedicated hardware environments in the future for the truly paranoid. There are several pre-configured software images to select from, offering a wide choice of configurations and deployment models. They offer 99.5% availability, sufficient for most dev/test environments, and support options up to 24×7 telephone support. This allows you to provision a development or test environment yourself in a matter of minutes: choose the service (software image, such as OS or OS plus tools), configure the usage configuration, and click to provision a new virtual server. Initially, they’ll be offering Red Hat and Novell Linux on x86 environments, with additional hardware options as well as Windows later in the year.
Adding development services, such as Rational SDS, to the existing Smart Business Test Cloud offering for private cloud deployments.
Rational Software Delivery Services for both their private and public Smart Business Development and Test Cloud.
Tighter integration of the developerWorks online community and the development/test cloud initiatives through a variety of learning resources.

Evan Bauer of the Collaborative Software Initiative joined the IBM team on the call to discuss their use of the IBM cloud for developing, testing and hosting the US Department of Education’s Open Innovation Portal. They used the beta version of the IBM cloud and open source software to develop and deploy this portal within three months. Hosting on IBM’s public cloud allows them to scale quickly and achieve excellent response time, providing a valuable pilot for the future use of cloud for government applications.

Last up was Tom Lounibos of SOASTA, an IBM partner offering CloudTest, an on-demand service for load-testing web applications by provisioning hundreds of virtual servers to simulate millions of users hitting a website. There are a couple of key use cases for this type of load-testing – e-commerce sites with seasonal peaks, and social media sites with peaks caused by news events – with some very high profile cases of unacceptable latency or even site failure due to load. CloudTest has been around for a while, but they’ve just announced that they’ll be running on the IBM cloud.

The IBM (public) cloud will initially be hosted in the US, with data centers in Europe added later in 2010. Although there was some talk about other data centers (such as Asia) in the future, the entire rollout plan wasn’t clear. Many organizations, especially financial services, need to have the data centers located in their own country, or at least one with better privacy laws than the US, so both the location of the data centers and the ability for a customer to select which country is hosting their systems will become important as IBM looks beyond the US market.

For those of us used to working with virtual servers hosted elsewhere, the concepts announced today aren’t new, but the IBM brand brings an air of respectability to the idea of using hosted virtual environments for a variety of uses.

John Goodson on Informational Integrity

John Goodson, who heads up the Enterprise Data Solutions group within Progress, had the last timeslot before lunch to present on the role of informational integrity in operational responsiveness. Problems occur because business needs data faster than IT systems can deliver it, and inflexible methods can’t adapt to the fast-changing business conditions. Batch ETL just can’t keep up with this: data needs to be available from any system at any time as required to support real-time operations. We need to get rid of the overnight batch jobs that (for example) don’t allow me to see my banking transactions online until the following day, or can’t get my package tracking number until the package is already delivered.

Progress already provides Data Exchange for model-based data transformation and exchange; next month, they’re launching Progress Data Virtualization Server, providing real-time data access, integration and delivery from almost any data source, application and service. The key to their Enterprise Data Services is a common model – a sort of Babelfish for data – that allows access to multiple applications and data sources. They’ll leverage key industry-standard data models, such as ACORD in the insurance industry, with the goal of providing the right information in the right form at the right time.

Stepping back from just the information side, he pointed out that they’ll be providing responsive process management together with responsive information management; otherwise, data issues will impede responsiveness even if process improvement is undertaken.

Tom Aubuchon of Panhandle Energy (gas pipeline) joined Goodson on stage to discuss their data integration strategy: they used a customized supervisory control and data acquisition (SCADA) system to monitor and control their 17,000 miles of pipeline, but need to integrate that with all of their other distribution and billing data. They have approximately 1,200 different applications, and a “hairball” of connections between them. They decided to replace their SCADA with a more generic ESB, and selected Progress because the common data model allowed them to tame all of the point-to-point connections between the applications, especially the new Data Virtualization Server.