The Open Group Conference, San Diego
21st Enterprise Architecture Practitioners Conference

Highlights of the Plenary, Day 2
(Tuesday February 3)

The second day of The Open Group’s Enterprise Practitioners Conference in San Diego was convened by Allen Brown, President & CEO, The Open Group. Allen engaged the morning audience by asking if a 24-month cycle is the right amount of time to implement an enterprise architecture.  Audience commentary was that one can’t have a “big bang” in two years; value needs to be shown more quickly.  Allen then asked the audience how one can show value more quickly. The resulting response was that enterprise architects need to understand their stakeholders and the pain they’re experiencing to alleviate it as soon as possible. In turn, enterprise architecture can deliver a business capability within an overall strategic direction.

Dr. Ann Rosenberg, BTC Global Practice Ownership for Business Process Management, SAP joined the conference via telephone from Denmark and presented via webcast on “BPM Blended with SOA Approach”. She opened her presentation with data from a recent Gartner survey of CIOs, who believe that BPM and SOA need to go hand-in-hand. She explained the Roadmap to Business Process Management and the five BPM deliverables which include: upgrades in business suite, SOA composing tools, application management, Six sigma process, and IT projects. She explained how they interrelate and support the third generation of ERP, based on the SAP Business Suite. She went on to give an example of a Danish company, Arla, that consolidated different IT systems and needed more agility for business and market demand. The company began to work on SOA and BPM to establish a transparency and allow drills into different layers in the architecture. The company agreed that one can’t do SOA without BPM and vice versa and proved that success is strongest with a combined BPM/SOA. Ann went on to explore SAP´s BPM Governance model and its four-step approach: strategy, set-up, transition, and continuous improvement.

Following Ann Rosenberg’s presentation, Minoru Terao, Senior VP at NEC and Chairman of the SOA Japan Working Group, presented on the “SOA Status in Japan and Future Direction”.  The SOA Japan Working Group is studying the real use-case of SOA in Japan and its adoption. Considering the advanced and pervasive use of the mobile internet via mobile phones in Japan, there are high expectations of safety and security. Users demand enterprise integrity on both issues. This is driving business process changes and collaboration across industries. Additionally, the evolution and revolution for environmental protection is also driving change. Critical IT governance and architecture is changing the business environment and technical evolution, increasing the importance of governance and architecture in Japan and globally.  The need for SOA and ROI were not yet recognized, so SOA has been started to be deployed in Japan.  Minoru gave Biglobe as an SOA reference case, which is slowly implementing SOA across its verticals.  Another reference case is Nissan, a great example of a global company with customers and suppliers being optimized with SOA.  In summary, new business models, environmental issues, and IT networking technology evolution (such as cloud computing, next generation computing, etc.) are supporting SOA adoption in Japan.

Ron Tolido, CTO of Capgemini for the Northern Europe and Asia Pacific regions, presented on “A Compelling Case for Business Analysis”. In a lively and humorous opening to his presentation, Ron referred to the crop circle diagrams that represent TOGAF 9 and related this to IT people often being seen as “alien” by their business counterparts.  He went on to state that standardization is being embraced with more business concepts and a growing number of different sets of people within organizations getting involved in standards. The Open Group is currently investigating the opportunity to create a standard methodology for Business Analysis. This is driven by the growing emphasis in the market on the business side of technology solutions and also aligns well with emerging areas such as Business Process Management (BPM) and continuous process improvement (e.g., Lean Six Sigma).  Ron explained the core competencies of Business Analysis (BA) – information analysis (understand process to improve and analyze them), BPM, and lastly, subject matter expertise. He mentioned a Forrester research report that proved that increasingly IT business analysts are reporting into IT departments and business analysts are reporting into both IT and business. Given that the new focus is on real business objectives and compliance, corporate governance has become very important. There is a big emphasis on project management because of new process management tools that can extract process logic from IT systems to bring IT closer to business strategy.  This “lean thinking” has gained importance because of the new project management tools.

Consulting and Training Manager at Real IRM, Paul van der Merwe is one of South Africa's most dynamic and insightful enterprise architecture practitioners. Paul wrapped up the morning plenary session on Day 2 with his presentation on “Why does process matter?” He began by discussing the current reality in South African as well as in the world – economic downturn and a new president in the U.S. In organizations, layoffs are a reality and there is uncertainty around EA.  He mentioned the importance of promoting EA during these times to companies to prove that the profession can improve agility and business efficiency. He addressed recent industry fodder around SOA being dead, by stating that neither EA nor SOA is dead since the industry is still wondering what exactly they are.  He went on to discuss the intersection of the four disciplines of BA, BPM, SOA, and EA and how process can play a key role in bringing all these disciplines together. By displaying the Zachman framework, he showcased how different grid columns can be applied very easily to different industries.  When architecture is being considered, the focus is on how to automate the process or the functionality of it. Process will always be dominant in any architecture work. He went on to showcase how applying architecture principles can optimize the disciplines of BA, BPM, and SOA into a single integrated solution that is enabled through business architecture with reference to case studies in South African companies in the financial services, public, and mining sectors.

The co-located Cloud Computing Summit commenced in the latter half of the morning with a presentation on the “Business Adoption of Cloud Computing” by Lauren States, Vice President of Cloud Computing, IBM Software Group. She started off by talking about the cloud computing hype and buzz at all industry levels and that a multitude market demands are driving organizations to explore this new technology. These market pressures and resulting demand are being matched by hardware, software, and service providers. Businesses looking to adopt cloud computing have the following in common: precisely located datacenters, highly virtualized and automated environments, very rigorous implementations, and desire to restrain enterprise sprawl.  She described the various types of clouds: public, private, and hybrids.  Hybrids are interesting for companies trying to find ways to peak their capacities.  She stated a case study of a company in New Orleans that was able to maintain service throughout Hurricane Ike because all of the infrastructure was in the cloud. She reminded the audience that everything always comes down to people to execute on the proof-of-concept. That it’s about the combination of business, technology, and people.  Clients have to ask themselves what are the right sourcing models that support their business model. She ended her presentation with an overview of the IBM journey to the cloud: centralization, consolidation (unutilized resources on larger clusters), virtualization, automation, and optimization. Some of the challenges include standards and portability, security and privacy, hybrid sourcing management, and governance.

Peter Coffee, Director of Platform Research, salesforce.com, was the next presenter and stated that he works with corporate and commercial application developers to build a community based on Force.com, which is the salesforce.com Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS). He outlined the enterprise roles for cloud computing, which includes applications, platforms, and extrastructures.  He explained that clouds aren’t all the same; not every cloud is a “grid”; most clouds are not “compute clusters”; some clouds are servers in virtual slices and enterprise cloud computing implies API leverage.  The salesforce.com cloud began with CRM, the mindset that everything that could be shared across customers needed to be shared. In discussing proliferating platforms (PaaS, he showcased how Force.com is working with Amazon web services, facebook.com, and Google.  He discussed how globalization demands world-class governance, considering that unsecured assets and storage are accessible to more people in today’s distributed environments.  To advance any platform, he reminded the audience that developers need to be excited about a platform.  There needs to be a decrease in developer workload to pioneer cloud-based tools and communities.

Russ Daniels, VP & CTO, Cloud Services Strategy, Hewlett-Packard, was the final plenary speaker on the second day and educated the audience with his “Understanding the Cloud” presentation.  He showcased the cloud’s potential to bring technology to new customers and to solve problems beyond the reach of traditionally architected solutions, but given the amount of hype and buzz around the cloud, it’s difficult to really define it.  Utility computing is a different model for sourcing and delivery infrastructure to deliver the services a business needs while saving costs and improving efficiency.  He stated that the definition his presentation takes on cloud is that the cloud is the Internet’s next stage of evolution.  He used an interesting information metaphor, that the Internet has been the nervous system and the cloud is beginning to add some brain function or memory. The cloud is about connecting; a great way to bring technology to people, connecting business to business, people to people, data to contacts and locations, businesses to customers, and people to enterprises.  The cloud is important because it’s pervasively available, it’s a great place to accumulate the data and add context, and allows technology to help in the process. Russ outlined the evolution of cloud service platforms: dedicated, multipurpose, partner, and platform.  The evolution of architecture itself (how it is designed) is as follows:

• Logical – structural description of a software system
• Enterprise – process-centric description of an enterprise
• Ecosystem – role/responsibility-based description of an ecosystem; cloud allows this design perspective by first understanding the key roles/responsibilities that reside in the ecosystem

Jinesh Varia, Technology Evangelist, Amazon Web Services, kicked off the afternoon Cloud Computing Summit stream with his presentation “Ahead in the Cloud: Amazon Web Services for the Enterprise”. He mentioned Animoto, a start-up run by community college students that creates soundtracks to submitted still photos for a price, as a case study which needed the ability to scale infrastructure immediately to handle traffic. Jinesh outlined the “develop-test-operation” chain when implementing cloud computing and showcased how capital expenditures directly turn into operating expenses via the pay-as-you-go cloud system. This also showcased the value of time.  Jinesh' favorite thing about cloud computing/web services is that it’s software that “creates and manages” hardware via on-demand provisioning through web service; basically software determining how much hardware is needed.  He mentioned that Amazon Web Services is enabling pluggable cloud architectures and that to do this, we need to consider that every application needs the following six capabilities:

1. Compute
2. Storage
3. Messaging
4. Payment
5. Distribution
6. Scale

Jinesh showcased a few cloud computing enterprise case studies: Autodesk, Eli Lilly, ESPN, major pharmaceutical company, and the “TimesMachine” from NYT.  His closing statement was that cloud computing is inevitable; it will mature quickly and needs to be embraced.

David Bernstein, VP/GM, Software Group, Cisco Systems, presented on the “Fundamentals of Cloud Interoperability and Standards” and started his presentation by stating that Cisco sees cloud computing as the “next Internet” and nothing less. Cisco is going to do for computing what they did for data. The Cisco cloud strategy is about:

1. Build the right products
2. Multi-phased
3. Open standards
4. Services/reference software
5. Technology

David explained that Cisco doesn’t run a cloud; they run a Saas application called WebEx. But they’ve helped build infrastructure. He listed out the various cloud adoption phases and outlined the different types of clouds which include standalone clouds (key challenges of security, SLAs, control); enterprise-class clouds (key challenges of federation, portability, market); and Intercloud which is a federation of clouds based on open standards.

Scott Radeztsky, Chief Technologist, Americas Systems Engineering, Sun Microsystems Inc., rounded out the early afternoon sessions on cloud computing with his presentation on “Real Clouds for Real People”. He explained that all clouds share common traits – one service fits all, virtualized physical resources, self provisioning, etc. There are several trends that are emerging, which include amazing infrastructure/densities; open/powerful alternatives; simplicity scales; bringing compute to the data; working code & adoption; hype and lipstick on pigs.  As companies consider various cloud business models, some things to consider are what “cloud” an organization is trying to be?  Public? Private? Hybrid? There are differences in approach and interaction. Scott also explained the different cloud ownership models where organizations want to use the cloud, leverage the cloud, build their own internal cloud, or be the cloud. A hybrid cloud example given was social graphing.  He also explained how disruptive analytics help evolve the business case for the cloud.

The second portion of the Cloud Computing Summit afternoon session was lead by David Linthicum, Founder, Blue Mountain Labs.  In his presentation on “Where Cloud Computing Meets Enterprise Architecture”, David educated the audience in understanding the relationships between enterprise architectures, SOA, and cloud computing.  He advised members to consider cloud computing as an extension of SOA, with the trick of knowing which services, information, and process to move into and abstract out in the cloud.  Patterns between SOA and cloud computing are transferable and identical.  He noted that while IT is skeptical of cloud computing – and naturally so – it is becoming apparent that many cloud computing resources will actually provide better service than on-premise. Security and performance are still the key issues being debated.

The second day of the 21^st Architecture Practitioners Conference concluded with a highly interactive panel hosted by David Linthicum and seven panelists from companies and organizations ranging from Cisco, Salesforce.com, IBM to The Open Grid Forum.