By Bill Ives
Expert Author
Article Date: 2011-03-03
A major transformation is occurring with enterprise IT services. I recently spoke with Jake Sorofman, CMO at rPath, to get his perspective on these changes. Jake pointed out that IT used to have a local monopoly on IT services. Their internal customers were forced to accept poor service levels because they had no alternative. Now the Cloud is fast becoming and alternative channel. Instead of waiting weeks or months for a critical application, business managers can simply license and deploy many applications in minutes. Instead of incurring massive implementation costs prior to any performance, they can just lease apps on a monthly basis and stop at any time.
Faced with this potential competition, IT organizations are under pressure to transform-to replace bottlenecks and bureaucracy with on-demand IT service delivery models. But this transformation to IT-as-a-Service requires new thinking about old processes. Jake pointed out that the reality is that today's manual and ad hoc IT provisioning and change processes will collapse under the weight of self-service, cloud and other on-demand IT models. Particularly vulnerable are today's practices for constructing and changing system images. Jake added that those IT departments that fail to make this transformation will be outflanked by development organizations and business lines who follow the path of least resistance to the cloud.The cloud is becoming more versatile. In a blog post, 6 IT Predictions for 2011, the first three that Jake listed were: private cloud proliferates, public cloud thrives, and hybrid cloud emerges. In the latter case, this will first be more likely simple shifts in deployment environments based on lifecycle stage-for example, dev and test workloads only in public cloud. This will set the foundation for the "dynamic data center of the future, where workloads can move fluidly between deployment environments. By enabling application portability, workloads become a liquid commodity and a marketplace emerges. IT can dynamically retarget workloads based on optimizations for price, policy or performance, and they achieve true leverage over service providers." This makes a lot of sense to me.
To help IT departments become more responsive and operate successfully in the on-demand world, rPath provides capabilities to automate application deployments, updates and retargeting across physical, virtual and cloud environments to allow for the dynamic data center of the future. Their tools help break down the traditional silos between development and operations. It is increasingly important so that when development speeds up it does not hit a speed bump when apps are deployed. Jake said that often when Agile currently meets operations, it can become fragile.
Part of the challenge is to extend the Agile concept into operations. Traditionally, operations views change as evil. Because of all the hidden dependencies within applications, changes can cause things to break. Now the fast paced changes within today's business world make constant change a competitive necessity. rPath provides the infrastructure and environment to support these new change requirements. It helps automate many of the traditionally time consuming IT processes.
rPath is based on a version-controlled repository that acts as a definitive software library for controlled reuse of application, OS, middleware and other system artifacts across development, test and production organizations. From this repository, rPath automates four key functions: automated generation of images for rapid deployment to physical, virtual or cloud, automated updates and rollbacks, compliance reporting and remediation, and controlled lifecycle promotion. You can see this illustrated below.
Jake closed his predictions for 2011 by suggesting that the new architectures that enable dynamic workload portability will also change CIO's prime focus from operations to sourcing and portfolio management. He wrote that we will see some old-line CIOs cycle out in the face of change. At the same we will see "new stars born on the basis of a new vision for IT, inspired-and not threatened-by the rise of public cloud services." This is very consistent with what I have heard from other sources recently. The times are changing.
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