As I type, New York Times writer, David Pogue, is entertaining the Interop keynote crowd. I’m hearing more guffaws than I heard during that tape of Larry Ellison’s cloud computing rant a few weeks ago.

Poking not so gentle fun at people who try to do live demos during keynotes, Pogue is actually trying to do 15 demos. Yes, some have failed, he’s had to resort to knock knock jokes at times, but for the ones that work, it’s pretty cool.

Check it out live/on-demand on the Interop TV site.

From virtualization to cloud computing - far from being a ”dark” time for IT, the opportunities and outlook are very rosy. The possibilities for true transformative change has never been greater and as shown in Interop surveys, Lenny sees IT embracing and being a driver for this change.

(To see the keynotes and sessions live or on-demand, check out the Interop TV site)

So first up on the Keynote stage was Mark Templeton, President  & CEO of Citrix Systems. His presentation: Transformation in Enterprise IT. Mark sees the IT challenges we face now as the biggest and toughest but  also providing the most opportunity ever, especially as changes can drive agility and velocity of the businesss.

First, he took us back to the Mainframe era (1960’s – 1980’s). We bought everything from vendors like IBM, NCR, Honeywell, etc. This worked great for IBM but not the rest of the bunch. Then came the transformation around Personal Computing.

With the Personal Computing shift came the Distributed Computing Era for Enterprise IT (1990’s – 2002). Industry re-orged itself along stacks (or silos as we tend to describe it), e.g., server os bs server hardware vs storage, etc.

And now along comes the transformation around virtualization to trigger the new era for Enterprise IT:

On-Demand Services Era (2002-present) – focused on service delivery, cloud, web 2.0, SaaS. First time the computing era is not a “technical” label but business process around delivery. Holy Grail: deliver IT as an on-demand service. Great idea but really hard. IT’s mindset is not as a service provider now (but as we’ve always talked about, they need to get there).

In the Distributed Computing era, here’s what happened: client + management + scurity + network + server. Bolted together and optimized (sometimes together) but no matter how much you optimize this, the original false set of assumptions creates complexity of enormous scale.

In order to simplify a system that is complex – either make each part more efficient or eliminate parts. Less is both more and simpler and will get you to the agility that you need.

Consumerization will force more IT change over the next 10 years than any other trend.

Around 2002, consumer IT (online) got better and better every day, surpassing enterprise IT rate of improvement (and the product plug – Citrix customers taking IT into their own hands)

Citrix’s #1 in SaaS: GoToMeeting, GoToAssist, etc

Echo Generation or the Millenials- this generation is driving a huge amoun of change around consumerization. This will create a struggle over control between IT and users (how, where and what).

Mark shared this quote from Abraham Lincoln:

if I had 8 hours to cut down a tree, I would spend the first 7 hours sharpening my axe.

So what’s the real problem? Spend the time thinking about this, defining it and then executing on solution. (kind of a tangent in this presentation but thought I’d include it because I like the quote so much)

GOAL: users get IT services that as easily as turning on the TV. Based on self-service along the lines of an ATM. So enterprise IT “advertises” what they have available and users “subscribe” to the services as needed. (Cool Advertiser/Subscriber model. Have to say as much as IT complains about marketing, I cannot imagine they’ll love having to “advertise”. Perhaps there’s another term that would make them like it better.)

The Agenda for Transforming IT today:

1) Device & network independence

2) Any-to-any, secure when needed (web model of when security kicks in)

3) Self-service user experiences

4) Elastic service capacity (cloud model)

5) Consumption-based costs

And finally in what was not so bad of a segue, Citrix’s announcement today:

Around NetScaler – a new “Pay-as-you-Grow” model. Buy an appliance like the NetScaler MPX 9700, 3Gbps. Then with a license key, easily grow to 5Gbps, then 8 Gbps as needed.

Virtualized version of this for the lower end – free 1Mbps VPX Express, and then license key to upgrade to 10mbps, 200 mbps, and 1Gbps.

Virtualization breaks the hard coding between the distributed computing stacks that hinder agility.

Transformation of:

1)  Work – not a place, something you do anywhere

2) Desktop – not a device, becomes a service

3) Data Center – not a collection of infrastructure in a building, but going forward a “delivery center” with resources in and out of the physical data center (Precisely – this is a core of our forward-looking product strategy and one reason EM7 G3 won Best of Interop this year for Network Management)

In the end, all this transformation will of course slash business & computing costs but more than that, put the fun and impact back into IT. (A worthwhile goal)

Phase 2 of corporate open source adoption has been accelerated by the current economic conditions. Open source software is entering a new phase of acceptance, especially those focused on cloud computing, collaboration and security:

• Cloudera: focused on making Hadoop easier to use and available to a wider audience
• Eucalyptus Systems: lets users implement a cloud environment using existing network infrastructure without requiring modification
• MindTouch: cited by Forrester Research as the best alternative product to SharePoint and Lotus, is part wiki, portal and application server

Cisco has extended its $3 billion offer to buy Cisco for nine additional days to November 18^th at 5:30 pm CET, with an announcement soon thereafter. Cisco CEO John Chambers said that he expects to close the $3 billion deal but hinted that he would drop the offer after investors holding 30% of Tanberg shares demanded a higher price. Cisco’s offer is conditional on 90% acceptance – as of Tuesday, they were at 9.37% acceptance. Hmmm – wonder if Cisco is staging a big telepresence announcement for day one of Interop NY. Stay tuned…

Oracle-Sun hearings with the European Commission are scheduled for November 25^th in Brussels. The antitrust arm of the 27-member European Union informed Oracle and Sun that it was filing an official objection to the transaction because it includes ownership of MySQL, citing a major conflict of interest in Oracle owning its largest open source competitor.

A recent survey points to the challenges of managing heterogeneous servers, leading many to outsource server management. The survey found:

• One third of IT staff time is consumed with server management tasks
• 60% of IT managers said the hassle of managing servers is a challenge in their organizations
• 61% found it difficult to find “time to drive innovation”
• IT teams spend 60% of their time troubleshooting and managing servers and 27% of their time on “strategic and value-add activities”

Richard Marcello, president of technology, consulting, and integration solutions at Unisys said cloud computing can save money by eliminating US jobs. Speaking at the Cloud Computing Conference & Expo, Marcello told how Unisys has deployed a private cloud internally and cut provisioning times from 10 days of manual provisioning time down to five minutes, adding, “We were able to eliminate a whole bunch of actually U.S.-based jobs and kind of replace them with two folks out of India to serve a 1,200-person engineering organization.”

Perhaps Marcello should take a few cues from Booz Allen Hamilton on a better approach to showing how agencies can save as much as 70% in operational costs by moving applications to the cloud. They crunched the numbers to show the potential cost savings:

Life cycle costs of running 1,000 servers:

• In-house: $77.3 million
• Private cloud: $31.1 million
• Hybrid cloud: $28.7 million
• Public cloud: $22.5 million

Since CEOs fro HP, IBM and Oracle hate the term “cloud computing”, InformationWeek is soliciting new names. The nominees are okay to read, but I like the ones in the reader comments, including:

• Marketing Computing – yet another solution driven by how it can be marketed…
• “HAL’s Rent-N-App” aka “HAL Has An App for That!”
• “WebDooData” – the use of the web for nonsense data harmonized to a lead user

Conan predicted that in the Year 3000 social media would converge to create “one super time-wasting website”. Well, he was off by 991 years, as Twitter and LinkedIn announced their partnership. I guess at some point I am going to have to start liking the concept of Twitter…just not today!

Another reason to be on Twitter. If my friend hadn’t sent me the tweet about Cisco Telepresence being on 30 Rock, I might have missed it. (OK – I admit that I probably would have seen it, given that all new episodes of 30 Rock are programmed to be taped on my DVR, and it’s my favorite show. Six Sigma, anyone??)

But still, I could have missed it, and what a shame that would have been. Jack Donaghy (played by the hilarious Alec Baldwin) somehow gets bedbugs and is forced to attend a meeting via Cisco Telepresence because nobody wants to have physical contact with him. So instead of the clear benefits of cost (travel) savings, better/virtual face-to-face communications, the show brings up an interesting side benefit of using Cisco Telepresence - keeping people out of your “immediate” presence. Think about it.  As Jack says:

I can hear your hair growing on this thing!

Or go to hulu.com to watch the full episode

Kudos to our friends at Cisco!!

(Now if we could only have gotten the plug in about using EM7 for Cisco Telepresence management…)

In related news, Dell says it expects to “promptly” close its acquisition of Perot Systems. For enterprises looking to implement virtualization and cloud computing, the merger brings together Dell’s hardware and software expertise for advanced data center implementations with Perot’s expertise around integration, deployment, and management. Merger plans were announced in September.

Technology industry trade association, TechAmerica, released its Vision report – a look at important trends and factors that influence the government market. As we found in our FOSE 2009 survey, the government is transitioning as long-established governing processes rapidly change. Some of their findings:

Inhibitors and Drivers to keep spending in check. Agencies will:

• Spend less to improve fiscal discipline, achieve economies in contracting and realize ROI
• Spend more to improve services to citizens, increase scope and scale, address pent-up demand, make upfront costs of investments and make investments critical to operation

Cloud Computing Implications:

• Threats: may lead to outsourcing government infrastructure, will lead to increasing erosion of margins, new competitors
• Opportunities: need for government clouds as commercial offerings don’t address all requirements

Web 2.0/3.0 Implications:

• Threats: breaks down heirarcy and government/industry relations; newer, faster ways to do business, and inadvertant release of competitive intelligence
• Opportunities: speeds communication and offers broader collaboration

TechAmerica also issued a letter to President Obama asking him to appoint a cybersecurity coordinator at the earliest possible opportunity. In our 09.19.00 Links List we noted that Frank Kramer was rumored to take the position “within two weeks” – looks like “two months” may have put us in the ballpark (if it indeed happens any time soon).

At the Cloud Computing Conference and Expo, Intel talked about the hurdles and potential gains of private cloud computing. Hurdle: there is no blueprint to building a private cloud, so enterprises will have to invest the time and resources to meet user expectations. However, the benefits of private cloud continue to be quantified:

• Cost efficiency – Amazon charges 8.5 cents per hour for a Linux server in EC2. Servers account for 50% of the expense of data center outlays; power and cooling for the servers adds another 23%
• Improving voltage regulators on servers, allowing a two-way server to scale back to 60 watts when idle, would save $6 million per year for a company running 50,000 servers
• Building private clouds with servers using flash drives instead of disk drives uses 90% less electrical for cooling

Despite today’s news that unemployment is the highest since 1983, the worst of the recession may be over for IT pros with certain high-tech skills. Pay for IT professionals increased slightly more than 1%, causing industry watchers to be cautiously optimistic. However, there is conflicting information, as some IT professionals are seeing their pay slashed during company-wide cuts. It may help to look for jobs in the top US hotspots for IT jobs.

Finally, for a harmless break, check out Numberology – a site that gives you a daily number with an explanation of what it represents. Today’s number is $200,000 – from Neiman Marcus’ annual holiday catalog – the cost of dinner with Malcolm Gladwell, Nora Ephron and John Lithgow. Proceeds are donated to a children’s reading charity.

• Clean technology will generate jobs due to billions of federal stimulus dollars
• Venture capital investments rose to $4.8 billion for 637 deals – a 17% increase in dollars from the previous quarter
• A memory chip maker in Seoul reported a net profit of $207 million after seven consecutive quarters of losses
• Western Digital finished Q3 with 44.1 million hard drive shipments compared to 39.4 million shipments in the same quarter last year
• Riverbed Technology’s Q3 revenue increased 12% from Q2 – an increase of 18 percent from the same period a year ago. Their WAN optimization technology helps improve application response times, particularly needed in SaaS applications.
• Apple’s Mac sales increased 17% from last year’s quarter, evidence that for consumers, some things are indispensible

Enterprise spending on cloud computing is expected to increase 28% this year to $3.2 billion, with most of the money going toward public cloud services. However, Gartner estimates that by 2012, IT shops will spend more than half of their cloud dollars on private clouds as costs decrease and management efficiencies increase. While others are debating between private and public clouds, Bechtel has successfully implemented a private cloud using virtualization and automated provisioning – since 2005, they have gone from 2000 IT employees to 1100, and increased server utilization from 2-3% to an average of 60-70%. They have shifted 60% of their applications to the cloud and expect the others to be moved by the beginning of 2010.

We’ve written about the speculation that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun may signal the demise of MySQL. But the backers of an Oracle takeover of MySQL are beginning to speak up, suggesting that the opposition may be trying to squash the deal so that MySQL could be purchased (by Microsoft) if Oracle is forced to sell it. Others say the merger would not damage competition and that the EU should not be involved in the decision.

“Opponents are “spreading what can only be described as fear, uncertainty and doubt. The only possible argument in favor of the EC blocking Oracle’s acquisition of MySQL is that it is damaging to competition, not that it is damaging to MySQL itself. Otherwise we are asking the EC to rule on whether Oracle is open source-friendly enough to own MySQL, and that is neither something that an organization like the EC is equipped to answer nor something that it should be asked to decide.”

Matthew Aslett, analyst at The 451 Group

While technical IT training is important, CIOs are advised of the growing need to train IT employees in a wider range of managerial skills that will benefit the business – hiring, terminating, teambuilding and emotional intelligence to help managers recognize and consider the emotional and cultural effects of the economic downturn.

On Sale!

• Lower prices on all Amazon EC2 On-Demand compute instances, effective on Nov. 1. Charges for Linux-based instances drop 15% — a small Linux instance costs just 8.5 cents per hour, instead of 10 cents per hour.
• Microsoft has cut its per user per month list price for Exchange Online services in half. The new $5 per user per month brings Microsoft much closer to Google Apps Premium Edition.

#1.  Unified Communications. Deloitte’s UC and collaboration solutions include real-time services like chat, IP telephony, and video conferencing in addition to email, voicemail, SMS and fax. Each month they handle about 36 million emails and 8,000 web meetings.

#2.  Mobility. 90% of their workforce is mobile so IT works to meet users’ demands for information anytime and anywhere. Their focus is more on the end result of making sure workers can connect – and less on the devices, network or applications.

#3.  Web 3.0. They are extending social computing by converting information into knowledge. Deloitte’s internal enterprise portal, DeloitteNet 2.0 is accessible on PDAs and includes blogs, Wikis, forums, instant messaging, Web conferencing, D Street – its internal social network that is similar to Facebook, collaboration tools, voicemail and email. They are updating it with more applications, new search functionality, more collaboration tools and mobile PDA applications.

#4.  Cloud Computing. Oglesby noted that cloud computing definitely represents a shift in technology architecture. However, he is taking a cautious approach to allow the technology to mature. (Thank goodness he did rant about cloud computing like Ellison recently did!) Deloitte has not moved to the cloud, but is definitely positioning itself for the move by virtualizing internal infrastructure, storage, desktops, servers and their network. For now, they are building a private cloud to understand the technology and what it means for their business. They’ll look at the overall efficiency and costs to determine whether an enterprise-wide private or public cloud makes sense for them. They also are looking at mobile virtualization. (See Q&A below.)

#5.  Green IT. Because of more pressing economic concerns, efforts to go green IT are scaling back, but Oglesby believes that green IT is still achievable. Some examples – they have virtualized 50% of their data center servers and eliminated 1000 standalone servers. They installed 179 multi-functional devices, replacing 569 standalone printers, 119 faxes and 69 copiers.

Oglesby said that while these 5 changes are visible, there are other less visible challenges:

• Despite the economic downturn, customers (internal and external) still want to receive the same or better levels of service as always. IT is forced to do more with less.
• Customers have a growing impatience with IT departments. They want their expectations met and IT has to keep up with the latest technologies.
• The inability of customers to outline their requirements means IT needs to be subject matter experts with answers. To be successful, IT must talk with and clearly understand what customers really want and need.
• There will be continued difficulty in aligning IT with business. All technology has to have a business benefit – new things should not be introduced if they do not add demonstrated value in some way.

Q&A from the Audience

Question: Exactly what is mobile virtualization?

• He admitted this is a work in progress, but the goal is to run the hypervisor on a PDA and allow it to run multiple OSes. Oglesby noted the convergence of the laptop, PDA and cell phone and is convinced that the PDA is the device of the future. He noted more and more people have ditched their laptops, netbooks and cell phones and now conduct a majority of their business on PDAs.

Question: What are the steps to success for IT?

• IT has to listen to its customers and can’t work in a vacuum. What’s “cool” is not always useful. IT staff needs to be proficient in asking probing questions to get to what the business really needs because people often struggle with articulating their requirements.

Question: What is laptop virtualization?

• The laptop is just a shell with an operating system – the applications and data reside in a data center, which helps meet customers’ security and privacy requirements,. This is important for doing business across borders, where governments have the right to seize and search laptops, PDAs and other devices.

Question: How do you train end users to properly use IT resources. (Apparently this person gets calls at the help desk on how to use Excel.)

• You can’t train end-users. Instead you need to educate and reinforce behavior. He suggested IT provide service – which may mean directing users to the proper resources for training issues. “Not my job” is not acceptable.

Question: How do you articulate the value of innovation?

• Innovation must add value to the business. It’s not the “cool” factor, but how does the technology add value to the business?

Oglesby will be presenting at Interop NY on November 18.

The panelists then gave examples (both good and bad) of how quickly things have changed in one generation when it comes to how the next generation of workers uses technology.

Law firm: older workers use the librarian to help with research. If they use the Internet, they are on CNN, WSJ, and other news sites. Gen Y uses the Internet, Facebook (date, time stamps), MySpace and Wikipedia.

Consumerism is driving IT. Younger workers may have better, faster and more IT resources at home than they do at their job (a reversal from just a few years ago). They know where to get free resources and they are able to cobble together applications to do what they need. They are pushing IT – “if I can do it at home, I should be able to do it at work.”

Skills vs. Experience. Students are learning applications, programs and gaining skills in school (elementary through college), but they still need the experience and a “willing-to-learn-more” attitude to apply these skills to their jobs.

Collaboration vs. Competitiveness. Panelists agreed that younger workers are more comfortable working in teams rather than individually. They feel this is because they work in teams in school and because of the number of available collaboration tools. On the people skills side, they noted that tools don’t resolve conflicts between people that happen when you actually see and talk to them and that individuals and departments often have their own agendas that aren’t exposed in applications or collaborative tools.

Quick learners. Everyone agreed that Gen Y picks up skills very quickly – the learning curve is down from weeks to sometimes days. There is very little tolerance for delay (go to Wikipedia for answers – it may not be right, but it’s an easy answer!) However, they all agreed that being able to apply skills in context in a business setting and making judgment calls still takes time.

Work ethics issues. Older workers think of their jobs as eight hours in the office and not taking work home. Younger workers work at any hour around the clock, come in late and stay late.

Interpersonal skills are lacking. Gen Y texts vs. talks. They don’t write in complete sentences or spell out words. Everyone agreed that being able to talk to others is a key job skill that seems to be slipping away.

• 4.75 million servers worldwide are running without being actively used daily
• 75% of server managers said at least 15% of servers do nothing useful
• 82% admitted they don’t have an adequate grasp of server utilization
• 72% rely on CPU utilization to measure server efficiency

“The problem with CPU utilization is that a server could be busy doing its housekeeping tasks, such as its own antivirus scans, its own backups, its own indexing and defragmenting of hard disks. It will look busy, but it’s not actually adding any business value.”

Sumir Karayi, CEO of 1E

Cloud computing was number 1 on the annual Gartner list of top strategic technologies. Other technologies on the list include “Client computing” which is being reshaped by virtualization, cloud and new models for accessing business applications; Green IT, reshaping the data center and “Virtualization for availability” (as in VMware’s VMotion and Microsoft’s Live Migration for high availability)

For the cloud to be a realistic long-term option, cloud costs need to come down significantly, according to IDC analyst Matthew McCormack. He warns that within three years, cloud costs exceed the costs of running your own cloud. He advises businesses to look at their capital and operational costs over the last five years and take a long-term view before moving to the cloud.

 “It could be useful in the short term financially for companies with sever cost overruns. Your data center would have to be really poorly run for it to be more expensive than cloud in the long run.”

Note – at the recent VMworld conference, Julia attended a panel on cloud computing case studies. The most interesting thing from the panel – not one of them mentioned cost savings as a reason to move to the cloud. These companies found the convenience, DR/HA, leveraging of expert resources and the ability to ramp up and down with ease (pay only for what you use) to be most important factors in using cloud computing providers.

Even though IPv6 has been mandated for the federal government, Gartner analysts believe the move to IPv6 isn’t working out. With everything else to invest in – unified communications, virtualization, VoIP and workforce mobility – and the effects of operating in an economic recession, IPv6 is a low priority.

A new report by TechAmerica predicts that IT spending by civilian agencies will slow to 3.4% annually over the next five years, down from the 8.3% between 2005 and 2010. The Departments of Health and Human Services, Justice and Treasury will see great increases in IT budgets, while the Department of Commerce is expected to see the largest decline. Even with lower budgets, agencies will be under pressure to continue to meet White House objectives for improved services, data transparency, cyber security and move toward virtualization and cloud computing.

Richard Stallman, a developer and prominent activist for free software, wrote a letter to the European Commission for Competition urging them to require Oracle to divest MySQL, writing:

“If Oracle is allowed to acquire MySQL, it will predictably limit the development of the functionality and performance of the MySQL software platform, leading to profound harm to those who use MySQL software to power applications…We recognize that Oracle’s acquisition of Sun may be essential for Sun’s survival. However, Oracle should not be allowed to harm consumer interests in the database market by weakening the competition provided by MySQL.”

You’ve probably seen all of the dogs dressed up and of course the kids are cute, but here’s a truly transformative Halloween costume.