cloud – Agile Elephant making sense of digital transformation

February 12, 2020 By David Terrar

#GLH2020 launches the GLH Inclusivity Challenge

We just yesterday blogged the details and opened registration for the London edition of this year’s Global Legal Hackathon, which might be the largest hackathon ever! To add to an already great event, The Global Legal Hackathon have just a short while ago announced a worldwide collaboration with with She Breaks the Law, RSG Consulting, and global law firm BCLP to launch the GLH Inclusivity Challenge and you’ll know inclusivity, diversity and LGBTQ issues are always high on our agenda. In any case the GLH weekend coincides with International Women’s Day (March 8), so the idea is a natural fit!

GLH2020 adds the GLH Inclusivity Challenge

The 2020 Global Legal Hackathon will be held between March 6-8 simultaneously in more than 50 cities and 25 countries around the world. This year is the third year Agile Elephant has co-hosted London with our friends at Cambridge Strategy Group, and our the second year that the venue is kindly provided by the University of Westminster, although this year we are moving to a bigger space at their Marylebone Campus.

As we’ve described, our goal is to get legal brains, marketers, business analysts and coders in to teams over a weekend creating apps and services that improve the practice and business of law, or provide better access to law for the public. We’ll be fuelling their creativity with beer and pizza, although other food and beverages (including wine) will be available too, thanks to our sponsors – this is a not for profit exercise, and free to enter for all participants (so somebody has to cover our costs please!). But this year, the Global organisers are setting this extra challenge:

“Participants and teams around the world, in every Global Legal Hackathon city, are challenged to invent new ways to increase equity, diversity, and inclusion in the legal industry.”

At the conclusion of GLH weekend, a local winner of the GLH Inclusivity Challenge will be selected by each city alongside the main winner, and will progress to a global semi-finals too. This will be an extra stream and, like the main stream, finalists will be invited to the GLH Finals & Gala, to be held in London in mid-May. On top of that, the overall winner of the GLH Inclusivity Challenge will be invited to present its solution during a diversity and inclusion summit that BCLP is planning to host in September, where leading figures from the industry will be asked to commit to ensuring the idea is brought to life and scaled up to deliver a lasting impact on the legal industry as a whole.

Kearra Markowich, Executive Director of the Global Legal Hackathon, and who is based here in London told us:

“the Global Legal Hackathon is remarkable for the fact that it is a global technology event that is majority women-led around the world. Women lead the event in Brazil, Israel, Romania, Singapore, the United States, and many other countries. On the occasion of International Women’s Day overlapping with the Global Legal Hackathon, we are thrilled to be joined by women-owned RSG Consulting, She Breaks the Law, and the diversity and inclusion team of BCLP to challenge the world to invent new and novel approaches to increasing equity, diversity, and inclusion in the legal industry.”

We think this is a fantastic addition to what is always a great fun weekend. Follow these links to find out more about:

We look forward to seeing you in Marylebone!

October 25, 2019 By David Terrar

HPE have a new angle on managing today’s Hybrid Multicloud World

Everyone’s talking digital transformation in today’s volatile, uncertain. complex and ambiguous business landscape. We all want our organisations to keep relevant, reinvent themselves and avoid going the way of a Thomas Cook or a Kodak. To support the transformational change that’s required enterprises have been talking app modernisation for a while, and moving business processes to the Cloud, sometimes “as is” and sometimes by redeveloping them from scratch. Today, both in terms of cost and agility, using Cloud technology for new developments is a given, but for most organisations there is no one right Cloud. We live in a Hybrid Cloud World whether we like it or not. Depending on the size of your organisation, from medium to large, according to the Rightscale State of the Cloud survey, you might be dealing with 5 different Clouds, along with the business critical systems you are, most likely, still running in your data centre. Even a born in the Cloud start up usually has more than just one Cloud/SaaS platform to drive their business. There is no single Cloud platform that has all the answers, and the three major Public Cloud providers are adding features and functions to their platforms continuously. How do we manage that Multicloud challenge? There is no one answer to that either, but a few days ago I heard HPE’s new angle on looking at the problem from the data layer, which ought to be the starting point for thinking about business solutions in any case.

The ingredients of their solution, in my mind, involve a combination of data abstraction and 3 Cs – Cloud, Containers and Choice. Let me explain their product and what I mean in a little more detail.

HPE Cloud Volumes

HPE explained their new Cloud Volumes series of data and management services at a workshop run by Nick Dyer, their Field CTO for Nimble and Intelligent Storage, and Tony Stranack, their EMEA Head of Information and Data Strategies. The problems they are trying to address are common across the Multicloud enterprise. They want to allow portability between the various Public Cloud options and/or on premises hardware so customers can choose the right tool for the job both now, and over time as platforms, circumstances and costs change. They want to provide those services with enterprise grade resilience and availability. They want to make the data repository itself easy to manage and in a unified way across the options. Above all they want to give customers choice and flexibility, whether you are working on existing mission critical apps, or developing new apps with an agile and DevOps mode of develop and deployment.

Nick asked the question “where is the right place for my data” and then went on to explain that data always has “gravity”. By that he means that data is bound by the constraints of where and how it was created, and how it is being stored. Depending on that context, there are various factors “pulling” at that data if and when you want to move it and use it.

Ingress and Egress

The biggest pull is Ingress and Egress, now a normal part of our cloud terminology, but why don’t we just say in and out? Putting my quibble about words aside, we are talking about the costs of getting your data in to and out of the major Cloud provider’s platforms. For Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud Platform moving your data in to their platform doesn’t cost a thing. Of course, they charge you for the storage you use, and they hope you stay a long time, but then they charge you when you want to move that data out of their platform, back on premise or to some other destination. The costs can be significant.

Data Abstraction

With the Cloud Volumes service your data is held in a single repository that is logically connected to your on-premise compute, or to any of the 3 Public Cloud Services. This brings significant benefits in both time and cost. Because the data isn’t being physically moved, there are no egress charges and no elapsed time for the data to move. This gives you all the flexibility and portability between platforms that you need, with the advantage that HPE only bills you for exactly the amount of storage and management services you consume.

Enterprise Grade Availability

You need enterprise grade security, resilience and availability. The service uses HPE’s Nimble storage, designed for low latency with 256-bit AES encryption and 99.9999% availability.

Potential Solutions

The key benefits the approach drives are choice and flexibility. Cloud Volumes allows you to move workloads and data from on-premises to any cloud (and back) simply and efficiently, helping you avoid being locked in to the first Public Cloud you chose. It allows you to develop natively in Cloud and deploy on-premises or vice versa. You could run production on-premises but apply AI and analytics logic in the Cloud adding the ability to scale capacity up and down as necessary. The service allows you to run multiple instances across several Clouds and on-premises simultaneously. You could run production on-premises but recover in the Cloud. It allows you to spin up a new instance to try something in seconds.

Data Management

Cloud Volumes allows choice on management of the data service too, as well as providing a consistent approach across Cloud and on-premises. You can use their portal, a Software as a Service based data management approach, as well as command line or cloud first APIs. The service embraces Docker and Kubernetes to support the kind of Continuous Integration, Continuous Delivery approach to allow you to release more, faster and better – to develop once and deploy anywhere.

Underpinning the service is HPE’s InfoSight. This is an AI based tool that analyses and correlates millions of sensors from all of their globally deployed systems. It constantly watches over your particular environment but has learned from managing the entire HPE customer hardware estate to predict problems. If it uncovers an issue, it resolves the issue and prevents other systems from experiencing the same problem. It continuously learns so it gets better and more reliable over time. It takes the guesswork out of managing infrastructure and simplifies planning by accurately predicting capacity, performance, and bandwidth needs. Pretty smart.

Conclusion

Cloud Volumes provides a new angle on the Multicloud management problem that every enterprise faces. By separating out the data it addresses a key cost and time issue as you are moving your data between platforms logically, not physically. It simplifies the options for developing new cloud first apps, dealing with mission critical systems, disaster recovery, fail over and more. It’s a set of tools that helps you choose the right Cloud, use a modern containerised approach, and allow you to change your Cloud or on-premises choice as the cost equation or other factors change. From what I saw at the workshop it’s well worth exploring, and we hear there will be more announcements around the service coming very soon.

Check back here once we’ve had that briefing, or contact me if you want more detailed advice now.

Views from my colleagues who also attended the Cloud Volumes workshop:

Hewlett Packard Enterprise is a customer and includes me in their global influencer programme.

October 7, 2019 By David Terrar

Breaking Down Silos in your Business

Every organisation in every sector is dealing with digital disruption in today’s volatile, fast changing and uncertain world. Businesses need to transform to stay competitive or be in danger of going the way of once great brands like Nokia, Blockbuster or Kodak who saw the writing on the wall but didn’t act fast enough to adapt. Too often digital transformation efforts fail with a regular cause being the organisation seeing the task as a project with a beginning and an end. Those organisations leading in this era of disruption recognise that transformation needs to be continuous and businesses need to think of being in a permanent state of reinvention. But often, the key barrier to change is the siloed nature of most organisations. In today’s connected world, that needs to change, and we believe the way to solve the problem combines different thinking in terms of people, culture and architecture, as well as a new approach to systems integration, making use of the API Economy.

There is plenty of research exploring how business has evolved over the 19th and 20th centuries. The various parts of a typical organisation often fail to work together with a shared sense of mission. We would argue that the structural issue of divisions is a natural result of the command and control and hierarchical management approach of most, and particularly larger, organisations. Most large companies have divisions, or even groups and functions within divisions, that operate in silos. Even the word “division” itself highlights the problem. People are, by their nature, territorial. Those functional teams that grew with an objective of efficiency and process simplification in the beginning, have created issues around territory and mistrust that can derail the cross functional thinking and new ideas that are required in the 21st century of the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

In looking at the people and culture issues we are guided by Professor Vlatka Hlupic and the research behind her book The Management Shift. She has investigated companies who have been tackling these big shifts over a number of years. She references more than 20 companies using her approach and leadership model. They are from small to large, in various sectors and include a FTSE 100 Company. She has categorised their management styles in 5 stages or levels from Traditional to Emergent. The traditional companies haven’t moved beyond command and control and silos. The smart, successful companies have an emergent management style characterised by an unlimited mindset, strong team cohesion, unbounded culture, inspirational leaders, a strong sense of purpose, and a passion for the work. These are the characteristics we need in our 21st century leaders and managers to break down barriers, encourage cross functional teams and foster the right mindset for collaboration rather than conflict.

We also think that the silo problem is a manifestation of Conway’s Law where organsations are constrained to design systems which are copies of the communication structures of that organisation. We need to be thinking, communicating and doing things differently.

Given the ubiquity of IT in the way enterprises are organising their business, one cannot tackle breaking down silos in an organisation without addressing it at a technology level as well as people level. Data silos are the result of cultural, organisational and technical choices that were made long ago, either for strategic reasons or because of technical limitations. They reduce productivity, they make it difficult to have a global view of your business, and they make it difficult to leverage the new technology available today.

Over the past 10 years, the start-ups who managed to create new business models managed to do it because they leveraged the new technology available to them and did not have the legacy to deal with. They could build everything from the ground up, at a speed unheard of before. 15 years ago, no organisation would have had the resources to develop geo-localisation, mobile apps, mobile payment, booking system, and scale as Uber did in such a short amount of time. Equally they had no organisational barriers to deal with. They were purpose built and organised from the ground up. They had an idea and leveraged the cloud to pick and choose what functionality they needed to make this idea reality.

In order to stay current, to re-invent themselves and stay relevant to their ever more demanding clients, enterprises need to be agile and break down the silos that they built over the years. To achieve this, they need to be able to develop applications extremely rapidly, matching what the business needs, and ready to iterate to deliver fast. However today, it is still considered that 50% of these projects fail because of integration issues.

Historically, integration teams have always been very centralised, being themselves one of the silos they should be contributing to break with integration technology. We are used to refer to the SOA team, or the ESB team. Integration was not something a developer would do on an ad-hoc basis, it was a full-time job, needing deep expertise in integration tools. This became very acute when the service-oriented architecture was put in place. It forced the creation of a centralised team to create the service layer that had to be used by the developers to developer their applications. The problem is that the integration team did not understand the application their services were created for and it created friction and finally slowed down the pace of developing new applications. It was clear that the best approach would have been to let the application team own the creation of the integration services, but technology did not allow that.

Over the past few years, new techniques have allowed us to re-think the way we tackle integration. Let’s take a quick look at some new concepts and how they help moving towards a decentralized integration team.

Fine Grained Integration & Microservices

Breaking up your enterprise wide deployed integration hub into right sized containers provides improved agility, scalability, and resilience. Agility, because many teams can work on integrations without having to defer to a centralised integration team. Scalability, because individual flows can be scaled on their own. Resilience, because isolated flows cannot steal shared resources such as CPU from one to another.

Microservices are a software development technique that allows you to decompose an application into smaller de-coupled services. They provide greater agility because they can be changed independently from one to another, they are scalable because we can tie their usage with the resources they need, and they provide better overall application resilience because they are independent from one to another.

As we have seen, fine grained integration architecture and Microservices are providing similar advantages, and once brought together they bring the developers the environment they need to be fast, to be independent and to be able to concentrate on their part of the application.

APIs

API solutions have come a long way and today provide the tooling to be offered and consumed easily. They provide tools to be easily discoverable, they allow the provider to secure them and control the on-boarding of users. They provide analytics so you can monitor them and control their usage, they can be promoted to third parties and they now can also be monetised. The API economy is here, and the companies adopting the approach are more successful – research shows it adds more than 10% to the firm’s market value.

APIs therefore provide a very simple way for the provider to “offer” access to its data, and to the consumer to get to the service he or she needs. Based on a modern integration architecture, they are the key to unlock the data new technologies need to deliver on their premise. AI is only as good as the data it can be trained on. Innovative mobile application are only worth it if they allow the end user accessing and manipulating meaningful data.

The combination of Microservices consuming APIs to get to integration points can give an organisation great prospects in terms to speed and agility to respond to changing business needs.

People

We have seen that technology can change the way integration teams are organised, and give more autonomy to application developers. But technology should also provide non-technical teams access to data. Take the example of the HR department that decided to subscribe to a Workday SaaS service. It is likely they did this without involving IT much – remember shadow IT – (at least during the choice of the solution). They did this because they wanted access to that application simply, without having to wait for a long IT development cycle, and were ready to adapt to get to the functionality. Now the HR department is using Workday and they need to access some specific information and want to receive an email alert when there is a specific change. For them, for simple integration requests like this, reverting to asking IT is out of the question. Modern integration tools should have “ready to use” connectors allowing them to perform no-code integration tasks.

Of course, technology used to create the silos we are trying to break. Over specialisation created barriers between the business and IT. Within IT, it created barriers between integration specialists and developers, and it certainly didn’t facilitate communication between an enterprise and the “outside” world. Today, the need for data to fuel new technologies such as AI, Blockchain and other emerging technologies forces us to break down these barriers. And that’s what new technology and techniques allow us to do. It gives greater autonomy to the developer, it allows business users to be self-sufficient for their simpler needs, with a new level of controlled self-service thanks to APIs and the API Economy.

In summary, for today’s organisation to stay ahead of the competition it needs both a new mindset and a new approach to technology addressing architecture, technology and people. It needs more open leadership that recognises cross functional teams are necessary and better teamwork is required at all levels. It needs a more agile approach to management as well as technology. In terms of the technology deployed to support transformation, it needs to recognise that integration is the key driver, and the creation of APIs to open up company data reduces friction, drives new business models and creates new revenue opportunities.

This post is a collaboration co-authored by Emmanuel Treny, Director Sales Europe – IBM Cloud Integration and David Terrar, Founder & CXO of Agile Elephant.

September 19, 2019 By David Terrar

Unlocking value from data – how can the API Economy help you?

“In 2000 you needed a Website, in 2010 you needed a mobile app, in 2020 you will need an API”
– John Musser, founder of Programmableweb.com

Underlying that intriguing statement there is a shift happening. Actually, it is a connected series of shifts that need explaining. On a wider level we are living through the Fourth Industrial Revolution, everyone’s talking Digital Transformation, and many CIOs are struggling with disconnected legacy infrastructure and systems. Can they keep pace with the transformation their organisations require? Next week I’m speaking at an Executive Workshop event in Londonrun by APIdays and IBM that is designed to explain John Musser’s quote and show you how the API-Economy can be put to work for you and your company.

To transform you need to be shifting your organisation from a legacy approach to new ways of working and thinking. You’ll need fundamental changes in how you conduct business, to adapt as the market shifts and as new technology presents opportunities. You need to think in terms of new business models and new ways to find and create value for the business. The successful businesses adapt continuously and embrace reinvention (we call that Mutable Business, but that’s another story). In making everything in IT work together it works for you. Integration not only connects for better experiences for your customers, partners and employees, but it also adds value through the new functionalities and new services provided by connecting different functions together, both from your own development team as well as plugging in to apps from the wider market. This is the API Economy that next week’s workshop will explain.

This exclusive event aimed at CIOs and senior execs is happening Tuesday 24^thSeptember, starting at 9:00 at the Royal Society of Arts. It’s organised by IBMand APIdays, who run API focused conferences in Melbourne, Paris, Helsinki, Amsterdam, San Francisco, Barcelona (and London). Let me run through the agenda for the day:

Mehdi Medjaoui the founder of the APIdays conference series will set the scope and scene for the new API landscape.
I will be speaking about how the API Economy is driving the move to Ecosystems and Software Composition. I’ll be presenting ideas from a Bloor paper I’m co-creating with David Norfolk our practice lead for development and governance. There’s a shift from products to platforms, from closed business systems to open APIs, from running your own systems to joining ecosystems, marketplaces and extending your solution by connecting to other people’s apps. We’ll discuss lessons learned, the mindset required and how you should be thinking like a composer rather than a builder/developer.
Ken Parmelee, IBM’s Director of Cloud Pak for Integration will talk integration in conjunction with app modernization and the agile approach to connecting new functions together. He’ll go through the options the Cloud Pak brings and he’ll show how you can open up your legacy applications to unlock their data for new value.
Peter Brabec, the API Economy & DataPower Leader at IBM Europe will explain the evolution of API Connect, DataPower and other Integration products into a combined Integration platform. As well as talking architecture he’ll discuss the approaches to simplify, while at the same time improving security and control.
Following the speakers there will be three parallel workshop sessions with enough time so that the audience will be able to experience all three:
- Monica Raffaelli will explore how Cloud Pak for Integration is designed to support the journey to a more agile integration architecture.
- Charlotte Nielsen will demo the two different software capabilities integrating APP Connect with API Connect.
- Carlo Marcoli will build a fintech solution in minutes with IBM App Connect. His demo will build an account information and aggregation service on top of the PSD2 APIs that are exposed by open banking in the EU.
Chris Roper, IBM’s Hybrid Cloud Integration Sales Leader for UKI, will summarise all of the morning’s session and pull out the common themes of where the value is created in the API economy, unlocking your data, and the new approach to innovation and software reuse.
The formal presentations and workshops will finish at 12:15 giving ample time for lunch and networking.

We are delighted to be involved in this Executive Workshop. The API Economy is here and now. We use it all the time without thinking too much about it. We expect the app or the website we are on to connect to Google Maps to show us the way. Whether it’s getting food with Uber Eats or booking a holiday with Expedia, behind the scenes the API Economy is connecting us to many different partner services seamlessly. Come along next Tuesday and find out how you can use it to innovate and unlock value for your own organisation. Go here to find out more and register for a place (using the code GuestOfIBM). And if you want to find out more about API options, p lease contact us.

A version of this post was first published on BloorResearch.com

July 25, 2019 By David Terrar

Every cloud has a shadow hiding!

Apologies for the play on words – couldn’t resist it!

This is our third blog, continuing the series of “where we’re going we don’t need roads” #dontneedroads, and for those of you wanting the throwback link how about Cliff Richard and the Shadows (cue Apache or Summer Holiday for those of a certain age!)

So buckle up as we get the De Lorean started for a Shadow IT blog. But hey! I hear you say, isn’t cloud supposed to have removed shadow IT? Well yes and no!

First there was on premise shadow IT, servers under desks, discretely hidden in broom cupboards far away from the IT department and in some cases serving business critical applications and services.

Then came along cloud, public cloud, we retain some on premise for regulatory or security reasons so we move/morph to hybrid cloud. Shadow IT gone? No!

Now we have the opportunity to have hybrid/multicloud shadow IT care of a smart device and a credit card, and the IT department have no idea of what’s happening!

So why is shadow IT still so prolific in organisations? I believe it’s down to several factors:

Convenience
Speed
Money talks

Let’s have a look at each one in more detail.

Convenience – I want a service or an application, its hosted on a public cloud, all I do is present my credit card details and within a couple of minutes boom! Got my service and good to go, I have flexible consumption models and no need to worry about availability, performance, security etc because my cloud provider does all that! (or do they?)
Speed – very similar to convenience but a direct pointy finger at the IT department, jeez you guys are slow, I want this and I want it now (see above!) I haven’t time for forms, I can’t wait for the long winded process you guys have, I want it now!
Money talks – that credit card in paragraph 1, well it’s just not credit cards, various studies show that although the IT department have a greater say at the beginning of a project/request by the end the business has the biggest say as they hold the purse strings. If a line of business executive has a budget then why bother with those IT guys, let’s just go out and buy what we need.

So with cloud based whatever you want as a service, for example SaaS (software as a service) the poor old IT department is well and truly in the dark, and there are more dark forces coming into play.

As an IT Service Management consultant in previous roles, Shadow IT has been the bane of my life – why? Where do you want to start?

Security, change and configuration management, data integrity, business resiliency, regulatory compliance I could go on but these are crucial aspects of keeping the business running regardless of which cloud or infrastructure you’re using, and Shadow IT bypasses most of these and more that are mentioned above.

So what’s the compromise – if any? Well how about:

A more responsive, faster, seamless change process, one which the user/requester can initiate, track and control? Today most new or updated service requests can be automated to the point of a button is pressed and voila! This is really the easiest way of combatting shadow IT as most organisations have it in place in one form or another.
A centralised, policy driven security and governance process, that the users are part of, it has worked for BYOD (bring your own device) so why shouldn’t it work for hybrid/multicloud?
Business and IT work together – yes together! How? Well compromise might be a good starting point but how about choice!

Let’s go a bit deeper into choice, with all the open source solutions available today many organisations are building or buying a platform. These platforms are part of their journey to cloud. This journey is more than likely a hybrid journey and probably involves multiple clouds and cloud providers, we now have a hybrid multicloud environment, ideal for Shadow IT!

However these platforms can provide choice across multiple disciplines – cloud native application development, continuous integration and continuous delivery (CI/CD), a choice of runtimes, different deployment options and more! Great choices that can nullify Shadow IT.

By providing a centralised policy driven governance/security posture which encompasses all of the business (on premise or on public cloud) business can be reassured that brand damage, data loss etc are prevented but their choices remain.

IBM has recognised that most businesses are in, or moving towards a hybrid multicloud world, and recently released their, Multi Cloud Management solution which provides Visibility, Governance and Automation across this new world. Business and IT can collaborate on what runs where, who can access it, which cloud/infrastructure it can run on.

This provides the speed that business needs but with the guard rails that ensures IT has control thereby reducing the need for Shadow IT!

See a happy ending! So all your clouds can have a silver lining instead of a shadow hiding!

The “Where we’re going, we don’t need roads” series of posts to help reframe how you think about what’s next in enterprise technology is co-authored by Dave Metcalfe of IBM and David Terrar of Agile Elephant.

July 2, 2019 By David Terrar

Wimbledon and IBM – a tennis doubles team

Courtesy of IBM I’m on the way to Wimbledon and the All England Lawn Tennis Club (AELTC) today to meet up with my #dontneedroads partner in crime, Dave Metcalfe. Like today, I was their guest 4 years ago, and I’m looking forward to revisiting “the bunker” under the courts where an army of IBM experts are working with AI, cloud and onsite technology to support the club, the players, the audience on site, the audience around the world and AELTC’s partners. Here’s my report from 4 years ago, and I’m looking forward to seeing what’s changed for 2019.

The IBM AELTC relationship actually goes back 30 years. The IT support has evolved over the decades and now includes an award winning website, a truly comprehensive smartphone app, and a whole array of up to the second video and information services aimed at making the experience of the fans, the players and the viewing and listening public better each year. One key factor is security. Last year at the championships IBM detected and blocked over 200 million cybersecurity events, and IBM has to be ready for even more threats trying to disrupt or subvert the show this year.

One of the new additions for this year is AI powered video highlights for us tennis fans using the app and the website. There is too much output for manual editing of highlights in near real time, so IBM’s Watson technology comes in to play. The AI has been taught to better recognise acoustics and understand inadvertent bias. Not all highlights are equal. A highly passionate crowd favourite could generate more excitement than a more reserved yet equally skilled opponent, so Watson has been taught to pick and choose to increase the quality of the video output.

As well as supporting those of us who are lucky enough to have a ticket to be there, or have super fast broadband to watch online, there is a world audience out there with different circumstances. For example 900 million fans in India, most with limited bandwidth. IBM and Wimbledon have developed a progressive web app to provide a good service for that audience too.

Four years ago I met Alexandra Willis using analytics to make real time decisions on what content should go to the app or the website, or spotting an incident that might be a great opportunity to pull in one of the sponsors. It was impressive back then and I’m guessing things will have progressed dramatically with more AI help.

Of course I hope to see some tennis between the tech too. Johanna Konta is second on No. 1 Court where we’ve got tickets. I’ll be tweeting, making notes and using my camera, but I’m looking forward to hearing “Play”.

Check back here for the next posts about my Wimbledon experiences today.

June 12, 2019 By David Terrar

Cloudy with some fog on the edge

To quote Monty Python “what have the Romans ever done for us”?

The same question in the future may well be asked of cloud computing, and how it has changed the face of computing, driven a new wave of technology and enables business/digital transformation.

So what has cloud computing done for us?

Most people think that cloud computing was invented back in 2006, but we must go back in time and travel to the 1900’s when cloud was first thought of.

So strap into your time machine (our favourite is a De Lorean!) and get ready for a brief history lesson of the origins of cloud computing, and why it underpins the major business/technical advances of this century to date.

1950’s,mainframe computers came into existence, several users accessed the central computer via dumb (green screen) terminals. The prohibitive costs of this did not make them economically viable for organisations to buy them. So the idea to share access to a single computer was born, primarily to save costs (sound familiar?).

In 1960s,IBM developed an operating system (OS) named Virtual Machine (VM). This allowed for simultaneous operation of more than one OS. Guest OS could be run on every VM, with their own memory and other infrastructure, making it possible to share these resources. This created the concept of virtualisation which is still prevalent today.

1980s,Open Source software starts to be created and donated by Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds leading the way, a more concise history of Open Source software is here.

The 1990’ssaw the advent of virtual private networks (VPN) primarily provided by the Telecoms industry, but invented by Gurdeep Singh-Pall a Microsoft employee. A VPN allows many users shared access to a single physical or virtual network infrastructure. We also saw the first mobile devices – more on these later!

Things were really hotting up in the cloud world although the word “cloud” was not as common as it is today.

Into the new millennium (hopefully no bugs follow us!) and we must mention other computing models and approaches which have contributed to the development of cloud computing.

Grid computing which allows for parallel computing.
Utility computing facilitates computing resources to be offered as a payed for service (yes we are close to the cloud word now!)
Software as a Service (SaaS) brought us subscription based usage of applications and so “as a Service” models were born.

Back to those mobile devices mentioned earlier, so today we now have more computing power in our pockets than I had in 1998 for my Windows NT 4 Microsoft Exchange Server!

Mobile computing is arguably one of the major driving forces of the rise, dependency and capability of cloud computing today. Business is now not 9 to 5 – it’s always on! Which brings challenges around:

Availability
Performance
Customer experience
Quicker, faster to market applications and services (competitive edge)
Connectivity (Wi-Fi, 4G and soon 5G)

The cost of doing this on premise is as restrictive and expensive as the early 1950’s when the mainframe came along so alternatives were needed.

Enter cloud computing, providing all of the above and more from a variety of cloud computing models, the most popular being public cloud. And from inception to around early 2018 public was seen as “the place to be” with Amazon Web Services, Microsoft, Google, and IBM leading the way. Other clouds are available!

But hey wait we have some compelling arguments for not being all in on public cloud! Primarily around:

Regulatory compliance
Security
Auditability
Latency (bandwidth) challenges

My favourite quote at the moment is:

“The old idea that everything would move to the public cloud never happened. Instead, the cloud market evolved to meet the needs of clients who want to maintain on-premises systems while tapping a multitude of cloud platforms and vendors.”
Stephen Elliot, Program Vice President, IDC

So Hybrid Cloud is now recognised as the way forward for the majority of businesses on their journey to cloud (regardless of which flavour of cloud we are talking about). Why?

Well we have read the quote and seen some of the reasons for a multicloud environment which comprises public, private and hybrid cloud environments

Why are these important to business today and going forward?

Well cloud allows business to:

Migrate – or lift and shift workloads to the public cloud, normally non business critical and/or test and dev environments.
Modernise – examine legacy applications and modernise accordingly (Gartner’s 7 options to modernise legacy systems). Creating containers and microservices.
Innovate – explore new technologies such as Blockchain, Internet of Things, Analytics, Artificial Intelligence and machine learning.
Optimise – understand the cost, performance and availability of their multicloud environments.

But early cloud computing really was only focussed on Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and the aforementioned players were really in a race concerned primarily on how fast, how quick and how often they could spin up infrastructure and compute, I can create 50 virtual machines in a minute, WOW!

But so what? It was only later that cloud stamped its mark on the business, providing a platform for business transformation, innovation and modernisation.

Which is important because as business and technology has evolved so has cloud computing, and it continues to do so. We are now exploring Edge computing and the impact that 5G will have on our world.

So having looked back a little we now can understand where we are going (and why) people of a certain age say there is little or nothing new in computing – rather its cyclic. I believe that cloud computing will be different – why? Because it enables transformation and innovation as well as being intrinsically linked to business, because where we are going we don’t need roads – just the right cloud!

If you want to learn more about the Journey to Cloud and how it can help your business I will be on the IBM stand at the TECHXLR8 @Excel 12-13 June, it would be good to have a chat! We will also be discussing multicloud management on a webinar on 5^thJune, 11am. You can register here.

Finally please check out our series of where we are going we don’t need roadsblog and more on cloud and business transformation here.

#GLH2020 launches the GLH Inclusivity Challenge