CloudCon – Funny Vendor Quotes

I’m sitting at CloudCon III – SaaSCon 2011.  It’s “a Cloud Conference with a focus on Software as a Service.”  Sadly the presentations are of limited value, with the same confusion I noted in my “Impressions” article (i.e. every IT business marketing department is trying to take advantage of it and rebrand their abilities “Cloud”).

While not of particular technical knowledge value, they to tend to result in humorous statements by the presenters…

IBM 

“80% of Fortune 100 companies are using IBM cloud capabilities.”  Wow, you’ve got 80 customers?  Really?  (Those Fortune 100 companies, that spent from $200 million to $1 billion per year on IT costs, are generally using some of every capability of every major IT vendor.)

Google

“4 million businesses have gone Google.”  As of 2007, the US Census Bureau reported there are 29,413,039 businesses in the U.S.  Assuming Google’s talking just about the U.S. (and I don’t think they were), that’s a 13% market penetration!  Wow!  (Not!)  If were were to take 2011 numbers and go worldwide, it might be 3% penetration.  Double wow!  (Double not!)

“We expected cloud email to be a growth industry and a challenge to Microsoft in the Enterprise.”  Chuckle.  This is your Cloud goal?  Email?

"Chromebooks – nothing but a browser, configured via the cloud, automatic upgrades, subscription model. Strong processor, wifi, 3G, battery lasts a full day. No hard drive.  Easy to replace a traditional laptop.  Happy IT managers and end users.”  Oh, and costs $499 in the US for a 12.1 inch netbook, $200 more than a Windows netbook with 1/2 the ability.  #Fail

“What the cloud offers: Enhanced Security”.  You’ve didn’t actually say this?  You couldn’t have actually said this!  Savings, definitely.  Ease of access to abilities, yes.  Flexibility, definitely.  Enhanced security, no way in h#ll.  If you’re going cloud you BETTER be spending A LOT more time layering on the security!

Symantec

“Software as a Service, Cloud, Managed Services, Hosted Services, Outsourcing – we just change the name now and then to keep it fresh.”  Well that was refreshingly honest.

“Strength in depth.  A cloud based solution, a gateway based solution, a desktop based solution, all from different vendors.  It’s expensive, but when places are serious about security this is what they do.”  Is someone really talking straight?  So unusual not sure if I can handle it.

Impressions from a SaasCon – CloudCon

I’m sitting at CloudCon III – SaaSCon 2011.  It’s marketed as a Cloud Conference with a focus on Software as a Service.  Here’s what I’m seeing…

a.  Computer hardware vendors selling small footprint office workstations.  It’s not a surprise that computer vendors for the office have finally decided to abandon the standard desk-drawer PC box for a cigar sized box.  (Anyone who opens a standard PC box will find the components would fit in a cigar box anyway, the rest is open space or fans.)  The surprise is it took so long and that they’re selling them as “cloud workstations” and spending their money trying to market them at a Cloud Conference.

b.  Network hardware vendors selling the next speed in network infrastructure, 10 gigabit.  Apparently since everything’s “in the cloud” you need yet more network bandwidth to get to it.  This is some nice marketing fluff since Cloud doesn’t increase your bandwidth needs, it just shifts it from inside your internal network to some external vendors as well – to which your network connections are inevitably slower simply due to WAN costs.  As far as the internal network goes, network storage devices, SOA and web services and heavy application infrastructure has already resulted in the massive network speed and capacity increases.  Not that I’d complain about deploying apps or integrations on a 10gbit network, it certainly makes non-local devices respond even more as if local.  But again, not new, not “cloudy”, just another marketing ploy.

Anyone notice I haven’t mentioned anything Software as a Service oriented yet?

c.  Consulting vendors.  “We’ve got Cloud experience and expertise.”  Sure you do.  Reminds me when early in my career I was seeing advertisements for “5 years of Visual C++ programming experience” when Visual C++ had only been general release for 1 year.  On the serious side, I did have a conversation with a major consulting vendor division VP who told me they have started recommending the use of some “private cloud” resources – which they translate to mean some storage or computing resources hosted in the consulting vendor’s data center.  So for some consulting vendors Cloud means outsourcing a customer’s storage or computing requirements to the vendor data center and/or hosting the customer’s applications for them in the consulting vendor data center.

d.  Utility service vendors.  Symantec “virus protection as a cloud service”, somebody offering Fax as a Cloud service (there’s something incredibly weird about offering a 1980’s technology as a 2010’s cloud ability), central Email management as a Cloud service, and Telephony as a Cloud service.  The last one is kind of interesting though again not what I think of when I think Software as a Service.  Since the PBX moved to VOIP (voice over IP) and the office phone handsets moved to TCP/IP network connected digital devices (the less technical may not have noticed over the last 5 years their office phone moved from being connected to a phone wire to being connected to the office network), it makes sense you could move the PBX to a Cloud service.

e. The Big Vendors.  Did you know IBM offers cloud services?  IBM Smart Cloud!  It’s IBM, it’s Cloud, it’s Smart.  Marketing at it’s best.  Not much to actually say or show beyond “we’ve got lots of data centers and cloud offerings around the world”.  Ok, we know it’s IBM and they’ll (probably) make just about anything you want work…if you’ve got money and time.

f.  Data center hosting vendors.  They can host your servers, they can virtualize for you, they can host your storage, your backups, your network services…oh and by the way they’ll host your Private Cloud (which for them is just your collection of servers in their data center).  A minor twist on what they already do.

f.  Far off in a little corner by themselves were a few real Software as a Service vendors.  A CRM vendor, a Project Management vendor, real life Software as a Service vendors offering their applications and their abilities and various pricing models.

Net net, it tells me that Cloud and Software as a Service remains a confusing poorly defined poorly understood tech space.  Every IT business marketing department is trying to take advantage of it and rebrand their abilities “Cloud”. 

But like the hype cycle for SOA, many try but not that many are offering actual value in the space.  The Cloud and Software as a Service market has a lot of growing to do and maturity to gain before it stabilizes.  There’s definitely value to be gained right now, but also the possibility to be taken by ridiculous claims and expensive products and services offering marginal value.

Batch Out to Web Services?

Calling web services from the mainframe has become a frequent question.  But as applications (and data) may be migrated off the mainframe to apps now hosted on Linux or Windows servers, the old trustworthy batch jobs may suddenly need to access remote systems and web services to do their job.

Here’s how one person phrased their problem…

We are currently looking at doing a partial migration away from a MainFrame.  Some of the functionality written in Mainframe Cobol and is called from Mainframe Batch programs.  We would like to move these cobol programs off the mainframe.  Question - If we moved the functionality in the cobol programme to a Java or .Net web service, is the a way to call this web service from a Mainframe batch programme?

Technically this is an easy answer.  Yes, web services can be invoked from the mainframe.  They can even be directly invoked from CICS and from IBM Enterprise COBOL (as of CICS TS 3.1).  There are some technical limitations to this, Enterprise COBOL web services cannot deal with complicated XML structures and all XML data types – which can make it a challenge to call pre-defined web services with modern standards.  But if the web services are being created directly to service the Enterprise COBOL call, no problem (technically speaking).

Architecturally, this type of batch web service invocation does have a major flaw.  Anyone doing batch programming knows that database commits can cause significant performance problems for batch, and therefore careful management of the database commits (and other database activities) are part of every batch implementation (commonly commits are only done every 100 transactions or more).

Similarly, every web service invocation has an overhead cost.  Multiply this by tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of transactions and your batch process will spend most of it’s time waiting to make the web service connection.  And that time may run to hours or more.

The solution is similar to the database commit approach.  The web service must be designed to pass multiple transaction requests through a single invocation.  The communication connection is made and an array of transaction requests (in mainframe COBOL speak) or a list of SOAP documents (in web service speak) are transmitted during the connection. 

Naturally the receiving web service must be designed to handle multiple transaction requests in a single invocation, and practically this is not a problem in any modern environment (such as Java or .Net).  It is an unusual pattern that most don’t consider, but even in most normal circumstances there is no reason that a web service shouldn’t handle multiple transactions included in a single request body or multiple request bodies in a single communication instance.

This is the only HTTP SOAP based approach to this problem.  Other alternatives include queuing, loading all the requests into a messaging system (such as IBM Websphere MQ Series), with the processing system having a reasonably large thread pool for pulling and processing the messages as they arrive.

These ‘mixed environment’ batches are already very common, and many organizations have no intention to move away from the ‘large processing job’ approach.  As resources spread even farther and into the cloud, this problem will grow ever more ‘interesting’.