Chris Boos on Automation

Yesterday night I attended the 2nd CloudStorm in London <LINK> togther with more than 100 other people interested in Cloud Computing solutions.
The organizers (namely Arvid Fossen from A-Server) have choosen a fantastic location at Allen & Overys offices in the 10th floor, which offered a great view over London, as you can see from the images. The venue was very decent and everything was perfectly arranged.

After a great keynote from Joe Baguley (@JoeBaguley) of Quest Software, serveral 5 to 6 minute talks presented Cloud Computing solutions and described some interesting real world customer scenarios. Following the talks there was a 40 minutes panels, where the audience posed a number of questions to the speaker: Most interest appeared to be the topic of security and how organisations and SME’s could benefit from Cloud offerings. There were a number of questions proving that Cloud Computing is a hot topic and people are starting to discuss benefits and tradeoff with their customers.

Following the panel there was a intesive networking party, including great finger foods and drinks, which offered a perfect framing for interesting discussions between the audience and the speakers, which countinued until around 22:00.

Overall it was great event, and we will continue to attend and contribute to the Cloudstorm events series. Find mor information at the Cloudstorm Homepage www.cloudstorm.org. There you soon will find all the slides from the event.

[View with PicLens]

Blog postings on a conference before the conference is actually taking place are normally very vendor driven. Since I have attended Pulse 2008, 2009 and will now attend 2010 I feel it is time to give some feedback on why I think it is worth a week of my time (and of course what could be improved).

First let me say that I am not part of IBM and that I am normally on a very tight schedule, so going to a conference created by ONE vendor is a rare thing for me. For me PULSE is quite different. So here are my top reasons for going

1.    Get a good feeling for trends in ITSM
The name PULSE is well chosen. There are many conferences on specific IT operational topics, but PULSE is the only one that exclusively deals with ALL topics surrounding the “Run the Business” area. The general setup of PULSE already tells me whether it will be a year for strategic thinking or work on technical details. Besides the “chit-chat” strategy IBM pulls out around the Smarter Planet initiative, the topics at PULSE actually focus on real life challenges and to someone like me who´s head in constantly engaged with tomorrow´s IT operational ideas seeing what is “cool” and “necessary” and “challenging” in everyday life is just great.

2.   Consistent content and people focus
Contrary to other vendor conferences (well as I said I rarely go), PULSE – at least for the last two years and this year´s agenda looks good too – has managed to deal with today, with the past (talking about organically grown IT environments and the challenges they present) and the future. It is a very consistent evolvement. If you take the example of cloud computing. Last year it was all talk from the labs and theory and pioneers like John Willis (Opscode) were tweeting “will I get a press invite”. This year clouds are a reality and even if you do not quite agree with IBM´s interpretation of the cloud the sessions presented at PULSE summarize the current state of IT-nation. And John is back accordingly – now out of the underground with a representative role and with his own presentation.

3.    Qualified attendees
a lot of time conferences are about people looking for jobs, sales opportunities and everything else that is not really the focus of the conference. I have found PULSE attendees to be actually interested in the topic, experienced and competent. And then you get the these open minded people on all levels. For someone like me – who is equally at home in the details technology discussion and the major strategy – this is definitely a key reason to come. You actually get to talk to people – apart from the networking – who know what they are doing, who have an opinion and will discuss it with you. And I am talking about all the IBMers AND everybody else. In combination with the straight forward American debate culture, this gets things right to the point and I love it, if the marketing get cut out a little.

4.    Great networking
Well, this had to be a point. When you get between 4000 and 5000 experts in their fields around ITSM together, there is not just room for business and technical discussions and exchange it is also about building your personal network. It is easy to find people you are interested and even the big shots talk to everybody.

5.    Hands-on experience
The last point of importance to me is the chance to go to a room and actually try something out you have just heard about. You can kick the car before you start ranting and raving about it and you have competent people at hand to answer your intelligent (more or less) questions, and you get all the background information. This opportunity has saved me so much reading red- white- and blue-books just by being able to give an idea a quick try and then being pointed at exactly the right material.

Reading this I am singing too much of a praise, ain´t I? Well I do believe what I said and I do act on it. Still there are some points to improve (let´s see what is done this year). So to any PULSE organizers reading this – please bring back the Guru Galaxy. I never had the chance to talk to 100+ IBM Gurus like Doug McClure and others in one room before and it was one of the most productive hours in my professional life. And while I am at it, why not make it easier for common place people to meet with Tivoli management. Sure they are booked out to wind and dine customers, but the feedback and ideas they could collect right from the base. I know that – if you know the right people – you can get a quick appointment and I have enjoyed so very much. But why not make that an actual part of the conference, a part accessible to anyone who takes the time to get his message or feedback down to a few minutes. Well I have to say Tivoli management itself seemed to be interested. Last year Al Zollar himself appeared at the bar talking to anyone interested in a conversation one evening.

Ok, I am done now. I hope this will give some inside or hint why it might be worth to spend time at PULSE. Of course I follow my own goals, because I would like to meet as many people as possible who are interested in IT automation (that being my own topic of the heart) and thus I am trying to get you there –smile-.

Is it just me? Or do you also hear clouds everywhere you go but still you do not really know what to do with them. So even though I try to focus on the technical aspects of operating a dynamic environment  – which basically means putting an autopilot into the driver´s seat, since neither me nor you can “administrate a moving target” – I feel that the topic of cloud computing needs some real business focus. With everybody getting involved on the technical side and all the lawyers talking about all kinds of legal issues and risks a question I hear over and over again is “when can I use the cloud?”.

Well, here´s the good news: you can use “the cloud” (no such thing by the way) today. You just have to be satisfied with a limited business angle so far.

While the concept of cloud computing looks to change the way we buy, operate and use IT, many players present their services as an early part of the cloud movement. There are infrastructure services (no I am not going to mention the same names over again) or standards for outsourcing peak infrastructure needs as included e.g. in vSphere. You can also see a lot of the “Software as a Service’ guys positioning themselves to offer “cloud services”. Well to my judgement a lot of that is about marketing (SaaS works without clouds just as well (just as badly) as other IT does), but service providers like SaaS-providers are the first wave of businesses to benefit from the cloud idea because it is easy for them to embrace it.

Still, if you are involved in building, planning, operating or controlling a normal business in an IT sense, you probably want to know “When is the right time to go to the cloud?”, ”How can I start?” and “What professional services are out there?”. Well, you can attend many good events created by individual companies to promote their ideas (IBM Pulse, EMC World, …). You can join the evolutionary discussion on clouds at a CloudCamp and in a LinkedIn group. You can even go into the design of a completely open sourced concept and framework for cloud building and join Thomas Uhl and LiSoG in their efforts. Or you could join one of the fathers of cloud discussions – John WIllis in his efforts to get the world to focus on cloud computing. All these actions will definitely get you involved into the process of getting cloud computing into the real world.

But your involvement into any of these much needed and very interesting activities will not really answer your questions as stated above because all these activities are very much focused on either a single approach, a very wide range or an evolutionary discussion. This is why A. Fossen from A-Server has come up with the idea of “a CloudStorm”.

CloudStorm 2010 is a series of events in Europe and the US where you do not only hear from one provider or vendor, but from many and where the focus is very much on today and interaction between the vendors rather than convincing you to follow one vendor into deep dependency (avoiding dependencies is exactly what  cloud computing is all about in the end). So if you want to get a good overview, see many examples of cloud usage that is taking place today and get into a discussion with vendors or have them run against each other (you will find out there is more cooperation than competition, clouds could actually become the first real driver for business eco systems) you should attend one or more CloudStorms. When Arvid presented the idea of a CloudStorm to us, we chose to get involved into the whole series because I strongly believe that using cloud computing is not a question of the future, it is just a question of where to begin – and this is exactly where CloudStorm is headed.

So join us all in the next event in London on Feb. 22nd . Free for attendees and just before the DataCenter Expo (so you may already be there anyway). That is, if you are not at IBM PULSE 2010 at the time (which I will be). If you cannot attend, the next event in London will be on March 15th connected to Cloud Computing Congress. After that, we are especially happy to meet you in Germany on May, 4th. So you see, there is not really an excuse not to get involved and take home lots of information where you can start to actually use cloud computing and in what legal and technical context you can use it for your business.

Become part of the CloudStorm, register today at www.cloudstorm.org.

Chris Boos is attenting the IT Automation Summit on BrightTALK.com on 7th of April 14:00 CET. All webcasts will be recorded and are available for download afterwards.

Hi folks,

we survived the 4th Frankfurt International Dragon boat Race, that was held from 30.5. to 1.6. in Frankfurt Germany, where our head office is located. Beside some sunburns and aching arms and legs, the whole team and our supporters, families and friends had a lot of fun. As being an IT projectmanager, the first thing that comes to my mind on monday morning is: What are the ‘lessons learned’? Beside the fact that water sport is wet sport.

dragonboat_finish.jpg

If you look at the photos you’ll see why this sport is booming all around the world: Dragon boat racing is all about teamwork. 20 people are working together and the most important point is not sheer ‘power’, but much more to stay in sync and to follow the stroke. And this is really not that easy with 6 boats starting at the same time, 18 paddlers plus drummer and steerer in each boat, counting the strokes or screaming ‘GO-GO-GO’.

OK, the distance is just 250 meter or about 120 strokes, but I promise, you learn how to manage and use your power because you are part of a team and anyone is trying to be a part of the success in the end – really great team building and also great fun for all of us. In the end nobody cared about our position 42 of 67 Teams participating the ‘Corporate Cup’. That was more than expected, because we only had one training session to prepare. Maybe there’s also a higher meaning in our final position 42, but I don’t dare to ask “Deep Thought” about that.

Next year, we hopefully will take this event more seriously and to advance from the middle to the first third of the starter field.

Roland