Cloud Data Centers - Architectural Drivers

More and more data centers are moving to the cloud. It is estimated that over two-thirds of the data center traffic will be on the cloud by 2017. As per the Cisco Global Cloud Index 2013, Cloud Data Centers are seeing a 35% CAGR (Compounded Annual Growth Rate) while the Traditional Data Centers are seeing only a 12% CAGR.

So what are the key drivers for a Cloud Data Center?

• It should provide organizations with Mobility
• It should enable Cloud Management with Security
• It should enable Application Transformation
• And lastly, it should turn Information into Insights to help organizations succeed

Mobility is the key for a Cloud Data Center. Your data should be available wherever you are in any part of the world! It should be safe and secure without any compromise. Management of your data center assets should not turn your hair white. It should be easy to manage, provision, de-provision and backup.

Elaborating a little on Application Transformation - today's applications have attributes like Dynamic Instantiation & Removal, multi-cloud models including hybrid clouds, multiple nodes and have different types of infrastructure demands that were non-existent a few years ago. Today, Infrastructure needs to be application aware for Agile placements, it should identify physical, virtual, cloud integrations, it should be flexible enough for a dynamic shared resource pooling and should be able to manage application clusters.

An optimum data center should give the business an insight into all the critical components of the data center and how each component is helping drive the business. What is the value add of each component and its availability - should be clearly showcased to the business.

So what are the Best Practices for a Cloud Ready Infrastructure?

• Consolidate & document your data center assets
• Develop your data center metrics - Power Utility Efficiency, Operational metrics, People metrics
• Identify & document the data, storage & application network requirements
• Develop & plan your data center architecture - Policies, Automation opportunities, fabric for the implementation
• Plan for the upgrade of your network access & aggregation layers - 10G/40G/100G, unified fabric etc, upgrade of the x86 assets, virtualization & server requirements.
• Identify Day 1, Day 30, Day 60, Day 90 operational requirements
• Plan for how you will deal with Disaster Recovery 
• And finally, develop your cloud management road map! 

CRM Cloud in India

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is catching on big time in India and many opportunists are cashing in on this huge market.  In Gartner's view, the Indian CRM market size is about 15% of the overall Asia Pacific (APAC) market, the second largest in the region, after Australia. By2014, CRM in India is projected to grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 16% to 19%. Yanna Dharmasthira, Research Director at Gartner said in 2009, "In the next five years, India is projected to have the second highest CAGR after China as far as CRM is concerned." Gartner revised the growth rate of the Indian CRM market, specifically for the year 2010 in which it was expected to reach $100 million.

CRM systems developed in India like Impel CRM, SageCRM, Zoho, CRM24x7.com and Smiles becoming quite popular, however they have yet to demonstrate significant market share in India where SalesForce, SAP, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Oracle CRM are dominating in the Enterprise space. Though, Zoho is catching up quite fast with their user friendly and simple interface.

Open source software solutions like SugarCRM and vtiger have also found some users in India, however, as with open source CRM software on a global basis, these products are largely accepted by the small businesses and are not very popular as they need a lot of maintenance / customizations.

Several enterprise resource planning (ERP) software suppliers such as Ramco, Focus Infosoft and Wings ERP were found to be domestic market share leaders in the back office space and offer integrated customer relationship management solutions along with their ERP suites.

Some other vendors and apps worth mentioning are marketing based apps that provide the intelligent information to the CRM applications. Eloqua (that Oracle has acquired) is a leader in the digital marketing and automation. Another big vendor in the marketing automation space is Marketo that acquired Crowd Factory last year and is playing in the space of digital marketing & automation. A few others worth mentioning in the email marketing domain are ExactTarget, Emailvision and Silverpop. Many of these focus on small to medium sized buyers, including Constant Contact,VerticalResponse and the rapidly growing MailChimp. There's much innovation at the SMB level including Nimble and InfusionSoft, which recently garnered substantial venture backing.

So folks, CRM is coming of age, even in India where more and more small & mid size businesses are following Mahatma Gandhi's eternal rule - Customer is God!

Real Time User Experience Monitoring in the Cloud

What is End User Experience, you may ask..it is lately getting a lot of importance by anybody and everybody providing a web based application with mid to large user base. It is measuring the end user's experience on the website, how is the performance of the application, how easy is the navigation of the application, what is the drop rate of customers / users. 


Historically, the end user monitoring was done via Synthetic Transactions - simulating how an end user would behave after logging on to a website via a script that executes certain functions on the website. However, it is not easy to predict each and every step that a user will take / perform on a website & therefore impossible to know what  a real user’s experience is with an application by using just a synthetic transaction monitor.

This led to the rise of Real Time User Experience Monitoring that helps companies to understand what is actually going on within the client side application (browser based, or proprietary thick client) of the end user. So you will ask, why is it so difficult to measure the Real Time End User Experience? So here you go..many major companies have moved their application functionality to the web. Rich Internet Applications (RIA) written in Ajax, Adobe Flex, Adobe Flash, HTML5 have become the norm. In RIA applications one cannot tell what is happening to the user by watching the protocol stream at the web server (as you can with a simple HTTP web application). Furthermore, the smart phone and the tablet platforms have emerged as true application platforms for business critical applications and are being adopted by many companies. Since users are going to be accessing business critical applications with these devices, and some of these applications will be SaaS or cloud delivered, then client side agents and therefore Real Time User Monitoring will be the only viable approach to monitoring the performance of these applications to their users. 

So who are the key players in this niche market?

Company	Product	Description (Taken From Vendor Site)
CA Technologies	Customer Experience Manager	CA Wily CEM focuses on identifying and prioritizing problems that affect end-user service quality by analyzing individual transactions in real-time; providing customized real-time dashboard displays that give you the information needed to make quick, accurate decisions; enabling business-based prioritization of problem resolution; and displaying information needed by both IT and business owners to work together to meet Service Level Agreements and deliver an optimum enduser experience.
CorrelSense	Real User Monitoring	SharePath RUM (real user monitoring) Express provides a real-time view into the actual experience of your end-user, including availability, response times and service levels. This free, enterprise-class software helps isolate problems and pinpoint bottlenecks in your data center, network, or online application.
BMC Software	End User Experience Management	Reduce the time, effort, and cost involved with monitoring dynamic applications by providing both IT and the business with real-time insight into application performance and its impact on user behavior — across physical and cloud environments, the internet, corporate networks, content delivery networks (CDNs), and mobile devices. This was earlier called Coradiant and came with the acquisition.
HP Software	Real User Monitor	HP Real User Monitor software passively monitors application performance and availability for all users at all locations all the time. It automatically discovers underlying infrastructure and classifies user actions—giving you instant visibility into session health. It allows you to trace user experience across tiers to quickly isolate application issues, capture live sessions, see where customers clicked, measure response times and see pages that caused problems. And you can easily capture and replay sessions to create test scripts that reflect real behavior.
IBM	Tivoli Composite Application Manager for Transactions	ITCAM for Transactions provides an agentless Web response monitoring component with the ability to dynamically switch monitoring levels. The Web response monitoring component allows you to adopt an end user’s perspective when measuring transaction performance. End-user response time is filtered down to specific transactions by time, user ID, or session.
Oracle	Real User Experience Insight	Oracle Real User Experience Insight enables enterprises to maximize the value of their business-critical applications by delivering insight into real end-user experiences. It can help identify lost revenue from frustrated users, reduce support costs by lowering call center volumes, accelerate problem resolution of poorly performing applications, and help businesses adapt to changing needs by providing insight into business trends and user preferences.
Tealeaf	Customer Experience Management	Tealeaf's solutions are used by customer-centric organizations to build a true online customer experience competency across the enterprise. From ebusiness and IT, to customer service and compliance, Tealeaf provides the common "view" of the online customer enabling organizations to understand how to deliver better online solutions and provide more effective service for their customers.
Quest Software	Foglight User Experience Management	Foglight® User Experience Management solutions help you understand and improve the experience users and customers have when interacting with your web applications. Proactively managing the user experience will help you identify performance issues, understand user and customer behavior, and improve web application performance.
Opnet	AppResponse Xpert	AppResponse Xpert is an appliance-based solution that monitors and analyzes end-user experience for all levels of transactions. It also supports in-depth monitoring and analysis of the underlying network, a domain that is vital to comprehensive APM.
Aternity	Frontline Performance Intelligence & Real User Experience Management	Frontline Performance Intelligence is the result of the real-time aggregation, analysis, correlation of all the performance metrics that define and impact real end user experience. By transforming end user experience metrics into actionable business intelligence, Frontline Performance Intelligence becomes a strategic business enabler.
Knoa Software	End-User Experience and Performance Management	Knoa's vision for EPM starts with monitoring application performance from the end-user perspective. Knoa's User Sensing Technology captures the end-user's interaction with an application at the GUI level rather than the transaction level, so it really measures true "end-user response time" and the actual "end-user experience."

So friends, look these guys up and see what they have to provide that suits your requirements & budget and get the best out of it...

Have fun monitoring your customers real user experience and see your revenues soar!

Cloud Platform - Select it carefully!

As a strategic part of your move to the Cloud, your Platform decision will greatly impact how you can maximize  your return on investment. The platform is just not simply a layer of technology. To fulfill the definition of 'Platform', it must meet 3 essential criteria:

1. Create a Standard Interface for users to "Plug-In"
2. Hide the complexity underneath
3. Provide quantifiable & tangible benefits to the users

The Platform helps to achieve the goals of the various cloud components. In a cloud, there are many layers of the platform - the hardware, the hypervisor & the cloud resources management. Each layer provides certain level of abstraction, interfaces & connectors for the next layer and obviously tangible value!

Cloud systems depend on the abstraction away from the virtualized resources, but the physical hardware beneath these virtual resources is critical. The underlying physical servers & storage are the foundation of this behemoth infrastructure and their quality is of utmost concern. Great care should be taken while designing & selecting the physical layer that will be the backbone of your cloud.

This physical layer seamlessly interacts with the hypervisor that provides administrators the ability to partition the physical servers into various virtual servers and hides the complexity of the underlying operating system and its complexities. The hypervisor acts as an agent that just needs to know that it has to setup a cloud service. The source of this request, which cluster to choose, what is the role of the service and what the service will it accomplish is not known to the hypervisor. Different hypervisors offer different type of features & flexibility and there are 3 considerations to keep in mind when choosing your hypervisor:

1. Type of workload that will be run on the hypervisor
2. Compatibility with the Management Layer that you have 
3. Compatibility with other hypervisors in your environment

The cloud resources management layer sits above the hypervisor that abstracts the virtual servers & storage and provides them to the users as a Cloud Service option where users can select & configure the service that they want by adding the components to their shopping cart. A good cloud management technology should integrate both upwards to the Data Center Management environment and downwards to all the underlying resources including hypervisors and should simplify & automate the various components. Select this layer carefully.

Together, all the above 3 layers are the basic platform layers for your cloud. Choose them very carefully as this is going to be the foundation stone of your Cloud!

References to a paper from Bryan Che, Red Hat

Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud - The New Game Changer

The new mantra to the world of Cloud Computing is the Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud. With both vertical & horizontal service solution offerings increasing day by day, the cloud adoption question changed from "if" to "when" and more frequently to "NOW!" With time comes maturity and so has the cloud industry matured - organizations are using a mix of Public, Private & the Hybrid cloud offerings. As organizations increasingly adopt cloud offerings for critical business operations from public and private providers, connecting them all back to the core of the business is becoming a challenge involving complicated integration, orchestration, work-flows and business rules management.

Public Cloud refers to a Cloud offering on the Public Network - Amazon EC2, Private Cloud is an internal Cloud offering within an Enterprise and Hybrid Cloud is a mix of Public & Private Clouds. The new game-changer is the Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud that refers to multiple clouds integrating with the core as well as other clouds! Each of the cloud offering has to connect back to the business and also integrate with the other clouds in the enterprise. Yes, it can get really complicated.

This shift from "cloud" to "clouds" provides new opportunities for Service Providers, but it also brings new challenges to the Enterprise, beyond just integration-security, data integrity and reliability, and business rules management for business processes that depend on enterprise IT assets composed of one or more services.

Smart organizations need to have a comprehensive vision & an execution plan to integrate on-premise systems & the Hybrid Cloud services with the external cloud offerings without which integrations could become a nightmare! With more & more business functions getting on the cloud solutions independently outside the purview of IT Governance & Control, the end to end business processes are getting cluttered with multiple cloud players & service providers. This is resulting in Enterprise chaos and that's where Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud walks in.

To tackle this, organizations are turning to Cloud Service Brokerages that help to aggregate and orchestrate cloud services, manage the relationships and interdependencies required, leaving the back-end complexity transparent to the Organization. Gartner described just such an example in Case Study: Mohawk Fine Papers Uses a CSB to Ease Adoption of Cloud Computing, released in July 2011. Mohawk chose to work with Liaison, an aggregator and orchestrator of cloud services that was able to manage the relationships and interdependencies required, leaving the back-end complexity transparent to Mohawk. Liaison provides Mohawk with on-premises integration, supply chain integration for its 300 customers and 100 suppliers and other external e-commerce partners and with intermediation of all its third-party cloud services providers. While Liaison focused on the technical implementation of doing that, Mohawk focused on successfully incorporating the external service into its various applications and processes to meet new business requirements.

So friends, Cloud Service Brokerage is the new entrepreneurial opportunity in the Cloud World that is giving a new meaning to the Hyper-Hybrid-Cloud!

References to Case Study on Gartner.com and Thor Olavsrud's article on CIO.com