Entertainment in the Cloud!

Entertainment industry is one of the hottest industries where millions are made & lost...Why should it not adopt to the latest & the greatest technologies? So there you go! This industry is rapidly adopting the Cloud Services in many many ways...When you are in a movie theater, you may not realize that so much of IT is needed to produce a single movie. Or for that matter, the computer / phone games that you play..have you ever stopped to think what is involved in creating a game? Oh yes, you guessed it right. A lot of hard work coupled with some serious piece of IT components including machines, software, hosted platforms and yes, Cloud Services!

So you would have a question as to how are Cloud Services related to the Entertainment Industry?

In fact, Cloud is the way to go for this industry, right from Content creation, to content processing (encoding / transcoding), to content delivery via streaming video and content management, storage for the huge media files, raw processing power provided by extensible resources on the cloud and the list goes on. 

Sony's "Music Unlimited by Qriocity" service on the Cloud, is being extended to France, Germany, Spain and Italy that is a subscription based service to enable fans to access music on their digital devices. This cloud service acts as a "locker" for a subscriber's own music collection so that they can access their music on different devices.

Apple has signed a cloud-music licensing agreement with EMI Music and is very near to completing deals with Universal Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment. One of the core features of a cloud music service is enabling consumers to store their songs on a company's servers. They can then access their libraries from Web-connected devices.

DreamWorks, one of the top movie studios in the world has signed up a multi-year deal with a Cloud Service provider that will allow DreamWorks to render computer animated films using elastic computing resources. Elastic cloud computing allows users to adjust computing capacity to meet their real-time needs.

You would be surprised to know that even the Adult Entertainment industry has taken a massive leap into the cloud by providing storage and playback of movies and video clips using a locker concept on their cloud servers!

Gaming on Demand, that delivers the latest high-end gaming titles over home broadband Internet to the TV and entry-level PCs and Macintosh® computers, is another cloud based service that is now making a ton of money. There are many players in this space and the number keeps growing everyday. OnLive is one of the biggest players in this segment competing directly with Sony, Nintendo & Microsoft's of this world! Other providers include Gaikai.com,Spoon.net and a whole bunch of others!

More and more people are getting rid of their cable service or their satellite services and moving to content on demand for their television, movies, games.  Music, movies and eBooks are all being delivered over the web to any number of platforms.  The Cloud makes this possible and should be an integral part of the Entertainment industry's strategy! 
Also posted on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more 

Cloud Services in Healthcare

What are the commercially available SaaS-based Cloud solutions for the Healthcare industry?
Cloud services are increasingly becoming popular in the Healthcare industry. And yes, they are starting to become a lot more common. One example is a New Zealand company called HSA Global, which has a solution called Collaborative Care Management System (CCMS). This is entirely based on Microsoft's Windows Azure cloud platform and focuses on shared care management, is fully integrated electronic health record and clinical case management solution that enables healthcare organizations to improve client care while creating clinical and business efficiencies. It enables people from different organizations to share and manage patients' health records, which ultimately bring convenience to the patients as well.

Dell has rolled out the Dell's Healthcare Cloud Services at the Healthcare Information and Management Systems Society (HIMSS) in Feb 2011 conference in Orlando, that is a subscription-based private cloud services for healthcare providers. These cloud services will provide a more streamlined access to patients’ archived information for easier sharing and management of the information between physicians, hospitals and other point of care. These new cloud services stem from Dell’s newest acquisitions of medical archiving InSite One, that provided healthcare providers medical data image archives through Dell’s Unified Clinical Archiving (UCA) private cloud services. Partnerships with Microsoft Amalga health intelligence platform to provide medical records analytics capabilities that will help healthcare providers manage and consolidate patients’ records. Dell also added security features to the analytics cloud offering with the acquisition of Secureworks, to provide compliance with Federal and State Health Care data reporting requirements.

Microsoft is also continuing to aggressively invest in interoperability and connectivity functionality, free of charge, making it continually easier for patients to upload and track their health data. Some of this functionality comes from interfacing with common health devices such as blood pressure monitors, pedometers, glucometers and even digital Images. Microsoft also offers HealthVault services through Windows Azure platform. HealthVault supports native DICOM (digital imaging) as part of the HealthVault connectivity feature. Their partners range from CVS, Aetna, Quest, and few others, which allow patients the ability to retrieve some of their data across the internet in order to develop a comprehensive patient record without a lot of manual work.

iSOFT's Lorenzo solutions enable collaboration and interoperability across all sectors of care and remove traditional barriers to sharing health related information and electronic record management. Lorenzo creates virtual health networks that securely connect doctors, care facilities and patients while protecting the organizations’ previous investments by integrating seamlessly with the existing systems. 


There are many other Cloud Service providers in the market and the competition is heating up!


So what are the topmost barriers for the adoption of cloud services in the healthcare sector?

• Control: Moving to the cloud allows a healthcare organization to focus on new projects or enhancements, as the organization no longer has to deploy and manage parts of their infrastructure. But it takes time for Cloud Service providers to earn that trust and for organizations to hand over the control over the management and deployment of IT. 
• Security & Privacy: Organizations, specially in the Healthcare industry, take time to be able to feel comfortable with cloud service providers and let them protect and secure the organization's confidential information. In reality, the amount of effort and engineering that goes into ensuring cloud services provides the best privacy and security is second to none, and most organizations would struggle if they try to match the engineering that is required to run a service like this internally.
• Data Sovereignty: This is an issue that is heard a lot from customers who are uncomfortable about their data being hosted in data centers overseas. While some countries have strong privacy laws that require information of its citizens to be kept on shore, some other countries do not.
• Lack of Standards: With respect to digital imaging, DICOM has been the predominant format for almost every system out there. This made it very simple for organizations to simply just start pushing or pulling images over the wire. When it comes to health records, however, there are some challenges. Since not all public & private healthcare providers can agree on one single standard, it remains a challenge for many to decide whether it is going to be CCD or CCR standards. Google Health, for example supports a subset of the CCR, while Microsoft HealthVault supports the entire standards set.

References: Microsoft, Dell, iSoft, HSAGlobal's web sites. 
Also published on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more 

Cloud Apps Performance Management & Quantum Physics

What? Quantum Physics…how is it related to the Cloud and more so, Performance Management for Cloud based applications?

Cloud Computing facilitates businesses to dynamically consume & utilize IT resources (hardware, software) based on their needs thereby reducing significant capital expenses. But how does the performance of cloud applications affect the end users of these businesses?

You guessed it right – Quantum Physics is where the answer lies! The Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle states by precise inequalities that certain pairs of physical properties of sub-atomic particles, such as position and momentum, cannot be simultaneously known to arbitrarily high precision. That is, the more precisely one property is measured, the less precisely the other can be measured. Oh God, this is too scientific to understand!

In simple terms for you and me to understand, Werner Heisenberg figured out in 1927, that it is impossible to determine simultaneously both the position and the momentum of an electron or any other sub-atomic particle with any great degree of accuracy or certainty. Taking this analogy to the Cloud, the virtualized resources, both hardware and software, are similar to sub-atomic particles & waves in Quantum Physics – it is impossible to precisely know where there position is (a.k.a. location) and how fast or slow their momentum (a.k.a. performance) is from an End User perspective!

What is the problem here?
As we all know, a cloud application may have multiple virtual layers between itself and the hardware that it resides on. It could be clustered across many application servers installed on a bunch of virtual servers spanning multiple physical nodes and spread out across various data centers across the globe! To measure the performance of the various layers in the Cloud Apps, metrics need to be captured on an extended time scale with performance / infrastructure baseline. But, these cloud configurations can dynamically change & reshuffled as the Cloud resources are adjusted based on usage & requirements. So the baseline keeps fluctuating making it near impossible to predict where Performance issues are from an End User perspective!

And how do you measure it?
So as an end user of a Cloud App, the critical metric to look at is YOUR experience of a Transaction for a service that a Cloud vendor delivers. The transaction is the glue that unifies and lays out the key properties that can be used to measure the effectiveness of a Service delivery and also indicate the quantum properties that contribute to the issues.

So what is the future of Application Performance Monitoring (APM)?
Gartner defines Application Performance Monitoring (APM) Solution for 2010 as the integration of the five functional dimensions:
• End User Experience Monitoring
• Discovery & Modeling of Application Runtime Architecture
• User Defined Transaction Profiling
• Application Component Deep Dive Monitoring
• Analysis & Correlation of Data Sets generated by the above 4 dimensions

Gartner goes on to say that by 2015, 50% of the enterprises will need capabilities beyond those delivered by the current APM tools (5 dimensional approach stated above) to manage a complex and dynamic infrastructure & application environment!

Management of Cloud Apps Performance will require newer strategies & approaches as the apps on the public cloud & private cloud integrate & intertwine with each other. These approaches will have to identify slow end user transactions & trace them across the various layers & tiers of hardware & software to deep dive into the root cause. These future strategies & approaches are further elaborated by Gartner in their model for Application Performance Monitoring (APM) 2015 that extends the APM 2010.

What are the BMC Software's Offerings in the APM 2015 space?
BMC is on the leading edge of the Applications Performance Monitoring space for 2015. Key products & solutions are lined up in each of Gartner’s APM 2015 area.

1. Policy & Orchestration Engine – BMC Atrium Orchestrator bridges people, process, and technology to automate manual, repetitive tasks across IT, enabling better support for business. Defines automated processes that are built on best-practice standards to ensure compliance with policies, Automates routine tasks, Scales automation to the scope and size your business demands, Orchestrates cross functional IT operations activities across internal and third-party solutions environments. This is the glue for the BMC Cloud Solution.
2. Application Behavior Learning – BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management solution (BPPM) automates prioritization of events based on predictive service impact analysis, Delivers early warning of impending problems, while eliminating reliance on reactive thresholds and realizing up to a 90% reduction in false events with patented predictive analytics, Automatically pinpoints predictive root cause across infrastructure, applications, and services, Automatically and uniformly maps, monitors and tracks relationships and behavior across physical, virtual and cloud environments.
3. Crowdsourcing & Collaboration - Various components of the BMC Product Portfolio contribute to this space dedicated to collaboration and crowdsourcing. BMC Atrium Orchestrator, BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management & BMC Atrium CMDB come together to enable enterprises to capture and apply knowledge to manage a diverse & heterogeneous infrastructure & application environment.
4. Cloud Enablement – BMC Cloud Lifecycle Management solution, which is a fine integration of key BMC solutions using BMC Service Request Management, BMC ITSM, BMC Bladelogic Server Automation, BMC ProactiveNet Performance Management, BMC Atrium CMDB and BMC Atrium Orchestrator provides it a unique advantage in the Cloud Enablement space. This solution supports multiple cloud environments, helps to monitor, manage & administer applications & infrastructure in public, private & hybrid clouds.
5. Cost Allocation & Chargeback – With BMC IT Business Management Suite, following capabilities are provided: Demand and Resource Management, Financial Planning and Budgeting, IT Controls Management, Service Cost Management & Supplier Management. This brings in a transaction transparency added with resource usage and associated cost information.

This highlights the tremendous scope & potential of the Cloud Apps Performance Management tools & technologies to cater to the Cloud Applications Performance Management challenges corroborated by Quantum Physics!

Cloud in the Automotive Industry

Automotive industry is bracing cloud-based technologies in a rapid wave. Along with green technology advances, cloud technology advances in automotive industry are the key to the progress of the industry. Ranging from GPS system to vehicle tracking system, cloud computing allows businesses in the automotive sector to deliver better and offer more to the end customers. I have listed a few case studies from the Auto sector to give you an insight into how the cloud technology is being used, right from in-car infotainment to supply chain management by these giants to transform their businesses.

Toyota is going to team up with the Microsoft Azure Cloud Platform to deliver various services related to automobile building activities. Microsoft and Toyota are supposed to stick $12 million in Toyota Media Services to develop diagnostic and GPS data for cars, developing a whole global cloud platform for "telematics" by 2015. Toyota means to open the platform to other car makers. Growing enterprise adoption of Cloud Platform is good news, especially for the automobile industry which is at a crossroads and trying to become profitable again. Interesting article by Srinivasan Sundara Rajan

Infosys was looking at revitalizing its auto dealer solution to address flexibility & scalability requirements as well as to simplify the process of sharing inventory & other data  between dealerships in a network and with their original equipment manufacturers (OEMs). They built this system by leveraging the cloud based Microsoft Services Platform along with Microsoft SQL Data Services.

Ford MyTouch uses cloud to help turn its vehicles into mobile communications hubs -  Source: “Ford Rewires Cars for Connectivity” — CMP TechWeb. 7 January 2010
In January 2010, Ford unveiled its new cloud-based MyTouch system at the CES show in Las Vegas. The new program brings hightech applications, WiFi capability, and the second generation of Microsoft's SYNC software into Ford vehicles. MyTouch will first feature in the 2011 Lincoln MXK, followed by the company’s other Lincoln and Ford vehicles. It will have several advanced telematics services that will be standard on new vehicles equipped with MyTouch and its SYNC communications and entertainment platform. These services include enhanced touch and voice access, Wi-Fi connections, cloud service connectivity, and pre-installed web applications such as Twitter and Pandora. Ford's vision for SYNC is to connect customers with families and friends, with their personal devices, and with the data they have stored in the cloud. And all while keeping their eyes on the road and their hands on the wheel.

Daimler uses cloud to connect with its supplier network Sources: Accenture Research Analysis; Factiva; “Compuware Covisint Extends Global Supplier Portal Contract with Daimler AG” — GlobeNewswire. 16 June 2009
In 2009, Daimler extended its agreement with Compuware’s Covisint group to build and maintain a comprehensive portal and identity management solution that securely connects Daimler with its vast network of suppliers globally. Covisint provides Daimler and its suppliers with an industry-standard connectivity and  security solution — including single-sign-on in a cloud computing, SaaS model — enabling seamless and secure collaboration for critical-business information. Together with Covisint, they plan to further leverage the latest Web 2.0 features and, in a systematic approach, look for solutions to bring the communication with their suppliers to the next level.

Also published on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more

Cloud - Do It Right!

"Do It Right!" This article was inspired by one of the DNA attributes of my current company - BMC Software! With so much of hype around the Cloud and every organization wanting to move to the cloud, it has become imperative to understand how to implement a cloud strategy in the right way. The Cloud marketplace is becoming more and more crowded making it more challenging for the CIOs to select the right cloud vendor with the right mix of services & capabilities. The cloud services are also moving up the value chain and into the enterprise computing realm, thereby increasing the stakes! The selection criteria for a Cloud Vendor is shifting from price advantages to things such as security, reliability, scalability, control and a trusted vendor relationship. A great focus is also being emphasized on how the End User Experience is.

Cloud computing must be enabled with effective security, resiliency, service management, governance, business planning and the end to end lifecycle management with extensive compliance reporting & auditing capabilities. These are the components of an effective and comprehensive cloud architecture that will enable the enterprise to control the environment more effectively, optimize productivity, reduce the associated labor costs and ensure a safe environment for business users. Organizations should feel secure with the Cloud services being offered - that's the key!

Basically, the cloud architecture should deliver best practices in a standardized way and should have the following characteristics:

• Should be based on open standards
• Should deliver robust security, governance, compliance and privacy capabilities
• Should combine powerful automation and service management with rich business management functions for fully integrated, top-to-bottom management of cloud infrastructure and cloud services
• Should support the full spectrum of cloud service models, including Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) & Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Should enable the flexible scaling and resiliency required for successful cloud economics and ROI
• Should facilitate seamless integration into existing customers’ environments
• Should be based on best practices to enable continuous improvement 

Your Security focus areas for the Cloud services should include:

• Federated Identity Management (OpenID / Representational State Transfer - REST), Authorization & Entitlements
• Auditing & Comprehensive Compliance Reporting
• Intrusion Detection & Prevention
• Secure integration with your organization's Enterprise Security Architecture & Infrastructure
• Secure separation of Subscriber Domains

I have tried to highlight some of the key things to consider before you proceed with your cloud deployment:

1. Strategize & Plan - spend enough time on planning - this may sound so simple, yet you will be amazed at how many people don't do this!
2. Define & Document the Requirements (both functional and non-functional). This should include use cases, roles, processes, approvals, workflows, automation, integrations etc.
3. Prepare the Logical Design of the cloud solution, and yes, get your Cloud Architect & the entire teams involved at every stage with a strong buy-in from the stakeholders!
4. Layout the Physical Design that defines the details of the implementation of your Cloud.
5. Evaluate Vendors who can support your strategy, plans and designs & finalize the one whose infrastructure is capable of handling all of the characteristics mentioned above.
6. Don't forget to negotiate which I am sure you will not!

Then, your arduous journey begins on a "Do It Right" implementation of your Cloud!

Also published on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more

Cloud Computing & the Public Sector

The Public Sector has started adopting the Cloud to improve the services provided to citizens. So what does the it use the cloud for? Good question. I wanted to understand the same and found that yes, the Public Sector does truly use the Cloud in many ways that you may have never imagined...Here are some of the case studies...

The Army Experience Center in Philadelphia uses SalesForce.com for Registrations, badge printing, and game play tracking. They also use it for their Recruiting and pipeline management system, Algorithmic scoring of visitors propensity to join the Army, connectors to Facebook and Email marketing campaigns!

The Federal Acquisitions Services (FAS) and Public Building Services (PBS) use an Enterprise-Wide CRM System that provides traditional Sales Force Automation (SFA) capabilities & Training and Event Management capabilities including automated surveys to measure quality and effectiveness.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory uses Amazon’s S3 cloud storage to store millions of images collected in real time and make them available around the world using Amazon’s CloudFront technology for their Global Robotics competition. For another project, NASA received data for 180,000 images of Saturn from the Cassini spacecraft. NASA scientists needed timely access to the imagery, and in-house systems were projected to take over 15 days to process the results. So, they chose to spin up 60 servers on Amazon’s EC2 cloud and completed processing the imagery in 5 hours.

The Department of the Treasury’s Vulnerability Assessment System needed improved security and reliability. They moved to a cloud-based scanning system with greater capacity and quality, reduced operating cost, and increased security capability.This resulted in 458% increase in scanning and an 86% reduction in cost per scan!

The US Air Force implemented cloud technologies for web self-service, incident management, customer surveys, analytics, and knowledge management. This resulted in savings of $4M/year in manpower reductions & reduced the time for locating customer information from 20 min to 2 min.

The City of Miami, Florida decided to leverage a scalable, cloud-based Windows Azure platform to provide 311 Service used by citizens to report non-emergency situations, with an interactive online platform for tracking service requests and mapping them geographically.

So what about the Indian Government? The Public Sector is slowly catching up to the Cloud bandwagon in India. The potential is unlimited - if you start thinking using the above case studies as analogies, the Indian Army, Airforce, Navy, Police, Regional Transport Offices, Railways, Education systems, ministries, public administration and the list goes on....there is no dearth of opportunities in the Public Sector to implement the Cloud services and benefit the citizens of India.

It's a different question as to how long it will take and how many politicians will rake in billions before this becomes a reality for the common man in India!

Also posted on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more

Game of Cricket & Cloud Computing

What? How is cloud computing related to the game of cricket? Impossible! - Nope - the word impossible breaks down to "I M Possible" so yes, Cricket & Cloud Computing go hand in hand just like Cricket and Sachin Tendulkar!

During the 2011 ICC World Cup Finals, July Systems helped millions of cricket-fans across the globe stay updated about the matches on their iPhones and Android phones. Even the heavy-weight media houses like ESPN International, SuperSport and others relied on July Systems to keep their mobile services highly available to sports fans across the globe. And guess what, they used Amazon Web Services Cloud based Mi platform to build, distribute, manage, monetize and measure rich mobile experiences - quickly and effectively.

For IPL 3 Cricket tournament last year, Bangalore based SportingMindz migrated their app - 22yardz, a cricket match analysis product, to the Microsoft Windows Azure Platform to provide analytical solutions and services to sports organizations.22yardz is a cricket match analysis software designed to analyze the different aspects in a live match scenario giving the detailed statistics along with the strategy of oppositions and player analysis in all departments of the match with seamless integration of videos.  The cloud model has helped SportinMindz address pain points such as performance, scalability and availability!

Netmagic Solution's Cloud Computing services enables India's leading sports broadcasting company ESPN-Star Cricket to seamlessly broadcast Cricket T20 World Cup live streaming on demand over the internet without any lag time! With the Cloud hosted solution, they achieved immediate implementation for their client, on-demand scalability, short term hosting for reduced infrastructure costs & economic efficiency!

As you must have guessed by now, Cloud Computing has not only benefited IT industries but now is spreading its reach to non-IT sectors very rapidly!

Also posted on BMC Communities blog - Cloud-n-more