It’s easy to dismiss Cloud Computing as just another IT industry hype bubble that will one day burst, showering everyone in a slightly stale-smelling mist. Certainly, as with all waves of technology advancement, there’s been an *awful* lot of hype about the potential and – just like any other technology advancement – Cloud Computing offers no silver bullet for anyone’s IT investment or management woes.

Nevertheless our research (including a survey of 350+ IT architects in 9/09) shows that many organisations are dipping their toes in the Cloud (if that’s not a heinous non-sequitur) and they are seeing success. What’s also interesting is that some of the most eager proponents of Cloud Computing and Cloud-based application use aren’t in those industries which are typically at the leading edge of technology adoption (financial services, telecom); they’re in industries like media, retail, utilities, pharma which are more generally thought of as conservative investors in IT. This is because Cloud Computing is not a model of technology ownership – it’s a model of service delivery and consumption.

2010 will see every major IT vendor and service provider moving to offer or enable Cloud-based infrastructure and services. You need to be prepared to reap the potential benefits while managing the potential risks – and this means having a solid awareness of how Cloud Computing concepts fit into the rest of your existing IT investment portfolio. Only then can you chart a course that makes sense for you (and which won’t be driven by the proprietary interests of one or more IT suppliers).

Here’s some questions to think about that can help you frame a strategy:

• What are the ways that Cloud Computing can deliver value, and in what kinds of scenario? How does the value of a “private Cloud” relate to the value of a “public Cloud”?
• How is Cloud Computing really related to SaaS? What does this mean for me if I’m considering using the Cloud as a strategic source of IT services? Where does SaaS make most sense?
• What are the tradeoffs that I’ll experience on choosing a Cloud Computing platform, and what will be the downstream effects?
• What’s the real story with security in a Cloud Computing environment? Is the security issue a show-stopper?

With all this in mind, yesterday we launched a two-part online event designed to help enterprises frame a Cloud Computing strategy. It’s made up of two on-demand webinars which you can view at any time – and it’s completely free of charge (you just need to register for Guest Pass access to our site first – which also gives you access to a big chunk of our research library for free, too).

The event is sponsored by Google Enterprise – and we’re very grateful for their support. Nevertheless we designed and created the content without any input from Google – it’s a completely independent piece of work.

We’d love to hear what you think of this event. We’re currently exploring a number of options regarding holding future events like this, so your feedback is crucially important to us. Once you’ve viewed the content you can provide feedback right from the event home page – or alternatively leave us a comment below!

As someone who wrote a little on the potential acquisition of BEA by Oracle, I’ve been in a quandary since the news of the acquisition broke: frankly, I felt that I needed to write something – but there was already so much other commentary out there (much of it saying the same thing), I didn’t want to just add another voice to the global egosystem. (The perils of writing in the age of the web, I suppose.)

So I asked our excellent partners Freeform Dynamics if they could help us look behind the headlines – to understand what regular IT people out there think of the deal. As it happened, they’d already kicked off a quick research effort on that precise topic without me knowing. Great minds think alike.

Freeform conducted a quick poll of readers of The Register (this is a big multinational IT news site, and its readers are typically IT managers, developers and ops people – people at the coal face of enterprise IT). They asked a couple of high level questions:

• Is the acquisition of BEA by Oracle positive or negative for the IT industry?
• Will the acquisition of BEA by Oracle be positive or negative for your business specifically?

They also asked respondents to provide “free form” answers to provide reasoning for the answers to the two main questions. The Freeform guys got just under 300 responses overall. So what did people think?

Well, there were no real surprises in the response to the second (“what does it mean for you”) question. There appears to be a large degree of nervousness amongst respondents who are BEA customers (this is bound to be true whenever a company buys something you’ve already made an investment in). In this group, around 40% were “unsure” and a further 35% or so felt the impact would be “negative”. For the Oracle customers, things look a lot rosier: around 40% felt the impact would be “positive”, and a further 35% or so thought the outcome would be “neutral”. Given Oracle’s standing as a middleware provider (the technology is good enough if you’re working within an Oracle environment, but not regarded as top-tier for cross-enterprise use in a heterogeneous environment) it’s understandable that Oracle customers are keen to get their hands on some more beefy middleware alternatives.

What was much more interesting to me were the responses to the first question, because they can’t be explained away by understandable acquisition jitters.

When asked “is the acquisition positive or negative for the IT industry?” fewer than 30% of respondents felt the outcome would be positive (45% or so were negative, 10% or so were unsure, and 15% or so were neutral). Within the BEA customer base, two-thirds of respondents were negative – but given my earlier points about why people buy BEA, I’m not too surprised by that. Tellingly, though, even among respondents with no investment in BEA or Oracle, over 40% felt the outcome would be negative for the industry (around 35% were positive, just over 10% were neutral, and under 10% were unsure).

Looking at the respondents with Oracle investments and those with investments in both BEA and Oracle, both camps were decidedly ambivalent about the impact of the deal on the IT industry in general. In both cases, more respondents answered “negative” than “positive” on this question.

When we looked at the freeform responses supplementing the other questions, there was more food for thought.

The most common explanations for “negative” responses could be grouped into one common answer: “it’ll lead to reduced choice in the market”. Other popular comments can be summarised as concerns about the viability of existing investments (this was cited by both BEA and Oracle customers), and concerns about the potential loss of innovation within BEA’s technology. Interestingly, the poll also threw up a significant number of respondents who were concerned about the degree of power that Oracle (after the BEA acquisition) would have over them as a customer.

There were, of course, freeform comments on the positive side (there were just fewer of them). The most popular positive responses could be best summarised as “a more mature solution will emerge”. The second most popular category of positive response can best be summarised as “it’ll enable the rescue of some good technology from a company that has lost its way”.

Looking back over all this data (and a more comprehensive analysis will appear soon on The Register, courtesy of Freeform Dynamics), my message is this: whether you’re the company buying BEA, or a company that has previously bought BEA technology, this shows the eternal truth of the phrase “caveat emptor”.

If you’ve historically bought BEA technology because BEA was an independent middleware technology provider, the lesson is that just because your middleware supplier is independent today, doesn’t mean it will be independent next year. If supplier independence at key points in your IT landscape is really important to your IT strategy, do a proper risk analysis and plan what you’ll do if things change.

If you’re an Oracle exec, the lesson is that many of the customers you’re about to acquire might already be customers of yours – but they may well have bought BEA technology precisely to avoid getting too deeply attached to companies like yours. You’re going to have to tread very carefully.

Just saw this great comment from Enterprise Architect blogger James McGovern.

This site is incredibly useful. It was developed by MWD so you know it is of high quality.

Thanks so much James – what an endorsement!

If you want to get to grips with your competency levels in the context of SOA, and learn how you can improve them and plan a SOA strategy, visit http://www.itstrategyplans.com/soa.

Today we’re delighted to announce that our SOA strategy planning tool, hosted at www.itstrategyplans.com/soa, is now live. This is a new thing for us and if you’re interested in SOA, we think you’ll find it useful.

What we’ve launched is a comprehensive, interactive, and vendor-independent online tool that goes much further than IT vendors’ own online SOA assessment tools – and crucially, there’s nothing behind it that is going to steer you towards buying tools or technologies from a particular company.

You can use the tool, free of charge, to determine your levels of competence in six areas that are crucial to SOA success: concepts, strategy, architecture, organisation and people, governance, and technology and infrastructure. On top of that, you can quickly see how your levels of competence compare to average industry benchmark scores.

As I said above, access to these features costs nothing.

If you want to know how your competence levels affect your SOA strategy and how you can reduce the costs and risks associated with SOA, then for a modest fee (normally £200 – but if you purchase before the end of September 2007, it’s £130) you can gain access to premium features. With premium access you can generate personalised action planning reports that clearly lay out actions you need to take in order to improve your competency levels – as well as providing more detailed breakdowns of how you compare to the benchmark averages (across your industry, geography and company size).

You can use premium access to generate as many reports as you like, whenever you like. So as your SOA programme progresses and you gain more experience and capability, you can revisit the tool and gain new insights.

It’s been a long, long road, and we (and our partner JEMM Research) have put in months of effort to get here since we started work on this project back in November 2006. This has been a major investment for us – so why have we done it?

There are two reasons. Firstly, of course, we’ll be delighted when people decide they want to buy premium access to the tool. That’s easy. Just as importantly, though, we wanted to try and find new ways of learning about how companies are pursuing key IT initiatives. By building tools like this one and inviting people to use them to learn about their competence levels and how they can improve, we’re also able to look at aggregated usage data from the tool to see how industries are grappling with SOA, and how the situation is changing over time.

For a group of companies that talks so much about technology innovation, we’ve found that the IT industry analyst community is generally pretty slow at trying to use technology in new ways. As a small company we can perhaps make bolder moves more quickly – and that’s what we’re trying to do here. If we see success with this tool, we’ll be launching more over time, focusing on different types of IT initiative.

So – please check out the tool, give us your feedback, and let us know if there are other areas you think we should apply this approach to!

Over the past six months we’ve been busy working behind the scenes with a partner, JEMM Research, on a pretty nifty online SOA strategy planning tool. We’re getting near to the point of launch, and we’d really like to find some people out there who would be interested in participating in a two-week beta test phase. Are you interested?

The heart of the tool is a self-assessment model that looks at six dimensions of competence/readiness: concepts, strategy, architecture, organisation & people, governance, and technology infrastructure. You can see a small screen-shot of the (pre-beta) tool below.

Now we know there are a number of vendor-specific SOA assessment/readiness tools out there, but this one is a little different, for a couple of reasons:

1. It’s vendor-neutral – it’s not designed to steer you towards buying a vendor’s product. It’s not sponsored in any way.
2. It’s more detailed – the assessment at the heart of the tool has around 150 questions, and is designed to really make you think about how well you’re implementing (or able to implement) a SOA initiative that has real business value.
3. It provides some pretty cool feedback. The self-assessment, which is free of charge to use, provides you with overall scores in the six dimensions. You can go back to the tool as often as you like, and rerun the calculations to see how you’ve improved.
4. If you want, you can pay a modest fee to gain "premium access" to the tool. With premium access the tool will generate, based on your self-assessment answers, a detailed and personalised SOA strategy action plan report. The report benchmarks your organisation against others of the same size, in the same geography and in the same industry as you. And most importantly, the report also contains a detailed set of actions you can take to improve your critical SOA related competencies. With premium access you can run the report as often as you like, whenever you like – so you can track your progress as you make your SOA journey.

If you’re interested in being a beta tester, please drop us a line. We’re currently planning on running the beta from May 14th to May 25th.