What are the major issues facing enterprise IT as they help propel cloud computing forward? I’ll make the assumption that cloud is not going to collapse in a heap some day as everyone returns to non-virtualized silo applications attached to dedicated resources. I’ll also assume that the uniform Big Switch to a third-party grid is not going to happen for 50 years.

With that in mind, I’m looking over the upcoming Cloud Expo program, and see a few things jump out at me: APIs, Big Data, security, and scaling, for starters. I’ll examine all these topics in the remaining weeks before the show. For now, here are three looks at the API issue:

Adam DuVander of ProgrammableWeb.com says “APIs are no longer a technical nice-to-have. Now APIs are a necessary business tool for startups to scale, much as Twitter and Facebook used theirs reach more users. With an API, business relationships become easier, because there’s a defined process waiting for a connection.”
Alistair Farquharson, CTO of SOA Software, says “We are in the midst of an API revolution. Countless major enterprises are opening up access to their core information systems, allowing innovative third party developers to build new business opportunities through collaboration and community. However, this remarkable movement puts pressure on IT to manage APIs.”
* Corey Scobie, VP Technology of SOA Software says, “The API Economy is here. Enterprises are making business applications available through APIs to drive business growth and expose new opportunities. APIs are becoming the primary way that businesses interact with their customers, reach new markets, and provide the global app development community with the tools to deliver innovative new business capabilities to customers.”

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Lenovo, the world’s second-largest PC vendor these days and pushing into tablets and phones, has made its very first software acquisition, picking an Indiana company called Stoneware that develops cloud solutions.
Lenovo has been reselling Stoneware’s widgetry for the last couple of years.
Terms weren’t disclosed but Lenovo said they weren’t material to its earnings.
Founded in 2000, Stoneware is supposed to be profitable and growing and should give Lenovo the ability to provide secure content across multiple devices in education and government.

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Most of us are hybrids. I’m Hawaiian and Portuguese with a bit of English and old time Shogun. The mix is me. I bet you probably have some mix from your parents which makes you a hybrid. The U.S. has been called the melting pot due to all the different ethnicities that live here. I’ve got hybrid seeds for planting – my grass is a hybrid that contains 90% of the fescue and 10% bluegrass so bare spots grow back and also got some hybrid corn growing. With the drought this year, some farmers are using more drought resistant hybrid crops. There are hybrid cats, hybrid bicycles and of course, hybrid cars which has a 3% market share according to hybridcars.com. My favorite has always been SNL’s Shimmer Floor Wax – A Floor Wax and a Dessert Topping! Hybrid is the new normal.

Hybrid has even made it’s way into our IT terminology with hybrid cloud and hybrid infrastructures. There are Public Clouds, those cloud services that are available to the general public over the internet; Private (Internal or Corporate) Clouds, which provides cloud hosted services to an authorized group of people in a secure environment; Hybrid Clouds, which is a combo of at least one public cloud and one private cloud; and, what I think will become the norm, a Hybrid Infrastructure or Hybrid IT, where there is a full mix of in-house corporate resources, dedicated servers, virtual servers, cloud services and possibly leased raised floor – resources are located anywhere data can live, but not necessarily all-cloud.

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1010data, Inc., on Tuesday announced the formation of the 1010data Analytical Dataspace, the first cloud-based community where organizations can analyze, share and monetize Big Data. The Analytical Dataspace is a revolutionary forum where organizations, regardless of size or vertical market, can analyze massive datasets in seconds, combine it with other organizations’ data to gain new analytical insights, and generate revenue from selling their data.
«The Analytical Dataspace gives enterprises a single destination for their Big Data analytics needs, allowing them to easily capitalize on the massive data they or others are creating,» said Sandy Steier, CEO of 1010data. «We believe that by creating a community for data providers and users, analysts and business decision makers, they can have the world’s data at their fingertips and leverage it to identify business opportunities that have never been possible before.»

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Being CIO means having your finger on the pulse of the industry. It doesn’t mean being a master of technology, and it doesn’t mean dictating to your people exactly how they should accomplish their missions. However, it does mean being aware of the prevailing trends in IT, and providing a forward-looking vision for all of your staff to see and benefit from.
Accordingly, here are some of the mid-year trends some experts are seeing in the IT field this year:
Security should be even more pervasive. It’s not all right to simply keep security at the perimeter any longer. Today’s networks and servers need to have real-time, embedded security. Increasing compliance demands coupled with increased security risks mean that functions like firewalling are moving closer and closer away from the edge, and nearer the core.

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Moving to a model that utilizes the cloud is a huge proposition. You can throw some applications out there without looking back – if they have no ties to the corporate datacenter and light security requirements, for example – but most applications require quite a bit of work to make them both mobile and stable. Just connections to the database raise all sorts of questions, and most enterprise level applications require connections to DC databases.
But these are all problems people are talking about. There are ways to resolve them, ugly though some may be. The problems that will get you are the ones no one is talking about. So of course, I’m happy to dive into the conversation with some things that would be keeping me awake were I still running a datacenter with a lot of interconnections and getting beat up with demands for cloudy applications.

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Business Process Management solutions enable business people to quickly and easily capture their business goals as models that can be instantly turned into intelligent, automated processes. No or minimal software development, and no wait for IT resources.
The Business Process Management solution is a complete set of tools for creating, executing, and optimizing business processes. This enables unparalleled collaboration between business and IT managers. As a result, business processes are automated and optimized to improve efficiency and agility while costs are lowered.

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Virtualization and cloud computing have forever changed how organizations achieve control and visibility over both core IT elements and IT services. Now it’s time to move away from solutions that are not ready to handle the dynamic high rate of change and service delivery in the Cloud. Traditional IT configuration and compliance tools cannot monitor changes that cause compliance violations in realtime.
In his session at the 11th International Cloud Expo, George Gerchow, Director of VMware’s Center for Policy & Compliance, will show you how to capture hundreds of significant changes in Cloud Infrastructure that alter our compliance posture without having to collect data or force manual assessments. To help customers address the fundamental challenge of getting the right information to the right people over an infrastructure that they can trust, VMware has adopted a two-prong approach to ensuring control and visibility for cloud environments. For areas that are fundamental to the deployment of secure, reliable applications in virtual and cloud environments, VMware offers solutions that are purpose built and embedded in the infrastructure. VMware has also raised the bar by providing a new set of Cloud Mission Critical Controls to help customers prioritize configurations as they migrate mission critical applications to Cloud environments. In addition, VMware is enabling a security ecosystem of industry leading security partners to provide a new generation of security and compliance solutions specifically designed for cloud infrastructure.

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Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) represents a complete preintegrated platform offering for the development and operation of general purpose business applications. A fully preintegrated and standardized platform – offered in a multitenant mode as a managed service – means much less manual effort than installing and configuring middleware components in on-premise servers.
Enterprise architecture patterns and framework changed heavily during the last decade, the software / platform / framework upgrades eat up the major chunk of it budgets and leaving relatively smaller portion for business innovation.
However, due to the support for Java EE full implementation and open standards along with extended support for common relational databases, Redhat Open Shift provides a better option for porting existing Java EE applications to Cloud.

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I remember thinking as a 22-year-old just out of college that I would be able to make wise business decisions because I’d read Plato’s Republic. Even studied it in a Classics class, no less. Such is the hubris of youth, or at least of mine.

I’m drawing an analogy here with my question in yesterday’s piece about how to go about creating a specialized cloud-computing college degree.

A quick review of some CS departments in the US finds requirements that include many semesters of programming, a few of software engineering (including working with frameworks), and some new-fangled, specialized courses for developing mobile apps. An intro to cloud computing can be found as a special topic here and there.

Would it be beneficial to education, IT, and humanity if a more-or-less standardized cloud-computing regimen were to emerge? And if it did, would it create a new generation of IT employees who thought they were now able to drive an enterprise-wide cloud strategy because they’d taken a course in RESTful services?

Actually, CS students should probably be required to read Plato’s Republic to get a grasp on some of the ethical dilemmas they’ll face with the use of the technology they design and deploy. Sun co-founder Bill Joy would routinely cite The Greeks when talking about how he approached his work.

What does it take to become proficient with cloud? Does it truly require a lot of experience – seeing what can and does go wrong, understanding past approaches that caused past problems – in addition to getting up to speed on the different programs and environments one will encounter with cloud? How much can be taught at the undergrad level? What courses should be included, even if the newly minted grad cannot quite yet be deemed a cloud guru?

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