June 2014 $99 Report ID: R7960614 Next rep o rts The Frictionless Enterprise Our exclusive research and insights into cloud, hybrid cloud, and mobile technologies can help CIOs build a fully integrated, next-generation infrastructure. By Art Wittmann reports.informationweek.com Special Research & Coverage Series
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June 2014 $99
Report ID: R7960614
Next
reports
The Frictionless EnterpriseOur exclusive research and insights into cloud, hybrid cloud,
and mobile technologies can help CIOs build a fully integrated,
T h e F r i c t i o n l e s s E n t e r p r i s eTable of Contents
Art Wittmann is an independent IT analyst and writer with 30 years of experi-ence in IT and IT journalism. Formerly, he was VP of InformationWeek Reports,and has served as editor of InformationWeek and editor in chief of NetworkComputing and IT Architect magazines. Prior to his time in business technologyjournalism, he worked as an IT director for a major university.
To succeed today, businesses need fluid integration of mobile and cloud, partners andsuppliers, developers and big data, and security and governance. Designing, building, anddeploying such a fully integrated, next-gen infrastructure will be less complex if you fol-low some key principles: Don’t create new data silos; consider cloud and mobile as justpart of the stack. Remember: It’s not “mobile business,” it’s just “business.” Hew to theprinciple of “develop once and deploy many.” That means investing in reusable compo-nents, such as HTML5 and responsive design, that ensure that new client devices andplatforms don’t send developers back to the drawing board. Bake in security that focuseson the data, not the device. Add automation and use DevOps principles to managechange. In this InformationWeek special-focus series, we’ll combine exclusive research and in-
sights to help CIOs integrate all the data channels in use today.
EXECUTIVE
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SUM
MAR
Y
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Survey Name InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey
Survey Date May 2014
Region North America
Number of Respondents 362
Purpose To gauge the extent to which enterprises are embracing a new approach to information technology
Methodology InformationWeek surveyed business technology decision-makers atNorth American companies. The survey was conducted online, and respondents were recruited via an email invitation containing an embedded link to the survey. The email invitation was sent to qualified InformationWeek subscribers.
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SYNO
PSIS
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Should IT pros consider themselves in an ex-istential crisis? At a time when technology’simportance in business is soaring, the IT de-partment in most companies is not benefitingfrom the klieg-light attention. In fact, as tech-nology becomes critical to more aspects ofthe business, the IT group is increasingly seenas an obstacle to be worked around. Avanadedid a survey of 1,003 business executives, line-of-business leaders, and IT executives. The sur-vey found that 71% of C-level executives andbusiness unit leaders believe they can maketechnology decisions for their departmentsbetter and faster without the involvement ofIT staff. The survey also reported that technol-ogy budgets increasingly reside outside of IT.That sure sounds like the makings of an exis-tential crisis to us. But when we asked IT pros, we got a san-
guine response. In our InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technol-ogy professionals done for this article, weasked how they would describe the align-
ment between what business unit customerswant and what IT delivers. Some 73% say theIT group is perfectly aligned or fairly wellaligned to the needs of the business. ClearlyIT pros are a bit more optimistic about theirability to serve the business than were the ex-
ecutives in Avanade’s survey.Yet even our IT pros admit that technology
leadership is slipping away from them. Weasked where new technology initiatives orig-inated within the business. Forty-two percentsay they come exclusively or mostly from busi-
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When new initiatives arise that require additional IT resources, from where within your organization do they originate?
7% 6%
14%
36%
37%
Origin of New Initiatives Requiring IT Resources
Data: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014 R7960614/2
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Exclusively from business units
Mostly from business units
Mostly from IT
Exclusively from IT
About equally from IT and business units
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ness units, only 37% say they come equallyfrom business and IT, and just 21% think IT isthe primary driver. As we look through the survey results and
listen to tech leaders, two facts seem appar-ent. The first fact: IT leaders know there’s anew game afoot for using technology in busi-ness. Businesses need a faster, more-respon-sive IT infrastructure and delivery process.That’s become brutally obvious, and IT leadersare taking steps to reshape what IT does in or-der to fit the new omnipresence of technol-ogy. The second fact: IT leaders aren’t chang-ing fast enough. And unlike at any pointbefore in the 40-plus years that IT has existedas a profession, business leaders now have analternative to in-house IT. In fact, software-as-a-service, infrastructure-as-a-service, andother cloud offerings provide business lead-ers with a rich array of alternatives — many ofwhich can be used without IT’s involvement. The pressure to do more, faster isn’t a sur-
prise to IT leaders. In our 2014 Strategic CIOSurvey, we asked about concerns for the IT or-ganization’s ability to support business goals.
The top concern this year, just as it was in2013, is that IT can’t implement fast enoughto meet business goals. This is followed by atrifecta of not having: enough staff, enoughbudget, and the right skills. The frustration ispalpable.Bottom line, though, is that IT leaders need
to change their outlook and tactics, and em-
brace today as a time of golden opportunity.They need to borrow tactics and strategiesfrom digital-native businesses, and adaptthem to their needs, to create an infrastructurethat’s as responsive as the company demands. Yes, there are things holding IT back from all
it would like to do in serving and leading thebusiness, and certainly the demand for speed
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FAST FACT
73%of business technology
pros responding to our
Next-Generation IT Survey
say the IT group is perfectly
aligned or fairly well
aligned to the needs of the
business.
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How would you describe the alignment between what your business-side customers want and what your IT team delivers?
4% 5%1%
22%
68%
Business Needs vs. IT Delivery
Data: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014 R7960614/3
and lack of expertise should land high on thelist. But executive committees are speakingwith their dollars that they consider IT increas-ing critical. Our Strategic CIO Survey largelyfinds healthy increases in IT budgets, withonly 16% reporting a decrease in budget, 25%with flat budgets, and the rest reporting in-creases — and 17% with an increase of morethan 10%. This rosy view of IT budgets, to-gether with the knowledge that departmen-tal spending on technology is also increasing,indicates that for many businesses, there’s suf-ficient money to support the technologyneeds of the company. IT needs to understandhow to influence all that spending to get thebest results — and frankly needs to quit whin-ing about resources. In an economy that’s stillslow in its recovery, these budget numbersare about as good as you can expect.
Old Habits Die HardIf left to their own methods, IT groups would
prefer that businesses bring them opportuni-ties that demand technology for studied as-sessment. In a reasonably sized enterprise, the
IT team will assemble its best and brightest,possibly with some outside consulting and, af-ter a month or so for careful analysis, come upwith a plan that calls for gold-plated systemsfrom your long-standing infrastructure andsoftware suppliers. The plan will come with aseven- or eight-digit price tag and call for an18- to 24-month implementation window. Ifthis is the mind-set you’re still in, then sure, IT’sbudget, manpower, and skill set all seem lack-
ing, and of course new projects that get thistreatment don’t make for happy businessleaders.We’re not saying that using your established
vendors is a bad idea. They are proven, they arestable, they are moderately responsive (com-mensurate with the size of your checkbook),and by keeping your list of vendors relativelyshort, you’ve created substantial expertise inmaking their products work together. That
Research: 2014 StrategicCIO Priorities
One hundred fifty-five IT execu-tives weigh in on their roles, in-novation priorities, budgettrends — and why speed of exe-cution matters. A lot.
DownloadDownload
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To what extent are the following development methodologies in use at your organization?
45% 30% 25%
31% 28% 41%
20% 23% 57%
15% 34% 51%
6
Primary methodology Secondary methodology Do not use
Agile development
Waterfall
Whatever the contractor wants
DevOps
Base: 311 respondents at organizations developing applications for internal or external customersData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
made them good choices for critical, long-term production systems. The problem is thatmany of the things that make systems andsoftware from these vendors — as well as amethodical IT process for implementing them— a good choice for critical production sys-tems also make them a really bad choice whenyou’re trying to capitalize on a near-term busi-ness opportunity with an unknown ROI.These near-term business opportunities are
precisely where IT and the business unit lead-ers misalign. The thingthat most IT executivesdo best is managedown their risks. CIOspay top dollar for name-brand technology andbelieve it’s generallyworth it because they
do have limited staff and that staff has specificbut limited expertise. Each team within ITmonitors its respective systems and keepsthem up to date with little or no concern forwhat other teams are doing. So when it’s timeto tackle new initiatives, of course it takes
months to figure out how to do it. Even if youhave enterprise or IT architects on staff, gettingdown to a design you can price out and a sys-tem that everyone agrees to run simply takestime. Meanwhile, that line-of-business cus-tomer is off looking at other ways to capitalizeon this urgent, newfound opportunity.Again, the thing that’s changed is that
those line-of-business customers now havegood alternatives.
Who Has This Nailed?Let’s take a look at it from a different point
of view. There are certainly companies forwhich a focus on technology and the abilityto rapidly seize business opportunities is crit-ical. The two most-celebrated classes are Sili-con Valley startups, which typically use thecloud as their launching point, and hyperscaleInternet companies that eschew hardwareand software from the typical vendors in favorof their home-brewed systems. It’s wrong-headed to advise the typical mid-
size, or even enterprise-sized, company to re-make itself in either of these images, but there
are things to learn from both in terms of howIT can become a better business partner. Forstartups and for hyperscale companies likeGoogle, Amazon, and Facebook, the biggestrisk in seizing new business opportunitiesisn’t that the technology required will fail, it’sthat the opportunity doesn’t turn out to be aslucrative as hoped. The goal is to get in quick,test the business concept fairly cheaply, andthen see whether the market opportunity isbig enough to warrant a major investment.Take the example of Zynga. The Internet
game business is as tough as they come. Thecompany needs to predict the fickle desiresof Internet social gamers and produce what ithopes will be the next FarmVille, Angry Birds,or Words with Friends. The company startedout with its own infrastructure, servers resid-ing in hosting facilities. The model worked un-til FarmVille came along in 2009, and the com-pany wasn’t prepared for the enormoussuccess. Acting quickly, Zynga shifted Far-mVille, and eventually all of its operations, toAmazon Web Services. After careful analysis, the company realized
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it would be more profitable to recast its owninfrastructure as a cloud and bring its mostsuccessful games back onto its own hardware.The result is a business model worth consid-ering for many companies and many applica-tions. Zynga uses the public cloud for rapiddeployment and proof of concept for newgames. Zynga can leave the game in the pub-lic cloud until it has a handle on how big it willbe. If it’s another FarmVille, it can resource forthat. If it’s a dud, it can kill it before the com-pany has spent too much money on it.For more typical businesses, there are good
lessons to be learned here. First, if time is ofthe essence for capitalizing on a business op-portunity, the public cloud is your friend. In2009 Werner Vogels — CTO of Amazon andthe father of its AWS infrastructure-as-a-ser-vice — spoke at the InformationWeek Confer-ence. One person in the audience of CIOs andVPs of IT asked whom Vogels meant when hereferred to his customers. “Developers,” wasVogels’ one-word answer. The environment isgeared for developers to rapidly create newapplications and to scale them. It’s perfect for
startups that haven’t invented their own en-vironment, and it’s perfect for enterprises thathave self-contained projects that require agood bit of resources but aren’t highly de-pendent on the rest of the IT infrastructure. Amazon has won a lot of business with that
definition, but our data also shows that a lotof potential customers don’t see a clear path
for how to use infrastructure-as-a-service of-ferings like AWS. In our Strategic CIO survey,we ask respondents about plans for incorpo-rating the public cloud into their technologyinfrastructure. In 2013, 14% said they’d al-ready incorporated public cloud, 21% saidthey’d do in the next 12 months, and 27%said they’d do it in 24 months. By those fig-
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Approximately what percentage of your IT budget is spent to maintain existing services?
13%5%
9%
4%
26%
16%
27%
IT Maintenance Budget
Data: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014 R7960614/4
ures, this should be a big transitional year forthe public cloud, with around one-third ofcompanies using public cloud. It didn’t hap-pen, and instead, the numbers are nearly thesame in 2014: Only 18% have already done it,20% say it’s a year away, while 23% say it’s 24months away. There are good intentions, butlittle movement into IaaS, and it’s been thatway for years. To make progress, IT leaders must think of
the cloud differently. While most IT architectsget that it can be powerful place for test anddevelopment, it often feels like the applica-tions will end up stranded in a public cloud —and thus the lackluster adoption. But just asZynga starts apps in the cloud with the inten-tion of bringing them back on its own hard-ware, so can you. Whether you carve out partof your infrastructure and structure it morelike your public cloud service of choice, or yousimply put restrictions on your cloud use —such as avoiding AWS-specific features forwhich your own infrastructure has no analog— that facilitate bringing software developedthere back into your environment, the cloud
can be a great way to give your business theedge it needs for rapid development.Those with a more conservative bent are
asking themselves questions like “What about
security?” and “What about availability?”Those are really good questions, and your ba-sic design methodology should offer someanswers. Fundamentally you should use en-
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To what degree have you realized the following benefits by using cloud services? Please use a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “no improvement” and 5 is “significant improvement.”
Benefits Realized Through Use of Cloud Services
1 No improvement Significant improvement 5Improved infrastructure fault tolerance
Eased IT staff workload
Improved app performance
Quickly deliver new apps to internal customers
Quickly deliver new apps or new features to external customers
Improved customer relations through new or better apps
Create new revenue streams for the company
Note: Mean average ratingsBase: 172 respondents at organizations using cloud servicesData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
cryption, a scale-out design, and orchestrationsoftware so that things like security and avail-ability happen as part of the developmentprocess. But more importantly, those aren’tnecessarily the questions to be primarily con-cerned with at this point. Even if you bar thecloud, developers will happily ignore ques-tions about security and availability as theypack in the features that the line-of-businesscustomer wants, doing it quickly through Ag-ile development techniques. And at the out-set — when you don’t even know if the busi-ness opportunity is real or how exactly tocapitalize on it — that’s OK. The main question to answer at this point is
whether there’s truly a business opportunityat hand. As the answer to that becomes ap-parent, it’s time to do the hard work of figur-ing out security, performance, availability, andthe other things that will make this servicebulletproof. What we’re addressing here is theneed for speed and proof of a real opportu-nity — that’s what that 71% of dissatisfied ex-ecutives in Avanade’s survey are looking forand not getting from IT.
Software-As-A-Service: InevitableDevelopment isn’t the only place where the
public cloud should play a role in helping ITto be more responsive. Software-as-a-serviceplays a surprisingly light role in the eyes of
CIOs. In 2013 22% of CIOs said they had a ma-jor initiative in place to increase use of SaaS,and that percentage is 20% in 2014. Doesn’tthat strike you as odd? It may be partially dueto the way the question was asked, but it
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To what degree do the following represent revenue streams for your organization? Please use a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is, “not a revenue stream” and 5 is “substantial revenue stream.” If your organization is not using a particular technology, please select "not in use."
Revenue Sources
Browser-based applications
Applications delivering identical capabilities across many platforms
Conventional analytics improved through new technologies like in-memory databases
Applications developed natively for mobile platforms
Extensive presence on social networks and marketing and customer support
Hadoop-style big data analytics
Note: Mean average ratingsData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
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2.9
2.6
2.5
2.3
2.2
2.2
1 Not a revenue stream Substantial revenue stream 5
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seems impossible to believe that less than aquarter of businesses use SaaS. Take marketing departments, where SaaS is
the dominant form for strategic platforms. Ifthey’re big believers in a digital strategy, thenthey’re going to use something like Marketoor Eloqua to track their email and online pro-grams and nurture their leads. If they’re not-quite-so-big believers, then perhaps Adobe’sOmniture is good enough. Mildly interested,then Google Analytics might do the trick. Andif they’re not interested in any of those? Youneed a new marketing department. SaaS apps are potentially everywhere. Box
or Google docs or HR apps or sales-force au-tomation or analytics services or spam filter-ing, or dozens of other nonstrategic servicesare probably being provided by SaaS some-where in most companies. And if not, thenthey should be. In our CIO survey, we askedwhat prevents the IT team from innovating forthe company. Seventy percent cite a focus onday-to-day IT operations, and nothing elsecomes close — the second most-cited con-cern is lack of budget, cited by 45%. SaaS is a
way out of at least some of the day-to-day op-erations issues. IT teams must be involved in picking the
right SaaS products and integrating them into the existing authentication system, so thatadministration is straightforward and securityis acceptable. But for that to happen, IT mustassert itself and prove to business units it hassomething to offer, or else SaaS will continueto sneak into the company without IT’s ap-proval. A quick look at the marketing for anySaaS product will show that those vendorsaren’t marketing to IT. They’re marketing tothe end user — whether it be sales, market-ing, HR, or some other function within thecompany. IT organizations need to find waysto say yes to SaaS, because it can lighten theday-to-day workload, and also benefit the endusers by providing a regular flow of updatesand enhancements without IT’s involvementin the way that on-premises software wouldrequire.The public cloud remains a lightning rod
topic among IT pros. Some will swear that it’sthe only way services should be delivered,
and some believe cloud computing is theleast useful thing to come long since the ASPcraze of the previous decade. Both extremesare wrong. But whatever the public cloud willeventually be for IT operations, right now it isan excellent tool to have at your disposal, andone that you must learn how to use effec-tively for your organization.
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Anyone who’s ever set up a virtual machine,and many who haven’t, can understand thenirvana appeal of the hybrid cloud that virtu-alization inspires. A pool of virtual machinesrunning in either the public cloud or a privatecloud, and all monitored and managed fromone software console, gives IT pros the abilityto configure and reconfigure their resourceswithout physically touching a thing. And justas important, they can manage an appthrough its life, from development to deploy-ment to maintenance and enhancement toretirement — all without ever stepping footin a data center.That’s the ideal scenario. Everyone from de-
velopers to testers to server and storage op-erators to security teams uses the same or-chestration software to manage applicationsand resources, whether it’s adding features,optimizing performance, ensuring integrityand security, or minimizing cost and down-time. Through a close partnership amongthese teams, new features can be rolled out
on a regular basis and applications can bemoved from private to public clouds and backagain, all with a few mouse clicks.Achieving this ideal, however, means com-
pletely remaking your environment, and theskill set and attitudes of your teams — some-
thing that’s nearly impossible in the shortrun. But like every transition IT has evermade, the important thing is to start theprocess and show that your new methodol-ogy and technology have merit. For the hy-brid cloud, increasingly there is a hard return-
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To what extent are the following technologies in use at your organization?
72% 4% 5%19%
44% 34% 11% 11%
24% 38% 17% 21%
21% 30% 22% 27%
10% 26% 24% 40%
6
Extensive use Limited use Testing/evaluating
Server virtualization
Storage virtualization
Network virtualization
Private cloud architecture
Hybrid cloud architecture
Base: 287 respondents at organizations using server, storage, and/or network virtualizationData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
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Extent of Technology Use
No use
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on-investment proof point, even be-fore you start factoring in the hard-to-measure value of improving the re-sponsiveness of IT for the business.
What’s The Challenge?IT teams have two avenues of pursuit
in their quest to be a better businesspartner, and the hybrid cloud can con-tribute to both. First, they must findways to be more immediately respon-sive to the needs of business partners.In both our 2013 and 2014 StrategicCIO surveys, the No. 1 lament amongCIOs was that they simply can’t imple-ment fast enough to satisfy the busi-ness. The second avenue is to improveIT efficiency — to cut IT operatingcosts, or at least do considerably morefor the company with the resourcesthat it has. More with less is a refrain that IT pros are
plenty familiar with, since C-level execs havebeen saying it for as about as long as therehave been CIOs. There’s new urgency to this
old refrain, though. In one way or another theInternet of Things juggernaut, along with thedesire to apply analytics to everything thebusiness does, will eventually hit your IT or-
ganization. Gone will be storage growth of30% to 50% more a year, and in its place willbe storage needs that increase by factors offour and five times a year. Throw in the sys-
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FAST FACT
72%of Next-Generation IT Survey
respondents say they have
server virtualization in
extensive production use,
but only 21% have a private
cloud in extensive use.
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Currently In two years
What percentage of your in-house applications and services are currently run on virtual machines? What do you estimate the percentage will be in two years?
In-House Apps and Services Running on VMs
Less than 20%
21% to 40%
41% to 60%
61% to 80%
More than 80%
Base: 287 respondents at organizations using server, storage, and/or network virtualizationData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
tems to process all that good data, and youhave a challenge that IT can’t possibly meetwith the way it currently does business. But it gets better — and by better, we mean
worse. The marketing department has its eyesfirmly set on your turf. In IDC’s Top 10 CMOpredictions for 2013, prediction five statesthat 50% of new marketing hires will havetechnical backgrounds. With all that will comea new title, that of “chief marketing technolo-gist.” Feeling queasy yet?A hybrid cloud architecture isn’t going to fix
all these problems, and we wouldn’t be socavalier as to suggest that, but it can certainlyhelp. Forward-thinking IT architects get this,and even in Fortune 500 companies, they’rerealizing that in order to meet the needs ofthe data and technology onslaught that’sabout to come, everything possible that cango will need to move into the cloud.Before getting into the particulars of the
challenges of hybrid clouds, it’s worth takinga look at just how well IT is doing on the foun-dation for the hybrid cloud — which our datashows is in the very early stages.
In our survey of 362 business technologypros for this report, we asked about the use ofvirtualization, and 79% are using some formof virtualization. Of those, we asked what per-centage of in-house applications and services
are running in virtual machines. Almost halfsay that more than 60% of their apps are vir-tualized. One-third say less than 40% are vir-tualized. In two years almost half expect to beat 80% of apps virtualized. The primary bene-
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To what degree have you realized the following benefits through your virtualization efforts? Please use a scale of 1 to 5, where 1 is “no improvement” and 5 is “significant improvement.”
Benefits Realized Through Virtualization
1 No improvement Significant improvement 5Better use of resources
Better able to meet the needs of internal users
More reliable service
Easier to manage than nonvirtualized infrastructure
Faster deployment of new applications and app revisions
Improved development and test results
Better able to meet the needs of external customers
Note: Mean average ratingsBase: 287 respondents at organizations using server, storage, and/or network virtualizationData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
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4.0
3.7
3.6
3.6
3.3
3.2
3.2
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fit reported for virtualization is better use ofresources — in other words, the payoff fromconsolidation. The majority of virtualization users have not
gone deeply into creating a private or hybridcloud. While 72% have server virtualization inextensive production use, only 21% have aprivate cloud in extensive use, and just 10%report extensive hybrid cloud use. Much ofthe hesitation for virtualization resides insmaller companies. One consultant to SMBsput it this way: “Our client base is still highlyresistant to many virtualization/cloud ser -vices’ development aspects. We are primarilystill in testing and light usage phases at thepresent, but promoting services such as Sales-force.com as potential entry points for ourclientele.” Among the companies ranked in the Infor-
mationWeek Elite 100 this year, just 15% saythey’re able to switch between a public cloudand in-house data center based on demand;43% have no plans to explore that option.Thus for many organizations, moving to a hy-brid cloud is still years off.
That makes today’s hybrid cloud usersearly adopters, and one of the primary piecesthey’ve found missing is good managementsoftware to make their hybrid cloud a reality.Or at least the good software they havefound comes with a steep learning curve.Many have spent significant time and moneyto build a private cloud based on VMwarevSphere only to find that vCloud — now onlya year old — is an expensive and less matureinfrastructure service than those offered byAmazon, Microsoft, and even Google. In ourrecent Hybrid Cloud Survey, only 7% of thosewho say they’re using the public cloud re-port using vCloud Hybrid Service.
The IaaS FactorThe statistics around public infrastructure-
as-a-service usage tell another importantpart of the story. Gartner recently released itsreport on hybrid clouds and found that Ama-zon Web Services had a near monopoly withmore than 80% of the market. However, whenwe asked about public cloud usage as part ofInformationWeek’s Hybrid Cloud Survey,
among hybrid cloud users or planners, thetop answer was Azure (48%), followed byAWS (39%), Google (23%), and Rackspace(15%). Our poll only asked about usage, it did-n’t ask about the quantity of use. So AWS’susers could be much larger users than Mi-crosoft’s, Google’s or Rackspace’s. It also ap-pears that Microsoft’s “software + service”strategy is appealing to early hybrid cloudadopters. Microsoft’s Windows Azure Pack contains all
of the necessary pieces and parts to makeyour data center look like Azure, with thesame self-service management portals andAPI services. In choosing that route, Microsofthas taken the opposite approach to VMware,which created its vCloud to look like and beaccessed from the same tools that enterpriseops teams are used to for their noncloud datacenter infrastructure. Azure Pack is intendedfor large IT organizations that serve a wide va-riety of business units or for service providersthat want to provide their own cloud services.To serve the needs of these audiences, AzurePack is a full multitenant implementation, in-
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cluding resource tracking and billing.While Microsoft gets bashed for its lack of
foresight with smartphones and tablets, itsdata center strategy is sound and somethingthat only it could pull off. The company willhelp you build a private cloud or your ownpublic or semipublic cloud, and while it wouldcertainly like you to use its public cloud, it getspaid no matter which route you take. So whileAmazon has the market share, it also contin-ues to struggle to show the sort of profits thatWall Street wants. Meanwhile, Microsoft hasmade the hybrid cloud into one more soft-ware sales opportunity, something it knowshow to exploit.That isn’t to say that Amazon is satisfied with
its commanding early lead in the public cloud.The company is well aware of VMware’s domi-nance in the data center and the potential thatrepresents as enterprise IT architects turn moreseriously to hybrid clouds. In late May, Amazonannounced AWS Management Portal for vCen-ter. The product is a plug-in for vCenter that al-lows operators to launch workloads from theirVMware management console into the AWS
cloud. The interface will be familiar to vCenterjockeys, and more important than that, accesscontrol and authentication are handledthrough integration with Active Directory. Ad-ministrators can create a directory structurewithin their AWS cloud and assign rights tousers within their organization. So ops usersmight have access to and responsibility for aproduction part of the tree, while developersand testers would have access to their part ofthe tree. That makes it an easy matter to importVMware images to Elastic Compute Cloud.
Cloud On The BrainIBM, too, has seen that the hybrid cloud is in-
creasingly on the minds of its customers. ItsSmartCloud Enterprise+ is intended for its ex-isting large-enterprise customers who are in-terested in cloud architectures but who de-mand IBM-like service-level agreements(99.95% in this case). The product has recentlybeen renamed IBM Cloud Managed Services,and unlike most of the cloud offerings we’vediscussed here, it’s less about a highly auto-mated on-demand self-service model, and
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To what degree does your organization use these cloud services?
31% 13% 11%45%
17% 31% 19% 33%
16% 30% 17% 37%
6%
Extensive use Limited use Testing/evaluating
Software-as-a-service (SaaS)
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
Base: 172 respondents at organizations using cloud servicesData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
more about the SLA and its support for regu-lated environments such as HIPAA and PCI.IBM works with AT&T to offer preconfiguredWAN and VPN services. In short, it’s for bigcompanies with deep pockets and demand-ing needs.To augment its Cloud Managed Services,
IBM purchased SoftLayer for a cool $2 billionlast June. SoftLayer’s business model is theopposite of IBM’s Cloud Managed Services. Itis highly automated, web-centric, and aimedat SMBs. The thing that sets it apart is that italso offers very good SLAs, and will offer bare-metal servers for those who are cloud ori-ented and would rather use a managed serv-ice. Originally based on CloudStack, SoftLayernow offers OpenStack services as well, such asSwift object storage. It doesn’t appear asthough IBM plans to assimilate SoftLayer in itstypical Borg-like fashion. Rather, it is helpingthe company expand its operations so thatbetween SoftLayer and IBM CMS, it has ahigh-end offering that should be attractive toany company regardless of size, as long aswhat it’s looking for is more of a managed
service with high-end SLAs and less of a self-service cloud portal. As the vendors jockey to provide you with
the best single point of management for bothyour private and public cloud needs, it’s im-portant to be aware of what is and isn’t pos-sible in a hybrid cloud. If your typical virtualmachine image is in the 20 to 50 GB range,then there’s obviously no way to just click amouse and seconds later have that imagemove from running in your data center to run-ning in the cloud. Moving images of that size
will typically take hours — even if you havebig, fat Internet connections, because thepublic cloud provider is likely to slow theprocess down a bit. Not to mention you’ll beusing that pipe for other things. Automating workload mobility is a big part
of the puzzle, but an even bigger part isidentifying the workloads that you thinkmight run in both the public and privateclouds, and finding a way to keep imagesconsistent between the two environments.As is often the case, it’s not the computing
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Looking ahead two years, to what degree do you estimate your organization will be using these cloud services?
56% 5% 3%36%
38% 35% 12% 15%
35% 35% 13% 17%
6%
Extensive use Limited use Testing/evaluating
Software-as-a-service (SaaS)
Infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS)
Platform-as-a-service (PaaS)
Base: 172 respondents at organizations using cloud servicesData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
resource that’s the hard thing to figure outin a hybrid cloud, it’s the storage. Getting theright images and the right data in the rightplace at the right time is not a trivial matter.Greg Ness, VP of marketing at CloudVelocity,a startup attacking the problem of hybridcloud automation, describes the problemthis way: “All of these public and privatecloud data centers are like airports, but wedon’t run planes between them. It’s more
like Pony Express.”The issue is com-
pounded by the natureof the object storage ar-chitecture used almostuniversally in IaaS envi-ronments. With an ob-ject store, the only op-erations available are
create, read, and delete. There’s no way to ap-pend to an existing object. If you need tochange it, you create a new instance anddelete the old one. So, clearly creating a VMimage as a single object is a bad idea. A bigpart of what automation software must do is
manage consistency of content between thevarious storage systems in use in the privateand public cloud.
From The Data Center To The CloudCloudVelocity is one of a handful of compa-
nies addressing the problem. The company’soriginal and continuing idea is to manage themigration of workloads — both virtual andphysical — from the data center to the cloud.An obvious application, and one with an im-mediate ROI, is to use the cloud for disaster re-covery. Every IT team worth its pay realizesthat critical systems need to be deployed atleast in an N+1 architecture. If your daily op-erations require three data centers, you’d bet-ter have a fourth, just in case. The bill for doingthis has given many a CFO cause to reach forthe Rolaids bottle. It’s a bit like saying that toensure the smooth and continued operationof your family, you need a second house justoutside of a local disaster zone. The N+1 architecture, when done with real
data centers or even with services from thelikes of SunGard, is an expensive insurance
policy, so the idea of using IaaS for backup isintriguing. By using AWS and mirroringchanges in storage systems as they happen,CloudVelocity claims it can reduce the cost ofdisaster recovery sites by more than 50%. Aswith most startups, its initial challenge wasconvincing anyone that it could be done. It’snow done that and claims that for one majorcustomer it was able to migrate 6 TB of appsand data over seven days. While that’s an im-pressive enough feat to get the companyGartner’s “Cool Vendor” designation in its an-nual disaster recovery roundup, it’s a far cryfrom push-button instant migration.As with most things that IT tackles these
days, software — and particularly automationsoftware — is a key to capitalizing on new ar-chitectures like the hybrid cloud. But just asimportant is a fundamental understanding ofthe new architecture and the shift in howteams work. To a certain degree, that uniqueand indispensable star performer on the ITteam, the one who could fix Cisco, Linux, orOracle problems solely on intuition and hard-earned knowledge, must disappear in favor of
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automation software that can manage sys-tems many times larger than one person or asmall team could ever master. But in anothersense, the new star performer will be the onewho gets how and when to put to an applica-tion in the cloud, and how and when to mirrordata in the private and public cloud. We’re seeing the Internet of Things and the
analysis of everything, and the mobilization ofthe workforce and customers, and the democ-ratization of technological awareness in theform of that chief marketing technologist andothers like him, all come together. As they do,companies will need architects and other ITleaders who can see beyond the grind of IT’susual work and capitalize on automation andthe cloud to satisfy the needs of the businesswithout breaking the budget.
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In most companies support of mobile de-vices hasn’t been IT’s finest hour, particularlywhen it comes to helping employees usenew devices. In fact, the process of embrac-ing mobility for workers in many companiesfollows painfully close to the Kübler-Rossmodel of the five stages of grief — denial,anger, bargaining, depression, and accept-ance. The process has been far from thewarm, welcoming embrace IT has given totechnologies such as virtualization or solidstate storage. When it comes to mobile support for exter-
nal customers, though, IT leaders are of an en-tirely different mind. For customers, IT hasjumped at the chance to build mobile appsand support connections via smartphonesand tablets, seeing this new link as the bestthing IT can build to contribute to the com-pany’s digital strategy.Supporting a mobile workforce and con-
necting to a mobile customer base both arecritical to companies looking to build what
we’re calling frictionless IT — an IT strategyand infrastructure that would allow compa-nies to quickly react to new opportunities. Be-cause mobility for internal users has taken amarkedly different path to acceptance thanmobile customer support has, we’ll look ateach separately. However, elements of the mo-bile strategy can and should be universal,even if the goals aren’t.
The Simplicity Of YouthIt’s hard to fault the grief process reaction to
bring-your-own-device smartphone policies.Prior to BYOD, most IT teams had it down. Lotsof people got laptops from the company, com-plete with security and management software.Fewer people got BlackBerrys from the com-pany, but the built-in security and managementand limited browsing capability made the
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Which of the following technologies are in use at your organization?
Technologies in Use
Applications developed for internal customer use (i.e., for other employees)
Server, storage, and/or network virtualization
Applications developed for external customer use
Cloud services, including IaaS, PaaS, and SaaS
Note: Multiple responses allowedData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
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79%
79%
56%
48%
R7960614_Nextgen_chart1
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Frictionless IT: Going Mobile
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BlackBerry pretty easy to manage. The iPhone,iPad, and Android devices changed that in aninstant. IT went from supporting two or threeend-user systems to five or six — or perhapsdozens, depending on how you approachedAndroid. And from IT’s point of view, the com-pany got very little in return. Workers just gotto use a fancier device of their choosing.According to our 2014 Mobile Security Sur-
vey, two-thirds of organizations have a mobil-ity policy that allows employees to bring theirown devices. A similar percentage said theyhad such a policy in 2013. Policies are split be-tween allowing a limited range of devices(46%) and letting users bring any device aslong as they agree to abide by the company’spolicies (43%) — and the trend is toward sup-porting only a limited range of devices. Policies differ significantly between com-
pany-owned devices and personally ownedones. For company-owned devices, 86% of re-spondents said it is OK to store company dataon the device, though 41% require the use ofan encrypted container. For personally owneddevices, only 53% said it is OK to store com-
pany data, with a third requiring the use of en-crypted containers. This huge gap between letting data on com-
pany-owned versus personal phones is a bit of
a head-scratcher. IT’s main concern for mobiledevices is that they’ll be lost or stolen (72%), fol-lowed by users forwarding data to cloud-basedstorage like Google Drive or Dropbox. Whether
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FAST FACT
86%of respondents to our
2014 Mobile Security
Survey said it is OK to
store company data on
company-owned devices.
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For which platforms do you develop applications?
84% 11% 5%
29% 34% 37%
26% 36% 38%
14% 38% 48%
12% 37% 51%
7% 31% 62%
6% 29% 65%
Primary platform Secondary platform Do not develop apps for platform
Windows
HTML5
HTML4
iOS
Android
Mac OS
Windows Mobile
Base: 311 respondents at organizations developing applications for internal or external customersData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
or not the device is owned by the company, itcan easily be left in a cab or at a restaurant. Poli-cies around security need to be shaped aroundthe data people are using, not based on the de-vice or who owns it. The goal for IT should be the ability to say
“yes” to allowing data on most any mobile de-vice; if business users have a legitimate use,then they should have access to their data. Af-ter all, it’s their data, not IT’s. Policies on en-cryption and the shareability of data need tobe predicated on the data’s nature and valueto the company. IT needs to look on securityat the device level as enabling data access.Unfortunately, while that mindset leads to agood consistent policy, device makers arenow going to extra lengths to make their de-vices safer. All in all that’s a good thing — butwhen each device maker gives IT a differentset of protection mechanisms, it’s all but im-possible to craft and enforce a consistent pol-icy. The bottom line is that you’ll need somesort of enterprise mobility management soft-ware that works on all devices and operatingsystems that you’re going to support.
Security Focuses On SandboxesBefore we get into the latest trends, it’s
worth reviewing the dominant approach tosecurity. Most all security products deploy on
the mobile device a container or sandbox inwhich enterprise apps run. There are dozensof players in the mobility management mar-ket these days. The major difference between
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Denial: “No, you can’t bring your iPadinto the office. The company policyis we only support company owned
devices. Period.”Anger: “What do you mean you still
brought your iPad in and loaded sales pre-sentations on it? And who gave you emailaccess?!?”Bargaining: “OK, you can bring your iPad in,
but we will manage it as though we own it.You’ll be subject to our password policies,we’ll be able to remotely wipe your device,and you’ll abide by our acceptable-use poli-cies. And you can only do email on it; we’renot porting apps to that thing.”Depression: “These iPads are impossible
to secure. Executives want to view the com-pany’s most closely held private data onthem, and then they leave the things in acab to the airport. We’re going to end up onthe front page of the WSJ, and not in agood way.”Acceptance: “We need to manage iPads as
part of our overall data-centric security strat-egy. I bet people would like to get their en-terprise apps on these. What about analyticsdashboards? What could our sales team doif we put all our product data on these? It’stime to form a team, choose a managementapproach, and find ways to make thesethings a business advantage.”
these vendors is whether the sandbox is ap-plied an app at a time or is a permanent spacecarved out on the device. The drawback to thecontainer method is that you can end up witha limited set of applications that will run in thecontainer. Some vendors wrap familiar email and cal-
endaring apps that are native to the deviceso that users will have two instances, one forwork and one for personal use. Other ven-dors provide enterprise apps for things likecalendaring and email so that the experi-ence for enterprise use is different than forpersonal use. Depending on the nature ofthe user’s needs, that might be just fine, butcertainly some power users will want a broadset of native tools for which the device isknown. A subset of products uses the acronym
MAM for mobile application management(sometimes with an “E” thrown in there forenterprise). These systems wrap a broader setof applications in a container that allows IT togrant or revoke access to the application andwipe just its data as it sees fit. These systems
help manage licensing as well as data accessand can be useful when roles or project par-ticipation changes regularly and dictateswhich applications can be accessed. Othersystems seek to limit what the device can do,including limiting the function of the cameraand email attachments.
What’s New In Mobility Management?Particularly in BYOD uses, it’s critical that the
security software in use be able to distinguishbetween what is personal data and what iscorporate data. A couple years ago, this was ahard feature to find, but now it’s becomingcommonplace. Forcing corporate policies on
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What resources does your organization use to develop unique applications for internal customers, that is, other employees?
1%
50%
39%
10%
Resources for Internal App Development
Base: 287 respondents at organizations developing applications for internal customersData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
R7960614/6
R7960614_Nextgen_chart6
We have a team of in-house developers for this purpose
We contract with outside developers to create such apps
We use contractors and in-house developers
Other
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personal data is a recipe for unhappy employ-ees, so increasingly vendors are trying to offeroptions to keep personal and company dataseparate. Tizen, the operating system co-developed
by Samsung and Intel, is just now coming tomarket and is said to use hardware virtualiza-tion to provide highly secure containers thatare a native concept to the operating system.At present iOS and Android can’t do this. Be-cause of its improved security, Samsung hassuggested that the OS will be appropriate fororganizations with special regulatory require-ments such as PCI and HIPAA, but it’s so newthat there really hasn’t been a chance to eval-uate these claims. Since Intel has been involved in the devel-
opment of Tizen, which is just now availableon the Samsung Z, it seems a safe bet thephone is using an Intel chip — though wecouldn’t find confirmation of that at publica-tion time. That means it’s a new task for de-velopers to bring apps to the OS — or thatthey must use a compatibility shim. Infrawareoffers one called Dalvik, but it too is quite
new. Whether Tizen will be an issue for ITplanners remains to be seen. It appears thatthe OS was designed to address shortcom-ings of Android and iOS, but even with thelargest handset maker behind it, that doesn’tguarantee success. Samsung also offers systems for separat-
ing business and personal data on Androidand iOS phones; it upgraded its Knox enter-prise mobility management earlier this yearand now supports cloud delivery of EMM management. Google got in on the act in May when it said
it was acquiring Divide (previously known as
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What percentage of your applications are for internal customers?
22%
13%11%
23%14%
17%
Percentage of Applications for Internal Customers
Base: 287 respondents at organizations developing applications for internal customersData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
R7960614/7
R7960614_Nextgen_chart7
Less than 20%
20% to 40%
41% to 60%
100%
81% to 99%
61% to 80%
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Enterproid), whose enterprise mobile man-agement system also is called Divide. Dividetakes the container notion one step further bygiving the phone a dual persona — completewith multiple phone numbers, messagequeues, and so on. Google was an early in-vestor in the company, participating in “A”round financing. Google’s purchase is timelyas chipmaker ARM has incorporated hard-ware virtualization support into its latest de-signs, and chips supporting such divisions arenow coming to market. In the same way hard-ware support spurred virtualization perform-ance in the server market, it’s likely to havethe same effect on mobile devices. Along with some stellar technology, the Di-
vide purchase gives Google the company’sfounders, who were previously executives incharge of mobility and security at MorganStanley. Along with the dual persona capability,Divide provides business-appropriate apps forcalendaring and email. With the purchase, itlooks like Google may finally be getting seriousabout creating a more enterprise-friendly ver-sion of its mobile operating system.
When you start talking about virtualizationat the device level, VMware of course pops tomind. It is active in this market with its Hori-zon product. (One of its early deals was withcarrier Verizon, leading to the unfortunatecombination Verizon Horizon Mobile. Can’tmake this stuff up.) Horizon seeks to offer
end-user device management across laptops,smartphones, and tablets. It also can providea dual persona phone, thus the need to workwith Verizon to manage the phone numbers.Horizon also includes other typical enterprisesecurity features like encryption and usagelogging. Horizon is fairly expensive, starting at
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What resources does your organization use to develop unique applications for external customers?
48%
1%
10%
41%
Resources for External App Development
Base: 201 respondents at organizations developing applications for external customersData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
R7960614/8
R7960614_Nextgen_chart8
We have a team of in-house developers for this purpose
We contract with outside developers to create such apps
We use contractors and in-house developers
Other
FAST FACT
79%of Next-Gen IT Survey
respondents said they
develop apps for internal
customers, while 56% are
creating them for
external customers.
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$125 per user for a perpetual license. Otherproducts will typically run $45 to $70 a yearper user. VMware also completed its purchase of Air-
Watch in February for about $2 billion incash and stock, which gives the company onone hand a proven EMM and MDM product(AirWatch along with Mobile Iron came ontop of Gartner’s EMM magic quadrant). Onthe other hand it sows some confusion withthe purchase of the highly successful Air-Watch and no clear statement on what willhappen with Horizon Mobile.
Mobile App Dev StrategiesSecurity is a big piece of what companies
want in mobile management, but it’s only onepiece. Data on mobile devices really requiresan application for it to be useful. Plowingthrough a spreadsheet on an iPhone is nottoo productive; you need an app, either HTMLbased or native, if people are actually goingto use data productively. In our Next Gen ITSurvey, conducted for this article, 79% of re-spondents said they develop apps for internal
customers, while 56% are creating them forexternal customers.Whether the customer is internal or external
bears heavily on the approach IT takes to cre-ating apps. Most respondents in our surveyare still creating Windows apps for internalcustomers to use on laptops. For external cus-
tomers the focus is on the web as a way touniversally support devices, and for informa-tional websites augmented by platform-spe-cific development. That makes Windows theprimary delivery platform; the No. 1 secondarydelivery platform is iOS (38%), followed by An-droid (37%) and HTML4 (36%) and HTML5
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What percentage of your applications are for external customers?
19%
11%
3%
23%
23%
21%
Percentage of Applications for External Customers
Base: 201 respondents at organizations developing applications for external customersData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
R7960614/9
R7960614_Nextgen_chart9
Less than 20%
20% to 40%
61% to 80%
41% to 60%
100%
81% to 99%
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(34%). So for all the talk of a “mobile first” de-velopment mindset, companies aren’t quitethere yet — particularly for internal users. However, when asked about contributors to
business success, respondents to our DigitalBusiness Survey at large companies rankedmobile apps for customers as their No. 1 con-tributor, with e-commerce websites coming insecond, followed by informational websitesfor customers. The importance of mobile apps is widely
agreed upon, then, but the debate aboutwhether to use native development or HTMLand JavaScript for end-user presentation isone where reasonable people will differ.Both have obvious benefits and drawbacks.
Native development will provide better ac-cess to the unique features of each device,and apps will perform better. However, there’sa constant need to do maintenance to keepup with native OS changes in functionalityand style. Apps that aren’t maintained quicklyshow their age. Then there’s the question ofwhere to stop. Android and iOS will certainlyget you most of the market, but Tizen could
take off if Samsung spends a few years push-ing it, and Microsoft seems to finally be win-ning some critical acclaim for the latest ver-sion of Surface Pro. That’s a lot of platforms tosupport. But HTML/JavaScript programming doesn’t
obviate the need to program for screen size
and touch-friendly input. There’s nothingmore off-putting than trying to use a smart-phone to view a website that isn’t mobile-aware. On top of that, HTML compliance is notperfect across browsers. Chrome usuallyscores best, Internet Explorer scores worst,and Firefox and the others are somewhere in
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How critical is application development to the success of your organization?
20%
2%7%
38%
33%
Importance of App Dev to Organization's Success
Base: 311 respondents at organizations developing applications for internal or external customersData: InformationWeek Next-Generation IT Survey of 362 business technology professionals, May 2014
R7960614/11
R7960614_Nextgen_chart11
Critically important
Moderately important
Very important
Not at all important
Slightly important
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between. So, while those who choose to gonative have to maintain independent code-bases for the devices they’ll support, thosewho go the HTML route must test against atleast four browsers (Chrome, IE, Firefox, andSafari) and include special code for smallscreen sizes and keyboardless devices.Cross-platform development environments
offer one way out of this mess, and there area bunch of them to choose from. But the ma-jority of developers are still using some form
of C++ such as Apple’sObjective-C or Micro -soft’s C#. Our Next GenIT Survey indicates thatmost application de-velopment for externalcustomers is done ei-ther by in-house teams
(41%) or by in-house teams in conjunctionwith contractors (48%). That may relegatecross-platform tools to development donefor rapid prototyping and for internal use,with the real deal for customer-facing appsleft to the C++ derived tools.
However, the complexity of C++ develop-ment is not lost on the device vendors. Thisyear at Apple’s Worldwide Developers Confer-ence, Apple surprised the industry by an-nouncing Swift, a more intuitive alternative toObjective-C, which has been its sole languageof preference for years. Apple says Swift codewill run significantly faster than Objective-Ccode, and it automates some of the moremundane development tasks. Google also of-fers more intuitive languages like Simple forAndroid and Dart for Chrome.
Speed Is EssentialIn terms of reducing the time to develop-
ment, there’s now more to it than simplypicking a good development environmentand committing to it by training your staff.The DevOps movement as started by the hy-perscale Internet companies and now heavilyused by startups is an important new con-cept that will be critical as companies outsidethe tech industry move from developingdozens of apps with a few updates a year tofielding potentially hundreds with an almost
continuous stream of updates, new features,and bug fixes.The central concept of DevOps is to bring
developers and operators together so thatthe path from concept to development totesting to deployment to maintenance ismapped out ahead of time and that depend-encies become part of the specificationprocess. Though one can certainly imaginecreating the process without the aid of or-chestration and automation tools, the realvalue comes when IT uses these tools well.Automation plus DevOps will mean, for exam-ple, that the testing environment for an appwill mirror the production environment sothat a new version can be rolled out under thecontrol of your orchestration system. Much of the development for mobile de-
vices will focus on the back-end systems thatfeed the mobile apps used to interact withyour company. The DevOps concepts are im-portant enough that companies like IBM arebuilding the notion into their platforms.BlueMix is IBM’s platform-as-a-service offeringthat runs on its recently acquired SoftLayer in-
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frastructure-as-a-service platform. BlueMixpulls together tools from various IBM prod-ucts with the goal of helping companies com-bine Agile development and DevOps tech-niques. BlueMix includes what IBM callsboilerplates, which are templates that helpprogrammers get started in various tasks.Among the BlueMix boilerplates are ones tosupport mobility. This, together with the Soft-Layer platform and the system’s DevOps in-clusions, shows that IBM is seeing many of thesame issues we do — primarily that meetingfuture needs will take a rethinking and simpli-fication of how IT does its thing.IT organizations are facing rising demand
for faster development, thanks to the in-creased strategic importance of analytics, theInternet of Things, a mobile-equipped work-force and customer base, and increased ex-pectation that business will be done digitally.Mobility is an essential part of the equation. Itoffers great promise in terms of both em-ployee productivity and customer interactionand intimacy. But mobility can also be a huge resource
suck. The continued confused state of theEMM market shows just how far from maturityand efficiency we are in mobility. Even themost confident IT pros will have a hard timechoosing development standards and stickingwith them in an age where shadow IT opera-tions are in vogue and non-IT business part-ners can get an app built quickly by any ofhundreds of eager development shops. So,along with choosing development standardsand sticking with them — something IT ispretty good at — the bigger task will be sell-ing IT’s approach to the rest of the company.That campaign will provide the most signifi-cant challenge for IT for the foreseeable future.
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