Frank Kenney

Has many of you who know me, you know that I’m always on the run. For instance I landed at 7pm and I’m back out at 6am in the morning.

<Sigh>

Sometimes there isn’t just enough time. So instead of screaming that all of you need to understand the benefits of Managed File Transfer, I will let superstar

who is signed to Bad Boy Records (That’s Diddy/ Puffy/ Sean Combs record label) explain why you need an MFT solution and why all the free services aren’t the best things to use all the time.  More info on Cassie can be found here.
Without further ado, here’s Cassie.

Cassie Explains Why She Needs MFT

Regardless of your beliefs about the origin of man and the evolutionary theories that accompany it such as the evolution of amoeba to chimp to man, you must agree that at some point there was a global phenomenon that caused us to stand upright and pull our iPhones on the jet way of a Delta flight to Tampa from Atlanta Hartsfield international. (Hey dude in seat 23A, see you in the fifth circle of hell with the guy that decided to bring Popeye’s chicken onto a flight that served no food.)  But I digress, in the interest of not starting another international incident, much like my advocacy of the adult industry being a key indicator of IT success; I will not attempt to identify what that evolutionary phenomenon was. But I can say that this phenomenon happened and those half man- half chimpanzees that fail to recognize it are today a mere blip on the evolutionary chain.

This, my slightly captivated audience, should serve as enough of a warning to all of you; especially if you are information technologists who believe that the phenomenon of the Cloud and Cloud Computing are just evolutionary steps from message oriented middleware, integration brokers, application platform suites, enterprise service Buses, SOA Suites, Etc.. If you believe that simply putting an enterprise service bus on an external server hosted by your local Internet service provider, will give you the capability to offer the same functionalities (including elasticity, flexibility and agility) as true Cloud platforms, then you are mistaken.  And you have made a mortal error if you fail to see the evolutionary trail of enterprise infrastructure and middleware has dwindled.

I fully expect to see that the chasm, which may be more like a deep bottomless pit, between enterprise stuff and true infrastructure for Cloud services, filled with the bodies and careers of men, women and analyst (sometimes we can be above sexuality) who failed to detect and comprehend the radical shift in existence necessary to consume and provide the proper mechanisms and methodologies necessary for survival in this new era of Cloud services and Cloud Computing.

In turn this means the fight for leadership in Cloud platform and Cloud service infrastructure markets is far from over and there are no incumbent leaders or even visionaries.  So if you provide application integration technology today by all means adapt your technology for Cloud service infrastructure but be forewarned; your competitors will come from the world of integrated service environments, multi-enterprise collaborative gateways, manage file transfer technologies, Web 2.0 platforms, productivity suites, business process management suites and even entire operating systems. Take nothing for granted.  Unlike SOA and to a lesser extent BPM, the Consumerisation of the IT will not let enterprise infrastructure and middleware providers and vendors dilute and shift the Cloud’s core value proposition, strengths and legacy has a defining shift in information technology.

I like many other analysts love talking in multi-letter acronyms (MLA) and do so when there is:

• An IT guy in the room
• When I’m getting a new cell phone (to prove I’m smarter than the sales guy)
• At the hotel bar (preferably after the conference)
• In seat 2B when seat 2A is occupied by someone much better looking than I

But here’s a suggestion. Let’s concentrate on solving our problems and achieving the desired outcome and not focus all of our attention on HOW the problem is solved. Doing so will get us thinking about all the options for getting the desired result. Maybe its SaaS, maybe its an appliance, maybe it’s a custom app or ff you happen to work in a city where it costs you 10 bucks a week for knowledge worker, maybe your application integration is a shared desk with a set of in and outboxes. Maybe your database is a very tall and thick file cabinet. All you really do is keep your workers performing at a high level (meeting SLAs), have a group of other workers validating the result (Validation) and you lock the front door and if sometimes you lock the file cabinets. (Privacy) Oh and by the way you still have a successful, growing business and your R&D budget is twice your IT spend.

It’s all about the result. For example my colleague David Mitchell Smith (Cloud guru) prefers red wine. David Cearly, (another Cloud guru) prefers single malt scotch and I prefer a tall frosty 40 oz. bottle of Ole English. At the end of the night we all get a little tipsy and that’s the desired result; who cares how we get there. OK maybe that’s not a good analogy. OK here’s another… You need visibility into your sales pipe and your IT shop says they need to integrate Salesforce.com with you backend SAP system. They want to do this with an appliance from Cast Iron, fine. Or maybe they prefer to do so with Software AG’s webMethods Fabric, that’s cool too. You just want to know how much it will cost, how fast it can be done and most of all you want a guarantee that the result is visibility into your entire sales pipe. By the way I don’t unilaterally advocate one approach over the other (different strokes for different folks, call us if you really want our recommendation), all I really care about is that you get the results you want.

This is what makes Cloud Computing so cool. Since I get what I need as a service, I’m reluctant to care about what’s underneath. All I care about is getting my result, correctly, securely and on time. Some may say this is overly simplistic but those are the same folks who check their power transformers, wood poles, underground piping, CAT 5 converters, and transformation drums (don’t ask). I prefer to leave all that stuff to the electric company; holding them responsible for when my “frige don’t get cold and lights don’t turn on”.

So from my pickup truck in front of the feed store in Tampa, I offer my “down south county boy” mantra for all you consumers of Cloud services:

• I don’t care how you do the transformation, just GIT ‘ER DONE, and GIT ‘ER DONE correctly.
• I don’t care how you do the workflow GIT ‘ER DONE and make sure it gets to whom it supposed to, when it’s supposed to.

• I don’t care if it’s a web services or a FORTRAN script, GIT ‘ER DONE
• Encrypt the hell outta it, leave a junkyard dog by the servers running the Oracle apps, heck even require your employees use that fancy iris scanning authentication, I don’t care just GIT ‘ER DONE and GIT ‘ER DONE securely and protect my stuff!

Seriously think about the outcome and its impact on the business. Think about the business process and the business service. But don’t get bogged down on the implementation until you figured the rest out. Yep the devil is in the details, but don’t confront him until you have to.

What he said:

“Regulations were gutted for the sake of a quick profit at the expense of a healthy market.”

What he means:

“We had governance but we didn’t enforce it. So the governance had no meaning…” (Sound familiar all you app developers out there? ;-))

What he said:

“That is why I have asked Vice-President Biden to lead a tough, unprecedented oversight effort - because nobody messes with Joe. I have told each member of my cabinet as well as mayors and governors across the country that they will be held accountable by me and the American people for every dollar they spend.”

What he means:

“We are going to redo our governance processes and build enforcement mechanisms into the process. I will expect reports and I will audit and I will reward/ punish for compliance.”

What he said:

“I understand that on any given day, Wall Street may be more comforted by an approach that gives banks bail-outs with no strings attached, and that holds nobody accountable for their reckless decisions. But such an approach won’t solve the problem.”

What he means:

“It’s maybe easier, both politically and technically to create rules and then ignore them but in the long run that approach always fails.”

What he said:

“I intend to hold these banks fully accountable for the assistance they receive, and this time, they will have to clearly demonstrate how taxpayer dollars result in more lending for the American taxpayer.”

What he means:

“I will audit for compliance and by the way since I’m auditing are you SOX, HIPPA, BASEL, PIC, *fill in the blank* compliant?”

What he said:

“Finally, because we’re also suffering from a deficit of trust, I am committed to restoring a sense of honesty and accountability to our budget.”

What he means:

See any of the above and multiply times 10.

Ok so maybe I’m reading in to this way more than I should but let’s stop and think about how we are governing our businesses and our IT shops and decisions. Are we monitoring? Are we measuring? Are we enforcing? At the very least, the American Government is going to start asking for proof that you are.

(cue that horrible whistling theme from that commercial)

So the other day I was surfing the web and a colleague who shall remain nameless sent me a link to a humorous video that had been making its way around the web. It seems that the content was quite adult and one of the two stars let a little gas slip. Oh how immature! But still funny in a MAD magazine sorta way. When I clicked through I found myself on a site that was much like You Tube but was 100% adult content. The advertisements were off to the sides, the content was free and the community was vibrant and very much participating. While I won’t share the name of the site (I don’t need the Google crawlers logging it) I will tell you a little research and the owners of the site was a company that started out distributing VHS tapes, then DVDs and now giving the content away.  After a few emails with the owner it became evident that it’s the same ole game plan that the adult industry has followed from day one.   

When the adult industry realized that less and less people were buying content (in any form), they gave it away for free and monetized the communities built around the content. Viewers that preferred a certain type of film clip were bought together in an effort to share their favorite clips. Specific advertisements and value added services were added to the community and bingo, revenue streams opened up again. Utilizing current technologies and deployment models for storing and playing media (cloud storage) and hosted search, provisioning and account management capabilities (many adult sites will leverage existing email accounts) have kept these firms lean and clean; without traditional IT departments and razor focus of their business models.

Taking cues from the adult industry isn’t something new; it’s just something we don’t want to admit. But lets face it, the tipping point in the VHS vs. Beta discussions came down to the adult industry (it was cheaper). The tipping point for Blue Ray vs. HD DVD came down to a decision from the manufacturer to not grant a license to adult companies. Some of the trends are large like the above; some are small… think DIVX, downloadable flash and avatars. While we saw some adult content come into virtual worlds like Second Life, most of that was via end users and NOT larger adult companies. (In fact many had already tried virtual worlds and passed on the idea for various reasons.)

Just something to think about and I volunteer to lead that research agenda and chair that conference. Any helpers out there?

-f

Twas about nine days before Xmas

And in my Google browser

I was ordering from eBay

Because I am to busy to go to a real mall (Hey I never said this would rhyme!)

After using PayPal to send money to 5 different sellers in a 24hr chain, the governance mechanisms of PayPal kicked off processes that sent emails to the seller that said…

Ahhh wherever eBay and the PayPal guys learned it they learned well! Looking at my virtually inactive PayPal account that was over foyur years old but seldom used, PayPal’s monitoring systems showed some strange transactions all within the same 24 hour period. I mean could it really be Frank Kenney that bought:

• A new bass guitar,
• Refills for Propellerhead’s Reason,
• A Gwen Stefani L.A.M.B. watch and bracelet,
• A limited addition DVD of Duran Duran’s Rio (Ohhh don’t start! YOU KNOW YOU WANT A COPY),
• And some perfume???

I mean no interactions for the better part of 2 years then a flurry of activity. So here I am getting emails from sellers telling me that they were not going to send my presents out until PayPal said it was ok. All in all the process worked very well. In fact it worked too well.

But I did authorize the purchases and they were paid from my checking accounts. Hmmm so much like air travel and the dreaded “SSSS” (The airlines way of flagging you to the TSA) I was on a list that I didn’t deserve to be on. Worse yet with eight days until Christmas there was a real chance that I would not have the gifts in time. Oh what to do?

Oh, I called the 800 number, authenticated my self and a very nice man, very quickly executed a process that removed me from the bad guys list and sent out emails to the sellers. Problem solved.

Moral of the story? Automated governance processes are way cool! In fact if it wasn’t me buying all that merchandise, then I would be ecstatic that PayPal stopped the entire process and more importantly protected my money. The best policies and processes are those that have very clearly defined exceptions.

I would like to thank all of Gartner’s clients and associates who helped us stay successful and I look forward to another 400K of travel. Seriously, lets do it again.

Oh by the way… Cloud Governance…. Hehehe you know you want to know more… Stay tuned!

-f

- Tony Montana, Scarface

Wow. All I have to say is wow. It seems that I may have touched a nerve when I suggested that quite possibly some IT professionals were responsible for their SOA failures. I got some great feedback, negative and positive and I thought this would be a great forum to address both. So here we go.

Here’s one from Matt,”

SOA is so overblown…can we please stop talking about it as a generality and instead only speak of what it actually means? There’s way too much divergence in what people mean to say whether it is good or bad at a high level.

For me it’s been pretty simple-
Applications should provide running instances of remotely accessible and technology neutral APIs, with a preference towards messaging style asynchronous integration. (as opposed to user interface, shared file, shared database, RPC, or, my favorite, no integration)

SOA is overblown and rightfully so. If everything around us in nature, our bodies, our minds, even our business models is service centric then should our applications and infrastructure is as well? Let’s all anwser this question first before we start talking about technology… then lets think about the challenges our business face:

• I ain’t competitive enough
• I can’t get products to market fast enough
• I’m a retail shop with 3,000 developers. What’s my core competency again?

Or here’s the best one-

• I need to stop buying new and reuse what I have. The government just may make me slim expenses and streamline operations if I want a part of that $700B.

Sorry Matt, great opening to your comment but the 2nd part makes too many decision makers tune out. Here’s what they read,”

For me it’s been pretty simple-

Applications should provide blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah (as opposed to blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah blahblah).

Don’t believe me ask them???

__________

The folks at moebius recursive, suggested that Gartner is a Failure and its neither the fault of SOA or the folks trying to implement it…

 ”It is equally important to notice what doesn’t get written: ‘We (Gartner) told you to drop everything and run after this technology previously without making sure it solved a business problem, etc’.”

I disagree here. As far back as Gartner has been writing about SOA (see research from Roy Schulte 1996), we always advised our clients to organize, analyze, organize again and then implement. But that message doesn’t seem to work with most ISV’s that insist on making their customers by “something”. As much as I would love to look at Gartner for the sole blame for SOA failure (doing so would mean that we are the prominent voice in IT in the universe), we can not make this claim… yet. IT professionals like Rich have a very loud voice in this industry and with the right dinner in the right restaurant with a few of his peers can make monumental changes in a company’s IT strategy.  

 ——————-

For the folks that agreed with me or were slight amused? What are you going to do next? As for being the bad guy around SOA it’s ok. We don’t mind taking the blame, but lets now do something constructive. Here’s a few things to your SOA initiatives be successful…

Yea, I feel your pain. So much time effort and money put into SOA and it is a complete a dismal failure. Sorry to have misled you. Daryl Plummer and I are deep in depression. Sucks to be us. Oh well here’s some free advice to help you get by. In fact I will make this very easy for you. All you have to do is copy and paste the following, substituting your name for the big red XXXX.

——————————————————————————cut here

To the CIO, CEO, CFO, CTO and shareholders,

As a result of the following I can now only deduce that SOA is a failure and any attempts at SOA will result in failure. Under my direction:

• I have failed to associate our SOA initiatives with our business needs, therefore I cannot show any value for the hundreds of services we have created ,
• I have failed to properly create and support an SOA Center of Excellence, Steering Committee or Competency Center,
• I have failed to enlist the executive staff as true supporters and evangelistscfor our SOA efforts.
• I chose to buy an ESB prior to truly understanding our SOA infrastructure needs (In reality this wasn’t my fault, the vendor said it was super duper necessary)
• I have failed to provide my developers incentives to reuse artifacts,
• It was not my responsibility to follow what was going on next door where there was a separate team dealing with BPM, I mean they are two different initiatives,
• I firmly believe that SOA is nothing more than fancy CORBA or COM.

Despite all of the things I have NOT done, SOA has failed. My additional failure to recognize and implement best practices that have been proven successful in many other companies worldwide also play into the failure of SOA.

Oh well, we should move on and try something new. On the bright side 70% of our initiatives fail anyway. The failure of SOA is SOA’s fault not mine.

Thanks for understanding and I’d like to declare in advance that Cloud Computing, Virtualization and SaaS will be failures under my direction as well.

Thanks for listening

XXXXXX

Project Manager, EA Artchitect, Lead Developer (Choose One)

———————————————————————-cut here

Email this to the largest DL you can find, and rejoice in the fact that you are not alone. Many others feel the same way.

 -f

 P.S. You failed, not SOA. Now go resign.

And no I don’t mean the US Armed forces mandate on homosexuality, I mean something more related to IT and specificially how many CIO’s and IT governance policies are enacted and enforced. 

Obi Wan Doing His Thing

I just attended a compelling presentation delivered by Tom “Obi Wan” Austin, entitled, “Exploiting Consumerisation, Technology Democratization and User Responsibility”. Oh snap. In 45 minutes, and this is one of those cases where we NEEDED to hear Tom talk more, he lays out the genesis for the thinking around the Consumerisation of IT, then he produced excellent survey data around what was really happening in the world. Here are a few nuggets that I’d like to share with you-

• The buzzword “The Cloud” is a manifestation of the evolution of Gartner’s thinking which included “On Demand”, “GRID” and “SaaS” – Yeah! Finally it’s been said VERY LOUDLY.
• Why doesn’t Microsoft Word or Google Chrome recognize the word “Consumerisation”?
• Demographics are sometimes destiny… 60 year olds want their secretaries back and 17 year olds are completely adapted to the next wave of technologies. – I sorta agree, but there are still deep social divides. For instance I know a white grandfather who enjoys using his Slingbox (Google it) over his Motorola Q and a black senior in high school that solely uses her $1600 Dell laptop for Solitaire and MySpace. We need to address the divide.
• Everyone send an email to Tom right now asking him to go through the BP case study on end user responsibility. Its worth the email and the call

I can’t help but noodle on Tom’s great point about end user responsibility. Today we received a friendly reminder that we needed to update our iPhone firmware to 2.1. While this is something that I have done for my own personal security, it makes sense to be a corporate citizen and do the right thing for the job. If we want to continue to enjoy the blossoming freedom of our own devices and processes we have to step up to the responsibilities.

Oh by the way Tom… let’s retire the bear!

-f

Today I had a conversation with a good colleague (Bill Ho from Biscom) and we got into the idea of governance as it relates to MFT. Now I stumble on governance because of the hype (heck I use it no less than 15 times on this blog alone) but the idea of the lifecycle of a managed file transfer is intriguing. One of the things that has been more and more evident to me is that I have tended to have a silo’ed perspective when it comes to MFT suite vendors. It isn’t a bad thing, but it isn’t the best thing either. My perspective until about 6 months ago was that the majority of MFT suite vendors would come from the secure file transfer arena. For the most part this has been true. But in the last year I have been contacted by representatives from Biscom, Group Logic, Datamotion (Certified Mail), Thru Inc, Folder Maestro and others who have come from a more content and collaboration perspective. They tend to address another set of business concerns including:

• How can I share…?
• My team of individuals needs to manage…
• I need to check each transmission for ____ to stay in compliance….

These are all relevant issues and while some have been addressed in a recent research note, there is more to say. So what if I start to define the lifecycle of an MFT, let’s say we start with the sending person or application and what they need to be concerned with? Issues like compression, security of the data at rest etc. And then provisioning the end point which has a plethora of issues. I could identify all the steps, and I’m sure you have many more, and we could begin to understand that not all MFT vendors come from the same place and as such they all tackle various steps of that lifecycle. Would love to hear your thoughts, leave a comment! For sure, more soon. Oh and thanks again Bill.

-f