The panel discussion summarized that while cloud computing is gaining traction in certain areas, one-size-fits-all cloud solutions may not work for complex enterprise IT environments. The panel identified several areas where cloud is currently working well, such as for federal governments seeking cost savings and variable workloads in research. However, for core enterprise applications, cloud providers will need to address issues such as customization, heterogeneity, platform continuity, and regulatory/licensing requirements to appeal to more large enterprises. Trust and security were also cited as challenges that cloud providers need to overcome to capture more of the enterprise market.

1. Open Group Cloud Panel Forecasts Transition Phase for
Enterprise IT Architecture
Transcript of a sponsored podcast panel discussion from The Open Group 2011 U.S. Conference
on newly emerging cloud models and their impact on business and government.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor:
The Open Group
Dana Gardner: Hi, this is Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, and you're
listening to BriefingsDirect.
We now present a sponsored podcast discussion coming to you live from The Open Group 2011
Conference in San Diego. We're here the week of February 7, and we have assembled a
distinguished panel to examine the expectation of new types of cloud models
and perhaps cloud specialization requirements emerging quite soon.
By now, we're all familiar with the taxonomy around public cloud, private
cloud, software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and my
favorite, infrastructure as a service (IaaS), but we thought we would do you
all an additional service and examine, firstly, where these general types of
cloud models are actually gaining use and allegiance, and we'll look at
vertical industries and types of companies that are leaping ahead with cloud, as we now define it.
[Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]
Then, second, we're going to look at why one-size-fits-all cloud services may not fit so well in a
highly fragmented, customized, heterogeneous, and specialized IT world.
How much of cloud services that come with a true price benefit, and that’s usually at scale and
cheap, will be able to replace what is actually on the ground in many complex and unique
enterprise IT organizations?
What's more, we'll look at the need for cloud specialization, based on geographic and regional
requirements, as well as based on the size of these user organizations, which of course can vary
from 5 to 50,000 seats. Can a few types of cloud work for all of them?
Please join me now in welcoming our panel. Here to help us better understand the quest for "fit
for purpose" cloud balance and to predict, at least for some time, the considerable mismatch
between enterprise cloud wants and cloud provider offerings we're here with Penelope Gordon,
the cofounder of 1Plug Corporation, based in San Francisco. Welcome, Penelope.
Penelope Gordon: Thank you.

2. Gardner: We're also here with Mark Skilton. He is the Director of Portfolio and Solutions in the
Global Infrastructure Services with Capgemini in London. Thank you for coming, Mark.
Mark Skilton: Thank you.
Gardner: Ed Harrington joins us. He is the Principal Consultant in Virginia for the UK-based
Architecting the Enterprise organization. Thank you, Ed.
Ed Harrington: Thank you.
Gardner: Tom Plunkett is joining us. He is a Senior Solution Consultant with Oracle in
Huntsville, Alabama.
Tom Plunkett: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: And lastly, we're here with TJ Virdi. He is Computing Architect in the CAS IT System
Architecture Group at Boeing based in Seattle. Welcome.
TJ Virdi: Thank you.
Gardner: Let me go first to you, Mark Skilton. One size fits all has rarely worked in IT. If it has,
it has been limited in its scope and, most often, leads to an additional level of engagement to
make it work with what's already there. Why should cloud be any different?
Three areas
Skilton: Well, Dana, from personal experience, there are probably three areas of adaptation of
cloud into businesses. For sure, there are horizontal common services to
which, what you call, the homogeneous cloud solution could be applied
common to a number of business units or operations across a market.
But, we're starting to increasingly see the need for customization to meet
vertical competitive needs of a company or the decisions within that large
company. So, differentiation and business models are still there, they are
still in platform cloud as they were in the pre-cloud era.
But, the key thing is that we're seeing a different kind of potential that a
business can do now with cloud -- a more elastic, explosive expansion and contraction of a
business model. We're seeing fundamentally the operating model of the business growing, and
the industry can change using cloud technology.
So, there are two things going on in the business and the technologies are changing because of
the cloud.

3. Gardner: Well, for us to understand where it fits best, and perhaps not so good, is to look at
where it's already working. Ed, you talked about the federal government. They seem to be going
like gangbusters in the cloud. Why so?
Harrington: Perceived cost savings, primarily. The federal government has done some analysis.
In particular, the General Services Administration (GSA), has done some
considerable analysis on what they think they can save by going to, in their
case, a public cloud model for email and collaboration services. They've issued
a $6.7 million contract to Unisys as the systems integrator, with Google being
the cloud services supplier.
So, the debate over the benefits of cloud, versus the risks associated with
cloud, is still going on quite heatedly.
Gardner: How about some other verticals? Where is this working? We've seen
in some pharma, health-care, and research environments, which have a lot of elasticity, it makes
sense, given that they have very variable loads. Any other suggestions on where this works,
Tom?
Plunkett: You mentioned variable workloads. Another place where we are seeing a lot of
customers approach cloud is when they are starting a new project. Because then, they don’t have
to migrate from the existing infrastructure. Instead everything is brand new. That’s the other
place where we see a lot of customers looking at cloud, your greenfields.
Gardner: TJ, any verticals that you are aware of? What are you seeing that’s working now?
Virdi: It's not probably related with any vertical market, but I think what we are really looking
for speed to put new products into the market or evolve the products that we already have and
how to optimize business operations, as well as reduce the cost. These may be parallel to any
vertical industries, where all these things are probably going to be working as a cloud solution.
Gardner: We've heard the application of "core and context" to applications, but maybe there is
an application of core and context to cloud computing, whereby there's not so much core and lot
more context. Is that what you're saying so far?
Unstructured data
Virdi: In a sense, you would have to measure not only the structured documents or structured
data, but unstructured data as well. How to measure and create a new product or solutions is the
really cool things you would be looking for in the cloud. And, it has proved pretty easy to put a
new solution into the market. So, speed is also the big thing in there.
Gardner: Penelope, use cases or verticals where this is working so far?

4. Gordon: One example in talking about core and context is when you look in retail. You can have
two retailers like a Walmart or a Costco, where they're competing in the
same general space, but are differentiating in different areas.
Walmart is really differentiating on the supply chain, and so it’s not a good
candidate for public cloud computing solutions. We did discuss it that
might possibly be a candidate for private cloud computing.
But that’s really where they're going to invest in the differentiating, as
opposed to a Costco, where it makes more sense for them to invest in their
relationship with their customers and their relationship with their
employees. They're going to put more emphasis on those business processes, and they might be
more inclined to outsource some of the aspects of their supply chain.
A specific example within retail is pricing optimization. A lot of grocery stores need to do pricing
optimization checks once a quarter, or perhaps once a year in some of their areas. It doesn't
makes sense for smaller grocery store chains to have that kind of IT capability in house. So,
that's a really great candidate, when you are looking at a particular vertical business process to
outsource to a cloud provider who has specific industry domain expertise.
Gardner: So for small and medium businesses (SMBs) that would be more core for them than
others.
Gordon: Right. That’s an example, though, where you're talking about what I would say is a
particular vertical business process. Then, you're talking about a monetization strategy and then
part of the provider, where they are looking more at a niche strategy, rather than a commodity,
where they are doing a horizontal infrastructure platform.
Gardner: Ed, you had a thought?
Harrington: Yeah, and it's along the SMB dimension. We're seeing a lot of cloud uptake in the
small businesses. I work for a 50-person company. We have one "sort of" IT person and we do
virtually everything in the cloud. We've got people in Australia and Canada, here in the States,
headquartered in the UK, and we use cloud services for virtually everything across that. I'm
associated with a number of other small companies and we are seeing big uptake of cloud
services.
Gardner: Allow me to be a little bit of a skeptic, because I'm seeing these reports from analyst
firms on the tens of billions of dollars in potential cloud market share and double-digit growth
rates for the next several years. Is this going to come from just peripheral application context
activities, mostly SMBs? What about the core in the enterprises? Does anybody have an example
of where cloud is being used in either of those?
Skilton: In the telecom sector, which is very IT intensive, I'm seeing the emergence of their core
business of delivering service to a large end user or multiple end user channels, using what I call
cloud brokering.

5. Front-end cloud
So, if where you're going with your question is that, certainly in the telecom sector we're seeing
the emergence of front end cloud, customer relationship management (CRM) type systems and
also sort of back-end content delivery engines using cloud.
The fundamental shift away from the service orientated architecture (SOA) era is that we're
seeing more business driven self-service, more deployment of services as a business model,
which is a big difference of the shift of the cloud. Particularly in telco, we're seeing almost an
explosion in that particular sector.
Gordon: A lot of companies don’t even necessarily realize that they're using cloud services,
particularly when you talk about SaaS. There are a number of SaaS solutions that are becoming
more and more ubiquitous. If you look at large enterprise company recruiting sites, often you
will see Taleo down at the bottom. Taleo is a SaaS. So, that’s a cloud solution, but it’s just not
thought necessarily of in that context.
Gardner: Right. Tom?
Plunkett: Another place we're seeing a lot of growth with regards to private clouds is actually on
the defense side. The Defense Department is looking at private clouds, but they
also have to deal with this core and context issue. We're in San Diego today.
The requirements for a shipboard system are very different from the land-based
systems.
Ships have to deal with narrow bandwidth and going disconnected. They also
have to deal with coalition partners or perhaps they are providing humanitarian
assistance and they are dealing even with organizations we wouldn’t normally
consider military. So, they have to deal with lots of information, assurance issues, and have
completely different governance concerns that we normally think about for public clouds.
Gardner: However, in the last year or two, the assumption has been that this is something that’s
going to impact every enterprise, and everybody should get ready. Yet, I'm hearing mostly this
creeping in through packaged applications on a on-demand basis, SMBs, greenfield
organizations, perhaps where high elasticity is a requirement.
What would be necessary for these cloud providers to be able to bring more of the core
applications the large enterprises are looking for? What’s the new set of requirements? As I
pointed out, we have had a general category of SaaS and development, elasticity, a handful of
infrastructure services. What’s the next set of requirements that's going to make it palatable for
these core activities and these large enterprises to start doing this? Let me start with you,
Penelope.

6. Gordon: It’s an interesting question and it was something that we were discussing in a session
yesterday afternoon. Here is a gentleman from a large telecommunications company, and from
his perspective, trust was a big issue. To him, part of it was just an immaturity of the market,
specifically talking about what the new style of cloud is and that branding. Some of the aspects
of cloud have been around for quite some time.
Look at Linux adoption as an analogy. A lot of companies started adopting Linux, but it was for
peripheral applications and peripheral services, some web services that weren’t business critical.
It didn’t really get into the core enterprise until much later.
We're seeing some of that with cloud. It’s just a much bigger issue with cloud, especially as you
start looking at providers wanting to moving up the food chain and providing greater value. This
means that they have to have more industry knowledge and that they have to have more
specialization. It becomes more difficult for large enterprises to trust a vendor to have that kind
of knowledge.
No governance
Another aspect of what came up in the afternoon is that, at this point, while we talk about public
cloud specifically, it’s not the same as saying it’s a public utility. We talk about "public utility,"
but there is no governance, at this point, to say, "Here is certification that these companies have
been tested to meet certain delivery standards." Until that exists, it’s going to be difficult for
some enterprises to get over that trust issue.
Gardner: Assuming that the trust and security issues are worked out over time, that experience
leads to action, it leads to trust, it leads to adoption, and we have already seen that with SaaS
applications. We've certainly seen it with the federal government, as Ed pointed out earlier.
Let’s just put that aside as one of the requirements that’s already on the drawing board and that
we probably can put a checkmark next to at some point. What’s next? What about
customization? What about heterogeneity? What about some of these other issues that are typical
in IT, Mark Skilton?
Skilton: One of the under-played areas is PaaS. We hear about lock-in of technology caused by
the use of the cloud, either putting too much data in or doing customization of parameters and
you lose the elastic features of that cloud.
As to your question about what do vendors or providers need to do more to help the customer use
the cloud, the two things we're seeing are: one, more of an appliance strategy, where they can
buy modular capabilities, so the licensing issue, solutioning issue, is more contained. The client
can look at it more in a modular appliance sort of way. Think of it as cloud in a box.
The second thing is that we need to be seeing is much more offering transition services,
transformation services, to accelerate the use of the cloud in a safe way, and I think that’s

7. something that we need to really push hard to do. There's a great quote from a client, "It’s not the
destination, it’s the journey to the cloud that I need to see."
Gardner: You mentioned PaaS. We haven’t seen too much yet with a full mature offering of the
full continuum of PaaS to IaaS. That's one where new application development activities and
new integration activities would be built of, for, and by the cloud and coordinated between the
dev and the ops, with the ops being any number of cloud models -- on-premises, off-premises,
co-lo, multi-tenancy, and so forth.
So what about that? Is that another requirement that there is continuity between the past and the
infrastructure and deployment, Tom?
Plunkett: We're getting there. PaaS is going to be a real requirement going forward, simply
because that’s going to provide us the flexibility to reach some of those core applications that we
were talking about before. The further you get away from the context, the more you're focusing
on what the business is really focused in on, and that’s going to be the core, which is going to
require effective PaaS.
Gardner: TJ.
More regulatory
Virdi: I want to second that, but at the same time, we're looking for more regulatory and other
kind of licensing and configuration issues as well. Those also make it a little better
to use the cloud. You don’t really have to buy, or you can go for the demand. You
need to make your licenses a little bit better in such a way that you can just put the
product or business solutions into the market, test the water, and then you can go
further on that.
Gardner: Penelope, where do you see any benefit of having a coordinated or
integrated platform and development test and deploy functions? Is that going to
bring this to a more core usage in large enterprises?
Gordon: It depends. I see a lot more of the buying of cloud moving out to the non-IT line of
business executives. If that accelerates, there is going to be less and less focus. Companies are
really separating now what is differentiating and what is core to my business from the rest of it.
There's going to be less emphasis on, "Let’s do our scale development on a platform level" and
more, "Let’s really seek out those vendors that are going to enable us to effectively integrate, so
we don’t have to do double entry of data between different solutions. Let's look out for the
solutions that allow us to apply the governance and that effectively let us tailor our experience
with these solutions in a way that doesn’t impinge upon the provider’s ability to deliver in a cost
effective fashion."

8. That’s going to become much more important. So, a lot of the development onus is going to be
on the providers, rather than on the actual buyers.
Gardner: Now, this is interesting. On one hand, we have non-IT people, business people,
specifying, acquiring, and using cloud services. On the other hand we're perhaps going to see
more PaaS, the new application development, be it custom or more of a SaaS type of offering
that’s brought in with a certain level of adjustment and integration. But, these are going off
without necessarily any coordination. At some point, they are going to even come together. It’s
inevitable, another "integrationness" perhaps.
Mark Skilton, is that what you see, that we have not just one cloud approach but multiple
approaches and then some need to rationalize?
Skilton: There are two key points. There's a missing architecture practice that needs to be there,
which is a workers analysis, so that you design applications to fit specific infrastructure
containers, and you've got a bridge between the the application service and the infrastructure
service. There needs to be a piece of work by enterprise architects that starts to bring that
together as a deliberate design for applications to be able to operate in the cloud, and the PaaS
platform is a perfect environment.
The second thing is that there's a lack of policy management in terms of technical governance,
and because of the lack of understanding, there needs to be more of a matching exercise going
on. The key thing is that that needs to evolve.
Part of the work we're doing in The Open Group with the Cloud Computing Work Group is to
develop new standards and methodologies that bridge those gaps between infrastructure, PaaS,
platform development, and SaaS.
Gardner: We already have the Trusted Technology Forum. Maybe soon we'll see an open trusted
cloud technology forum.
Skilton: I hope so.
Gardner: Ed Harrington, you mentioned earlier that the role of the enterprise architect is going
to benefit from cloud. Do you see what we just described in terms of dual tracks, multiple
inception points, heterogeneity, perhaps overlap and redundancy? Is that where the enterprise
architect flourishes?
Shadow IT
Harrington: I think we talked about line management IT getting involved in acquiring cloud
services. If you think we've got this thing called "shadow IT" today, wait a few years. We're
going to have a huge problem with shadow IT.

9. From the architect’s perspective, there's lot to be involved with and a lot to play with, as I said in
my talk. There's an awful lot of analysis to be done -- what is the value that the cloud solution
being proposed is going to be supplying to the organization in business terms, versus the risk
associated with it? Enterprise architects deal with change, and that’s what we're talking about.
We're talking about change, and change will inherently involve risk.
Gardner: TJ.
Virdi: All these business decisions are going to be coming upstream, and business executives
need to be more aware about how cloud could be utilized as a delivery model. The enterprise
architects and someone with a technical background needs to educate or drive them to make the
right decisions and choose the proper solutions.
It has an impact how you want to use the cloud, as well as how you get out of it too, in case you
want to move to different cloud vendors or providers. All those things come into play upstream
rather than downstream.
Gardner: We all seem to be resigned to this world of, "Well, here we go again. We're going to sit
back and wait for all these different cloud things to happen. Then, we'll come in, like the sheriff
on the white horse, and try to rationalize." Why not try to rationalize now before we get to that
point? What could be done from an architecture standpoint to head off mass confusion around
cloud? Let me start at one end and go down the other. Tom?
Plunkett: One word: governance. We talked about the importance of governance increasing as
the IT industry went into SOA. Well, cloud is going to make it even more important. Governance
throughout the lifecycle, not just at the end, not just at deployment, but from the very beginning.
Gardner: TJ.
Virdi: In addition to governance, you probably have to figure out how you want to plan to adapt
to the cloud also. You don’t want to start as a Big Bang theory. You want to start in incremental
steps, small steps, test out what you really want to do. If that works, then go do the other things
after that.
Gardner: Penelope, how about following the money? Doesn’t where the money flows in and out
of organizations tend to have a powerful impact on motivating people or getting them moving
towards governance or not?
Gordon: I agree, and towards that end, it's enterprise architects. Enterprise architects need to
break out of the idea of focusing on how to address the boundary between IT and the business
and talk to the business in business terms.
One way of doing that that I have seen as effective is to look at it from the standpoint of portfolio
management. Where you were familiar with financial portfolio management, now you are
looking at a service portfolio, as well as looking at your overall business and all of your business
processes as a portfolio. How can you optimize at a macro level for your portfolio of all the

10. investment decisions you're making, and how the various processes and services are enabled?
Then, it comes down to, as you said, a money issue.
Gardner: Perhaps one way to head off what we seem to think is an inevitable cloud chaos
situation is to invoke more shared services, get people to consume services and think about how
to pay for them along the way, regardless of where they come from and regardless of who
specified them. So back to SOA, back to ITIL, back to the blocking and tackling that's just good
enterprise architecture. Anything to add to that, Mark?
Not more of the same
Skilton: I think it's a mistake to just describe this as more of the same. ITIL, in my view, needs
to change to take into account self-service dynamics. ITIL is kind of a provider service
management process. It's thing that you do to people. Cloud changes that direction to the other
way, and I think that's something that needs to be done.
Also, fundamentally the data center and network strategies need to be in place to adopt cloud.
From my experience, the data center transformation or refurbishment strategies or next
generation networks tend to be done as a separate exercise from the applications area. So a
strong, strong recommendation from me would be to drive a clear cloud route map to your data
center.
Gardner: So, perhaps a regulating effect on the self-selection of cloud services would be that the
network isn't designed for it and it's not going to help.
Skilton: Exactly.
Gardner: That's one way to govern your cloud. Ed Harrington, any other further thoughts on
working towards a cloud future without the pitfalls?
Harrington: Again, the governance, certification of some sort. I'm not in favor of regulation, but
I am in favor of some sort of third party certification of services that consumers can rely upon
safely. But, I will go back to what I said earlier. It's a combination of governance, treating the
cloud services as services per se, and enterprise architecture.
Gardner: What about the notion that was brought up earlier about private clouds being an
important on-ramp to this? If I were a public cloud provider, I would do my market research on
what's going on in the private clouds, because I think they are going to be incubators to what
might then become hybrid and ultimately a full-fledged third-party public cloud providing assets
and services.
What can we learn from looking at what's going on with private cloud now, seemingly a lot of
trying to reduce cost and energy consumption, but what does that tell us about what we should
expect in the next few years? Again, let's start with you, Tom.

11. Plunkett: What we're seeing with private cloud is that it’s actually impacting governance,
because one of the things that you look at with private cloud is chargeback between different
internal customers. This is forcing these organizations to deal with complex money, business
issues that they don't really like to do.
Nowadays, it's mostly vertical applications, where you've got one owner who is paying for
everything. Now, we're actually going back to, as we were talking about earlier, dealing with
some of the tricky issues of SOA.
Gardner: TJ, private cloud as an incubator. What we should expect?
Securing your data
Virdi: Configuration and change management -- how in the private cloud we are adapting to it
and supporting different customer segments is really the key. This could be utilized in the public
cloud too, as well as how you are really securing your information and data or your business
knowledge. How you want to secure that is key, and that's why the private cloud is there. If we
can adapt to or mimic the same kind of controls in the public cloud, maybe we'll have more
adoptions in the public cloud too.
Gardner: Penelope, any thoughts on that, the private to public transition?
Gordon: I also look at it in a little different way. For example, in the U.S., you have the National
Security Agency (NSA). For a lot of what you would think of as their non-differentiating
processes, for example payroll, they can't use ADP. They can't use that SaaS for payroll, because
they can't allow the identities of their employees to become publicly known.
Anything that involves their employee data and all the rest of the information within the agency
has to be kept within a private cloud. But, they're actively looking at private cloud solutions for
some of the other benefits of cloud.
In one sense, I look at it and say that private cloud adoption to me tells a provider that this is an
area that's not a candidate for a public-cloud solution. But, private clouds could also be another
channel for public cloud providers to be able to better monetize what they're doing, rather than
just focusing on public cloud solutions.
Gardner: So, then, you're saying this is a two-way street. Just as we could foresee someone
architecting a good private cloud and then looking to take that out to someone else’s
infrastructure, you're saying there is a lot of public services that for regulatory or other reasons
might then need to come back in and be privatized or kept within the walls. Interesting.
Mark Skilton, any thoughts on this public-private tension and/or benefit?

12. Skilton: I asked an IT service director the question about what was it like running a cloud
service for the account. This is a guy who had previously been running hosting and management
and with many years experience.
The surprising thing was that he was quite shocked that the disciplines that he previously had for
escalating errors and doing planned maintenance, monitoring, billing and charging back to the
customer fundamentally were changing, because it had to be done more in real time. You have to
fix before it fails. You can’t just wait for it to fail. You have to have a much more disciplined
approach to running a private cloud.
The lessons that we're learning in running private clouds for our clients is the need to have a
much more of a running-IT-as-a-business ethos and approach. We find that if customers try to do
it themselves, either they may find that difficult, because they are used to buying that as a
service, or they have to change their enterprise architecture and support service disciplines to
operate the cloud.
Gardner: Perhaps yet another way to offset potential for cloud chaos in the future is to develop
the core competencies within the private-cloud environment and do it sooner rather than later?
This is where you can cut your teeth or get your chops, some number of metaphors come to
mind, but this is something that sounds like a priority. Would you agree with that Ed, coming up
with a private-cloud capability is important?
Harrington: It's important, and it's probably going to dominate for the foreseeable future,
especially in areas that organizations view as core. They view them as core, because they believe
they provide some sort of competitive advantage or, as Penelope was saying, security reasons.
ADP's a good idea. ADP could go into NSA and set up a private cloud using ADP and NSA. I
think is a really good thing.
Trust a big issue
But, I also think that trust is still a big issue and it's going to come down to trust. It's going to
take a lot of work to have anything that is perceived by a major organization as core and
providing differentiation to move to other than a private cloud.
Gardner: TJ.
Virdi: Private clouds actually allow you to make more business modular. Your capability is
going to be a little bit more modular and interoperability testing could happen in the private
cloud. Then you can actually use those same kind of modular functions, utilize the public cloud,
and work with other commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vendors that really package this as new
holistic solutions.
Gardner: Does anyone consider the impact of mergers and acquisitions on this? We're seeing the
economy pick up, at least in some markets, and we're certainly seeing globalization, a very
powerful trend with us still. We can probably assume, if you're a big company, that you're going

13. to get bigger through some sort of merger and acquisition activity. Does a cloud strategy
ameliorate the pain and suffering of integration in these business mergers, Tom?
Plunkett: Well, not to speak on behalf of Oracle, but we've gone through a few mergers and
acquisitions recently, and I do believe that having a cloud environment internally helps quite a
bit. Specifically, TJ made the earlier point about modularity. Well, when we're looking at
modules, they're easier to integrate. It’s easier to recompose services, and all the benefits of SOA
really.
Gardner: TJ, mergers and acquisitions in cloud.
Virdi: It really helps. At the same time, we were talking about legal and regulatory compliance
stuff. EU and Japan require you to put the personally identifiable information (PII) in their
geographical areas. Cloud could provide a way to manage those things without having the
hosting where you have your own business.
Gardner: Penelope, any thoughts, or maybe even on a slightly different subject, of being able to
grow rapidly vis-à-vis cloud experience and expertise and having architects that understand it?
Gordon: Some of this comes back to some of the discussions we were having about the extra
discipline that comes into play, if you are going to effectively consume and provide cloud
services, if you do become much more rigorous about your change management, your
configuration management, and if you then apply that out to a larger process level.
So, if you define certain capabilities within the business in a much more modular fashion, then,
when you go through that growth and add on people, you have documented procedures and
processes. It’s much easier to bring someone in and say, "You're going to be a product manager,
and that job role is fungible across the business."
That kind of thinking, the cloud constructs applied up at a business architecture level, enables a
kind of business expansion that we are looking at.
Gardner: Mark Skilton, thoughts about being able to manage growth, mergers and acquisitions,
even general business agility vis-à-vis more cloud capabilities.
Skilton: Right now, I'm involved in merging in a cloud company that we bought last year in
May, and I would say yes and no. The no point is that I'm trying to bundle this service that we
acquired in each product and with which we could add competitive advantage to the services that
we are offering. I've had a problem with trying to bundle that into our existing portfolio. I've got
to work out how they will fit and deploy in our own cloud. So, that’s still a complexity problem.

14. Faster launch
But, the upside is that I can bundle that service that we acquired, because we wanted to get that
additional capability, and rewrite design techniques for cloud computing. We can then launch
that bundle of new service faster into the market.
It’s kind of a mixed blessing with cloud. With our own cloud services, we acquire these new
companies, but we still have the same IT integration problem to then exploit that capability we've
acquired.
Gardner: That might be a perfect example of where cloud is or isn’t. When you run into the
issue of complexity and integration, it doesn’t compute, so to speak.
Skilton: It’s not plug and play yet, unfortunately.
Gardner: Ed, what do you think about this growth opportunity, mergers and acquisitions, a good
thing or bad thing?
Harrington: It’s a challenge. I think, as Mark presented it, it's got two sides. It depends a lot on
how close the organizations are, how close their service portfolios are, to what degree has each
of the organizations adapted the cloud, and is that going to cause conflict as well. So I think there
is potential.
Skilton: Each organization in the commercial sector can have different standards, and then you
still have that interoperability problem that we have to translate to make it benefit, the post
merger integration issue.
Gardner: We've been discussing the practical requirements of various cloud computing models,
looking at core and context issues where cloud models would work, where they wouldn’t. And,
we have been thinking about how we might want to head off the potential mixed bag of cloud
models in our organizations and what we can do now to make the path better, but perhaps also
make our organizations more agile, service oriented, and able to absorb things like rapid growth
and mergers.
I'd like to thank you all for joining and certainly want to thank our guests. This is a sponsored
podcast discussion coming to you from The Open Group’s 2011 Conference in San Diego. We're
here the week of February 7, 2011.
A big thank you now to Penelope Gordon, cofounder of 1Plug Corporation. Thanks.
Gordon: Thank you.
Gardner: Mark Skilton, Director of Portfolio and Solutions in the Global Infrastructure Services
with Capgemini. Thank you, Mark.

15. Skilton: Thank you very much.
Gardner: Ed Harrington, Principal Consultant in Virginia for the UK-based Architecting the
Enterprise.
Harrington: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: Tom Plunkett, Senior Solution Consultant with Oracle. Thank you.
Plunkett: Thank you, Dana.
Gardner: TJ Virdi, the Computing Architect in the CAS IT System Architecture group at
Boeing.
Virdi: Thank you.
Gardner: I'm Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. You've been listening to a
sponsored BriefingsDirect podcast. Thanks for joining, and come back next time.
Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Download the transcript. Sponsor:
The Open Group
Transcript of a sponsored podcast panel discussion from The Open Group 2011 U.S. Conference
on newly emerging cloud models and their impact on business and government. Copyright
Interarbor Solutions, LLC, 2005-2011. All rights reserved.
You may also be interested in:
• Examining the Current State of the Enterprise Architecture Profession with the Open
Group's Steve Nunn
• Infosys Survey Shows Enterprise Architecture and Business Architecture on Common
Ascent to Strategy Enablers
• The Open Group's Cloud Work Group Advances Understanding of Cloud-Use Benefits
for Enterprises