Business drivers and IT strategy

In today’s world of global competition, rapid business change, and narrowing margins, enterprises are under increasing pressure to simultaneously grow revenue and market share while reducing costs, simplifying infrastructure and speeding up processes. As a result, technology has become more than simply a process enabler, but rather a key component in building sustainable competitive advantage.

Traditionally, IT has supported these demands through investments in powerful computing resources and software. However, application silos, heterogeneous hardware environments, lack of technology integration, and increasingly complex system management challenges have slowed down the realization of the expected ROI (return on investment) from these investments. When IT must spend more resources managing the infrastructure than supporting business imperatives, the enterprise suffers.

The main challenges of doing Grid-based business

This article, based on research carried out by the BEinGRID project summarizes the most significant challenges of Grid based business and tries to answer the question: which main challenges can keep a Grid based business from being successful?

The main challenges of doing Grid-based business

Why invest in Grid or Cloud solutions?

Grid computing impacts key applications, thereby, the productivity and effectiveness of the users of those applications. The impacts can be shown in 2 levels:

• Bottom-line impact: cost reduction
• Top-line impact: revenue enhancement

Based on the most important application types, such as database management systems, application development, network and systems management, among others, there are two categories of benefit that can be clearly identified:

• Faster, better, cheaper (productivity and effectiveness)
• Greater operational confidence (predictability, stability, reliability, scalability, agility)

According to a survey (IT and Business executives) made by Platform Computing in 2004, Grid gets the silver medal in expected ROI. Ranking of the survey:

What is the industry looking for?

• CFOs (Chief Financial Officers) are constantly looking for methods of improving their company’s performance.
• CIOs are constantly looking for methods of improving their company’s Enterprise IT efficiency while at the same time also increasing its agility.
• Enterprise Developers are constantly looking for rich development environments with lots of tools that enable them to extend in-house developed applications to leverage modern SOAs (Service-Oriented Architectures). Their goal is to improve their company’s competitive ability while at the same time increasing its agility.
• Independent Software Vendors (ISVs) are constantly looking for ways to increase the value of the products and services they offer to their customers.
• Systems Integrators (SI’s) are constantly looking for new value added services and expertise with which to help their customers become more effective and add to the bandwidth of Enterprise IT. By adding or expanding a grid services practice, SI’s can help customers realize the ROI from implementing a Virtualized Data Center strategy.

Business issues behind the purchase of technology solutions

What does the organization look at when purchasing a service-oriented technology solution? The key business issues that need to be taken into account are:

• The business must retain the business strategy, not be led by the technology strategy: the technology must enable the ongoing changes in the processes that are required to enact the strategy – so high levels of flexibility will be required. The key to flexibility lies in the adoption of standards.
• Technology solutions must be capable of supporting and reporting on processes that move along supplier and customer lines: The “Glass Walls” between an organization and its partners are disappearing. Business processes go beyond the control of the organization’s control.
• The technology must be built on a suitably mature foundation: the use of middleware and application platform technologies is so strategic that the use of unproven solutions should not be countenanced. Key areas to look at here are the messaging and workflow capabilities of the chosen solution – both must be open enough to interoperate with other systems embedded within applications, yet must have the capability to “hold” information in place - if an application or service is not available for any reason, the solution must be able to then re-start the flow from a known position automatically once the application is back on line.
• The platform itself must be stable: with today’s business processes being so complex and spanning multiple applications, multiple sites and multiple companies, it is an imperative that the system not be the weak link in the chain.
• The solution must support existing investments: irrespective of the hardware and operating systems already in place, whether looking at mainframe systems, high-end, mid-range or low-end systems, or indeed blade farms and virtualized environments.
• Connectivity to existing applications must be allowed: the key here is that connectivity has to be across the whole of the business process – not just being able to integrate one enterprise application into other applications that it touches. The latter approach constrains the capability of the organization internally as well as externally. As the world moves towards more of a service-based view, the need to see existing applications as sets of functions supporting the organization is expected to become more pervasive, and the need for these services to be able to interoperate through loose bindings, across application and physical boundaries, will drive the need for systems that are completely free of specific applications, and that can reach and manage processes beyond the constraints of the organization.
• The solution must ensure information fidelity: if the information cannot be trusted, then the process itself is suspect, and the organization may suffer accordingly. Therefore, any chosen solution must ensure information integrity, as well as having the capacity to raise exceptions where the fidelity of received information may be suspect.
• The solution must be able to present information usefully: as business processes within an organization go across multiple applications, they go across multiple data stores, some of which may be formalized data (such as held within a standards database), while others may be more ad hoc (such as documents or e-mails). The chosen solution should be able to aggregate the information required across all of these possible solutions and present this back to the reader according to their needs - a sales director will require the information to be presented differently to a sales executive, for example.
• The solution must be easy-to-use: IT solutions must ease people’s work instead of making it more complicated. The solution itself may be a complex system, but the goal should always be to aid work effectiveness.
• The solution should enable communication and collaboration: a greater part of the decision making function within an organization is now based around the capabilities of the people involved to be able to communicate and collaborate around the information feeds involved.
• The solution must be able to support business continuity requirements: should an unforeseeable event occur that does bring down a major part of a system, it will be necessary for the chosen solution to help you through the crisis. For this, it will be necessary for the solution to be able to failover into a known state – it should be capable of logging the status of any ongoing processes and transactions, and rolling back unrecoverable transactions to a last known good position, so that once the problem has been resolved, it can resume where it left off with the minimum loss of transactions.
• The solution must be able to support regulatory requirements: in today’s increasingly regulated world, the capability to monitor a process’ progress along the value chain is needed, both for internal governance and external audit. It must be able to track the process end-to-end, with firm integration into an organization’s policies and roles and responsibilities for its own employees and the individuals and services that are included within the value chain.
• The solution must be secure: as part of the creation of a supportive business infrastructure organizations need to ensure that there is a fully secure environment in place, supported through a framework driven by corporate policies and procedures.