This article was downloaded by: [Tufts University]On: 08 October 2014, At: 12:58Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Journal of Information Technology Caseand Application ResearchPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/utca20

An Interview with Alistair CrollPrincipal Analyst Bitcurrent(www.bitcurrent.com) Montreal,CanadaConducted and documented by: Mahesh S. Raisinghani Ph.D.a

a Associate Professor, Texas Woman’s University, TX, USAPublished online: 12 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Conducted and documented by: Mahesh S. Raisinghani Ph.D. (2011) AnInterview with Alistair Croll Principal Analyst Bitcurrent (www.bitcurrent.com) Montreal,Canada, Journal of Information Technology Case and Application Research, 13:1, 60-68, DOI:10.1080/15228053.2011.10856202

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Expert Opinion

An Interview with

Alistair Croll Principal Analyst

Bitcurrent (www.bitcurrent.com) Montreal, Canada

Conducted and documented by: Mahesh S. Raisinghani, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Texas Woman's University, TX, USA

Alistair Croll founded Bitcurrent in 2006. Since that time, he's been writing on emerging technologies, authoring books on web performance and IT operations, and running some of the world's biggest conferences on emerging technology. In addition to Bitcurrent, Alistair is a founding partner at startup accelerator Year One Labs, an advisor to several venture capital organizations, an executive at CloudOps, and the founder of the Bitnorth conference and the Human 2.0 blog on human-machine convergence.

Prior to Bitcurrent, Alistair co-founded web performance management firm Coradiant and analyst firm Networkshop; he has also worked for 3Com Corporation, Primary Access, and Eicon Technology. Alistair has a Bachelor of Commerce degree in strategic marketing from Dalhousie University.

JITCAR: Could you please provide us with some background on Bitcurrent and its global initiatives?

Bitcurrent's a strange company-plenty of people have asked us how we make money. We really do three things: find great content for technology events; write and distribute reports on emerging technology; and work with vendors and enterprises to understand where business technology is going.

Since the summer of 2010, Bitcurrent has been part of Syntenic, a managed service provider based in Montreal. Syntenic was founded by some longtime friends, and their hands-on work on

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things like cloud computing and web performance helps Bitcurrent avoid the "ivory tower" attitudes that can sometimes encroach on analysts. We're launching a new offering as a result of the merger, called CloudOps, that helps companies embrace cloud computing. While many startups already rely on on-demand infrastructure, enterprises are a few years behind-so CloudOps will help them migrate to clouds, and then help them run their applications across private and public infrastructure.

One of the unique things about Bitcurrent is how we publish content. We don't charge for what we write. In fact, we distribute it freely on a Creative Commons share-alike license. Sometimes, the reports are sponsored by a company that wants to educate the world about a particular subject-but the reports are nonpartisan. A good example of this is one we authored for Neustar's Webmetrics division. Neustar let us use their infrastructure for several months to test five cloud platforms, which produced the industry's most comprehensive report on cloud performance. We didn't endorse their product, but they were able to use the report to start a conversation with customers about the need to monitor clouds. In many ways, this is a reflection of the "new" marketing model: Find something interesting to talk about, rather than throwing slogans and offers at your audience.

Because Bitcurrent and CloudOps are Canadian companies, we have a somewhat more international view of on-demand computing. We try to get other opinions into the dialogue-for example, at Cloud Connect, we have a session on global clouds with folks from Europe, India, and Mexico joining us.

JITCAR: What are the key elements of building private clouds from the perspective of a global product1 service management strategy?

The privatelpublic cloud debate rages on. Cloud technologies are all about automation, self- service, and elasticity that ride atop virtualization. Cloud as a business model is about a third- party, shared provider than can offer more capacity than any one customer needs because it gets economies of scale and because its customers' capacity needs are varied.

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Here's an example of these distinctions:

"Cloudy" technology: Classic "clouds": "Cloudy" business: Self-service, virtualized, On-demand, 3'"-party Outsourced IT with few on-demand computing virtual environments options, short contracts

Characteristics Virtual machines / / a r F E E e 1 G a s Dynamic'ita applications 1 Infrastructure

as a Sewice

For many enterprises, cloud adoption will be a two-step: first, they'll embrace the technologies that democratize IT, which will reduce the time it takes them to roll out new services and lower the amount of hand-holding IT has to do. But eventually, as developers build increasingly parallel sofiware that can consume all available machines, they'll move to public platforms because of cost efficiencies.

To decide what to move to any kind of cloud-public or private-IT professionals need to look at each workload they run along two dimensions. First, they need to consider the technical suitability of the workload for a cloud platform: will it run in a cloud environment in the first place? Many legacy applications don't like being virtualized and automated. Second, they need to ask about the business case for making it cloud-based. Will it save money? Reduce delays? What are the quantifiable benefits? If there aren't any, there's no real reason to move the workload.

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Once all the candidates for migration to the cloud are evaluated along these two dimensions, then they'll know what to do with each of them. The following diagram explains the different strategies.

High

Low

j Virtualize, Move first. j ensure Use to : portability. showcase i Monitor cost & cloud benefits I pric~ng. & ROI.

Low Business case for migration High

JITCAR: Radical changes in the global business environment demand a seismic shift in the enterprise approach to IT. Capitalizing on market changes, customer demand and emerging opportunities requires speed and flexibility; yet more IT departments find themselves hobbled by restrictive budgets and an aging, inflexible infrastructure. How can global organizations leverage their existing infrastructure?

I think this idea of the cloud as a "switch" is misleading. There's a spectrum of IT architectures, from on-premise, dedicated machines for known, sustained applications to on-demand services for experimentation.

What will become important, however, is portability. There are three factors to consider when evaluating whether an application should run on local or ondemand infrastructure; I call these the "3 C's" of cloud computing:

Capacity. Do you have capacity to run something on existing hardware? This will change from time to time, as both private and public infrastructure changes how busy it is. You may have certain user experience constraints that require you to move applications around. Cost. There's no reason to believe cloud pricing won't change. Just look at Amazon's spot market and you'll see how price fluctuates based on consumption-it spikes at Christmas and on Valentines' day. Maybe on those days, it's cheaper to run something in house. Much like utility companies offer a discount for electricity during off-peak hours, so cloud providers could incent people to use their clouds in the lulls.

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Compliance: Is it legal to run the application on a given platform? Many IT governance regulations are in flux; in some cases, data must be encrypted when it's in a public environment. Certainly, a third-party provider can interfere with your business-for example, by following a government takedown order.

All three of these drive the need for portability. If you can't move workloads from provider to provider, or from in-house to on-demand, you'll be hamstrung. So legacy equipment must be able to run some of those workloads.

This is also one of the reasons companies like Red Hat, Rackspace, and so on are offering private cloud stacks-they know that the future of computing is a spectrum of possible infrastructure, with all components working in concert to optimize cost, capacity, and compliance.

Bare Virtual Private Virtual Infrastructure Wrapped Platform Cloud Cloud Pure SaaS metal machines cloud prlvate as a Sewlce abstracttons as a Sewlce APls servlces (apps on

cloud (Mapreduce, NW) (1.e. storage) demand)

JITCAR: According to a recent Gartner Research report, "Reimagining IT: The 201 1 CIO Agenda", cloud computing ranks No. 1 on the CIO technology priority list in 201 1. The report predicts a significant increase in cloud computing adoption in the coming years. Mobile technologies and virtualization are also top priorities for CIOs. Do you see these tech priorities being aligned with the top three business drivers most often considered by CIOs and IT decision makers - namely: Increasing enterprise growth, attracting and retaining new customers, and reducing enterprise costs?

I have a problem with broadly stated research like that. If you ask ten CIOs what cloud is, you'll get 10 different answers. Does it include SaaS? Or is that just the dynamic web? Does it include private clouds, or just public ones?

I think what those CIOs are really after is the democratization of IT. For the last 4 decades, machines were expensive and humans were cheap, so it made sense to give IT a sanctioned monopoly on technology. But times have changed. We landed on the moon with the computing equivalent of a Speak-and-Spell; today, we carry huge computing power in our pockets.

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Mobility and clouds are the symptoms of this democratization, and a business where individuals can innovate quickly is likely to grow. Virtualization is really a means to an end-it replaces rack-and-stack with click-and-drag, divorcing the task from the physical infrastructure. It turns atoms into bits, and in doing so, drastically reduces the coefficient of friction of getting things done. All of these will change IT until we'll wonder whether we really need an IT department at all.

JITCAR: What is the significance of Bitcurrent's products/services for global IT executives?

I like to think we push the envelope. We try to ask awkward questions that nobody in the room wants to ask, because we don't have the usual constraints of an employee or an analyst.

As for CloudOps, of which Bitcurrent is a part-well, the cloud isn't a magic wand that makes IT problems go away. Indeed, because of the way it lowers the friction of IT, bad things can happen more quickly than ever. Side-effects of a flat, democratic, on-demand IT world include server sprawl, and the ability to copy a bad decision a thousand times in an instant.

As companies move to the cloud, they'll need a guide. Once they're there, they'll need to partner with an operator whose primary focus is tracking the changing landscape and alerting them to new tools and techniques that can help their business. That's what we hope to do.

JITCAR: What advice would you offer to businesses that are facing the challenge of cloud migration and operations to gainlsustain competitive advantage in the global economy?

They need to start with the business problem. A CEO that comes back from a golf game and issues an edict that "we'll have 20% of our servers in the cloud by 2012" isn't starting with the business in mind.

To properly take advantage of the cloud will require a retooling of IT-and of IT professionals. Clouds demand new ways of thinking. Consider, for example, how you'd behave if servers were free. Or if disaster recovery were built in. Or if applications had to heal themselves. Or if capacity requirements could increase a thousand fold for five minutes. In the cloud, all of these things are true-but that's not the way enterprise IT thinks.

JITCAR: What is the role of open standards in preserving the ROI of existing technology and in building a foundation for the future in global IT?

I think it's early for formal standards in the industry, but I do think portability is critical. In clouds, this comes down to three things:

The machine format. Today there are lots of ways of encapsulating a virtual machine, and it's not always easy to move from one cloud to another.

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The command interface. There are certain "primitives" in a cloud control system- starting and stopping a machine, copying something, etc.-that need to be consistent across providers so that management tools are platform-agnostic. The MIS. Many clouds offer RESTful interfaces that do everything from authenticating a user, to rotating an image, to putting something in a message queue. The more a developer uses these APIs, the easier their job is, because they're standing on the shoulders of giants. At the same time, however, they're inadvertently getting locked in. We saw this with the Microsoft Foundation Classes: it was easy to build something for Windows, and hard to port it elsewhere. In the end, tools like Java and Adobe Air fixed this, by creating an 0s-independent container. It's likely that we'll see the same thing for clouds.

JITCAR: What is your vision for the future of virtualization, public/private hybrid cloud, infrastructure as a service, platform as a service, and other components---and how to choose the right options?

I'm a big believer in Platform as a Service. Nobody wants to see the sausage being made-while Infrastructure as a Service is popular today, that's because enterprise IT managers want to control their machines. But that's not a value-added activity. We recently ran a hackathon at Year One Labs, where 55 developers built 18 applications in 12 hours. They built them atop Google App Engine. There's no way they could have built so much in such a short time without the ability to ignore the underlying infrastructure.

If you look at Amazon Web Services' product catalog, there are roughly 20 services available. Only one of them is virtual machines. Smart CIOs will start introducing on-demand services internally, not just rent-a-VM interfaces.

JITCAR: In light of the current worldwide financial/economic crisis, what are the key challenges/limitations (if any) that a global organization faces currently as it tries to balance capacity, cost and compliance?

I spent some time with the World Economic Forum late last year, discussing the impact of clouds on the economy. They're bullish. They see the clouds as a way of encouraging innovation because it lowers the barrier to entry for new companies; but it does so at the expense of large incumbents.

Cloud computing is tied to many other changes in our society: the flattening of hierarchies; the rise of interactivity and the demise of broadcasting; and so on. It's hard to disentangle these from one another, but it's clear that there's a major disruption of nearly every industry as a result of on- demand, pay-as-you-go, large-scale computing.

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JITCAR: In this digital, global knowledge economy, what do you see as the biggest challengels from a security and regulatory perspective as they embrace "the cloud"?

Moving personally identifiable information across legal boundaries is the biggest issue. Most of our laws were written to deal with atoms, not bits. Nay-sayers use this to ignore the advantages a cloud can offer.

I suspect that legislation will eventually catch up. I visited a doctor yesterday, and every patient's medical record was stored in a manila file folder with stickers on the side, in a huge wall. That's a risky, error-prone model: there's no way to check for drug interactions, and it's easy to misplace or mis-file something. It's also much easier to steal a record than if it were in a properly encrypted, authenticated application.

But this office had ten doctors and four administrators. There's no way they were going to re-tool their environment. How long will it be before a legislator sees the cloud as more secure- insisting that data be stored somewhere centralized, where it can be backed up, where access can be logged, and where infomation can be federated with other agencies?

JITCAR. Could you share your insights about the future of balancing technology, people and process since the right balance across these three areas delivers sustained business impact and transformation? How do you see this global IT industry evolving (i.e., where do you see the industry in 3 years)?

I'll be brief, as I've covered some of this above. Technology is democratizing, so get used to it. Change your expectations about how fast things happen. Once, we thought nothing of spending our lunch at a bank; now, if the ATM takes 10 seconds to give us our money, we panic. We also carry less cash with us, and don't buy travellers' cheques. Clouds will have similar effects-some obvious, some less so.

People need to be retrained, because IT isn't a monopoly and once procurement and deployment go away, IT workers need to find new things to do. Clouds make it easy to do big data analysis, but the rest of the business doesn't know how to ask questions about the data the company has, so IT will spend more time as a service bureau to the rest of the company, helping them solve business problems with information.

Processes will change. Consider, for example, the old way of handling an upgrade: you announced a maintenance window, worked quickly, and hopefully everything went smoothly. With a cloud, you just make a copy of the old application, upgrade it, test it, and switch over. You have double the infrastructure for a few hours, but you don't care-servers are free, remember?

JITCAR. If you could offer one piece of advice to global IT/business leaders grappling with sustainable competitive advantage in a digital economy, what would it be?

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I concluded Interop ECS last year by saying that the Cloud Computing genie is out of the bottle. Companies need to stop looking for a cork, and start deciding what to wish for. I think this is good advice for any enterprise executive.

JITCAR: Thank you so much for your time and insightful responses!

Interviewed by Dr. Mahesh S. Raisinghani.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Mahesh S. Raisinghani is an associate professor in the Executive MBA program at the TWU School of Management. He is a Certified E-Commerce Consultant (CEC) and a Project Management Professional (PMP). Dr. Raisinghani was awarded the 2008 Excellence in Research & Scholarship award and the 2007 G. Ann Uhlir Endowed Fellowship in Higher Education Administration. He was also the recipient of TWU School of Management's 2005 Best Professor Award for the Most Innovative Teaching Methods; 2002 research award; 2001 KingIHaggar Award for excellence in teaching, research and service; and a 1999 UD-GSM Presidential Award. His research has been published in several academic journals such as IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, Information & Management, Information Resources Management Journal, International Journal of Innovation and Learning, International Journal of Web-based Learning and Teaching Teclmologies, Journal of IT Cases and Applications, Journal of Global IT Management, and Journal of IT Review among others as well as various internationallnational conferences. Dr. Raisinghani is included in the millennium edition of Who's Who in the World, Who's Who among Professionals, Who's Who among America's Teachers and Who's Who in Information Technology.

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