© Copyright IBM Corp. 2013.

Redbooks

Highlights

Business success increasingly depends on the ability to apply new and innovative business models and supporting IT solutions more quickly than one's competitors can. In short, it requires an agile enterprise. Recent advancements in cloud computing can provide an enterprise with the essential capabilities it needs to become an agile enterprise:

� The open cloud architecture establishes the foundation for the agile enterprise, enabling innovative solutions and avoiding vendor lock-in.

� New applications that increase customer and employee loyalty and interactions are enabling the agile enterprise in a mobile and socially connected world.

� Open source technologies and standards are transforming existing business and IT processes, making them more flexible and agile.

Supercharging the Cloud for an Agile Enterprise

An IBM Redbooks® Point-of-View publication by IBM Corporate Headquarters Strategy

By Mac Devine, IBM Distinguished Engineer, Walter Falk, IBM Program Director, Christopher Ferris, IBM Distinguished Engineer, and Rob Sauerwalt, IBM Director of Strategy, Cloud Initiative

Thriving in this fast paced and connected world

Technology advancements in cloud computing are creating exceptional opportunities for enterprises to transform business models, supply chains, and the ways in which they interact with customers and partners. New technologies and tools are transforming traditional software development lifecycles. Innovation around an open cloud architecture is dramatically changing the entire digital fabric inside and outside of the data center with profound impact on how enterprises should think about their business:

� Unlock innovation: Cloud computing is enabling changes in how business and society operate and is unlocking huge avenues for innovation that are leveraging new ecosystems.

� Scale through open architectures: Evolution of an open cloud architecture based on open source software (such as OpenStack and Cloud Foundry) and open standards is enabling a new approach to delivering capabilities, with new innovations in workloads and services. Applying this open cloud architecture results in dramatic improvements in data center operations, application development, and lifecycles, for highly scalable solutions both on-premise and in the cloud.

� Develop rapid business outcomes: Developers are taking a more central role in delivering value to the business. Rapid technology innovations in tools, frameworks, open interfaces, and languages are enabling them to create or synthesize highly interactive and dynamic applications that accelerate business outcomes. DevOps innovations coupled with composable cloud services are allowing new cloud-centric applications to be ready in days, rather than months.

� Engage social business for competitive advantage: Social applications and mobile devices are transforming customer and partner interactions. Advanced analytics processing applied against the mobile and social interactions provides insights to transform marketing and product innovation, resulting in competitive advantage for those willing to engage.

� Economics of consumption: Emergence of a cloud services consumption model (often called the API economy) and the availability of composite cloud services based on open standards are creating the opportunity for cost effective sophisticated solutions for enterprises large and small.

� Open source ecosystems: Leveraging open source projects, tools, and technologies can greatly enhance the enterprise's ability to adapt and leap-frog its competition. Open source projects supported, maintained, and enhanced by global partners can dramatically improve innovations. This

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approach is becoming the norm rather than the exception for IT going forward.

To be an agile enterprise in this fast paced and connected world, each enterprise must continuously transform itself in order to adapt to the ever changing business landscape. To enable this continuous transformation, an agile enterprise (Figure 1) needs a flexible digital fabric and application platform.

Figure 1 Agile enterprise in today’s environment

The IBM® vision for the agile enterprise is based on the open cloud architecture. The IBM strategic direction for IT services is based on this architecture. IBM is ready to accompany your enterprise on this journey to take advantage of these technology innovations and market forces in order to become agile and to prosper. However, creating the agile enterprise is riddled with challenges and questions.

Building the foundation of an agile enterprise

The heart of an agile enterprise is based on the rapidly maturing open cloud architecture. This architecture has evolved as a result of steady technology advancements, improved integration, and standardization in virtualization and management automation. Lately, this architecture has evolved more rapidly as a result of business requirements for radical improvements in data center operations, developer productivity, and application lifecycle agility.

Today's business environment is demanding greater flexibility in order to introduce new products to market faster. This requirement demands that new tools be available that promote such products to an ever increasingly interconnected, mobile, and social world. As a result, the digital fabric supporting the business must be designed for utmost flexibility in order to

support modern business processes, and customer and partner interactions.

The open cloud architecture (Figure 2) encompasses at its most basic level three distinct layers.

Figure 2 Open cloud architecture for an agile enterprise

The Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) layer (Figure 2, layer 1) resides above the physical hardware and supports virtualization and management of the hardware components. Virtualization has evolved to a point where it is used by most enterprises today. However, virtualizing physical hardware and creating this abstraction layer does not deliver on the full promise of the cloud. Although virtualization is a key component of the cloud infrastructure architecture, all basic infrastructure resources should be provided as true services. As defined by National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST)1, the full set of characteristics for IaaS includes managing all the infrastructure resources in a resource pool, with self-service provisioning, rapid elasticity, and as measured services. Virtualization alone does not accomplish this vision and set of characteristics. Once all infrastructure resources are provided and managed as services, the data center can be treated as a true software-defined environment (Figure 2, layer 1).

Software-defined environments encompass three major infrastructure components (networks, storage, and compute) and have to be considered holistically as an environment:

� Software-defined networks move the network control away from the physical switch to server-based control software. This approach improves programmability and extensibility for the developer,

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1 NIST, http://www.nist.gov/index.html

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and at the same time scale and efficiency for the business.

� Software-defined storage enables developers to build their own control software to access data. By using this approach, developers can customize, optimize, and integrate storage components that are ready for immediate use.

� Software-defined compute decouples the software image from a physical compute resource. Application workload mobility is bolstered by providing the ability to automatically select the best system on which to run the application. The selection is based on the attributes and capabilities requested by the workload.

The value in a software-defined environment stems from two aspects. First, by expressing physical infrastructure as software services that can be manipulated and automated, programmatically. Second, by considering the infrastructure as a composite whole, not the network, storage, and compute as individual parts. Building the software-defined environment requires a disciplined approach. Standards (both formal and informal) are rapidly evolving to ensure portability, interoperability, and manageability of the software-defined environment. The OpenStack Foundation2 has emerged as the most important consortium for the implementation of the software-defined environment by adopting many of the cross industry standards initiatives. The OpenStack Foundation was founded by IBM and several other leading IT vendors.

OpenStack is an open source IaaS cloud platform that has broad industry support across a wide variety of virtualization platforms such as, Kernel-based Virtual Machine (KVM), XEN, VMware, Microsoft Hyper-V, IBM PowerVM®, and IBM z/VM®, as well as the base hardware (also referred to as bare metal). OpenStack itself runs on most Linux distributions. The OpenStack Foundation has an open governance model and a very vibrant and growing ecosystem of vendors, providers, and other open source projects delivering base capabilities and services, and supports a wide variety of plug-ins and add-ons.

A number of other important standards initiatives help ensure portability and integration across the software-defined environments. To support networking capabilities, the Open Networking Foundation (ONF)3 is defining rapidly emerging networking virtualization and software-defined networking standards. A new open source initiative called Open DayLight is pursuing

the delivery of an open source framework for software-defined networking. The Organization for the Advancement of Structured Information Standards (OASIS)4 is defining a standard for defining portable workload template definitions called Topology and Orchestration Specification for Cloud Applications (TOSCA)5. TOSCA also takes advantage of various open source deployment automation tools such as Chef, Puppet, and Juju. TOSCA is itself being implemented as one of the supported template languages in the OpenStack Heat project.

The agile enterprise takes advantage of the capabilities of a software-defined environment to make sure that its applications receive the resources and performance available when demanded by the business, customers, and partners. This new design approach and architecture establishes a new mind-set in the value of IT to the business. This design and architecture ensures that enterprises do not have to let key resources (financial assets) sit idle ever. The success of IaaS in public and private cloud deployments and the associated cost savings have already transformed the operations of many data centers.

IBM is investing heavily to build and acquire world-leading IaaS capabilities. The recent IBM acquisition of SoftLayer Technologies Inc. provides the industry's only seamlessly unified global cloud computing infrastructure. It combines virtual public cloud instances, powerful bare metal servers, turnkey private clouds, and a broad range of storage, network and security devices, and services. All these services are connected via a global private network across 13 data centers, with a single control-and-command portal.

Quickly, SoftLayer customers can deploy globally distributed hybrid architectures. These architectures are provisioned in real-time and billed hour-to-hour or month-to-month. Options that are available include GPU-powered servers, high-speed storage, and multi-processor bare metal. These options give customers access to higher levels of performance than available in commodity public clouds. The performance mandate extends to SoftLayer’s innovative triple-network architecture with these capabilities:

� High-speed public connectivity� A global private network for security� Point-to-point intra-application and inter-data center

connectivity � Out-of-band management network for systems

administration

2 OpenStack Foundation, http://www.openstack.org/foundation3 ONF, https://www.opennetworking.org

4 OASIS, https://www.oasis-open.org/standards5 TOSCA, https://www.oasis-open.org/committees/tc_home.php?wg_abbrev=tosca

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Cloud-enabling an existing application environment or data center has resulted in increased flexibility for the enterprise, but this is often not sufficient to be a true agile enterprise.

A new style of cloud-centric applications, often designed for a mobile and socially interconnected world, is rapidly emerging. In some applications areas (such as, commerce and customer relationship management (CRM)), these cloud-centric applications are already having a dramatic impact. These cloud-centric applications take full advantage of software-defined environments and are also leveraging rapid evolutions in platform services. The open cloud architecture empowers developers with increased flexibility, which is further enhanced in the Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) (Figure 2 on page 2, layer 2) layer. Bridging the software-defined environment layer with the compositional PaaS layer above it is an emerging open standard, which is based on the Wide Web Consortium (W3C)6 linked data, referred to as Open Services for Lifecycle Collaboration (OSLC).

The concept of composable environments, which consists of finer grained elements that can be recombined to create new capabilities, are a key element of the open cloud architecture. Composable environments (Figure 2 on page 2, layer 2) can contain cloud services, which bring together operational, development, application, database, and third-party services. All of these cloud services include embedded monitoring and manageability capabilities. Developers can take advantage of these cloud services to build new composable applications. These new applications are built as cloud-centric (designed for and deployed to the cloud) and in a mobile-first (user interface that is designed for mobile devices) fashion. New cloud-centric applications can digitize the enterprise's business and allow the enterprise to reach and interact with its customers regardless of where customers are located or what devices customers are using.

IBM and Pivotal have announced their intent to collaborate on development of the Cloud Foundry open source Platform-as-a-Service framework and to work towards defining an open governance model for the emerging Cloud Foundry community. Cloud Foundry is an interoperable PaaS framework that enables rapid application development, deployment, and scaling of new cloud-centric applications. It runs on a broad range of cloud infrastructure platforms, including OpenStack, Amazon Web Services (AWS), VMware, IBM SmartCloud® Enterprise with IBM SoftLayer. It

also supports a wide range of application programming language runtimes and frameworks through the use of portable buildpacks. Buildpacks is a concept that was first introduced by Heroku. As with OpenStack at the IaaS layer, Cloud Foundry is emerging as the open standard at the PaaS layer, by virtue of its growing community and broad ecosystem of partners, vendors, and users. An agile enterprise can take advantage of this open and vibrant cloud development platform without fear of vendor lock-in.

Software-as-a-Service is the top layer of the open cloud architecture (Figure 2 on page 2, layer 3). This layer is where end-users gain access to and leverage business applications to support the enterprise's business processes.

Modern applications are increasingly composed from a wide variety of composite services and leverage many application programming interfaces (APIs) to access information and integrate with other applications. The rapid evolution of social applications, coupled together with the desire to have multi-modal applications that can be accessed from any type of device with consistency of data and user experience, is fueling an increase in APIs. Composite applications leverage APIs from internal and external providers to build even more powerful application environments with a focus on employee productivity and efficient customer interactions. While APIs have been around for decades, these APIs are representational state transfer (REST)-based APIs that enable web-scale interactions between the application and services that it consumes. Increasingly, these APIs may participate in an economic model, where the consumption of the API is tied to a fee or on-going subscription model. As a result, this approach is often referred to as the API economy.

Many business models across various industries are being transformed as a result of the rapidly evolving API economy. Enterprises are making existing and new business applications and data available through APIs in order to expand their reach and drive new business opportunities for growth. The explosion in APIs is fueling a dramatic shift in the business landscape where customers, business partners, vendors, and clients can directly participate in an enterprise's business processes and gain access to enterprise data, from both inside and outside of the enterprise. APIs offer a cost-effective way to provide access to large amounts of data and the enterprise can leverage sophisticated analytics that are available to increase the value of such data.

6 W3C, http://www.w3.org

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It is important to carefully design and manage APIs because they are often published and made available in internal and external marketplaces or application stores. Many new business models are evolving around the availability of APIs. For example, APIs could be used to hail a taxi from a smart phone application, to process a mortgage application on a tablet, or to purchase health insurance from health exchanges via the web. Monetization of APIs and governance of the API lifecycle are rapidly evolving. Developing and implementing applications that take advantage of the API economy requires enhanced tools, frameworks, and programming models that are part of the PaaS layer of the open cloud architecture. Cloud Foundry is the open source framework that pulls all these pieces together.

As enterprises become more agile and take advantage of the open cloud architecture, they often must leverage existing IT systems inside, as well as outside of the enterprise. Adopting Cloud Foundry is not sufficient to bridge all these requirements because the agile enterprise often needs to link new applications with existing business applications and data in a secure and scalable way. IBM has worked on these challenges with its clients as their IT systems have evolved, and IBM is focused on helping enterprises bridge the gap.

The cloud-centric application environments that incorporate mobile and social business support are often referred to as systems of engagement, due to their highly interactive nature. In contrast, traditional application environments are often referred to as systems of record because of their transaction-oriented and database-oriented nature.

Figure 3 shows the combined environment of systems of engagement and systems of record, together with the Internet of Things, referred to as systems of interaction.

Figure 3 Systems of Interaction

IBM is leveraging its middleware platforms, IBM PureSystems™, IBM Worklight, OpenStack, and Cloud Foundry to ensure that enterprises can build systems of interaction. Next generation applications will be built in such an environment within most enterprises. These applications could take advantage of existing investments in packaged line of business applications including CRM, human resources (HR), and enterprise resource planning (ERP) as well as new cloud-centric applications. Through workload-optimized deployment, IBM can ensure that the agile enterprise receives optimal benefits out of existing line of business applications as they are deployed in system of interaction environments.

With this new type of infrastructure, an agile enterprise can rapidly and incrementally create and evolve applications including mobile applications. These new and enhanced applications consist of cloud services and may use different programming models or run times. The IT infrastructure can respond to business requirements as they occur, increasing customer loyalty and providing an immediate impact on the bottom line of the business.

Empowering developers to create applications for the agile enterprise

In order to take full advantage of cloud computing and the open cloud architecture, with its composable cloud services, applications must be designed to an emerging set of cloud-centric architectural principles. Developers must continually balance the need for application performance, security, deployment, and management. The development environment should make it easy for the developer to write applications, deploy the applications at the required scale, and use cloud services seamlessly in a secure manner.

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Developers require the tools and the infrastructure necessary to publish and manage APIs. These capabilities allow the developer to expose services (as appropriate) to the ecosystem of customer and partner applications so they can leverage these services. These items are critical to developing cloud-centric applications:

� Open source tools and technologies and the ability to use multiple programming languages (known as polyglot programming) in order to deliver the most optimal and efficient solution for the given task at hand.

� Creation of composable services and publishing such services as APIs in application stores or market places.

� The implementation of development and operations (DevOps) leverages automation, tool integration, and process optimization in order to accelerate the application lifecycle from requirements through development, test, and into production.

Cloud-centric applications may consist of composable components that are created using a combination of languages and frameworks such as, Java, Node.js, PHP, Python, Ruby on Rails, and Ruby. An enterprise would likely choose just one or two languages for their internal projects. Polyglot programming optimizes both system performance and programmer productivity. Traditional programming languages (such as, C, C++, and Java) are compiled and optimize system performance where it matters, but often at the expense of decreased programmer productivity. Newer dynamic languages (such as, Ruby, PHP, and Python) are interpreted, which results in lower performance, but allows for higher programmer productivity and greater agility. By combining traditional and dynamic languages (that is, polyglot programming), the developer can optimize the elements of an application and the development process for that application. The Cloud Foundry framework supports such polyglot programming. Cloud Foundry can also be run on various IaaS implementations, including the OpenStack implementation as a cornerstone of the IBM open cloud architecture. Cloud Foundry supports polyglot programming, by allowing providers to create “buildpacks” in support of their unique environments. This approach is enhancing the enterprises' flexibility and their ability to choose the right environment for a given development job, allowing developers to focus on their skills and productivity.

Enhancements to existing integrated development environments (IDEs) to support polyglot development greatly improve developer productivity and retention

during this transition towards cloud-centric application development. Developers should have the freedom to choose the languages and development environments that best serve their needs. Many of the popular languages and tools are already used in numerous cloud-related open source projects. The languages and tools include OpenStack (based on Python) and Cloud Foundry (based on Ruby and Go), and other popular open source tools such as, Chef, and Puppet (both based on Ruby).

The emergence of cloud services (which can be used as composable services) is transforming the way developers work. Cloud services provide a means to create and use complex capabilities without the need to install, configure, and tune the service in the traditional manner. For example, a commonly used cloud service is Database as a Service (DBaaS). This service allows developers to quickly provision a new instance of a MySQL, IBM DB2®, Redis, or MongoDB database automatically and start using it in mere seconds.

The developer should be able to simultaneously write, test, and deploy their new mobile and cloud-centric applications and the cloud services that they use without leaving their favorite development environment. As new applications move through test and quality assurance cycles, various tools are often used to stress test the applications. Ensuring interoperability between the tools and their shared metadata is important for efficient deployment and maintenance of new applications in a cloud environment. OSLC is an emerging open standard to make software lifecycle tools interoperable by enabling them to bind data into each other’s namespace, thereby sharing data. The open cloud architecture ensures that developers at the PaaS layer can pick the tools that they are most comfortable with from various open source projects.

DevOps covers the application lifecycle from conception and business planning, through the development and test phases, to release, deployment, and maintenance of the application. DevOps (in this case the testing, management, and deployment of applications) is a very important focus area because it increases developer productivity, quality, and facilitates an end-to-end application development and deployment lifecycle. DevOps is undergoing rapid evolution and innovation to optimize its effectiveness in a PaaS environment by leveraging new tools, frameworks, and programming languages. DevOps tooling is being enhanced to work with Cloud Foundry and OpenStack to facilitate the agile enterprise and the API economy. IBM has recently acquired UrbanCode, Inc. to help with deployment and orchestration of

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application releases. These products complement an existing and very extensive DevOps tools portfolio from IBM.

Application security and federated identity are undergoing enhancements to support the API economy and the cloud. A number of existing and evolving standards, such as the OASIS Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), the OpenID Foundation (OIDF) OpenID, and the Internet Engineering Task Force (IETF) OAuth 2.0 are in the works. These security standards play an important role in enabling and securing the API economy as the standards govern the application APIs and their access controls. Other standards, such as OpenSocial, could further define the component model for cloud-centric social applications and help with integration of existing applications. Standards could also enable the ability to add third-party applications, thereby providing a single integrated solution. Business event and messaging, as well as security enhancements could also be improved to deal with the new requirements of cloud deployment and scalability. The Active Streams middleware approach is an emerging standard that provides developers with a common vocabulary to describe business events, enabling apps that are able to socialize data and knowledge with people in real time. By leveraging big data analytics applications developers now have the tools necessary to really make the enterprise agile.

Ultimately, the infrastructure and platform must make it as easy as possible for developers to rapidly deploy applications to the cloud. These mechanisms must also manage the complete application lifecycle. Developers must have an ecosystem of easily consumable cloud services that are based on proven cloud technologies.

The IBM SmartCloud Application Services (SCAS) platform today provides many of the DevOps capabilities outlined in this paper in a public cloud consumption model, including services from IBM and many business partners. Recently, IBM introduced Project BlueMix (Figure 4) a technology incubator platform that leverages Cloud Foundry and includes the core capabilities necessary to build cloud-centric applications. Project BlueMix is intended to further take advantage of the rapid technology innovation happening in the broad ecosystems around OpenStack, Cloud Foundry, and various other open cloud architecture components and technologies. IBM plans to make Project BlueMix available for private and public cloud consumption, as well as merge in the core capabilities with IBM SmartCloud Application Services.

Figure 4 Project BlueMix

Project BlueMix leverages the IBM DevOps tools and capabilities from across the IBM Rational® portfolio. Project BlueMix also leverages a number of open source capabilities, including GitLab, Jenkins, and Gerrit. These open source tools make it possible for Project BlueMix to take advantage of inherent features of Cloud Foundry and OpenStack. Project BlueMix makes critical application services available from the extensive IBM middleware portfolio, which includes IBM WebSphere® software solutions, IBM InfoSphere® BigInsights™, and IBM Rational software, as well as additional services from across the industry, such as: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, blob storage, elastic caching, RabbitMQ, and MongoDB.

Because the Project BlueMix environment is built on and is an implementation of the open cloud architecture, it also offers the opportunity for business partner and Independent Software Vendor (ISV) content. In addition, IBM Systems Integrators could leverage the environment for their own client projects and solutions.

When developers gain access to the tools, services, and technologies they need, they can write new cloud-centric applications more easily. The agile enterprise saves money by reducing bottom-line IT infrastructure costs. More importantly, the agile enterprises’ top-line revenue can be increased by enabling new business models and applications to be delivered with a quicker time-to-market. As an example, agile enterprises can take advantage of the composable application methodology to create mobile-first applications. This methodology allows the developer to select from available cloud services to compose applications for mobile devices that access

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enterprise applications and data. Mobile-first applications are customer-centric in that they are designed for the mobile device rather than trying to perpetuate existing business processes on mobile devices. Also, mobile-first applications support the mobile user interaction paradigm as the preferred interaction style. This paradigm is redefining the nature of transactions between consumers and service/product providers, enhancing the value served. Geographic location and context information provided by mobile devices greatly streamline interactions and require significantly less manual user input. Mobile-first applications enable the agile enterprise to quickly respond to customer needs, increasing customer satisfaction and retention. The IBM initial focus is on providing first-class support for the complete DevOps life-cycle for cloud-centric applications in a mobile-first environment with Project BlueMix.

A knowledgeable partner is key to becoming an agile enterprise

IBM is in a unique position to help transform its clients’ IT infrastructure and development environments into the base for an agile enterprise. IBM has led the way in embracing new technologies to provide business solutions that benefit enterprises. Now, IBM is helping to define this new era of cloud computing via the open cloud architecture, which is based on software-defined environments and composable cloud services. IBM is using continuous delivery methods for the design, construction, deployment, and maintenance of applications.

These new technologies and tools bring both challenges and great opportunities to enterprises. The open cloud architecture is built on a number of open source projects with impressive ecosystem momentum. However, most enterprises should not embark down this road without a knowledgeable partner who is investing in the core technologies, as well as providing service and maintenance. Open source projects have their challenges and only an experienced and trusted partner is able to provide world-class support, service, and the long-term maintenance capabilities that are needed to make these projects successful.

IBM has successfully introduced and integrated new technologies into the enterprise in the past with its leadership in Linux, Apache, and now with OpenStack and Cloud Foundry. To build an agile enterprise, enterprises need to develop and acquire new skills and

embrace different approaches. In return, the enterprise has the opportunity to deepen its relationships with customers, find new ways to deliver value, and grow its business. IBM is ready to embark on this strategy with your enterprise.

Through the SmartCloud initiative and the acquisition of SoftLayer, IBM has introduced the initial capabilities necessary to enable the agile enterprise. IBM plans to continue this journey to build out the open cloud architecture and the Project BlueMix environment for its clients. IBM also plans to continue enhancing its platform and application services that are necessary for the agile enterprise. The IBM acquisition of SoftLayer greatly enhances the IBM capability to provide a world class and scalable cloud platform. Significant additional investments are going into the open source OpenStack community for the further creation of IaaS technologies. IBM plans to base PaaS capabilities on Cloud Foundry with significant new investments into that open source project and the ecosystem supporting and enhancing it. IBM has launched the SmartCloud brand and family of foundation, platform, and cloud solution products to help clients take full advantage of these capabilities and services.

Open standards are important and IBM intends to help solidify their definition and usage. IBM is a founding member of The OpenStack Foundation. IBM is also a founding member of the Object Management Group (OMG) Cloud Standards Customer Council (CSCC) where customers, vendors, and consultants collaborate to influence the evolution of the open cloud. As the Cloud Foundry community continues to grow, IBM plans to work with Pivotal and other members of the community to help steer it towards an open governance model. These initiatives and investments, combined with other standards activities, help to advance broad industry adoption of an open cloud architecture, reducing the concerns of vendor lock-in and fostering an open API economy. The standards also improve the ability of developers to interchange component services when they need to modify or enhance their applications.

Enterprises can choose to use these technologies on their own premises or from a provider. They can choose to use capital to procure and own these solutions or they can pay only for their usage, converting some or all of this expense to their operational budgets. All of these choices result in the flexibility to construct business models that scale from small startup situations to large globally integrated endeavors. IBM has the skills to customize technologies and assist clients with their

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decision-making process to become an agile enterprise.

What’s next: How IBM can help

IBM is investing to help enterprises realize the vision of the agile enterprise. IBM is working with thousands of enterprises worldwide to make them agile by helping them adopt the next generation of cloud computing. IBM partners and clients are providing feedback and identifying best practices based on real world projects. IBM continues to share this collective knowledge and expertise with its clients so they too can become an agile enterprise.

You can start your journey to becoming an agile enterprise by learning more about the IBM SmartCloud offerings and Project BlueMix. IBM SmartCloud and IBM SoftLayer provide a full range of offerings that span the continuum from designing cloud-based solutions to deploying and maintaining these solutions. The offerings include infrastructure, platform, software, and business process as a service. Information about the IBM SmartCloud offerings is available at this web address:

http://www.ibm.com/cloud

Information about the IBM SoftLayer offering is available at this web address:

http://www.softlayer.com

Information about Project BlueMix is available at this web address:

http://www.ibm.com/software/ebusiness/jstart/bluemix

Resources for more information

For more information about the concepts that are highlighted in the paper, see the following resources:

� eBook: Cloud Services for Dummies

http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/files/cloud-for-dummies.pdf

� All Clouds are Not Created Equal: A Logical Approach to Cloud Adoption in Your Company

http://www.ibm.com/services/be/en/attachments/pdf/SmartCloud_Enterprise_-_IBM_-_Frost_and_Sullivan_Whitepaper.pdf

� IBM is a leader in cloud open standards

http://www.ibm.com/cloud-computing/us/en/open-standards.html

� The Twelve-Factor App

http://www.12factor.net

� The Citizen Developer

http://thecitizendeveloper.com

� Systems of Engagement and the Future of Enterprise IT: A Sea Change in Enterprise IT

http://www.aiim.org/futurehistory

� IBM's open cloud architecture blog

http://www.ibm.com/developerworks/cloud/library/cl-open-architecture/index.html

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© Copyright IBM Corp. 2013. 10

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This information contains sample application programs in source language, which illustrate programming techniques on various operating platforms. You may copy, modify, and distribute these sample programs in any form without payment to IBM, for the purposes of developing, using, marketing or distributing application programs conforming to the application programming interface for the operating platform for which the sample programs are written. These examples have not been thoroughly tested under all conditions. IBM, therefore, cannot guarantee or imply reliability, serviceability, or function of these programs.

This document, REDP-5011-00, was created or updated on September 5, 2013.

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