Supply Chain Management Blog articles

HP's Cloud Announcement

christianverstraete — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:54:55 GMT

HP made an important Cloud announcement. I wrote a small piece on the vision behind the announcement and posted it on the Grounded in the Cloud blog. You can read it here.

2011 Cloud Predictions

christianverstraete — Thu, 13 Jan 2011 15:25:57 GMT

First, happy New Year It's the time of the year again where people come out with their predictions, so I took a stab at it. This year I focused on "cloud", how could you guess. So, if you want to know what I see in the tea leaves, just read and stay tuned. By the way feedback is more than welcome.

Private Cloud, how do we define that?

christianverstraete — Thu, 02 Dec 2010 07:06:01 GMT

Many conflicting definitions exist for private cloud. Is it something behind the firewall, is it set-up and managed only for one customer. I argue it's neither, but one needs to look back at what the customer issues are and how those can be addressed. This brings us to a definition of a private cloud leaving room for multiple delivery models. You want to know more ...

Cloud, let's dream a bit

christianverstraete — Thu, 25 Nov 2010 14:42:05 GMT

How will cloud address the needs of the CIO and it's new GEN-Y employees moving forward? We put ourselves in 2015 and describe what the IT world would be. Personal devices connected to both the enterprise and the social networks, interacting with a "cloudified" IT back office, things will definitely change.

Cloud is not just another form of Outsourcing

christianverstraete — Sun, 14 Nov 2010 00:16:18 GMT

Patrick Gray from TechRepublic wrote a blog entry "Why the “cloud” doesn’t matter". I fundamentally disagree with him and describe why. But taking advantage of that, I describe how the role of the CIO is changing and how he becomes the aggregator of services delivered by legacy applications, his own private cloud and the public cloud.

The Need for Cloud Aggregation

christianverstraete — Wed, 27 Oct 2010 09:22:01 GMT

Enterprises are not creating clouds from scratch. They typically have huge legacy environments and are confronted with integrating those with newer cloud based services to address user requirements. An aggregation platform can help in that process, reads how.

Cloud, the hybrid model

christianverstraete — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 14:12:15 GMT

Is public cloud really the cheapest approach, or would it be a combination of private cloud for day to day use and public to address the peaks? But that would imply workloads can be migrated from one to the other, and that is where the fun starts. A quick look behind the scene.

Is Cloud Computing the Great Equalizer?

christianverstraete — Wed, 06 Oct 2010 07:28:34 GMT

Nicholas Carr compares the evolution of Cloud Computing with Electricity Provisioning, pointing towards a centralization of cloud services. Will cloud truly replace our existing datacenters? Or will it become another way to deliver IT, complementing what we have today?

Networking and Cloud, the forgotten link

christianverstraete — Mon, 13 Sep 2010 12:18:33 GMT

One important element of Cloud, often forgotten, is its networking aspects. Telecommunication companies have a unique opportunity to take a leading role in improving clouds by addressing networking and latency issues. Not taking that opportunity may sideline them in the future.

What is Cloud up to?

christianverstraete — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 16:53:38 GMT

Cloud helps IT become the strategic service provider for the business. This in turn leads to the transformation of IT into a shared service center. This article discusses some of the issues related with that change.

Cloud, Supply Chain and Gen-Y

christianverstraete — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 08:45:06 GMT

Supply Chains need increased visibilty. The cloud can provide them that, but Gen-Y type interactions make the end-to-end experience completely different.

Manufacturing is moving east, but will it go south next?

christianverstraete — Fri, 09 Jul 2010 07:31:52 GMT

60% of the world population is living in Asia, 60% of the developing world middle class is hosted there. This makes Asia the next market to be in for growth. But interestingly, Asian manufacturers, and in particular chinese, are already looking at Africa as their next source of low cost labour. What does this mean for American and European companies?

Cloud, Security & Compliance, don't put your head in the sand

christianverstraete — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 08:48:49 GMT

A number of voices start dismissing potential security and compliance risks of the public cloud. Making the analogy with the telecommunication space, they argue issues are well known. Starting from the CSA Top Threats to Cloud Computing report, I highlight why things are different and why we should not fool ourselves.

Productive, Sustainable Innovation

christianverstraete — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 13:27:18 GMT

Starting from an interview of Joe Barkai from IDC, Manufacturing Insight, I discuss the challenges manufacturing companies have to maintain appropriate levels of innovation while many experienced members of their workforce retire. What processes, systems and people do they need to put in place to maintain the momentum and speed-up the development of new products.

Innovation, what trends should we take advantage of?

christianverstraete — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 16:00:51 GMT

A couple weeks ago I discussed the areas of innovation in manufacturing enterprises, I'd like to continue the analysis, focusing this time on key trends in the market and how those could become starting points for innovation.

Interview with Charles Babcock - Part 2

christianverstraete — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:57:27 GMT

This is the second part of an interview I had the opportunity to do with Charles Babcock, the author of "Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution"

Interview with Charles Babcock - Part 1

christianverstraete — Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:55:02 GMT

This is the first part of an interview I had the opportunity to do with Charles Babcock, the author of "Management Strategies for the Cloud Revolution"

Innovation, how shall we go after it?

christianverstraete — Wed, 19 May 2010 18:06:00 GMT

I've been asked to prepare a presentation on the subject of innovation in the high-tech industry and spent the last couple days doing some research on the subject. What I found out was so fascinating that I decided to share it with you in a couple blog entries. So, let's start today with the fundamental question, what is innovation? And let me start with a quote from a French writer, Marcel Proust. He says "The real act of discovery consists not in finding new lands, but in seeing with new eyes". And that really made me think. I believe we often misunderstand between innovation and invention.

Indeed, innovation and invention do not have the same meaning. One definition of innovation I found a long time ago sounds like this: "New ways of leveraging existing ideas, technologies, processes etc. to create value". This includes two important elements, first innovation may consist in the new use of existing ideas, not everything needs to be new, and second, innovation is related to the creation of value, in other words to the notion of doing business. Invention on the other hand is: "The creation of new ideas which may or may not prove to have value." So, invention inherently includes the concept of coming up with something new. Whether that something new is valuable or not remains to be seen. Obviously, invention and innovation can go hand in hand. When Edison created the light bulb, not only did he perform a great invention, but he did it in such a way that it became economically viable. He innovated through the creation of an entire integrated electric system of which the light bulb was one component.

Enterprises today can innovate in a variety of spaces. The most known one is obviously the product/services innovation, but it is not the only one. I count five spaces, I'd like to discuss briefly here:

Business Innovation, finding new business models, new processes to reach the customer or consumer, new efficiencies in the approach taken, new channels of distribution etc. That innovation is often left to the line of business managers. Marketing will innovate in how to approach customers and make the brand visible and desirable. Services will find new ways to help customers out and resolve potential problems during and after warranty. And I could go on like this.

Ecosystem Innovation, finding new approaches to use the strength of the supply chain and distribution partners to delight the customer. This includes supply chain integration, visibility, exchange of information across the ecosystem, improvements in operations etc. It is all related to tying the enterprise better with its partners up- and downstream. Functions such as Supply Chain and Distribution are focused on this type of innovation.

IT Innovation, finding new ways for IT to support the business better. This can go from the development of a private cloud to support the changes in workload throughout the year, to the development of platforms to support interacting with suppliers, distribution partners and customers.

Product/Services Innovation and I put products and services together as the lines between both are increasingly blurring. How can new technologies improve the experience of an existing product? Can the integration of the product with some services deliver a new user experience? Can new things be invented by the creative combination of existing products/services with new technologies, channels, approaches etc. In a world where new things appear all the time, where software takes an increasing role in products, where the internet becomes ubiquitous, many new things can be dreamed up. This is the role of business units in general and the product development team in particular.

And then, there is a last type of innovation that supports all of the above, and this is Technology Innovation. Indeed, identifying new technologies and making them available to improve the business approach, the ecosystem integration, IT or product/service combinations, is critical for companies that want to stay at the forefront of innovation. This is often how inventions will enter the innovation cycle. Having a technology watchdog that reviews what's new out there, is critical. Is this the reason why the role of CTO (Chief Technology Officer) is becoming so popular?

The key thing for enterprises is to carefully choose their bets. This requires curiosity and creativity. Indeed, curiosity to go and find out the new ideas that might be of interest and creativity to see how those could best be used in the context of the enterprise. In a future entry, I will take the example of the electronics industry, look at key trends and how such trends could lead us to innovation as described above, so stay tuned.

Cloud and Grid, where does HPC plays?

christianverstraete — Thu, 13 May 2010 22:04:00 GMT

High Performance Computing is used increasingly in Product Development as digitization increases. Companies tend to perform an increased amount of testing digitally and simulation is increasingly becoming mainstream. For a number of years grid computing has been used to address the computational needs to run such algorithms. Over the last couple years, people have start using cloud computing and some have run grid type workloads on cloud computing.

So, are these two different needs to address similar problems? Actually not. The first element to point out is that they are optimized for different type of activities.

Cloud computing (and I am talking here about IaaS, as this is where the comparison makes sense) focuses on making available virtual machines (VM) to run a specific program. Typically, it's one virtual machine for one program. In most instances, the program will execute in the VM for a certain period of time. Cloud is all about provisioning a large number of VM's to many customers, helping them achieve a variety of tasks.

Grid computing on the other hand implies parallelization, the execution of a single task across many computers. This is typically used for operational research (OR) and other computation intensive tasks. Operational Research lends itself very well for such tasks as you search an optimal through approximation. Calculating the value of a particular objective in a number of situations with slightly evolving parameters to obtain a maximum or minimum, is what OR is all about. It is used increasingly for simulations, planning and scheduling and other compute intensive tasks. By executing the same model with different variables on a large number of machines, and then identifying the maximum or minimum, one can speed up the process drastically. That's what parallelization is all about.

So, is IaaS a good platform to run grid computing tasks on? And here the opinions differ. In an interesting podcast, Mike Vizard, the CEO of Parabon Technologies, a grid software and service provider, explains the differences, but at the same time points out they are very complementary. In an article, titled "Grid Computing and the future of Cloud Computing", Jennifer Schiff describes the differences and points out no one technology will take over.

My take on this is that it depends. Indeed, as Grid Computing is all about computational intensive tasks, the less overhead in the execution of the task, the better. So, running compute intensive tasks on a cloud reduces the CPU bandwidth available for actual computation as some cycles will be used for managing the virtualized environment, delaying the computational task, and as a result, slowing down the overall problem solving. So, if you have a regular need for such compute intensive tasks, and computer idle time in your datacenter, a grid is probably better. You may even think about a HPC cluster. It will give you the best efficiency.

On the other end, if you are only an occasional user of such environments and do not want to have to manage/provision a separate software stack, you might want to run such compute intensive tasks in a cloud environment. But you should realize you run it in a sub-optimal way.

Simulations, operational research, planning and other computational intensive tasks are increasingly used in organizations. Parallelization is becoming easier and more effective. So, companies are starting to look at environments where such workloads can be executed.

So, should cloud service providers also provide specific environments for grid computing, or will we see separate grid service providers appear on the market. Future will tell, but it is clear companies will be on the look-out for high performance computing types of environments. Due to the importance of such computation workloads in manufacturing, they will be amongst the first ones.

The Cloud Ecosystem, where are the bottlenecks?

christianverstraete — Mon, 10 May 2010 03:55:00 GMT

Cloud is increasingly becoming a familiar topic for many companies. Although it is still early in the lifecycle, Cloud Computing goes Mainstream, according to the BBC. And I am seeing an increasing amount of large enterprises discussing the subject with ever increasing understanding. Many are testing the public cloud, but a number of issues, including security and legal ones, are keeping them from using it effectively for their key requirements.

The public cloud ecosystem consists in three key parts, the cloud infrastructure (IaaS), the network and the devices. Although there are these security and legal aspects to take into account, the cloud infrastructure is becoming more robust by the day. As times passes, new services with higher levels of security, more business tailored service level agreements, and more business oriented services are starting to appear on the market.

The device space is still in its infancy. It is increasingly becoming clear that the PC or the laptop will no longer be THE interface into the cloud. As the Millennial Generation, also referred too as Generation Y, is entering the job market, they bring with them a complete new approach to interacting with technology. They use smart phones, tablets, iPAD's or slates etc. to surf the internet, to remain in contact with their peers and to interact with each other. They expect a similar approach in their business. While PC's and laptops will still be sold in large quantities over the coming years, building new devices allowing such interactions with the cloud will be the new battlefield. Highly visible battles between companies such as Adobe and Apple are the first examples of what is doomed to happen. Indeed providers of cloud services are looking at a single standard, being de-facto, to develop the interfaces allowing them to offer their cloud based services on any device, going from a set-top box to a smart phone. Many see Adobe Flash as just providing that capability. This however works for everything except the Apple camp.

Who will win this battle is uncertain at this point in time, but what is interesting is that the battle is happening and that many are tipping in. People are looking for an intuitive experience to access the cloud, regardless of the device they have chosen to use. It is actually interesting to see that a number of enterprises are no longer dictating which device their employees should use, but rather give them a compensation to buy the device they wish. Compatibility in the device world is quickly becoming an issue that needs to be addressed.

But the device side is not the only one. There is also the network. And here things are more complex. First, networking is quickly becoming the most expensive cost element of your cloud bill. First, the cloud service providers charge you per GB of information you upload or download. And if you do anything else than a compute intensive task, these start counting pretty quickly. Second your network provider also charges you for transferring data over the internet. So, you are being charged twice. But the cost is not the only aspect. There is also the real bandwidth available for uploading and downloading information. I have checked bandwidth during my travels over and over again, and found download speed going from 3-7Mbits/second, and uploads from 300KBPS to 1.4MPS. Even with the lather, transferring 1GB takes more than 15 minutes. You may argue that you have way better numbers in your premises, and I believe you, but the whole objective of the cloud is ubiquitous access, this means access from any place. Indeed, the cloud facilitates the work of the mobile worker, giving him/her access to his/her computing environment from anywhere in the world. Unfortunately, then you need to take consumer type network bandwidth into account.

It is the combined experience of the cloud services, the network and the devices that will make cloud really attractive to the mobile worker of the future. Today I see activity happening in each of the areas, but unfortunately, I do not see a lot of work going on where all three are looked at in combination. Maybe this is a new area we need to focus on moving forward.