…a merry-go-round of conflicting views from the HP execs attendant, finally closed off on the most unfortunate note by one executive who told us that HP cloud will succeed simply because it is built on HP hardware? SHOOT ME NOW! If only all the execs in the room had come out with a simple and concise message, we would have all bought into it.

Perhaps HP has begun to listen as it is today releasing versions of its operation and automation tools that are designed to provide a comprehensive, and most importantly integrated, portfolio to automate the complete life cycle of IT services. According to the release, the new tools will:

• Drive business growth by quickly deploying innovative IT services on a massive scale with HP Operations Orchestration (OO) 10, which automates the execution of up to 15,000 simultaneous operations
• Lower IT costs by efficiently delivering computing capacity with HP Server Automation (SA) 10, which automates server life cycle management to increase utilization, while reducing manual administration
• Increase employee efficiency with HP Database and Middleware Automation (DMA) 10, which automates manual database management tasks
• Accelerate time to value of IT services with HP Cloud Service Automation 3.2, which provides service life cycle automation, utilization and financial management capabilities to accurately and efficiently manage and scale cloud services

There’s a veritable cacophony of marketing buzzwords and lingo in there so let’s see what it means. The Operations Orchestration tool takes the notion many in the cloud world will be familiar with from Chef and Puppet and creates “runbooks” (otherwise known as recipes). These runbooks automate the provisioning of infrastructure so deployment can be both faster and more automated than previously. OO10 now supports Amazon S3 Storage, HP ArcSight, HP Fortify, OpenStack and SAP applications meaning that automation can be applied to core business processes.

SA10 is a server life cycle management platform that creates a “single pane of glass” across heterogeneous infrastructure to make it easier to manage servers – both virtual and physical. The product also comes as a virtual appliance.

DMA10 automates the administrative tasks around database management – it handles provisioning, patching, upgrading and code release functions and coversDB2,Oracle, SQL Server, Sybase and WebSphere databases.

Finally CSA is HP’s cloud management platform that aims to ease the building, brokering and management of cloud services.

MyPOV

Anyone else seeing a problem here? HP is touting this portfolio as creating an integrated, holistic management platform. And yet we have multiple products with multiple names and questionable deep integration. It feels very much (and I suspect this is because it is) several distinct applications that have had a bit of a lick of paint in terms of some superficial integrations and are being launched together in order to tick a box for an enterprise that wants truly integrated IT operations.

It seems like this launch is an example of the troubling situation at HP whereby different divisions are busily beavering away on their own solutions – without a staunch leader who can break down those silos. When HP appointed Saar Gillai as general manager of the pan-HP cloud division, many of us hoped that this indicated that there was a mandate to break down these silos. Gillai has been in the job now for eight months and quite possibly the tone of this combined release is a result of pressure from him. However I’d expect significantly more and hope that, if not by HP Discover in June, then at least by their December event, that HP will have a far stronger story to tell that once and for all breaks down the walls that would appear to exist between the various units.

@benkepes How long do you do CPR Ben?

— Jo Maitland (@JoMaitlandSF) May 6, 2013

That’s a pretty harsh comment and needs to be seen in the light of a couple of interesting pieces of news for one of those companies, Dell, in the past couple of days.

Yesterday came the news that Dell was acquiring Enstratius, the cloud orchestration vendor that has been seen for years as the home of the most innovation, the highest degree of thought leadership and the epitome of what a modern and progressive vendor needs to do to stay relevant. Now some might characterize the acquisition as simply a last ditch effort, but it needs to be seen in light of all the other similar software-based moves Dell has made in recent times. As my friend Alex Williams pointed out:

The acquisition gives Dell another way to provide end-to-end-cloud solutions. Offering enterprise solutions is part of Dell’s larger plans to transition from its dependence on personal computer sales and move deeper into the myriad opportunities that are coming as companies recalibrate their data centers to more automated, elastic infrastructures

The Enstratius deal filled up the tweet stream of most of the cloud insiders. art of this is, of course, because Enstratius has, over the past year or two, sucked up much of the cloud talent – big hitters like James Urquhart, Bernard Golden, John Willis et all have joined the company and created something of a dream team. But it’s not all inside baseball causing the excitement – Enstratius have built a truly compelling offering. At an NDA analyst session at the OpenStack summit a couple of weeks ago, one huge profile company was there to talk about it’s use of OpenStack but spent more time talking about how great Enstratius fits what they’re doing. This is a theme that is repeated elsewhere. As Gartner’s Lydia Leong said:

When I discuss AWS deployment for large user base with a customer, I almost always recommend they look at Enstratius for mgmt, governance.

— Lydia Leong (@cloudpundit) May 6, 2013

So, yes, partly the Enstratius deal is exciting because it means some of the Clouderati get a good exit, but it’s also a genuinely smart move on Dell’s part and the way they’re talking about the company, and the benefits it brings to Dell, indicates a real understanding of what their future needs to look like:

As enterprises increase their use of public, private and hybrid clouds, the need for controls, security, governance and automation becomes more critical. Dell, together with Enstratius, is uniquely positioned to deliver differentiated, complete cloud-management solutions to enterprise customers, large and small, empowering them with the efficiency and flexibility in the allocation and use of resources.

Yes, that’s marketing talk. But it’s not talk that even remotely related to a legacy hardware business. Dell has done a lot of work moving to a software world – Project Sputnik, Crowbar, the acquisitions of Quest and Gale – all point to Dell strongly realizing where its future really lies. And today we see that story told again with the release of the latest version of the Boomi integration platform that Dell acquired a year or two ago. Already a strong provider of integration services, Boomi is now moving into the API management space that is white hot at the moment – in the past couple of weeks alone we’ve seen massive action in this space with Mashery being acquired by Intel, Layer7 by CA and a big funding round for 3Scale, and now Boomi moves further into the space as it recognizes that application integration is only part of the integration solution moving forwards and that a broader API management layer is going to be increasingly important.

As one would expect of an API management layer – the API aspects of Dell Boomi allow customers to monitor, measure, secure, throttle and scale their enterprise APIs – essentially it allows enterprises to control the plumbing behind application integrations to both protect against denial-of-service attacks but also to shape the way their API load is borne. It allows them to shape quality of service behind the actual integrations that Boomi enables.

Of course the API management space is busy, and there have been cases of vendors rolling out solutions that for whatever reason haven’t really succeeded in the marketplace ( most notably Alcatel Lucent) – Dell Boomi and its API play may not prove successful – but in the context of Maitland’s assertion that Dell is dead, it counters that view and shows a company that understands that it needs to provide a holistic offering totally apart from its traditional hardware business. It’s not all going to be plain sailing for Dell – but I’d be reluctant to write them off just yet. Final word to Simon Wardley, an individual who spends his time looking at innovation in the context of organizations and their lifecycles:

Dell is a company who if they did nothing would die because the market is fundamentally changing. We all suffer from inertia to change but many companies are disrupted not by random and unpredictable market changes but instead highly predictable ones which can be planned for and inertia resolved. Dell, had all the hallmarks of a company which was going to be disrupted by predictable changes. It acted in a way (as many do) that the changes around cloud were somehow unexpected. It’s inertia was compounded by a lack of preparation.  In recent times they have seemed to act in a manner which suggests a greater realisation of the war that is occurring. Whether they will survive this depends upon the ability to act, how courageously they act, how willing they are to deal with inertia in a short period of time, their situational awareness of the environments and most importantly their strategic game play.

As they say, watch this space.

While it’s fair to say that CloudStack had the high ground early on in terms of on-the-ground adoption with enterprises, it’s also fair to say that OpenStack, with the massive buy in from big names vendors like HP, IBM and Dell, won out on the attention measures. OpenStack was, from a technical perspective, a little rough around the edges 12 months ago but it’s fair to say that the past year has seen it come along nicely and the upcoming OpenStack summit will no doubt be a showcase of enterprise adoption (disclosure – OpenStack is covering my T&E to attend the OpenStack summit in Portland and as part of the summit I have written a general open cloud report for the foundation). Much of the criticism that OpenStack proponents have been able to level at CloudStack has focused on its apparently limited contributor base – in their minds, a project with support from essentially only one company is never going to get the traction it needs to truly become an accepted standard.

Which is why the announcement that the Apache Software Foundation is promoting CloudStack to a top level project next week is so important – to qualify as a TLP, an initiative needs to have proven a well developed community, strong governance and, by definition, widespread adoption.

According to Chip Childers, Vic President of Apahe CloudStack, the foundation’s work since adoption has focused on growing a strong community around the code and ensuring the governance is robust. As a thinly veiled criticism of some previous dramatic and unhappy happenings in the OpenStack community, Childers went on to say that:

…we’ve managed to build a diverse, friendly and very open community around CloudStack. New participants receive a really warm welcome and we  make sure that all contributors are on an equal footing, whether they are writing code or helping with any other aspect of the project. Anybody thinking of getting involved in the project would quickly find what a great community we are

In terms of how the project actually works – Apache CloudStack software is released under the Apache License v2.0, and is overseen by a self-selected team of active contributors to the project. A Project Management Committee (PMC) guides the Project’s day-to-day operations, including community development and product releases. Apache CloudStack source code, documentation, mailing lists, and related resources are available at http://cloudstack.apache.org/.

The key thing here though is just how wise the developer community to CloudStack is. The foundation reports that as of today the initiative boasts some 440 developers and, in the most important metric of all, only 32% of those developers are from Citrix. That’s a positive statistic and should give the CloudStack fans cause for cheers. While CloudStack has some loyal customer however, it’s hard to see how they’ll manage to push through the OpenStack juggernaut – time will tell how that all shakes down…

The briefing I had was about the news that Dell was launching its “next-generation” Dell Boomi MDM offering Essentially the new product is aimed at mid sized companies and allows them to take advantage of MDM functionality – something that previously was outside of their skill set or budget. As Philip Russom said in the TDWI Best Practices Report focusing on next generation master data management:

Given their complexity and cost, most master data management solutions are simply out of reach for midmarket customer

Anyway, the Dell Boomi MDM offering focuses on four core steps:

• Define – model master data entities through a visual experience with no coding necessary
• Deploy – deploy models into the MDM repository and identify which source systems will interact with them
• Synchronize – orchestrate data synchronization and design process flows that ensure data quality
• Govern – govern data as it flows into the MDM system to resolve duplicates, fix data entry issues as well as identify and correct erroneous data

MyPOV

I’ve been guilty of writing off any offering that doesn’t look at data integration as a single step between applications, but the reality is that data management is, to coin a phrase, “a thing”. Despite how much we’d like data to simply move between applications with no massaging, the reality is that data manipulation is something that happens every day in the real world. Data formats change, particular systems have requirements for particular ways of expressing data and one piece of data (say a phone number for instance) might have to be delivered in multiple formats to different third party solutions.

Which is where Master Data Management comes in. In my call with Chris McNabb, director of product management for Dell Boomi, he rightly pointed out that most existing MDM solutions, apart from being expensive, entered the orbit of an integration player by acquisition – as such they tend to have different architectural paradigms and different ways of interacting with data – I kind of buy the Boomi spin that a single solution from a single vendor, with a single pedigree is a compelling proposition. A consistent look and feel, centralized user management and single sign on all make it easier to adopt and use a broad integration platform.

In the integration space there seem to be two distinct approaches – the real-time API-driven approach that most often is seen at the smaller end of town (products like SnapLogic for example) and the larger (and generally slow) approaches around building data warehouses. Dell Boomi’s perspective is that there is a third way – one that sucks data out of the source system, lightly manipulates it in the MDM product and then delivers the cleansed data out to one or many different third party solutions.

I suspect that, over time, the requirement for this intermediate step will reduce as solutions find ways to reconcile the differences in the ways that data is presented and parsed. In the meantime however, no matter how much we hate to admit it, MDM has a place. And Dell Boomi, with MDM tied closely to integration, is providing a compelling tool to the mid market.

Boomi is announcing a couple of things:

One million integration processes running per day – this number relates to individual integration processes (ie not discrete data packets) and should be seen in light of both its own historical figures and those of the competition. Boomi is claiming a 263% increase in integrations year on year, following up from a similar increase last year. Perhaps more importantly Dell is claiming that this is three times the number of integration processes than their nearest competitor can claim.

Wipro partnership – More interestingly, Boomi has announced a partnership with well known systems integrator, technology consultant and outsourcing house Wipro. I spent time talking with Boomi founder Rick Nucci about this partnership, and the role for cloud integration platforms generally. Traditional consulting firms have been a little slow to partner with the integration platforms, in part because it is a challenging partnership to articulate externally. These consulting houses make their not-insignificant revenue from, in part, providing deep product integration services. Partnering with a platform which essentially says “integrations can be easy” challenges their own position. I put this to Nucci and he conceded that it is a sensitive point. Surprisingly he is dubious about the claims that many make about one-click integrations and the like – his perspective is that an integration platform simply reduces the time to integration and hence the time to value. As such he feels there is a logical fit with the consulting houses who can use the partnership as a way to abstract the more mechanical aspects of an integration off to a specialist, while focusing heavily on the implementation and customization part of what they do. I kind of buy that, but also expect to see the traditional consulting firms remain somewhat muted when it comes to integration services – while integrations may be simple plumbing, if a Deloitte, an Infosys or a Wipro can wrap it up in paper, put a bow on it and call it consulting, they’re able to monetize it richly. That said, the partnership makes sense and should help to avoid lots of duplication and, most importantly, reduce the time that these deep integration projects can take.

I spent some time talking with Nucci about the fact that many integration vendors are talking up the “one-click” story. Perhaps as a sign of respect to Boomi’s new found consulting buddies, he suggested that the truth of the matter is somewhat more complex and that integration vendors need to be careful to navigate a path that sees them articulate the real value that integrations can bring to a organization, while not understating just how much manual work an integration will actually take – it’s a fine line and a situation where the marketing spin sometimes delivers more than the actual product can.

Both these announcements, coming off the back of the Dell privatization deal, give a real insight into where the opportunities for traditional IT vendors lie. Marc Andreeson famously proclaimed that software is eating the world – integration is an important part in that process and Boomi is well placed to capitalize on that.

Anyway – with that said, the latest IaaS MQ is pretty interesting viewing:

Random thoughts, in no real order:

• Congrats to my buddies at Tier 3 – a little player being seen to punch above its weight (and doing awesome stuff with PaaS at the same time)
• AWS up and to the right – that’s one positioning that is very hard to argue with
• Dell? Dell? What the hell are you doing – you and your buddies at Fujitsu better do something big, and fast (whatever DID happen to Fujitsu and private Azure)
• There’s a lot of folks hanging around the middle there – something has to happen to create some differentiation sometime soon

The VCs would seem to agree since SnapLogic is this morning announcing a further $20M in funding from new investors Ignition Partners and Triangle Peak Partners and existing investor the venerable Andreeson Horowitz. The funding makes a total of $32.5M raised so far. Alongside the funding, SnapLogic is crowing about its marketplace success with some major enterprise customers on board alongside the US federal government.

I like what SnapLogic is doing, but believe it only solves half of the pain area for organizations – while integration is a big problem area, so too is the cognitive dissonance caused by having so many different user interfaces and user experience approaches – this is the next big area of opportunity and one which I hope SnapLogic will have a look at with this newfound treasure chest.

Last week PandoDaily ran a piece by Farhad Manjoo which concluded that Dell is a company on a rapid downward spiral to oblivion. I’ve had a little bit to do with Dell over the years (see disclosure) and have written about them before but haven’t really had any inside view other than a few discussion with their ex SVP marketing Andy Lark, some chats with Barton George who spearheads their Project Sputnik initiative, and some thoughts around their OpenStack strategy. So this counter is very much from the outside looking in.

The original article is, I believe, flawed from the outset, in that it characterizes Dell as a “large American personal computer company that has no conceivable way of combating an existential threat to its business.” This classification would be fine coming from a middle-American soccer Mom. After all, it’s what 90 percent of the population sees from Dell. But looking more closely, the reality is very different.

Dell has so many non-PC initiatives that give me lots of hope for its future. The failings of looking at them merely through the PC lens were summed up by one commenter perfectly who suggested that being known for one thing, doesn’t mean that other parts of the business don’t exist.

I’ve previously written about Dell’s strong entry into the packaged and integrated software market – and recently Dell indicated that software would be a $5B business for the company. We really are seeing an excellent example of a traditional hardware company reinventing itself as a services company. At the same time, and in order to accelerate this change, we’re seeing reinvent itself as an open source company. Alex Williams opined on this shift in a recent post and it’s hard to fault his logic.

Dell has been adding products and services to build out this open source based, developer centric rebirth – alongside the Sputnik announcement above, Dell has, in the past few weeks announced;

• A partnership with Datameer a big data analytics offering that sits alongside Dell’s Hadoop solutions
• A partnership with Pentaho for its solution which couples data integration with business analytics
• That the Dell | Cloudera Solution is now available with additional options and in additional regions
• An extension of Dell’s OpenStack offering including additional technical and geographic options

At the moment this feels a little disconnected, but it’s not hard to see a few additions which could start to glue this stuff together and move Dell to having a complete end-to-end solution for application development, deployment and management. For example, Dell has a pretty close relationship with enStratus already – it’s not a stretch to imagine Dell filling in the “heterogeneous cloud systems management” of it’s product line by acquiring the company to create an even more holistic infrastructure solution that ties together Dell’s hardware, its OpenStack offering and gives customers the ability to manage those, alongside their other cloud services.

Developer solutions – It is interesting that Dell is enabling users of Sputnik to pull down their individual profiles from GitHub. As developer tools like GitHub start to extend beyond being about code repositories, and move further into the PaaS space of application deployment, I can imagine Dell offering a stronger PaaS-like product mix. At the moment there is a distinction between code repository solutions and PaaS solutions but vendors like CollabNet are blurring these lines. Indeed Dell already has their Crowbar open source product – designed to deploy OpenStack. It also has add ons that can support other, higher-level tools such as CloudFoundry and Zenoss – I’d not be surprised to see an acquisition or extension in this general area to really continue the story to developers.

Dell really is doing some pretty amazing work to reinvent itself – while it’s true to the general public that Dell is all about hardware, and that this perception will likely continue – under the hood a very new sort of company is emerging.

Launched last year at salesforce’ DreamForce event, the unit packages up software solutions (from salesforce, echosign and others) and ties them together with integrations from Dell-owned integration vendor Boomi. They’re aiming for organizations in the 50-1000 employee bracket, a large customer base but one that is traditionally difficult to service because of their relatively complex requirements and small budgets. By leveraging their own integration solutions, and the leverage they have with third party vendors, Dell aims to deliver compelling and economically viable packaged solutions to businesses that, importantly for this demographic, is all delivered form one central billing relationship.

Recently Dell announced that is was partnering with Pardot to roll out an end to end marketing automation solution. Included in the offering are pre-built integrations into CRM systems and social media applications. The idea is to bring demand generation initiatives, generally the domain of larger organizations, down to small and mid size businesses and to ease the implementation of the solution by providing pre-configured integrations into commonly used solutions. To ease in this time-to-implement drive,the offering includes services for setting up email campaigns, developing web site forms, and integrating Google AdWords and CRM systems.

The solution, strikingly called Dell Marketing Automation is price  from $1,000 per month for unlimited users. All editions come with basic Dell Implementation services and to speak to Dell’s new services thrust, Dell is offering pricing for additional fixed-fee, fixed-scope implementation services starting at $2,500.

Interestingly Dell hasn’t yet tried to use their clout to answer the very real issue (at least for SMB users) of inconsistencies around user interface and experience. I’d really love Dell to leverage their Boomi integration smarts to come up with something to address these deeper problems – as an interim measure however, an integrated suite of SMB offerings, all billed from one vendor is a compelling proposition for customers. And one which helps Dell wean itself from the ever-decreasing returns of a hardware vendor’s traditional models.