When I got back into the analyst business I spent a full year mostly writing for practitioners. I and my Wikibon co-founders, Peter Burris (Forrester) and David Floyer felt it was the best way to launch the Wikibon community and appeal to IT professionals to join. It wasn’t lucrative but it sure was productive as in less than a year, along with others in the community, we’d produced nearly 500 research notes on information management and storage infrastructure– all free and open to anyone, including Google’s crawlers.
In November of 2007, seven months after we’d launched Wikibon, I ran into Gil Press, the Editor in Chief and Publisher of On Magazine. On Magazine is a high quality publication produced by EMC. Contributors include “Power Consultants” like Tom Davenport and Jim Champy, and practitioners such as CIO John Halamka.
I was flattered when Gil asked me to write an article for On and I reached out to a practitioner, colleague and client, Michael McCreary who at the time headed Pfizer’s Legal IT group. We wrote an article for On entitled Information: Asset or Liability? which was very well received and helped us get our names back out to the IT community.
Recently, Gil approached me again to see if I’d be interested in hosting a series of practitioner discussions around the future of IT. He’d seen what we’re doing with Wikibon Peer Incite Research Meetings and wanted to have a similar forum produced by On. Because this is a paid engagement I had to carefully consider the parameters. That’s because Wikibon has a policy not to take money from vendors to produce white papers and we have to be careful not to be ‘hired guns.’ Gil told me that I didn’t have to talk about EMC or EMC products, in fact he didn’t want that. He wanted these meetings to be open discussions with practitioners about applying technology to business– similar to what we do with Wikibon Peer Incites.
Having passed the Wikibon ’smoke test,’ I took the gig and I’m pleased to tell you that the series has been launched. It’s called: On The Horizon, the Future of Enterprise IT and the first session is next Monday June 22nd at 3PM EST. The topic is Technology Convergence: Transforming Data Center Infrastructure.
For the first Webcast, I reached out to two colleagues and practitioners, Mark O’Gara who is the Vice President of Infrastructure at Highmark and Daryl Molitor, a Senior Architect at JCPenney. Highmark is the Blue Cross Blue Shield of PA and JCPenney is a multi-billion dollar retail company. While clearly participating in different businesses, both firms in the past five years have had a major emphasis on IT efficiency, consolidation and virtualization.
As a health insurer, Highmark has a mainframe legacy and is constantly challenged to modernize its infrastructure while maintaining high service levels. Because the firm participates in a highly regulated market, it faces additional challenges with regard to security, records retention, personal health records standardization and navigating through the payer, provider and customer maze. The main challenge currently facing Highmark from an infrastructure perspective is maintaining SLA’s in an increasingly diversified environment (e.g. Mainframe and so-called open systems). In particular, legacy modernization, speed to market, efficiency and service re-usability are major themes. Moving mainframe-like function into the open systems world and evolving the people, process and technology and managing the diversity of skills is a challenge.
JCPenney’s infrastructure has gone through substantial changes with an emphasis on virtualization, consolidation and efficiency. The current challenge is building high availability and redundancy into its backoffice applications and re-defining/scoping data protection and business continuity. Historically, the business continuance requirements of backoffice apps haven’t required super high availability but today they do.
As these organizations modernize IT and prepare for technology convergence they are focusing on simplifying the infrastructure supporting applications. Each firm is taking a different approach to achieve this simplification. Highmark is focusing on more of a services-oriented approach, providing stack integration within its own computing infrastructure to reduce complexity. This integrated services approach will make it easier to guarantee service levels across applications.
JCPenney is putting more emphasis on building redundancy directly into the applications where possible…re-writing applications and simplifying the recovery requirements of the infrastructure. This approach will be somewhat limited to database functionality but will take complexity out of the infrastructure.
On this call, Mark, Daryl and I will discuss the challenges they’ve solved in the recent past and the high priority problems they’re attacking today. We’ll explicitly focus on how the converging data center will impact their investments going forward. We’ll also talk about the relevance of cloud computing, network convergence, virtualization and simplified infrastructure in the context of these challenges, and how they perceive such technologies impacting the future of their data center environments.
I hope you can join us.
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