DirectionIT Magazine Issue 8

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tent ents What do virtualization and Star Wars have in common? Nothing … seriously, nothing

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The CEO talked with Marketing and you won’t believe what happened next!

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Mobile device management isn’t a choice, it’s an absolute necessity

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Five steps to beating Amazon and Wayfair: And why, if you are a serious brick-and-mortar retailer, you have a leg up in the retail game

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No money should be harmed: IT infrastructure transparency & the modern enterprise

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The mainframe in the 2020s

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Part II: Six ways to improve datacenter performance while saving on costs

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Letter from the Editor

A common thread that seems to run through every meeting I attend lately is that of the need, want, and desire for data, as well as the proliferation of data. And this leads to a myriad of challenges in today’s new data-driven economy. From how to manage data itself from a physical perspective (the growth of data centers has reached an all-time high), to the need for security and management and how to leverage it for business goals and more, data is the world’s new currency and will be the driving factor in business for years to come. So, with this comes the unofficial DirectionIT “data” issue. Although the articles in this edition weren’t planned to be primarily data-centric, they evolved that way simply through the organic influence of the world around us. Whether we’re looking at the IT industry, news, politics, commerce, or more, the influence that data has apparently cannot be ignored. Therefore, I encourage you to read this issue with the hope that it sparks your imagination and your inquisitive nature—and maybe even your trust in some institutions—into how data is used, stored, and commodified. The fact is, we all live through data, so it’s our collective job as a global society to manage it with care and with a thoughtful plan for our futures. Enjoy!

Allan Zander Editor-in-Chief

WHAT DO VIRTUALIZATION & STAR WARS HAVE IN COMMON? NOTHING … seriously, nothing

By Paul Hogg, CEO – Inteleca IT Business Solutions

Okay, all blog title jokes aside, the topic of virtualization continues to be a hot topic amongst the majority of our clients and potential clients. And, as a company that focuses heavily on data centers, telecom companies, utilities, and large enterprise, I figured the topic to be apt, lending some insight into what the future will hold for the aforementioned business types.

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To begin, it’s no shock at this point in 2018 that virtualization has, in many ways, fundamentally changed the way we all architect modern data centers. With the ever-expanding and everevolving nature of cloud computing and its inherent connection to virtualization, the data center will continue to evolve in step, enabling better, faster, and far cooler business applications than perhaps any of us realize today. So the question becomes, what will virtualization and hardware evolve to in the coming years? For many, the hardware versus virtualization topic can lead to more of one and less of the other, but that’s not necessarily the case. With the need for continued cloudbased apps, continuous data expansion, the influence and impact of IoT, and all the other endless advancements that seem to be inundating our business and personal lives daily, the connection between virtualization and hardware is growing in lock-step—in new and innovative ways. Starting with the more traditional aspects of virtualization, such things as user, network, security, and storage virtualization are all now integral parts and practices of the data center environment. And with these new practices, the necessity arises for more robust appliances to be placed through the data center in order to manage the flow of data and to address the need for security vigilance. Obviously, when bringing up the topic of virtualization it leads to the inevitable topic of distributed data center management. And without boring everyone with speeds, feeds, specs and in-depth discussion regarding DCIM (I’m still convinced DCIM is actually the name of a goth band from the early 1990s), the result is the ability to globally connect computing capabilities and to create a global computing and data center ecosystem, one that can provide everything from around better controls of the environment itself. However, as we all know far too well, for every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. For everything that distributed data center management entails, comes yet another challenge of high-density computing. And for those non-technical folks, I’m not talking about computers that weigh more. In this particular case, this is the part that impacts the hardware side of the equation. It simply means that everything from servers to switches, and even racks, are now being designed with the desire to greatly reduce the physical hardware footprint—however, all tasked with doing far more than their predecessors. So, when combining these two aspects together, we now bring up yet another topic—that being data center efficiency. In essence, the world around us is demanding more and more computing power every day. Hence, the need to virtualize and compress things into more efficient entities. And to aid in this comes the need to support far larger numbers of users— all leading to restructuring. From cooling to power consumption—all environmental factors from both the macro and micro aspects—no matter the driver, data centers need to run more efficiently. And with older machines being replaced daily with newer, faster, and cooler machines (pardon the pun), that much needed speed also directly translates to more cooling and energy draws. All things adding up, it means that data centers want to greatly expand processing power while greatly reducing their power usage effectiveness, or as some say, “PUE,” or simultaneously the same sound my wife makes when pretending to fire a laser pistol from Star Wars. Darth Vader aside, as our demand for cloud and virtualization continue to expand, the demand also increases for placing larger and larger workloads into the data center. Something we all need to consider. Speaking of Darth Vader, how much cloud computing power does it take to blow up Alderaan? Oooohhh … too soon?

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TH E E TE RNAL MOVE ME NT Ulysse Nardin, from the movement of the sea to the perpetual innovation of Haute Horlogerie. For over 170 years, the powerful movement of the ocean has inspired Ulysse Nardin in its singular quest: to push back the limits of mechanical watchmaking, time and time again.

THE CEO TALKED WITH MARKETING

AND YOU WON’T

BELIEVE WHAT

HAPPENED

NEXT! By Allan Zander, Chief Executive Officer – omNovos Omni-Channel Customer Engagement

Don’t those clickbait articles just make you want to puke these days? They do me. Sometimes, in our haste to get things done, or to simply get the message out, we forget some basics. I think this is the case here.

Now, I completely agree there could be competing agendas as article headlines are sometimes used like this to simply get someone to click on a link that generates a fractional amount of revenue for someone somewhere. A sort of instant payback for bringing a horse to water and then saying, hey getting the horse to drink was your job. In other cases, I read article headlines like this that are attached to products or brands. In this instance, I get really worried for the modern-day marketer. Let’s not forget that one of the key objectives of an organization’s marketing efforts is to develop satisfying relationships with customers that benefit both the customer and the organization. These efforts lead marketing to serve an important role within most organizations and within society.

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Marketing essential for survival

At the organizational level, marketing is a vital business function that is necessary in nearly all industries whether the organization operates as a for-profit or as a not-for-profit. For the forprofit organization, marketing is responsible for most tasks that bring revenue and, hopefully, profits to an organization. For the not-for-profit organization, marketing is responsible for attracting customers needed to support the not-for-profit’s mission, such as raising donations or supporting a cause. For both types of organizations, it’s unlikely they can survive without a strong marketing effort.

Marketers deliver consistent brand image and benefits

Marketing is also the organizational business area that interacts most frequently with the public; consequently, what the public knows about an organization is determined by their interactions with marketers. For example, customers may believe a company is dynamic and creative based on its advertising message. At a broader level, marketing offers significant benefits to society. These benefits include: • Developing products that satisfy needs, including products that enhance society’s quality of life •

Creating a competitive environment that helps lower product prices

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Developing product distribution systems that offer access to products for many customers and many geographic regions

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Building demand for products that require organizations to expand their labor force

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Offering techniques that have the ability to convey messages that change societal behavior in a positive way such as anti-smoking advertising

Marketing must play the longer game

So, why not push the envelope here? Should the challenge to marketing not be: How do we find ways to further strengthen the relationship with our customer? How do we find ways for the customer to discover what our brand is all about and why that relationship should be relevant to them? That is really the critical element to any marketing department. Those who are doing it well will undoubtedly drive revenue and increase profitability. Marketing has the ability to pull on both of these levers at the same time if they do it right. When I think of companies that are doing well these days, I realize they understand how to develop that relationship with the customer and how to tie that relationship to the promise that their brand delivers. They don’t need small clickbait tricks to get that done. For the CEO out there: Push your Marketing team. Push them at least as hard as you push your Sales team to drive business forward and don’t settle for small tricks. Instead, play the longer game and your business will grow faster and more profitably.

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MOBILE DEVICE MANAGEMENT ISN’T A CHOICE, IT’S AN

ABSOLUTE NECESSITY By Derek Stiles, President and CEO – Noble1 IT Managed Services

Cybercriminals are breeding like the proverbial rabbit, and that fact, together with the unfortunate fallibility of humans and the growing threat of mobile device security breaches, paints a bleak picture of the future. The sweeping changes in organizations brought about by big data, which has fundamentally changed the way businesses operate and compete, in conjunction with the rise in the use of mobile devices personally and professionally, deliver an unmistakable message: endpoint security is no longer an optional feature, it’s a necessity on all current and future endpoints. Let’s look at current trends and how mobile device management (MDM) has moved into mainstream IT and has now become essential to the business.

SECURING DATA ACCESSED BY MULTIPLE MOBILE DEVICES

The more data, and the more ways to access that data, the larger the attack surface—one that is constantly under threat. While mobile devices are proliferating and increasingly being used to access business email accounts, enterprise WiFi connections, and sometimes the VPN tunnel, they are rapidly becoming the number one target for cybercriminals. This, alongside the necessity of securing sensitive data and protecting private information, creates an untenable situation. How can corporations manage and protect their data when their employees are accessing the database from many diverse and unsecured devices? Security is a major concern with big data, as it is with the growing use of mobile devices in the workplace—think BYOD. In addition, because cloud computing puts more data in motion it causes additional security complexities. Corporations are not only tackling these and other complex security issues, but they are also dealing with increasing global regulations around security, continuously raising the cost of data breaches. Securing data accessed by multiple devices can be done, but the solution has to evolve along with the threats—it’s highly complex because cyberattacks are becoming more sophisticated, frequent, and unpredictable.

FACING INCREASINGLY SOPHISTICATED ATTACKS

If not already established, then an MDM solution must be implemented immediately. Cyberattacks are continuously evolving and increasingly creative. Cyberattacks range from web-based to phishing and social engineering, from malicious code and botnets to denial of service. Take WannaCry, one of the largest global ransomware attacks in the history of the internet, as an example. The criminals rapidly spread malware using a leaked NSA exploit called EternalBlue, infecting hundreds of computers. In 2017, the number of attacks increased: WannaCry, NotPetya, Equifax, and CCleaner—to name just a few.

DEFENDING AGAINST HUMAN FALLIBILITY

In its 2013 report, Forrester Research predicted that payments made via mobile devices in the US will reach a total $90 billion by 2017—up from $12 billion in 2012. And all those mobile devices have people attached to them. How then do you apply safeguards at all levels of IT infrastructure to guard against cyberattacks? When it comes to people, they make mistakes? And when they make a mistake with a connection to the company’s network data, the repercussions to the business could be costly. Education is key. Educating IT people so they know and understand the latest threats and mitigation techniques, train for worst-case scenarios in how to manage a data breach or attack, and recognize the human factor so they are not embarrassed, but rather diligent and self educating. When your IT people become knowledgeable about threats and best practices, it will make it much harder for a cybercriminal to access your data. Raising awareness through education is raising a barrier against human fallibility.

BLURRING THE LINES

With mobile devices being used for personal and professional activities, the line between the office and home is becoming increasingly blurred. With mobile devices attached to the hip of every employee, the way they work has changed dramatically. No longer tied to the office, they check their email whenever and wherever they like, even while watching a ballgame or sitting in traffic. This continuous connectivity poses a major security risk to network data, and because the devices are personally owned it’s extremely difficult to monitor and secure them. One security incident caused by a personal device can expose an entire network to risk. According to the Cisco 2011 Annual Security Report, three out of four employees worldwide have multiple devices, like a laptop and a smartphone, and one in three young professionals use at least three different devices for work. Cisco’s report also found that the most popular mobile platforms—Apple iPhones and iPads and Google Android devices—are now targets for malware. Continued on page 22

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WHERE TO GO FROM HERE

The first step is to implement an MDM solution. If one is already in place, then ensure it has the right security measures. Many of the well-known attacks have used malware variants that could have been blocked with the proper security measures. To guard against these types of attacks, the right knowledge and expertise are required. Unfortunately, supply has not met demand: cybersecurity has faced an increasingly large personnel shortage over the past decade. The talent gap is a global problem. According to a report from US defense giant Raytheon and the National Cyber Security Alliance (NCSA), in 2014 in the US, companies posted 49,493 jobs that require Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) certification, a major cybersecurity qualification. However, only 65,362 people are CISSP certified in total, and most of them already have jobs. Combine the shortfall of qualified employees and the severe shortage of certified cybersecurity professionals—there are more jobs in cybersecurity than people to fill them—with cyberattacks growing in sophistication and frequency, and the picture is bleak. More so when considering the other trends discussed: the complexity of securing data accessed by multiple mobile devices, and defending network data against human fallibility. If an organization does not have the fundamental cybersecurity technologies in place, the requisite certified personnel, and an established MDM solution, then it is only a matter of time before it’s scrambling to put out fires after a cyberattack. Where to go from here is simply this: Implement an MDM solution and hire the certified personnel without delay. Today, mobile device management isn’t a choice—it’s a necessity.

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STEPS TO BEATING AMAZON & WAYFAIR And why, if you are a serious brick-and-mortar retailer, you have a leg up in the retail game

By Andrew Armstrong, Chief Customer Officer â&#x20AC;&#x201C; omNovos Omni-Channel Customer Engagement

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I love disruptive technology. Looking at markets and how they mature and change the way we do things that previously we thought were simple. Recently, I came across an interesting quote that really made me think about the state of retail and what we are seeing in the world today. The quote, which was about how to become profitable these days, was along the lines of, “To create a new game, you don’t need the courage to come up with a radical new idea, you just need the courage to change the way the old game is played.” What did Uber do, for example? They didn’t exactly come up with a new paradigm for giving rides—it wasn’t rocket science to make it easy for someone with a car to offer a lift to someone who needed it. What they really did was change the way the taxi industry had defined the rules, and they had the courage to litigate with cities that tried to call them a taxi service.

THEY CAN’T DO WHAT YOU CAN DO

Retailers who have a brick-and-mortar store are worried about how to compete with Amazon and other large e-commerce retail sites. My advice? Stop worrying. Do to them what they did to you: change the way the game is played. Once you look at it that way, I think it’s quite easy to beat Amazon and Wayfair because, ultimately, these largescale retailers can never do what you can do, and that is: engage with the client. Now, I am not saying you are going to knock Amazon over. But I am saying that you can use the relationships you have with your customers to your advantage: Sell awesome stuff. Create great experiences that customers will talk about that will lead to better keyword rankings—and don’t allow yourself to be destroyed by them. It’s not going to be easy. While I can give you what will sound like five easy steps, there’s a fair amount of work that you’ll need to do. I’m not talking about hard, sweating, gruelling work either. I’m talking about the roll-upyour-sleeves and really get deep-into-your-business kind of work.

WHAT YOU MUST DO

Let’s start with something you are going to need to do that I believe most of the retailers I have talked with so far are fundamentally failing to do: mapping out the customer journey. I don’t mean the Excel spreadsheet type of approach. I mean really get into it—roll-up-your-sleeves and understand what is going through the mind of your customers. Like, what are they doing two or three days before they come to your website? After they decide to come to your store, what are they talking about in the car on the way there? What are they looking forward to—or not? What are they doing while in your store? If you don’t know this customer journey really well, then you have lost to Amazon already because, ultimately, Amazon is offering the customer convenience. I can get most of what I want, including products recommended for me, delivered right to my door by completing a one-click transaction. Who wouldn’t want that? Only someone who hasn’t properly gone through a customer journey. If that is lacking, I may as well just sit at home and order what I think I need from Amazon and wait a couple of days for it to arrive. But human beings like to be out and doing. Shopping is an opportunity for social interaction and we crave that. We crave the surprise and delight that comes with finding something unexpected and being treated like our business matters. And we always will. So, if you’re a merchant, you need to be aware there has been a radical change since the days when all a retailer needed was a nice store with nice products. Today, the customer wants an experience and, if you give them that, those customers are hooked. In fact, there are great brands that have grown quickly with a strong brick-and-mortar play. Brands that have invested in the customer experience and done it right will, on average, see a 38% increase in revenue in less than 12 months. Stop and think about that—even if you don’t believe me and cut this proven, bona fide statistic in half. What I am telling you is that today, as we roll into spring, you have the ability to increase your 2018 Christmas season by at least 19 percent over 2017—if you start to change your customer journey now.

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LET’S GET INTO IT AND START TO LOOK AT WHAT YOU CAN DO

NARROW YOUR NICHE

The strength of large-scale e-commerce retailers is that they have the proverbial endless aisle. They can sell everything and do it efficiently but, as we know, you can’t be good at everything—it’s impossible even if you wanted to. So, you have to narrow your niche and focus on what you do sell. Don’t focus on “everything”; focus on those few things that you do sell—and sell better than anyone else on the planet— in a way the customer finds intriguing. In most cases, the customer will start their journey (in some form or another) on your website, so it’s extremely important to narrow your e-commerce niche and dominate as best you can. How? Through content marketing; specifically, content marketing that is targeted at individuals and that has been developed by having a better understanding of the profile of your website visitors.

Think: When was the last time you received a custom-designed email campaign from Amazon that they did particularly well? It just doesn’t happen. Why? Because it’s impossible for Amazon to do content marketing. So, bam! You have an amazing opportunity to start to get to know your customer by personalizing the interaction with them so you can really get into your niche and rank for all kinds of the required keywords.

DO SOMETHING RADICAL AND INVENTIVE WITH SHIPPING

Quite honestly, if I were the CEO of a retailing company, one of the first phone calls I would make would be to a company like Uber to ask how we could develop a partnership. Are you worried about a customer who comes into your store and checks out a product they weren’t sure about, just so they can order it from Amazon on their mobile phone as soon as they walk out the door? If you are, I’m going right back to customer journey. If this behavior worries you, it’s because you are missing the boat on a great opportunity to create an engagement with the customer and give them a surprise. Can you imagine what would happen if you showed up at, say, a Cirque du Soleil show and they said, “Sorry, we don’t have that act here, but it might be at our other circus location—you should go there and check”? Of course not! Does your customer typically have a busy day? In that case, how about sending that product to them in less than two days. How about having a local delivery service find the product for them, which they then send to the customer’s house, delivering later that same day. My point here isn’t to get into a debate about profitability and the ability to do this—I get that. My point is, can you look at shipping as a way to do something inventive and unexpected for the customer? Whatever you decide to do will depend on what type of customer experience and customer journey you want to create and, like I said before, you need to do the work. What expectation do you want to set, and how can you deliver a surprise to the customer?

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CREATE A SUBSCRIPTION A subscription service is one of the smartest ways to sell a product because you don’t just get a oneand-done transactional experience with your customer. Instead, you not only get a relationship, but also revenue every month or year. You don’t have to be a software provider to make the subscription model work; any form of recurring deliverable warrants recurring payments. To really get to know your customers, you need to look for every possible excuse to have an interaction with them, and a subscription can do that for you. Are you a grocery merchant worried about Amazon’s acquisition of Whole Foods? First of all, don’t be—unless, of course, you don’t have the courage to change the way the game is played. In that case, you should be afraid, because the Whole Foods acquisition probably had a lot to do with data. Amazon desperately needs to understand who their customer is. Remember, they don’t have any form of content marketing and they sell everything, so it’s impossible for them to personalize and engage. The only way they can feed their recommendation engines is to make them smarter, and looking at what I am eating, and how frequently, can actually drive a lot of big-data algorithms to select products that are likely to be of interest.

So, change the game: instead of one-and-done, figure out how you can turn your data engine on and learn more about your customer.

BOAST THAT YOU HAVE THE BEST CUSTOMER SERVICE ON THE PLANET AND THEN RAISE THAT LEVEL EVERY YEAR

It might sound like I am somehow against Amazon but, actually, I’m not—what they have done is amazing. In all honesty, if there were a book that tells us what’s coming for retail and reveals how we will buy things in the future, then I would argue that we are only at chapter 1 or 2 of the first volume in a series called e-commerce. In other words, there are things to come that we haven’t even begun to contemplate yet.

So, I mean no disrespect to Amazon, but they can’t do customer service the way you can, because they are too big. Amazon is never going to offer personalized one-on-one service (well, it’s unlikely) with one human talking to another human to help them create and feel good about a transaction. Therefore, Amazon is unlikely to achieve a virtual standing ovation from a passionate brand evangelist that goes viral. On the other hand, WestJet posts videos around Christmastime every year about how they are doing really cool and amazing stuff for families that are flying over the holidays, and it always results in exactly that type of passionate brand evangelism. Imagine that: What do you think of when you think airline travel? I travel a lot and experience a lot of airlines, and I can say that I am seldom thinking, “This is going to be AH-MAY-ZING!” What a surprise that would be if it were.

Think about the last time you had a great buying experience. It likely had to do with a human being who helped you out. That’s why you are never going to hear chatter about the great buying experience they had on Amazon—there is no one you can talk to at Amazon, even if you wanted to. Simply put, customer service involves personal interaction with, and relationships with, your customers; don’t make it any more complicated than that. All you need to do is provide personal care and be nice about it. I mentioned before that when brands invest in the customer journey, they can make the experience something that gets an average 38% return in less than 12 months. Customer service is where you are going to win, and how you will be remembered. Invest in those relationships— because that investment will serve you well.

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BUILD A FANATICAL FAN BASE This last step is probably the biggest one. Think of your brickand-mortar location as an opportunity to “perform.” Change the rules and make that performance intriguing, and you will have a loyal fan base. Something that I really want you to think about, as well, is how you can create a new lexicon for what you sell. Do you think I might be wrong? “I’ll have a triple grande Mochaccino—no whip.” If I had turned to you 15 years ago and said that, you would have looked at me like I had three heads. Yet, Starbucks transformed the coffee shop into a place where a teleworker can get out of their home and come and work, spend $5 to $7 on a cup of coffee, and connect with a loyalty engine and a fanatical fan base that loves the same product. Fans who engage. Starbucks changed the way you order a coffee, changed the way your coffee is made (right in front of you), changed the way you get a coffee—complete with your own name on it—and they changed the way you enjoy the coffee, if you stay there to finish it. Starbucks changed nothing about coffee and lattes; they changed the way the game is played. Engage, engage, engage. I would say that Starbucks is now one of the best omni-channel retailers out there, enabling me to shop in the store for a coffee using my mobile phone as easily as walking up to a barista and ordering one.

DIG DEEPER INTO THE DATA

I cannot stress this enough. You have to figure out that customer journey, and I mean really figure it out. Push deeper. If you think you already have a customer journey laid out, let me tell you, you haven’t gone deep enough and you haven’t looked at a single user profile enough to really know your customer. Don’t be ashamed or alarmed; most retailers haven’t—how could they? Most retailers I’ve talked to don’t have much more than a first and last name and an email address in their CRM or loyalty system. Without data, you can’t know who your customer is. I would hate to be a retailer who has jeans for men and women and needs to send an email to Pat Smith and sibling, Robin. Don’t send them a promotion for the wrong jeans, or neither is coming back! Yes, I’m aware there are some serious issues plaguing retailers, and it’s likely Amazon that caused them. But stop. Take a breath, and realize that your business has to change and that you need to look at your business as an opportunity to engage and develop strong personalized relationships and experiences with your customer. The retailers that do this will succeed and see their business grow. I’m passionate about helping to make that happen, as I think there’s a real opportunity here to successfully ride a disruption wave. Seize it—map it out—and be successful.

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IT Infrastructure Transparency & the Modern Enterprise By Craig S. Mullins, President & Principal Consultant – Mullins Consulting, Inc.

Today’s modern data centers are composed of many different systems. They work both independently and in conjunction with one another to deliver business services— an ecosystem of hardware, software, network resources, and services required to operate and manage an enterprise IT environment.

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The Challenges of the Modern Age

4. Application delivery

It can be challenging for IT architects and executives to keep up with the burgeoning IT infrastructure. Homogeneous systems were common in the early days of computing, but most medium to large organizations today have adopted heterogeneous systems. For example, it is not uncommon for Linux, Unix, and Windows servers to be deployed throughout a modern IT infrastructure. And for larger shops, add in mainframes, too.

1. Impact of multiple types of servers

And when multiple types of servers are deployed that impacts everything else. Different operating systems, software, and services are required for each type of server. Data, quite frequently, must be shared between the disparate applications running on different servers, which requires additional software, networking, and services to be deployed. The modern computing infrastructure is inherently complex.

2. Rapidly changing technology

Technology is always changing—and hopefully advancing— but definitely different from last year. Consider the database management system (DBMS). Most organizations have anywhere from three to ten different DBMSs. Just a decade ago, it was a safe bet that most of them were SQL/relational, but with big data and mobile requirements many NoSQL database systems are being deployed. And NoSQL does not rely on an underlying model like relational, every NoSQL DBMS is different from every other NoSQL DBMS. And let’s not forget Hadoop, which is not a DBMS, but can be used as a data persistence layer for unstructured data of all types and is frequently used to deploy data lakes.

3. Cloud computing

Consider the impact of cloud computing: the storing and accessing of data and programs over the internet instead of your own servers. As organizations adopt cloud strategies, components of their IT infrastructure will move from onpremises to the cloud. What used to reside in-house— whether at your organization or at an outsourced location— now requires a combination of in-house and external computing resources. This is a significant change.

Application delivery has changed significantly as well. Agile development methodologies combined with continuous delivery and DevOps enable application development to produce software in short cycles, with quicker turnaround times than ever before. With micro-services and APIs, software components developed by independent teams can be combined to interact and deliver business service more reliably and quicker than with traditional methodologies, such as the waterfall model. This means that not just the procured components of your IT infrastructure are changing, but your in-house developed applications are changing more rapidly than ever before, too.

And there is no end in sight as technology marches forward and your IT infrastructure morphs to adopt new and useful components. The end result is a modern, but more complex environment that is more difficult to understand, track, and manage. Nevertheless, few would dispute that it is imperative to keep up with modern developments to ensure that your company is achieving the best possible return on its IT investment. But keeping track of it all can be daunting. It is easy to miss systems and components of your infrastructure as you work to understand and manage the cost and value of your technology assets. And, you cannot accurately understand the cost of your IT infrastructure, let alone be sure that you are protecting and optimizing it appropriately, if you do not know everything that you are using. In other words, without transparency there is anarchy and confusion.

The message in the black box

The goal of IT must be to run it like a business, instead of as a cost center. It is often the case that senior executives view IT as a black box; they know it requires capital outlays but have no solid understanding as to where the money goes or how expenditures enable IT to deliver business value. On the other hand, it is not uncommon for senior IT managers to look at company expectations as unrealistic given budget and human resource constraints.

IT activities lack financial visibility

The problem is that there has been no automated, accurate method for managing and providing financial visibility into IT activities. Budget pressure and IT complexity have conspired to make it more and more difficult to provide IT cost transparency.

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Software that delivers IT cost transparency

A new category of software is emerging that delivers cost transparency for IT organizations. The software offers automatic discovery of IT assets with the ability to provide cost details for each asset. By applying analytics to the IT infrastructure and cost data, the software can offer a clear picture of the cost of providing applications and services to your enterprise. This useful insight enables CIOs and other IT managers to make faster, fact-based decisions about provisioning and purchases. The capabilities of such software can vary by vendor and solution, but capabilities to look for include:

Automated collection of IT asset details Tracking of operational metrics and usage Cost modeling capabilities Executive and CIO dashboard Custom reporting and analysis Forecasting and budgeting Chargeback reporting and billing capabilities ROI analysis for IT projects

IT cost transparency software benefits •

IT cost transparency is not just a solution for improved communication. By using IT cost transparency software to model and track the total cost to deliver and maintain IT software and services, better decisions can be made. For example, infrastructure components like servers and storage arrays are frequently deployed with more power or capacity than is needed.

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Such over-provisioning—whether it is CPU, memory, storage or any other IT asset—costs money and wastes resources. With an accurate view of what is being used, how it is being used, and what it costs, it becomes possible to provision capacity as needed. Not provisioning until necessary can significantly reduce costs by delaying spending as well as taking advantage of Moore’s Law— or the tendency for capacity and performance to increase while cost decreases for technology over time.

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With an accurate view into your IT infrastructure and its cost it becomes easier to keep your IT and business initiatives on track. Armed with accurate data, your business and IT teams can better align investment with goals and therefore better manage budgets and spending. Cost transparency solutions provide decision-makers with knowledge of where money is actually being spent throughout the business. IT leaders can use this information to make accurate decisions about current allocations and future investments.

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Chargeback for IT services has traditionally been troublesome for organizations with a complex IT infrastructure. How can you accurately charge for IT services when you may not know all of the services being delivered and on what components, let alone the actual cost of those services? IT cost transparency can be used to drive service-level agreements (SLAs) based on actual costs and requirements.

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IT cost transparency can be a significant help for outsourced IT departments. An actual accounting of the real IT costs can help you to negotiate—or renegotiate— your outsourcing contract and bill.

Armed with the facts provided by IT cost transparency, CIOs can accurately discuss budget allocations with business executives. When you understand your IT infrastructure and know what you spend on IT resources and applications, your company can make informed decisions because they know where the money is spent.

Attempting to understand the cost of IT is too frequently a one-off effort conducted to address a crisis such as an audit, a contract negotiation or to define a new budget. A better approach is to understand your IT infrastructure and the cost of IT services and software with a proactive approach using automated IT cost transparency software. Let’s face it, we’ve been living with anarchy for too long and an informed, automated, analytical approach to managing IT costs is long overdue.

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2020s THE MAINFRAME IN THE

BY LARRY STRICKLAND – CHIEF PRODUCT OFFICER– DATAKINETICS | DATA PERFORMANCE & OPTIMIZATION

A countless number of mainframe articles exist about whether you should stay on the mainframe or get off it. As you can imagine, most vendors who are mainframe-specific will typically tell you that if you stay on the platform it’s cheaper and more reliable than any other platform out there.

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MAINFRAME USE PREDICTED TO INCREASE

This is true. Particularly for the large-scale, revenue-generating applications that are in use by the Fortune 500 today. In fact, BMC recently released its annual mainframe study that shows mainframe use is likely to continue and even increase. I get opportunities to talk with many CFOs and CIOs of the largest companies in the world, and I can believe that point. I’m not hearing much of an anti-mainframe sentiment. Instead, I hear more about the common issues facing business today: My business is hard, competition is tough. I need to cut costs and increase market share. That’s not really a mainframe issue per se. That’s an issue about making good choices with technology. Companies that rely on DevOps and the practices related to it, are going to say you can increase your reliance on mainframes by adopting agile processes. Likely, that’s true. But then you really need to look at best-of-breed performance and optimization practices to get the most out of your mainframe system.

DO MORE WITH LESS

Investing not only in the DevOps paradigm, but also in IT analytics to truly understand how to tie together company revenue against IT investment to help manage and direct those costs, will lead you to making the investment decisions required. You’ll pull on two levers at once by increasing profitability while building a system that will handle more transactions. You do more with less. Other vendors will suggest that their tools will give you a straightforward process for moving large-scale enterprise applications to other platforms, such as Windows or Linux, and they’ll likely do this by focusing on a target platform that is classically JAVA or .NET based. This may also be true if you are still one of the few people who has an application that is not accounting for revenue and is more a functional piece of logic that is required to run your business, such as payroll or logistics. If you still have that and it’s an application accounting for cost and not revenue, then you should be moving to an application like that from your mainframe— if for no other reason than leaving those cycles to do what they do best for you, and that is make you money. Be careful on the revenue front as, for the most part, these suppliers typically fail to mention that many mainframe applications include workloads that use COBOL, PL/1, and possibly mainframe assembler. Moving these workloads is not straightforward and not easy, and comes with a risk that may impact revenue.

ARE MAINFRAMES “LEGACY?”

I don’t know. They have been around for a long time and for good reason. It doesn’t take much to find the stats surrounding mainframes and it’s pretty impressive what they do, have done, and will continue to do. IBM invests heavily in the mainframe. It has created mainframe technology that is groundbreaking and nothing short of amazing. Even so, some suppliers discredit mainframes and have created a marketing buzzword—“legacy”— to describe them. It's as if the use of such a word could discredit mainframes in the face of cost-of-ownership (COO) and return on investment (ROI) studies showing that, in certain circumstances, the mainframe computing environment may be less costly and less complex than moving workloads from a single mainframe system to a herd of commodity servers. If you look at the newest IBM processor for the mainframe, it includes not only a fair amount of computing power, but also some interesting microprocessing. This manages memory, security and complex computational workloads right within the silicon itself, driving the profitability of many of the largest companies in the world. Additionally, it’s built upon some 50 years of use within the industry. That’s pretty solid in a world of tighter and tighter shareholder demands.

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WHY ARE ENTERPRISES STAYING ON THE MAINFRAME?

Enterprises, however, have kept their mainframes and, if the BMC study is to be believed, are increasing their use of the platform. "Why are they staying on the mainframe?" is a legitimate question in the face of all the market activity to get enterprises to change. Talking with people, it apparently has a lot to do with revenue and profitability and fitting the right type of computing against the right type of workload to forecast business and shareholder dividends with a greater degree of accuracy. Likely there are other reasons, but disruption to fin tech with technologies like Blockchain and personalized unified commerce is just around the corner. Therefore, to embrace these technologies to help drive more revenue, it makes a lot more sense to engage a lot closer to the system of record, which is the mainframe, so this does seem to corroborate the BMC study. Enterprises have to consider, in their IT environment and with their applications, if a distributed computing environment would be better than a centralized one. They also must consider if a patchwork quilt management and monitoring environment will introduce simplicity and cost savings over a more centralized management approach. They should also consider security and reliability issues that might arise in a distributed, multi-platform, multi-vendor computing environment, which is a complex set of considerations—you can’t really make any one decision in the absence of another. Thus, it’s no wonder we are seeing hybrid environments in today’s large businesses that include distributed, mainframe, on-premises, and cloud-based computing.

LOOKING AHEAD TO THE 2020S

Like many things in life there is no answer that universally applies across the board. I’ve found that every customer is unique and the challenges of their IT strategy and implementation are just as unique as the customers themselves, and in the way they service their customers. I do think we will continue to see mainframe computing into the 2020s, and well beyond. You can’t unify the multiple types of computing requirements down to a single platform that will handle the cost of running your business as easily as the profit and revenue generation of your business. What will the future hold? Who knows? But in the meantime, it will just mean some good analytical working—you know, “legacy” analytical working.

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Focus your Business

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SIX WAYS TO IMPROVE DATACENTER PERFORMANCE WHILE SAVING ON COSTS By Keith Allingham, Marketing Manager â&#x20AC;&#x201C; DataKinetics Data Performance & Optimization

SMART TECHNOLOGY SOLUTIONS In Part I (DirectionIT Issue #7), we talked about the top four typical solutions for improving performance in the mainframe datacenter, and they didn’t all deliver good results. In this issue, we look at six more possibilities—all low-risk and all highly effective. There are many smart technology solutions provided by IBM, the big VAR players, and the smaller specialty VAR players in the mainframe ecosystem. These are proven technologies that have been improving system performance and saving on costs in large corporate datacenters for years. Here are six of the best of the best.

IN-MEMORY TECHNOLOGY People keeping up with the buzz in the tech business have been familiar with the concept of in-memory databases for five years or more, within the context of Big Data and data analytics. With the plummeting cost of memory, it only made sense to put as much data as possible into memory and to access it from there, bypassing the physical/mechanical I/O portion of data reads and writes. First there were hybrid disk/memory databases, followed by databases that are 100% in-memory. But it started long before that. The truth is that in-memory technology has been around for a very long time—it has been with us since the beginning of computing—if you think of caching and buffering techniques. A completely different type of in-memory technology—high performance in-memory technology— has been running in mainframe systems for decades, and it continues to do so in most of the large finance and insurance systems running today. It’s a tried-and-true technology that enables processing to finish faster, use fewer system resources (CPU, I/O, MSU), and to consume less operational costs. If IT organizations are looking for a magic bullet, a solution that improves performance at the same time that it helps to control cost, it’s right there under their noses.

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IT BIG DATA AND ANALYTICS Anyone keeping up with the buzz in the tech business is also aware of Big Data as it has been talked about to death, and then some. But that’s for a good reason: the enterprise data that large businesses possess—information about their customers, their location, their transaction records, their buying habits, you name it—is a highly valuable resource for extracting critical intelligence through the use of analytics. We know the value of the data, and we know that it can make all the difference in marketing and sales efforts, the bottom line, and the future of the business.

But customer data isn’t the only data that has been collected by IT organizations. There is another type of data that is being collected continuously, including right now as you read this article. It’s called IT data, actually, IT Big Data. It comprises all of the data that you’re logging on your servers, your distributed servers, both within your datacenters and within your service providers’ datacenters, as well as your mainframe server data. This data contains information about your IT resource usage and, through the use of analytics, it can tell you how much memory your servers are using versus how much is available, how many CPU cores are configured versus how many are needed for your current workloads, etc. It can also tell you how much CPU and MSU you’re using, and who is using it.

This data is no less important than any other data you are collecting. It can tell you how much you are spending on IT resource usage right down to the department, application, and user. It can tell you how and where you can save money just by being more efficient. It can tell you how efficient your outsourcers are, and whether or not they are helping you or hindering you with cost optimization. It can help to turn your IT organization from a giant cost center to a window on the efficiency of your entire business.

SMART MOBILE DEVELOPMENT There has also been a tremendous amount of buzz over how mobile is one of the biggest disruptors in business over the last few years—actually, for a decade or more. By now you know that failure to respond to your customers’ mobile needs is a direct invitation for them to start looking elsewhere; in effect, pushing your customers to your competition—businesses that are providing the mobile connectivity that your customers want. Most large banks now provide some level of mobile capability to their customers. And most forward-thinking businesses are now moving in that direction. For companies that still do not provide mobile access to customers, especially those running mainframe systems in their datacenters, they face an uphill battle. Their mainframe applications were never designed for a mobile interface. Many IT leaders in this predicament feel that the only way out is to duplicate the capabilities of their existing mainframe applications, but rebuilt from the ground up as mobile applications. Beyond the enormous cost of such an endeavor, it also means that COBOL applications, that were designed decades ago and updated on a regular basis, now have to be reverse engineered. The reason is that the original program designers are long gone, and anyone with deep insight into how they work has either moved on, retired, or looking to retire. The smart way out is to use a mobile solution that allows new development to leverage the legacy mainframe applications, as opposed to duplicating them or replacing them. A sort of hybrid development solution. Such a solution removes most of the risk involved in providing mobile capabilities to a mainframe house. The mainframe applications have worked well for years, and still work flawlessly; why not leverage them, rather than reinvent the wheel? Today’s programmers can use a solution like this as no new COBOL or even DBA work is required. With this technique, mobile programmers use a modern toolset to connect to the legacy applications, using the modern languages they are used to. They focus on the mobile interface, and do not have to recreate legacy logic. Development time and development cost using this technique is far less than any ground-up technique—by a factor of 10 or better. This is truly a low-risk, high-reward solution.

SQL QUALITY AUTOMATION AND CONTROL

Tight and efficiently designed Db2 applications can be undermined by inefficient SQL statements. Hidden and hard to find SQL inefficiencies can hamper productivity and dramatically affect costs. If they remain hidden, the ongoing performance drain can drastically impact performance and worse: the performance of future workloads. The problem can be far more serious in outsourced Db2 development and support environments, where control of development and test processes may not be very effective (or visible). Exacerbating the problem, SQL continues to become more and more complex, as each new version of Db2 introduces more functionality and, therefore, complexity. And with the growth and now dominance of dynamic SQL, programmers often have to deal with mixed dynamic and static SQL environments. What solutions are out there? There is some thought that monitoring can solve SQL quality problems, but this is true only for new problems that arise within production systems. For those SQL bottlenecks that have existed since day one, monitoring will not help. The better solution is an automated quality control of SQL that can be applied in development, test, and production environments. Certainly, you want to be able to solve SQL quality issues as early as possible—on the developer’s desktop if possible. But you also need a way to validate the SQL that’s running right now on your production systems. This type of solution would also mitigate the quality risks involved in Db2 development or maintenance outsourcing.

SMART CAPPING Tell anyone in a large mainframe datacenter about capping and their eyes will glass over, and they will stop listening to you completely. That’s because capping is one big no-no when it comes to running business-critical transaction processing—it’s a bad word. The last thing you want getting in the way of your critical processing is performance capping. Slow down your processing—on purpose? No thanks, and there’s the door; don’t let it hit you on the way out. The purpose of capping in the first place was to help control costs in the mainframe datacenter. Unfortunately, it’s a misunderstood concept. The right idea is to cap low-priority workloads, leaving high-priority workloads to complete without capping. However, the details are sometimes difficult to grasp, and to be fair, it’s a challenging feature to run effectively. It can also be risky to manually make changes to system capacity settings as erroneous performance capping of critical workloads is something that occasionally happens, with disastrous results. Fortunately, there are a small number of third-party vendors specializing in this specific area. They automate system capacity settings is such a way that critical workload capping is not a risk, and system resources can be shared between LPARs, giving more resources to critical workloads when needed.

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SMART DATA REPLICATION Most of the large banks and insurance companies in the US and around the world have multi-platform datacenters that are a mix of mainframe and mid-range servers. Different user groups use different platforms, but in some cases, they require the same data. For example, a transaction processing application on a mainframe system may require some specific customer data to complete a transaction—it gets that data from the Db2 database attached to the z13 mainframe system in the Dallas datacenter. Meanwhile, a customer service agent may require that same data to answer questions put forth by that same customer during a support call. The agent gets that data from the customer service network server running Windows NT in the Kansas City datacenter.

In some instances, that customer service data is out of date by minutes, hours, or even days because of the data replication techniques used to share data across the datacenter (and datacenters) for all users to access. The reason for replicating data is simple: IT organizations don’t want customer service agents directly accessing mainframe data because of the risk and extra load represented by that type of access, which is understandable. So, data replication is a requirement, and there are many ways to do that. One popular technique is ETL (Extract, Transform and Load), basically copying all of the data from one database to another. A serious problem with ETL is that it’s a time-consuming and resource-consuming process as it consumes large amounts of server resources, as well as large amounts of network resources. And the result is typically data that’s up to a day old, in some cases, it’s older. ETL is an important part of a datacenter’s emergency backup plan, and isn’t going away anytime soon. However, as a daily replication tool, it’s left wanting. A better technique is to use a fast replication technique that employs a speed-optimized CDC (Changed Data Capture). And using one tool that does it all is preferable: one that is multi-platform, multi-OS, and multidatabase format capable. Using this technique ensures that replicated data is accurate at all times as it’s virtually a real-time solution. That mainframe application and the customer service agent will be using the same data.

SIX WAYS TO DO THE IMPOSSIBLE Increases in business translate into increased transaction processing, and increased transaction processing costs—this in conjunction with rising costs all around such as personnel, power consumption, and so on—leave CIOs and managers looking for ways to control costs anywhere and everywhere. For the most part, companies will continue to rely on the “tried-and-true” solutions, some of which make sense, although limited in vision. And most of these are alarmingly risky, costly, or both. Cases exist where these types of solutions will make sense, but there are just as many where unnecessary risks are being made, and where money is being left on the table. These six smart solutions include some of the most effective techniques that IT leaders can follow to help control rising costs, all while improving system performance. They are mainframe IT best-practices that have been used and are being used today by some of the biggest and most successful companies on the planet.

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