Already one of the largest tech companies in the world, EMC has worked hard to engineer billions of dollars-worth of acquisitions over the past few years which have propelled it into an even more powerful and influential position. Its software presence is now significant - as is its participation in all of the various dimensions of IT - from storage to hardware to applications to security.
Jeffrey Nick, senior VP and chief technology officer for EMC, took the stage at Software 2007 last month to deliver a keynote address which took advantage of EMC's big-picture view to deliver a glimpse of IT's next set of advancements and opportunity areas.
Forces in the IT Vortex
Nick began by describing the big picture of forces which shape today's IT landscape.
"There is a set of forces in the IT vortex as I call it: information, infrastructure and applications - really make up the elements of IT - and interaction is how we interact with our IT infrastructures...
First, from an information asset perspective, we are experiencing an explosion in digital information of all types - rich media, documents, content of all forms.
From an infrastructure perspective, we are facing more and more complexity as the network becomes more the central nervous system of the distributed infrastructure, and 'connecting the dots' between all the infrastructure elements now needs to be done to recompose IT back into a coherent stack.
From an applications perspective, we've seen that integration and Web 2.0 capabilities are really where the technologies are driving us.
From an interaction perspective, bandwidth and ubiquitous connectivity are enabling worldwide reach, global organizations and a new way of computing with Web 2.0."
Explosion in Information and Complexity
The new issues which arise from an ever-increasing volume of information, mounding complexity and only modest increases in IT management budgets will pose significant challenges for CIOs and vendors alike.
"The information explosion last year alone generated more than 3 million-times the amount of digital information that has been captured in written history for mankind. That's an incredible number and it is validated by the IDC study on the Digital Universe. That's about 161 exabytes of information.
By 2010, it is projected that that number will grow six-fold to 988 exabytes of digital information of all forms... By 2010, we will have over 2 billion email boxes to protect and backup. YouTube hosts over 100 million video streams per day. We share billions of songs over the internet. This is an information explosion.
Somehow organizations are going to have to figure out how to manage all this information - how do you back it up, protect it, be sure that it is compliant, how do you archive it, how do you find it and use it?
From a complexity perspective, it is interesting that human costs are actually dominating the IT bill. With organizational budgets growing at approximately 4 to 5 percent annually, how do you reconcile that with the information explosion?
Most importantly, given the distributed infrastructure, given componentization, commoditization, network distribution and disaggregation... How do you create an end-to-end linkage from the business process to the IT elements to figure out if you are getting quality of service?
The integration explosion is all about SOA [Services-Oriented Architecture.] Web services enabling real-time delivery of applications, application architectures are becoming loosely connected... for 'plugability' and interoperability. What this is really offering is a way to do composition of applications instead of very low level, tight, application development... This is definitely an explosion on the vector of applications.
What does this mean? A chasm is occurring between business process management and application composition and delivery, and IT infrastructure - which is still very much delivered 'by the pound.' If you navigate through applications and their deployment through business process tools and you orchestrate them through Web services, how do you then tie that to the IT infrastructure to deliver the qualities of service that the applications and business processes are requesting through policy? It is very difficult if you're talking about config parameters down at a device or a switch.
There has also been a bandwidth and connectivity explosion on the interaction dimension... Information has no boundaries on any of our devices... What is our computer anymore? For my kids, their computer is their cell phone... The richness of interaction is changing forever the way that we interact with IT."
IT Inflection Points
The forces driving the IT industry today will collide to create a variety of IT opportunities and challenges. Nick says modeling and service orchestration will be useful tools in this new world.
"IT inflection points are where any two of these forces come together - wherever there is a collision, there is an inflection point that is both a challenge and opportunity.
If you look at where application modeling and composition and business processes and orchestration and SOA and Web 2.0 meet traditional IT infrastructures which are managed through configurations, knobs and dials and parameters, we find a critical need to realign IT infrastructure with the business processes and the applications that comprise them through service orientation... Here I'm not speaking about SOA from the perspective of applications, I'm speaking about services -oriented architectures applied to the IT infrastructure management itself.
This comes in two key flavors. First, we need to extract up above the physical IT elements using modeling so that we can reason about the IT elements as they relate to other IT elements in the assembly or composition of business processes.
Think of it as the skeletal structure which makes up the organism. You need to be able to understand the dependencies between the server, the network, storage, information assets, databases, file systems and deployed application instances that comprise a business process. If you can't reason about them in that way, as a composition and its dependencies, you can't figure out what changes in the infrastructure actually mean in business terms to the business processes being served.
This is a model-based abstraction proposition. There are technologies that do this... We are at an inflection point where to deal with this complexity, we need modeling and model-based abstraction to connect dots between IT infrastructure asset elements and the business processes being served.
Then we need IT Service Orchestration. The way that you want to interact in a dynamic information and application world with loosely- coupled, service-oriented, business process workflows and composition, is we need to similarly orchestrate IT in terms of provisioning, security, data migration and assembly. We need to be able to similarly orchestrate IT through service interfaces that do not expose all of the details of the implementation underneath.
How about where information explosion meets IT infrastructure complexity? Here, with a 4-5 percent increase in resources for IT management and 3 million-times the amount of digital information ever recorded in history before - we have to take people out of the low-level management loop: Backup processing, data classification, compliance and management, archival... We need to automate the processes for information management and govern them in accordance with policy so that the products behave in an integrated suite in a way that does the bidding of the business instead of the business being a slave to the tools."
The Future of Information Infrastructure
Nick explains that the industry needs to think differently about data in order to turn information into knowledge, and move towards what may become "Web 3.0."
"Where interaction and global connectivity and collaboration tools and Web 2.0 meets information... from heterogenous sources, we want to turn that information into knowledge. But it's not just full text anymore. What we need to focus on is the semantics of the information that is actually being exposed.
We need to be able to compose information into assemblies like we do with modeling IT elements. Just like we look at CMDBs for IT infrastructure discovery, we need to think about loosely coupled federated repositories for metadata about the information.
If we do that modeling, then we can do what I call 'ontological views.' By that I mean that the creation of information is decoupled from the use of information. The applications that are using information are pulling information from different sources and different forms in next-generation business processes and information analytics.
What that requires is a way to navigate through the info elements so that they have similar tagging and attributes so that you can act reasonably about it and draw value from the data itself. That is data turned into knowledge. We are seeing this all over in all kinds of different fields - health care, radiology, financial analysis, and so on.
Where interaction meets applications, we are really approaching what I call 'edgeless computing.' The grid computing constructs allow multiorganizational sharing of resources and dynamic assembly, SaaS, local/remote transparency, and Web 2.0 - which is really about changing from producer-oriented IT capabilities to user-oriented capabilities.
Where this is all headed? Your guess is as good as mine. But if we can expose not just applications as a service, but functional delivery as a service and if we use SOA and Web 2.0, then we can deliver them. Then those functions will no longer be tightly bound to a particular IT organization, deployment or implementation...
With that model, we can move to deliver global access to both consumers and enterprises. A lot of the companies that are exploring capabilities like grid and SaaS are looking to expand downstream into consumer or SOHO or SMB from enterprise. It is not about delivering capability by the pound, it is about delivering a service.
Most importantly, it affords dynamic business composition. If we can assemble businesses in a SOA model, why can't we assemble SaaS services in a similar model? Maybe it is Web 3.0 - where new businesses are enabled by the ability of to actually compose the infrastructure services they need, applications services they need, that support their business model and plan, and then they focus on the value-added delivery of new capability to market in a rapidly accelerated model.
I know this is a vision. I know this is a bit far out. But the opportunities are there. There is work going on in the industry - in every single area of the landscape - and it is certainly true that it is going on inside EMC."
Learn how EMC is acting on these inflection points with the EMC Innovation Network in the complete video of Jeff Nick's Software 2007 keynote address at the post-conference video page.
Maryann Jones Thompson is editor of Sand Hill Group and SandHill.com.