JP Morgenthal

Application development has been moving in the direction of platform abstraction. That is, the need for developers to have detailed knowledge of the infrastructure that the application was being deployed on was becoming less important with increasing sophistication of the application platform for which they were developing. Cloud computing is now reversing this course of action, at least in the short term. Actually, the platform abstraction is a bit of a misnomer since the implementation resulted in operations struggling to tweak the infrastructure to meet performance requirements. Additionally, most applications typically had their own dedicated hardware allowing for specialization to meet the needs of the applications deployed on that hardware. So, more accurately, cloud computing illustrates the flaws in the approach of pure platform abstraction and a ‘Chinese W... (more)

The Key to Private Cloud Is Removing IT Stratification

One of the leading problems plaguing IT organizations is the high costs of operations and maintenance.  The industry average is roughly 70% with some organizations going as high as 90%. Picking apart these costs one often finds a stratified organization focused on narrow bands of computing with little crossover between the bands. Moreover, the weighting of political density between layers often makes it too risky for basic collaboration between the stratified layers. Hence, when problems arise, each layer attempts to solve the problems only with the tools at their disposal. The r... (more)

IT-as-a-Service and the Facebook Effect

I’ve recently been theorizing around a new model for IT transformation. There’s anecdotal evidence that, in general, business problems tend to change slower than the rate of technology innovation. Thus, we can discern that IT has focused on the application of technical innovation to solve existing business problems in more effective ways versus using technology innovation to solve only new problems or continually having to evolve the solution to an existing business problem. The figure below illustrates a generally-observed pattern in IT. Existing problems move to the new platfo... (more)

The Path to the Intelligent Cloud

Let's face it right now the cloud is pretty immature. The level of automation and management of these environments are analogous to the early assembly lines, but it won't be this way long. This is not the industrial revolution and it moves at a wicked fast pace. Before we know it the next generation of cloud computing will be upon us and it will be very different than the IaaS/PaaS/SaaS offerings we know today. For one, it will be intelligent. That is, the cloud will be content aware and it's network connections will act like mycelia hyphae and what one hyphae learns will become ... (more)

Why Poor Data Classification in Government Will Impact BYOD

In recent discussions with IT leaders from both federal and Department of Defense sides of US government, representatives stated that they are having a heck of a time accommodating expansive growth in mobile computing. This is critical given that today, in most cases, agencies and departments still have control over which mobile devices can be used. In the future, these executives realize that the changing demographics of contractors and employees means they will not only need to support continually growing traffic, multiple presentations and increased asset management, but will ... (more)