The traditional business model for acquiring storage capacity is challenged by today’s business realities. Utility Ready Storage solution is designed for organizations that require greater flexibility in IT resources because of variable and uncertain business demands and that want IT costs to reflect the business value delivered. Utility Ready Storage integrates products and services, to deliver IT resources when they are needed, where they are needed, with payment based on usage. As an example Storage as a Service options are quite suitabe for non-critical data.
One of the biggest providers of this type of services is HP. The HP Utility Ready Storage program is a utility pricing solution that allows you to select the storage configuration and software appropriate for you and pay monthly based on the amount of storage capacity configured for use. HP utility ready storage helps you to cut costs and free up your resource for innovation and savings. In addition to these benefits, by using HP’s Utility Ready Storage offerings one can start up a company to sell Storage as a Service (STaaS).
For some, strategic spending takes a back seat to tactical spending. Many companies will not want to risk huge strategic investments in IT for the next two years or so while there is still an economic downturn. They will be looking for tactical gains, in other words quick projects that deliver quick results. Cash is an increasingly scarce resource and will restrict investments for many including startups, not just for companies at the edge of bankruptcy. In addition economic downturn will further contribute to the early adoption of STaaS (Storage as a Service) from my point of view.
Just to name some of the advantages of Storage as a Service, it
- ensures that costs are aligned with usage.
- eliminates large up-front storage investments.
- provides reserve capacity that can improve service levels by ensuring that the capacity is available when needed.
- makes the cost of storage visible for better decision making.
- results in less frequent procurement and ensures storage capacity never runs out.
If you want to have more discussion about HP’s offerings around Utility Ready Storage, please do not hesitate to contact with me.
Direct Marketing: You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, “I am very rich. Marry me!”
Advertising: You’re at a party with a bunch of friends and see a gorgeous girl. One of your friends goes up to her and pointing at you says, “He’s very rich. Marry him.”
Telemarketing: You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and get her telephone number. The next day you call and say “Hi, I’m very rich. Marry me.”
Public Relations: You’re at a party and see a gorgeous girl. You get up and straighten your tie; you walk up to her and pour her a drink. You open the door for her, pick up her bag after she drops it, offer her a ride, and then say, “By the way, I’m very rich. Will you marry me?”
Brand Recognition: You’re at a party and see a gorgeous girl. She walks up to you and says, “You are very rich..”
Customer Feedback: You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, “I’m rich. Marry me” She gives you a nice hard slap on your face.
Demand and Supply Gap: You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and say, “I am very rich. Marry me!” And she introduces you to her husband
Competition: You see a gorgeous girl at a party. You go up to her and before you say, “I am very rich. Marry me!” she turns her face towards you———— she is your wife!
Yesterday I got a phone call from one of my fellow student from KTH (Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm) regarding their project final presentation date. They are working on a project aiming on providing open source high definition video conference system. The presentation and exhibition date of their project are this 16th of October 2009 and next 19th of October 2009, and they sincerely welcome you to their presentation and exhibition.
I have presented my master thesis last week and started to work for HP as a junior product chef. I have spent more than 4 months to complete my master thesis and the most single difficult part for me was the writing part. I think it is crucial to have good communication with your academic supervisor, since he/she decides how you should write and how much you should write. After this master thesis I began to abhor the communication problems. Giving an example, I wrote 100 pages at the beginning and spent almost 3 weeks to write it, then my supervisor wanted me to cut it down to 30 pages (max.). It was a very big hassle. Moreover, my supervisor did not want me to do those changes with alacrity. Because of that I had to wait two more months before I present my master thesis. Any way it is still good that I have the rights to decry my supervisor and my own work. By the way, my academic supervisor was Gustaf Juell-Skielse from KTH and he is a very experienced Accenture consultant. I have learned a lot from him and he has incisive comments which make me work harder and harder. But my recommendation for those of you, who will write master thesis, is that; talk to your supervisor very very clearly at the beginning. What he/she wants you to do, how much and how does he/she want you to write and so on. Because time management is difficult and you might waste your time if your supervisor changes his/her mind.
However, it was a priceless experience to work in one of the biggest energy companies at Europe and has an experienced academic supervisor back at school. Even if I had some difficult times to finish my thesis, I liked it and enjoyed a lot. In case you need, I am sharing my final master thesis (believe me, this is the real final version:) ) and my final presentation down here:
I have written my master thesis about SAP systems integration at one of the biggest energy companies in Europe. The company is called Vattenfall and owned by Swedish government. Since the size of the company is large, so that the data size which will be transferred within and outside of the company is also large. Thats why systems integration plays a very crucial role in Vattenfall’s IT concerns. The company is very much SAP centric and the SAP systems are increasing in number and size. This increasing trend intensifies the need for SAP systems integration and an integration platform, which is the most plug and play integration engine for SAP systems, could be of benefit. That’s why I made a qualitative study to evaluate SAP NetWeaver PI to help Vattenfall Nordic to decide whether it can be used as main integration platform at Vattenfall Nordic instead of BizTalk.
SAP PI is coming! I think the product will be used more commonly once SAP solves the core problems. For example SAP PI is a dual stack product and complex to configure, use and manage. The product is very much based on hub and spoke, centralized architecture. But I think it must be (will be) 100% java based, distributed product. Also SAP NetWeaver BPM and PI are emerging more and more. These are all good things for the future of the product. As I mentioned before, PI is coming and will be used commonly in SAP depended companies!
Matthew E. May is the author of In Pursuit of Elegance: Why the Best Ideas Have Something Missing and the ChangeThis manifesto called Creative Elegance. He spent nearly a decade as a close adviser to Toyota and works with creative teams and senior leaders at a number of top Fortune companies.
1. Question: How do you define elegance?
Answer: Something is elegant if it is two things at once: unusually simple and surprisingly powerful. One without the other leaves you short of elegant. And sometimes the “unusual simplicity” isn’t about what’s there, it’s about what isn’t. At first glance, elegant things seem to be missing something.
2. Question: Why is elegance so important?
Answer: Elegance cuts through the noise, captures our attention, and engages us. The point of elegance is to achieve the maximum impact with the minimum input. It’s a thoughtful, artful subtractive process focused on doing more and better with less. That’s especially important during this economic crisis when everyone is trying to move forward while consuming fewer resources. Continue Reading »
I finally finished my master thesis and wrote my final report. Originally it was 100 pages and now I am trying to cut it down to 35-40 pages. As a summary my final thought about SAP PI are that;
It is crucial to understand the companies’ application landscape and then make a final decision to go for one integration platform. Because in fact, it is really difficult to say PI is definitely better than BizTalk or vice versa. Giving an example, many large SAP customers already selected an integration platform. But, they also know that PI (XI) is required component of some SAP modules. Therefore they try to understand the product and decide how much they are going to use it. As far as seen on the market, they are introducing SAP PI along with their established integration platform, mostly to support SAP-to-SAP integration scenarios. Where this looks like an advantage, most of the other companies do not want to deal with two different integration platforms. In this case, if a company wants to adopt their integration platform strategy with SAP, gradually moving to SAP PI is the best way to go for by 2009. Because, as a result of the research, SAP NetWeaver PI will have a revolutionary change and this might cause serious problems for old PI investments. In addition to this, it is for sure that replacing all BizTalks with PI is not really a strong business case, because PI is still not a perfect product and needs a bit more real life experience.
After 4 months of research about SAP NetWeaver PI, the researcher makes two predictions about future of SAP PI;
1- PI will be 100% Java based product. It means, SAP will re-write the ABAP part or make an OEM agreement to replace ABAP with an already available solution in the market.
2- Currently, PI is based on hub and spoke, centralized architecture. First development of XI (PI) started as a part of MySAP technology but right now SAP has NetWeaver which is more distributed, SOA oriented base technology. So, XI is not a perfect match since it does not support distributed architecture. Because of SAP’s eSOA strategy they need to make integration based on more distributed architecture. By doing that they can dramatically reduce the total cost of owner ship and increase availability and performance. So, this will also cause a major change on product.
These changes can be done in two ways;
1- SAP will outsource PI to some other middleware company but will continue to development of this product. Because they already sold PI or XI to 50% of their large SAP users and they cannot suddenly stop supporting the product. Also, PI is playing a centric role for SAP’s ESOA strategy. So that, if SAP wants to be successful on this, they have to pay more attention to integration since this is one of the most crucial part of ESOA mentality.
2- SAP will buy another middleware company or make an OEM agreement to add their solution to PI in order to make it 100% Java based and distributed architecture based more open product.
So, it is important to keep all these in mind before making a buying decision. As mentioned before, a radical architectural change on PI, rather than an incremental evaluation, is expected. In order to mitigate the risks, it is recommended to be careful where companies use PI right now. For the time being, it is recommended to use PI within SAP landscape and for opportunistic applications, which means not mission critical projects. Also, make a good calculation about ROI. If it is 10 years, changing already established integration platform to PI is not recommended.
To sum up, both integration solutions have bad news – good news situation. As PI adoption grows, SAP will invest more into this technology. But if they want to penetrate into the main market, they have to enrich the functionality of their solution against competing integration platforms. Because current picture clearly shows that PI is dominantly used only by SAP customers. While this can be seen as a success, there are still lots of miles to go for SAP. Both integrated middleware approach (SAP PI) and best of breed approach (SAP PI + MS BizTalk) has pros and cons. So, it is up to company to decide which way to go. As mentioned earlier; unlike “Who Wants to be a Millionaire,” there is not a “final answer” to this ongoing debate.
I am working towards my master degree thesis about SAP systems integration and at some point I needed to learn the easiest way to explain what is SAP NetWeaver and what is the systems integration. While looking for some boring PDFs I have found this video, which is much more fun to learn from, and wanted to share it with you. Enjoy !
NetWeaver is SAP’s latest application platform suite and the foundation for all future SAP applications. As companies add new SAP applications or upgrade to mySAP ERP, the core components of NetWeaver will automatically be there. For example; Enterprise Portal, Process Integration, Master Data Management, Business Process Management, Business Intelligence.
This means SAP PI will be part of SAP investments and it will already be there. Another important fact is that if a company purchases SAP applications such as, Customer Relationship Management, Supply Chain Management, Product Lifecycle Management SAP PI is the standard integration platform from R/3 and other applications to these new modules. Because all of these solutions are built on top of the NetWeaver platform and PI is the integration part of NetWeaver platform suite. So, all of the mySAP licensees have access to this tool set waiting unused on the shelf, if they decide not to use PI. All in all, for large SAP customers it is not a question of “if” it is a question of “when and how much” are they going to use SAP PI.
But on the contrary, SAP XI (now called PI) is definitely a “closed” product. It runs on a SAP Web Application Server, which is a combination of a J2EE stack and ABAP stack (ABAP is the proprietary SAP programming language). The core parts of SAP PI run in this ABAP stack, in particular all the queuing and business processes (BPEL). Other parts such as connectivity and adapters runs in theJ2EE stack. Most software assets that are developed in PI are proprietary (maybe except for XSLT transformations). So software components from 3rd parties (such as iWay or Seeburger) need to be customized to run on/in PI. The architecture of SAP PI/XI is definitely closed and proprietary, but so are most integration solutions.
On the other hand SAP does endorse a large number of standards: J2EE, HTTP(S), XML, XML Schema, SOAP, WSDL, WS-Security, . Like all the other integration vendors. PI comes out-of-the-box with adapters for JMS, File/FTP, JDBC, HTTP, SOAP and obviously the SAP specific IDoc and RFC adapters. The (XMB) protocol that PI uses internally to communicate between its different components (standalone adapter engines, proxies, other PI instances) is based on SOAP with Attachments (MIME), with proprietary extensions for security and reliability.
From the experiences of other people, SAP PI works OK and is a good integration solution that matches the offerings of other EAI vendors. But it is a rather complex product. Now, PI only makes sense if you have a large SAP installation and a major part of your applications are from SAP. In particular, your SAP team can leverage their knowledge to manage an integration solution that runs on the same base infrastructure. If SAP applications only play a minor role in your organization, you might still deploy PI for opening up your SAP applications and SAP-2-SAP interfacing, but you will most likely combine this with other integration solutions.
So, because of all these problems and complexity, it is not recommended to use PI outside SAP world. But, SAP is investing time and money to make their product more open and simple. So, just wait and see how PI will penetrate into the main market. I have lots of cool ideas and documents about the future of PI, just fallow my blog and my master thesis report.
The traditional business model for acquiring storage capacity is challenged by today’s business realities. Utility Ready Storage solution is designed for organizations that require greater flexibility in IT resources because of variable and uncertain business demands and that want IT costs to reflect the business value delivered. Utility Ready Storage integrates products and services, to deliver IT resources when they are needed, where they are needed, with payment based on usage. As an example Storage as a Service options are quite suitabe for non-critical data.
