Virtual and Cloud Configuration Management

9:30 - 10:00

Registration Tea/Coffee

10:00 - 10:15

Introduction - David Norfolk, CMSG Committee

David first became interested in computers and programming quality in the 1970s, working in the Research School of Chemistry at the Australian National University. Here he discovered that computers could deliver misleading answers, even when programmed by very clever people, and was taught to program in FORTRAN.

His ongoing interest in all things related to development has culminated in his joining Bloor in 2007 and taking on the development brief. Development here refers especially to automated systems and services development. This covers the technology including acronym-driven tools such as: Application Lifecycle Management (ALM), Integrated Development Environments (IDE), Model Driven Architecture (MDA), automated data analysis tools and metadata repositories, requirements modelling tools and so on. It also covers the processes behind them and the people issues associated with implementing them. Of particular interest is organisational maturity as a prerequisite for implementing effective (measured) process and ITIL (v3) as a framework for automated service delivery.

10:20 - 11:00

Cloud Land - an Analyst View, Martin Banks, Bloor Research

Martin takes a look at what Cloud Computing as a term really means and where the concept comes from. He suggests that the term itself is now so generally applied that it has little practical meaning left.

Managing the Information Exostructure – aka The Cloud - will be a major issue. The potential is huge, but lack of good management could cause some real problems. There is an obvious degree of trust involved, particularly in the beginning – and there is a strong case for identifying those areas of extended management that can be automated or where standardised interface/communications protocols can be agreed so that different management tools can interoperate properly.

There is tremendous potential for communications breakdowns between users and service suppliers, which is why automation (ideally directed by the users with sensible blocking controls available to the service providers) is going to be so important. You can think in terms of 'Collective Capitalism' – where the real benefit will come from the parties (both the user and the collection of service providers and service aggregators they may be working with) collaborating as a collective enterprise.

Martin Banks has been an observer and commentator on the technologies and businesses of the electronics and IT industries since 1968. As one of the UK’s leading specialist journalists he has observed the development of IT systems and their impact on both individuals and business since the emergence of the first semiconductor memory chips and, subsequently, the first microprocessors.

In that time he has either worked on or written for all the leading publications covering the industry, from trade papers such as Electronics Weekly and Computer Weekly, through to national press such as The Times and Financial Times. He was the first winner of the Times/ Hewlett-Packard Technology Columnist of the Year Award, an award he won twice.

Martin recently took on the Infrastructure Implementation brief for Bloor. This refers to the infrastructure and systems required to deliver applications and services to enterprise users, from servers, mainframe systems and data centres through to architectures and operational concepts such as Service Oriented Architectures (SOA) and Software as a Service (SaaS).

Complementing his Bloor work, he now runs his own specialist analysis and writing business. He is still a regular contributor to a number of publications, including Register Developer and IT Week, where he specialises in covering SOA, SaaS and enterprise infrastructure management and implementation. In particular, his focus is the business impact of such technologies.

11:00 - 11:30

11:30 - 12:30

The Agile Answer Lies in the Cloud, Kevin Parker, Serena

As Agile goes mainstream and expands to become an enterprise standard the methodology gets strained. How can Agile support stand up meetings with developers in a dozen different time zones? How can executive management retain the control and visibility into the development process of an Agile team that craves autonomy when enterprise IT has spent decades bringing more and more control to the business of software development? When the last thing an Agile team wants is another tool how can you ensure their processes are repeatable, auditable and traceable? The answer is in the cloud. Let's look at a real solution to enterprise Agile teams that exploits SaaS, is lean and provides the enterprise with the controls it needs.

In the past year Kevin has spoken at 50 conferences and seminars on a range of leading IT topics, including methodologies, business analysis, quality assurance techniques, governance, open source issues, tool interoperability, from the mainframe to distributed to the web and embedded systems. He is a much sought after speaker, recognized around the world for his provocative and entertaining style.

Kevin is a 30 year industry veteran, holder of three technology patents and today is VP and Chief Evangelist at leading Application Lifecycle Management vendor Serena Software. He started his career software developer and rose to lead the engineering team as VP of R&D at Serena Software, a role he held for 8 years. In the past three years he has been crossing the globe building an ecosystem of leading vendors in support of the Eclipse Application Lifecycle Framework (ALF) Project. As the project’s evangelist he has met with over 4,000 people. At Serena he works closely with analysts, the press, customers, partners and employees to exchange ideas about industry direction and business issues. He was born and educated in the UK and now lives and works in California with his wife, two kids and obligatory dog from the pound.

12:30 - 12:45

Q&A on both morning sessions

Led by David Norfolk
 

12:45 - 13:45

13:45 - 15:00

Workshop - Managing a Fluffy Cloud

This session will be facilitated by Shirley Lacy and led by Brenda L. Peery, Service Architect and Management Consultant.

Brenda has a diverse background across a range of industries and business models - frequently working in the narrow space between development and delivery sometimes referred to as "the Wall". She has worked for several multi-nationals, mostly in the Finance Sector (with Citrix, Virtual Desktop, and Datacentre teams), but also for companies of less than 100, albeit in six countries (ESM software development and consultancy). Although she is not an accredited translator and has never having worked for the UN, she spends plenty of time interpreting. She translates user, business and IT requirements, strategies and projects between various groups and stakeholders.

This workshop is an opportunity for participants to explore real and current concerns of those facing or engaged in deploying Cloud and Virtual architectures. The focus is specifically on some back to basics questions in the area of change, configuration and release management. It includes;

• Introduction to the workshop - cloud computing and virtualisation
• Why are organizations moving to the cloud and who makes this decisions?
• What are the dangers of lack of control - what do we need worry about?
• What information do we need to understand the impact of change?
•  Feedback

15:00 - 15:30

15:30 - 16:15

Panel Discussion

After the workshop (20 - 30 minutes) a panel discussion will be chaired by Martin Banks, around the question: "Can we use a standard configuration management approach for cloud computing and virtualisation?"

The Panel will include the speakers:

• Shirley Lacy
• Brenda Peery
• Kevin Parker

16:15 - 16:30

Wrap-up - David Norfolk

16:30

Close