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Download the White Paper: http://cloudservices.microfocus.com/main/Namespaces/MFECS/doc/MFECS-WP-deriving-business-value.pdf
Cloud computing is the next computing platform paradigm shift and refers to Internet-based development and use of computer technology. The cloud is a metaphor for the Internet and is an abstraction for the complex infrastructure it conceals. It is a style of computing in which users access technology-enabled services from the Internet without knowledge of, expertise with, or control over the technology infrastructure that supports them. Cloud computing incorporates software as a service (SaaS), Web 2.0, virtualization, multi-tenancy and other recent technology trends in which the common theme is reliance on the Internet for satisfying the computing needs of the users.
Infrastructure utility providers are building out platforms at a phenomenal rate. In the case of Amazon Web Services, the reason was to ensure enough capacity to support Amazon buying patterns around peak times of the year. Microsoft began building data centers to support a tremendous upturn in use of its hosted version of Microsoft Exchange. Google constructed their data centers to support the search business. Gradually these companies realized they could make excess capacity available through controlled Web service interfaces to create “Platform-as-a-Service” (PaaS).
Enterprise business users’ interest in Cloud computing comes in the shape of numerous potential benefits. The Pay-As-You-Use consumption model traditionally associated with utility consumption can now be applied to IT – to both the hardware and, perhaps even more interestingly, to the business applications themselves. Cloud computing converts the traditional capital expenditure model (CapEx) common in data centers today to an operational expenditure (OpEx) model. Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services allows CIOs and CFOs to control costs through these hardware and software leasing environments.
To business software ISVs, Cloud computing is a potential new distribution channel for their applications. Modernizing the digital intellectual property (IP) of the COBOL application to create Web 2.0 versions allows them to hook into the growing trend of subscription, transaction or even ad-based revenue models.
Hardware alone is insufficient to support mission critical or traditional IT data center use of these new operating models. Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services provides the vital layer enabling organizations to leverage PaaS offerings in support of an evolutionary, low-risk transition to SaaS-based COBOL applications, providing the expected level of scalability, security and availability, and meeting service level agreements with the users of such core enterprise systems.
The term ‘Cloud computing’ has come into common business and IT usage recently, and like many terms that rise to popular awareness quite dramatically, it has arrived on the scene with some confusion. This paper aims to dispel this confusion, and place the ‘Cloud computing’ phenomenon firmly in the context of today’s business challenges and priorities.
Understandably, we will start by providing our own brief definition of Cloud computing, and explore some of the key vendors who are driving the aggressive growth in this area. But, for ‘Cloud computing’ to be seen correctly as the major ‘disruptive technology’ that it is, bringing entirely new ways of delivering IT service to the enterprise, it is crucial that we address up front its relevance to the business community. How will the Cloud help companies sell more products, deliver better services, and satisfy customers more effectively? Ultimately, why should the CFO care? And when? Is this something the IT organization should embrace today, in two years, or five?
One of the key concerns with any new major innovation in IT is the consideration of how it will impact the vast expanse of heterogeneous infrastructure that we have acquired and nurtured over the decades, and that we have built our businesses upon. For Cloud computing to deliver the scale of value that it is truly capable of, it must be applicable to organizations’ core enterprise applications, to the mainframe and high-end server systems that are, globally, responsible for some 80% of all business transactions executing every day.
With its Enterprise Cloud Services, Micro Focus is the first company addressing this huge section of the world’s IT infrastructure. With its Cloud agnostic stance, it is enabling organizations to leverage Platform-as-a-Service offerings from vendors like Microsoft, Amazon and IBM in support of an evolutionary, low-risk transition to the use of Software-as-a-Service-based COBOL applications. And doing so while still providing the levels of scalability, security, availability and service-level commitments rightly demanded by the users of such core enterprise systems.
“Cloud computing” refers to the use of Internet-based (i.e. Cloud) computer technology for a variety of services (including storage capacity, processing power, business applications or components). It has become more usefully characterized as a style of computing where massively scalable IT-enabled capabilities are provided “as a service” to multiple customers. Unlike previous IT licensing models, however, these ‘services’ are typically billed on a consumption basis (giving rise to other common phrases such as ‘utility computing’ and ‘platform-as-a-service’).
More significantly, Cloud computing is the next “turn of the crank” in IT data center paradigms. IT data center managers have been put to the test over the years, being asked to respond to in-sourcing (remember when timesharing was the only game in 1970), glass-house build-up (in the 1980s), server-room build-out (in the 1990s), datacenter out-sourcing (the shift in the 2000s), virtualization and server-consolidation (today). Cloud computing combines the best of infrastructure utility out-sourcing with the IT control of in-sourcing and the lower-cost advantages of server-consolidation.
Cloud computing is often associated with new Web 2.0 start-up companies. The best known Cloud application is the Google search engine that, while consuming huge amounts of processing power, never needs to rely on database ACID rules or two-phase commits. Amazon’s Elastic Compute Cloud hosts start-up companies that provide photo sharing, phone text message collection and redistribution services, and social networking and collaboration. These relatively simple applications built from scratch using languages such as Python or Ruby need not adhere to the critical uptime requirements of a traditional data center processing payroll or controlling inventory.
Nevertheless, Cloud computing is extremely attractive to traditional IT in the way that it can convert the consumptive model of IT resources from a capital expenditure model to an operational expenditure model. Instead of building out on-premises datacenters, Cloud offers the ability to soak up excess compute capacity wherever it may lie. After all, it is always 3am somewhere in the world and finding and using that capacity, thanks to high speed network infrastructure, can be very cost effective.
Of course, the consumptive model of controlling costs offered by Cloud computing is nothing new to IBM data center managers, and many of the significant trends we are witnessing in the industry today have some very interesting parallels and precedents in traditional data center evolution. See Appendix 1: How Did IT Get To The Cloud? for further discussion on the industry’s voyage to the Cloud.
The business world has grown increasingly comfortable with Pay-As-You-Use methods of consuming business services. Web conferencing is an accepted alternative to “flying in” to a customer meeting. Hosting corporate mail in an external Web-accessible server under someone else’s control is growing in popularity. Even something as critical as a Sales organization’s lifeblood, their sales prospect information, is now finding its way off-premises into somebody’s Cloud, currently most typically that of the application vendor. Decisions to go the hosted route are often made by the CFO, not the CIO or data center manager, and are largely based on cost control and the ability to translate CapEx into OpEx that look better on a balance sheet.
The CFO also realizes that the company should invest in its core business processes and in the software IP that supports them, rather than in building out an expensive workforce and portfolio of non-differentiating infrastructural components. It is unlikely, for example, that a food processing plant’s core value is knowing which SPAM filter is best or the difference between x86 and x64 architectures. Developing the resources to do so is costly and potentially diverting from a company’s main focus.
Furthermore, the ability to pay for services based on usage, and for the provision of those services to be immensely scalable (or ‘elastic’) so as to increase and (importantly) decrease in line with that usage, ensures minimal wastage and redundancy. The demand, for example, of year end accounting or seasonal retail peaks is quite different to other periods. Also, the ability to scale in support of new product and service offerings or geographic expansion provides “cash-flow-friendly” ways to increase resource availability. This ability to commission additional capacity without significant capital outlay is particularly attractive in difficult economic conditions where upfront funding is harder to obtain.
For ISVs, the Cloud offers a vast platform from which to reach new markets and users, enabling them to bring their applications into the Cloud for access by users on a global scale without the traditional infrastructural investments required of “going online”. And what is more, when supported by Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services, these applications will then be based on the very same code as their other supported platforms, ensuring maximum reach with minimal impact on development.
Until recently, much of the discussion around Cloud computing has focused on new, and usually non-mission critical, applications. The ability to apply Cloud economics to core enterprise applications provides, perhaps, the beginning of the tipping point for CFOs, as they consider ways to optimize and boost the cost efficiency of IT service delivery and consumption.
Just bringing commercial Cloud computing environments to the Enterprise is not enough. Indeed, prior to Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services, Cloud computing meant rewriting or authoring new applications in Python (the language of the Google Apps cloud), Ruby (commonly used in Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud), or other languages. Even the use of Microsoft Azure cloud in its true form is a platform change ... away from Microsoft .NET and to the Azure APIs such as identity services and SQL data services that are radically different from standard .NET.
It is only through its relevance to organizations’ existing portfolio of critical applications, however, that real uptake will ensue, and companies will begin to realize the true potential of the utility model that Cloud computing offers. Micro Focus is enabling companies to transition to the Cloud in an evolutionary way, building upon rather than replacing the valuable components they already have in place, both in terms of systems and skills.
Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services has taken the approach of providing a cloud agnostic layer between the PaaS environment and existing business transaction and batch applications. Insomuch as is possible, COBOL business logic need not change to be deployed in Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services. For ISVs, this is critical in supporting multiple deployment options for customers.
Compatibility with business execution technologies such as COBOL, CICS, IMS, JES/JCL, and VSAM KSDS, ESDS, RRDS are absolutely necessary. In addition, the ability to seamlessly layer Web Service protocols such as HTTP, HTTPS, SOAP or plain-old-XML (POX) protocols used by AJAX (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) and XBAP (extensible application markup language browser applications) is provided by a number of Micro Focus products.
There are also issues of application data security to consider. Micro Focus brings new technologies to commercial Cloud computing environments by securing all data while at rest (on persistent cloud storage) or in motion (to/from the on-premises data center and/or to the worldwide user community).
Globally, there are in excess of 200 billion lines of COBOL code in operation, growing annually, supporting some 30 billion transactions per day. For Cloud computing to deliver its true potential, enabling dramatic cost savings throughout IT and the business, as well as fundamentally changing the way that the business interacts with its applications, it is vital that companies have a way of taking this investment forward. Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services provides this capability.
Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services brings together the compatibility and operating models of the traditional data center with the elasticity and low cost of utility infrastructure companies. It provides relief to traditional IT data centers and ISVs. First and foremost, Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services provides the compatible environment in which to host mission critical business systems. Traditional IT that continues to be under cost pressure can use the commodity cloud systems on a consumptive cost basis. ISVs can find a new distribution channel for their digital IP by running their application in the cloud while providing a low-cost subscription pricing model (e.g. $40/month/registered user) model.
In this scenario, the application runs the same whether it is running in Clouds managed by Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services or running inside the company’s own data center on Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition or Micro Focus Server for SOA on Windows, UNIX or Linux. Once a COBOL application operates as a service, or is accessible as a Web application, it doesn’t matter whether it is operating on-premises or in the Cloud.
Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services is a hosted services model provided on a Pay-As-You-Go basis. All Cloud computing models are hosted to some degree; the infrastructure utility constructs the data center, ensuring there is power, cooling, storage and networking. Micro Focus provides a Cloud agnostic operating environment. The COBOL business applications are insulated from the differences in the underlying infrastructure utilities, the operating system and the persistent storage environment. These facilities vary widely from Cloud to Cloud.
Micro Focus provides the production high-availability (through Micro Focus N+1 clustering services), scalability and elasticity as the needs of the application grow or shrink. The COBOL runtime environment together with CICS or IMS transaction monitor, the DB2 or IMS DB environment is seamless.
Organizations provide their CICS COBOL application, data, Micro Focus Server configuration and static collateral necessary for a Web 1.0 or Web 2.0 application or simply a SaaS interface.
Micro Focus hosts the combined environment in the infrastructure utility most suitable – Microsoft Azure, Amazon Web Services Elastic Compute Cloud, or other infrastructure utilities to be provided in the future.
Once your application is prepared for operation in the Cloud (by adding the Web or SaaS interface using other Micro Focus tools) it can also be run in Micro Focus Server for SOA or Micro Focus Server Enterprise Edition in your data center. These on-premises and Cloud-resident environments are identical. This allows you to use the Cloud as an overflow area when you’ve run out of processing power in your data center, perhaps near quarter-end or year-end processing or when the batch window of your IT data center is closing.
Contact Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services through your Micro Focus sales executive to begin the Early Adopter Program. If you don’t know your sales executive, visit our Web site (www.microfocus.com) or phone one of the numbers at the end of this paper.
If you are a Micro Focus customer today, you probably have enough to start on the Enterprise Cloud Services track. The application modernization discussions we’ve had with you previously are the starting components today. Micro Focus Studio Enterprise Edition or Micro Focus Studio for SOA are products built from the COBOL development tools Net Express (Windows development) and Server Express (UNIX/Linux development). You use these development tools through the Microsoft Visual Studio 2008 SP1 plug-in or the Eclipse Framework plug-in or the native Net Express graphical user interface.
If you are a mainframe ISV, you are probably using Micro Focus Mainframe Express Enterprise Edition (MFEEE) to develop, test and re-deploy your applications back up to IBM zOS environment. Part of running in the Cloud is to pull your program source off the mainframe into a Micro Focus Studio framework.
No matter which IDE (interactive development environment) you choose to develop and test your COBOL business applications, the next step is to modernize those applications to provide a SaaS interface to the transaction business logic. This can be done in a number of ways, each of which leaves the COBOL business rules intact without having to rewrite them. You can choose to build COBOL native Web services into your application with the Micro Focus Studio tools. Alternatively, if the application currently runs as a “green screen” application on a mainframe environment, you can choose to wrapper CICS COBOL transactions with Micro Focus EnterpriseLink. This gives you the option of producing a Web 1.0 style Web application, one with checkboxes, radio buttons, select lists and “OK” button at the end of each page. Alternatively, COBOL business applications can generate XML SaaS suitable for Web 2.0 RESTful applications or “mash-ups” of multiple Web 2.0 applications.
Indeed, the federated cloud computing model, combining public and private clouds with on-premises computing environments, may be the norm. Why not use the Google App Engine to generate a 3D pie chart graphic of data extracted from a COBOL web service? These Web 2.0+ “mash-up” applications will combine Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services hosted apps with other data sources to give the end user a rich internet application experience.
At the end of the day, Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services provides the vital layer enabling organizations to leverage PaaS offerings in support of an evolutionary, low-risk transition to SaaS-based COBOL applications. This provides IT and ISVs with the expected level of scalability, security and availability, and meeting service level agreements with the users of such core enterprise systems.
The consumptive model of controlling costs offered by Cloud computing is nothing new to IBM data center managers, and many of the significant trends we are witnessing in the industry today have some very interesting parallels and precedents in traditional data center evolution.
Software lease programs are the norm with primary and third party vendors in this space and pricing is based on total capacity measured in MIPS or MSUs installed in the data center at the time. With the ability to add and remove chips electronically to mainframes, even hardware is somewhat elastic. But mainframe elasticity comes at a tremendous cost: Mainframe CPU boards are shipped at full capacity of 12 or 20 chips per frame – even if you only ordered a 2 CPU model. The cost of these mainframes is extremely high because no one else can use the hardware turned off in your frame.
Contrast that with the Cloud computing model. Here, the advent of extreme virtualization across commodity components spread around distant data centers drives lower costs of service. Originally called Multiple Domain Facility by Amdahl in 1984 and Processor Resource/System Manager by IBM, logical portioning of hardware resources became commonplace within a data center mainframe complex. But, it required the IT organization to run at near capacity to spread the considerable costs among internal department users. Complex batch scheduling systems and expensive system operators to run them spread those costs over a 24 hour period. But, when mainframe headroom capacity was reached it incurred that “on demand” licensing charge. Typical in large data centers is the doubling of the organization’s software lease bill over the final two months of the year when additional resources are required.
In the mid-1990s, data center outsourcing was considered the savior of IT because it combined multiple, independent organizational units in a single data center where LPARs could be continually monitored and restructured to move capacity among the customers. Multi-tenancy issues were solved by fencing off DASD associated with one outsourcing customer to another. But, costs remained high. The outsourcer had to find a way to distribute their costs among all their existing users. If one customer out of ten moved off the outsourcer the costs of the datacenter were borne by the remaining nine. Yearly increases of 10% or more were common. Typical pain-points for IT organizations using data center outsourcers occurred roughly two and a half years into the outsourcing contract.
Meanwhile, mainframe and UNIX application ISVs had a different problem. They built their digital IP in the form of complex COBOL application business logic, the lingua-franca present on everything from Burroughs to Tandem to HP3000 to IBM CICS systems mainframes. But, then they handed off their application source code to only the largest customers available to them ... those running large mainframe data centers. An insurance ISV specializing in life insurance actuarial calculations could only sell to the dozen largest life insurers.
AJAX / XBAP
Asynchronous JavaScript with XML (AJAX) or the Microsoft equivalent extensible application markup language for browser application (XBAP) is a technique to build rich internet applications (Web 2.0) that enhance the browser user experience. COBOL applications generate XML data packets and transport them to the browsers over the Hypertext Transport Protocol (HTTP) where they can be combined with other sources. Thus, Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services provides the Web services that can be consumed by AJAX browser applications.
Cloud Agnostic
The ability to leverage an optimal infrastructure utility (i.e. “Cloud”) for a particular job while providing compatible interfaces no matter the actual Cloud provider. Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services builds upon the strong tradition of Micro Focus Enterprise Server and the COBOL language itself to exist in a number of operating and database environments.
Mash-Up
A consumer of COBOL SaaS applications and other Web Services. By combining multiple Web 2.0 applications in this way, it is possible to create Web 2.0+ “mashups” that may be unique to every individual using them. A desktop “dashboard” customized for each particular user to include some COBOL SaaS data feeds hosted in Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services would be one example.
MIPS
Million of instructions per second. Reference to common usage of mainframe performance now calculated through five transaction processing and batch workload benchmarks. A Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Service building block is equivalent to several hundred mainframe MIPS.
Platform-as-a-service is providing elastic hardware platforms in an Internet based Cloud so value added services, such as Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services, can be layered on top of them.
RESTful Application
Representational state transfer style of building Web 2.0 applications move the state between the application running in the cloud to the browser or HTTP client application running at the user. State is sent back and forth over stateless HTTP communication in the form of XML data. This allows for, in Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services model, for the state to be sent to the particular CICS region running in the cloud that holds traditional state such as CICS COBOL COMM areas, TS/TD queues and the like. RESTful programming techniques of today may be more familiar to mainframe programmers using pseudo-conversational programming techniques of 40 years ago. Then the reason wasn’t so much to allow state to move around a cloud as it was to reduce memory constraints associated with holding a transaction open. Therefore, the Web 2.0 programming style of REST is a natural fit for COBOL applications today.
Software-as-a-service is providing Web service interfaces to applications that meet a Service Oriented Architecture (SOA). Also called Software+Services by some vendors.
Web 0.0 Application
An CICS or IMS COBOL “green screen” application that is accessible in a Web interface. Using, for example Micro Focus EnterpriseLink template mechanisms these apps can seem to be classic Web applications with “OK” buttons and hyperlinks for other program function keys, but it is suitable for existing Intranet users that are already familiar with the screen based interface. Using the HTTP protocol instead of older TN3270 protocols allows the packets to be encrypted between the end-user and the cloud and load-balancing and fail-over/fail-back componentry built into Micro Focus Enterprise Cloud Services.
Web 1.0 Application
Classic Internet based Web application with Web pages consisting of checkboxes, select lists, radio buttons which map to elements of the COBOL transactions, usually one-to-one or many-to-one (eBiz transactions) with CICS COBOL transactions without having to change those transactions or the existing screen-based interface.
Web 2.0 Application
New Internet applications that combine COBOL business logic with RESTful AJAX Web interface that makes it more responsive to end-users. The COBOL business logic is accessible through WS-I stack Web Services or “plain old XML” documents that flow from your application (possibly through Micro Focus EnterpriseLink).
XML
Extensible Markup Language (XML) provides a standard specification to represent sent between one or more SaaS services as well as persistent data storage within datasets or databases. Communication of XML is through Web Services, either structured WS-I* standards or “plain old XML” (POX) flowing over HTTP. COBOL applications can be modernized to provide native delivery of XML out of Enterpirse Cloud Services or use Micro Focus technology such as EnterpriseLink to wrapper standard COBOL interfaces (e.g., BMS “green screens”) and generate a corresponding data packet in XML.
Micro Focus, a member of the FTSE 250, provides innovative software that allows companies to dramatically improve the business value of their enterprise applications. Micro Focus Enterprise Application Modernization and Management software enables customers’ business applications to respond rapidly to market changes and embrace modern architectures with reduced cost and risk..
For more information, visit http://www.microfocus.com/
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