OC CIO Roundtable Minutes 3-11-10

1993-2010
Southern California/Orange County CIO Breakfast Round Table
March 11, 2010 meeting

Present: Jeff Reid, Mike Siersema, Andy King, Jennifer Curlee, Hicham Semaan, Jeff Hecht, Vinu Gurukar, Carmella Cassetta, Jim Sutter, Joe Cracchiolo, Sean Brown, Dave Phillips

We welcomed Mike Siersema, CSC, to the meeting as our guest subject matter expert. The minutes of this and other meetings are available online at the Peer Consulting Group’s website, www.peergroup.net, with links to other material, when available.

The following have volunteered to introduce topics in 2010:

4/08/10 Developing an IT strategy (Open discussion)
5/13/10 IT Governance Carmella Cassetta
6/10/10 Social networking site comparisons Jeff Hecht

We still need discussion topics and volunteers for the rest of the year.
Check the updated spreadsheet for unassigned topic suggestions.

Topic: On-Demand / Cloud computing

Jeff Reid, Clean Energy, introduced our quest - subject matter expert, Mike Siersema, who is a senior technical director at CSC. Copies of his presentation slides were not available at the meeting but are attached, as is a Gartner paper on the subject. You can find a number of white papers on cloud from CSC at http://www.csc.com/lefreports. Mike started by asserting that market forces are driving IT delivery from in-house integrated technology to outside providers assembling and managing it. Cloud computing is one promising way, which is forecast to grow from 5% in ’09 to 10% by ’13 of worldwide IT spending. The NIST definition is “a model for enabling ubiquitous, convenient, on-demand network access to a shared pool of configurable computing resources that can be rapidly provisioned and released with minimal management effort or service provider interaction.” The fundamental characteristics include on-demand self service, accessed via the Internet, and paid for on an “as you go” based on use. Certain types of IT services lend themselves to this model more than others, such as email, test environments, Amazon.com, AWS, salesforce.com. It appeals to both ends of the spectrum - Government departments are big users and so are start-ups. Usage can be classified as SaaS, infrastructure services, storage, application software platforms, business process services and testing environments – all with significant growth forecasts. The key challenges to cloud computing adoption are security, compliance, control, performance, vendor lock-in, integration, availability and connectivity. This can be summarized as a lack of trust, which CSC address with their Cloud Trust Protocol services - see Mike’s slides for more detail. Probably the best approach for most companies is to have an orchestrated hybrid of public clouds and private clouds. I recommend you take the time to read Mike’s presentation slides for more detail.

Jeff Reid, Clean Energy, just recently joined his company, which has under-spent on IT in recent years. They are not using cloud computing yet but are starting to move in a major way. Cloud computing is an attractive option, as is virtualization. At Conexant they were aware of the promise of cloud computing, especially as they acquired and spun off many companies.

Andy King, Exemplis, thanked Mike for his presentation and for clarifying the differences between SaaS, etc. and cloud computing in general. This will come in handy as he prepares a presentation to his various user divisions on the pros and cons of cloud computing for things like project management, storage, etc.

Jennifer Curlee, Surefire, said that they are a small manufacturing company in 5 separate buildings, all within 2 miles of each other. They have 350 email accounts and 80% of the email is internal. They do have Internet network problems so should they be using cloud computing solutions, or virtualization? They are looking at using cloud computing for DR.

Hicham Semaan, Quickstart, said that they use applications like CRM and email in the cloud. They agree with all the listed concerns such as low security but are using the cloud where there is a low need for integration, and for public services, such as Sharepoint. The ROI is very good but he is not sure how easy the cloud vendors will let you move to using another vendor.

Jeff Hecht, Word & Brown, looked really hard at using cloud computing, and would like to use it for email, Sharepoint and CRM. He feels that there are still problems with DR and archiving. Security and integration are major problems. Still, the ROI is compelling.

Vinu Gurukar, Edwards Lifesciences, said that they are dipping their toes into cloud computing for things like project management and Salesforce.com. His IT guys are being invited to industry meetings on the subject. He would love to have nurses and Doctors use the cloud for data capture. Security is a problem.

Carmella Cassetta, Corinthian Colleges, said that they have outsourced their infrastructure to ACS, and would like to get an application up quickly on the cloud in a test environment. Something like gmail and Google apps for their students. They are worried about their lack of leverage with the gmail vendor.

Jim Sutter, Peer Consulting Group, said that there is not a lot to report from his client - Microsoft CRM is being used by one division. Web sites that are customer facing are hosted outside the firewall. He recently sat through a full day of project review for 2010 and there were no green or no cloud projects in sight. He is on the board at WaveMaker which offers a development environment that deploys applications to the Cloud. He mentioned an article in the CIO Magazine, where Bechtel’s CIO reported that the list prices for Amazon’s cloud service (EC3) were less than his new center.

Sean Brown, RJTCompuquest, thanked Mike Siersema for a good presentation. The customers for cloud computing are those who are moving rapidly, as you can bring things together quickly at low cost.

Thank you, Mike, for a very interesting and interactive presentation.