 | Level: Introductory Alfredo Gutierrez (fredgz@us.ibm.com), Manager, IBM developerWorks Developer Skills Program, IBM
17 Feb 2003 IBM has defined e-business on demand as an enterprise whose business processes -- integrated end-to-end across the company and with key partners, suppliers, and customers -- can respond with speed to any customer demand, market opportunity, or external threat. Are you wondering just what this means for you? Developers and IT professionals will be expected to build the technical infrastructure to support the integrated business processes of e-business on demand. To help you get up to speed, this article describes the e-business on demand environment and gives you the technology roadmap to get there.
It's all about return on investment. In the beginning, the Internet linked scientists in academia,
government, and research. It evolved to provide e-mail and then the World Wide Web, which was
good for communicating market messages but didn't have a lot of business value. Technology
quickly evolved and enabled computing on the Internet, driving business processes. But this
capability has come with a cost -- it has required serious investment in technology.
And when a business invests in information technology, it expects to derive benefits from
its investment. Issues of cost reduction never go away.
So what's the problem?
There's a gap between what IT promises and what it delivers. You're a
developer -- you know that integrating disparate, heterogeneous systems and
networks is complex. This complexity is the number one issue troubling CIOs today.
Just trying to get technologies to work together eats up more than 40 percent
of IT budgets. That means almost half the IT investment goes toward things that don't
directly drive business value. Because it's complex, it can take months, maybe
a year, before an IT investment delivers any value. Because it's complex, skills
are in short supply, and it will get harder to hire the people to integrate,
implement, and maintain technologies. Complexity costs.
And then there's utilization costs. Did you know that:
- Mainframes are idle 40% of the time.
- UNIX servers are idle 90% of the time.
- Most PCs are idle 95% of the time.
Of course, the industry grappled with cost of ownership and utilization long before
the Internet and e-business introduced a new era of computing. Now we have the Web,
but the promise of complete business integration efficiency still lies in the next
generation of e-business technology infrastructure. And this is where you -- the developer -- come into play.
In this article, we'll take a tour of the e-business on demand environment and look at what businesses
are demanding from a technology infrastructure. Then we'll talk about how you can integrate
heterogeneous systems and platforms using a roadmap that incorporates these technology milestones:
- Java and open standards
- Linux
- Web services
- Grid computing
- Autonomic computing
- Utility computing
Just what is e-business on demand?
You are in an e-business on demand environment when your organization connects its core business systems to key constituencies using intranets, extranets, and the Web, allowing you to:
- Build and enhance business relationships through the
thoughtful use of network-based technologies
- Leverage Internet technologies to transact and interact
with customers, suppliers, partners, and employees to achieve and sustain a competitive advantage
Getting to e-business on demand is a natural progression that typically goes through these stages:
- Access: Enable transactions against core business systems using simple Web publishing and point solutions.
- Enterprise integration: Use the Web to integrate business processes across enterprises. Link internal and external systems, both across enterprises and beyond enterprise boundaries.
- e-business on demand: Use the Web to adapt dynamically to customer and market requirements. Change business models. Combine people, technologies, and processes in new ways.
Figure 1. A natural evolution
Phases of e-business on demand
e-business on demand evolves in phases. In each phase, the Internet transforms the business processes.
- Access to digital information: This phase is all about publishing content,
most of it of the static "look-up" variety. Simple database queries allow us to check
a bank account, look up airline flight information, or see where our overnight package
is. It's pretty easy to get in the game here. All an enterprise needs is a home page.
All an individual needs is a browser.
- Real transactions, real e-business: Don't just look at your bank account--move some money.
Don't just check a flight departure time--book your seat. Trade a stock, buy a book,
apply for a loan, renew your driver's license, take a college course. Doing this
requires more than a Website -- this requires behind-the-scenes integration of
technologies and business processes.
- The advanced stage of e-business: In a fluid system of customers, suppliers, partners and employees, the Internet is the primary way to communicate, transact, and connect. Business processes shift
from manual to automated. A relationship could last only as long as a single transaction. The
environment is real-time computing. You form networked communities so that organizations can:
- Create new products and services faster
- Reach new customers and economically add new relationships
- Dynamically change existing relationships
- Simultaneously engage in multiple e-business models
- Improve access to information by constituents involved in these relationships
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Which phase is your enterprise in?
About 75% of all businesses are in Phase 1. Another 20% are in Phase 2 and are already
reaping the benefits. These businesses have identified key processes -- from procurement of raw material
to the manufacturing floor, to shipping and distribution, to customer relationship
management -- and they're applying networked technologies to transform them. These
enterprises have determined that transforming a stand-alone process is a beginning,
not an end.
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What's the return on investment for an enterprise that progresses through these phases? An increased share of customer spending, a better return on assets, new revenue opportunities, and better shareholder
return.
Every industry segment has the common requirement to
integrate end-to-end so that products, services (private sector and government),
invoices, images, decisions, and answers are all available on demand. Who will
have the competitive advantage? The enterprises that get there first, and the software
and services providers that know how to make it happen.
Any globally connected enterprise must have the ability to handle whatever comes its way,
such as changes in customer preferences or competitive actions, fluctuations in capital markets,
labor situations, natural disasters, or political unrest. An advanced e-business must be able
to respond to the unpredictable and the unforeseen and never question the ability of the
infrastructure to deliver.
So what kind of computing environment is required for an on-demand business? What does "on demand" mean for the way a business buys and manages its computing technology? Before tackling these questions, let's look at the four business characteristics of an on-demand business:
Business characteristics of an on-demand environment
An on-demand business has these characteristics:
- Responsive: Able to sense changes in the environment and to respond dynamically to unpredictable fluctuations in supply or demand, emerging customer, partner, supplier and employee needs, or unexpected moves by the competition.
- Variable: Able to adapt cost structures and business processes flexibly, to reduce risk, and to drive business performance at higher levels of productivity, cost control, capital efficiency, and financial predictability.
- Focused: Committed to concentrating on core competencies and differentiating tasks and assets; able to use tightly integrated strategic partners to manage tasks ranging from manufacturing, logistics, and fulfillment to human resources and financial operations.
- Resilient: Prepared for changes and threats like computer viruses, earthquakes, or sudden spikes in demand.
A business with these attributes requires technology that can support it, but
that's not the computing environment that's operating today. No, today's environment
is heterogeneous, widely distributed, vertically isolated, and generally more complex
than businesses would like. The same IT that's essential to a business' ability to
create strategic advantage, is also a major obstacle to becoming the kind of fluid,
responsive, dynamic business that's been talked about for years.
Technical
characteristics of an on-demand environment
Based on the above business characteristics of an on-demand business, what kind of
technology environment is needed to support it?
It's integrated
Beyond just transformation department by department, business processes and
applications need to integrate horizontally to link data, legacy systems, and custom
applications, and this integration requires new levels of data integrity and transaction
processing. You will need an infrastructure built on Web services, new development tools,
and open standards. Applications that had previously integrated vertically -- with an
operating system and stand-alone processor -- must now integrate horizontally,
application to application. You will write applications to the middleware layer, not to
the operating system. Applications are being decoupled from the underlying infrastructure.
It's open
There's no other way. In a networked world, you have to do more than simply
integrate everything inside your enterprise. You have to connect your enterprise
with other enterprises, other business processes, other applications, and billions
of pervasive computing devices. You can't just rip and replace your existing data,
applications, and transaction systems to make them homogenous with those of your business
partners. Open specifications and industry standards are the only realistic way that
all of this can connect.
It's virtualized
Every organization that has made capital outlays for technology is sitting on
enormous, unused computing capacity. Server consolidation and capacity-on-demand
offerings begin to address the issue of under-utilization. But now there's an opportunity
to virtualize the entire data center with an emerging technology called grid computing.
Grid computing allows distributed computing resources to be shared and managed as if
they were one, large, virtual computer. Initially most grids are being built in government
laboratories and universities. From there, they will be implemented inside companies.
These "intra-grids" will allow enterprises to increase the utilization of their own computing assets.
It's autonomic
The upward spiral of complexity will soon exceed the ability of skilled technical,
human resources to keep up with it. The solution? Computing systems that take on
more of the management themselves. In the same way that the human autonomic
nervous system manages basic functions like respiration, autonomic systems will
self-manage, self-protect, balance workloads, install device drivers, and upgrade
software. This requires innovation, real science at both the component and overall
system level. In 2001, IBM's technical community articulated the capabilities and
requirements for this kind of autonomic infrastructure. IBM Research defined the kinds
of innovation required at the component,
product, and systems levels. The industry has been invited to join us in the mastery
of this computing challenge.
Utility computing
We've been discussing transformation on two levels:
- Transforming business processes
- Transforming the underlying technical infrastructure
Together, these transformations bring yet another transformation that may prove to be the most
exciting aspect of the movement to e-business on demand: the way a business buys and manages its computing power.
Until now, your choices were limited. You needed more computing power? You
bought more computers, or you outsourced. Now, on-demand business requires a
fundamental change in the way we access, pay for, and manage all the assets of
the IT industry.
The answer is utility computing. You virtualize the data center and build
internal computing utilities that drive up utilization and value delivered to
the business. When this kind of virtualization moves to the Internet, you'll be
able to tap into external utilities, get computing from service providers, and
pay only for what you use.
Technology roadmap
If adaptive, dynamic integration is the goal, and utility computing is how
you're going to implement it, where do you start? Focus on the key technologies: open standards and Java, Linux, Web services, grid computing, and autonomic computing.
Figure 2. Landmarks on the technology roadmap
Open standards and Java
You don't want to rip and replace. Instead, you want to link together your
disparate, distributed, heterogeneous systems, and you can do this using open
standards. You can use open standards to ease your integration burden and tie
new products and technologies into your existing infrastructure easily and at low cost.
In your on-demand environment, you must be able to add or reduce capacity
quickly as the business requires. In today's heterogeneous environment, open
standards with common interfaces let you choose function from a variety of
vendors and snap it into the infrastructure. The IT industry is evolving into
a culture of open standards.
Figure 3. Open standards speed integration
Learn more
Linux
Why choose Linux? First, it's reliable, scalable, and secure.
It's an enterprise-quality operating system, and you can trust Linux with
your enterprise applications because it's a stable and mature base.
Second, Linux is about the lowest-cost alternative on the market, and
that's a major factor in its growing appeal to business and government. It's
easy to migrate your code from UNIX to Linux, and there's a sizeable pool of
developers with Linux skills.
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Linux and the IBM eServer products
For IBM, Linux is consistent with our principles of open standards-based
computing and platform independence. We have solutions for Linux across all
our hardware platforms, and our middleware provides extensive support for
Linux across the entire eServer set of platforms.
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Plus, the applications you write for Linux can run on any platform. You
can choose the server that's right for the application instead of the application
that's right for the server. This flexibility frees you to innovate and create
new applications, rather than spending your time rewriting old ones.
Finally, Linux provides an open, standards-based application platform,
especially when combined with J2EE and Web services. Open standards make
sense because they allow you to choose the best from among a wide variety
of products and integrate them easily, rather than having to settle for
whatever fits into a proprietary environment. This is a new model for the
industry -- companies compete to produce the best products on this open
standards base, instead of competing to establish a proprietary hold in a
particular industrial segment.
Figure 4. Comprehensive Linux support in IBM software
Learn more
Web services
Businesses have been searching for a technology solution to
enable their infrastructures to be as flexible as their highly fluid
business models. They've found an answer in Web services architecture,
a set of industry-standard methods that enable simplified programmatic
connections between applications. Web services focuses on simple, Internet-based
standards to address heterogeneous distributed computing.
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Web services and IBM software
IBM has enabled its software portfolio (from WebSphere to DB2, Lotus, and Tivoli)
to support the development, deployment, storage, and management of Web services solutions.
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Applications designed within a Web services architecture can seek each
other out, integrate and execute transactions, all in an automated fashion.
The advantages for a business are clear. A manufacturer could automatically
connect with the supplier that best meets its cost and technical demands,
while that supplier in turn could connect automatically with manufacturers that
have similar needs.
Learn more
Grid computing
A grid is a collection of distributed computing resources available over a network that
appear to an end user or application as one large virtual computing system. A Grid can span
locations, organizations, machine architectures, and software boundaries to provide unlimited power,
collaboration, and
information access to everyone connected to the Grid. The effect of Grid computing is
to make network computing more like a utility. You deliver computing power to where
you need it only when you need it; you pay for what you use, when you use it.
Like the Internet, Grids started in the scientific community but are now being
deployed by business enterprises. Recently, IBM and Globus collaborated to combine
open grid protocols and Web services standards, producing the Open Grid Services Architecture (OGSA).
Learn more
Autonomic computing
Autonomic computing systems are:
- Self-configuring: Able to adapt to dynamically changing environments
- Self-healing: Able to discover, diagnose, and act to prevent disruptions
- Self-optimizing: Able to tune resources and balance workloads to maximize use of IT resources
- Self-protecting: Able to anticipate, detect, identify, and protect against attacks
When you implement autonomic systems, you are free to focus on more strategic
and higher-level issues. For the business, the core benefits of autonomic computing
are improved resiliency, ability to deploy new capabilities more rapidly, and increased
return from IT investments.
Autonomic computing capabilities play a critical role in the development of grid
computing. Grids can become the most complex computing environments available.
Autonomic computing will allow grids to be easily managed and to ensure that they
deliver the levels and quality of service demanded by businesses.
Learn more
Utility computing
The concept of e-sourcing is simple. It's Information Technology as a
utility. Think of electricity, or telephone service. You don't need a
generator to get electricity to your home or office. You just plug into the
the electrical grid, use what you need, and pay for what you use.
An enterprise will be able to focus maximum
resources on its core business, on what differentiates them from their competition.
Where's the data center? It's in the enterprise. It's outside the enterprise.
Or it's shared between them. It doesn't matter where, because the infrastructure
becomes a pool of resources available on demand. Like electricity, computing becomes
an on-demand, pay-as-you-go service -- a utility so reliable that a business can take
it more or less for granted.
Once grids enable computing resources to be shared
globally and managed autonomically from end-to-end, an enterprise's infrastructure
becomes incredibly flexible. It can deliver computing power itself, but also switch
to a supplier for peak power, since they both operate on the same standards. The
infrastructure is a pool of virtual resources a customer can call on as needed.
In an on-demand future, a company might respond to increasing demand for computing
resources first with spill-over services from their own IT utility and, if that
isn't enough, with capacity from a service provider, purchasing only the extra
capacity needed at the moment. Because provider and customer share common, open
protocols and use grid and autonomic technologies, all sorts of services can be
provided dynamically in the smallest, most economical blocks. Imagine paying for
increments of computing power as used instead of for large volumes, long- term.
The potential impact on budgets and the bottom-line is huge.
The concept of IT delivered as a utility isn't new; but only now are technological advances making it possible:
- Reduced cost of bandwidth, which enabled the creation of new data
services and high-speed network delivery of a variety of services to a
broader range of customers
- Distributed content and application architecture deployments that
shift delivery to the edge of the network
- Server and storage virtualization, which enables a new level of
shared infrastructures with the potential of reducing customer costs
Over time, as the focus turns more toward the application and the business rather
than the infrastructure, the question will become: "Do I really need all that
infrastructure?" To put it another way, "Do I want to generate my own electricity,
with all the investment in people and equipment that entails? Or am I comfortable leaving
the generation of electricity to the experts and IT to the IT professionals?"
Conclusion
Add them all together: You have applications and systems integrated using
open standards. Plus Web services that provide definitions, discovery, and access
to self-managing, autonomic IT resources on a grid. And what do you get? You get
computing resources capable of being shared globally and managed end-to-end. You
get an infrastructure that's incredibly flexible and that will allow new capabilities
to be deployed with relative ease. This is the technical environment on which an on-demand
enterprise depends.
With e-business on demand, information technology will change. IT will be delivered as a
utility. Utility computing will offer fundamental advantages over the current model.
You'll get there in stages, and you can start today by following the technology
milestones we've outlined: Java and open standards, Linux, Web services, grid computing, and
autonomic computing.
Resources
About the author | 
| | Alfredo Gutierrez manages the IBM developerWorks Developer Skills Program. By staying in tune with
developers and the IBM technical professionals who help them solve their integration
issues, Fred helps the developerWorks team provide relevant information and technical content
through articles, tutorials, developer briefing days,
Webcasts, and workshops. You can contact Fred at fredgz@us.ibm.com. |
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