Archive for the ‘Interoperability’ Category

Initiatives Aim To Bring the Clouds Down To Earth

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November 8, 2011 · by Duane Craig · Interoperability

If you’ve been wondering just how you were going to spread your construction business throughout the cloud with connections to key onsite IT infrastructure, and achieve iteroperability, the answer may be coming sooner than anticipated. The one-year-old  Open Data Center Alliance  is turning the collective heads of cloud vendors as it impresses upon them the need for interoperability.

The organization describes itself as:

global IT leaders developing a unified vision for long-term requirements for the cloud – particularly focused on secure cloud federation, automation of cloud infrastructure, common management, and transparency of cloud service delivery.

The alliance has 280 members including many familiar names such as BMW, Marriott, Hewlett Packard and CA Technologies. One of the recently announced initiatives brings together the ODCA and the  Distributed Management Task Force  to focus on interoperability and ease of use in reining in the most pressing issue hampering widespread cloud adoption these days — the need for a single view of all cloud resources. Here’s how the press release describes the anticipated advances.

The collaborative work of these organizations will initially foster transparent management of virtual machines regardless of virtual machine manager or data center location and is expected to create a simplified path to cloud workload migration. With virtual machine management estimated to represent 60% of the IT overhead of a physical server, simplified management across enterprise and public cloud implementations represents a major opportunity for increased operational efficiency.

A key aspect of the collaboration is to specify solutions for interoperable management of virtual machines regardless of data center location. So, your land-based enterprise systems will blend seamlessly and securely with your cloud efforts – someday soon, hopefully. Results from the collaboration are expected early in 2012.

What Are Cloud Planrooms Missing?

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March 7, 2011 · by Duane Craig · Interoperability

Online planrooms were one of the early AEC industry cloud offerings and it appears they’re still going strong. Early on they were an easy way to distribute documents and today they make it very easy to access files using any mobile platform. Some even have on-screen measurement and markup abilities. Pricing on these planrooms is all over the map but many have free versions that simply limit the amount of storage and charge add-on fees for more storage space and items such as scanning or printing.

There seems to be a gradual creep in features as seen for example with Buzzsaw from Autodesk. The company offered this originally as an application service provider, (ASP), but today refers to it as a SaaS, (software as a service), and includes many more features than simple document management. One reason for that is the close marriage between its CAD offerings and Buzzsaw, allowing users to share sophisticated BIM models without having to own expensive software. It also has integrated design review where people can markup and annotate plans, and version control features that keep everybody on the same page. Then too, there are functions that would be difficult to find in other offerings that aren’t tied to a company that makes CAD software. One of those is the capability to limit the particular layers and cross references to only those portions of the CAD drawing that a user would need.

Ideal.com offers its planroom as a “complete custom solution for project management” with the application hosted on its servers where you only pay for the space you use, or as a dedicated application running in your own data center, or in theirs. The dedicated option eliminates storage charges and makes the application fully customizable. The company also offers a cloud solution that includes document management, workflow automation, collaboration, compliance and certification using a “workbasket” approach. All relevant documents get assigned to a job workbasket and then the basket makes its way through the business processes with people interacting with the documents as necessary. As with Buzzsaw, Ideal is bringing a wider range of options to the planroom than simply making plans available to interested stakeholders and subcontractors.

Keep in mind there are companies that are more narrowly specializing in the planroom and document management process. ContractorsPlanRoom has been around since 2001 and it is a completely SaaS offering so there is no software to buy or host. It has a free plan with a limit of 250 MB of storage with other plans that increase functionality such a adding on screen measuring and markup capability. Planroom Direct becomes the repository for bid documents making those documents available for viewing printing and saving by those you select to have those privileges. Bidcenter Online Planroom takes the next step and allows people to actually submit bids based on the plans you upload. DC Reprographics also focuses on the bidding process and document distribution but it adds the option for people to order plan sets by leaving a deposit or by outright purchase.

The one thing troubling about planrooms today is they continue the same old silo effect that construction has dealt with for years. Even though they are cloud-based they still force users into proprietary spaces. For the issuer of the plans that is not a big deal because everyone will need to visit their little cloud space to view or get the documents. But what about the subcontractor who works for five different general contractors? The firm is left potentially having to navigate five different planrooms, interact with five different approaches to the online user interface and deal with five different levels of functionality.

What the AEC industry needs is NOT more silos, but fewer of them. A contractor, architect, engineer or subcontractor should only need to visit one cloud planroom to work with all projects. The cloud actually offers that functionality through interoperability standards. Now, if we could just get the silo builders to understand that, the true promise of increased efficiency offered by technology might come one step closer to being realized for the AEC industries.

A View on the Current State of Cloud Interoperability

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August 26, 2010 · by Duane Craig · Interoperability

Podcast: Play in new window | Download

Podcast Transcript

Perspectives from Roman Bukary at NetSuite

Companies like Informatica, certainly big guys like Oracle, and even now SAP with their acquisition of Sybase, and even smaller companies like Boomi and Iron Cast Systems, (now part of IBM), all these companies have assembled the technical bits and pieces to make it work.

So if the technology exists, and even as I’m thinking back to the early 90s when companies like Pro Engineer, Parametric Technologies were really building interoperability standards, and yeah it was a third party, and AutoCad had its own format, and PTC had its own format, and Computer Vision had its own format, but yet even then, in the early 90s, there were ways of making the interchanges happen. So, today there are ways to make this data flow, and yes, you as a small company or you as a small contractor absolutely are reduced in the traditional world of (combining) bits and pieces together. Here’s where the cloud world is different.

Interoperability Framework

What the cloud guys have done is by building a solution in the cloud, and then building a platform in the cloud, the acronyms (SaaS PaaS) are irrelevant. What’s critical here is the cloud guys have a platform and once they built the platform then the very natural logical thing for them to have done, (and the reason they built these platforms), is to build an ecosystem of technology providers. What you end up with is technology providers who are pre-certified on these clouds, pre-certified to interoperate with these vendors, and pre-certified and preconfigured to seamlessly deploy as an extension to the core offering. (Now) it starts to behave very much the way iTunes works with your iPhone, where you have the foundation with the platform and then you get to extend and customize at your convenience.

So, why is the cloud any different than the on-premise? The answer is simple and obvious. In the on-premise world yeah it may take you two or three or twelve different bits and pieces to make your complete solution specialized and cusomized and just right for you, and guess who’s responsible for all that? You are. You, your IT, your servers, your technology providers. Things go down and you’re on the hook. One bit doesn’t work with the other bit, you’re on the hook. You finally get everything working beautifully, you’re happy, you take a breather and damn it, one of the vendors just migrated from version 3 to version 4. Everything breaks, you’re back to square one, you’re  on the hook again to reconfigure everything.

In the cloud world you may still need two, three, four different vendors to make your complete solution as perfect as possible for you. Except because it lives on the cloud’s platform, the cloud vendor, for example NetSuite, guarantees you upgrade compatibility for ever. That’s a significant issue and it’s not because NetSuite is nice, or stupid, it’s not because Netsuite is in the business of being altruistic, it’s because once we deliver a solution from the cloud, and build a platform, it is critical for us to keep our cusotmers happy and it is critical for us to make things as easy and pain-free for both our customers and our partners. That means you simply go to your browser, access the services you require, provision the services that you desire, and you’re done.

Can We Talk? Interoperability and Portability Hold the Keys

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August 25, 2010 · by Duane Craig · Interoperability

Portability and interoperability are so closely defined sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference. But for those in construction, architecture and engineering, knowing the distinction is important to help understand cloud computing. The CCIF (Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum) draws on definitions from the UK’s Testing Standards Working Party.

Simply put, you can think of interoperability as the successful communication between, or among systems, and portability as being able to use components or systems in multiple hardware or software environments. Interoperability and portability exist today in many ways in the computer world inhabited by builders, architects and engineers.

Whenever you open up a PDF document using a Windows PC, while a team member opens the same document across town using a Linux machine, you have just enjoyed interoperability. Transferring that PDF from the Windows PC to the Linux machine via email is an example of portability. There is a more detailed explanation of the terms here.

Roman Bukary, head of manufacturing and wholesale/distribution industry marketing for NetSuite, Inc. emphasizes that interoperability is not a technology challenge as much as it is a business challenge.

“It’s not a technological problem at its core, it’s a business problem,” says Bukary. He uses the example of running two applications, NetSuite and another one in separate clouds. Both run in the cloud in their own worlds. In both cases references to a person exists in both clouds. In one cloud the person may be a customer and in the other he is a customer that has a problem with a product or service. In one cloud the person is referenced by name and in the other case the person is identified by first initial and last name followed by three random numbers. Technology can reconcile the two different representations but the sticky, business questions are:

  • Which is the right way to refer to the customer;
  • How do the heads of sales and support find a way to agree on the reference;
  • Which cloud is the master and which is the slave;
  • Which cloud will dictate to the other cloud the references; and
  • What happens tomorrow when a person with the same last name interacts with one cloud or the other?

Bukary says technology can solve this problem, but at its core, interoperability is really a business problem. In many cases too he points out, you might not know the two references are to the same person until after the records are already established and each already has a history.

For the cloud to work as an all-encompassing solution for those in construction, architecture and engineering it’s very important that all clouds are interoperable and that all the software and hardware you use on them, and with them, is portable across all clouds. Without full interoperability and portability, companies will only be able to use bits and pieces of the total cloud. So, you might use the cloud only for data storage and backup, or only for file sharing. But if, as Bukary says, the technology is available (and he points to companies like Informatica that are assembling the bits and pieces), then what stands in the way of seamless interoperability? The answer appears to be, “standards.” All providers will have to be on the same page and using the same protocols. Because the federal government recognizes the savings it can achieve by being in the cloud, it has an aggressive effort underway to get the standards in place.

The National Institutes of Standards and Technology, (NIST) has an initiative aimed at speeding up the development of the interoperability and portability standards needed to keep the cloud effort moving ahead while consensus standards develop and mature. Called Standards Acceleration Jumpstarting Adoption of Cloud Computing (SAJACC), it has the goal of establishing a Web portal where specifications and implementations that are known to work will be available for distribution. Dawn Leaf, the senior executive for cloud computing at NIST, said on July 21 that the portal should be up by the end of the year.

Stay tuned right here as we bring new information and coverage to the portability and interoperability challenges facing cloud computing and the construction, architecture and engineering sectors.