Enterprise IT Transformation - overview
Enterprise IT environments have to undergo constant changes, both driven by new business needs and by a desire to reduce cost by taking advantage of new technology. This is a significant challenge in typical large enterprises because production workloads are running, personnel changes, documentation gets out of date, and the transformation costs should not exceed the expected benefits. We will present general methodologies and techniques, typical current enterprise environments, near-and mid-term goals of transformations such as clouds, and samples of concrete transformation projects and the tooling used in them.
1. Enterprise Environments and the Need for Ongoing Change (Maheswaran Surendra,, Sept. 8) Enterprise environments, business and cost drivers, transformation phases, transformation as a service
2. Clouds and Other Transformation Goals (Murthy Devarakonda, Sept. 15) Desirable features and architectures for enterprises, in particular various types of clouds.
3. Discovery (Nikolai Joukov, Sept. 22) The first phase in almost every transformation: Finding out the current structure, with minimal intrusiveness into the production environment
4. Workload placement (Birgit Pfitzmann, Sept. 29) Often a transformation means placing workloads in new, virtualized ways on machines. Placement algorithms optimize the results
5, 6: Automatic migration (Chris Ward, Larisa Shwartz, Oct. 6 and Oct. 13) At some point, OS instances and applications have to be actually moved. Automation technologies are emerging for this.
7. Desktop cloudification (Andrzej Kochut, Oct. 20) The previous 4 sections mainly considered servers. Desktop transformation, in particular to clouds, has very different aspects and algorithms.
8. Storage and network optimization (Nikolai Joukov, HariGovind Ramasamy, Oct. 27) Optimization project and algorithm samples from areas of storage and networks
9. Mobility transformation (Randy Moulic, Nov. 3) Transforming infrastructure and applications such that they can accommodate increasingly mobile employees and customers
10. Testing (Hai Huang, Nov. 10) Testing is an important and costly phase in transformation project, with techniques quite different from an initial software development
11. Crowdsourcing in transformation (Maja Vukovic, Jim Laredo, Nov. 17) Use of people clouds to speed up transformation tasks
12. Contracts and Governance (Jih-Shir Yih, Nov. 24) A key part in the success of a transformation project is having good governance, established in initial contracts. There is science in this too.