ITIL

2010 Hot Tech Jobs

/ prabasiva / 3 Comments

“Everyone knows someone who loves Honda” commercial in context with Honda Facebook is a prime example how social network channels have changed today’s business.  If any IT executives still thinks that social networking platform is for kids and teenagers, wake up! You have already missed lots of opportunity, try to speed up and catch on.

Social network is integral in today’s sales and marketing for almost all products and services.  Customization of a product or service based on each individual requirement is not a new concept and it has been discussed and implemented in isolation. The challenge faced before was to approximate each individual’s requirements and social network is an approach to approximate individual’s requirement. Once the requirements are understood, social networks are again used to influence individual customers to buy the given product or service. There are quite a few books written to leverage social network to promote and market products and services. To summarize, in today’s challenging market, it is obvious and evident that social network plays major role in selling product and services to consumers and some cases, even to big corporations.

Given this context, current economical circumstances, growth potential, emergence of cloud computing, compliance conformance requirements,

The following IT jobs will have high market demand in 2010..

1. Enterprise Architect – (Thorough understanding of business process management, business strategy, IT strategy, portfolio management, social networking tools ,techniques and its business application and etc)
2. Security Officer/Analyst (Audit, compliance,policy management, Threats from social networking, Identify Management Strategy,proactive incident avoidance – data loss prevention)
3. Network Engineer – (SAN/IPS/BGP/SONET/DNS/Firewall/Load Balancer/NetCache devices/SSL Accelerator/SMTP/SNMP/High availability/Disaster recovery/..)
4. Cloud Architect ( Cloud operating system – like VMVare, Business cloud)
5. Application Architect – (open source technologies,blog – wordpress, blogspot, facebook, youtube, SaaS, twitter, GoogleWave, web services, Rich Internet application – AJAX/Adobe Flex/Microsoft Silverlight)
6. Information Architect (Data Mining, Dataware house, Reporting, business intelligence, text minig, search optimization)
7. ERP specialist (SAP, PeopleSoft, JD Edward, Oracle financial, Banking – Fidelity, FiServ, Shaw, Phoenix, Hartland, and etc) 
8. Vendor/Contract Management ( ITIL)
9. Program/Project Management (PMBOK, PRINCE frameworks)
10.Smart Phone Application Architecture & Design – (iPhone, BlackBerry, etc)

Technical Architecture Components

/ prabasiva / 3 Comments

In general, infrastructure or data center cost is around 35-40% of an over all IT cost. Due to the high cost absorption in that area, it is prudent for any senior executive in the IT organization to have a better handle on the infrastructure cost.  The industry lacks uniformity in the cost management of IT as a whole and it applies to infrastructure/data center cost. The various cost management structure are available to manage the over all IT cost and it depends on the size and type of an organization. However, the general principle remain the same.

IT infrastructure cost  looked closely for IT cost optimization by every chief information officers. It is essential, particularly during this economical climate, to look the infrastructure cost distribution and study the alternative approaches for cost and competitive advantage. Chief Enterprise architects are directed by CIO and other senior executives to develop an IT infrastructure cost optimization program. To accomplish it, the enterprise architect must understand the high level information of  various components of  infrastructure and develop a technical architectural strategy.  Technical architectural strategy defines the future state and provides a foundation, the blueprint, for the infrastructure/data centre cost optimization program.

For any future state analysis and definition, the current state is studied and understood before a road map is developed to reach the future state.  1. To study the current state, itemize the various components of technical architecture and the service rendered in each components.

Components of technical/infrastructure architecture

  • Hardware
    • Servers
      • Distributed
        • WinTel
          • Linux
          • Windows
        • RISC
          • HP-UX
          • AIX
          • SGI
          • SUN Solaris
      • Mainframe
        • MVS
        • AS/400
    • Disk arrays
      • SAN storage
      • NAS storage
      • Backup
    • Network
      • Logical
        • Extranet
        • Internet
        • Intranet
      • Physical
        • Network Appliances (SSL accelerators, Net Cache devices, XML appliance)
        • Network devices (Routers, Switches, VPN devices, Hubs, Firewall, Wireless,Intrusion prevention)
        • Telephony devices (Dialer, ACDs, IVRs, PBX)
      • External Connectivity
        • SFTP drop box
        • VPN Tunnel
        • T1 line
        • ANX
        • OC3/5 internet connectivity
        • Frames/MPLS
    • Desktop
      • PC
      • Laptop
      • Mobile devices (iPhone, BlackBerry, Smart Phones, pagers)
  • Software
    • System Software
      • Server operating systems
      • Network operating system
      • Storage operating system
      • Desktop operating system
      • Compilers, Interpreters
      • File system management (VSAM, GFS )
      • Name resolution system (DNS)
      • Email servicing system (SMTP)
    • Web infrastructure
      • Application Server
      • Web Server
      • Portal Server
    • Data Administration
      • Database server – OnLine Transaction Processing (OLTP)
      • Data ware house
      • Reporting
      • Business Intelligence
    • Office management
      • Microsoft Office/OpenOffice
      • Email client
      • Browser
      • Remote login
      • Security – Virus prevention
    • Service Layer
      • Business process server
      • Message broker
      • Connector – database drivers, bridges,
    • Monitoring and control management
      • Service monitoring
      • Device monitoring
      • Compliance management
        • Data Loss prevention
        • Login monitoring
    • Collaboration Management server
    • Document management server
    • Storage Management Server
    • Emergency Management Service
      • Disaster Recovery Management
      • Business continuity Management
    • Enterprise Resource Planning (it will expand based on the core business)
      • Financials
        • Accounting
        • Management Accounting
          • Cash flow management
          • Fund flow management
      • HR
      • Procurement
  • Data center Services
    • Power grid architecture
    • Power Distribution Units (PDUs)
    • Backup power –
      • Automatic generators
        • Cooling and backup cooling for generators
        • Fuel capacity and distribution management
    • Cooling and heating
      • Backup cooling and heating
    • Wiring management
    • Rack management
    • Physical security
  • Security Service
    • Directory Services
    • Identity Management Services
      • User provisioning
      • Authentication
      • Authorization
      • User management
      • User de-provisioning
    • Network Security
    • Intrusion prevention
    • Firewall protection
    • Layered protection
      • Zoning – web zone, app zone, database zone, messaging zone, Demilitarized zone, file exchange zone

The service offering in each area depends on an enterprise.  Some enterprise has internal teams to provide all these services  and some has outsourced all of them. Mostly, enterprises adopt a hybrid approach with both external service provider and internal teams.  2. Define the future state in terms of strategic objectives like IT simplification, cost optimization, adaptability, agility for new market segment and etc.  3. For each component of the infrastructure, perform a SWOT, cost and new solution analysis and define the road map.

Rapid Solution Delivery Framework

/ prabasiva / 1 Comment

In this tough economical situation, leading a multi-million, multi-year project to a failure is not an option for any corporation.  Leaders or managers who lead project for years without successful implementation must be watched closely by the executive management for their performance during this economical situation. I totally understand an organization can learn from their mistakes, but successful organization learns from others mistakes but not on their own cost.

The project managers and leaders are seeking the best possible ways to ensure successful implementation in spite of any unforeseen hindrance in the execution. Even for the multi-million dollar projects utilizing the cost effectively solution are demanded. The project managers and leaders are seeking the best enterprise or system architect to provide solution to exceed customer expectation, meet requirements and at the same time provide most innovative and cost effective solution.  Enterprise architects or system architects are required to have a set of tools in their arsenal to provide a rapid cost effective solution with highest possible success rate.

Rapid Solution Delivery Framework is an abstract concept used to rapidly define a cost effective and innovative solution. The key components of the framework are:

1. Cloud computing
2. Open source
3. Social network tools

Cloud computing: It addresses the rapid infrastructure setup or applicaton setup or business rules for any solution delivery. The cloud platform may come from external public cloud provider like Amazon or internal cloud provider or external private cloud provider (like secure24, rackspace for infrastructure) . It is rapid way of setting up the infrastructure for the solution delivery. There may be cases where cloud platform may also provide business solutions.

Open Source: There are lots of commercial software product companies leveraging the open source or supporting or sponsoring the open source to improve their commercial product quality tremendously. For instance, IBM supports Apache product development and leverages the Apache web server and bundles it as a IBM HTTP Server (I H S). The open source concepts are not pertained to system software. The open source concept proliferated to various segments and even in the chemical bonding structural analysis there are lots of open source tools available where the researchers and students easily learn and collaborate. Open source has become an integral of any IT solution delivery model.  Open source provides wide range of solutions from operating system, system software (webserver, database server, application server), application development frameworks (spring, hibernate, struts), security (OpenSSO, Crowd, OpenLDAP) , application development IDEs (like eclipse, Galileo ) and etc. These open source products not only provide quality solutions but also provide cost effective solutions.

Social network tools: Social networking concepts and its implementation matured over the years and it is extensively being used beyond for personal use. There are major corporations like Cisco, Deloitte, IBM uses the social network tools for better collaboration among the employees to provide effective solutions to their clients. The tools landscape in the social network media is vast and deserves a separate blog. To name a few major categories like Video, Video Aggregation, documents, events, Wiki, LiveCasting, Pictures, social bookmarks, Crowdsourced content, blog and etc. There are at least 3-4 popular tools in each of those categories. The social networking technology landscape plays a vital role in leveraging existing solutions, collaborate better among various stakeholder of the projects.

Vivek Kundra implemented few projects in DC state government as a CTO are few practical examples how social networking platform provides a foundation for a rapid cost effective solution.

Along with these key components, depends on the business requirements, there may be other commerical products like SAP, or Flex (for UI) will be part of the over all IT solution.