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IT technology under a new light. Media Duemila interviews Marco Neri, Manager of both Application Architectures that Innovation and Partnerships AlmavivA
IT technology under a new light. Media Duemila interviews Marco Neri, Manager of both Application Architectures that Innovation and Partnerships AlmavivA
18-06-2012
IT technology under a new light. Media Duemila interviews Marco Neri, Manager of both Application Architectures that Innovation and Partnerships AlmavivA
A radical process of change is under way, which is set to inexorably transform demand and the market positioning of ICT leaders: the changeover from IT to business management, an opportunity AlmavivA intends to grasp in full. The new mobile technologies, through consumers, are already prompting public and private organizations towards implementing radical changes in IT spending, according to an approach increasingly focused on ideas that create new services, by integrating consumer and enterprise technologies.
Cloud Computing solutions too are contributing to this transformation, by removing the need for geographical proximity between the service and the client. Mobility can pave the way for an “everywhere” logic and entails a flexible, secure and smart platform for providing services to the public and businesses by exploiting the great wealth of data that has not yet been fully tapped.
Cloud Computing solutions too are contributing to this transformation, by removing the need for geographical proximity between the service and the client. Mobility can pave the way for an “everywhere” logic and entails a flexible, secure and smart platform for providing services to the public and businesses by exploiting the great wealth of data that has not yet been fully tapped.
Cloud, Social Information, Mobile, the new paradigms of information technology which we’d like to discuss with Marco Neri, Chief of Application Architectures and of Innovation and Partnerships at AlmavivA.
Clouds undoubtedly make for an evocative metaphor, but the focus should be on the new paradigms of information technology, the family of hardware and application software resources that come together to provide a set of web-based functionalities: an evolution of IT outsourcing via the Internet, an ICT solution suited to both public and private organizations of all sizes.
The actual breakthrough of Cloud services is the total application of Utility Computing: users can pay for the services as they go, just like you pay for water, electricity and gas. Today, the virtualization of hardware and software resources can deliver innovatory technologies without the need for large investments, with obvious economic advantages: infrastructure start-up costs are practically nil, scalability is on demand, the management of traffic peaks and server resources can be optimized (in view of the fact that, normally, they are used for no more than 20/30% of their actual potential), and businesses no longer have to worry about updates, maintenance and licensing. A whole spectrum of services becomes available round the clock, ranging from basic hosting to platforms ready for application deployment, to SaaS - Software as a Service, an all-round customizable software, and X as a Service, the global services. This concept marks a clear break with the past, because the “smart cloud” enables business through “technology” and not “technology experts”: business managers can now call up state-of-the-art services in the space in a few minutes and in just a few clicks …
And can you tell us about the importance of Cloud technology for AlmavivA...
For AlmavivA, Cloud Computing has now reached its maturity and is ready to go widespread, consistently with the forecasts, which predict a constant growth of 30% per year until 2014. We need to emphasize, however, that AlmavivA is always there to solve the criticalities that still afflict Cloud technology: service continuity, privacy issues and, in particular, data and information security, because at AlmavivA we have the skills, expertise and the certified infrastructure to effectively tackle these matters. Our strong point is our capacity to offer services based on market products and open source components, thanks to our software factory, which employs about 700 software engineers, qualified to exploit in the best possible way the advantages of both types of solutions, to help our clients decide on the one best suited to their needs.
Over time information technology has become a commodity…
… which nobody can do without anymore. This truth has had a huge impact on production, profits, the delivery of services by suppliers and of requests by clients: the former must strive to be increasingly speedy, efficient and competent, while the latter are increasingly demanding, technology-wise and prepared to spend solely for value-added and cutting-edge products. This is the current backdrop for strategy and Cloud Computing.
All this seems very useful in a period of spending review.
In order to be successful any spending review operation cannot disregard the present situation, this is the only way in which to rationalize spending without making any indiscriminate cuts.
Several surveys, commissioned by the Microsoft Corporation to worldwide-renowned companies – and which, therefore, should be applied with a pinch of salt to the Italian situation – have highlighted future scenarios that will lead to reconsider previously ignored strategic plans.
AlmavivA is well acquainted with these scenarios and, for some time now, we have started outlining IT strategies which, apparently, have very little to do with Cloud Computing – Web 2.0 and 3.0, Corporate Social Networking, Collaboration combined with Unified Communication, Teleworking – and we have been engaged in refining competencies and knowledge in specific fields that are strictly and predominantly related to Cloud solutions, namely: the Virtualization of Servers and, above all, Desktops; the Self-Provisioning portals, consisting in the creation of virtual DIY computers; the design of “green” DPCs, which require lower amounts of energy, while offering the same – or even higher – computational power; the Private Marketplaces for the supply of mobile apps.
Can you give me some examples of good practices by AlmavivA?
There are quite a few, but two of the most interesting ones are the Data Center for the Region of Tuscany and the HyperCED solution for Ferrovie dello Stato.
Are there any alliances you consider strategic?
Our approach at AlmavivA is to combine innovation and quality, so we offer both consolidated vendor solutions, often proposed to us by our clients themselves, and solutions developed by emerging cool vendors, which are very aggressive players, even though they are not yet fully established on the Italian market, providing reliable innovatory technologies. Our strategic alliances today are with the market leaders in the fields of virtualization, SOA, the automation of IT processes for the creation and provisioning of applications and monitoring of the End User Experience. Negotiations, in fact, are at an advanced stage with CITRIX for virtualization; TIBCO, in particular for the Silver Fabric product, for federating DPCs and the automation of application load peak management; COMPUWARE for the monitoring of end-to-end application performance, covering the entire Application Delivery Chain, from the user and to the application code, through a new generation of End User Experience solutions.
TIX 2.0, THE DATA CENTER CLOUD FOR THE REGION OF TUSCANY
AlmavivA has developed for the Region of Tuscany a compact high-density facility for computational logic systems, with significant savings in term of physical space, electricity consumption and maintenance costs, ensuring improved performance, enhanced scalability and fast assistance in the case of malfunctioning. TIX 2.0 is a flexible infrastructure, developed according to state-of-the-art Green IT concepts, an excellent example of Cloud Computing: the virtualized services and resources enable "XaaS" (X as a Service) procedures, consisting in the use of “on demand” software platforms and hardware infrastructure). The TIX 2.0 is a regional pole of technological excellence that can make available to all branches of the Regional Government in Tuscany a catalog of evolved services, ensuring a highly scalable processing power at the highest service levels.
THE HYPERCED® SOLUTION FOR FERROVIE DELLO STATO
The migration program for the legacy systems of FS Group into the HyperCED® solution developed by AlmavivA has produced one of the largest Private Clouds in Italy. The new concept of Datacenter is a set of scalability models, technologies and statistical models for the saturation of the processing resources, which transforms the IT infrastructure into an on-demand service capable of real-time provisioning. The solution has been developed using state-of-the-art technologies and exploits the Unified Computing and virtualization models as far as possible: four times the number of physical systems compared to a conventional solution can be placed inside a PoD, the HyperCED® solution’s processing power container. This factor increases by two orders of magnitude also introducing virtualization.
Electricity savings of 75% can be achieved and 90% less physical space is required. The challenge was to transform the technological infrastructure into a business driver for the Group: today, AlmavivA can offer one of the most innovatory Cloud Computing solutions in Italy. Today, AlmavivA’s HyperCED® is a concentrate of technologies, certified according to the strictest quality and management standards (ISO 9001, ISO/IEC 20000-1), with special regard to security (ISO/IEC 27001), capable of escorting medium-to-large public and private organizations operating in a variety of sectors into the Cloud.
