FP&A is part of HP's expanding IT Financial Management (ITFM) portfolio designed to help chief information officers (CIOs) and IT managers create comprehensive financial transparency, optimize costs deeply but prudently, and newly demonstrate the business value of IT services.

In a related announcement here at the HP Software Universe conference this week, HP unveiled enhancements to its project and portfolio management (PPM) solution for planning and organizing IT investments.

HP also opened its related Tech Forum conference here this week. For the second year in a row, BriefingsDirect will cover the HP Software Universe 2009 conference through a series of podcasts, blogs, transcripts and Twitter entries. [Disclosure: HP is sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Follow the HP Software Universe 2009 conference on Twitter by searching on #HPSU09.

HP Project and Portfolio Management (PPM) Center 8.0 arrives as a key component in ITFM, providing integrated capabilities for IT portfolio investment management, global resource efficiencies and IT financial transparency.

PPM popularity is on the rise as organizations align planned business investments with IT project portfolios, said Daniel Stang, principal research analyst at Gartner, in a release.

Analysts in addition to myself are hearing consistently from IT executives that cost-optimization, cost-containment, and cost-reduction initiatives are the top priorities being driven from the business side onto IT.

The business leaders are demanding a clear understanding of all IT costs and benefits as the global recession lingers, if no longer still steeply deepening. HP's enhanced IT planning and analysis solutions are designed to help IT executives reduce costs without jeopardizing IT's ability to support future growth when it's called for.

The recession therefore accelerates the need to reduce total IT cost through identification and elimination of wasteful operations and practices. But at the same time, IT departments need to better define and implement streamlined processes for operations and to show the near and far business value of any new projects.

As part of the opening keynote address here today, Andy Isherwood, Vice President and General Manager of HP Software and Solutions, said the recession compels better management of IT. CIOs need to reduce costs, yes, but they should do so without jeopardizing future growth.

Consolidating IT cut costs and saves energy by focusing on the operational inefficiencies up front. It's about getting down and dirty, not pie in the sky solutions, said Isherwood.

Along with consolidation, IT leaders can increasingly automate and virtualize infrastructure and data centers. Combined with greater financial management, IT performance analytics, and IT resources optimization, enterprises can cut their IT operations bills while setting the stage for the new phases of advancement.

And those new benefits, said Isherwood, include using flexible sourcing, from on-house premises data centers to outsourcers like HP's EDS, as well as clouds, both on or via off premises partners like Amazon Web Services. As Ann Livermore of HP said yesterday: Everything as a service.

HP is already preparing to better manage and govern the cloud transitions with its Cloud Assure, which joins IT financial management, IT performance analytics, resource management as next major focuses for the HP Software and Solutions group.

To sum up, Isherwood said that HP's major solutions drives are around IT Management Software, Information Management Software, BI Solutions, and Communications and Media Solutions.

HP expects that after a 12-month period of operational optimization initiatives that CIOs will also seek more transformative IT functional delivery improvements, including such next-generation data center bulwarks as consolidation, automation, and virtualization.

Today's pressing IT management and architecture decisions, then, need to gain from better financial management tools, proffer IT performance analytics, and exploit IT resources optimization techniques for both near- and long-term benefits.

These financial performance indicator insights and disciplines for IT will also place CIOs in a better position to look at and pursue future flexible and cost-reducing sourcing options. Those are sure to include modernizing in-house legacy deployments, outsourcing to providers such as HP's EDS, and exploring a variety of burgeoning third-party cloud offerings (on premises, off premises, or managed hybrids).

Knowing the true costs and benefits of complex and often sprawling IT portfolios quickly helps improve the financial performance, while setting up the ability to meaningfully compare and contrast current with future IT deployment scenarios. Who knows if cloud computing will save money if we don't know the true costs of all-on-premises approaches?

Gaining real-time visibility into dynamic IT cost structures provides a powerful tool for reducing cost, while also maintaining and improving overall performance. Holistic visibility across an entire IT portfolio also develops the visual analytics that can help better probe for cost improvements and uncover waste.

This is where the HP planning, analysis and financial management solution comes to the rescue in terms of value, optimization priorities, and future planning comparisons.

The HP Financial Planning and Analysis product announced here today is designed to help organizations understand costs from a service-based perspective. It provides a common extract transform load (ETL) capability that can pull information from data sources, including HP PPM and asset management products as well as non-HP data sources.

Cost Explorer, a key component of FP&A, provides business intelligence (BI) capability for visualizing data that is applied to IT costs. Users are able to see data displays color-coded to help identify different dimensions and variants in costs.

HP FP&A can be run as a stand-alone or in conjunction with other HP software products such as HP Project Portfolio Management Center, HP Asset Manager and HP Configuration Management System as well as the newly enhanced version of HP Project Portfolio Management (PPM) Center 8.0.

Along with the software products, HP is also offering consulting services based on best practices, including:

• Strategy and Advisory Services to help synthesize organizational requirements, data, process and technical gaps for developing detailed implementation roadmaps.

• Implementation Services to provide BI services for strategic decision making including forecasting budgetary needs, quantifying the value of IT services delivered to the business, improving cost efficiency, and aligning IT resources with business needs.

• Process Consulting and Solution Implementation Services based on the HP Service Management Reference Model help in deploying HP ITFM and HP PPM to get improved business results.

• Best practices for Configuration Management Systems help accelerate deployment and provide a use model for customers to identify IT assets and relate them to the costs of the services delivered to the business.

Key enhancements to HP PPM Center 8.0 include:

• IT portfolio investment management for improved alignment between IT and business with cash flow analysis that supports business reviews with actionable, real-time information.

• HP PPM Center Mobility Access for governing IT expenditures through secure and automated checkpoints from mobile devices, which send email notifications and workflow actions to cell phones and PDAs.

• Global resource efficiencies for managing human resources with reports and notifications in the recipient's language.

• Additional IT financial transparency and controls for decision support with a comprehensive financial summary that aggregates IT investment data and related analyses.

• HP Universal Configuration Management Database (UCMDB) integration with HP PPM Center 8.0 provides advanced search capabilities for business and technical users.

• HP Service Manager integration offers a single IT services access point, so users can access services by creating an HP PPM Center proposal from an HP Service Manager catalog item via Web services.

What's more, HP PPM is now available in a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS)-delivered solution that offers accelerated deployment. Expect a lot more from me on this subject, via podcasts and interviews with the key leaders.

HP is also offering new Software Professional Services for HP PPM 8.0, including:

• Solution Consulting Services for PPM 8.0 providing design and implementation consulting to help customers reduce IT costs by automating enterprise-wide portfolio management via services.

• Fast Track Deployment and Upgrades to help speed deployment of the new software.

• Process Consulting Services to help customer make use of best practices guides for industry standards. HP delivers standardized processes based on HP and industry best practices such as Information Technology Infrastructure Library (ITIL) v3, COBIT and ISO

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

Courtesy the credit crisis and big bailout packages, the figure trillion has suddenly become part of our everyday conversations. One trillion dollars, or 1 followed by 12 zeros, is lots of money but have you ever tried visualizing how big that number actually is?

For people who can visualize one million dollars, the comparison made on CNN should give you an idea about a trillion - if you start spending a million dollars every single day since Jesus was born, you still wouldn't have spend a trillion dollars.

Another mathematician puts it like this: 1 million seconds is about 11.5 days, 1 billion seconds is about 32 years while a trillion seconds is equal to 32,000 years.

Now if the above comparisons weren't really helpful, check another illustration that compares the built of an average human being against a stack of $100 currency notes bundles.

A bundle of $100 notes is equivalent to $10,000 and that can easily fit in your pocket. 1 million dollars will probably fit inside a standard shopping bag while a billion dollars would occupy a small room of your house.

With this background in mind, 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) is 1000 times bigger than 1 billion and would therefore take up an entire football field - the man is still standing in the bottom-left corner.

Related: Visualize Units of Measurement

Visualizing a Trillion: Just How Big That Number Is? (Published at Digital Inspiration)

Motivation:

Software systems are getting larger, more complex and more configurable all the time. While beneficial in many ways, these changes dramatically increase testing obligations.

For example, today's systems are increasingly built to run on multiple OS, compiler and library platforms. They are composed from multiple components, each with multiple versions. They are configured by manipulating numerous compile- and run-time options. Additionally, distributed applications add an allocation dimension in which runtime topologies can vary widely.

This situation is further complicated by agile and flexible development practices in which systems are evolved incrementally over short, but varying update cycles and in which development teams may be geographically distributed.

Basically, each new configuration dimension increases the number of potential runtime configurations combinatorially. Since each of these configurations might behave differently or host different bugs, each of these configurations, at least in theory, must be tested. Furthermore, this increased amount of testing must be done in shorter and shorter time frames because the systems themselves are changing faster than ever.

The Skoll project:

Our research aims to create better, faster and more powerful techniques for testing these kinds of systems. Our vision is to redesign traditional testing processes so that they can be executed around-the-world, around-the-clock. These processes are logically divided into multiple tasks that are distributed intelligently to client machines around the world and then executed by them. The results from these distributed tasks are returned to central collection sites where they are merged and analyzed to complete the overall QA process.

At the second Google Test Automation Conference, I and my colleague Atif Memon presented an infrastructure and approach called Skoll that was created to support this vision. The video is embedded below.

Skoll in action:

To give you a better sense of how this works we're going to walk you through how we set up a Skoll server to run a simplified version of the continuous build, test and integration process we've developed to run the MySQL Build Farm Initiative. This process runs on computing resources that are temporarily volunteered by members of the MySQL developer and user communities. After reading the rest of this post, we hope you too will be ready and willing to volunteer as well!

MySQL, as you probably know, is a very popular open source database comprising over 2 million lines of code. It is developed by a world wide community and runs on many different platforms, has over 150 configuration options, and allows substantial static and runtime end-user customization. For instance, you can select different database front- and back-ends, and you can run the system with different runtime topologies to support database replication. In short, it's exactly the kind of system we had in mind when we created Skoll.

We first started speaking with MySQL developers after the first Google Test Automation Conference. They were interested in running a continuous build, integration and test (CBIT) process. They had several goals, such as: testing a broader variety of configurations, not just a handful of popular ones; giving developers greater visibility into the quality and stability of the system; improving bug fix turnaround time; and managing test data to enable long term statistical analysis and improved decision making.

Since they couldn't seem to find anything off-the-shelf that was sufficiently targeted to their needs, we worked with them to develop a Skoll-based CBIT process. This process has several parts: defining a configuration model, implementing a sampling strategy, executing the tests, and analyzing and visualizing the results.

We will discuss each of these below. Readers who just want to run a client can jump straight to the Section marked Test execution.

Some more details:

Configuration Model: We are starting out by looking at 23 options. There are some inter-option constraints as well. For example, a configuration can compile in support for either the libedit library (--with-libedit) or the readline library (--with-readline), but not both. Here's a ling to the current configuration model . We will expand this model as we gain more experience with this process and more insight into the key issues concerning MySQL.

Sampling strategy: There are over 48 million unique configurations in this test space. Since testing 1 configuration can take up to 2 hours and because new releases come out more or less daily, exhaustive testing of each check-in is clearly impossible. Therefore, we only test specially-chosen subsets of configurations in which all t-way (2 <= t <= 4) combinations of option settings are tested at least once. Our particular algorithm for selecting these configurations, which we invented with Myra Cohen of the University of Nebraska, works incrementally. First it tests 3 sets of ~23 configurations, each set of which covers all combinations of settings between every pair of options (i.e., 2-way combinations). We then move up to testing 3 sets of ~84 configurations that cover all settings of every triple of options and then move up again to cover all quadruples (~272 configurations), also 3 times each. This allows us to test low level interactions quickly, even if new releases come in before all levels of interactions can be tested. As we gain experience with this process, we will evaluate whether and how much we may need to increase t.

Test execution: To participate in this process, users can go to our MySQL 5.1 project page. On that page you can find links to download a client along with instructions on how to install and run it. This client is a simple Perl script that connects to a Skoll server and asks for a test job. The server examines its internal databases, selects an outstanding job and returns it to the client who then executes it. Currently, testing a configurations involves compiling MySQL in a specific configuration and then running about 750 MySQL-supplied tests on that configuration. The test scripts determine which test cases can be run in the current configuration and runs them. After completing the tests, the client uploads the results to the server.

Feedback, analysis and visualization: For this process, we are interested in understanding where configuration-related bugs might be hiding. To figure this out, we periodically analyze test results by building a classification tree for each test that has failed in a minimum number of configurations. These trees model test failures in terms of the configuration option and settings that were set when the tests failed. Users can look at a web page to see the current test results . This page shows summary statistics for each build ID. Clicking on a build ID takes you to a detail page listing each test that failed a minimum number of times. Each test presents classification information, both in a raw form and as an interactive treemap.

Current status:

We have just started running this process on a continuous basis using an a small number of MySQL developer community machines. We hope to bring many more test machines online in the coming weeks. Please check out the results web page to watch our progress. And don't let everyone else have all the fun -- download your client today! Thanks!

While startup churn is inevitable in any industry (thank goodness we're not restaurant founders!) I think this forecast is selling the future short. There are some big trends I'm really excited about for the web in 2008. Whatever happens to the economy, there's at least a whole lot of innovation to be inspired by right now. Ultimately, I think that will end up brightening the picture for all of us around the world.

Let's Build Some Stuff

For each of the 5 big topical trends described below, I've assembled some resources I think will be useful for anyone who wants to keep up with cutting edge developments in these fields in the next year.

These resources include:

* An OPML file of top blogs on each subject. This is a bundle of feeds you can import into your reader.
* A filtered RSS feed of just the most popular items regarding each topic (using AideRSS). Remember, whenever you subscribe to new RSS feeds - some of the magic won't be visible until you mark all the initial items as read and new ones come in again.
* A Custom Search Engine that you can bookmark and use to search inside the top news and reference sites regarding each topic.

If you'd like to recommend any additional feeds or sites to add to these resources just let me know and I'll check them out. Please do, in fact. I hardly have the energy to make these lists exhaustive by myself. That's kind of the point of this whole web endeavor, isn't it?

All of these resources are dynamic; sites added at a later date will be automatically delivered to everyone who subscribes to these OPML files today.

So let's get to some trends that are shaping up to make a big impact on 2008...

Open Data

Data silos and walled gardens are a huge loss of opportunity and more people are figuring that out every day. The developments in this direction seen just in the last half of 2007 are too numerous to list here but some of the subthemes include the following.

• Data portability - taking your archives and friends from one site to another.


• The portable identity of OpenID


• The Google-led OpenSocial


• Google's Android mobile OS


• The "by hell or high water" rise of data-centric startups


• The personal data aggregation and publishing tools called Lifestreaming apps like Tumblr, named one of Time's Top 50 Websites of the Year, or the bleeding edge Onaswarm, Lifestrea.ms and Soup.


• The burgeoning Attention standard APML and various other efforts you can learn more about at sites like DataPortability.org.

Open Data Resources:
*RWW Open Data Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
*RWW Open Data Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
*Preview the above feeds before subscribing (pop-up window)
*RWW Open Data Sites Search (Visit and Bookmark)

Recommendation

As is aptly demonstrated from the category above, the future is likely to be even more swamped in data, social and content options than the web is today. From Google Reader's recent incorporation of both item level recommendations and shared items in Reader from your contacts in GMail to the ascendancy of services like Last.fm, Pandora and StumbleUpon - recommendation is beginning to make a big splash already.

Dr. Rick Hangartner, Chief Scientist at recommendation engine MyStrands, posited the following about the relationship between search engines and vendor-specific recommendation engines in a recent guest post on mobile search blog MSearchGroove:

In the near term, search engines will increasingly incorporate simple recommender technologies to handle approximate queries (e.g. You asked for this, and based on similar queries/behavior by others, you might be looking for this.). But in the long term, the recommender industry will be larger, and recommender technologies will be more pervasive than the search industry and search technology as we know it. [Because there will be recommendation going on all over the web.]

Recommendation Resources:
*RWW Recommendation Industry Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
*RWW Recommendation Industry Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
*Click to preview the above feeds before subscribing (pop-up window)
*RWW Open Data Sites Search (Visit and Bookmark)

Semantic Web

A Semantic Web has been in the works for a long time but is just starting to hit the scene for real. The idea is that semantic web technologies are able to derive meaning from online content and determine connections where none have been made explicitly.

If I'm looking at a web page about Assata Shakur, for example, then SemWeb tech should be able to determine that she's the subject of the page I'm looking at and that it's a biographical page. Once that's been determined, semantic technology can leverage the two trends discussed above (data openness and recommendation) to do all kinds of interesting things.

As I wrote in coverage of an excellent interview with Semantic Web scientist Yihong Ding - once our software is capable of deriving meaning from web pages it looks at for us, then there's a whole lot of work that's already been done, allowing our creative human minds to reach new heights. By pre-processing online content for us, Semantic Web technology lets us start from a point of higher abstraction.

Richard MacManus called Semantic Web application Twine possibly the first mainstream consumer semantic web app, but there's a whole lot of innovation going on in this space. Major companies are starting to leverage Semantic Web technology under the covers of existing websites as well.

Semantic Web Resources:
*RWW Semantic Web Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
*RWW SemWeb Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
*Click to preview the above feeds before subscribing (pop-up window)
*RWW SemWeb Sites Search (Visit and Bookmark)

Mobile

While Michael Arrington says the release of the iPhone relieved him of any pressure to build a mobile version of TechCrunch, I think there's still going to be a whole lot of innovation in the mobile space well into the future.

Most of the people online in this world access the web through a tiny little computer they carry in their pocket and also use as a phone.

Mobile means more than just small, though. It also means portable, fast, location-aware and tied to voice, media and the meat-space.

Mobile is already a great analogy for data portability in general - people are thrilled in the US that we can now switch cell phone carriers and keep the same phone number. Imagine if we lost our contacts when we switched phones. The same type of expectations are totally reasonable for services online.

Once mobile really gets tied into open data on the web, to recommendation engines and to the semantic web - then we'll be cooking with gas.

Mobile Industry Resources:
*RWW Mobile Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
*RWW Mobile Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
*Click to preview the above feeds before subscribing (pop-up window)
*RWW Top Mobile Sites Search Engine (Visit and Bookmark)

Visualization

We're only going to get so far if we just tell the world, "trust us, all this ephemeral crap is going to change your life!." A big part of why there isn't widespread consumer demand for OpenID is that the benefits of it haven't been clearly communicated. The concept is gaining steam almost in spite of the communication of its advocates, many people believe. The future of OpenID and many other key technical innovations, lies in communicating with people about what they can do with the tools. That is not easy to do with things that are complicated or new.

Just as video has changed the web forever because visual communication is infinitely more evocative than text - so to do I expect the perceived value of visualization to grow by leaps and bounds in 2008.

I wrote a post about 3 methods of visualizing best practices in social software design over Thanksgiving, highlighting the work of Thomas Vander Wal, Chris Messina and the Google OpenSocial team. To that list I'd like to add Dave McClure's SlideShare archive, where you'll find images like the one below. This stuff is pure gold. Powerpoint is the future? Well, effective visual communication of complex data-based concepts is going to be an invaluable part of the future.

Visualization Resources:
*RWW Visualization Feed Favorites OPML file (save link)
*RWW Visualization Feeds - Best of Feed (copy and paste to your reader)
*Click to preview the above feeds before subscribing
*RWW Top Mobile Sites Search Engine (Visit and Bookmark)

That's It! Post Suggestions Below, Please!

I hope these resources will prove useful for our readers in the coming year. Please let us know about any sites that ought to be included here - or let us know if you think I'm barking up the wrong tree and these won't in fact be hugely influential trends in 2008. Thanks for getting all the way through this long post!