Failing Fast: The Quickest Route to Digital Transformation

Speed, agility, and innovation—these are the hallmarks for success in the digital era. What’s less proven is the “fail fast” concept, which encourages exploration by floating trial balloons quickly, then allowing ideas to fail if they don’t help drive positive business outcomes. Using this approach, failure becomes a stepping-stone for success—allowing teams to iterate quickly, learn from mistakes, and triage ideas in rapid succession, much like a startup.

Not too long ago, a failed IT project could be catastrophic, resulting in missed delivery targets, productivity drop-offs, even lost revenue. It’s no wonder that IT teams remain a bit gun-shy about adopting a fail-fast approach to business given that their job stability likely depends on their success. The IDG Cloud Futurecast survey found that just 15% of IT directors believe risk-taking is critical to transforming products and services.

C-level executives, by comparison, are far more bullish on the advantages of fail-fast techniques, in part, no doubt, because their jobs don’t directly hang in the balance. According to the IDG survey, 29% recognize the ability to fail fast as a key enabler for revenue-driving strategies compared with only 17% of vice presidents and general managers.

These forward-thinking leaders understand that the cloud is the engine behind creating an iterative, agile mindset across the entire organization. The cloud allows teams to test-drive many small innovations without the traditional risk of a major setback. A cloud-based, fail-fast approach removes technology constraints and allows organizations to explore new ideas constantly, versus one or two ideas annually.

Advances in big data analytics and artificial intelligence promise to take fail-fast strategies to entirely new heights, delivering real-time monitoring and robust data access capabilities that can detect failure almost instantaneously.

The cloud’s ability to drive innovation and mitigate risk are also central to a fail-fast mentality. Twenty-eight percent of IDG survey respondents say the cloud is essential for reinventing their businesses. Perhaps more important, 25% of respondents say the cloud’s ability to support testing product concepts in early stages with greater accuracy is a key asset. Another 21% say exploratory, fail-fast methods can help minimize the risk associated with continuous innovation. These percentages, while relatively low, signal an important shift in thinking: The cloud is no longer just a cost-saver, but an innovation engine.

For many organizations, enhancing customer experience is the leading priority for success in the digital era. And applying a fail-fast methodology may be the secret sauce. Organizations emphasizing the cloud for customer engagement strategies are far more likely to embrace fail-fast capabilities—32% of survey respondents, compared with companies using cloud to optimize operations (19%), empower employees (17%), or transform products (15%). Experimenting with new products and services using the fail-fast method may give these leaders a leg up on their competitors.

For all the negative connotations, fast failure in the digital era may be just the right recipe for digital transformation success.

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Now Generally Available: On-premises data gateway in Azure

By Dimah Zaidalkilani as written on azure.microsoft.com

With today's update, we're excited to announce that the on-premises data gateway is now generally available in Azure. This gateway helps you securely connect your business apps in the cloud to your data sources on premises. You can use the gateway to move data to and from the cloud while keeping your data sources on premises. The gateway currently supports Azure Logic Apps, but in the next few months, will also expand to support Azure Analysis Services.

This release includes these new features:

• Support for multiple regions

• Delete your gateway connection resource in Azure

• New on-premises connectors for Azure Logic Apps

To get the latest gateway installation, download the gateway installer.

Support for multiple regions

This update gives gateway admins even more control over data gateway settings. When you install the gateway on a local computer, you can now select the region for the gateway cloud service and Azure Service Bus communication channel that you want to use with your gateway installation. Previously, this region defaulted to your Azure Active Directory tenant’s location.

We will move existing gateways to match the original location of your tenant. So if you currently use the gateway, you might notice this change. However, this update won't affect currently running logic apps, which will continue to work as usual.

Note: You can't change this region after installation unless you uninstall the gateway and reinstall. This region also determines and restricts the location where you can create the Azure resource for your gateway connection. So when you create the gateway connection resource in Azure, make sure to choose the location that you selected during installation so you can select your gateway from the installed gateways list.

Delete gateway resource in Azure

You can now delete your gateway connection resource in Azure and associate your gateway to a different Azure resource. The ability to delete the gateway installation is coming soon.

New on-premises connectors for Azure Logic Apps

Also, we’re adding new connectors that support on-premises data sources for Azure Logic Apps, Oracle EBS and PostgreSQL. These connectors follow two other connectors that we introduced a month ago, MySQL and Teradata.

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Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016

By Kurt Mackie as written on redmondmag.com

Microsoft today announced that Windows Server 2016 and the System Center 2016 management suite of products have reached "general availability" (GA) status.

GA means that the products can be purchased and used in production environments. Both are now licensed on a per-core basis, instead of the earlier per-processor approach. In addition, today's GA milestone means that that Microsoft's service provider partners can now begin testing Windows Server 2016 in their datacenters.

In late September, both products were at the earlier "release-to-manufacturing" stage. They got a small bit of stage time during Microsoft's Ignite keynote product "launch" back then.

Microsoft seems to have reserved Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 product details for its Ignite session attendees. Many of those sessions are currently available on demand via the Ignite 2016 Channel 9 portal. The agenda for Windows Server 2016 and System Center 2016 sessions at Ignite can be found at this page.

Also, Microsoft announced this week that it will broadcast a Windows Server 2016 Webcast on Oct. 13, starting at 9:00 a.m. Pacific Time. The Webcast will feature talks by Microsoft luminaries such as Jeffrey Snover, Jeff Woolsey and Erin Chapple.

Windows Server 2016 Highlights

Microsoft is marketing Windows Server 2016 as another advance in its "hybrid cloud" approach. The "hybrid" part means that the traditional customer-maintained server model can work with the services delivered from Microsoft's datacenters, such as Microsoft Azure services and Office 365 services.

Windows Server 2016 was "forged in our own Azure datacenters," Microsoft stressed in its announcement. The new server also has software-defined capabilities that come from Microsoft's experience in running Azure datacenters. Microsoft also had previously announced that the Docker Engine was added to Windows Server 2016 at "no additional cost" to customers. It facilitates running applications without conflict by using either Windows Server Containers or Hyper-V Containers, which both tap Docker Engine technology.

Microsoft lists its application server product support on Windows Server 2016 in this TechNet publication. The main Microsoft application server products that aren't yet supported on the new Windows Server 2016 product include Skype for Business Server 2015, BizTalk Server 2016, Visual Studio Team Foundation Server 15 and Host Integration Server 2016. They will get supported eventually, though, a Microsoft spokesperson indicated.

IT pros looking for hardware recommendations for Windows Server 2016 might take a look at this listcompiled by Thomas Maurer, a Microsoft Most Valuable Professional. He's also compiled other useful links on "deployment, upgrading and certification" in this blog post.

Microsoft is touting access to its new server technology via a relatively new licensing portability option. It's for current Windows Server users that have Software Assurance coverage. Under this "Azure Hybrid Use Benefit" option, if an organization has Windows Server products installed on premises that are covered by the Software Assurance annuity program, then it's possible to move that licensing from an organization's infrastructure and use Windows Server virtual machines on Microsoft Azure datacenter infrastructure.

Windows Server 2016 currently can be downloaded. It's available via the MSDN subscriber portal and the TechNet Evaluation Center (a free 180-day trial copy).

System Center 2016 Highlights

The GA announcement of Microsoft's System Center 2016 suite of products means that all of its components are now available, including Virtual Machine Manager, Operations Manager, Orchestrator and Service Management Automation, Service Manager, Data Protection Manager and Configuration Manager. A 180-day trial edition is available for download at Microsoft's evaluation portal here.

Instead of listing the exhaustive feature details, Microsoft broadly listed the following highlights of the System Center 2016 suite:

• Faster time to value with simple installation, in-place upgrades, and automated workflows.

• Efficient operations with improvements in performance and usability of all System Center components.

• Greater heterogeneity and cloud management with broader support for LAMP stack and VMware, including monitoring resources and services in Azure and Amazon Web Services.

There's also a Microsoft white paper listing the System Center 2016 highlights (PDF).

Microsoft is also touting an option to license System Center 2016 components via its Operations Management Suite (OMS) subscriptions. OMS is Microsoft's solution for managing public cloud workloads. There are four service options available to OMS subscribers, namely Insights & Analytics, Automation & Control, Security & Compliance, and Protection & Recovery. They are priced per node.

Various System Center 2016 components come with each of those OMS service options. For instance, Configuration Manager use rights come with an Automation & Control OMS subscription. It's also possible to "attach OMS services to your existing System Center license," which Microsoft calls the "OMS Add-on for System Center." It requires having Software Assurance coverage on System Center to use this add-on option. More details about these System Center-OMS licensing options can be found in Microsoft's OMS "Pricing and Licensing Datasheet" (PDF).

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