DMR: And building business rules … 

Lew Tucker: Yes, one can build in both business and economic rules into the application itself. In fact, the application might also be able to notice, “Gee, I’m very lightly loaded.  I’m going to save some money by turning off some of my resources that seem to be very lightly loaded.”   

DMR: Interesting. Do you think that is going to be managed by the application itself, or rather by an application overlay or application controller – some sort of a business policy server? 

Lew Tucker: This approach does require some real careful consideration. We all know the Skynet scenario in the Terminator movies which shows what can happen. But we are approaching this capability, so now is the time to start thinking about how we make applications aware of their true cost of running and build in economic rules and the necessary oversight. Service providers will also need to look much more at monitoring application  behavior before provisioning resources. If an application all of a sudden is spinning up 1,000 servers that may want to be blocked and a call made to the owner to ask, “Is this a mistake? Or is this something that you really intend to be doing?”   

DMR: So real-time customer care suddenly becomes really important. 

Lew Tucker: Absolutely. 

DMR: Of course customer care has always been important. But the real-time aspect clearly shows the intersection of automation, self-service portals, and real-person interaction. 

Lew Tucker: Again, I think this is something telecoms actually understand. Support and service are going to be some of the real differentiators. 

DMR: Let’s say I’m a large chemical company. I have a carbon footprint. I’m running applications. Suddenly applications spin up servers themselves. Do they need to report and monitor the carbon footprints as part of the running costs as well? 

Lew Tucker: Could be. What we know is: the main issue for computing in terms of the environment is that most of the servers running are so under-utilized, and therefore wasting a lot of energy. The extent to which we can increase utilization and turn off servers that aren’t being used in the data center, is how we will really lower the overall carbon footprint. I do believe that service providers will do a better job of doing that and managing that than your traditional data centers who may not have the manpower or the expertise to do it.