Controlling on-demand

Hi, I'm Dan Friedman, Director of Product Marketing for Jamcracker, and I'm here to talk about controlling on-demand applications. On-demand applications are hosted applications, they are software delivered exclusively as a service SAAS applications and web services.

So let's get started by taking a look at today's IT landscape. Here we have enterprise applications. These could be ERP applications, CRM applications. What's important to note here is that these applications are managed. There's one sequence of steps for doing all of the things you need to do to run these applications. Examples of these services are administration, managing user IDs and passwords, security, access control, support, help desk, charge-back, things along those lines. So this is how things work for today's IT applications.

But now let's look at on demand applications. Now these have been proliferating over time. It could be an SFA application, an expense reporting app, you could be using Webbex for customer presentations. There are literally hundreds of them out there. What's important to note is that these are not centrally managed. In fact, they're often administered by the lines of business that have contracted for them. For example, in the SFA app, the sales administrator could be managing those apps instead of someone from centralized IT.

And so this can create a lot of issues. For example, things like phantom users that aren't deprovisioned when an employee leaves the company, blown audits, how can you pass an audit if you don't know who's using which applications. In fact, if you don't even know which applications are being run to manage your business. This has always been important, but in this age of Sarbanes-Oxley, it's like ten times as important now.

Finally, broken policy. Since there isn't one central place to manage all of these privileges, how can you be sure for example that someone who creates a purchase order can also authorize payment on that purchase order. So how do you address these issues? Well you need to take these applications and you need to put them in a box. You need to create a management layer very similar to this IT management layer, only for on demand services that provide the same services for these applications.

But that's really only the first step. In addition to managing these applications, you need to integrate them into your business processes, and you do this by creating a portfolio management layer. It doesn't care where the applications are run, via on demand or on premises, to create one complete solution that's delivered efficiently and effectively to your end users.