Freeform Comment

Time for a fresh look at Disaster Recovery?

2012-01-24T15:40:00.000Z

Insights and tips for small and mid-sized businesses
by Colin Beveridge, Principal Analyst, Freeform Dynamics

Not many people read IT Disaster Recovery plans for pleasure but these documents are often far more insightful than the organisation’s Annual Report. That’s because the quality and scope of the DR plan instantly reveals the company’s relative priorities, levels of resource investment and commitment to business continuity planning.

At the very least, a robust, up-to-date and proportionate IT disaster plan shows not only that somebody cares enough to try and keep the wheels of industry turning but has also put adequate measures in place to minimise the risks of unexpected IT failure.

Of course, the interpretation of ‘adequate measures’ will always vary from organisation to organisation, according to local needs and resources, because there is no cookie-cutter model (one size fits all) for disaster recovery.

Nevertheless some fundamental principles do apply, regardless of organisation size and scale, which means that Small and Mid-Sized Businesses (SMBs) face very similar DR challenges to those of their larger counterparts. Even the smallest SMB needs to take some steps to protect the integrity of its business systems when things go wrong.

A Freeform Dynamics study focused on organisations with between 50 and 1000 employees shows that SMBs generally care about IT disaster recovery and proactively establish DR measures, even if they don’t always describe them in such terms.

However, the research also highlights some gaps and shortfalls in disaster recovery capability, which respondents readily acknowledge. Having said this, only 20% of SMBs indicated that investing in DR improvements would be considered as high priority spending:

The chart above is one of a number from the aforementioned research which tell us that a good proportion of SMBs are well aware of their DR challenges but most can’t afford to throw money at the problem areas, particularly in a difficult economic climate.

But that shouldn’t stop them taking a fresh look at their disaster recovery plans, not only to see if there are any affordable opportunities for incremental improvements in key areas, but also to check that any previous plans remain properly aligned with their systems portfolio and infrastructure.

Chances are that some re-alignment may be necessary, particularly if business systems, IT infrastructure or services have been changed or introduced since the last DR review. It’s also vital to pay specific attention to any changes in business priorities, working practices (such as growth of remote/mobile working), service delivery models or service providers, because these will all directly affect the business continuity and disaster recovery requirements.

Likewise a previously suitable mix of DR tools, techniques and technologies might now benefit from a rethink. SMBs may find that the falling cost of storage, the mainstream readiness of virtualisation technology and the maturation of third-party hosting services (including Cloud) offer real benefits of cost and timeliness, in terms of better IT resilience and recovery, when compared with a ‘traditional’ DR approach, such as offsite tape backup and recovery.

Perhaps, though, the biggest challenge for a smaller business is in knowing what ‘effective’ DR and good business continuity planning looks like in practice. This is where awareness of what works well elsewhere can be invaluable.

In an attempt to flush out some of the ‘best practices’ for SMB disaster recovery, our analysis of the research sample divided the interview respondents into two groups: a) those with comprehensive/ good IT DR, and b) those with inadequate/ poor IT DR capabilities.

On comparison of the two groups we saw some significant differences, with seven specific characteristics, or behaviours, that appear to stand out as ‘enablers’ of better DR performance.

Some of these enablers, such as inclusive planning (i.e. ensuring that IT disaster recovery planning is fully co-ordinated with general business continuity plans for people and process) and the prioritisation/ funding of DR investments, are hardly surprising because they represent the fundamental points of entry to effective DR anyway.

However, other enablers identified in the research may be less obvious to an SMB hoping to improve IT disaster recovery capability. These include the use of alternative storage media and advanced DR solutions, such as Continuous Data Protection (CDP) which facilitates rollback or recovery to a particular point in time – extremely useful if a key data store has become compromised, or otherwise invalidated by application or user error.

For a full discussion of the effective DR enablers and more information on this topic, you can download the full research report here

(originally published on computing.co.uk)

RIM changes its leadership, but not its course

2012-01-23T22:41:00.007Z

On January 23rd, 2012, Research in Motion (RIM) announced Thorsten Heins as President and CEO. Mike Lazaridis, former Co-Chair and Co-CEO becomes Vice Chair of the Board, and also Chair of the Board’s new Innovation Committee. Jim Balsillie remains a Director. Barbara Stymiest takes on the position of Independent Board Chair. Prem Watsa joins as a new Board Director. All with immediate effect. The complete press release can be found here: http://press.rim.com/release.jsp?id=5358

So what’s new, apart from the personnel moves summarized above? Based on the official press release and what was said during the company conference call, the answer is: not a lot.

Thorsten Heins stated that the top priorities for his first 100 days in office would be – in that order - improved marketing (with the appointment of a Chief Marketing Officer), and the strengthening of processes and execution.

He also made it abundantly clear that the emphasis for the new CMO (to be brought on board asap) was going to be very much on the consumer market, with a particular emphasis on making up lost ground in the US. By contrast, nothing was really said about RIM’s enterprise customer base, and how to shore it up in the face of increasing competition.

Those who were looking for a change in overall company or product strategy were disappointed. Thorsten very firmly stressed the company’s commitment to BB10 (described as not simply a new operating system, but a new platform) and PlayBook 2.0, and hailed the technical superiority of both. He also made it clear that RIM was not going to hive off any parts of the business, as having an integrated approach (hardware, software and services) is seen as a key competitive differentiator. Requests to license BB10 would be considered on a case-by-case basis, but hardware-only deals were firmly ruled out.

Improvements to resource planning and program management will no doubt be a positive move, if they lead to fewer product delays and more stable early releases of new software. And better marketing can’t do any harm, provided the product and service are right. But there is little sign as yet that RIM is bringing the developers round to its vision of the future.

In the near term, urgent action is needed to address the enterprise part of the business. Despite having lost market share in some countries, RIM still has a large number of enterprise customers. If it wants to retain these, the company must spell out very clearly the reasons why these customers should stay loyal. While RIM may still have the edge when it comes to certain corporate requirements, such as security and central management, the gap is closing, and RIM has to move fast.

The big questions remain: Is this management change too little, too late? And how much room to manoeuvre will Thorsten Heins really have, should he decide a change in strategy is required after all, with the shadow of Mike Lazaridis continuing to loom large?

New analyst at Freeform Dynamics

2011-11-14T21:17:00.003Z

It is my great pleasure to announce that Colin Beveridge joined Freeform Dynamics a week ago as Principal Analyst. And he's off to a flying start, as you can see from his blog post below. To say that Colin brings a wealth of experience to the role is probably the understatement of the day, and we all look forward to working with him. Find out more by looking at his profile here.

Metadata: the Jumbo Data problem?

2011-11-14T13:53:00.007Z

A chance conversation about Big Data led me to think about the importance of metadata to effective information exploitation.

Of course, we have long recognised that we create actionable business intelligence and information by attributing meaning and context to data.

We also know that recording our thought-process and rationale for creating information from data can provide valuable insight for future decision-making. That's why metadata is so important.

And yet descriptive and contextual metadata is too often the metaphorical elephant in the data center, because our systems and databases still tend to be heavily biased towards transactional data capture, consolidation and transformation.

This makes me wonder, do we put sufficient effort into metadata management, or is it a Jumbo problem that we put in the "too difficult" box?

Spreading iTunes beyond Apple equipment

2011-08-04T18:57:00.003Z

This is a story of my experiences of using non-Apple equipment to expand my use of digital media stored in an iTunes library. How this library came to be is a long story, but back in the dark ages of digital media (late 90’s and into the early part of the naughties), I was holding out against moving to iTunes. I’d started building up my library in the 90’s and didn’t want to get locked into a particular vendor.

For a while it worked – Windows Media Player was pretty good at managing the library, while there was a range of hardware available to sync to. However, it all came to a head when Microsoft made changes to the workings of Media Player and hardware. This had the effect of removing support for syncing to many recent devices, rendering my Toshiba Gigabeat to the role of an expensive doorstop (in reality it found a second life as a very expensive USB hard disk drive with a screen).

In combination with the rapid drop in hard disk drive prices, this set me on a course to get a high quality media library in place and I moved to iTunes and the iPod and AirTunes to do this. I ripped my music library in Apple Lossless format to maintain full CD quality, while I created digital copies of my DVD and now Blu-Ray libraries to have available on the move and to protect the discs from the prying and very destructive hands of my small and very technology aware daughter.

Gradually, more iPods were acquired, and then iPhones, Apple TVs and iPads until eventually there was a sprawl. Things started to become a bit of a headache, as streaming content off one PC, and a notebook at that, left the Wi-Fi saturated. Content availability was quite patchy due to the limited ability to sync iTunes libraries (content, playlists, playcount, favourites etc) between different PCs and also devices.

At this point, I thought it would be good to see just how easy it would be to be broaden out beyond iTunes and iDevices and look at how easily third party solutions could integrate and extend the experience. At about this time, I was approached by Western Digital to try out a few of their consumer storage, networking and media devices for feedback on how they worked. And so the two came together and the result on the whole was very positive, although there were a few gotchas.

This is not meant to be an in-depth review of total features or technical competence, but rather a laymans approach to how simple and easy it is to branch out beyond iTunes, and as such is my personal experience and observations of using the kit.

So to kick things off, here is a summary of the Western Digital home computing and media devices, and my top level view of how they rate (for more about them please read on):

• LiveWire data over power adapters – 8/10 (easy to setup but could be faster)
• MyPassport 500GB USB 3 hard disk drive 10/10 (small, quiet, fast)
• 1TB LiveHub Network Attached Storage box 7/10 (No USB or Wi-Fi)
• TV Live Hub with 1TB of internal storage 6/10 (No Wi-Fi, no lossless audio, large file transfers >4GB can be an issue)

Moving off Wi-Fi helped performance and predictability

Looking first at the LiveWire data plugs, these were extremely easy to set up. I literally plugged the first box into the switch port on the router, and then into the power socket. I then plugged the second box into a power socket in my study and the two connected seamlessly. The Mac in my study is the iTunes library and is responsible for streaming a lot of content. This used to hammer the Wi-Fi, as clients would be streaming via the Wi-Fi access point too. Shifting the streaming over the LiveWire devices has really helped alleviate the pressure. Streaming videos in particular are now much more reliable, particularly the hi-def ones, and it has also helped when we stream things like BBC iPlayer HD content where freezes are noticeably less.

The downsides is the plugs really have to go straight into the power socket and not an extension with surge protection, and the speed of connection is around 100Mb/s – which while still very good compared to 802.11n Wi-Fi is still slow for wired Ethernet these days. Fast file transfers of very large files still require copying to an external USB hard disk and using the good old sneakernet.

An added bonus was solving a longstanding Wi-Fi and BlueTooth conflict on my Mac. I had reverted to using a wired Mighty Mouse because heavy use of Wi-Fi would cause BlueTooth on my MacBook Pro to get jittery and as a result the BlueTooth Magic Mouse was unusable. Switching off Wi-Fi and using wired Ethernet over the LiveWire plugs solved that and means I am a happy camper again with a multi-touch mouse.

Fast, light and small – ideal to transfer large files

Which brings us to the My Passport USB 3 hard disk drive. Unfortunately I don’t have any new PCs with USB 3 ports to really push the drive, but using USB it transferred files at 35 to 40 MB/s which is comparable to my larger 3.5 inch USB 2.0 drives and a noticeable boost on my 2.5 inch portable drives which usually top out at around 25 MB/s.

Very small and very light, it ran cool and quiet and enabled large media file transfers to be done very quickly and easily. I’ve not doubt this drive could provide somewhat more performance when connected to a USB 3 interface, but it will be with the emergence of lower cost SSD drives that I expect USB 3 to really shine.

NAS boxes with Media Servers still have niggling troubles

I then set up the MyBookLive NAS box. This was very easy to do, with an intuitive graphical interface and an easy administration routine. Part of the attraction of the device was the ability to do Time Machine backups, which was the first thing I set up.

It was also the first thing I turned off a week or so later, as I couldn’t find a way to limit the size of the TimeMachine backups to a set limit for each machine. What I found was that with 3 Macs backing up constantly the disk was just filling up and not being all that useful as a general NAS storage box. With a single Mac without too much changing this would be useful, but in my case with lots of big files changing regularly across multiple machines, it was pushing it a bit.

As a file server, everything was pretty easy to set up, especially the ability to set up shared public directories that are accessible on the local network, as well as creating secure private shares for individual users. A peculiarity I had was a difficulty connecting by a Windows drive mapping to a secure share. Using the supplied SmartWare software enabled this, but it was a bit strange.

While performance is adequate, the unit did struggle as a shared file server. This is to be expected with a single disk setup, and although more advanced caching may help there is a limit as to what can be expected.

As a media server, things are generally pretty simple to set up and share, but there were some issues.

Getting the bad news out the way first, accessing the iTunes server proved a bit problematic. The embedded ID3 information in the iTunes files got misread and so finding the artist was a headache as it was giving the composer. Then iTunes itself would not play the tracks themselves. They were listed, but when double clicked would not play, and yet the same files copied to the TV Live Hub iTunes Server would play in iTunes.

The other issue is that the iTunes server is not capable of streaming to the newer Apple devices that depend on Home Sharing being set up, such as the Apple TV 2. For me this would make a world of difference, as I would no longer have to run iTunes constantly on one of the Macs to feed the Apple TV local content.

It was a different story with the Twonky media server and Windows Media Player on my PCs – the tracks, artists and albums were listed properly, even bringing in the embedded album art and the tracks could be played without problem provided it was converted from Apple Lossless format to iTunes+ format.

The content could even be seen by my networked Sony Blu-Ray drive, although it doesn’t seem to like music ripped even in iTunes+ format (256kb/s variable bit rate) which is what my “converted” lower quality mirror library is ripped at.

At the end of it all, I ended up removing the media content from the NAS drive and hosting it on the TV Live Hub, both to free up space and because the TV Live Hub is the natural place for the media to sit, rather than having to stream from NAS to media player all the time.

There were two limitations that I would like to see addressed. The first is the lack of a high speed USB 2 or 3 port for fast loading of files and content, and the other is the omission of Wi-Fi, resulting in having to place the router and NAS device close together. I was hoping to put the NAS device in an inconspicuous place, which I could do by getting more LiveWire plugs but it would be good to have the option at least.

TV Live Hub has good capabilities, but needs broader media format support.

The TV Live Hub was straightforward to set up, although it did require about 3 sequential firmware updates to get everything fully up to date.

As a music library, setting everything up was a doddle. I must admit though, I was rather surprised that the player could not handle the Apple Lossless format. The player will import the lossless files happily, but is not able to play them. I solved the issue by just converting my main library to iTunes+ quality - but that did take 4 days to complete and is not all that convenient to have to do.

I copied my iTunes+ version of the library to a USB HDD, and then connected it to the TV Live Hub and it did the rest (although I ended up arranging the folders neatly for ease of folder browsing). The interface for choosing music is straightforward and logical. However, it does require the TV to be on to browse for music. Providing a remote application to select what to play from a browser or phone would be a good step here.

When it comes to video, things are a bit more complicated to get up and going. For smaller files such as rips of DVDs, it is easy enough to copy the files to a USB key or HDD and have them import simply. Or you can copy them across the network in a short period.

However, when playing HD content such as MKV versions of Blu-Ray discs which are 10’s of gigabytes in size, copying them to a FAT drive is not possible as they are too big. exFAT can handle file sizes this big, but the TV Live Hub does not yet support this very useful media format. The reason it’s so useful is that it is supported on Windows and Mac, and so is pretty universal.

Instead I found myself having to copy from Mac to exFAT USB HDD, then go to a Windows PC and copy again to an NTFS USB HDD to copy the content. Or else copy the file over the network, but 35GB files take the best part of a day to copy even over the LiveWire. The leftfield option may be to also support, even if read-only, Apple’s HPFS file system for easy copying.

Playback of HD format files is clear and good. When streaming there was a tendency for stuttering, but this was helped by moving the streaming server onto the LiveWire data plugs to free up some Wi-Fi capacity. I did have issues, however, playing a number of standard definition DVD rips from Handbrake which were set to the original Apple TV format.

On the usability front, things are pretty clear. The remote is sensible if somewhat odd shaped and could do with a little more tactility. What stands out is a lack of volume control over HDMI when used with a PC monitor that has no easy way to change the volume without touching buttons on the monitor. This is not a problem with a TV with remote volume control although it does require using two separate remotes.

It is nice to have integration with the iPhone, where a WD app allows photos and videos to upload directly to the TV Live Hub. This works seamlessly and is in use often more convenient than connecting the iPhone to iPhoto and importing them there first. The only issue I had was a rotation problem on videos, where depending on the orientation of the phone when recording the video had a tendency to play upside down as it did not recognise the orientation setting in the file data.

Again, the lack of Wi-Fi, particularly in a media player that will likely have to live in a very specific location in living rooms or bedrooms / kitchens etc, is a major omission in this device, and one that should be easy to rectify in future versions or else this should be bundled with LiveWire plugs to enable use in rooms without data ports.

A good start with minor niggles

Overall the experience has been a good one – both of broadening my view beyond the iTunes experience and of having an alternative way of organising my media that does not rely on either Apple or Microsoft. The downsides have been that the capabilities do not yet match an enthusiast’s expectations, although they would suit many casual users’ needs.

Not supporting Apple Lossless for me is an issue, and could be overcome by building in support or allowing seamless conversion to another lossless format. I don’t really want to have a library at lower quality, not have the headache of maintaining and synchronising a second library. Even building in an automatic converter to iTunes+ would be a good step forward.

Time to get serious about managing security

2011-07-07T12:27:00.002Z

Do you know what’s running in your network?

In this time of ever increasing security threats and hacking attacks, a recent meeting I was at brought home the old adage “If you can’t manage it, you can’t secure it.” I was talking to a major web services company that provides large scale hosting (no prizes for guessing who). Because of what they do, security naturally plays a massive role in their service architecture.

A large part of the success of their security implementation comes down to a combination of knowing what to protect and how to protect it. Knowing what to protect comes naturally, because they have to bill customers for resources or services used. As a result they know - to a very high degree - what is running on their infrastructure at any point in time, and can also flag up when unauthorised or suspicious services attempt to run.

When it comes to the how of protecting applications and services, they have invested in developing security policies and frameworks – based around standards such as PCI DSS, ISO 27001 or HIPAA - that are regularly – and independently - assessed and audited.

This type of investment in management and security is natural for service providers because it is core to what they do (although some do this far better than others). Yet when it comes to internal IT, our research shows that security and management are often areas that are a struggle.

A recent survey indicated that a large proportion of companies never have their security capability independently assessed, and even fewer undergo external auditing. Our on-going research into systems and service management continues to highlight that effective service and asset management – the foundations of good IT practice - are the preserve of the few rather than the domain of the many.

When it comes to improving the situation, one option of course could be to start to move applications into the Cloud. But for many, this is not really a viable strategy in the short or even medium term. This means that any improvements needs to made to internal IT policies, processes and tooling.

Lessons can be learned from how the service providers approach security and management in service delivery to improve the situation internally. If we consider this at the fundamental level, this is really the right way to secure and run IT. This means that getting serious about investing in management. Too often management is neglected and the fallout is dealt with as an IT operations overhead. But with the changing and ever more serious threat landscape good management it is no longer an IT option, it is a business necessity.

Originally published on Computing.co.uk

Operating System Selection

2011-06-24T09:35:00.005Z

Open Source and Proprietary – The Decision Criteria

The selection of operating systems was once one of the major decisions IT managers had to face when considering their options for service delivery, be it for servers or desktop systems. Until a decade or so ago, such choices were limited to choosing one from a range of proprietary operating systems supplied by vendors. But the last ten years have witnessed a new option take hold in the form of open source operating systems. What drives the selection process when choosing between open source software and operating systems supplied by a vendor?

When deliberating whether to use open source operating systems software or that supplied by a commercial ISV the factors influencing the decision-making process are, essentially, the same as they have always been. Some eight or nine characteristics form the major items to be taken into account, including license models and costs, application support, skills availability, operational support options, performance requirements and risk analysis. Of these, three or four tend to dominate the selection processes. When looking at PC solutions it is also important to remember that the user’s experience of the solutions and their comfort can be major selection factors.

At the top of the selection process when picking between operating systems, there is one factor which has absolute importance. Does the application run on the OS or will someone have to port it over to a new platform? After all, no one runs an operating system because they want to run the OS for its own sake. It is there to anchor an application, database or some other service and make it available to users.

When open source operating systems first came to prominence, few commercial business applications were supported on the platforms available, thereby severely limiting some choices. Today, this has changed with many commercial ISVs now more than happy to support operation of their software on major open source platforms, frequently in addition to Windows, Unix or another of the major server operating systems. Unless the application does not support a particular OS this factor alone may not be a major selection bifurcation point between an open source and commercial operating system.

If the application under consideration is compatible with both open source and proprietary operating systems, other factors come into play. Amongst these, though our research indicates them rarely to be the most conclusive elements, are the matters of licensing model and costs. For commercial ISVs, everyone understands that there are license fees to be paid, potentially with associated support and maintenance / software upgrade charges to be accounted for.

The same cannot be said of open source operating systems, where in some minds the perception exists that “open source” equates to “free of charge”. In point of fact, many of the major distributors of open source software in general, and of operating systems in particular, struggle to explain the terms of the use of the solutions they make available to customers. The confusion becomes particularly acute when the Linux distributors, such as Red Hat, SuSE etc., supply the base software for no fee but offer support subscription services to help organisations keep the operating system functioning effectively and to provide assistance when problems are encountered.

Given that open source software is, by its very nature, readily available to inspection and modification (from the perspective of a source coder), with active communities working to develop, enhance and resolve problems when they arise, it is theoretically possible for IT staff within the business to fix any problems they encounter without paid services from the supplier. But few organisations have the skilled staff available in house to resolve problems, at least to do so within the very short time frames on which service problems must now routinely be resolved, never mind having the capabilities to test them. Furthermore, support and maintenance of platform software per se is generally considered to be a distraction in a mainstream IT environment where resources are already stretched.

This is where the vendors of open source operating systems offer support contracts. In truth, simply from a risk perspective, few organisations would consider using software to deliver mainstream business services without having some form of external support contract in place unless they are extremely confident in their own capabilities to resolve, rapidly, any problems encountered. And here’s the rub, because once you sign such a contract, for open source software, you will often find yourself as constrained as you are with commercial solutions. In some cases, for example, you may be required to pay a subscription for all instances of the software used in your organisation, whether you want support for them or not.

On the matter of “cost”, it should also be recognised that whilst the acquisition and support costs, when all terms and conditions are understood, may be straightforward to calculate, over the lifetime of such systems, it is likely that it will be the management overheads that account for the majority of the Total Cost of Ownership. With this in mind, it is therefore important to understand just how well the management and administration tools the organisation has available can handle the operating systems under consideration. Whilst many management frameworks are now able to integrate, at least to some degree, with open source operating systems, the exact capabilities must be examined to ensure that additional costs for acquiring administration facilities do not arise unexpectedly.

As with commercial operating systems, the contracts for open source operating systems must therefore be read with care and diligence, potentially backed up by engaging professional advice to ensure the terms and conditions of support and business usage are understood. The subject of license costs differentiating between open source and commercial software may not be quite as simple as can be assumed.

Of even greater importance is to ensure that the skills the IT management team has available match the needs of the chosen platform, and/or any cross training or recruitment requirements are taken into account. In many organisations, the familiarity with open source software, especially Linux, is now reaching similar levels to that for the longer established commercial operating systems, but this is not the case everywhere, especially amongst smaller organisations. Also, skills to handle advanced capability such as fault tolerance and clustering should not be overlooked where relevant.

In the end, all of this may be academic, though, as open source software is so often chosen on the basis of unqualified perception or even personal interest and/or preference. Assuming you are making an objective decision, however, we hope our discussion has been of use to highlight that choosing between the options is seldom straightforward, and requires careful consideration.

Originally published on computing.co.uk

RSA hack demonstrates need for proactive security and multi-layer protection

2011-03-22T09:41:00.006Z

The recent news that RSA Security suffered a security attack and breach that resulted in the theft of sensitive and confidential Intellectual Property relating to SecurID should be a cause of concern for many.

The good thing is that RSA Security had agressive security measures in place that detected the attack and allowed it to take proactive steps to limit the scope of the attack and to quickly identify what had been accessed and stolen.

The downside is that the source code to the technology behind a good proportion of multi-factor authentication solutions is now most likely available for inspection to aid the creation of cracks or subversions. We can only hope that the information was limited in scope, and that RSA has been thorough in developing the code in a Secure Development Lifecycle approach that will limit the attack surface and potential vulnerabilities.

The event once again raises the issue of how to tackle security, and in particular the protection of the core information assets of a company. We've written on this is the past, particularly on the need to protect data across the company, and not just on devices such as laptops, tablets or smart phones. There is a prevailing mindset that because servers are located within a secure environment such as an access controlled data centre, the data on them is also secure and access can be controlled by security policy such as Access Control Lists.

The reality is that this only works for employees, and particularly those employees who follow policy. Protecting data on servers needs more than this, and encrypting the data is a proven method for doing this. If crackers do gain access to the bits and bytes, making sense of it is rather more difficult. Coming back to the RSA attack, it is somewhat ironic that a company that started out as the leader in encryption has itself fallen foul of having the stolen data potentially able to be exploited because it was unencrypted.

Getting to grips with software licencing

2011-03-18T14:49:00.004Z

Building a solid platform for licence management

Andrew Buss, Service Director, Freeform Dynamics

We are told time and again that software licencing and management is a major headache. The situation remains a problem, and far from improving it is often getting progressively more difficult to manage. IT is becoming more embedded within the business, with more use of IT for business processes and communications.

Things are changing more quickly too. Virtualisation is now well established and accepted and there is a small but growing movement to dynamic IT infrastructure such as resource pooling or internal private cloud.

On the client side, desktop and application virtualisation are adding another layer of complexity. This is all putting pressure on companies to comply with licencing terms, but contrary to many other areas of IT management this area for many remains a ‘black art’.

When it comes to licencing, there are three main areas to consider. The first is the basis on which licencing takes place, whether it is by server, socket, core on the physical side, or per seat, concurrent or subscription on the user side, never mind any limits to enterprise or site licenses. This would also take into account things like support and maintenance.

The second aspect is the terms and conditions that govern the use of the software. This affects aspects such as the term of usage, resale potential, the flexibility of deployment for allocation or reallocation, and the ability to ramp up or down as demands dictate. It can also determine how independently different software licences ‘pools’ can be negotiated, whether as a single block or as independent groups.

The third, and the focus of the discussion in this article, deals with the real foundations of licence practice - and how that is management. This covers what has been purchased, what is actually in use or duplicated, what comes under support, how everything is audited or verified and whether licencing meets the requirements of the business.

It would seem obvious that in this day and age that something as fundamental as the building blocks of IT infrastructure would be moving towards commoditisation. This has been steadily happening in terms of the industry standard servers and to some degrees also the networking. But when it comes to software, problems abound.
Software procurement may seem less about buying and managing IT and more about qualifying as a lawyer. Things are made even more complex because every vendor seems to have a different take on how to do things. The end result is that licencing for end-to-end service delivery that takes in operating systems, databases, middleware and applications is a massive challenge and far more difficult than it needs to, or should, be.

Given the complex constraints that many IT buyers and managers work to, it is little wonder that licence management is frequently cited as a major issue. This is not helped by the fact that in a recent survey we ran, IT asset management and software licence management tools were cited as the tools that IT managers were most unhappy with. When it comes to licence management, there is a lot of manual work going on trying to keep on top of things with very little formal policy. With IT operations staff often overstretched, having up to date records is difficult to achieve and things fall through the cracks.

The end result is that many companies take a conservative approach to licencing in order to achieve compliance with licencing terms. Rather than buying from a position of strength with solid information on actual usage, they instead compensate for uncertainty by buying more licences than necessary to cover all possible use cases rather than what is needed. Gaps in knowledge also mean that shelfware (software no longer in active use) keeps being renewed and support costs remain higher than necessary. Others may just run what is needed and wait for an assessment to bring things into line, potentially putting themselves at risk of fines or damages for non-compliance.

So what can be done to improve the situation? Given the costs of licencing overall, simplifying and rationalising the approach can pay big rewards. Getting started is often the hardest thing, when there is little structure in place. The potential rewards are high, so it will be a good strategy to dedicate some resource to it.
The best path for many will be to try out or purchase discovery tools to get a feel for the licencing situation, then choosing the best plan of action. This may involve further investment in training and tools.

It may even lead to bringing in some of the increasing number of licencing specialists to do an audit. They can help to establish a baseline and advise on ways to manage, optimise and negotiate licences. Longer term, if the benefits are good enough, it may justify implementing dedicating resource to optimising licencing and putting in place a management infrastructure keeping in mind the difficulties associated with the current generation of tools.

In it’s own way, the difficulties of managing software licencing is a wake up call for the industry at large – for how much longer can this ‘last-century’ approach to licencing persist? Vendors are making it much harder than necessary for companies to buy and implement software. Predictability, commonality and transparency are needed to build a management practice that works reasonably practically. In most cases it could be argued that all of this is lacking. For all those vendors talking about the journey to the cloud, it’s time to put the money where your mouth is.

Originally published on Computer Weekly

Desktop virtualisation: Myths jar with realities

2011-03-15T13:01:00.003Z

Vendors have been pushing desktop virtualisation hard over the course of the past year. So to give IT professionals a better picture of what’s really going on in this field, Freeform Dynamics recently published a report looking at the overall state of desktop virtualisation adoption and how far expectations measure up to the experiences of those who have already undertaken projects.

Over recent months, each of the major approaches to desktop virtualisation has continued to mature, especially in terms of reliability and usability. The same cannot be said for the overall level of understanding among organisations of the options available and their suitability for deployment to support various user requirements.

Desktop virtualisation is not a point solution or indeed a single architectural approach. That fact has not been well communicated by vendors and their channel partners to the IT community. It is fair to say that organisations have a poor grasp of the possible approaches and their suitability.

But while the overall levels of understanding remain low, it is interesting that the views of IT managers with practical experience of the technology are strikingly different in some important areas from those who have yet to deploy any virtualised desktops to end users.

Overestimating associated challenges

The research highlights that in the absence of practical experience, IT professionals tend to underestimate the relevance and value of desktop virtualisation while often overestimating the associated challenges.

In particular, those who have never deployed systems are more likely to discount it as an option for demanding users, even though experienced adopters have often made use of desktop virtualisation in those same scenarios. This finding complements another that suggests organisations yet to undertake projects consistently find it more challenging to make acceptable business cases than those who have already begun to use the technology.

Obstacles to desktop virtualisation

That finding may sound obvious but a deeper look shows that among the inexperienced, the perception is that desktop virtualisation involves significant investment in upfront infrastructure systems, especially servers, storage and networking. The perception is also that the benefits deliverable may be difficult to value in monetary terms. Together, these obstacles can make it difficult to move forward at all with any degree of confidence.

Conversely, organisations that have started to deploy desktop virtualisation have faced these challenges head on, many by seeking to extend the debate. Factors to consider include the impact of enabling modern working practices, such as hotdesking, efficient home and remote working, perhaps coupled with the ability to provide secure access to corporate systems for mobile users.

These factors can have a significant monetary impact when translated into direct savings on real estate and travel, as well as an increased contribution through the associated boosting of end-user productivity. Because these benefits typically surface over extended periods, they can pose challenges when capital budgets are tight.

With so many options available, organisations considering desktop virtualisation, perhaps as part of projects to roll out new desktop and laptop hardware along with Windows 7, have considerable upfront work to undertake beyond that normally associated with desktop refresh projects.

Varying requirements for desktop service

Chief among this work is establishing which types of user exist in the business and how their requirements for desktop service vary. This requirement in turn necessitates having an accurate knowledge of their use of applications and business services, as well as an in-depth understanding of how and where users work and need to access systems.

Only with this core information can managers identify appropriate desktop virtualisation approaches for each class of user. Attempts to roll out inappropriate systems to any group of users could well endanger, or at least significantly delay, the widespread adoption of desktop virtualisation.

Bad news travels fast and discussion of poor initial experiences will spread like wildfire, making further rollouts problematic.

Desktop virtualisation holds great promise, but it adds complexity to the ongoing management of systems and makes it more challenging to ensure that each user group gets appropriate systems. Effort expended here will pay dividends in the short and long terms for the whole business.

SaaS suppliers are no black box, evaluation is key

2011-02-15T13:47:00.002Z

Don't short-cut your due diligence

An aspect of cloud computing that is often overlooked is supplier evaluation and management. We spend time considering the pros and cons of new delivery models, but just like any other area of IT, the vendors and service providers you choose to work with have a huge bearing on the outcome of any investment or contract commitment.

This is particularly relevant in the area of Software as a Service (SaaS), the flavour of cloud computing that from an enterprise perspective is typically aimed at delivering business application functionality as a hosted service. Offerings here range from full blown ERP and CRM, through comms and collaboration solutions, to more tactical services aimed at workgroups or even individual users. Some would characterise online backup, security and other systems level capability as SaaS too, but for the purposes of our discussion, let's stick to the business functionality layer.

The first point to make is that it is still relevant to consider pretty much all of the criteria we would normally apply when selecting a piece of traditional on-premise application software. The solution must meet immediate needs in terms of business functionality and allow configuration around policies and processes as necessary. It will also ideally be flexible and expandable enough to deal with evolving requirements over time.

Stating such things may seem obvious, but all too often the seductive immediacy of SaaS, with many providers promoting a 'subscribe and go' approach to adoption, leads to short-term thinking and short-cutting of the important needs assessment and gap analysis process. If anything, the requirement to ensure a good functional fit with room to grow is even more important with SaaS.

While most organisations nowadays try to minimise the degree to which they customise core parts of application packages, at least it's an option with on-premise solutions should it be necessary. With SaaS, the software installation is not yours to tamper with, beyond standard configuration facilities, so there is a limit to how much you can work around supplier imposed constraints.

This brings us onto another area of common misconception. In the context of larger scale enterprise computing environments, the chances are that SaaS solutions are likely to have to integrate with other systems and technology.

The technical architecture therefore really does matter, at least insofar as it manifests itself in terms of application programming interfaces (APIs), support for industry standards, and interoperability with existing management tools, security systems, desktop software, mobile devices, and anything else that is important to you.

Thinking of SaaS offerings as black boxes is generally a mistake, especially when we consider that so much cost, risk and general frustration and inefficiency in IT is as a result of fragmented and disjointed systems.

Turning to providers, we clearly need to consider the basics. It's important to consider how stable the organisation is financially, how well it is tuned in to different customer requirements in terms of industry and size, and how capable it is of providing the kind of support needed in the places it's required.

On this last point, there is a specific consideration with SaaS around the support process. Some providers are comfortable with and capable of supporting end users directly, while others require the customer's IT department to deal with front line interaction.

There is no absolute right or wrong model here, but mismatches between requirements, expectations, capability and processes can cause significant issues if they arise.

It doesn't help, for example, if the provider is offering end-user support but works on the basis of strict demarcation of responsibility, resulting in users being handed off too frequently to other parties because the problem is not proven to be associated with the service.

Neither is it helpful if in-house support staff are taking calls about the service, but don't have the visibility or tooling to troubleshoot problems effectively. In today's IT service delivery environment, the need for end-to-end service management, and therefore end-to-end visibility, diagnostics and troubleshooting capability, is becoming ever more critical to meet business expectations.

Another practical area to consider is the supplier's policy on software release and implementation. Some providers trickle out a constant stream of updates in the spirit of continuous improvement. Others have one or two major releases per year, with very little happening in between.

There is then the question of whether you will have a choice of if or when you take a new release on board, with some providers allowing a degree of customer control, and others forcing new updates onto all subscribers unilaterally. Again, there is no right or wrong, but again, mismatches can lead to issues.

The areas we have discussed are just some examples of what matters when it comes to SaaS supplier selection. We could extend the discussion to include pricing models, contract terms and a number of other areas. The bottom line though is that due diligence is just as important with SaaS as it always has been with any key IT related decisions.

Originally published on cio.co.uk.

Next generation systems management

2011-02-08T10:06:00.003Z

Strategic enabler or survival tactic?

The IT environment is complex, and undergoing continual upheaval. For many businesses, although the IT infrastructure is felt to be modern and generally fit for purpose, many challenges remain, especially around operational issues. One of the most common headaches we hear about in our surveys is just how difficult it is to keep up with the day-to-day operations, let alone optimise IT to face new challenges.

A big part of this is down to the lack of investment in management tools that are able to deliver joined up IT services to the business. Our research shows that most of you are probably sitting on management environment that is not really performing as well as you would like.

Historically, IT has evolved in a fragmented manner, resulting in an equally fragmented management environment. As you look to the future at where the business is going and how IT needs to support this change, you will need to take a more joined up view of systems management.

This doesn't mean that you need to go out and spend money straight away — if at all. Instead, the place to start is to have a good look at what you do, and how you do it. You may well find inefficiencies, overlaps and conflicts, as well as gaps and hidden costs.

Organisations of all types can benefit — from those where IT is a core part of the company and funded to enable innovation — to those where the least amount possible is spent to keep things ticking over.

Let's consider a couple of scenarios.

If you are working in one of those companies that invest heavily in IT, the challenge is not getting systems to work together. Management processes tend to be well defined with many formal processes and policies, and integrated tool sets enable joined-up IT services to be delivered to the business.

Instead, the issue is likely to be scalability and responsiveness. The big problem is that much of the management is still reliant on people to make changes. Unfortunately, repetitive tasks are limited by the productivity of individual staff, adding massive overhead. People also take time to prepare and travel, and to make and test changes. The end result is that change is slow and costly, although very well managed.

The reason this issue is being felt more keenly is that IT is becoming more dynamic. Virtualisation is taking hold, and dynamic IT is starting to have an impact. Doing things the manual way is not really viable in this new virtual world, and change needs to happen. This means that it is time to look at automation.

You may have looked at this in the past and felt it too risky to be practical. Time has moved on, and you may well find that to ignore automation is the risky option. Modern tools are able to integrate many more applications and automate much of the routine management activities while still allowing manual control where required for dealing with exceptions.

Implemented properly, it can also greatly aid the implementation side of change management once decisions have been made – although arguably the whole approach to change management will require significant changes too to deal with a more dynamic business.

Moving to automation will be a long arduous process. Politically, there may be fears of job losses, but the most likely outcome is that operations staff are freed from mundane, low impact tasks to dealing with much higher value and more interesting work.

If you are having to manage an IT organisation that is not valued by the business, investment in management tools may not seem at first glance to be an obvious way to save money. Indeed, just making the case for investment in modern management tools will be a challenge all in its own right as we are told repeatedly that senior management do not recognise the link between better management and the services delivered to the business.

But consider the alternative — a patchwork of tools that have evolved as various systems and services have been put in place that add overhead and complexity to the on-going operations. Ask yourself how many different tools you use for troubleshooting problems or for day-to-day systems management.

Each additional tool adds time and cost, while also requiring investment in training and support.

It also makes it more difficult to implement any form of structure and process around systems management, as difficulties in working with different management systems is often cited as a problem. This is important because end-user satisfaction then also tends to be low, resulting in a chicken and egg situation where expectations of IT are low, and therefore the willingness to spend more on IT remains low.

In this situation, the most pressing problem is to consolidate and simplify the management environment. The feedback we've had is that moving to lightly structured management processes works well in combination with a single main management suite. The reality is that the management processes are likely to be attempted initially, with difficulties in implementation prompting investment in the tools a little later on.

You don't have to go all out for completely integrated IT systems management. Starting small and implementing changes a step at a time can go a long way towards increasing the value of IT to the business.

Identify which issues are having the greatest impact on management, and tackle these with investment in updated or new tools where possible, rather than slapping structure on areas that have a minor role to play but that are easy boxes to tick.

Whichever situation you find yourself in, investment in improving your systems management capabilities is likely to generate big results. The problem is that it is often realised too late in the cycle to have the most impact.

If we can leave you with an opening thought for the New Year, it's to put management at the heart of all new projects.

Originally published on CIO - Registration required

The channel impact of cloud computing

2010-11-21T22:16:00.002Z

Will the domino effect undermine traditional business?

(Thoughts for Distributors, Resellers and System Integrators)

The writing is on the wall. As cloud computing steamrollers across the market, on-premise infrastructure will be the first to go. And with nothing to implement or look after, there’ll no longer be a need for in-house IT staff. Then, of course, the traditional channel business will collapse, as there will be no one left to buy anything. Oh yes, and after all of the dominos have tumbled, Amazon, Google and the like will inherit the earth.

Well that’s the line we hear from cloud evangelists and suppliers trying to drum up business for hosted services of one kind or another. If you subscribe to this view, then you’d better stop reading now, as we are not going to entertain such nonsense in the remainder of this article. Instead, we are going to apply some common sense and take a more grounded look at how cloud computing in its various forms will co-exist with more traditional approaches to solving business computing needs.

Given the ambiguity around the meaning of cloud, for the purposes of our discussion we are going to consider two categories of offering. Firstly, ‘private cloud’, which allows organisations to aggregate server and/or storage equipment in their data centre or computer room to form pools of virtualised resources. Compute power or disk space can then potentially be allocated flexibly on-demand, boosting overall efficiency and enabling IT to respond more quickly to new requirements and change requests from the business.

Private cloud is an evolution of the activity we have seen around virtualisation. At the moment, it is the form of cloud computing in which mainstream customers are most interested. With equipment and software running on-premise, the opportunity for resellers and SIs is clear, especially those targeting mid-sized and large organisations. As we are still in the early market, however, exploiting the opportunity will require more of a consultative/educational approach. Fortunately, key vendors are now well geared up to help channel partners with cross-sell and up-sell techniques and collateral.

The second category of cloud we shall consider is on-demand hosted services. Within this, we find a range of offerings such as Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS), Platform as a Service (PaaS) and Software as a Service (SaaS). If you want an explanation of these, and other forms of hosted service that fall under the cloud banner, then check out our recent paper ‘Applied Cloud Computing’. Suffice it to say for now that similar technology advances to those underpinning private cloud are allowing service providers to deliver more flexible and cost effective hosted services of all kinds. This, in turn, is shifting the line in terms of what is feasible or attractive for customers to outsource to a third party hosting company.

Despite the possibilities, the demand for hosted cloud services, whilst growing, is still relatively small compared to the overall activity in the IT marketplace. Furthermore, rightly or wrongly, a general lack of trust in the model continues to act a brake on mainstream progress. With a deep cultural dimension to this, the situation is not going to suddenly change. We are therefore unlikely to see a wholesale shift in emphasis from on-premise to hosted solutions overnight.

Even as the comfort level grows, the market can only shift so far. For all but the smallest customers, the notional ‘move to the cloud’ would typically involve subscribing to many services from many different providers to meet the wide and varied needs of the business. The integration, maintenance, support, accountability, and supplier management issues that arise when dependencies cross many different operational domains are daunting. So too are the practicalities of coordinating security and compliance policy across jurisdictions.

Things will get less scary over time as interoperability and service assurance standards emerge, and as the service provider community matures beyond the current ‘every provider for themselves’ mentality that prevails. The continued evolution of monitoring and management tools will also help to keep things working as smoothly as possible across a distributed on-premise/provider landscape. All of this will simply reduce rather than eradicate the risks, however – hence there being a natural limit to how much of a shift to cloud services will take place in most organisations.

Having said this, as we discuss in the aforementioned paper, cloud computing is creating both choice and complexity for customers, so it cannot be ignored by those in the IT channel. Skilling up will therefore be necessary to maintain account control and exploit the spin-off business. There may also be some incremental margin to be gained from hosted service resale or referral. For small customers in particular, it may be possible to meet needs through hosted services in areas such as messaging, collaboration and CRM that would otherwise not be feasible for commercial or practical reasons through the on-premise alternative.

The bottom line is that there is no need for resellers and SIs to panic about the rug suddenly being pulled from under them by the emergence of cloud. However, doing nothing about it could represent an increasingly high opportunity cost over time, especially as more service providers figure out the importance of the channel in reaching and supporting customers. There are therefore definitely advantages to embracing cloud computing proactively.

Taking advantage of the Windows 7 migration

2010-11-19T13:52:00.003Z

After almost a decade of service, the end-of-days is drawing near for the long-lived and very widely used Windows XP. It has entered legacy mode with the end of mainstream support. The extended life of Windows XP was partly due to economic conditions hampering spend on desktop upgrades and partly down to Windows Vista failing to get off the ground successfully in the business sector; it never really recovered the confidence that was lost in the early days because of compatibility, performance and usability issues.

Nevertheless, we are where we are, with many organisations relying on a desktop operating system designed over a decade ago that is facing obsolescence, with all of the direct and third party software support and maintenance implications that come with that. It is a position that is not sustainable for much longer, unless you are willing to live with escalating cost and risk [link: http://www.freeformdynamics.com/fullarticle.asp?aid=848 ]. Every day extra spent running Windows XP adds additional risk to the business as support costs increase, security issues escalate and software vendors target their products and support at newer Windows releases.

With this in mind, while other options exist, the most obvious way forward that most organisations are considering is a move to Windows 7. This has been pretty well received and represents a massive turnaround. It is Microsoft’s fastest selling operating system and has become widely adopted by consumers and also small businesses in the year since its release. Now we are seeing signs that mid and large sized companies are preparing to make the move too.

Windows 7 is a derivative of Windows Vista, albeit a much improved one, so benefits from a lot of the ground work done in terms of compatibility, interoperability, security and manageability. While it has only been around for a year, much of the componentry and core feature set has been road-tested and optimised for significantly longer than that.

So is it just a case of out with the old and in with the new? Well clearly not. Despite the general level of comfort with Windows 7, there are many practicalities to still consider.

Doing a straight switch from Windows XP onto Windows 7 may seem like a simple approach, but migration in practice takes extensive planning, testing and remedial work, which is costly and time consuming. This work needs to be performed on legacy applications as well as new ones, as well as looking at the underlying hardware. Beyond this familiar territory, if you think a little bit ahead and consider also other changes that are happening to the PC, it may help to alleviate or avoid issues that if retrofitted at a later date could increase risk and costs and decrease the capabilities of the solution.

On the software front, the Windows 7 migration is a good opportunity to evaluate, test and introduce up-to-date versions of software. This is true for specialised software as well as more general productivity suites, and particularly Office. Many of the companies that we have surveyed are still running Office 2003. Although it is still reasonably functional, it is showing its age with a lack of support for new document features and standards, less capability to support mobility and a higher incidence of security issues.

Like Windows Vista, many companies avoided the big change that was Office 2007. Office 2010 continues the evolution of Office, and enhances much of the interaction with back office functions such as Exchange, SQL Server and SharePoint. After the upgrade licence costs, testing and user training are some of the biggest expenses involved in upgrading Office. As extensive training and testing have to be done as part of the Windows 7 migration, it makes sense to take advantage of the activity to support an Office switch.

Looking at the underlying hardware, there are a couple of big changes to consider. The first is whether to move to 64-bit support or not. Windows 7 has a 64-bit version that can perform much better with increasing memory capacities. The beauty of it is that, from an end-user perspective, it is almost indistinguishable from the 32-bit flavour. So the issue is – is it best to jump straight to 64-bit at the same time as adopting Windows 7, or to wait and only migrate when applications demand it?

The advice here is to leave your options open. As applications and hardware may behave differently, it is definitely worth testing them on both 32-bit and 64-bit for compatibility. This will identify any issues that may cause problems when moving, and allow workarounds to be considered – for example using the built in Windows XP mode of the business versions of Windows 7.

Ultimately, most applications are likely to lag the operating system by a number of years in moving to 64-bit. This may seem like a compelling reason to stick with 32-bit for the time being. However, without moving the platform to 64-bit there will be no opportunity to run applications that have been updated to take advantage of the extensions without a time consuming and costly re-installation of the operating system.

Beyond performance and compatibility, the ever-increasing move to mobile working and the more sinister nature of threats and malware means security is high on the agenda. An upgrade presents the opportunity to introduce additional security in the shape of encryption for data and information. The encryption functionality can add significant overhead, so the introduction needs to be carefully managed. It may need to be implemented in conjunction with hardware upgrades – particularly modern CPUs with encryption acceleration or Solid State Disks (SSDs) - to maintain performance.

Whatever your migration plans for Windows 7, it is important to look at the wider view to take advantage of the biggest transition in years to improve and optimise the capabilities of the PC pool as retrofitting at a later date may be expensive and time consuming to implement.

Originally published on CIO (registration required).

Taking it to the n’th degree

2010-11-09T14:11:00.003Z

Why you should upgrade to 802.11n

The notebook market started to gather steam in the early 2000’s with the launch of mobile initiatives such as Intel Centrino in 2003. This spurred the development of an installed base of Wi-Fi clients where previously uptake had been low. Although some companies took a proactive approach to building out Wi-Fi networks, many companies either reacted to demand with a piecemeal infrastructure or were surprised to find that they had many unauthorised access points installed by ‘enterprising’ users.

The performance of Wi-Fi, particularly in the early days, could be characterised as sluggish at best, and the wired network was preferred in most instances where possible. With the Wi-Fi network as a convenience, the approach to integration, management and security was often treated as an afterthought.

The introduction of the second generation of Wi-Fi, 802.11g, was good in that it lifted performance a notch, but this in itself was not compelling enough to encourage proper joined up investment in infrastructure. The pressure to upgrade was tempered by the presence of legacy devices that could not run faster, or would interfere and result in general slowdowns on faster networks.

In the meantime, network connectivity has become so ubiquitous that it is now a critical element that many applications need in order to achieve full functionality. On the PC front, user expectations of performance have escalated as gigabit networks have become widespread, while the big swing to notebooks means that many employees are using them away from the desk and default to wireless.

On the mobile side there has been an explosion of new devices such as Smartphones and Tablets that rely entirely on wireless for connectivity. These devices are capable of running sophisticated applications and consuming rich media, just as the traditional PC is. This need for Wi-Fi as an equal partner to wired connectivity is driving the development of the blended wireless edge network.

All of this, together with the escalating costs and risks that trouble existing installations, brings the 802.11n, the latest and greatest version of Wi-Fi, to the top of mind. Unlike its predecessors, this version is both fit for purpose - with a throughput comparable to Fast Ethernet and increased coverage to support more devices with fewer access points - as well as future proof as it has only recently been ratified and no successor is immediately around the corner to wait for before splashing out.

Another aspect to consider is that although the standard has only recently been ratified, devices based on the draft specification have been in the market for years. This has resulted in a large pool of 802.11n client devices that can benefit immediately from an updated infrastructure. At the same time, many of the devices with legacy Wi-Fi (802.11b and g) are approaching the end of their life and being removed from the active client base.

With up to date hardware and software that is being actively developed and supported, 802.11n is also easier to integrate from a security and management perspective. Older Wi-Fi kit suffers from security that is less than robust, with WEP in particular being easy to crack. With modern Wi-Fi infrastructure, access and encryption are far more secure with WPA2, especially when 802.1X is used for authentication.

Now is the time, if your Wi-Fi infrastructure is based mainly on older standards, to consider updating to 802.11n. Upgrading the Wi-Fi network on its own will bring many advantages, but there is also the opportunity to reconsider how the wireless and wired networks should work together, with increasing integration and compatibility.

Whether you choose to integrate the two or operate Wi-Fi as a standalone network is up to you. Integrating the management and policy across the two may not be a trivial matter to undertake, especially in multi-vendor networks. However, the demands on the wireless network may mean that developing separate management or security tools and policies, such as Network Admission Control (NAC), for each network would be cost-prohibitive. The initial pain and cost of integration may well be worth it for the longer term benefits. In some cases, the wireless network can help to develop the wired one, as in the case of 802.1X which is in widespread use on Wi-Fi networks but has yet to gather momentum on wired networks.

Whichever path you choose, the time is right to do something for all of the above reasons. If you do it right, you’ll not only be ahead of user demand for once, but will also position yourself well for the future.

Originally published on Computing.

Unified Communications: Coming of age?

2010-10-19T13:33:00.006Z

Time to put it on the agenda?

Unified Communications (UC) is a term that has long been bandied about, but has yet to really gain the serious attention of businesses. Its slow uptake has not just been hampered by dire economic conditions, although this undoubtedly has had a negative impact on rate of adoption. Confusion around exactly what UC is has been a major barrier for companies when looking at it. The term Unified Communications was originally coined by the market in an attempt to encapsulate exactly what it was about. Unfortunately, it was an over-simplification that served to confuse more than convey, as many companies did not really grasp what UC included. In fact, UC, rather than being a broad, difficult to define solution set, is actually made up of a number of quite distinct components (such as Unified Directory, Unified Messaging and Presence Awareness, to name but three). And when businesses think in these more specific terms, then it becomes much easier to understand what UC involves.

Beyond this, however, companies often struggle with making the business case for UC – seeing it more as a ‘nice to have’ rather than a ‘need to have’. And while there are various case studies of successful UC implementations that they can call on as collateral, on the flip side, there is enough anecdotal evidence around implementations that have not proved so successful, to make them think twice about taking the plunge. So are the success stories the exception rather than rule. And can UC really deliver? According to recent research carried out by Freeform Dynamics UC can deliver very real benefits into the business. The chart below shows how what we have termed 'aggressive adopter' – companies - that have adopted UC more broadly across their business, and with a broader component set - report much better levels of communication and collaboration, which they attribute to their UC implementation.

It is important to note that this positive outcome is not solely down to broader adoption of UC. Simply implementing UC will not automatically result in a workforce that collaborates better, can carry out enhanced decision-making, and so on. UC is an enabler but only if it is implemented and worked into the business in the right way.

This is precisely what more aggressive adopters have done. They understood from the outset what they wanted it to deliver, how it would fit into their business, and, how it would be rolled out, including what support was required. There is clear recognition in this group of respondents that UC was essentially a new system that brought with it new capabilities, and this is where the real benefits lie. Companies often don't recognise and plan around this, and hence fail to realise the genuine benefits of UC.

Consider, for example, a technical call centre that handles customer queries. In a non-UC environment, the details of calls that can’t be handled straight away will be taken by a call centre operator, and followed up later with relevant technical support experts. Once a query has been resolved, the customer will be contacted by the call centre operator with (hopefully) a solution to their problem.

Coming at the same issue with a UC-enabled call centre can involve a completely different approach, with the call centre operator assessing the problem immediately, and then reaching out to a number of experts simultaneously, based on suitability and availability. Depending on the nature of the query, the call might be handed directly to an expert to resolve, or be dealt with by the operator directly, based on feedback from the expert.

The whole process can be geared towards first-call resolution, in a way that wasn’t possible before. While this might seem obvious, if a company implements UC, but carries on working in exactly the same way, then very little will change from a first-call resolution perspective, and any potential efficiency savings will be missed.

The story doesn’t end there. While the benefit of UC is that it enables staff to work differently, they will only do so if the change process is made relatively painless, and this is exactly what companies that succeed with UC have ensured. This translates into providing not just the usual technical support but also more process-based help. This might include step by step guides on topics such as setting up a videoconference from a given location, including where people can go for help if they get stuck. To assist people who are more reluctant to access such resources, locally embedded help, in the form of nominated ‘experts’ - people within the same department, for example - can work well. Getting this right goes a long way to ensuring that UC ‘delivers’.

So is UC coming of age, at last? While it is unwise to get caught up in the UC hype, it is at least worthy of consideration, even in the prevailing economic conditions. As the way that people work changes, UC becomes ever more relevant. Cross business collaboration, mobile workers, virtual workplaces, the 24x7 workforce and global teams are areas that can be assisted by UC. The caveat to this is to ensure that, like any implementation, there is a clear understanding about what it will deliver, and enough support in place to make sure it happens.

Originally published on http://www.cio.co.uk/ (registration required).

Is there a case for encrypting backups?

2010-10-08T09:42:00.001Z

For most organisations, backups form an essential part of the day to day activities of IT operations. They keep users happy in the short term, as individuals can recover files lost due to accident, incompetence or system failure. They keep the business moving, as systems and services can be protected and recovered. And they help get things going again, in the case of ultimate disaster.

In all of these scenarios however, what we really mean is that it is the flipside of backup that is important. Backups are essentially a doorstop unless the systems or information can be restored to functional use. This is an area that all too many companies neglect to test regularly, and can be a significant business risk if not addressed. Tapes can, or more likely will, fail. Equipment such as the tape drive, once out of production, will rapidly become obsolete. While the backup may be tied closely to the physical system, even if the backup is good, a suitable system to restore to may not be available – although eBay may help in some cases! Even if one moves to use online or hosted services, there is no guarantee that the provider will remain in business, making backups even more important.

So, both backup and recovery are an essential element of business function and continuity. However, they are also a source of risk from a data protection point of view. Backups contain the low-level about the company – not just data, but entire systems, configurations and raw information. In addition, bnd backups tend to move about a lot. They move inside the organisation, they are transported outside and are frequently stored in multiple locations. Keeping track of backup media is hard, even for the best companies. We frequently hear of lost backups that cannot be traced.

Now, why should companies worry if the data on backups go missing? Surely we can just take another backup? That might cover the business risk internally, in terms of having something to restore should a failure or similar happen. However, it doesn’t cover the external aspects of the data loss, which is an area that is already under increasing scrutiny from regulators. Regulations surrounding the loss of data already have had sanctions increased while individual industry regulators may take their own view. With new regulations coming that will require any losses to be disclosed, the cost in terms of notification, compensation, reputation and brand will only go up and up.

The most effective method for reducing the level of risk associated with a backup is to encrypt the data it contains. This ensures that should the backup be lost or stolen, it is not feasible to access and restore the data without appropriate pass codes or decryption keys. Achieving this should be relatively straightforward, Many IT managers agree that backups are vital to protect, but few do so.

So if encryption of backups is so important, why isn’t everyone doing it? While not every organisation is aware of the risks of data loss through unprotected backups, there will also quite a number of companies that will have quantified the potential cost implications and decided to ignore the risks rather than doing anything about them.
Near the top of the list of challenges are also technology hurdles which get in the way of practical encryption implementations – software encryption has its own limitations such as loss of compression capability (increasing the number of tapes required), and higher processor requirements to encrypt the data. Hardware encryption may tie the backups to individual drives, resulting in complexities when recovering data.

Key management is another concern that has been talked about for years but still remains a bugbear. In many cases, different systems will have independent key management systems and processes. Bringing these together will be challenging, but necessary, with firm control of process, documentation and management tools. In many cases, key management for backup encryption will need to fit in with the key management systems across the business. Regular testing to ensure that nothing gets broken accidentally, particularly as systems are upgraded or keys are rotated. Crucially, testing should cover not just verification of recent backups which are top of mind in most cases, but should also cover the old information which is sitting in archive libraries, which many IT managers may have never touched.

Encryption on backups should be considered in the light of what it is that really matters, namely the successful restoration of systems and data, over a period of not only years, but potentially many decades given regulations regarding data retention for regulatory purposes. Perhaps the biggest mitigating factor is that encryption is not yet a seamless part of either process or infrastructure, leading to complex trade-offs and tactical decision making which fails to take the longer term issues into account.

Given the problems involved, it is no wonder that many companies choose to skirt the issue. As the shadow of compliance and legislation creeps ever closer, IT managers will have less and less wiggle room, so plentiful planning now will help to achieve a much better result at the end.

Originally published on InfoSecurity (www.infosec.co.uk)

The hidden benefits of UC

2010-09-27T11:59:00.007Z

Take a closer look and you’ll find them

Whether businesses like it or not, the likelihood is that Unified Communications (UC) in some form or another will work itself into many workplaces at some point in the not-too-distant future. And this isn’t just fanciful analyst thinking, ‘bigging up’ the UC story. Recent research into UC carried out by Freeform Dynamics in December 2009 with 544 enterprises confirmed that UC is increasingly on the enterprise agenda in some shape or form. This is well illustrated in the chart below, which shows the extent to which enterprises have adopted, or are planning to adopt the different components of UC.

While businesses increasingly recognise the benefits that UC can potentially deliver, around improved collaboration, process streamlining, reduced travel costs etc, implementing a solution that actually does deliver is not without its problems. A key concern is the whether the benefits will actually be achievable in practice, and if so, will the benefits outweigh the costs associated with a UC implementation. And unfortunately, there is a lot of anecdotal evidence to support these concerns.

While there are a number of reasons why UC doesn’t turn out to deliver the expected benefits into the business that it was heralded to do, one of the main downfalls that companies make when moving forward with UC is that they expect it to bring about change in the organisation simply by the fact that it is there. The reason that this won’t happen, and why UC implemented in this way is doomed to fail, is that UC, rather than being designed to fit in with the way people work in a non-UC context, is a new system that delivers new capabilities. If businesses fail to recognise and address this, then this is where things can start to go wrong. What this translates to in practice is that, to get UC to work properly within the business requires companies to revisit how they do things currently, in a very systematic and detailed way, and look at how they can be done differently to maximise the benefits of UC.

An example of this is the process around call-handling within a call centre. In a non-UC environment, a call centre agent will take a call and if they are unable to deal with the query directly, they will note down the necessary details, with a commitment to call back the caller once they have the information they need. They will then contact the relevant experts within the company on an iterative basis, until they have the required information, and only at this point can they go back to the caller. If the caller has a follow-on query, the whole process begins again. As well as impacting on how the company is perceived by the caller, the process has to be carried out in a number of steps, and is extremely time-consuming and resource-intensive.

In a UC environment, the process is essentially condensed. For the same call coming in, the agent would try to resolve the call directly, and at the point where other people needed to be involved, would identify which experts to deal with the query, determine their availability, reach out to experts in parallel, and connect directly with the most appropriate one to obtain a response to the query. They would then either feedback the necessary information to the caller, or hand the call over to the expert to complete. And all this would appear seamless to the caller.

This example illustrates that UC brings with it the need to approach things differently. So if a company implements UC but does not change how it does things in any significant way, the likelihood is that, a few months down the line, it will be closely questioning the investment and upheaval it has endured. But changing the way that things are done in terms of communications and processes in a company needs to be dealt with properly. Failure to provide the necessary support around this, particularly in the early days, can ultimately leads to the failure of UC within the business.

Of course, part of this support is about ensuring IT staff are properly trained and have enough time allocated to deal with the uplift in helpdesk calls that are likely to follow implementation. But more importantly, businesses need to look beyond this, and proactively consider the processes that people will need to follow to make the most of UC, and communicate this effectively throughout the business.

Moreover, this will need to be done in a very specific and straightforward way. So, if someone wants to set up a videoconference meeting, what processes will they need to follow? What variants to these might exist, e.g. involving home-based workers, or individuals from outside of the company? And what is available in terms of help when things come unstuck?
Help desk is an obvious port of call, but as some people tend to avoid this route if possible, other options need to be made available, such as online resources, or even a nominated ‘friendly face’ on the same floor or in the same department, who can help out with low bandwidth queries.

It makes sense to extend this to cover what people shouldn’t be doing with UC, and putting together a set of guidelines around good business etiquette. UC by its very nature makes people more available. However, just because someone is available doesn’t mean they are open to constant interruption, particularly for trivial requests and queries.

Rather than looking at UC though rose-coloured spectacles, and believing that it will transform the workplace simply by virtue of the fact that it is there, it is vital to take the time to define exactly how UC will play out in the business, and how to make it easy for people to actually use it. Most of them will not be real proponents of UC - many may not even know what UC actually is, so the transition will need to overcome their natural resistance to embracing it. The more they see it being used around the business – particularly by senior management, and the more ‘best practice’ guidance they are exposed to, the easier, and more importantly, the more successful the transition will be.

The Time has come for “Chargeback”

2010-09-10T15:44:00.001Z

Ever since the industrial revolution there have been periods when businesses have prospered simply on the back of the general growth in the economy. Equally it is true that there are periods when life isn't so simple and organisations have to retrench in an attempt to prosper on their own merits in spite of prevailing economic conditions. This is where we are today: Certainly market conditions are not good but the fact that the market is difficult should be something with which organisations can cope, even when banks appear to be doing little to make life less awkward for businesses.

The pressure is on IT to demonstrate that it is delivering value to the business. Whilst this sounds simple, it is usually extremely complex. With few exceptions, most organisations do not have established models indicating exactly how the use of IT systems correlates with “business value”. In truth not many organisations posses even a high level view of how IT resources are consumed by different business services. This is a matter which the increasing usage of virtualisation tools, if left unchecked, is going to make even more difficult. In many scenarios this is a task that would be considerably simplified if some form of internal chargeback modelling based on IT resource consumption were to be used to help set and monitor IT budgets.

Whilst the basic concepts around chargeback reporting have been around in IT for a long time, there is strong evidence that chargeback is not viewed as important internally within the business. This clearly poses a challenge as IT may have to push the chargeback concept strongly to help position the associated “value proposition” to the business. Perhaps one example of how this might be achieved would be to use chargeback tools as a reporting mechanism for the efforts currently underway to align IT resource usage with front-line business requirements. (link: http://www.silicon.com/management/cio-insights/2010/08/03/how-can-it-shake-off-the-negativity-get-feedback-from-the-business-39746147/) Such a move away from simply utilising chargeback as a throttle on IT consumption could garner a positive reaction from front-line business managers.

The fact that trading conditions are difficult obviously poses a few challenges for IT departments as they seek to deliver good service whilst maintaining at the same time a very strong grip on costs. One thing that has become clear over the course of the last five years is that IT departments are now expected to show exactly where money is being spent and to provide unprecedented degrees of transparency on such expenditure.

Alongside this, increased levels of sophistication are being sought. IT needs to be ready to support new business operations that may emerge or evolve dramatically overnight. There now often seems to be an inbuilt expectation from the business (however unreasonable that may be) that IT must be ready quickly to support any business change, frequently without having much latitude to assess or manage the potential impact these changes might have on the underlying infrastructure.

Just how can IT demonstrate to the business where the money is going and how effectively the IT infrastructure is being utilised to support key business services? Consideration of this subject naturally leads to the obvious requirement to be able, at the very least, to report on which IT resources are consumed by which applications during certain periods of time. Even in relatively traditional IT solutions where virtualisation plays little or no part, getting hold of this information usually requires considerable manual time and effort.

The ever-expanding use of virtual systems makes such reporting even more necessary, particularly if organisations wish to get themselves into a position whereby they plan to share core infrastructure resources such as server, storage and networking platforms in order to dynamically provision, run and support different applications based on changing business needs.

This scenario is simply crying out for the use of chargeback modelling, despite the likely resistance, or at least indifference, from business users. After all most business people are extraordinarily familiar with the concepts of money and budgets within their own departments or areas of responsibility. On the other hand they may be very uncertain of quite how IT actually supports their daily operations. A simple way out of this dilemma is to employ some form of chargeback modelling which allocates costs to the users of IT services based on the percentage of the infrastructure resources that those services actually consume.

Today some organisations already use a primitive chargeback model based simply around the numbers of users of a service and the “assumed” costs of delivering said service. These models are by their nature usually very simplistic and do not take any effort to allocate costs based on actual usage, which will become much more important as systems become virtualised and the allocation of physical resources varies over time.

Such resources could also expand to include electricity costs as well as building related costs such as floor space, land costs, building depreciation etc., whatever makes sense for the business to measure. Alas whilst this sounds easy in principle it can, in fact, become extremely complicated in practice.

I believe that we have now entered an era when the use of chargeback models will become prevalent in a majority of IT organisations, certainly those where the IT systems number more than a few tens of servers and where flexible virtualisation is employed to pool physical resources together rather than running individual servers and back end systems to support a single application or service. Chargeback models provide transparency in a format which is acceptable to the majority of business users since it operates using concepts of money spent for each service delivered. For line of business managers this approach should be easy to get grips with.

However from the IT perspective this places a degree of burden on the infrastructure in terms of monitoring resource consumption and then reporting on what resources each business unit is actually consuming. This reporting must be in financial and business operational terms rather than IT centric metrics. The challenge is to find a model that the infrastructure can sustain that is politically acceptable to the business users and economically acceptable to operational IT. Get it right and hopefully everybody will be happy, or at least recognise where there may be IT / business conflicts that need to be resolved.

In addition so called “Cloud solutions” are being marketed by many as being inherently lower cost than in house IT solutions, and these comparisons are causing some IT departments considerable challenges. This is especially the case as few cloud services exactly replicate specific conditions around the security of services or service level commitments. It is very easy for business managers to not realise that potentially they may be comparing a very bland apple with a specific variety of the fruit grown in house to meet very tight taste requirements, and one that it is tightly integrated into the overall business menu. The fact that there is considerable activity amongst the vendors of cloud solutions to appeal directly to business users is likely to cause them to have to defend the costs of running their own services as compared to whatever external solution is being marketed. This task becomes more straightforward if IT has a good idea on how much each service costs rather than a purely theoretical model.

So the question becomes which forms of chargeback modelling will be acceptable along with how are such models to be built, monitored and reported on? Then there is the challenge of how to sell the idea of charge back modelling it to both the business and a sceptical IT team? The answer is for both sides to recognise the opportunity charge back reports provide to monitor service levels, decide on service change requests and to report on IT / business alignment but IT is likely to have to drive things.

The Mainframe Extends its Reach

2010-07-30T13:36:00.000Z

Over the course of the last decade there has been considerable discussion about the future development and use of the revered Mainframe platform, usually now to be found under the IBM System z banner. At times much that has been written has not flattered the mainframe but that may be about to change. Whilst the platform is still by no means cheap in absolute Dollar, Sterling or Euro terms there is usually an array of financing options available to help meet most potential scenarios. Beyond that, the platform usually manages to compare favourably when its scale, management, power / space efficiency and overall TCO estimates are calculated.

There is absolutely no doubting IBM’s commitment to the platform. The company continues to invest large sums of money and resources developing the mainframe in both the hardware and software platforms. Equally it is important to recognise that there is a very active community built around the mainframe and it is clear that the majority of these are also committed to developing their offerings further. To see that this is the case one has simply to look at how companies such as CA and BMC are developing their complementary management tools as well activities by application ISVs such as ACI who are now robustly promoting mainframe based solutions. The mainframe vendor ecosystem is large and active.

Clearly there are challenges that organisations using the mainframe need to address. Perhaps the most visible of these concerns the age of those currently administering these enterprise workhorses. In many cases these highly skilled professionals are in the age bracket where considerations of retirement are not far away. Given the skills required to run mainframes this is causing some concerns but there is now an active education programme in place to tempt students and those new to IT to acquire mainframe skills. At the same time the overall management workload is easing as CA, IBM and other vendors deliver new tools to the market to help reduce the workload burden further. In some ways this is somewhat ironic as several studies have indicated that mainframe administrators can already handle far larger workloads than administrators of other platforms.

But the debate on the future of the mainframe should not be focussed so much on the development of the technology itself or how to ensure that skilled administrators are available to run the systems. Instead it should now focus on what role the mainframe has going forward to deliver business services? To understand this it is important that people understand just what type of system the Mainframe is today and what business operations it can assist. In some places this “understanding” may be several years behind reality and is often linked to out of date perceptions of where things fit.

Recently the importance of meeting this challenge head on has become even more important, partly as a consequence of recent system z announcements by IBM, but even more so as business requirements for secure, cost-effective, flexible and resilient business services continue to grow. The announcement in July of the release of the IBM zEnterprise 196 System has huge potential to cause a major rethink on where the mainframe is perceived to play, if IBM can wake organisations up and educate on the system as it exists today rather than where people, many IT professionals included, think it sits with images of times long past.

As well as offering all of the now well-established offload engines, such as the IFL, zIIP, ZaaP to run Linux, DB2 and java workloads, the new system promises to allow organisations to add zBlade extension systems running IBM’s Power platform or x86 workloads. When used with the new Unified Resource Management software it will become possible for administrators to manage services composed of workload elements running on any of the mainframes multiple operating systems and IBM’s AIX or Linux platforms on the special blade extensions as single environments with all of the control functionality and flexibility for which the mainframe should be well known.

Challenging peoples’ out of date perceptions takes time and effort and can be extremely taxing. The challenge for IBM and its ecosystem of suppliers is to assist in perception resetting, especially helping to update the understanding of the potential use of mainframes amongst both the wider IT community and, more importantly, amongst business managers. The new IBM zEnterprise 196 offers IBM a great opportunity to reposition the mainframe and to actively seek out new customers rather than to simple continue to grow amongst its well established user base.

It is clear that the platform has the capacity to deliver a greatly expanded range of IT services cost effectively and the challenge for IBM and the wider mainframe ecosystem is to ensure that organisations understand where its capabilities can be most effectively deployed. This will take considerable effort by IBM and its ecosystem partners like CA and BMC. But the platform has never been better positioned for a major market re-education and the wider economic and regulatory environment make now the time for the undertaking to begin. The major questions are thus will the market see these developments as defensive measure to protect the established mainframe base or as moves to encourage others to take up the platform and will IBM aggressively seek to educate potential new customers on the extended modern mainframe’s capabilities?

Martin's flying the nest

2010-07-12T09:11:00.003Z

It is with some sadness that we say goodbye this week to Martin Atherton. After a lively three and a half years with Freeform Dynamics, he has decided to fly the nest to give himself the space to capitalise on some of his core talents. Those of you who know Martin will be familiar with his articulation, presentation and relationship building skills, and it’s in this area of ‘outreach’ that his heart really lies.

In the meantime, I believe Martin will be taking some time out over the summer to explore the opportunities that are out there in the industry. He’ll be a good catch for someone, and we look forward to Martin remaining a close friend of Freeform wherever he lands.

I'd like to add my personal gratitude for his broad contribution over the years - thanks Martin and all the best!

Jon

2010-07-07T14:24:00.003Z

Sugaring the pill

The iPad signals the start of a new wave of tablets. Supporting users that wish to work on these devices will be difficult, but existing technologies can help.

Originally published on CIO.co.uk

Apple, as a computer company, has been focused on the consumer market. It has paid lip-service to trying to tackle the ‘bread and butter’ corporate market, instead relying on niche departments to decide on Macs in order to run specific applications, or for professionals with the budget and freedom of choice to make their own choice to purchase, run and support a Mac.

But Apple is, by its own admission, no longer a computer company. The launch of the iPod in 2001 started the shift, but now Apple derives more than half of its revenue from the sales of the iPod and iPhone. The iPhone has tremendous traction, selling more than 8 million units in the first quarter of 2010, with many going to business users.

Now Apple is tackling a market that has always promised great things, but never really delivered. The new iPad tablet has already seen sales of over two million units in less than two months, and Apple is on course to ship more iPads this year than the entire sales of Windows Tablet PCs since it launched in 2002.

Arguably, the failure of the Tablet PC to reach critical mass lies in the name. It is a PC, with all the drawbacks that entails for extreme mobility. The success of the iPhone demonstrated the potential of devices with limited capabilities but sophisticated and polished interfaces, and this has translated into the success of the iPad.

Apple is far from alone in sensing the opportunity. HP acquired Palm for its WebOS which it intends to deploy on a range of devices including tablets, while Google is also making moves, with partner Dell launching the Streak Tablet based on the Android platform.

While it is not yet clear what the long term picture will look like, it is certain that there will be a sizeable market of ultra-portable computing devices that do not run Windows. These will employ a variety of operating systems, form factors and user interfaces. Each will be accompanied by their own security and management issues.

Many of these new tablets will be purchased by business users. Much of their use will be an extension of what smart phones are used for today: communications, such as voice, texting and email; web browsing; content consumption, such as music and video; and amusement or productivity through native applications.

Tablets enable a much richer environment than smart phones with larger screens, potentially better performance and longer battery life. This will enable tablets to make the switch from being content consumers which smart phones are quite good at, to content producers at which smart phones are not very good. And this will mean that business users increasingly will want to use the tablets to do work. The difficulty is that the whole environment is new and alien to IT.

Getting the software vendors that provide business applications to produce and support applications for so many device types will be nigh on impossible. It will be difficult enough to persuade them to do so for one or even two leading platforms. This will make it tough enable tablet users to work with business systems natively on the devices. And while it is fairly easy to locate reasonably good document viewers, it is very difficult, if not impossible, to find a workable editor that can preserve the document formatting and structure, making sharing, distribution and document flow problematical.

It may be possible to provide access to applications through the use of Web or Cloud systems, although the use of advanced scripting tools and languages for rich application environments could pose compatibility or usability issues for tablet users.

The best solution, especially in the short to medium term as the market matures and develops, will be to avoid custom solutions as much as possible, and make use of tried and tested and widely implemented technologies. Virtual desktop solutions may prove to be an ideal way to deploy applications and services to these new tablets. This type of infrastructure, from the likes of Citrix, VMware and Microsoft, is already being used to provide remote virtual access to systems across many companies, supporting many users including mobile workers with laptops.

In this scenario the applications run in the data centre, and the tablet accesses them though a dedicated virtual desktop application, which provides the ‘window’ into the virtual desktop and business applications. The applications would run unmodified, ensuring full compatibility and features, while requiring minimal additional training and support as the results would be the same as running the applications on a small-screen notebook.

Although desktop virtualisation is a ‘silver bullet’ for running business applications on the new wave of tablets, it is not perfect. Continuous connectivity will be essential to productivity, as the applications run externally, as there is not yet the ability to cache the applications and work offline. If there is no connection, then the applications will not run. This will be fine if users can locate coffee shops or other locations with Wi-Fi services. It may even be suitable to run virtual desktop applications over 3G connections. But in many situations where users may wish to work, such as on trains and planes, or even automobiles, connectivity may be patchy and unreliable. Cost may also be an issue if the user is highly mobile and travels internationally as roaming charges mount.

How can Organisations be helped to exploit Storage Management Solutions?

2010-07-05T10:50:00.010Z

The amount of data stored by organisations continues to grow at a very fast rate. Indeed, as the figure below illustrates, the growth of data to be served has become one of the most important drivers impacting both the architecture and operation of IT systems. It is also clear from our work in this space however, that managing storage is not an area where many organisations excel. This begs the question, how active will the channel be in taking new storage solutions to market?

We know from conversations with IT professionals that most of the architectural attention is rightly focussed on the server side of ‘service delivery’, with storage utilised simply to support what is happening on the server. One reason for this is that, especially in small and mid-sized businesses, IT professionals tend to be generalists rather than specialists. The result is that expert storage knowledge can be at a premium.

It is also fair to say that until very recently in many organisations, storage has not been that high on the agenda, but this state of affairs is changing. The rapid growth of data being stored, coupled with the expectations of users to be able to access all data without limitations, is putting the storage infrastructure under stress. In addition wave upon wave of new legislation is compelling organisations to retain more data, or indeed delete information according to set rules. As a consequence the costs of data storage and management are becoming more and more visible elements in the IT budget.

Thus many companies are faced with the key questions of how to keep the cost of their storage use under control whilst the data volumes generated ramp up, and how to ensure that users can find key information in a convenient and timely manner. Against this background it is not surprising that many of the recent developments in storage management solutions have become increasingly prominent. For storage management, the ‘do nothing’ era is coming to an end.

The exact moment for a company to revisit its approach to storage management will vary by organisation. The balance point at which making changes becomes economically favourable is hard to judge, given that the breakdown of storage costs, especially operational costs, are still somewhat opaque. More strategic storage decisions are likely to be taken as part of a bigger review of infrastructure spending unless some outside, usually regulatory, factors intervene to stimulate a change of approach.

So what solutions could be of interest? Clearly storage virtualisation and thin provisioning, archiving and data deduplication are all tools which may be useful in certain scenarios. The challenge for many small and midsized enterprises will be to work out which solutions fit their own circumstances, particularly given the aforementioned lack of storage skills in house. If the basics of storage expertise are not present, it becomes quite a leap to expect such organisations to have the knowhow to adopt more advanced storage solutions.

Consider storage virtualisation for example. Whilst many mid-market organisations may have adopted x86 server virtualisation to some extent, the same cannot be said of storage virtualisation. In many ways if organisations already have a level of understanding of server virtualisation it will be easier for them to relate to the potential benefits of storage virtualisation. These include consolidation, resource usage optimisation, increased availability and resilience coupled with the ability to manipulate and protect data more flexibly and effectively.

However, given the limited understanding in the general IT community regarding such capabilities, a major hurdle to their adoption is clear to see. Who is going to educate the markets? So far the majority of the storage management solution vendors have done a less than effective job marketing and evangelising their tools, especially with respect to highlighting potential usage cases and achievable business benefits.

Until the vendors get better at such primary education there is an obvious space for the channel to step up to this particular plate. The need for sophisticated storage management is growing in small and mid-market companies, but they are crying out for “someone” to explain, position and deliver such solutions. While firms of storage specialists exist, it will be interesting to monitor how the broader channel community tackles storage management in the coming months and years.

Why server virtualisation can store up trouble

2010-06-29T12:22:00.002Z

Originally published on Silicon.

Server virtualisation technology is taking hold in mainstream IT environments and is on its way to becoming a core technology. But the views I hear time and again from IT professionals are as much about virtualisation's impact on the wider infrastructure as about their experiences of the technology itself.

One of the side effects of virtualisation is its impact on the storage infrastructure. To understand this issue, we need a grasp of how IT environments have traditionally evolved. Generally, each time a new application was deployed, a new set of servers and storage devices came with it, creating a so-called silo.

This approach causes some problems: it requires physical space for a start, and managing multiple, disparate hardware and software platforms has proved onerous for many organisations. Nonetheless, it has one major benefit in that each application's storage requirements are handled more or less individually.

The paths between application processing and storage, and the bandwidth required, can be calculated in a relatively straightforward manner for individual applications. While bottlenecks have always existed, the nature of silos makes them relatively easy to spot.
But there is an additional downside. Because storage systems have been fully specified upfront to cope with expected loads, much spare capacity exists today that has never been used but which is unavailable for anything else.

Enter server virtualisation, which offers a way to consolidate multiple workloads onto a single physical server. The benefits are generally well appreciated and in principle can also result in more efficient use of storage by breaking the silos that were bought to serve the needs of particular applications.

However, the downside of server virtualisation is that it doesn't pay sufficient attention to the physical environment beyond the server. It's great in principle to shift multiple workloads onto a single server. But rather than having individual routes to the physical storage layer, information flows now take place using the same physical interface.

From talking to early adopters of server virtualisation, we know this approach can easily cause a bottleneck if the workloads are data-intensive or require access to concurrent physical resources. Where silos make bottlenecks easier to spot, virtualisation does not.
Numerous IT managers describe their difficulties understanding what physical resources a virtual machine is actually using. Management tools - or at least those used by many IT departments - are not sophisticated enough to provide such a view, and many IT staff lack experience of the new environments.

However, we should also remember it is still relatively early days for virtualisation in the distributed systems environment. IT management vendors are working with virtualisation vendors to ensure the physical and virtual worlds are both taken into account.
Meanwhile, although the traditional storage infrastructure of NAS, SAN and the like evolved without considering virtualisation, a number of vendors are starting to incorporate recognition of server virtualisation in their products.

In fact, the principles of virtualisation are also highly applicable to the storage realm and happen to have been around for a long time. Indeed, storage virtualisation makes the overall pool of storage easier to manage and enables the allocation of storage as it is needed through so-called thin provisioning, reciprocating the operational flexibility of running a virtualised server environment.

Storage virtualisation also offers a number of other benefits such as reduced power consumption and makes supporting disaster recovery easier, as data can be replicated and moved within the overall storage pool with minimum disruption to users and applications.
Ultimately, one of the key things we've learned from early adopters is that it doesn't make sense to think about server virtualisation and storage virtualisation in isolation from one another. Looking at virtualisation across both areas should improve performance and efficiency, and cut costs.

Storage is often an area that hasn't been revisited for some time in many organisations, so it makes sense to study how the latest capabilities can support server virtualisation, before operational bottlenecks threaten to spoil the fun.

Videoconferencing: coming to a company near you?

2010-06-29T11:36:00.003Z

Originally published on cio.co.uk.

It is probably fair to say that the likelihood of videoconferencing becoming mainstream in the next year or so is slim. Of course, many vendors will no doubt vehemently disagree with this, and claim that the videoconference revolution is only just around the corner. For some, maybe, but not for all. In spite of the often touted benefits, such as the ability to involve remote teams in 'face-to-face' meetings, reduced travel budgets and time lost due to travelling, there are a number of negatives that videoconferencing struggles to overcome. To begin with, professional business-grade video conferencing is generally acknowledged as being expensive, and difficult to set up and maintain, with specialised equipment required at both ends of a connection, often in a pre-designated, and often purpose-built room. In addition, latencies on video calls can make them, at times, painful to participate in. And perhaps most importantly, a lot of people just aren't comfortable with their picture on the screen, and are happier sticking with the tried and tested audio conference, perhaps calling on web-conferencing when some visual interface, such as a set of slides, is required.

But while video conferencing is unlikely to replace the humble phone call any time soon, it shouldn't be dismissed out of hand. It is certainly already well past the starting post, no doubt egged on somewhat by the continual stream of travel woes affecting businesses such as rail and air strikes, the recent disruption caused by the ash cloud, and swine flu , along with shrinking travel budgets and changing work practices. Recent research carried about by Freeform Dynamics with companies into their use of advanced business communications revealed that while video conferencing is less widely used than most communications tools, it is at least on the agenda in some shape or form for many, although broad adoption is fairly limited.

But just implementing video conferencing doesn't automatically guarantee that it will deliver benefits to the business. And in fact, if the expectation is that it will be used just because it is there, then it most probably won't. In fact, in this scenario, it is more likely to end up with the cameras pushed towards the wall while people just use the system for voice. The 'trick' in getting it to really work in the organisation is to ensure it has a good home in the overall communications strategy. This demands a real 'top-down approach' to make it happen, with senior and middle management as genuine flag-wavers of the solution. This means getting them to actually use it, not just talk about it, e.g. by starting to organise meetings themselves on a regular basis, and getting inventive with strategies around this. Some companies, for example, have had 'competitions' to see who can cut the most travel budget by using video conferencing, with prizes for the winners. Of course, ensuring that everyone uses meeting best-practices, such as clear agenda etc., applies here just as it would in any other type of meeting. Like most technologies, once videoconferencing starts being used successfully, and talked about, everyone else will demand to use it.

It is probably also worth remembering the old maxim of horses for courses, and identifying precisely which courses work best for video conferencing. For example, in some companies, larger group meetings aimed at disseminating information, where information flows from one site to many others but not much interaction is expected from the satellite sites, are probably well suited to videoconference sessions, whereas smaller, interactive discussions might be better handled by a web or audio conference. In other companies, the reverse may be true. The point is that video conferencing is not a solution that solves all meeting needs, and is very much about delivering specific values in well-defined scenarios. It works much better when it coexists with others tools, such as web and audio conferencing. Over time, individual company experience will determine the best tool for any given communications objective.

On a final note, when video conferencing is considered as a component or 'option' within a broader communications solution such as Unified Communications (UC), interest increases significantly. With this in mind, UC just might be the conduit that pushes video conferencing into the spotlight, even if it is one shared with a whole raft of other communications tools.

Selling the Cloud

2010-06-24T19:59:00.005Z

Vendors are pushing cloud for all they are worth. And customers talk about it too, whether they understand what the word means or not. Some claim cloud computing is the key to lower costs and increased flexibility. We also hear that cloud is about surrendering control, and exposing private information. Some of what you hear is misleading, and even misinformed. Cloud is really quite a nebulous concept – if you will excuse the pun.

It seems that almost every 'cloud' vendor has a different strategy. Some are offering applications accessed over the internet or host custom applications in shared datacentres. Others specialise in highly automated and virtualised infrastructure to transform the datacentre. Some offer flexible, use-based pricing, while others prefer longer commitments or set resources.

The cloud computing vision is really the fulfilment of a long-talked-about but not quite realised concept: IT as a service. A combination of ‘cloudy’ ingredients, such as on-demand capacity, self-service setup, shared resource pools and service monitoring may construct what are widely called cloud services.

Many poster-child cloud-focused services, such as SalesForce.com, are close to past visions of service-based IT, such as application service provision. Vendors such as VMware want to make manual, internal IT provisioning into a dynamic process. VMware proposes that customers use virtualisation and automation extensively to create a ‘cloud computing environment’. By default, this cloud environment is both internal and private. Even with no external services being consumed, this model is widely described as cloud computing.

The ultimate expression of cloud computing is for near-complete freedom to choose where a service may run. It may run locally in the datacentre, but as requirements change the workload could be moved or extended to another location. This other location may be external to the company, and provided in a secure but shared facility, or even in a publicly accessible facility by a third party.

How cloud it is perceived by customers is by far the most important thing. Some customers may not even require your approach to involve the word ‘cloud’, if all they care about are the attributes of a particular service.

Generally, we can split customer views into three main classes:

The first is that on-premise solutions are not generally considered cloud. So when vendors bang the ‘internal private cloud’ drum, it needs to be presented to the customer more in terms of application and infrastructure flexibility, without complicating the issue by talking cloud.

Second, customers do not view email, communication and collaboration tools as ‘cloud’ but more as ‘hosted services’. However, vanilla infrastructure capable of hosting a variety of applications, business tools, data or development environments are seen as cloud.

But the third and most important consideration in the customers’ eyes is that cloud services should offer freedom. They must be flexible, on-demand and with no ongoing commitment.
Ultimately, if you feel that you absolutely must talk about cloud to your target audience, it is worth avoiding defining it through services that are aggregated into ungainly artificial containers – such as fixed or pre-allocated resources, defined capacity, and especially longer-term fixed contracts.

It’s the data that drives us

2010-05-14T13:59:00.004Z

An alternative view of software rationalisation and retirement

In business, the phrase ‘change is constant’ may be a tad overused but it is nevertheless true in many regards. The response from IT to this change is (ideally) to be able to change as the demands on it do. The need for change may filter through from the business as a response to an external event, but we also instigate change independently when seeking to improve or streamline the way we do things. Drivers from both these domains have stimulated software and infrastructure evolution over the last few years: the economy and intense levels of competition on one hand, and technologies such as virtualisation helping businesses improve their capabilities beyond ‘just’ financial benefits, on the other.

For IT shops aiming to tune the efficiency and effectiveness of the services they provide to the business, a natural consequence is to maintain a keen eye on the relevance and value of those services so as to be able to make the right decisions about how and when to retire, replace or modernise them.

Regardless of the motivation change, however, a few important considerations are worth bearing in mind. To be blunt, it’s the ‘I’ in IT that really matters to our business, because without it, even with all the process, workflow and software we can’t run our businesses. Given this, it’s relatively easy to think about how the value of data and the obligations we are under to protect it and maximise its value, can (or should) be used to help steer changes in areas like software rationalisation and consolidation [1].

In a software rationalisation exercise, ‘just’ ensuring that information assets are protected on their journey from an old application to a new one might be a wasted opportunity. Business advantage is to be gained from the data that emerges from a rationalisation process being slicker, cleaner, and of higher value than the data that goes in. Ultimately, ‘input’ to the rationalisation process is a set of data repositories, databases and so on. All these can be treated, for example, if data is fragmented and/or duplicated across multiple repositories, inconsistent or contradictory, difficult to access, formatted in ways that need translation or stored or managed sub-optimally.

Essentially, the rationalisation process offers an opportunity to deal with these issues, but its only worth doing if there is some positive business impact to be gained, such as streamlining any new processes which may involve exploiting the data, reducing the cost of compliance, or moving towards a ‘single version of the truth’ – a goal that any business will aspire to, but rarely gets the chance to pursue.

To do any of this properly we need a combination of the right approach and the right technology. The former requires us to firstly understand the data impact of applications to be retired – for example, do we actually need to treat and migrate all the data from the old application to the new one, or can we ascertain that some of it is of much less value to the business and simply archive it?

Building a picture of the ‘data under rationalisation’ and the needs of the target application architecture is also important, as is making an assessment of migration risks; for example what would the implication be of personnel not being able to access the data for a period of time should something go wrong?

Plenty of tools are available to help manage and streamline data migration processes, including archiving and retrieval software to ensure that data is moved to an accessible location and assigned appropriate indices to aid discovery. Data movement and migration tools can ensure the integrity of data (e.g. preservation of references) so it can be relied upon by the new applications, and data cleansing and quality management tools can really drive the value to be gained from the process itself, because it’s an ideal time to deal with issues of ‘dirty data’.
Needless to say, we’ll always need to update, then retire the software applications we use, but given the rate of change around data protection laws, our responsibilities to ‘do the right thing’ with data will see the data itself easily outliving the systems it runs on. Taking a data centric approach to software rationalisation may feel a bit like making work for yourself, but ultimately its part of taking responsibility for what really matters to the business.

[1] Application Retirement: What about the Data? Jon Collins & Martin Atherton

Want to reduce mobile voice costs?

2010-02-04T13:00:00.001Z

Change the channel

It has been a while since the EU introduced regulations to address the cost of roaming in Europe - 2007 to be precise. Undoubtedly, this was a welcome piece of legislation for consumers and businesses, with 'Eurotariff' limits being imposed - no more than 43 Euro cents per minute to make a voice call and 19 cents per minute to receive a call before 2010. In addition, mobile service providers now have to apply per second billing, as well as sending users information on the price of calls when they first enter another EU country, usually done via a 'Welcome' SMS. The legislation was extended in 2009 to encompass SMS and data services. So far, so good and, according to Ofcom, the UK communications regulator, this has resulted in a reduction of retail prices (not costs) of more than 50% for most users.

While this is undoubtedly a move in the right direction, it is important to keep this in perspective, particularly from a business viewpoint. Economic downturn aside, mobility, including roaming, and the need to maintain effective business communications while mobile is increasing, irrespective of whether this is within the home country, regionally based or global, which in turn leads to increasing costs. And as this spend spirals upwards, there is increasing pressure on IT and communications managers to reign this in. This is already being evidenced with some companies reducing the number of corporate sponsored mobiles across the business, and setting monthly spending limits on mobile usage.

Given this need to balance increasing mobility needs against increasing cost, a recent announcement from Agito Networks, a company that focuses on solutions for enterprise mobility, is worth highlighting. The company, which is probably better known for its support of voice over wireless LAN (WLAN) has recently released a solution for delivering enterprise grade voice over 3G data.

What this means is that when a user roams abroad, rather than using cellular voice, calls can be made and received using cellular data. The advantage of this centres around how data plans are currently priced compared to voice plans. A growing number of US data plans that businesses can subscribe to offer unlimited international data as extension to the standard plan, for a fixed (and, by comparison to usage based pricing, relatively modest) additional fee. To date, however, Europe is behind the US on data roaming plans, meaning that this solution will only make sense as and when these plans become more commonplace.

Of course, for heavy users of roaming voice, who are on such a plan, by using 3G data to make voice calls, the costs will effectively be absorbed into an 'all you can eat' package. In this scenario, it is evident that there could be substantial cost savings available. And while it won't be cost effective for each and every user, for an IT manager who has to contend with spiralling mobile costs, it merits at least a cursory investigation.

Unlike the situation with mobile VoIP, mobile operators in the US at least, have not (according to Agito Networks) had an adverse reaction to voice carried in this way, as the volume of traffic involved is not significant enough as a portion of the whole (roaming business users compared to everyone else), and this essentially creates user stickiness. Again, time will tell whether European operators will feel as comfortable, given that international data roaming is much more significant in terms of data volumes.

Of course, it remains to be seen how much businesses will embrace this particular solution, and of course, if they do, then they clearly need to pay careful attention to the calculations and all the variables involved. What this does highlight is that the cost of mobile communications is a critical one for businesses, and one that will continue to generate solutions aimed at minimising these costs.

From play to work and back again

2010-01-27T15:00:00.000Z

Mobile devices and the consumer effect

After a number of years of preliminary investment, activity and experience with mobile technology, many companies are finding themselves moving into a new phase of activity in this area. Part of this is characterised by the desire to get more users ‘mobile’ – driven by some quite dramatic changes to working practices over the past few years. This is coupled with a desire to make the mobile experience a much more functional and effective one, through extended use of applications which are already used in a static working environment. A good example of this is the extent to which people access email through their mobile device in a work context.

An important element of this shift is that businesses find themselves faced with the need to integrate mobile technologies more fully into IT strategy from a policy, security, execution, development, management and skill-set perspective. While all this is indeed important, it is nothing that companies are not already dealing with.

A somewhat newer challenge they face, however, is the need to more explicitly acknowledge the expectations of users in terms of form, function and desirability of technology they have been exposed to in their non working lives as consumers. While mobile devices are a constantly evolving story, the advent of the iPhone had a phenomenal impact on individuals’ attitude towards and use of ‘smart’ mobile devices. Although this effect took off from the consumer space, individuals increasingly want to bring their enhanced mobile experience into the workplace. People’s experiences and preferences are inevitably different. While some are happy with a BlackBerry for work purposes, others want the functionality of the iPhone in the office, and yet others are devoted to their Palm Pre... and so it goes on. Moreover, this isn’t a static picture, with devices and the way that people use them, constantly changing. Take, for example, the dramatic increase in web browsing with mobile.

So, just how far should companies go in embracing employee preferences? It is understandable that in a large corporate environment, IT managers will be wary of a fully ‘consumerised’ approach to equipment, i.e. letting users adopt whatever they want with no constraints, on the basis of cost, risk and support overhead. But if companies swing to the other end of the scale and completely restrict choice around mobile devices, this brings its own issues. For example, there is an increasing likelihood that some employees will bring in their own device in any case, and try to use it for work applications. Yet others will simply not use the company device, which may have negative impact on the value of the mobile solution to the business.

Companies that want to make the best use of mobile in the workplace should aim for the happier medium, and consider offering a range of devices that meet corporate standards in terms of security, supportability manageability and cost, but that are also ‘desirable’ and meet user expectations on functionality. A possible hidden benefit to the business in all this is that more suitable devices may come to light, by virtue of the fact that the net was cast a little wider than may have been the case historically.

Another important factor to bear in mind is the extent to which the chosen device or solution supplier is committed to dealing with both corporate requirements and user expectations in the same equipment.

Granted, the question of consumerisation of corporate equipment is not an easy one to deal with and it is one that companies are unlikely to be able to avoid for much longer if they have not yet taken the first step in at least acknowledging it. A proactive, rather than reactive or dismissive approach is much more likely to bring the workforce on side, and may indeed uncover business benefits which were not obvious before a broader view of the options available was taken.

Embedded Developments

2010-01-14T13:30:00.010Z

Is anyone still developing software anymore, particularly in smaller-scale, “embedded” systems running on platform-specific operating systems? Despite the best efforts of packaged software vendors, software development never went away – indeed, the annual barometer studies that Freeform Dynamics undertakes with readers of The Register repeatedly shows that “custom application development” is always one of the top areas for investment. And in a recent mini-poll, when we asked you about embedded systems in particular, we found considerable interest in this area. But what’s guiding the decision about the embedded OS to use?

A quick glance at the figure below highlights that embedded systems development is being undertaken in a wide cross section of industries. The figure also illustrates that many developers of such applications operate in multiple industries. Such a result is not terribly surprising given the increasing importance of solutions using embedded software and the relatively small numbers of skilled and experienced programmers comfortable in this space, at least when compared to traditional enterprise applications.

As the chart shows, embedded systems are popping up across all industrial sectors, everywhere from high consumer-touch areas such as automotive systems, mobile devices through to the heart of the business supply chain and manufacturing and along to specialised high value verticals such as aerospace, defence and medical systems.

With developers of embedded applications being in some demand, it begs the question of what do they look for in the operating systems that might be deployed to support these systems? Naturally enough the availability of target-specific development tools and testing tools / emulators top the list. Close behind comes a desire to be able to use standard development tools for the majority of the code work, again perhaps not too surprising given that many of the developers are likely to be working on a broad range of solutions.

The most interesting aspect of the second figure is that “standards conformance and / or interoperability” figure at the bottom of the list when developers are evaluating embedded operating systems options. The “ease of porting code to new target platforms” performs only slightly better as a desired attribute. These last two results are surprising as in other areas of applications development these are highly desirable attributes.

It might well be the case that decisions concerning the choice of operating system on which to build embedded applications are more tightly associated with the underlying device that will house the application than in other areas of software development. Equally it might be that the relative youth of embedded systems development may also be having a major influence in these results. Do you have any opinions here? Please let us have your feedback in the comments section below.

However with this an area that is highly likely to grow in importance there are challenges ahead for all suppliers working in these areas.

Data protection and identity management – are you sure you’re safe?

2010-01-06T10:50:00.005Z

Data protection is an essential area for businesses, and an increasingly critical one to deal with, as volumes and complexity of data grow, along with the volume and complexity of interactions both within the business and with the outside world.

Complex it may be, but it is one that businesses can ill afford to bypass, as without it, they are vulnerable to both pre-meditated and opportunistic attacks, as well as exposures through negligence or even failure of systems. Companies are also exposed to threats from different sources both from within and outside of the business. Internal attacks are typically driven by company staff, be they more general end users, senior management or IT/admin staff, while external attacks might be as a result of someone hacking into the company system or users accessing compromised web sites and infecting their machines. Additionally, partners that have a business relationship with the company may also be a potential vulnerability unless well managed.

While it is very difficult to completely eliminate all security exposures that arise, be they external or internal, businesses need to ensure that all bases are covered, and that IT processes are closely linked to business ones. For example, a common vulnerability to which companies are often exposed relates to insufficient measures being in place dealing with visibility and accountability around systems that relate to partners. Companies must ensure that they continually monitor interactions with partners, and that any access by partners to internal systems is tightly controlled. Additionally, they should take steps to verify that the security practices of partners are adequate, and should revisit this on a regular basis.

A business may believe it is sufficiently protected because it has a set of security policies and procedures in place however this is not always sufficient. If these are not linked to specific people or groups, with accountability attached, then a company risks leaving itself exposed. Such policies and procedures need to address all essential areas, both inward and outward facing – rather than trying to focus on best-in-class for specific areas. Importantly, all policies need to be followed by staff, and must be executed in a timely manner.

More significantly, all users need to be properly educated with regards to the importance of protecting company data and, crucially, to the part they play in this. A key element of data protection – inextricably linked to end users – are access and identity management processes. These deal with the identification of users in a system and controlling their access to resources by linking identity to a set of rights and restrictions.

As companies often have a variety of systems that are not necessarily fully integrated, the issue of identity management can quickly escalate, with users having multiple points of entry across the various systems. Managing multiple identities is a challenge to system administrators and to users alike. If there are too many identities and passwords to be managed, users may seek to use a common password across multiple systems thereby exposing the most valuable systems to the level of security of the weakest. This is also likely to be a major procedural challenge when a user leaves a company, possibly leaving some accounts operational rather than being closed down promptly.

Companies may often consider that their approach to data security and identity management is sufficient. While it may be true for certain processes or systems, it is not an area that should be glossed over. Businesses are continually changing, internally, and in the way they link to the outside world. Sensible companies are well advised to ensure that security policies and procedures adapt accordingly and well polished and understood identity management policies, effectively implemented, hold the potential to help reduce both business risk and operational costs.

Are there Clouds on the Horizon?

2009-12-22T11:01:00.004Z

Seldom in the history of IT marketing has there been such a tornado of hype as that which is currently to be found billowing around the term “cloud computing”. It appears as if every vendor with any product or solution to market is compelled to employ one of the terms “cloud”, “IaaS” (infrastructure as a service), “PaaS” (platform as a service) or plain, simple “SaaS” somewhere in the stories they promote.

With so much energy being expended marketing the term, it is worthwhile looking at what is actually happening in the real world. Several studies have shown us that actual deployment of any form of cloud solution is still confined to a relatively small number of organisations, with usage being higher in larger organisations rather than in small business. This is a matter of some concern to those calling themselves “cloud service providers”.

If everything to do with cloud computing is as wonderful as many vendors believe, what are the inhibitors holding back the active utilisation of such solutions in main stream organisations? Beyond the lack of clarity surrounding the term “cloud computing” and the normal fear, uncertainty and doubt attached to any new offering, I believe that potential customer concerns fall into four main areas. To be specific these are questions regarding security, quality of service, the question of data / vendor lock-in and, finally, the long term cost of such services.

Security of information, and potentially of the structure of business processes, will always be matters that merit acute study even when services are run in house. When organisations consider moving to services that reside entirely outside of their computer rooms and data centres they need significant reassurance that not only their staff will be able to access and change corporate data, but also that such data will be adequately backed up and otherwise protected.

There is also the question or where, geographically and geo-politically, corporate data will be held. Many nation states have strong restrictions on how and where certain data types must be held. Until cloud providers are able to demonstrate that their offerings more than adequately satisfy such legislative requirements there will be significant hurdles to overcome.

Another factor to consider, especially when looking at PaaS and IaaS offerings, concerns the nature of software licensing, who is responsible for what from a licensing perspective, and how any licensing issues can be monitored and managed effectively.

The concerns surrounding data and IP “escrow” are matters that merit serious consideration by anyone looking to use any form of cloud service. It is essential that client organisations have agreements that detail the processes to be used to return all corporate data and any embedded intellectual property held at the end of life of the service, whatever the cause. This is an area where few cloud suppliers have taken any pains to explain how these situations are handled and how any guarantees are to be enforced.

The next question, that few cloud service providers do much to publicise, concerns what, if any, guarantees they will meet when it comes to the quality of service they will deliver to customers. It can be difficult to get anything beyond a “best effort” agreement to be put into contracts and many questions asked by potential customers are met with references to past performance without offering any assurance of future service delivery. Such an approach is likely to clash with enterprise and smaller company demands for service quality, visibility and the corresponding drive for continuous improvement.

This just leaves the matter of cost. One of the great arguments put forward by cloud suppliers is that the have the benefits of 'economy of scale' on their side and can therefore deliver services more cheaply than can often be achieved by in-house IT. However, our research highlights that the long term cost of service question is a major inhibitor to cloud adoption amongst both existing users of cloud services, frequently SaaS offerings, and those yet to take the leap. There is clearly a perception that cloud services have some way yet to go to be priced at levels acceptable to many organisations, for anything more than one-off engagements.

There are clearly many factors for cloud service providers and potential customers to address, both technically, in contract production and in market education. For what it is worth, I have stated on many occasions over the course of the last decade that I believe that slowly organisations will utilise an ever-expanding range of services that are sourced from outside the organisation itself. I still believe this to be so, but it is equally clear that cloud will not “take over” the market overnight. Instead usage will grow slowly, perhaps in many instances almost without being visible. Yes, there are process and technical challenges to be addressed but there is nothing insuperable to be overcome, perhaps apart from inertia and understanding. All the same, I would advise companies to move forward with their eyes wide open when it comes to what remains currently a relatively immature space.

How to make sure your e-commerce strategy delivers

2009-09-09T13:28:00.004Z

Introducing “e” into industry parlance has caused all manner of problems, not least for electronic commerce. Its use as a convenient prefix to anything vaguely related to the internet has played a central role in many a false start in the technology industry.

Instead of signifying the complexity of taking a physical activity and translating it to the online world, it seemed to have the opposite effect of luring many organisations into action without thinking things through properly.

However, lest we forget, e-commerce has been around for a long time – though perhaps not as we know it today. From corporations trading via electronic data interchange (EDI) systems to high street shoppers buying their groceries online, e-commerce is gradually capturing more of the spend both between businesses and between consumers and retailers.

Despite a shaky start, e-commerce is doing OK. From the dot com boom-then-bust, some useful lessons have emerged. So how can businesses thinking about e-commerce avoid the mistakes of their predecessors?
We can consider this by referring to the life cycle that has evolved during hundreds of years of traditional retailing.

What are the key ingredients? The first thing to acknowledge is that we do not need to reinvent the wheel – the underlying success factors for e-commerce can be expressed in the same terms as normal commerce. This may be of no interest to an online retailer, but is of critical importance to a traditional retailer looking to extend its presence into the online world.

Marketing: Generating demand is all about advertising, word of mouth and events, involving marketing, sales, and product development teams internally, and the customer community externally. Online, the big difference is immediacy. A key guiding principle here is: don’t make bets you cannot afford to lose or promises you cannot keep. With this in mind, online marketing benefits from the ability to introduce and remove a campaign overnight, to take advantage of an event, a move by a competitor or even the weather.

Community: Individuals buy things, but communities influence individuals. The immediacy effect means that the audience is anyone with a web browser, including the competition. Hence, online communities need careful nurturing. They are less constrained than high street shoppers. For example, nobody walks down the high street discussing forthcoming purchases with complete strangers, do they? Today’s online communities are informed, opinionated and have made a conscious decision to opt in, while knowing they can opt out just as easily.

Point of sale: The most effective online checkouts today are more than a transaction engine, but not too much more. They offer a simple route from start to finish, and offer appropriate cross and up-sell opportunities. None of this is possible without additional insight from one or more of the other areas discussed.

Supply chain: Does traditional retail and online retail involve the same products, the same distribution and warehousing? Often the answer is yes, but not always. Does the supply chain work in both directions? Can returns be dealt with? Can the system cope with products being introduced and removed from different parts of the chain? This is perhaps one area where really, only the individual retailer knows the answers. But asking the right questions is paramount.

Customer relationship management (CRM): Somewhere in the equation, there needs to be a mechanism for pulling together all the threads. This means purchasing history and patterns, creditworthiness, individual preferences and so forth. This data can be used to drive product development and marketing activities, thereby closing the loop in the life cycle.

However, the sum is greater than the individual pieces, and this is especially true when it comes to e-commerce. So what else is there to consider to make it happen?

If we take a step back, one of the key enablers of a lifecycle approach is the flow of information. Fortunately, this notion is not just restricted to online retail; the entire industry is paying much closer attention to the need to extract and exploit information more effectively. Treating e-commerce as an extension of existing activities avoids repetition and duplication of effort.

Of course, there are some areas of e-commerce that need specific attention, such as online security and accessibility. Just as your physical store is obliged to offer access to able and non able-bodied customers, so is your web store. Just as you are obliged to protect your customers’ payment details in your physical tills, so too are you expected to take security and privacy seriously in the online world. Consumer confidence here above many other areas remains one of the key limiting factors preventing e-commerce truly becoming the norm.

All businesses need to decide the appropriate weightings for the areas we have touched on in relation to their own needs, and those of their customers. However, while marketing, community, point of sale, supply chain and CRM activities are driven by the nature of the business, the critical foundations – information flow, security, privacy and accessibility – are not really up for discussion. They just have to work.

The tough economic climate means there is little margin for error, and lots to be gained from doing a proper job the first time around. In a few years’ time, those that like doing so may look back and state with confidence that the recession in 2009 was when businesses started to get e-commerce right, because the conditions of the time meant they had no choice.

UC – FMC usurper or saviour?

2009-09-04T14:29:00.001Z

As enterprises move through their comms journey, should FMC still be on the cards, or has it been beaten to the budget post by other more compelling technologies?

Fixed Mobile Convergence (FMC) – essentially the process of bringing together fixed and wireless technologies to offer service through one handset has been around for a while. However, as yet it has failed to set the business world alight. Part of this failure may be attributed to lack of an optimum working environment in which FMC could truly thrive. Intuitively, FMC is best suited to a high mobility environment. While mobile workforces have existed for a number of years, in the form of sales and field staff out on the road, for example, it is only relatively recently that mobility has been brought more into the overall business processes, and the need for really true mobility has ramped up across many organisations, as workers become more mobile and dispersed. Additionally, implementing FMC within the business can be a daunting prospect, particularly when deciding exactly what FMC should look like, where it should reside, and what it should deliver. To expand on this point, FMC has a number of different flavours, including merging office and mobile numbers onto one handset (twinning), and dual mode – using WiFi enabled phones to take advantage of the corporate Wifi network to both improve coverage and reduce costs. This alone is not without its problems, as many company wireless networks are not able to handle the extra burden of voice calls, and would require extensive upgrades.

As a result of these factors, FMC has typically been seen as a nice to have rather than essential, and securing budget against this has been difficult. Moving forward, however, potential drivers for FMC services are the high and growing proportion of outgoing business calls that involve mobile, even when a fixed line is readily available, and the increasing degree of mobility required. Supporting this results in higher costs to the business and is putting added pressure on communications budgets. This will only get worse over time, as the need for mobility spreads within businesses, making it essential for companies to look at ways of dealing with spiralling costs.

But has the driver come too late for FMC? Already, we are seeing increasing take up and interest in complementary technologies such as Unified Communications, which provides integration of different types of communications, such as voice, email, instant messaging, audio and videoconferencing, within a common interface, in real-time, and which lay the foundation for a compelling migration path for businesses, as opposed to just providing enhanced flexibility to voice. Both FMC and UC serve a similar purpose in that they both deal with the issue of fragmented communications, and do not directly compete in terms of what they deliver. However, given the much broader reach of UC, in a world of tightly controlled costs, and ensuring implementations that are relevant to the business and deliver significant benefits, UC could just have the edge. Of course, UC has suffered in the past from being misunderstood, but companies are gradually beginning to get to grips with what it is all about along, with the benefits it brings.

Maybe, but maybe not, given the need for increased mobility, mobilising UC applications is where businesses will probably see the biggest impact, as UC allows everyone in the business to benefit from more streamlined, collaborative communications. In particular, UC will allow mobile users the benefits of integrated presence, messaging and conferencing facilities previously not easily available to them. Given this shift, and the cost issue associated with increased mobility requirements already mentioned, FMC clearly has a part to play in the UC stack, and provides a good opportunity for market players to revisit their offerings. Providers such as Avaya, with its oneX Mobile UC offering, along with its recent partnering with dual mode mobile UC player DiVitas networks, are already tuned into this fact. There are still issues to be resolved, however. With the DiVitas solution for example, the one key UC feature not yet available is that of presence, although this is on the cards for the near future. Similarly, there are issues with handsets – most notably a lack of support for Blackberry, which will doubtless irk many businesses. And of course, there is still the earlier mentioned issue of how the wireless LAN handles the increased voice traffic – something which has to be addressed by the business. Clearly from a user perspective, these are not necessarily paltry, but equally, they not insurmountable, and any decision will need to balance these ‘cons’ against the potential benefits.

Issues aside, FMC provides an enhancement to the UC stack that has the potential to increase the overall value of the investment – in particular by reducing pressure on call costs, businesses will be able to better embrace the UC applications that will in turn, drive productivity. While FMC might not be a primary consideration for businesses moving forward with UC, it does provide a natural fit, and it is worth seriously considering the extent to which it can be incorporated and the associated benefits it will bring.

Scoping UC - all bases covered?

2009-08-03T15:39:00.002Z

While lots of people think Unified Communications (UC) is a nice idea, they don't necessarily see it as inevitable. The debate around fragmented communications, and moving to a more joined up, coherent way of working will help UC gather pace. As higher echelons in the enterprise ultimately decide that UC is for them, the IT manager will then be handed the challenge of deployment. What is less likely is that the task will be fully scoped, with full appreciation of what UC is, or should look like. Confusion about what UC really is about is still rife, thanks in no small part to the vast array of UC solutions in the market, and as yet, limited availability of impartial guidance. In the main, companies still do not know what UC can really do for their business, and what an implementation should actually look like. And the market still suffers from a shortage of solid case studies to reference.

A UC deployment presents no easy task for the IT manager. At the outset, there are lots of 'parts' to UC - voice, video, audio conferencing, messaging, mobility, presence - to name a few. Contrary to popular belief, existence of these within a company does not mean that UC is in place. Rather, it is about how these parts hang together, or are unified.

Unless the IT manager has been given a very clear remit, a crucial start point is bringing in key players from across the organisation. This is not a go-it-alone exercise, and technical considerations need to be tied into company goals. This includes identifying the communications and collaboration needs of different user groups in the company. Not all people will need video conferencing, for example. UC will only have value if people actually use the stuff. This analysis will provide a basis for determining success criteria - essential if the company wants to know whether the UC implementation has been worthwhile (which, of course it will).

From a technical perspective, where to begin with UC will to some extent be determined by what is already in place, in terms of both network infrastructure and applications. E.g. at the underlying basic level, is an IPT installation needed. Some enterprises may choose to begin with existing applications such as messaging, and build down into the network (a somewhat more risky approach, as without proper assessment, unanticipated stress may be placed on the network). Irrespective of this start point, a baby steps approach is much more likely to succeed than a big bang one. Common sense should prevail, and the deployment should be based around applications that are likely to bring quick and identifiable benefits into the organisation, and that are easy to implement/manage. It does not have to incorporate every single application usually quoted under the UC banner. So, if video doesn't tick all those boxes, for example, put it on hold until later. Similarly, don't give people functionality that they just won't use. Again, common sense suggests using a targeted group of people, and assessing how successful that has been before building up and out.

The enterprise will be working with a broader technology set, and this brings with it the need for greater support, whether internal or external. The IT manager may be working with a new toolset, and failure to provision for this can create a weak link in the chain.

The vendor issue is also on the potential headache list. While a single vendor environment is possible, a multi-vendor environment is extremely common, for a number of reasons, but raises the matter of integration. Key questions that fall out of this are: How will different solutions slot together? What are the potential areas of weakness? Do case studies exist for reference?

Once UC is in, then on-going management becomes priority. We've already mentioned the skill set issue, and this is important not just at the point of deployment, but continually. This may be served in part by vendors through a managed service approach, depending on the size and nature of the enterprise.

A final, albeit rather obvious point is, don't forget future proofing. UC is a broad and evolving proposition that encompasses a wide range of technologies. So while video isn't needed today, consider what will happen when it is needed.

There is no hard and fast rule for what UC should be within an organisation - it should be what works in a given situation, and really should be viewed in terms of horses for courses. The key is integration and unification of solutions to create a more powerful overall proposition that delivers tangible benefits to the business. More importantly, UC should be a naturally evolving proposition built on a solid foundation.

Let us know what your experiences with UC have been, both around implementation and how it has evolved within your business.

Catching your clients at moments of need

2009-08-03T12:59:00.003Z

With mobile service providers offering more and more, in their bid to keep subscribers hooked and move them up the value chain, mobile users really do seem to have it all – high speed networks, sophisticated devices and a myriad of services and content. All of which suggests a win-win scenario if ever there was one. Reality, however, paints a somewhat different picture. Despite this wealth of mobile richness, uptake of mobile services beyond standard telephony and SMS is still pretty patchy.

True, mobile email for business use is gaining a lot of ground, and advanced devices are taking hold in the market, no small thanks to the advent of the iPhone, and the numerous ‘me too’ devices it has generated. However, beyond voice communications and SMS, a lot of mobile use resides around listening to music or playing games, and has yet to move on to more advanced services such as information search, navigation and social networking.

In spite of this limited use of more advanced services, recent research from Freeform Dynamics has highlighted several scenarios or ‘moments of need’ – working away from home or an evening out, to name but two - that users often experience and where such services are seen as valuable. The degree to which a particular service will be of interest will depend upon the context. For example, someone out for the evening may want to look up information about restaurants, show availability, etc.

Unsurprisingly, the most common ‘moment of need’ is when people have time on their hands. This may be when travelling, waiting for transport, waiting to meet friends for coffee etc. It is at such times that interest in information and entertainment services, as well as services that enable interaction with others, is at its highest.

What this points to is the prevalence of ad hoc or opportunistic use. If the mobile service provider is able to take this casual use, where users dip lightly into a broad range of services and turn it into deeper, more consistent usage around one or two specific services, the benefits could be significant. Freeform Dynamics research shows that users who form a deep habit around one particular service are much more likely to extend their use to other services in a more committed manner.

This shift in user behaviour is driven by a number of factors, however, a significant one of which is device capability. This spans ease of navigation, as well as physical input and display characteristics. Those with more capable and accessible devices are more likely to use services at a deeper level. They also take more advantage of advanced services today, and, looking ahead, have a higher affinity for new service adoption in the future.

So what does this mean for the mobile service provider and the market in general? Simply put, encouraging more advanced service use leads to a win/win for both service providers and subscribers. Achieving this requires focus on a number of threads. At one level, a shift in emphasis from individual services to service portfolios and customer level profitability is needed, to create a more targeted, customer-centric approach.

Beyond this, however, the focus sits firmly on the device. Making sure subscribers have advanced devices that are easy to navigate, with a good user interface will make the transition up the value chain much easier.

For more in-depth analysis on this area, take a look at our recently published report, Moments of need: Factors affecting mobile service uptake.

The Future of Mainframes

2009-06-15T09:00:00.000Z

There is absolutely no doubting IBM’s commitment to the platform. The company continues to invest large sums of money and resources developing the mainframe in both the hardware and software platforms, just witness the development of various offload engines (IFL, zIIP, Zaap) and software tools. Equally it is important to recognise that there is a very active community built around the mainframe and it is clear that the majority of these are also committed to developing their offerings further. To see that this is the case one has simply to look at how companies such as CA and BMC are developing their complementary management tools, as well activities by application ISVs such as ACI who are now robustly promoting mainframe based solutions. The mainframe vendor ecosystem is large and active.

Clearly there are challenges that organisations using the mainframe need to address. Perhaps the most visible of these concerns the age of those currently administering these enterprise workhorses. In many cases these highly skilled professionals are in the age bracket where considerations of retirement are not far away. Given the skills required to run mainframes this is causing some concerns but there is now an active education programme in place to tempt students and those new to IT to acquire mainframe skills. At the same time the overall management workload is easing as IBM, CA and other vendors deliver new tools to the market to help reduce the workload burden further. In some ways this is somewhat ironic as several studies have indicated that mainframe administrators can already handle far larger workloads than administrators of other platforms.

But the debate on the future of the mainframe should not be focussed so much on the development of the technology itself or how to ensure that skilled administrators are available to run the systems. Instead it should now focus on what role the mainframe has going forward to deliver business services? To understand this it is important that people understand just what type of system the Mainframe is today and what business operations it can assist. In some places this “understanding” may be several years behind reality and is often linked to out of date perceptions of where things fit. Challenging these perceptions takes time and effort. The challenge for IBM and its ecosystem of suppliers is to assist in perception resetting, especially helping to update the understanding of the potential use of mainframes amongst both the wider IT community and amongst business managers.

The mainframe continues to grow both in terms of its capabilities, the community around it and, indeed, in the scale of its deployment. It is clear that the platform has the capacity to deliver an expanding range of IT services cost effectively and the challenge for IBM and the wider mainframe ecosystem is to ensure that organisations understand where its capabilities can be most effectively deployed. The development of the mainframe as a platform over the last few years is now matched by changes in the wider economic environment to make now a very good time for IBM and its partners to make a serious effort to communicate widely on what the modern mainframe is all about and to help replace any out of date perceptions that may still be out there.

Lessons from BT on joined up operation?

2009-05-28T23:33:00.005Z

Information and knowledge management within the enterprise is something that Freeform Dynamics has looked at on numerous occasions. A good example of this is our recent report ‘Information Management in the Retail Sector’. So, when I was offered the opportunity to talk to BT about the challenges it has faced with managing information and knowledge internally, and how it has approached these challenges, I was more than a little intrigued.

Individuals are increasingly comfortable with using technologies for contacting people and finding information quickly in their personal lives, and these expectations are being carried through into the work space. Such expectations are often not met, however, as the stark reality is that large and small companies alike so often struggle with inefficient and ineffective management of knowledge. Within the majority of organisations, there is a colossal amount of information being created and stored on a continual basis, often in discrete locations around the company. The problem of finding information or expertise is exacerbated by the fact that it is very much a moving target – information is continually changing, with a not insignificant amount of it being in people’s heads.

A real-life example which illustrates this very nicely concerns a financial services (FS) organisation that was particularly impressed with reports produced by an analyst company about its activities. What it subsequently, and embarrassingly discovered was that the analyst company had obtained a lot of its information from Facebook postings placed by the FS organisation’s own employees. This highlights two important points. The first is that there is an increasing propensity for employees to use social networking tools for work related purposes – whether sanctioned or not. The second, and much more important point is that there was a whole tranche of information about the company that was simply not on the internal radar, and took a third party to locate it, harvest it, analyse it and give it back for it to become useful..

The inability to locate and access information and expertise can have a very real impact on a whole series of company success measures. For example, if employees do not have easy and real-time access to company knowledge, the likelihood is that they will spend extra time looking for it, or, worse, will re-create information. Similarly, when internal teams are created to support a particular project or customer initiative, they will often be pulled together based on personal knowledge of individuals rather than looking across the full skills base of the company and selecting the most appropriate people for the job.

It was with some interest, therefore, that I went to view a demo by BT for its ‘My BT’ tool. My BT, which was developed for internal use within BT, has a feature called SignPost, which intelligently 'joins the dots' between enterprise data repositories and people within the company. It is also able to make connections that, unsurprising for a large company, are not always obviously apparent.

My BT brings the concept of social networking into the corporate environment, and allows people to find other people in the organisation and communicate and collaborate with them. Contact and skills information, as well as projects people have been involved in, and documents they have either written or reviewed is also transparent. And users can search for specific information, for example, on BT’s capability. There is a lot more, besides, but too much to cover in one article. The tool, rather than being a complete ‘build from scratch’ system, overlays and plugs into existing systems, databases and document repositories. It is also neatly designed to make unified communications (UC) more tangible, and, therefore, more accessible.

When I saw a demo of My BT with a colleague, I have to say, we were both impressed. According to BT, it has been shown to save a lot of time and money and the response from staff has been very positive. Although this is an internal development, some of BT’s customers have already expressed an interest in the tool, and are looking at how something similar can be implemented in their own organisation. My colleague, David Tebbutt, explored a similar theme in a recent blog on Knowledge Management. What we see in both cases is that managing such knowledge in a more intelligent, joined-up way can be hugely beneficial and is increasingly of interest to organisations. Of course, it will remain a challenge – but examples such as this show a convincing way forward.

A(nother) Take on Cloud: ‘Nothing to Worry About’

2009-05-22T09:42:00.003Z

Although we’ve said on several occasions that cloud computing isn’t the revolutionary movement that many would have us believe, my visit to Cloud Expo this week really hammered home a point that could make many businesses breathe a sigh of relief, so I thought I’d reiterate it here.

When it comes to engaging with service providers, most organisations are really only interested in outcomes. The key question is: Does what is on offer here fulfil my requirements? A business wants to achieve a specific goal, and if a service provider meets certain criteria, it wins the business. How the service provider delivers the paid-for outcome is a factor to be included in the due diligence process but only insofar as delivery mechanisms meet the need.

Cloud computing changes absolutely nothing in this regard. If the service provider is using ‘bona fide cloud computing technology’ (whatever that means) in its data centre to help it deliver services with greater economies of scale, resilience, flexibility, and so forth, then so be it. Some customers will care, some will not.

This point became ever more clear to me yesterday at Cloud Expo because most service providers in attendance were offering hosting and/or managed services. The entire event would not have looked any different had it been called ‘Hosting Expo’.

And there’s the point. None of this really matters if all you care about is the outcome you want to achieve from a third party service provider. For practical purposes today it might be easier to consider ‘The Cloud’ as simply a consolidation term, an umbrella term under which all the different types of third party service providers that existed in more narrowly defined boxes in the past now live.

Sure, there is more to it than that, but only if you care about details beyond what you are actually paying for. For example, virtualisation technology allows service providers to offer up ever more specific services to suit lots of different performance, scalability and price point requirements. But this is the difference between ‘what’, and ‘how’, and there is currently far too much mixing up of the two, which is counterproductive to say the least.

Back to third party service providers, then: The effect of ‘cloud’ is greater choice to the customer in terms of what’s on offer and how it is sourced, paid for and used. But nothing has fundamentally changed. Despite so many providers claiming that because something carries a certain label, it must be good, everything you ever knew about using third party service providers remains as important – nay – more important, than ever before.

Managing Recovery – Why do we still have problems?

2009-05-05T09:00:00.000Z

Over the course of the last few months I have spent a lot of time speaking with end users and vendors about backup and recovery systems and their associated work processes. In fact, just this week, I gave a presentation on some research data that we have generated over the last year or so on the whole area of managing data protection and information management. Talking with end users, one thing is still abundantly clear - despite the fact that data backup and recovery being processes on which organisations, large and small, have spent much time over the years, very few think that they have safe, reliable systems running.

Well the answers here are many and varied. Alas no one thing can make all backup and recovery systems perform flawlessly each and every time. A lot of work needs to be put into the processes themselves whereas, in many instances, ’belief‘ that the technology of the backup and recovery software will function as desired is the only investment of effort undertaken.

It is interesting to see that today even professional service suppliers manage to get things wrong. Or, if not entirely wrong, then too often not quite what really should have been provided. Let me give you an example. I was recently talking with a health care professional who pays for a professional data recovery service on the PC he employs to run sophisticated patient management software and image processing equipment. He is a skin specialist. Well, as certainly as Murphy’s Law operates, there came an occasion when he had a hard disk failure so he called his support service.

They duly arrived in his surgery and confirmed that said PC was indeed non-operational and that they would be able to recover the system and the vital patient data. Perfect. Well, not quite. Instead of being able to get the system operational again within a short period of time, they did not return a working system for over a week! Naturally, during the downtime, the doctor had many patients arrive expecting to be scanned by the imaging system which was not possible due to the non-functional PC. Lo and behold, patients were unhappy at having to arrange a second appointment, with all the associated inconvenience and disruption, to complete everything. And this in a health system where practitioner income is directly related to patient sessions and insurance companies being happy with service provided.

Clearly this is a case where, whilst the recovery service works, it does not appear to provide appropriate service levels for the nature of the business being protected. Now who should shoulder responsibility? The Doctor, the company providing the specialist recovery service, or both? Tricky question.

What this does illustrate is that, unless attention is paid to the real needs of the business service being protected, it is easily possible to provide data protection and recovery systems that are less than perfect. Alas, in many institutions, the real value of recovery systems is only appreciated when they are called upon in anger. And, in too many organisations, the ability to recover data and systems is tested too rarely, if at all. Time and effort need to be expended to understand just what the business requirements are, and then putting in place simple systems that meet the need at an affordable cost.

Today, too many backup and recovery systems operate the way they do because that’s the way they have always functioned and, for some time, no further effort has been spent working out what is really required. With a wide range of affordable and workable recovery systems available to help make data protection more effective and efficient now is a good time to look with fresh eyes at backup, recovery and information protection. The place to start is to find all the data stores that exist in the business, now a more straightforward task than in the past, and then to establish just how they should be protected. Sounds easy but it requires time and effort plus whoever undertakes the task must be ready to talk to the business users to identify their real requirements and then translate these into potential technical solutions.

Mobile TV – who’s watching?

2009-04-08T12:18:00.002Z

Despite regular predictions of mass market adoption of mobile TV, take up to date has been disappointingly low in the majority of markets. Since 2005, people have claimed that this (mainly streamed on-demand content) would be the killer application for the mobile phone. This failure cannot be attributed to any single reason and, correspondingly, it is unlikely that a single success factor will emerge.

Key barriers behind mobile TV’s to-date unremarkable performance, unsurprisingly, seem to point towards content, pricing and device. In terms of content, the main complaint is that typical services are based around uninspiring modified content which is often inferior in quality to conventional TV. This holds little allure for subscribers and it is delivered in a way that does not suit the mobile user.

While this might hold some sway if it were free, when users have to pay for what is essentially a significantly inferior service to traditional TV, it is little wonder that mobile TV hasn’t taken off in a big way. In terms of devices, while smart-phones with bigger screens make mobile TV viewing more palatable, a lot of basic devices, or devices with less than ideal screens that are out in the market, either are not equipped to receive mobile TV (in the case of broadcast services) or simply do not do it justice. Even for those subscribers who do have a phone that works with mobile TV and which has an acceptable screen size, one could argue that a mindset shift is required. And this needs to be supply-side driven.

In spite of these barriers, there is an increasing buzz around mobile TV. Freeform Dynamics’ research points to an increasing, albeit modest, propensity for the market to pay for services which, on the face of it, is good news for players in the market. Of course, in the world of increasingly accessible and often free video content via the internet, questions need to be asked about exactly what subscribers will pay for, when, in what way, and how much.

Mobile providers are starting to wake up to the fact that, if approached properly, there is potentially a big market out there. And, given the challenges they face in other parts of their business, they see the need to drive what will essentially be a necessary money-spinner. Mobile TV is already fairly well established in a number of markets – Italy, Japan and South Korea being the most cited. The models that have underpinned these ‘successes’ are quite different across the three countries, from free services, supported by advertising revenue, to pure subscription based services. As yet, it is uncertain which model, if any, will really drive the market.

Additionally, alternative models may also cause waves in the market, or at the very least, make people more aware that a genuine market exists and is accessible. Sling media, for example, has a box that allows subscribers to watch and control the content they view at home anywhere in the world, and provides an alternative approach to subscription-based services as offered by mobile operators.

The team at Freeform Dynamics believes that, despite there being a number of question marks around the subject, mobile TV will be an important part in the evolution of the industry, and sees this as an interesting area for study, and one that mobile operators increasingly need to be attuned to. We will be researching and reporting on the mobile TV market over the coming weeks, to look at how real the market opportunity is for mobile TV, how it will be brought to market, who the key players will be, and what the challenges will be along the way - including device, network, and customer interest. We will also review what the prevailing model(s) are likely to look like, and who will be the ultimate winners. Watch this space.

Chargeback – its time has come

2009-03-16T13:15:00.002Z

The fact that most of the world is currently undergoing a challenging time, as a result of the economic climate negatively impacting most areas of life, should not come as too much of a shock. Throughout the industrial age there have been periods when good businesses prosper on the back of both their own merits and general growth in the economic climate. Equally it is true that there are periods when life isn't so simple and organisations have to retrench. This, essentially, is where we are today. Certainly market conditions are not good but the fact that the market is difficult should be something with which organisations can cope. The onus on IT is to demonstrate that it is delivering value to the business. In many scenarios this is a task that would be much more straightforward if some form of internal chargeback modelling were to be used to help set and monitor IT budgets.

The fact that trading conditions are difficult obviously poses a few challenges for IT departments as they seek to deliver good service whilst maintaining a very strong grip on costs. Undoubtedly, IT organisations are having to look very carefully both at how they deliver services and how they can meet the needs of the business going forward whilst ensuring tight financial constraints are not breached. One thing that has become clear over the course of the last five years is that IT departments are now expected to show exactly where money is being spent and to provide unprecedented degrees of transparency on such expenditure.

So today the pressure is on for IT to be able to demonstrate exactly how money is being spent to support the business. Alongside this, IT needs to be ready to support new business operations that may change dramatically overnight. There is a now an inbuilt expectation that IT be ready to support any business change very, very quickly, frequently without having much latitude to manage the potential impact such changes might place on the underlying infrastructure. This begs the question of course just how IT can demonstrate to the business where the money is going and how effectively the IT infrastructure is being utilised to support key business services?

To my mind this scenario is simply shrieking for the use of chargeback modelling. After all most business people are exceedingly familiar with the concepts of money and budgets whereas they may be very unsure of quite how IT runs to support their daily operations. A simple way out of this dilemma is to employ some form of chargeback modelling which allocates costs to the users of IT services based on the percentage of the infrastructure resources that those services actually consume. Alas whilst this sounds easy in principle it can, in fact, become extremely complicated in practice.

I believe that we have now entered an era when the use of chargeback models will become prevalent in a majority of IT organisations. Chargeback models provide transparency in a format which is acceptable to the majority of business users since it operates using concepts of money spent for each service delivered. For line of business managers this approach should be, therefore, easy to get grips with. However from the IT perspective this places a degree of burden on the infrastructure in terms of monitoring resource consumption and then reporting on what resources each business unit is actually consuming. This reporting must be in financial and business operational terms rather than IT centric metrics. The challenge is to find a model that the infrastructure can sustain that is politically acceptable to the business users and economically acceptable to operational IT. Get it right and hopefully everybody will be happy, or at least recognise where there may be IT / business conflicts that need to be resolved.

This is easier said than done but it is an area that many organisations will begin to explore very carefully in the near future. The rapidity with which business managers need to adapt is placing new burdens on IT support staff. These in turn are encouraging the adoption of new IT solutions, virtualised computing and other dynamically manageable systems. When the business itself is looking for IT to provide levels of resource flexibility such as have never before been possible some form of chargeback modelling simply has to take place in order for IT not to become a bottleneck on operational business. So the questions become which form of chargeback modelling will be acceptable and how is the idea to be sold to the business?

IBM – getting sentimental?

2009-02-27T18:48:00.009Z

In our online, data driven society, a vast amount of opinion transfer goes on every day through blogs, forums, and general social media. This ‘grassroots’ dialogue provides a real insight into what is driving people, and what they really think - blogs provide an ideal location for people to talk about their real life experiences, and air grievances in a much more open way. And enterprises would be wise not to ignore these views from the Joe Bloggers of this world. Witness the recent ‘about turn’ by Facebook regarding its terms of service around retention of content submitted by users. Of course, this is an extreme example, and the threat of legal action probably did as much to force the u-turn as the groundswell of user opinion. It does, however, illustrate the power of public opinion. In the case of Facebook, however, the underlying sentiment showed itself quickly and far too clearly to miss. For many companies, however, gauging sentiment is not such an easy task.

A recent briefing with IBM was all the more interesting because of this. The focus of the briefing was a brand management tool that sits within its portfolio called COBRA (which stands for Corporate Brand and Reputation Analysis), which allows identification of relevant marketplace sentiment as expressed on blogs, social networks and news sources. The tool allows companies to spot trends, relationships and opinions that are being expressed on defined areas.

The possibilities of this really aren’t difficult to imagine. In government, for example, it is important to understand how people feel about issues that will sway political sentiment. Green is one such area, the government's handling of the current economic crisis another. To be able to know what people on the street think and are saying is a valuable tool when preparing to reach out to those same people. Similarly, an enterprise, in the retail space, for example, cannot fail to benefit from advance intelligence that presents itself in social media on a competitor's campaign strategy. Competitors’ campaigns can be seriously undermined if a company has advance warning and is able to quickly respond with a counter campaign. And this is where COBRA comes in. It scours literally thousands of dispersed items very quickly and bring the number down to a few hundred relevant ones on which mere mortals can carry out detailed analysis, COBRA having eliminated areas that aren't worth looking at. It will also identify the strength of ‘signals’ – for example a weak signal could be an early indicator of an emerging trend. IBM claims that COBRA is able to identify strong and weak signals from thousands of documents daily with high accuracy.

Of course, COBRA isn’t the only such tool in the marketplace that can perform sentiment analysis, but it is one of a number that are starting now to gain traction - David Tebbutt has blogged on sentiment analysis on several occasions, most notably about Corpora (part of Infonic). Nor are such tools the answer to everything – no amount of clever software will completely remove the need for the human element. But in our world of information overload, tools such as COBRA really do seem to make an impossible task possible, and are surely real gems.

VDI's Biggest Challenge

2009-02-20T14:56:00.010Z

Over the course of the last few months there has been a surge of activity, at least amongst many vendors, in the area of ‘Virtual Desktop’ solutions. In fact it would also be fair to say that there has also been a gentle bubbling of interest in this developing area amongst end user organisations as well. Following numerous conversations with different suppliers of virtual desktop solutions as well as taking note of much research in the area it is clear that the widespread adoption of these systems faces numerous challenges.

And many issues need to be considered by an organisation contemplating adopting a Virtual Desktop approach. Among these the first, and usually considered to be of paramount importance, is the non-trivial question of which of the many approaches to virtualising the desktop will be suitable to the needs of the organisation. Vendors today offer a wide range of solutions which utilise a number of techniques to provide service to the end user. It is clear however that there is not a high level of understanding of the solutions available, and in particular which approach fits which goals. Of even more importance, there is research evidence which suggests that IT departments have significant difficulty identifying suitable business cases to justify their adoption.

Pressing as these obstacles are, it is my opinion that many other challenges surpass these in terms of inhibiting the adoption of virtual desktop systems in numerous enterprises. The most challenging of these to address is the small matter of changing the culture and perception that users have created around ‘their PCs’.

In particular it is clear that very many individuals regard the laptop that they use for business as ‘their PC’ even when it patently belongs to the business. As such they feel free to customise the machine in any way they wish irrespective of any impact this may have on the machine's ability to operate effectively as a tool of the business. The only time when this possessive behaviour abates, albeit for a limited time, is when a problem arises. Then the machine instantly devolves back to being a standard piece of equipment for which IT naturally carries responsibility and the concomitant burden of repair.

Until now, many attempts to proactively manage PCs have met with considerable user resistance as such moves have been perceived to be steps towards removing the users’ ability to ‘customise’ their machines. For VDI initiatives (with the term VDI now becoming something of a shorthand for ‘Virtual Desktop’ initiatives or infrastructure) to succeed it will be essential to ensure that users do not consider such projects to be methods to rein in their ‘freedom’, as has frequently been the case in many previous PC management initiatives. Thus it is essential that user conversations focus on areas that they may see as having benefits for them beyond simply raising the quality of service and availability experienced by PC users. In fact it is recommended that steps be taken, if at all possible, to find ways to get prospective users to actually desire new VDI driven systems.

If this can be achieved, I see strong potential for many virtual desktop solutions to be deployed in anger over the course of the next few years, in organisations of all sizes. The secret will be to ensure that communications with potential users not only point out the strong business cases that may exist for their introduction but also take the time to find some ‘personal’ benefits that may be attractive to users. Getting the users on board early will smooth the path and reduce resistance, possibly by significant orders of magnitude.

It will also be interesting to see if the current harsh economic climate coupled with the rapid development of solution offerings in the virtual desktop space will see an acceleration of interest in the coming months, perhaps initiated by the potential future consideration of Windows 7 as an enterprise platform. Watch out for fireworks.

Thoughts from IBM Pulse : 1

2009-02-16T14:58:00.007Z

Weirdly enough, I feel sorry for Vegas right now. The very ideas that could save it were right under its nose.

I had the opportunity to catch up with IBM's service management bods last week in an uncharacteristically wet, cold and windy Las Vegas. The weather fitted the prevailing mood rather well, with taxi drivers and hoteliers alike in agreement that things are a bit on the quiet side and conferences are pretty much keeping things going right now. Apparently the average price of a hotel room on the strip is a low $90 or so. No doubt IBM drove a hard bargain on the conference facilities.

Vegas is not to everybody's taste, but I doubt even the least enthusiastic would prefer it to not exist, given the chance to make it disappear. A lot of people depend on it for a living, for a start. I'd like to see those people given a better chance at long-term survival. I'm not sure sustainability is high on the agenda at the board meetings of whoever runs Las Vegas, at least from what I see. Which is a shame, because if there was one show which rolls into town and has something to teach Las Vegas, its Pulse.

McCarran Airport, long the poster child of IBM's asset and IT service management convergence story already knows this, and as the gateway to Las Vegas, sets the standard by which Vegas could but fails to live up to. Sure, it all works swimmingly well in the main, (occasionally it fails with comedic brilliance - I once had to call an engineer to close the curtains in my suite) but at what cost? A high one it seems. Most hotels are close to bankruptcy - I cannot prove this but lets just say it came from someone in the know - which to cut a long story short, means they are too inefficient and waste too much 'stuff'.

So why do I feel sorry for Vegas? Well aside from all the half built skyscrapers making the place look untidy, the city, like the happy go lucky cricket, has been singing all summer and not taken the time to curtail its pursuit of pleasure to put something aside for the winter. Is the city to blame for that, or us, for expecting to drop the worries of the daily grind and be royally entertained for a few days no matter what the cost? (Not those on conferences, obviously). I feel sorry for it because of the all or nothing principals it seems to be built on. Going forwards, unless it can temper this mindset, and provide service with restraint, it's a goner.

Service management, at its core, is about creating the optimum balance between 'stuff' and 'experience'. Something Vegas needs to learn, and quickly. I suspect IBM with the undoubted bargain it drove with the MGM to host this years shindig, could afford to chuck the burghers of Las Vegas a couple of freebie passes so they could learn a thing or two next year. If 12 months doesn't see the entire place shut down.

In my next post, I'll talk about what we learned of IBM's latest vision – the Smarter Planet -delivered with no irony at all given the location - which takes its service management convergence theme to the horizon, allowing lots of room for other fancy ideas - like cloud - to slide on in and get settled.

How real is the mobile VoIP opportunity?

2009-01-15T10:52:00.001Z

At first glance, mobile VoIP has the potential to be a significantly more disruptive technology than its fixed counterpart, in both the consumer and the business market .The ubiquity of, and shift towards mobile communications is all too evident. In the UK, for example, in 2007, mobile calling minutes accounted for 40% of all calling minutes, and 70% of people with a mobile used it at home to make calls. Whilst mobile calling minutes accounted for less than half of all calling minutes, mobile revenues dwarfed fixed access and call revenues, accounting for 62% of the total.[1].

In the business environment, in terms of connectivity, the mobile phone is equally seen as a dominant device by mobile workers, which has achieved near-complete penetration at least for certain scenarios.

If we add the issue of costs to this picture of extensive use, particularly the costs associated with international calling, or for mobile roaming, as experienced by enterprises, the mobile VoIP proposition has the potential to carry an awful lot of weight. If there is one topic that is guaranteed to raise the blood pressure of the average corporate telecoms manager, it's mobile roaming charges. The level of fees imposed by mobile operators on customers making or receiving calls when travelling internationally has been a bone of contention for many years.

The figure below is from research carried out by Freeform Dynamics with enterprises across Europe, and shows the importance to businesses of a number of criteria around mobile connectivity. After quality of service, cost related issues figure very highly.

Mobile VoIP providers clearly believe there are gains to be had, with players such as Vyke, Fring and Truphone becoming more prominent in the market. In particular, the business market is considered a potentially lucrative area to make gains. For example, I spoke recently to Vyke which is focussing on the enterprise space in addition to its usual consumer haunt. And it has an interesting story to tell. Probably the most compelling aspect of its proposition is that, beyond the handset (and there are some limitations around this currently), there is essentially no upfront investment.

However, in spite of this, the move to mobile VoIP is far from a fait accompli, and I suspect that mobile VoIP will only serve to disrupt a certain portion of the market. And the extent to which it will cause disruption within that portion is debatable. Whilst the numbers cited above on mobile usage hold true, in terms of fairly extensive use of mobile both at home and in the office, many of these calls will be to national landlines or other mobiles, which will be covered by bundles of minutes for a fixed monthly fee – many users, either through personal or corporate subscriptions, typically have big bundles of usage at their disposal. And the pricing of bundles has been set by mobile service providers such that the incremental cost between a relatively small bundle and a large one is not a big uplift. So, bringing mobile VoIP into this picture is unlikely to reduce costs for national landline or mobile calls, and may in fact increase them. Of course, if a user has used all their bundled minutes for a given period, and is aware that they have, then use of mobile VoIP may be more cost effective – providing the user has access to all the necessary pricing information to enable them to make an informed decision.

International outbound calls may see more benefit in terms of call cost reduction, but it is questionable why users would make international calls from their home countries via their mobile, unless they really needed to. And in such cases, various alternative approaches are available in the market.

Possibly one area where mobile VoIP does have the potential to make a big impact is for mobile roaming. International roaming charges are still exceedingly high, and for certain groups of employees, the costs associated with mobile roaming can be prohibitive. Mobile VoIP is not the only way of dealing with the problem, of course, and it will face competition from alternative means of communication. But if it can meet this head on, it may be able to carve out a respectable niche for itself, at least for the time being.

Ultimately, underpinning the success of mobile VoIP is the desire of the user (whatever the motivation) to embrace the service by identifying where it is financially beneficial to his or her particular usage profile, and working it into this accordingly.

[1] Source: Ofcom

The contact centre - the answer to UC vendors’ prayers?

2009-01-13T17:21:00.003Z

Unified Communications (UC) hasn’t really captivated the market in the way that vendors had originally hoped, and whilst it has enjoyed moderate success in some areas, by and large it hasn’t gained the much-needed traction to make it mainstream. This is largely because enterprises don’t really understand what UC is, and more importantly, they don’t have a genuine, defined requirement for it, as they are unable to identify a compelling location where it will make a real difference – one big enough to warrant investment. And this has proved no small challenge for vendors to overcome.

But maybe UC has at last found a place where it can really make an impact – in the contact centre. Certainly, there is an increasing interest in the market around this, with all the major vendors – Avaya, Cisco, Siemens, Nortel - having offerings in one guise or another in this space.

So why is focussing on UC in this way, rather than as a horizontal enterprise application likely to capture the attention of the enterprise which is so badly needed? Contacts centres provide an all-important interface between a company and the outside world - typically customers and prospects. In order to deal with the various queries coming in, agents in the contact centre need to tap into expertise located at different parts of the company. The implementation of UC in the contact centre will lead to more seamless communication with other people in the company, providing agents with both presence and skills data that is key for quick and successful call handling. So, an agent will be able to identify which experts are able to assist with a particular query, based on their expertise, and, more importantly, which of those experts are available.

For example, a contact centre agent has identified two experts, Pete and Sue, who are qualified to answer a customer query. The agent can see that Pete isn’t available as he is in a meeting, but Sue is at her desk and is available to be contacted via phone, email or IM. The agent can then engage with Sue in whichever way is most effective, based on a pre-determined set of contact criteria. A response can then be delivered back to the caller, or, if necessary, the caller can be directly linked to Sue. The outcome is that the caller has had his query dealt with during the one call in an apparently seamless fashion. This delivers two core benefits. From the point of view of the company, first call resolution – that all important goal of contact centres – is much easier to achieve. From the perspective of the person calling in, their interface with the company is much quicker and smoother, and much more likely to improve their overall perception of the company.

Of course, this is good news all round. Isn’t it? After all, the benefits of UC in the contact centre really do make sense, and are easy to envisage. But of course, as with any nirvana, you have to go through some serious hurdles before you get there. One of these hurdles is stumping up the necessary investment. Contact centres tend to be treated as cost rather than profit centres, and this classification makes the business case much more difficult to get approved, particularly in the current climate. This suggests the need for innovative thinking around how UC in the contact centre can create competitive advantage that will result in an uplift in revenues. It is beyond the scope of the discussion here to say where this thinking should be driven from, and what it might suggest, etc, but at the very least, it needs to be on an agenda somewhere.

Even when a company decides to implement UC in the contact centre, its success isn’t guaranteed. A lot of groundwork needs to be done, to deal with communications processes between the contact centre and the rest of the organisation. Agents have to have clear guidelines about who they can contact, and what conditions exist around that contact. Similarly, nominated experts need to be fully au fait with their role, including how and when they make themselves available. In short, collaborative working practices within the enterprise need to be water-tight. Failure to do this can lead to mistakes being made in contact handling, which could be visible externally. This in turn can have a very negative impact on how the company is perceived by its customers and prospects. At a more company-wide level, customer-centricity needs to be embedded in the culture, so that everyone understands its importance and works towards achieving it.

I suspect there is still some way to go before UC in the contact centre really takes hold. But I also believe that it provides a logical home for UC. Undoubtedly, and rightly so, the buzz in the industry is there, and perhaps UC vendors will finally achieve what they were hoping for.

Where now for Content Management?

2009-01-08T19:58:00.005Z

Today it appears that Content Management has been 'the next big thing' for several years. So with much of the press speculating about the imminent collapse of civilisation, or at least of severe constraints on IT project spending, it’s a good time to ask what the future holds for the wide ranging potential of managing content effectively using IT systems.

In the past the widespread use of content management systems has been confined to a few industry sectors or within specific departments of large enterprises. Typically these have included legal departments or others that have specific, often external requirements that necessitate, or at least encourage, the use of electronic content management systems.

However it is not unreasonable to believe that there is potential for growth in the use of content management systems. As has already been stated much of this is caused by the increasing burdens on organisations to meet external legal requirements concerning the discovery and lawful disclosure of information when so requested by the authorities and / or industry regulators. But is there room for growth beyond these “traditional” markets? I believe there is and that these lie in many areas across business.

But in order for the use of content management to extend much further beyond the existing base the challenges for the purveyors of these solutions are varied. At one level they need to encourage their existing customers to deploy the solutions beyond those specific business functions for which they were acquired. Whilst the scale of this task should not be underestimated it is fair to expect that existing users should be aware, at least to some degree, on where benefits might be accrued by expanding system usage. It is interesting to speculate on whether the vendors have a similar awareness.

A far greater challenge will be to find believable business cases to encourage new users to start deploying content management solutions in green field settings. This requires the vendors to put out much stronger business related examples of material benefits that can be achieved by organisations. The vendors also need to educate potential customers on how they can get results in a short time scale, a matter that has even greater import in this economically challenged period. I would add that this applies in spades when it comes to proffering content management to mid-scale enterprises.

The early adopters have picked up content management, although this has taken longer than might have been expected. Can content management now become a mainstream offering in all areas of business and in all sizes or organisation? The jury is still out and the vendors need to adopt new tactics to reach new markets.They also need to ensure that potential customers are aware of any process changes they will need to make to exploit these systems.

The Video Market—Hot or Not in 2009?

2008-12-19T14:35:00.002Z

At recent video industry events, optimism filled the talks of virtually every speaker, from content generators, to service providers and even extending to the normally staid world of venture capitalists.

A theory is the online video market is *so* ready for prime time that no economic turmoil or consumer malaise can stop it, even if progress may slow. To turn this on a cynical head, perhaps it is true that so much money and hope has been invested, and so few other emerging markets exist with such promise, that the market really must happen to maintain the momentum.

No matter where the level of optimism deserves to be pegged, a few very interesting facts have emerged as we exit 2008. A few key observations include:

Old media and new media fans are beginning to agree that online video does not cannibalize broadcast video in any way, and in fact, evidence is mounting that MORE eyeballs are heading to broadcast if online media promotes it. As seen in the Beijing Olympics, online highlight reels and special interest stories actually created more interest in broadcast content. One way to think of online video is as a channel for syndication. Just like TV syndication increases the longevity of a show, it also increases viewers by making content available at different times and through more sources. Online video, therefore, is just a syndication method, allowing a much broader reach. Of course, figuring out how to monetize that broader reach is still a major issue. In the long run, it’s clear that eyeballs, and dollars, will shift away from traditional broadcast services to new services, and among one new service to the next.

Once upon a time, at least 10 months ago, the market was convinced that online video was all about short clips and specialized online content. Long form TV shows and movies would have no consumer acceptance. What a difference a year makes! With the availability of premium, quality long-form content, acceptance (at least among younger demographics) for PC video watching, and technologies that fling PC content to a TV, long form, mass market content is where the eyeballs are trending. Yes, YouTube is still quite popular—for user generated, short form content—but consumers are keen to pay for quality, longer viewing experiences. (As an aside, video for mobile devices is still a market where short form content—user generated or paid premium—still have a strong play). Again, this is another market where monetization models are being explored.

A big problem exists with the proliferation of content sources and content digesting/viewing devices. While there are popular formats for content, there are no standards, per se. Consumers are already overloaded with the number of formats, and could go for broke having to buy multiple devices to get and play back content. To date, some of the devices have been successful, like the Netflix-Roku box, but the content is limited to what Netflix has available for download. It seems the proliferation of sources and devices will continue (an opportunity for revenue), but the market will have to rationalize if truly widespread consumer acceptance will occur. While I have many ideas about how the future needs to involve in this space, that complication topic will be addressed later. In the meantime, keep your eyes on Apple, Sony, Netflix, Google, Nintendo, Yahoo, and Microsoft, among others!

Money abounds in the online video market. Big names, like the CSI TV show franchise, are investing in new and innovative online content, trying to use online presence to enrich the broadcast experience—without cannibalizing their broadcast efforts, since that’s where the proven dollars are today. Venture capitalists are actively engaging this market, too. While valuations are smaller and money is harder to get, venture capitalists are still hunting for new companies. Clearly, to them, they want people with unique ideas and first mover advantage; no longer can the me too, and me three, get money. The online video market fascinates the VCs because revenue models around content and advertising online are completely uncertain. Yes, this means risk, but it also means incredible potential upside. (To watch an enthusiastic VC panel from NewTeeVee Live conference, click on the following link)

As we head into 2009, the online video market certainly provides much intrigue-and much hope-and I look forward to telling you more in the coming months.

Financing IT in the current climate

2008-12-01T18:30:00.001Z

Over the years I have often written about the potential for far greater use of financing solutions in both the acquisition of IT based solutions and their operations. With many, if not most, of the major IT markets now in the grip of the fallout from the wide-spread global economic panic, now is an opportune time to once again examine what financing solutions have to offer.

For the majority of organisations IT purchases still tend to be funded directly out of capital budgets, frequently with little thought, and even less research, being given to using any other method of payment. Until comparatively recently the concept of “financing” IT solutions has usually meant some variation on the leasing of the hardware, and perhaps the software, deployed in a solution. However, over recent times we have begun to see some new funding packages coming into IT, although mostly for those in the millions of dollars bracket.

A few suppliers of IT finance, notably those of one or two of the larger infrastructure players, have recognised that a large proportion of IT projects now consist of multiple components and phases that usually require significant up front funding and investment. In many circumstances the investment at the start of projects may not lead to direct business (and cost) benefits until months, occasionally very many months, later. For many organisations, this cost/benefit gap can create a major hurdle. In the current economic climate there is every likelihood that such cost/value delivery perception gaps could severely inhibit project approval. It could even significantly delay some projects that have already received the go ahead.

Thus there is a clear need for agile “project financing” solutions to enable organisations to implement IT solutions. This type of financing should enable solutions to be implemented when business conditions / business opportunity indicate, rather than when internal funding becomes available. This approach would make it possible for more projects to pass the deliver fast ROI test, and therefore help businesses move forward in the current economic climate.

I am firmly of the opinion that with the financial markets and national governments making the cost of capital relatively low, there is a major opportunity for agile funding services for IT projects to step out of the shadows. I see great potential for IT-based business transformation projects to deliver serious business value if only the funding can be obtained. I hope that the financing arms of IT vendors and the financial services industry are ready to step in and provide the kick start needed to allow sensible projects to take place rather than be mothballed.

There is little understanding about the possibilities that financing can provide to IT solutions, with only very large enterprises usually having the time to perform any form of research in the area. Clearly there is a need to educate mid- and small- enterprises on the pros and cons of IT financing. In fact the IT vendors, channels and their sales reps could do with such education as well to help their customers make good choices. Equally, with national governments today being so tightly intertwined with the markets it is not beyond the realms of plausibility for government inspired or backed schemes to be sanctioned, or at the very least new tax breaks introduced for a short period to help keep IT, and thus businesses, moving forward.

Taking the reins at Freeform Dynamics

2008-12-01T16:40:00.010Z

Today, I take over from Dale as MD (or CEO, depending which side of the Atlantic you are on) of Freeform Dynamics. It’s pretty much three years to the day that the company first went live, and it is testament to Dale and Helen’s vision back then, and their driving efforts since, that in such a short period we should have developed a reputation for world-class research of the global IT market.

Freeform Dynamics was founded on the basis that while organisations might baulk at the ongoing costs of their research subscriptions, they would still need the best possible information to support their own activities. Fundamental to the Freeform approach, ethos and culture is keeping tuned into the real consumers of IT, not just CIOs but decision makers and technology users across the board. It is true that as we approach the end of 2008, we are living in very different economic times to three years ago. However, it is perhaps based on this initial philosophy that we are seeing demand for our community research services increasing, even in the current climate.

We’re in an enviable position, and while I am in no way complacent I am nonetheless delighted to be building on the sound foundation that Dale has put in place. It takes a lot of gumption to see when is a good moment to hand over the reins, particularly when things are going well, and I’d like to thank Dale wholeheartedly for both getting Freeform Dynamics to where it is today, and offering me the opportunity to take things forward. I look forward to working with you all in 2009.

Backup and Recovery – Still Imperfect After All These Years

2008-11-21T14:02:00.004Z

Some things in life, for example taxes, taxis and the music of younger generations, seem to have been around forever yet we are still not comfortable with them. The same can be said of some areas of IT, with “Backup and Recovery” springing readily to mind. Over the course of the last few weeks I have taken part at a number of round tables hosted by DCG Group and one theme that has been common to all attendees has been a recognition that there are still major challenges getting backup and recovery processes right.

Backup and recovery processes have been undertaken since the beginning of IT. In fact it can be argued that the very antiquity of the operation works against the process itself. In certain organisations backup processes have been working so long that they have almost, but not quite, become a tradition. “We do backups because we have always carried out backups” is the subtext. In fact it is probably fairer to say that “We have problems with backups but, then again, we always have” is the prevailing attitude.

It goes without saying, or does it, that the recognition of having issues with backup processes makes the recovery of data / systems very difficult, if not impossible. It is worthwhile noting, some legal requirements prevalent in a few industry verticals aside, that at heart the only valid reason for carrying out backup and allied data protection operations at all is to put oneself in the comforting position of being able to recover information whenever so required.

Now it has to be admitted that it can very difficult to ensure that backup and recovery systems deliver the degree of protection desired by the organisation. Not least amongst the issues is that data volumes are growing so rapidly whilst business operations require access to information for ever increasing time windows that simply taking backups quickly enough can be a non-trivial challenge. There are now several techniques available to address this challenge from using disk to disk (and then perhaps to tape) backups or the use of “snapshots” / point-in-time copies / SaaS / CDP and managed service solutions, never mind just faster tape systems.

However beyond the mere technical details of how to get backups to be taken within the desired backup window or ensuring that data can be recovered with the required recovery time objectives there are other, perhaps less visible obstacles to be overcome. Many of these are wrapped up in the very fact that data is now routinely held in so many locations, by no means all of them sitting inside a data centre. Just tracking down data to be protected, understanding the desired backup and restore characteristics of the information and its global business value is a task that can be extremely difficult to undertake, especially given that it can never be considered completed as things change so rapidly. The advent of “virtualisation” of systems in mainstream IT operations is further exacerbating this situation.

Finally there is the ultimate difficulty, and this is wrapped up in the very fact that backup and recovery has been around so long. It is simply not fashionable or exciting. It is also difficult to be able to test recovery scenarios with sufficient frequency. Indeed many organisations will admit that they test their recovery capabilities very rarely and tend to rely on getting it right when there is a real world need to recover data to hone their operations.

It must also be said that for operations staff tasked with keeping systems working in line with business demands there is never enough, or any, time to learn about new solutions, identify best practices or to work out how things can be made better. And this applies across the entire gamut of business, never mind humble but ever so essential backup and recovery operations. This is likely to open up major opportunities for specialist providers of managed services and new solutions that help address the challenges both in backup and recovery as well as across much of the “routine” IT operational spectrum allowing the IT organisation to focus more sharply on matters deemed to be of more value to the business.

Can backup and recovery operations ever routinely reach 100 percent coverage at an affordable cost? Maybe not, but there is clearly plenty of room to make things better for everyone concerned, i.e. the entire business.

Clouds Yet To Fill The IT Skies

2008-11-15T09:57:00.015Z

You may have noticed that the IT vendor weather has recently become quite stormy as these organisations claim to see “clouds” appearing from almost each and every direction. There is no doubt that many IT vendors are either talking about this or seeking to bring a variety of offerings to the Cloud market. The question really is, should organisations expect their IT systems infrastructure to become hazy with numerous Cloud offerings?

Let me try to be clear about what I think of as Cloud IT. In fact the term can be deceptive as to my mind there is no single definition or description that absolutely defines cloud offerings. To my mind a cloud offering is any service that runs utilising IT infrastructure resources such as Servers, storage or applications etc; that are not hosted within the environment of the organisation and of which it has no legal ownership. In this model very many SaaS (software as a a service) offerings can be found along with many of the pay on demand / pay for consumption infrastructure services.

Indeed the past few weeks has seen Microsoft talking about project Azure at its PDC conference in Los Angeles whilst Salesforce.com held its Dreamforce conference the following week in San Francisco. Both vendors, and indeed most of the rest of the community, speak with almost uniform glee about the importance that “the Cloud” would play as organisations look to develop and deploy production systems free of such traditional IT constraints of capacity limitations and availability of capital budget.

It is more than apparent that many IT vendors are expecting that the use of cloud services will grow very rapidly. Although in truth it is probably fairer to say that “hoping” is a more appropriate verb than “expecting”. For my part, and backed up by most of our research statistics, it is clear that SaaS, as opposed to the more generic Cloud computing, is continuing to grow. However it must be said that it is not “explosive growth”, rather a more controlled use, with an appropriate approach, rather than an out and out fashion.

I have great faith that the SaaS and generic cloud type models will take a very firm role in the delivery of IT services over the course of the coming years. Note the use of the word “model”. Many organisations are already looking to deliver their internal services using the SaaS approach, but running on the company's own infrastructure. There is also a very clear connection between many of the capabilities that the virtualisation of the IT infrastructure that is now being undertaken could essentially end up delivering cloud compute type facilities, but once again hosted on corporately owned kit.

I do see the use of externally delivered SaaS and, ultimately, cloud computing services becoming very strong but there are many obstacles that need to be overcome. These include many matters of privacy and data / service location as many nations already place strong limitations on where and how much information can be processed.
Today many cloud and SaaS services are hosted on systems operating from the USA making them, at least in theory, unsuitable for many uses by non-US located entities. For example many European nations already have strong privacy laws that restrict how, and sometimes where, data can be stored and processed. Clearly for SaaS and Cloud computing to take off, the weather systems involved need to be far more widely dispersed than is currently the case.

Beyond this there is also a need for both the vendor sales models to evolve, and I do mean evolve as there is no widespread recognition of just how organisations wish to pay for these services. And ultimately, as I have said before (IT Budgets, Clouds and Virtualisation), the manner in which IT budgets are created, operated and ultimately modified requires significant change for virtualisation, cloud and SaaS to really take off in mainstream business. It will happen, but not like an overnight storm.

The Price of Free

2008-11-12T13:40:00.003Z

A couple weeks ago, OpenOffice.org 3.0 was released, and millions of consumers downloaded it, including me. OpenOffice.org is a Sun-sponsored project that provides a suite of desktop “office” applications, such as word processing, spreadsheets, presentations, graphics and a database, and is an open source, free competitor to the likes of Microsoft Office. This is the first time OpenOffice has run natively on Apple’s OSX.

While we officially run Microsoft Office 2007 and Vista here at Freeform, many of us use Macs, and occasionally need to open up documents while running OSX. At first glance, OpenOffice.org 3.0 was a viable solution for this, and a major improvement, from a UI perspective, to previous version 2.4, and also an improvement over NeoOffice, another desktop open source competitor (for the purpose of this investigation, we did not investigate Google Documents, which operates in the cloud and is not how we currently manage documents).

On the surface, the OpenOffice.org 3.0 applications achieved a decent user interface, mimicking Microsoft Office older toolbars and drop down menus. However, I find switching back and forth between OpenOffice and current Office applications quite challenging compared to simply switching back and forth between operating systems, due to the countless nuances between a given application on one office suite versus the other.
Please see comparative screen shots of a new text document in OpenOffice.org 3 and Microsoft Office 2007 Word below.

One of our major issues with using multiple office-based applications across the organization and with clients is interoperability. While promising nearly 100% interoperability with major Office applications, all open source programs we have tried have failed to provide interoperability in enough cases, especially with PowerPoint. I tried a few experiments with OpenOffice.org 3.0, and at first, I was hopeful. Relatively simple word and spreadsheet documents created in OpenOffice in OSX opened perfectly in their counterpart programs in Microsoft Office in Vista. Editing these documents in Office and sending them back roundtrip into OpenOffice also worked perfectly, to my surprise. This is where the good news ended.

I then tried opening two modestly complex documents created in Office in OpenOffice, and had entirely unacceptable results. When I opened a PowerPoint document in OpenOffice, all the graphics and template colors were perfect, a surprise. However, various viewing modes didn’t work, such as handout, which would not render on the screen, let alone print. A Microsoft Word document created with a straightforward outline numbering system, when opened in OpenOffice, randomly renumbered and changed the format of most headings, rendering the document illegible.

Given that Microsoft Office Home and Student edition lists at $149.95, Microsoft Office Standard at $399.95, and Microsoft Office Professional at $499.95 (substantially lower prices available online), it is hard to justify enterprise reliance on a compatibility-challenged, albeit free, program. This is especially true in any organization in which office applications are mission critical for conducting business, and even more true for any business that ever shares anything more than very simple files outside the organization in an editable form.

However, OpenOffice can suit individuals and groups where interoperability is less of an issue, or where cost is a major factor, such as in a non-profit or bootstrapped startup. Solo entrepreneurs, students, home users and others may also find OpenOffice to be quite suitable. OpenOffice users do get an amazing amount of functionality, with more power in the programs than available at a premium just a couple years ago, and the community should be applauded. It’s intriguing to think, too, with the popularity of OpenOffice, and the donations coming in, what may be next.

While OpenOffice is impressive for the cost, the cost of using it in most situations is too high for me at present, as I suspect it will be for most mainstream businesses, although I will keep it running and updated so I can open documents when running OSX. In the meantime, I think it is safe to say commercial software for the enterprise desktop will remain the default option for the foreseeable future.

View from the defence: seven reasons for security as a service

2008-10-28T23:03:00.004Z

I'm just back from RSA Europe 2008, where I was hosting a panel on software as a service (SaaS) in general, security as a service in particular, and dealing with the security risks of both. I don't know what the feedback will be like from the audience, but it was one of the most animated panels I have had the pleasure to host.

The big and very blatant caveat, was that all of the panellists had some vested interest in the topic, as they were all SaaS providers. We had:

Gerhard Eschelbeck, CTO of Webroot

Peter Bauer, CEO of Mimecast

Eldar Tuvey, CEO of ScanSafe

David Stanley, MD EMEA of Proofpoint

Indeed, this was no accident - as we put together the programme for RSA Europe, we took note of the number of people who wanted to talk on this topic and their rationale, and agreed: "Wouldn't it be best to invite them as a panel?" And so, we did - to great effect as each looked to differentiate themselves from the others in the face of an oft-skeptical audience.

Against this background, one section interested me in particular. Having worked through the general benefits of SaaS, the back-and-forth of responses to questions such as, "Isn't it just hosting in the Internet age?" and other such pleasantries, the panellists worked through what security as a service brought to the party. I summarise, paraphrase and otherwise pillage the responses to yield the following:

Specialism. Providers can do things that may well be beyond the ken of their customers - this can particularly be true in the realm of security, where there is a dearth of domain experts.

Technological breadth. Where customers may only install one or another package to protect against the outsider threat, providers can (and do) install tools from multiple providers.

Augmentation. This is the 'standing on the shoulders of giants' argument, in that whatever a customer wants to do, a provider can build on top. Many packages take things so far, and providers can then take things further.

SLA's. Providers are contractually bound to the SLA's they define, whereas internal services may not be subject to the same level of stringency. ("You've now managed to upset all the service managers in the room as well," I remarked.)

Geographic reach. Providers tend to have a wide, often global reach with their services, which can make it easier for customers to roll out services if they are geographically distributed, while maintaining more centralised control

Scale. Many services are hard to scale across large numbers of users, which can be difficult for customers, but which is today seen as 'table stakes' for providers.

Removal of burden. Last but not least, use of an external provider for security services equates to less things a customer has to do, and therefore the more time it can spend concentrating on its own business.

So - are these valid criteria? Our own view from the ground tends to be coloured by projects such as IT on the Front Foot, where our research suggests that forward-thinking organisations are more likely to look to external sources of services, whether outsourced, SaaS or whatever. So - nothing against the model in principle, as long as it is seen as a new delivery mechanism for many vendors (which is perfectly valid), rather than as a whole new-and-improved way of doing things for customers (many of whom have been drawing services from external sources for many years). From this point of view, the above list can make sense - but with a final caveat: that it is well worth looking at SaaS in the cold light of what you are trying to achieve, rather than what vendors are trying to do.

Storage Expo – What happened in 2008?

2008-10-16T20:21:00.005Z

In 2007 the UK's large exhibition focussed on the storage industry found itself parroting all things “green”, frankly often flying in the face of any or all material evidence to the contrary. This year the exhibitors at Storage Expo spent a lot of time concentrating on explaining how various solution stacks can help address the item that, whilst it has always held a degree of prominence in solution acquisition planning, over the course of the last three weeks has raced ahead of the field. Of course, I am talking about efforts to save money.

Now whilst there was no shortage of platforms, both tape and disk, promising to save on the consumption of electricity to host data unlike last year this characteristic was not front and centre during the show. Instead a broad range of solutions were being promoted, many offering different potential to save many to organisations in the short or medium terms. Equally, many solutions considering the very many facets of “protecting” data and information, and its security were equally visible. Similarly the subject, or more accurately the very many subjects of storage virtualisation had many opportunities to shine.

Areas such as data de-duplication and data compression, quite rightly, received considerable coverage. It was interesting to see that some of these solutions are also now being promoted as suitable for use by small and mid-sized organisations, not just large enterprises.

I was further encouraged to note that management tools were finally being talked about as offering capabilities that should be better exploited across the board. Chief amongst these are those that seek to help automatically “discover” data and then to, at least to some degree, help classify said data and then move it around the various layers of the data storage tiers.

So all in all there was a lot on offer. Alas some vendors still succumb to over marketing and seek to position fundamentally sound tools as the answer, in the immortal words of Douglas Adams, as the answer to life, the universe and everything. The good news is there are solutions out there. The difficulty is going to be finding the identifying which offerings will work for you and then getting them to work. I hope you can find the time to look around. Good Luck.

SAPTechEd: Lead or follow, but get out of the way

2008-10-15T15:56:00.000Z

Another theme at SAP TechEd08 is agility-as the company evolves, it needs to help the customer move quickly, and offer the flexibility to deploy what is needed, when needed. In essence, enterprise software can be a source of good, but it can also get in the way. According to SAP Co-CEO Léo Apotheker’s, the days where integrating a new upgrade took weeks of downtime and chaos must be reduced to a simple weekend upgrade that few even notice. To this end, SAP is promoting the “timeless software” concept as a philosophy, implementing regular small upgrades rather than large overhauls.

With the Business Process Management product, NetWeaver, SAP is working with different functions at clients to create a “simplicity of notation,” according to Wolfgang Hilpert, Senior VP at SAP. Getting people inside of a company to speak a common language that has meaning for all users around processes can be difficult. Another challenge is to get companies to move quickly to integrate new BPM systems or upgrades; SAP seems to realize that implementing or upgrading systems can be disruptive.

What seems to be a progressive strategy actually has some conservative overtones. One such manifestation is around social media, a topic which SAP seems slow to embrace. Admittedly, SAP’s reasoning, that some social networking technologies may be short term trends, is reasonable; building support for technologies that become irrelevant goes against SAP’s philosophy towards agility. Picking between agility and features, however, is a tricky balance, especially if the tradeoff causes SAP to delay what will be a mission critical feature. I hope we hear more about SAP’s plans around social media technology integration, because customers will not wait. Perhaps SAP does not see the irony that the whole point of social media in the enterprise is to increase agility, at least in theory.

SAPTechEd: Maintaining enterprise IT momentum through an economic downturn

2008-10-14T15:39:00.006Z

Sitting here at SAP TechEd08, one nagging question gets in the way of appreciating the (few) announcements and case studies. With the collusion of forces we see in the enterprise today-decreasing budgets due to the uncertain economic climate, the importance of spending money to increase efficiency, and a ground swelling of support for new technologies-what will happen to the enterprise market in the next twelve months? Will immediate term economic reality outweigh the momentum in the enterprise? I’d rather think momentum will carry the day, but what forces will drive that? SAP has provided some insight into some of these forces today.

SAP seems to be thinking carefully on what strategies will help keep momentum flowing. One comment made is that while SAP software can become indispensable, in itself it is not sufficient. SAP is aware that enterprise software must become more usable, by a wider range of users. It also means that SAP must be aware that different types of organizations, and indeed, even different parts of an organization, move at different speeds.

Another concept brought up repeatedly by SAP is the democratization of innovation, a fancy way to say “let’s share the cost.” Democratization of innovation, in SAP’s view, takes a few forms: working with value chain partners and even customers to create applications and widgets, building community with SAP “mentors” who share knowledge and case studies as well as through business process experts (SAP recently announced a BPE certification), and by empowering the actual end user to be able to tune SAP processes on their own, without the support (or hindrance) of IT.

Of course, SAP has been criticized for stymieing developers by making the tools too expensive and too a limited group of people, potentially jeopardizing the reach of the community. It will be interesting to see if SAP liberalizes its developer program in light of this philosophy. In a fireside chat with Zia Yusuf, Executive Vice President, Platform Solutions, discussed a related note, the role of open source. Clearly, the proponents of open source in the discussion feel SAP is far from embracing open source, although SAP proclaims to be quite pro open source - as long as certain limitations and conditions (avoiding lawsuits was a key theme) are met. I fully expect to see SAP create a clearer policy, and possible embrace, of open source in the future.

For real time insights from the author, follow “idarose” on twitter, and the conference twitter stream at #sapteched08.

SAPTechEd: Irony and Contradictions

2008-10-14T15:27:00.005Z

The annual SAPTechEd, being held in Berlin this week, is hosting over, 4500 attendees, record attendance, which is especially noteworthy given the global economic crisis. In our opinion, this is proof that difficult times create intense interest in business process improvement and efficiency. Of course, this creates a Catch-22 situation, when investment is most needed when free flowing cash is least available—hence, the recent news surrounding SAP finances, and the retreat of some key executives from the event.

Based on SAP Co-CEO Léo Apotheker’s comments, the irony of the situation is not lost on the company. While the company is instigating cost cutting measures such as a hiring freeze, the company appears to be committed to new product development. This is well and good, but a long term worldwide financial crisis might require SAP to revisit pricing structures, product offerings and market strategy.

Three themes define the conference: connection, collaboration, and co-innovation. Perhaps the most critical in this climate is co-innovation. Apotheker announced SAP® EcoHub, a community-powered solution marketplace, where makers SAP-compatible applications can readily match up with customers. Many of these solutions enhance the utility of SAP solutions. Another key announcement was made with Cisco, a launching of an application that will help organizations enforce data privacy across the business network. Both announcements acknowledge that SAP is reliant on value chain partners, especially in times of economic woe. Regardless of conditions, the need for this kind of partner collaboration will only continue, as boundaries between corporations will start to blur; SAP is certainly starting to eat the dog food by focusing on co-innovation at this conference.

Is IT offshoring ready for “Designed in India”?

2008-10-03T16:35:00.003Z

There’s an interesting article in India’s Business Standard newspaper this week, about the impending plans for the World's Largest Democracy(TM) to promote itself not just as a place where things can get made or services delivered, but as a centre of excellence for design. “Designed in India, Made for the World” is the tagline, and the stated goal is to follow a similar path to countries like Japan, whose companies have moved from being perceived as low-cost manufacturing centres to purveyors of high-quality product.

Nice aspiration, and its not for anyone to question the principle. It does make me wonder however what the implications might be for IT offshoring. I’ve written elsewhere about how experiences have been seen as variable – and I mean variable as variable, not as a euphemism for variable-to-poor. Some people we have spoken to have had very good experiences of outsourcing development to offshore third parties, whereas others, less so. So, where's the truth?

The answer probably lies somewhere in between – with the necessary checks and balances in place of course. A few months back I attended an event organised by India’s National Association of Software and Services Companies (NASSCOM), in which the subject of recruitment was brought up – largely because of a couple of high-profile incidents (such as this one) about how under-vetted staffers were doing dodgy things with customer data. However this is far more to do with general best practice, than anything specific about a given geography.

One bone of contention has been around the subject of design – software design, in this case. It is generally agreed that a well-documented design, passed to an offshore agency, will generally lead to a higher likelihood of good code. Some of the more negative people I have spoken to have complained how designs have had to be spelt out in detail before they can be ‘offshored’: while this is again more suggestive of collaboration issues than anything else, it does beg the question – what if the aspiration of being perceived as a design centre of excellence was also applicable to software?

The question is whether there is an opportunity for any companies, anywhere in the world, to pip others to the post in terms of having a reputation for offering highly usable, scalable, elegant and secure yet bespoke IT systems. Right now, software is still perceived as being difficult to do – organisations have to choose between packaged applications which don’t totally fit their needs, or hand-crafted applications developed internally or externally, with all the baggage that comes with them. My question – or dare I say speculative challenge – is whether there is a middle ground to be found between the two, that enables custom software applications to be delivered in a commodity manner.

Thinking about it, it’s not necessarily that much of a leap of faith. We already have ISVs that offer customisable platforms, we have SOA to support decoupling of application elements and standardisation of interfaces, we have a number of platform technologies available in commercial or open source flavours, we have web services, mashups and composite applications. The middle ground is there for the taking, so given its current desire to move on from a reputation as a subcontractor to becoming a global industry peer, why not India.

Socialtext Launches Socialtext 3.0, Battle for Enterprise 2.0 Heats Up

2008-10-02T17:55:00.005Z

Socialtext, known for its enterprise wiki solution, made a serious play for the enterprise 2.0 space, by launching Socialtext 3.0 on Tuesday. The application trio includes the new Socialtext People, for social networking, a la Facebook for the Enterprise, Socialtext Dashboard, a la NetVibes, a collaborative workspace, and an overhaul to Socialtext Workspace, the existing enterprise wiki application. Socialtext also announced Socialtext Signals, an enterprise microblogging system (think Twitter for the enterprise), which will be released in a few months. The flexibility and modularity of the applications allow an enterprise to set up the systems for individual, team, company-wide and extranet use. Customization options exist with dashboard plugins. The new applications will be available as a hosted platform and as an on-premise appliance.

The demos are impressive. Sleek, with little distraction, the applications are simple enough for a social networking newbie to use, but engaging enough for the social networking guru. Of course, once my colleague, David Tebbutt, and I tried the application, we realized that a lot of the nice look and feel of the demo comes from the user added content and customization. For people who don’t have the initiative or the skill to build out the tools, out of the box utility might be challenging, and without the effort to build it out, user’s stickiness will be jeopardized, as is the case with all enterprise platforms. But, the price is right, at $10 per user per month, Socialtext comes in below some competitors, but similar to SharePoint pricing. The cost encourages relatively risk free experimentation with social media.

According to Socialtext founder Ross Mayfield, essentially two forces drive enterprises to utilize enterprise 2.0 tools. One is grassroots support for the tools that spread up from movements at the business unit level, often sales, marketing and business development, the other force is otherwise stodgy corporations that ban consumer social media but feel they must offer their disconnected employees some appeasement. In June 2008, we conducted research that corroborates that unofficial, grassroots support leads to substantial unofficial adoption of social media tools (see charts following this paragraph) According to Brett Guretize, Epitaph Records founder and Socialtext user, not only does Socialtext improve collaboration, it makes working together “more fluid, and more fun.” Together, these concepts show that enterprise 2.0 is in an evolution, in the midst of an identity crisis, rising from the bottom but occasionally coming from the top, and both a useful tool, and a fun tool, the latter function possibly making some corporate managers cringe.

If making enterprise 2.0 a reality was simple as facilitating one to one, one to many, and many to many conversations for sharing knowledge about individuals, activities and the corporations, with an easy to use and scale format, then Socialtext 3.0 adds up. But does a good set of tools enable collaboration and communication, or must these factors need to exist for the tools to be implemented and successful? As we’ve noted, without content, the tools themselves are just tools, but could inspire content generation in the right hands. Unfortunately, this chicken and egg situation is one of the critical unanswered questions in enterprise 2.0.

One concept Socialtext has nailed is the uniqueness of enterprise social networking, compared to consumer social networking. In the enterprises, users, and their IT overseers and business managers, want the signal to noise ratio rather high. By design, Socialtext adds context around conversations and users, and avoids pointless broadcasts. For example, users can get announcements focused on team members they work with and projects they support.

Another area Socialtext is working on is being able to integrate with other, bigger brand collaboration tools. Productized “connectors” are available with Microsoft SharePoint and IBM Lotus Connections. Of course, both Microsoft and IBM are also competitors in the field, leaving me to wonder just how close and strategic the relationships with such companies will be over time. Other strategic partnership opportunities include mash ups with systems like Salesforce.com, providing, for example a seamless connection between the systems that pops up an announcement in Socialtext if a sales member closes a key account. In tying closely to other enterprise applications, Socialtext can increase its value and decrease the “just another system to manage” challenge it can face.

With strong competition from Microsoft’s Sharepoint on the established front, and competition from many small companies that provide pure play collaboration functionality, such as Twitter-for-the-enterprise, (YuuGuu, Yammer, and so on), Socialtext must execute well, and find the right channel. While small companies might be the darlings of grassroots efforts, large companies have the respect of the establishment. One issue I have with Socialtext 3.0 today is that Signals did not come integrated with it. In his blog pitch, Mayfield states that Signals is the essential glue to hold People, Dashboard and Workspace together, and it’s not there. This opens up a window to let the competition catch up.

The Fear of Buying

2008-09-26T08:43:00.005Z

Even when times have been good, when the economy is strong and everything looks rosy, those lucky folk charged with buying IT solutions frequently exhibit signs of reluctance, if not downright fear and panic when it comes to buying new solutions or technology. Indeed research that we have carried out in the past illustrates that over 4 out of every 5 IT managers confess to having held back from implementing new technologies because of perceived “risk”.

This state of affairs has delayed solution procurement processes for years. Of course, when macro economic woes grab the headlines week after week, the fear of buying anything, never mind complex IT solutions, becomes subject to even greater levels of scrutiny.

This makes today a good time to ask, is it time for IT purchasing decision making processes to move forward? Clearly whenever times are tough business focus shifts to seeking out solutions that can visibly demonstrate a clear return on investment. Equally the fear of buying the “wrong solution” can be similarly intensified. The question thus becomes, should some of the IT systems/solutions available today be inherently less risky?

One could argue that when it comes to considering the deployment of major server infrastructure based solutions the advent of server virtualisation technologies has helped to remove significant concerns in at least one area, namely system deployment. The capabilities required to permit new systems to be deployed rapidly, once all necessary testing has been performed, helps reduce some concerns that have bedevilled IT for decades. Of equal importance, the speed with which solutions can be “rolled back” to an established, sound state helps further to mitigate considerable elements of risk associated with upgrades.

Contrary to some expectations, virtualisation is not the answer, to paraphrase Douglas Adams, to life, the universe and everything in IT. The various technologies available under this umbrella can help mitigate much of the risk as well as potentially reducing costs and increasing utilisation. They can also provide considerable scope to enhance flexibility in systems where previously it would have been operationally awkward, if not downright silly, to intervene unless circumstances so dictate. It is not a panacea.

There has always been risk associated with change. There are major challenges for IT to face, especially as systems become inherently more flexible as the full capabilities available through the use of virtualisation technologies are exploited in the real world. Chief amongst these will be to implement robust change management procedures that whilst containing risk to acceptable levels still permit IT solutions to be more dynamically varied in the face of rapidly altering business conditions and challenges. The need for better communications channels to be operational between IT managers and business users will similarly be thrown into harsh contrast.

BT in tune with the market on UC?

2008-09-15T15:49:00.007Z

Although the Unified Communications (UC) propositions from the key vendors in the market encompass a lot of very clever functionality, the market is dragging its heels in embracing UC in all its glory. This has been evidenced by research that Freeform Dynamics has carried out in association with Macehiter Ward-Dutton, with large enterprises in the European market. The results of this research showed that both IPT and UC implementations are at a relatively low level, and in many cases, are only partial implementations. Furthermore, the degree to which an enterprise has integrated, or plans to integrate UC shows a strong correlation to the management culture of that enterprise, in terms of how collaborative it is. The chart below shows how much enterprises are embracing the concept of UC. As is evident, the more collaborative the management culture, the more likely the organisation is to embrace UC.

This view was further corroborated when I met with BT recently, which believes that a major UC driver is collaboration. Furthermore, our collaborative culture is being strongly driven from the consumer side – witness the phenomenal growth in collaborative applications such as Skype, MySpace and Facebook. What has made these applications particularly successful is that they are very user friendly, intuitive tools that are free and of course, they work pretty much first time and all the time. Compare and contrast this with applications in the corporate environment. And here lies part of the dilemma.

Essentially, BT believes that the key to real growth in the UC market boils down to the user interface (UI), with the argument over which vendor to choose becoming largely irrelevant. There is probably a lot of truth in this. Enterprises are genuinely very confused by the concept of UC, and that this confusion is further compounded by the various ‘mine is better than yours’ messages of the vendors.

Even if a sound business case for UC were to fall out of the sky, then, for the majority of enterprises, their infrastructure simply cannot cope, with networks often not optimised for ongoing corporate communications, let alone real-time communications. The key, therefore, is to focus on optimization of the network so that it is essentially UC ready. But alongside this, ensure that the communications capability is embedded within the UI, and the transition to UC is a much smoother, more gradual one that simply just happens.

BT’s approach to the UC market is a very different one to that of the vendors, and is certainly very interesting. A lot of investment has gone into UC for it not to happen, and perhaps BT’s approach will provide the impetus that the market needs. Watch this space, I think.

IT Budgets, Clouds and Virtualisation

2008-09-11T19:57:00.007Z

Currently there is a lot of noise being generated regarding Cloud Computing and flexible IT infrastructures based on virtualised platforms. There is no doubt that the technologies to be found at the heart of these types of solutions have matured considerably over the course of the last couple of years. However in my view both face significant challenges before any of the currently available solutions can be fully exploited by organisations.

For Cloud computing chief amongst these concerns is the readiness of commercial organisations to trust significant proportions of their essential, and hence incredibly valuable, corporate information to platforms and suppliers over whom they have little control and who might hold the data wherever they wish. Such a leap of faith is today beyond consideration in many business scenarios.

Now if we instead consider using cloud-like solutions that are operated by the organisation itself there are far fewer objections to overcome and this "service delivery" approach to IT is already finding favour. But beyond these considerations there is another, far more challenging, issue to be addressed for both for the cloud approach to IT service delivery as well as to the concept of employing a truly virtualised, flexible IT infrastructure to support business operations across the entire range of services delivered and this concerns the models of IT budgeting in common use today.

Nearly every IT department today operates on the basis of budgets that are fixed in advance for the following year. The budget may be added to on a project by project basis but by and large the major areas of expenditure are identified in advance and funding limits put in place. It is readily apparent that such IT financing models are ill equipped to cater for much variability.

In many organisations these out of date budgetary models may also interfere with attempts to manage IT resources as a whole rather than on the application or project terms that dominate infrastructure equipment acquisition today.

It is clear that traditional models for IT budget setting and management are focussed squarely as cost control metrics. This is not suitable if the potential flexibility inherent in fully virtualised IT infrastructures are to be realised and, by no means incidentally, thereby be utilised to deliver the full business value potentially available through effective IT usage.

In my opinion organisations must begin to show they can migrate to value based IT funding to be in a position to reap maximum business benefits that modern IT should, and can, deliver. This poses challenges that far exceed anything posed by even the most complex IT technology project.

Welcome IdaRose!

2008-09-03T18:48:00.002Z

It is with great pleasure that we announce the recruitment of IdaRose Sylvester to Team Freeform, as our first US-based analyst. IdaRose was until recently with IDC, where she was covering the Digital Connected Home. However, she has plenty more strings to her bow, notably (from a deep tech perspective) in networking/ telecommunications, electronics and video technologies such as transcoding. Those who know IdaRose from her blog and twitter feed will also be aware of her interests in sustainability and in social networking: she will be bringing all of these coverage areas to bear in her role as program director at Freeform Dynamics.

At the core of IdaRose’s coverage will be what we term ‘the humanisation of IT’. We know from repeated research studies as well as from our own experience that corporate IT decision making is often influenced by the human factor - for example we have seen this in the adoption of the Blackberry as the de facto email device in many organisations, which has been driven as much by personal recommendation as anything more strategic. We see it also in the impact social tools are having on both internal and external collaborations, with suppliers and customers alike. IdaRose’s remit is to get to the bottom of how individual behaviour influences corporate behaviour - and in consequence, on how IT is procured and deployed.

IdaRose will be working closely with Dale Vile, Josie Sephton and David Tebbutt in the ‘people and process’ team (a.k.a. the Peep Squad). It’s important to stress that we have no intention of re-creating the silos of expertise so often used as the foundation for team structures in larger firms. Just as David makes sure the team as a whole remains social media savvy and Josie drives our collective understanding of the service provider beat for example, so IdaRose will keep us all up to speed in her areas of in-depth expertise. It is the big picture insight that arises from this approach, which differentiates our research and analysis from most of the competition.

A well as operating as an analyst, we’re very happy that IdaRose will be representing the interests of Freeform Dynamics in the United States. With IdaRose’s proven track record as a project and relationship manager, along with her high degree of commercial awareness, she fits the bill comfortably. We hope therefore that you will join us in welcoming IdaRose to the independent analyst community in general and to the Freeform family in particular, and we look forward to extending our coverage and deepening our relationships with our clients and analyst contacts as a result.

A happy announcement

2008-09-01T11:22:00.000Z

Everyone here at Freeform Dynamics would like to welcome a new arrival, although too young to be a Freeformer yet!

Congratulations to Martin Atherton and his wife Victoria on the arrival of their new baby, Jacob Michael Heathcote Atherton born at 12.54am on 29th August.

Time To Take the Tablet – Vista's unsung platform

2008-08-24T12:59:00.003Z

Several years ago Microsoft launched its Tablet software with much fanfare. Today the platform has almost vanished from corporate marketing programmes despite the fact that Windows Vista Tablet is a very usable piece of software with much to recommend it.

Earlier this year Lenovo loaned me an X series tablet PC to try for a few weeks, and I have to say I was impressed. Impressed by many things not least the sheer usability of the operating system. As is usual with Lenovo ThinkPad notebooks the machine itself was well built and came preloaded with the company's usual array of handy tools to simplify mundane tasks such as WiFi network switching. But what really shone out was the how well the Tablet software performed, especially in recognising pen input.

Despite not spending very long attempting to learn the ins and outs of the Vista tablet OS, and there is a huge array of pen based functional short cuts available, I was quickly using the Tablet via the pen interface. I was impressed with how well the software managed to recognise my input despite the fact that I frequently resorted to using pen actions I had picked up from my previous exposure to Palm and Microsoft Windows Mobile PDA devices. In fact “unlearning” these actions ultimately proved to be one of my biggest challenges.

All in all the Tablet and associated office applications performed extremely well, which therefore begs the question "why is there very little marketing of this platform or associated business solutions? For its part Microsoft states that it is the job of the device OEMs to promote Tablet, whilst naturally enough the OEMs are keen to push Microsoft to the fore. I suspect that if the interested parties, and to Microsoft and the major OEMs of Lenovo, HP, Fujitsu Siemens and Dell I would also add many ISVs, could get their act together and really promote Tablet that the platform could become very widely used.

There is also the possibility that many of the features of Tablet software will be utilised in the emerging UPC (Ultra Portable Computer) / Netbook market. Already we are seeing that some UPC and Netbook devices are utilising pen devices as the primary input mode. Clearly platform and operating systems boundaries are merging. I sincerely hope that Tablet software manages to come out of the shadows in which it has been hiding for the last few years. This is software whose time has come.

iPhone: First impressions of a Blackberry user

2008-08-20T16:21:00.001Z

For a while now, I have maintained two mobile phones – one for business use and one for personal use - and in terms of requirements, I need different things in each context.

There are four ‘must haves’ for my business device – good battery life, quick and convenient calling from a large directory of contacts, a solid, immediate and user friendly email capability, and acceptable security.

As a long time Blackberry user, three of these have been ‘givens’ for the past five years, the only compromise in the early days being relatively clunky functionality for making and receiving calls. The Blackberry Curve I am using at the moment, though, delivers well on this front too, so all of my needs for business use are catered for effectively.

On the personal side of the equation, my requirements are a bit different. From a calling perspective, I tend to be dialling from a much shorter list of contacts – tens rather than hundreds – and telephony use in general is much lighter. As a small business owner, there is still a requirement to access business email (as you never know what might need your direct attention), so connectivity to Microsoft Exchange and security are still important. Immediacy and user friendliness of email functionality is less so, however – these just need to be good enough allow periodic inbox browsing and very occasional replies.

Battery life is an interesting one. When using a device off duty, if I see the juice is getting a little low, I can curtail my usage and prolong the life left in the device. This is generally not an option for business use given the communication intensive nature of the job I do.

Beyond the communication stuff, there is also the recreational side of things – music, games, photography and perhaps a little web browsing. This brings me to the iPhone, and when I was looking for an upgrade to my personal device a few weeks ago before going on holiday, I felt obliged to check out this option.

Like most people who pick up an iPhone for the first time, it immediately felt quite natural, and it is the first device I have used that appeared to deliver a genuinely usable full web browsing experience – at least when connected to WiFi in the O2 store. When digging a little deeper, the Microsoft Exchange access seemed pretty well covered, the device was pin-securable with remote wipe capability, and the embedded iTunes, GPS enabled mapping, etc looked great. The only thing that seemed a little naff was the camera spec, though I figured it was probably good enough for snapshots of the kids, dog, etc.

So, I succumbed, and signed up for an iPhone on the basis that it seemed to do most of the things I wanted. But has it lived up to expectations?

Well three weeks on, I have to say that I still really like the iPhone and am pleased that I went for it. It has stood the test of real life use and quite a bit of experimentation over my recent 2-week holiday. It functions OK as a phone and call quality seems pretty good. The music playback quality is also good, especially when compared to my iPod Nano. Beyond this, there’s a reasonable number of games available to keep me amused, and, as suspected, the camera is actually OK for family snapshots, though, unsurprisingly, no good for ‘proper’ creative photography.

However, the iPhone is far from a perfect device. The most immediate problem I ran into was battery life. Perhaps optimistically, I started out running with all of the defaults – relatively bright screen setting, 3G enabled, GPS switched on, email delivered from our Exchange server through the ‘push’ mechanism (similar to Blackberry), etc. After returning home a couple of times at the end of a day out with the battery almost exhausted (with relatively light use), I suspected a little tuning was in order.

Fortunately, the iPhone allows you to switch off 3G access with the flip of a soft-switch, leaving the device running purely on the GSM network with data access over GPRS or EDGE. This improves battery life considerably, and as I don’t do much browsing when out and about, I have left it this way, figuring I can always enable 3G again for short periods when I really need to. The other adjustment that seemed to extend battery life significantly (apart from the obvious move of winding down the screen brightness) was disabling the push email mechanism and setting the device to poll the Exchange server every hour instead. Again, this adjustment can be made through soft-switch flicking, allowing the polling frequency to be set to every 15 minutes, 30 minutes or whatever, with more frequent polling clearly consuming more power.

Interestingly, enabling and disabling WiFi doesn’t appear to make a huge difference, so because of the convenience of the iPhone automatically hooking onto my home network when I arrive at the house, and discovering hotspots when out and about, I have tended to leave WiFi switched on.

As a disclaimer, I have to say that my tests have not been that scientific in that I have just been making adjustments in an attempt to get a configuration that works for me while I get on with my life. Unlike a lab test, no two days usage have been exactly the same, so what I am picking up here are gross differences in performance. That said, the one conclusion I have come to is that the combination of battery life limitations coupled with the inability to swap batteries when the power runs out makes the iPhone far from ideal for heavy business use on the basis of the power issue alone.

And while I wasn’t explicitly evaluating the device for business use, there are some other things that would cause me concern in this context. Apart from the widely reported lack of cut-and-paste capability, I noticed some quirks associated with the email client, for example, which make it difficult to do some things offline and require zooming and horizontal panning to read some email messages that refuse to word-wrap. Then, while I was pleasantly surprised at how usable the soft touch-screen keyboard was for casual text entry, I cannot imagine ever getting to the level of speed and unconscious use that comes naturally with a device that has a decent physical QWERTY keyboard. This may not be a concern for many, but it is major consideration for me, as I tend to use mobile email very interactively for business purposes.

In terms of issues from a corporate adoption perspective, others may also be concerned about lack of data encryption on the device itself, but with a sealed unit, pin access and remote wipe capability, if you take a common sense approach to assessing risk, there is probably not a huge security exposure for most business users.

When all things are considered, I would say the iPhone comes nowhere near devices such as the Blackberry Curve or 8800 series in terms of business fitness for purpose, particularly for heavy mobile data users. As a predominantly personal device, however, it is a great example of where mobile technology is going, and as I said, I am very pleased with the overall package.

As an industry analyst, I should probably grumble at the closed business practices of Apple itself in terms of controlling the distribution of content for the iPhone, but when I then think about the convenience and ease of use for a non-technical user, I can see that there is a also an upside to controlling things end to end for mass market consumer adoption.

So, the bottom line is that based on my initial impressions, I would not discourage anyone from buying an iPhone for personal use, but I would urge them to think about their requirements and do the appropriate due diligence before investing in the device for business use. As for large-scale deployment in a business environment for hard-core mobile requirements, I am not sure the device is yet ready in its current form, though if anyone has any experience to the contrary, I would love to hear from them. How do you rate the iPhone from a policy management, software distribution, maintenance and end-user support perspective for example?

Whatever the current situation, the end-user appeal of the iPhone will ensure that it makes its way into many businesses one way or another, and with Nokia, Microsoft, Palm and others already challenging RIM on fitness for purpose, we can look forward to an interesting couple of years as it all shakes out.

Public VoIP for business – a viable option?

2008-08-13T21:33:00.001Z

My previous post explored my very positive experience with public VoIP. My views haven’t diminished since then, but I was left wondering how far, realistically, public VoIP could penetrate a business. My use to date of public VoIP has been case-by-case, based on significant savings on international calls. But I elected to stick with my existing phone provider for national calls which worked out much cheaper for me, hence my pick and mix approach to date. The issue of quality, by the way, didn’t enter into the equation, as the quality of the public VoIP service was on par with my traditional phone line, and perfectly acceptable for business communications.

My experience aside, however, I do think there is an increasing case to at least carry out a more thorough evaluation of a public VoIP solution for small and medium businesses for which enterprise-class VoIP systems based on private IP networks are off-the-scale, cost-wise. A number of VoIP providers are increasingly offering a business solution as part of their portfolio, and businesses are starting to test the waters. One example I stumbled upon via ‘networking’ (www.networkingplus.co.uk) was that of Firmdale Hotels – a chain of London-based boutique hotels. Firmdale has recently installed a PBX-to-Skype gateway, which has delivered a number of benefits to the chain and its customers, including free hotel-to-hotel calling (within the chain), as well as the ability for Firmdale to maintain contact with overseas business partners cheaply. Firmdale’s experience to date seems very encouraging.

The essence of this implementation is that Firmdale has integrated public VoIP into its existing infrastructure, to reap the add-on benefits of public VoIP, rather than moving to a full dependence on public VoIP, which seems like a very sound approach.

Over the net, there is no guaranteed quality of service, and priority isn’t given to any type of traffic, and as the technology is particularly sensitive to latency, voice quality or dropped calls could result from late-arriving packets. It is risky for a business to rely fully on VoIP over the public internet (but the same could be said of relying on any one single method of communication). Whilst some public VoIP providers market their solutions as replacements to traditional phone systems, my view would be to proceed with caution, but at least begin the walk. SMBs need to invest some time to understanding the technology, and weighing up the pros and cons of the solutions they can afford before deciding just how far to ‘walk’. Whilst public VoIP may not offer a full replacement to traditional phone just yet, it is potentially a very useful complement that SMBs should consider.

The long and winding road to application service availability

2008-08-07T15:48:00.003Z

Strange as it may seem today the days of hyper-resilient systems have yet to arrive. Applications today suffer service disruption events on a reasonably frequent basis. Our research shows that some 84 percent of organisations experience some form of disruption due to application failure at least once a quarter, with almost one organisation in four encountering such instances at least every week.

A quick dive into the figures shows that the most frequent cause of application disruption are laid at the hands of “software component failure”with “network failure or poor performance” being identified as the second most likely area to cause problems. “Physical component failure” trails in some way behind in third place with “power outages or brownouts” lagging far at the back as an identified major factor in application service disruption. Clearly power is not yet a major problem for most organisations when it comes to unscheduled interruption to service.

In fact these results are pretty much in line with experience. Twenty years ago the proportion of interruptions caused by hardware component failure would have been much higher, but systems have got better over time. So what's causing the software problems? The figure below gives some hint at where most issues lie, and the answer is, essentially, to be found in the people and process side of IT operations and the way organisations handle testing and service scoping.

As can be seen, inadequacies in configuration and change management is identified as the most frequent cause of application failure with system sizing / capacity planning challenges coming in close behind. More general “IT staff error” is given as the third most common cause of service interruption with “patch management issues” having a similar interruption profile. “Security breaches” are far and away the least problematic challenge, at least as far as people are willing to admit in an anonymous survey.

The Freeform Dynamics' report “Risk and Resilience - The application availability gamble” clearly highlights that despite the increasing use of sophisticated management tools, virtualisation systems and even especially resilient server and storage platforms there is still considerable room for improvements in most areas of service provision. Further it is very apparent that the area where there is most scope to increase resilience is to found in the processes that organisations employ to support their applications and its underlying IT infrastructure.

Hardware is getting better and more highly available and many software and management developments, including but not limited to virtualisation, are also making service resilience more affordable. But without changing the support process side of things availability will get better but we will not see significant improvements. Alas, with organisations looking to put greater pressure on IT staff day by day this is perhaps the hardest area to address in the current work / economic climate, but it is one where major benefits are obtainable.

Cloud Computing – Costly Storm or Gentle Breeze?

2008-07-31T18:32:00.005Z

It's hard to read an article on the web these days without either “Cloud computing” or “Software as a Service” (SaaS to those in the know) being proffered as the answer to life, the universe and everything that is perceived to be a bottle neck in IT. It is true that there are many valid reasons why such offerings could, perhaps even should, be used but it is also accurate to mention that Cloud based systems are not yet taking the world by storm.

As the chart below illustrates, the accumulated costs associated with a SaaS solution when considered over a long period of time is seen be a major drawback by nearly forty percent of people who are not yet users such offerings whilst a similar number rate cost as a limiting factor in their considerations. This is clearly bad news for SaaS and Cloud providers who are keen to promote the subscription model of paying for service as a good fit for many organisations.

It is interesting to note that amongst organisations who do currently utilise SaaS solutions the rate of discontent is even higher with one in two calling the accumulated cost of service of long time periods as a major drawback and another forty percent giving it as a limiting factor. These results came from a range of UK organisations. large and small. In the survey larger organisations were far more likely to find the SaaS model of application service delivery to be acceptable than smaller businesses.

These perceptions pose a clear challenge to those offering Cloud computing and, especially, SaaS services. It is true that the customer has little in the way of maintenance and management operations to fund when using such systems but this does not automatically translate into cost savings visible on the statement of accounts. I find it interesting that non users state that data management and security come bottom of the list for non-users of SaaS systems, but still accounting for a hefty number of worries, but are the second biggest issue for active users. A hidden problem waiting to make waves or a non-issue? Probably much more likely to be the former rather than the latter, especially as using multiple vendors becomes the norm as I expect to happen. However, it is an issue that the vendors are finally beginning to address.

SaaS and Cloud computing will become mainstream, the only question is when, not if.

Public VoIP for cheap long distance calls

2008-07-17T14:12:00.002Z

I had to prepare for a research project recently that would involve conducting lengthy telephone interviews with service providers around the globe. As a home-based worker with a small company, I began to get very jittery about the likely size of the phone bill I would run up – small businesses and big phone bills being like the proverbial oil and water – and so began to search for cheap phone options in the form of public VoIP.

After looking at various options, I settled on Jajah. It wasn’t so much the rates that were the deciding factor - yes, they were very good, but they were comparable to other VoIP players. What I particularly liked was that I didn’t need to download any software onto my already overburdened laptop. Nor did I have to invest in a VoIP phone, or worry about which one was the best buy (a big deal for me as I am a true Northerner – I worry and I watch my money, often both at the same time).

In practical terms, the Jajah service is phone-to-phone, which means that the call is initiated on the Jajah website, and the service calls both parties and connects them. There are some neat options, too, such as an easy-to-use address book for saving dialled numbers, the allocation of a local number for regularly dialled contacts to circumvent the need to use a PC for subsequent calls, and an automatic redial at a pre-determined time. There is even a conference call option (though I haven’t tried that yet). The whole thing is scarily simple.

Of course, none of this matters if the call quality is poor – particularly as these are business calls. But so far, for me, call quality has been pretty good – I’d say it is on a par with my standard landline. Additionally, call quality hasn’t degraded during a call, even for very long calls. And the fact that I am using my own phone has a positive impact on the overall experience. A few calls have been barely audible, but I have typically been able to remedy these by re-dialling. And on the odd occasion that I haven’t then, of course, I still have my landline.

Pre-Jajah use, I was very sceptical about public VoIP for business use, and viewed my landline as far superior – a bit of ‘phone snobbery’ to be honest. Now, though, I am a VoIP convert, and find myself raving about it to anyone who will listen. I have some minor quibbles, for example, around the address book set-up, but as for the big downsides, I’ve yet to find them.

I’m not necessarily recommending VoIP for routine business use as the cost of local/national calls from traditional providers is not high enough to justify the switch. However, it is a pretty compelling commercial proposition in the context of a specific usage requirement such as a period of intense of international calling for a home-based or small business user.

Desktop Virtualisation – Where to Begin

2008-07-17T13:38:00.006Z

There is increasing discussion in many organisations, across a broad range of geographies, industry verticals and sizes, concerning the subject of “Desktop Virtualisation”. Even without the tremendous volume of vendor hype concerning the subject it is easy to understand why this subject is grabbing attention. A quick glance at the figure below highlights many potential reasons why an organisation might decide to investigate desktop virtualisation.

As we can see whilst the combination of cost reduction and resource / space optimisation receives most attention, but only just. In fact compared with the cases for x86 server virtualisation, and even the virtualisation of storage, cost reduction is much less of a factor in the desktop arena. Indeed one can clearly see that factors such as improving service reliability and providing better service levels along with providing better response to changing business requirements are almost neck and neck with cost reduction as the leading driver for desktop virtualisation. It is interesting to note that these are matters with which those charged with supporting desktop PCs inside (and often outside) the business have struggled since the PC first appeared in the workplace.

Now we also know from our research that whilst there are several benefits that organisations envisage using desktop virtualisation solutions there are also a number of issues to be faced. When it comes to challenges or barriers to the adoption of desktop virtualisation, the small matter of “determining where desktop virtualisation is appropriate” is ranked as the biggest issue, closely followed by “unclear business case”, “other more pressing priorities”. A self confessed “lack of familiarity with the technology” highlights that all parties have major work to undertake before starting major desktop virtualisation projects. So where should efforts begin?

In the same way that most IT organisations have struggled to deliver very high or even, at least as seen by end users, adequate and responsive desktop support service many frustrations stem from the lack of visibility support staff often have regarding the current state of the deployed PC / Laptop population. It is my very strongly held belief, backed by not inconsiderable real world experience in these areas, that in order to be in a position to deliver effective desktop support services and to be able to make valid decisions concerning potential desktop / laptop service deployments there is an unavoidable need to build and maintain an accurate record of deployed inventory coupled with information of software installed and the nature of the users of each and every piece of of IT technology and service. IT Inventory management is no longer a “nice to have”, it is a necessity.

I would further argue that adding additional information to such a repository and making it into a true asset management system yields considerable advantages in ongoing IT support, service monitoring and planning.

Thus before anyone considers undertaking any desktop / laptop service project they would do very well to put in place an asset management system or at least a reliable, maintained inventory repository. There are now many tools available to assist in this task, including the functions required to ensure that once it is built it continues to hold up to date information rather than an historical snapshot of the state of affairs when the system was installed. The first step along the path of any desktop virtualisation project must be the creation of an IT asset repository, after all you need to know what’s being used and by whom before any rational choices can be made. Indeed, as I have often stated, such a system should be the foundation of all IT management systems.

Desktop power management

2008-07-15T16:20:00.000Z

It’s encouraging that many of the conversations we are having at the moment in relation to IT and sustainability are moving beyond power management in the data centre. It is not that optimising the use of central IT isn’t important, but it really is only one way to drive an organisation’s environmental agenda. And even before we get to main question of how technology can enable more eco-friendly working practices, there is another place we can look to for operational IT power savings – the desktop.

When looking in this direction, though, I have noticed that there is a tendency to apply the same kind of thinking that is used on the server side of the equation. Fair enough, accelerating hardware refresh to introduce more power efficient kit into the equation reflects a similar game to that being played in the data centre, but with the carbon cost of manufacture/disposal taken into account, the net gains are hard to establish. In the data centre of course, hardware modernisation is augmented by consolidation and virtualisation to drive up average server utilisation and thus improve energy efficiency.

Virtualisation is a different game on the desktop, however. Sure, some will go down the route of running virtual PCs on the server and accessing them through thin client configurations, but it will be a long time before this is the norm. The reality is that most organisations will remain wed to their fat clients for the foreseeable future, so we need to think of the energy question a bit differently. Essentially, the challenge boils down to optimising the power consumption of desktop machines that typically idle for the majority of time they are switched on.

In order to deal with this problem, we need to think less about utilisation and inherent power efficiency of hardware and software, and more about controlling the state of machines in terms of their sleep/wake cycle. In practice, a configuration exhibiting a high degree of runtime energy efficiency, but has no active policy to transition to a low power state when idle will consume considerably more power than a less efficient machine whose state is properly managed.

This something that Microsoft makes a big point of when talking about Vista in the green context, and indeed early adopters with large Vista estates corroborate Microsoft’s claims that Vista’s enhanced manageability translates directly to power savings. The problem is, however, that Windows XP isn’t going away in a hurry, so what about all of those organisations who are interested in desktop power management but will be maintaining older versions of the operating system for some time to come?

Well the one approach that is generally acknowledged not to work that well is to educate, encourage or threaten users in an attempt to get them to keep their power configuration set in accordance with environmental policy, and/or to manually shut down their PCs or put them to sleep when they are not in use. IT managers relying on this kind of user discipline are probably not going to see the results they were hoping for unless they’re working for a totally green-tinted organisation.

Fortunately, third party solutions exist that can help to enable/enforce centralised power management – a couple of examples being Verdiem and 1E. Using such technology, you can not only cure PC insomnia from a policy enforcement perspective, but also allow real-time remote control of power state so machines can be woken up for backup or software distribution purposes then put to sleep again afterwards. So, if you are serious about saving energy across a large XP estate, the options are there.

Something I haven’t had time to look into is whether similar solutions exist for alternative desktops – namely Mac OS X and Linux. Apple kit is certainly not renowned for its enterprise management friendliness, but perhaps ‘right on’ Mac users aren’t so much of a problem as they are of course more environmentally aware. As for Linux, I would be interested in any views, recommendations or experiences.

Meanwhile, it would be great to see a bit more awareness raising from Microsoft on the availability of solutions to centrally manage power consumption by Windows XP, rather than automatically seguéing from this discussion into a Vista upgrade pitch.

Is There a Business Case To Be Made In Favour of Virtualising the Desktop?

2008-07-01T09:33:00.000Z

If you are looking at desktop/notebook replacement or optimisation now, what are the options and considerations that should be on your mind as you weigh up the options? As one of my colleagues stated a day or two ago, “given that so much has come to market over the last 12 months, not forgetting developments at Citrix, Microsoft as well as VMware, at one level, it is all very exciting and full of possibilities, at another, it bloody confusing!” So what are the options?

Well the “straightforward” option might be to simply replace all desktops and laptops in a like for like switch and consider moving to Windows Vista. At one level this offers simplicity of change in as much as the new operating system is unlikely to pose to a major headache for users. However before such a transition be attempted it is absolutely essential that a thorough evaluation of application compatibility be undertaken. There are some clear management benefits that can be achieved with Vista, especially in the area of policy setting , particularly around power management. However as an interesting side note, one senior IT director mentioned that had made the decision to defer a move to XP SP2 because of application compatibility issues. For his organisation the move from XP SP1 to Vista apparently holds fewer problems due to the superior sand boxing in Vista (i.e. you really can run things reliably in compatibility mode). To put it another way, he said more of their XP SP1 applications ran successfully under Vista without modification than under XP SP2.

However, there are now many alternatives to running “standard” desktops and laptops. Great to have choices, but it does make life a little more complex. Such alternatives include, but are by no means limited to, application streaming, desktop virtualisation, application virtualisation, virtual machine plus application capture, and a more traditional terminal service driven application approach to name but a few. But our research shows that it is not simple to make a business case for going down the 'virtualised desktop' route. That mix of solutions holds lots of potential cost savings in management, and possibly in hardware too. But, and it is very big but, it is hard to make a case for some of the newer elements therein and especially on the new management tools for virtualised desktop that are only just beginning to trickle out.

We are also seeing that it is a prime objective for CIOs to make solid 'NOW' business cases which I and several of my colleagues suspect means that we will only see a slow take up of desktop virtualisation solutions unless there are extremely clear forcing factors to accelerate adoption. It is now clear that CIOs are extremely reluctant to base any investment case on futures or too many assumptions reflecting just how hard nosed business stakeholders are nowadays.

Thus there is now a clear onus on desktop virtualisation vendors and, indeed, on the analyst community to help explain just what options are available, where they fit, where each is inappropriate and, perhaps most importantly of all, what is the business case for adopting such solutions. No small job here then.

Justifying a large scale Vista migration

2008-06-27T16:19:00.000Z

Over the past couple of months, I have had in-depth conversations with five CIOs that have made a significant commitment to Windows Vista.

One of the main issues I explored with each of them was the foundation upon which the business case for migration was made. The responses I received were remarkably consistent, and not completely in tune with the way Microsoft articulates the Vista proposition.

What all these guys said was that their business case for Vista, i.e. the one put before the board, CFO and/or other significant stakeholders, was founded on benefits in two key areas - security risk management and operational cost control.

From a security perspective, the focus tended to be on three specific attributes of Vista - better run-time security in the operating system itself, more effective policy enforcement, and the ability to encrypt data on notebook PCs through BitLocker.

What I found interesting was the view that while all three of these security related benefits were considered to be significant, it was the last one in particular that was most frequently highlighted as resonating directly with business stakeholders. Recent high profile press coverage about notebooks storing sensitive data being lost or stolen was seen to have an influence here in terms of awareness. Against this background, Vista’s ability to deal with an acknowledged business risk straight out-of-the-box was perceived to be of significant value.

Beyond security, double-digit reductions in operational cost generally formed the substance of the business case in financial terms. The general streamlining of the management and maintenance process was highlighted as part of this, and the dramatic simplification of image management in particular was seen as a significant contributor to the savings in the large multi-national environment.

Something I was personally very sceptical about, but which three of the five CIOs defended very strongly, were the savings in relation to desktop power consumption. Numbers from 50 Euros per year per desktop upwards were cited as savings, though to be absolutely clear, the benefit comes from better centralised control and enforcement of power management policies rather than efficiencies in the way Vista uses hardware resources.

When asked about the element that was clearly missing from these business cases, namely improved user productivity, the general consensus was that this was a red herring. The most positive view was that there is likely to be some impact in this area, but it is impossible to measure in any tangible way, so why would you dilute an otherwise solid business case with something that could easily discredit it? Best to stick the list of intangibles in your bottom drawer and run with what you can defend with confidence.

And it is on this point that the CIOs I have been speaking with diverge from the view articulated by Microsoft. In fact one said the obsessive reference to the great user interface, user facing productivity features, etc caused a lot of distraction and confusion when he invited a Microsoft executive to meet some of his business sponsors. When a stakeholder says, “I don’t understand, I thought we were doing this to save money”, it doesn’t actually help to get the investment case signed off.

There are a couple of lessons that fall out of this. Firstly, if you are going through the process of evaluating the business case for Vista yourself, the abovementioned criteria will hopefully provide some thoughts based on where at least a few others have put the emphasis – particularly in a large corporate or public sector environment.

Secondly, the feedback suggests that you should be prepared for business sponsors to get confused about the rationale for migrating based on the messages broadcast by Microsoft both directly and indirectly through advertising, the media, marketing collateral, etc. The trick here is agreeing that it will be a great spin-off benefit if all of the claimed or suspected end user productivity gains are realised, but keep the investment case itself focused on the more solid stuff that can be defended under cross-examination.

Finally, there is a message in here for any Microsoft executives reading this. If you can curb your enthusiasm for obsessing about the Wow! and focus on the things that drive decisions, you might see more movement in the market.

Behind the scenes at the National Gallery provides plenty of food for thought.

2008-06-19T21:46:00.002Z

I recently had the pleasure of attending an event which took a group of analysts and journalists ‘behind the scenes’ at the National Gallery to see some of the work HP is involved in.

Combining new and old has always fascinated me. The sight of a Victorian frontage hiding a glass and steel interior may horrify the purist, but for me, the contrast and aesthetic effect created is simply fantastic. (I was on a stag weekend to Dublin recently. The Guinness storehouse is an example of this on a grand scale).

Hence, on that premise alone, the National Gallery trip seemed like a pleasant – but only vaguely relevant – way to spend an afternoon. In hindsight, not only did it remind me why technology is so important for adding colour to our busy lives, it was also relevant to my interests in information management and sustainability.

The topic of the day - restoration and analysis of the collection at the National Gallery, is relevant but only to a point – highbrow art is not to everyone’s taste. However, combining technological advancement with ‘traditional pastimes’ is relevant to us all. And, as we seem to find less and less time in which to enjoy ourselves, we need all the help we can get.

So, the two sides of the day. First we were treated to lectures on the restoration work being carried out on some of the paintings. HP provides the equipment (and sponsors a doctoral post) to carry out non-invasive studies (imaging) so that the gallery can learn more about composition; x-ray imaging reveals the artist’s original plans -many paintings are altered during their creation- and other information on colour pigments and so on. All fascinating stuff, if that’s your thing.

The second part of the day was about creating new applications and communities by liberating information. Or at least, that’s what I now see it was about. A sizable investment in on site technology and the National Gallery’s website has created a resource that allows the user to access practically any work in the collection. High resolution zooms (useful if you are into studying the actual painting, as opposed to admiring it), and a whole load of useful search and referencing capabilities are now at the user’s fingertips.

Having only had a short time to play on it, I know I’m hugely underplaying the features. However, the net result is a system which creates opportunities for a range of activities; from tourists planning gallery visits, to scholarly groups carrying out research or sharing information.
In short, the gallery has extended the reach and influence of its entire collection to a global audience. The collection can be scrutinised in infinitely more detail than ever before, without actually being there.

The gallery has to address information storage and management as knock-on effects. While it applies new ideas to old works, it also creates new, but not insurmountable challenges for itself. One of the solutions the IT department is currently playing with is virtualisation. Interestingly, although there are limitations on the use of images from its collection, the gallery seemed relatively relaxed about its 'IP' being disseminated globally. Perhaps the knowledge that the real thing hangs on its wall helps somewhat.

As an example of how moving bits instead of atoms can enrich work and play, I believe this one deserves thinking about. The fact that the example stems from a relatively surprising source makes it even more interesting.

Technology, when applied thoughtfully and appropriately can improve the way we interact with the world, and lessen the impact of us doing so.

It is this sentiment that all organisations should seek to apply to their people, products and processes, instead of charging into the data centre and seeking to reduce power consumption before really thinking about what the business wants to achieve.

Not If or When, The Question is What?

2008-06-16T10:03:00.000Z

A few weeks ago I pointed out that IT management tools are finally, after many decades of masquerade, ready to deliver the functionality that their product descriptions infer, namely capabilities to actively manage nearly all elements of the IT infrastructure rather than simply monitor if systems are up and “running”.If one takes this as a valid starting assumption then one really must consider how organisations can best move their systems management thinking forward.

Some IT managers may be tempted to ask the “should I really look at automating my systems management processes”? To which the answer is very clearly yes. The pressure on IT to deliver more flexible services to its customers is immense whilst the workloads now placed on IT administrators is almost overwhelming. Doing nothing on automation, the “If” question, is no longer an option.

So we then move on to the “when” side of things. Often this is phrased along the lines of “sure we will adopt this technology (whatever it may be) when the time is right and when the technology is mature enough”. Frankly, and at long last, for automating very many systems management and administrative tasks that time is now. The technology is now advanced enough to deal with many routine, repetitive tasks that consume so much scarce It personnel resources. Now I do understand that the automation of well understood, and sometimes even well documented, IT processes will grate for many of my IT generation who can remember numerous occasions when IT solutions did not quite deliver what was promised. For systems management automation this is a major challenge and one that needs to be addressed quickly. The technology is available, but often the trust of said systems is not there.

Which just leaves the question of “what” management tasks to automate. Well this will vary organisation by organisation. And if the trust of new management automation tools is not there then the identification and testing of the automation of simple tasks should be the first step to take. It will consume some of those scarce personnel resources but the investment in locating and automating tasks will quickly prove to be of immense value. And not just in saving time but potentially in raising the quality of the IT services delivered.

Business Intelligence and the bolting horse

2008-06-12T16:17:00.000Z

There appears to be a revival of interest in Business Intelligence (BI) among IT vendors at the moment. Some pretty big guns, the likes of Oracle, IBM, SAP and Microsoft, are trying to position themselves more aggressively in this space following the spate of acquisitions.

So is this renewed vigour justified?

Well from a customer perspective it undoubtedly is. It is pretty clear when you research BI that the gap between business need and IT capability is as great as ever. When we interviewed a bunch of senior business managers from City of London financial institutions last year, for example, they were very clear about this gap:

And if you look at this chart closely, you will notice something quite interesting. While business information availability isn't that bad at an overall financial and arguably operational performance level, it is not very good when you look at more detailed measures and indicators.

Why is this interesting?

Well because it tells us that by the time those managing the business find out about something important, it is often too late to do anything about it. Stories of product, client or partner related issues only coming to light when someone starts investigating why a higher level number has been missed are quite common.

To put it another way, business managers usually have what they need to monitor the ‘effects’ of doing business, but are typically underserved when it comes to the information required to manage the underlying ‘causes’ of those effects. We discuss this more in the research report from the study if you are interested, but it does bring home the importance of incorporating continuous analytics capability into the business process itself, as well as having traditional retrospective BI operating off to one side.

The aforementioned vendors are therefore spot-on when it comes to making a big noise about the principle of integrating BI capability into applications in a more embedded fashion. Now, whether they have done a good of integrating their recent acquisitions into their broader solution set in practice is another question, but it is at least worth hearing them out.

Asset + IT asset management = enterprise service management. Perhaps.

2008-06-12T00:38:00.003Z

The IBM Tivoli Pulse event a few weeks ago left me with a clear thought. Convergence between enterprise asset management and IT (asset) management) is a long haul. This is not a bad thing – except – and we know this to be true of some IT vendors – there is always the risk that if things don’t move fast enough, interest is lost, ideas go stale, people get distracted.

Am I saying IT vendors are a bit fickle on occasion? Moi?

I don’t expect IBM to get bored easily though, but I do expect it to start looking for ways to catalyse the consolidation between the two camps.

So what’s all this about anyway?

The view is that there are significant benefits and economies of scale to be found in consolidating the visibility, control and management of assets owned or used by an organisation, which traditionally are divided into two classes: enterprise (non IT) assets and IT assets.
By having a single view of an asset base, services can be better aligned to the goals of the business, because it has better control over the things it uses to deliver the services which define it as a business, and better control over the services which support it as it does its business.

On paper, it’s a common sense principle of ‘single version of the truth’. In practice, it will take most organisations a long time to get there because the asset guys and the IT guys are facing the notion of giving up some level of control or ownership. For people more used to repairing trucks or moving physical goods to specific places, and for people more used to making sure email servers don’t crash, it is understandable that one could have difficulty in seeing the world from the others’ point of view. But mutual understanding and appreciation isn’t actually what’s required. Mutual access and roles-based manipulation of the same, consistent information is. Two disparate groups of people collaborating physically, or ‘giving things up to each other’ isn’t the issue. But this I fear, (or fear of this, in fact) could be the rate limiting factor.

As long as each side has the access to the information they need to carry out their jobs, the source of the underlying data – as long as it’s consistent – is hardly relevant. Furthermore, the asset guys ‘get’ services, the IT guys know how to make things talk to each other and stop them falling over – both sides in fact have things they can teach the other. Figuratively.

So the long haul sentiment comes about from the human nature angle I outlined above, and the fact that this year’s star customer at Pulse was the same as last years. Its not going very quickly, yet.

Also, IBM is treading (too) carefully in that it went to lengths to maintain a clear demarcation between talking about Maximo customers (its enterprise asset management (EAM) customers acquired during the MRO purchase) and Tivoli (systems and IT management) customers for fear of being seen to be favouring one over the other, or perhaps running into the type of uncertainty Oracle’s recent acquisitions created. This makes the audience it has for actually evangelising the notion of convergence artificially small, which is ironic, given it owns two customer bases with minimal overlap which form the foundations for what is a pretty sensible idea.

Rather than taking the softly softly approach, what needs to happen is for IBM to start providing the reasons why, and help customers work around the reasons why not. And then find as many McCarran Airports as it can to become advocates.

I have to say I’m a little surprised at the (apparent) lack of buzz on this from the Tivoli or Maximo customer base, as there must surely be an opportunity for asking IBM to ‘step up and prove it in my organisation’.

Microsoft’s virtualisation story was pretty cool at MMS, so why’s it all gone quiet?

2008-06-02T22:53:00.004Z

I had a few days in Vegas at MMS (Microsoft Management Summit) at the end of April, just before I moved house and then took some time off to get things straight. When I got back it was like the whole thing never happened. Even a quick Google search on ‘Microsoft+virtualisation’ gives me content from 2005 from the fifth finding down. Weird.

It wasn’t like Microsoft didn’t say anything of note either: pricing for virtualisation capabilities inside Windows Server 2008, support for non-Microsoft virtualised environments, and the big one which hasn’t really been talked about loudly up to now from any vendor with management products – managing virtualised environments. Sure, the word ‘Beta’ was all over the place, but that’s what we’re used to.

I’ve not quite decided yet if virtualisation needs calling out specifically as a candidate for special management focus, and that’s possibly a conversation for another time. Until organisations get their bearings, fine, after that virtualisation needs to be seen as the means to an end it really is, and managing as such. The fact that generating change in a virtualised environment is slicker than in a physical environment does make the case for an equally slick approach to management, but that’s not the same as treating virtualised and physical environments as separate entities. There are too many management silos already.

But the virtualisation product-in-beta-list wasn’t the most interesting bit. That came when Microsoft, by placing such a low price point ($28 or some seemingly made up figure) on the virtualisation component of Windows Server 2008 made the clearest statement of intent / reality around virtualisation yet. Virtualisation isn’t the exciting bit. What organisations do in their virtualised environments is the exciting bit. The fact that it’s Microsoft saying this means virtualisation is no longer hip or sexy, but it is real, because now it’s a mainstream activity.

And that’s why I thought there’d be more out there on this: there were a few mumblings about ‘being late to the party’ (which only make sense if you forget there is an entire world outside of the fortune 500) and managing non-Microsoft environments circulating before hand, but then again, as a group we’re quick to gripe but slower to acknowledge change. Or maybe, as the conference silly season was / is in full swing, everyone simply went home and immediately got on a plane for the next one. I know I did (and the house move, obviously). IBM Tivoli Pulse next.

PS. A big thumbs up to everyone who got a mention in the IIAR analyst of the year poll. Our stable mates MWD and Redmonk did rather well, and for a relative newbie we’re rather pleased with our own showing too.

Talking at cross purposes, or being deliberately misled?

2008-06-01T16:16:00.000Z

Ever had one of those conversations where you debate something for a while then it dawns on you that each party has been talking about something different? It has happened to me quite a few times recently.

One example was in relation to Business Process Modelling (BPM), which is something I grew up with and in my mind is about, well, modelling business processes. It’s a discipline that business analysts have been involved with for a years, and while the technology to support it has moved on, and arguably some of the methodologies too, the fundamental principles haven’t changed that much for a long time now. Then someone asked Freeform Dynamics to design a research study to figure out the level to which organisations had adopted BPM. When I argued during an internal project start-up meeting that you couldn’t really ask someone about when and how they were taking something on board that they had been doing for a decade or two, it turned out that the ‘BPM’ we were being asked to investigate was actually 'Business Process Management' and was based on a definition which included the technical side of things – workflow rules engines, SOA orchestration, and so on. Not quite the technology-independent business view of BPM that I was taught earlier in my career, but as soon as the misunderstanding was cleared up, we could design the research accordingly.

Another example was prompted by a report I read the other day claiming that Software as a Service (SaaS) is now a mature and pervasive model. This was reminiscent of claims made during a number of other conversations I have had recently with SaaS advocates, that I have been struggling to reconcile with the findings of our own research. The latter has shown quite conclusively that while larger organisations are starting to make selective use of SaaS for delivering business application functionality, 'pervasive' is certainly not a word that applies in this area. Then I realised that some of the advocates were throwing a whole bunch of stuff into their definition of SaaS (or the related S+S model) that I would never dream of including when discussing the delivery of business application functionality. Internet search, traditional ISP services, and even things like consumer content services, online help and automatic updates associated with desktop software can sometimes be lumped together when referring the 'SaaS market'. Again, once the ambiguity is cleared up, you can see where people are coming from, and make a judgement on the usefulness (or otherwise) of what they are saying.

I guess we at Freeform are particularly sensitive to precision when it comes to discussing market activity, as primary research designed to figure out what’s really going on behind the buzzwords and the hype is so central to what we do. The experiences I have outlined, however, highlight how easily people can be misled by imprecise or ambiguous definitions if they are not on their guard. And with so much vested interest and evangelism driving the market, the temptation for some to spin and exploit our ever changing vocabulary is significant, so we all need to careful about what is behind those stats and definitions.

Missing Meta Data Needed for Effective Storage Management

2008-05-30T14:56:00.003Z

Ever since time, or at least Computing time, began most of the focus has centred around the processing of data. Until recently it would be straight forward to argue that too little attention has been given to the long term storage of said information. But as the volume of data being generated soars and the costs of storing it escalates dramatically it is clear that something has to be done.

Over the course of the last ten days I have visited the EMCWorld show in Las Vegas, been present at the opening of the IBM Global Archival Centre in Guadalajara and spoken with both HP and Fujitsu Siemens about various aspects of storage management in modern business. And there is one thing on which all agree - it's time for change.

Traditionally there have been two approaches to the long term storage of data. One was to leave it alone until the "system", usually a business application, dies or if there is just too much data to leave it at rest move some of it to tape. The decision of just what data to move off of the spinning disks was usually based on how old it was or, in sophisticated cases, when it was last accessed or modified.

Now this might be better than nothing but in today's high pressure, litigious business world where attention is grabbed by anything that saves money or that can help generate new value it is clear that such basic methods of data archiving are simply not tenable in sophisticated tiered storage architectures where information may need to be retrieved with great speed. Enter Content and Document Management systems coupled with clever archiving management software.

Until recently such systems have required considerable effort to get in and running and as a consequence have usually been deployed in only key situations. But now some vendors have started to deliver software that helps to automate the discovery and categorisation processes that form the foundation of ECM / EDM systems. Step one “Discover” just what data is out there in the enterprise and step two “categorise” it in terms of its importance and in terms of by which management policies it should be controlled.

It then becomes possible to define policies that describe just how and on which platforms different classes of data should be held. Then everything else is relatively straightforward (if you can ignore the internal politics associated with questions of data classification and importance ranking). Modern software and the experience of best practices obtained in the real world are now offering the chance for wide spread data classification to happen. And it is this meta data and classification that hold real promise to help in the effective administration of data over long periods of time. Automation is the key as is not attempting to do everything at once.

Finally “Management” Not Just “Monitoring”

2008-05-15T17:12:00.000Z

Almost since the world was created, at least the IT world, computer systems and all the associated, and increasingly complex, plethora of associated equipment has required feeding and watering. Few systems, with perhaps the notable exception of the AS/400 sorry System i no wrong again the i, manage to keep themselves functioning efficiently, if at all, without the care and attention of skilled IT professionals. As the number of systems to be controlled and looked after increased the gods of IT, better known as the software vendors, started to build tools to monitor the condition of servers and storage. Strangely these monitoring tools were called “management” systems.

Today with every organisation seeking to optimise both the availability and effectiveness of its IT systems the demand for true systems management tools has never been greater. The increasing deployment of virtualised systems adds further to the need for tools that really help with the automatic management and administration of systems. Just in time many of the tools that have previously only provided capabilities to monitor systems have moved forward and, at last, are bringing to market true management functionality and options to automate many tasks that until required the undivided attention of sys admins.

Now it is interesting to note that it is not just the vendors who have traditionally supplied monitoring / management tools that are bringing updated offerings to market. Alongside IBM Tivoli, CA Unicenter, HP OpenView and BMC Patrol, the management giants,can now be found a range of newer, though not new, entrants. Amongst these is the industry behemoth that is Microsoft and it is interesting to note that the company is rapidly developing not only management tools to help automate the administration of Windows systems but is actively developing capabilities to manage virtualised systems, including those running on their hypervisors supplied by other vendors.

Then there are other suppliers such as Quest and EMC amongst the raft of virtual system management specialists who are putting together strong offerings. The management space is finally able to deliver, at least from the software supplier side of the equation, management and automatic administration capabilities; it is no longer just concerned with monitoring.

This situation then raises the obvious question, namely are IT professionals ready to exploit the management and automation capabilities that are now becoming available? I hope that the take up of these capabilities will be rapid although I do detect that many system admins still consider any management automation capability with more than a little scepticism, and perhaps with some concern over their job security. Granted these management tools need to prove themselves in the real world and that the vendors have a duty to deliver them with some idea of how they can be best exploited. They must be utilised as widely as possible if IT is help its business customers to exploit as fully as possible the benefits that IT delivers.

Welcome Josie

2008-05-08T20:01:00.004Z

It is with great pleasure that we welcome Josie Sephton into the fold as the latest addition to the Freeform Dynamics team.

Josie may be a fledgling Freeformer, but is a highly experienced telecom analyst and consultant with a solid track record in the industry, most recently with Ovum. She joins us to head up our activities in the service provider space, which means Jon and I won’t have to bluff our way through all that telecoms stuff anymore – we now have someone who really does know what they are talking about :-)

Seriously, as other areas of activity and have been so busy for us, we have struggled to cover the service provider area adequately, and filling this slot will provide much needed focus on a really important part of the industry.

You can check out Josie’s bio and contact details here.

Cloud Computing and Web 2.0

2008-04-27T16:15:00.000Z

Don’t you just hate it when another woolly ambiguous term is forced upon us? When I was approached by yet another journalist the other day asking me my thoughts on the impact of cloud computing, I simply sighed and told them it is a bit like Web 2.0. In itself, it is difficult to pin down exactly what is meant by it. The best you can do is say that both of these terms refer to a general direction in which the industry appears to be moving.

In the case of Web 2.0, it is about the Web becoming a generally more interactive medium. This can manifest itself at a technology level through everything from Ajax through mash-ups to SOA, and at a behavioural level through social media and the simple fact that websites are generally now more geared up to a two-way dialogue than they used to be.

In the case of cloud computing, it is about the evolution of dynamic virtualised infrastructure that allows us to think more in terms of resource pools than individual IT components. This in turn opens the door to delivering computing resource on a utility basis, which is equally applicable both internally (i.e. with regard to the way you use your data centre) and externally – which takes you into the realm of utility computing and software as a service.

The point about both Web 2.0 and cloud computing is that they both sprung up arbitrarily on the evolutionary timeline, and seeming embraced anything and everything that could be thrown into the mix. While the very specific phenomenon of social networking is certainly noteworthy, this bears little relationship to evolution of rich user interfaces and composite applications, in fact many social networking sites have appalling UIs by traditional standards. Yet Web 2.0 can mean either of these things, and, confusingly, lots of other concepts too.

Similarly, we have been talking about virtualisation ultimately leading to computing grids and utility computing for years, and giving it a new name doesn’t actually change anything in terms of the underlying trend. In fact, you knew where you stood much better when you could talk about virtualisation and grid technology as the enabling stuff, and utility computing and application services as what it enables. As everyone jumps onto the cloud computing bandwagon, it all gets mixed up and confused, just like Web 2.0.

So, if you are one of those people wondering what cloud computing is really all about after listening the IBM explanation, the Microsoft one, and the evangelical rhetoric we have heard recently from the Google and Salesforce.com camp, don’t worry, you are not alone. The trick is to think of it as a label for a trend at one level, and an industry bandwagon at another, and keep your expectations pretty low in terms of clarity and consistency for the time being. Don’t however, dismiss the underlying trend it itself. While we are not looking at a revolution here, some of the developments in this general area are really quite interesting and valuable – though, you probably knew that already, even before the marketing hype was thrust upon us.