By: Robin Bloor, Co-Founder, The Bloor Group Posted: 20th March 2013 Copyright The Bloor Group © 2013

Big Data is mentioned in IT articles everywhere; it even makes appearances in the national press and on TV. It is famous. Naturally, IT professionals are mesmerized by this. There are challenges. There are opportunities. There are prizes to be won. But sadly, many IT professionals do not have to manage and exploit very large data heaps. What gives?

Is something dramatically new happening with Big Data. Specifically: “Is the current growth in data volumes greater than it has been historically? The short answer to this is “No, not really.”

The problem of data obesity
Examine data growth estimates and measurements by IDC and Gartner and you see that, historically, the volume of data that we store grows at about 55% every year. When the economy is in recession, it grows less, and in boom times it grows more, but it doesn’t vary much from that figure. That’s how it has been for years and it is also the case now. It grows at a hell of a clip all the time.

Nevertheless there are companies; Google, Yahoo!, Facebook, LinkedIn and quite a few others, that experience data growth rates much higher than that. But "there's nothing new under the sun" as Solomon once said. There always were such 'data-obese' companies. In previous IT eras some companies (banks, telcos, retailers, etc.) experienced data growth that was well above the average, just as some companies experienced modest growth rates.

Take a look at the graph above, which was constructed by averaging the decline in the costs of various forms of storage over the past 5 years and extrapolating from there. The dotted red line, which represents data growth, easily outpaces the decline in the raw costs of all storage media. The costs of storage media, by the way, do not represent the whole cost of storage. In fact they represent maybe 25–30% of the costs; other costs include manual labor (the cost of that is not falling, it’s gradually rising) the cost of data center space, power costs and the costs of downtime and recovery.

The question then is whether a company has a genuine 'Big Data' project going on involving much larger volumes of data than normal, or whether they are simply experiencing average data growth. Either way, there is an unrelenting pressure to manage an ever increasing collection of data.

Shoop, Shoop, Hadoop
When we think of data, we tend to think of the databases and files where the data is stored. But over the past two decades most tranactional data has tended to have multiple uses rather than just by the application that creates it. It is shared. it has a life cycle. This leads us to the area of data warehouse. The once beguiling idea that we could syphon off data from transactional systems and accumulate it into a central data store that fed multiple BI applications has experienced a bruising encounter with reality in recent years.

In some sites, the attempt at a single data warehouse was sunk beneath the need to also have operational data stores (that had more up-to-date data) and the disease of 'spread marts,' with joyously empowered users and corporate departments breeding data marts like rabbits. The single data warehouse—some companies had multiple ones anyway—turned into a staging point for the creation of other data heaps. Big fleas had little fleas on their backs to bite 'em, and little fleas had lesser fleas and so ad infinitum From a service-to-the-user perspective this may have been healthy, but from a data management perspective, it was not. As transactional data volumes grew, so did the data warehouse volumes and the data mart volumes naturally followed suit. Data growth happened everywhere.

So, with an impressive drum roll, Enter Hadoop, and its oddly named children, HBase, Hive, Pig, Mahout, Flume, and many more (There was an old woman who lived in a shoe...). Whether a company uses Hadoop for new data, such as click streams from web sites or social media data or floods of data from RFID tags, or whether it is simply being used to accommodate data that would otherwise be archived, is not the issue here. The issue is that Hadoop is a data lake that can take data from anywhere and everywhere without any need of preparation. It is a data lake that has tributaries and it can be used as a data reservoir. And as a consequnce, the traditional data warehouse idea is shattered.

This is what is new about Big Data. And it is reinforced by the fact that Hadoop, although limited in many ways when compared to a large traditional database engine, is capable of ingesting any kind of data. It is capable of impersonating a database and it is capable of impersonating a file system, and even mixing the two together. Its popularity among IT folk is a testament to that, even though, in many ways, the whole software stack is immature. Hadoop is has become a natural part of the IT ecosystem, and it is not going to suddenly disappear.

Consider the data flows
Imagine for one glorious moment that we have a single distributed data store that serves every single application we run. Imagine that different applications; office applications, transactional applications, BI applications, mobile applications—in short, all applications—use this one distributed data store to serve their every need. Within that imaginary data store there will be a great deal of activity, partly to keep all data consistent as it is updated and partly to create fast caches of data for specific applications—BI applications and analytic applications for example—so that the data is served at the right latency. It will also need to provide backup and recovery.

That was a pleasant dream; now let’s return to reality. Oddly enough, that's the kind of data arrangement we actually have 'logically'. Sadly, the data is not in a single distributed data store, it is in multiple different data stores, some of which are built to provide the right speed of data access. In between these various data stores (traditional databases, column store databases, Hadoop, document stores, etc.) we have a data transport system. Constant data flows feed staging areas or directly feed databases or data stores. And like the databases, these data flows have service levels that they need to meet.

That’s difficult enough, but just add in the average 55% data growth rate and you will quickly conclude that the database performance will deteriorate and the data flows will go slower as the data volumes increase, so there’s a constant need to buy more iron and to have faster software just to keep pace. It’s a balancing act, and if you fail to balance it, the service to the user begins to deteriorate.

So in summary, or perhaps in consolation, I suggest that irrespective of the actual volume of data, you have Big Data if you are encountering the problems I just described. Big Data is only big if you are having big problems managing it. Really Big Data means really Big Problems. 

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 1st February 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Just before Christmas, GlobeRanger announced iMotion Stratus, the cloud-based version of its iMotion Edgeware Platform. It delivers the features of the iMotion server-based platform from the cloud. Stratus provides a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) avenue for companies to begin utilising RFID technology without the upfront costs of RFID software and the servers to run it. It allows for economical small initial deployments with the ability to scale up as needed. Deployments can scale from a single location to thousands of locations globally.

iMotion Stratus is the cloud-based platform for RFID, mobility and sensor solutions. It is built with the same software used by the GlobeRanger iMotion Edgeware Platform. Stratus integrates seamlessly with iMotion server-based and network appliance-based deployments to allow the best-suited technology for the specific application to be used, whether an on-premise server or cloud-based. It utilises the same configurable application and solution accelerators as the server-based iMotion platform. The configurable applications enable quick deployment of solutions from the cloud including shipping/receiving, asset tracking, and perishable goods tracking.

David South, VP Solutions and Support, said, "New initiatives based on the Internet of Things (IoT), the Industrial Internet and Big Data are now fully enabled with the complete iMotion family of products. iMotion sits at the intersection of Information-in-Motion, Inventory-in-Motion, and Infrastructure-in-Motion. iMotion Stratus completes a vital part of GlobeRanger's vision of global processes, data mobility, and machine to machine communications to manage the Internet of Things. The iMotion family allows data and processes to reside on a mobile device, a network appliance, an on-premise server, or on the cloud. "

GlobeRanger have been one of the more successful RFID middleware vendors. They are still an independent company whereas many of their competitors have been bought by either RFID application vendors or hardware vendors. GlobeRanger and iMotion are well worth looking at.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 29th January 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

Ford has exploited the strengths of big data analytics by directing them internally to improve business results. In doing so, they scour the metrics from the company’s best processes across myriad manufacturing efforts and through detailed outputs from in-use automobiles—all to improve and help transform their business.

So explains Michael Cavaretta, PhD, Technical Leader of Predictive Analytics for Ford Research and Advanced Engineering in Dearborn, Michigan. Cavaretta is one of a group of experts assembled this week for The Open Group Conference in Newport Beach, California.

Cavaretta has led multiple data-analysis projects at Ford to break down silos inside the company to best define Ford’s most fruitful data sets. Ford has successfully aggregated customer feedback and extracted all the internal data to predict how best new features in technologies will improve their cars.

As a contributor to the The Open Group conference and its focus on "Big Data—The Transformation We Need to Embrace Today," Cavaretta explains how big data is fostering business transformation by allowing deeper insights into more types of data efficiently, and thereby improving processes, quality control, and customer satisfaction.

The interview was moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: What's different now in being able to get at this data and do this type of analysis from five years ago?

Cavaretta: The biggest difference has to do with the cheap availability of storage and processing power, where a few years ago people were very much concentrated on filtering down the datasets that were being stored for long-term analysis. There has been a big sea change with the idea that we should just store as much as we can and take advantage of that storage to improve business processes.

Gardner: How did we get here? What's the process behind the benefits?

Cavaretta: The process behind the benefits has to do with a sea change in the attitude of organizations, particularly IT within large enterprises. There's this idea that you don't need to spend so much time figuring out what data you want to store and worry about the cost associated with it, and more about data as an asset. There is value in being able to store it, and being able to go back and extract different insights from it. This really comes from this really cheap storage, access to parallel processing machines, and great software.

I like to talk to people about the possibility that big data provides and I always tell them that I have yet to have a circumstance where somebody is giving me too much data. You can pull in all this information and then answer a variety of questions, because you don't have to worry that something has been thrown out. You have everything.

You may have 100 questions, and each one of the questions uses a very small portion of the data. Those questions may use different portions of the data, a very small piece, but they're all different. If you go in thinking, "We’re going to answer the top 20 questions and we’re just going to hold data for that," that leaves so much on the table, and you don't get any value out of it.

We're a big believer in mash-ups and we really believe that there is a lot of value in being able to take even datasets that are not specifically big-data sizes yet, and then not go deep, not get more detailed information, but expand the breadth. So it's being able to augment it with other internal datasets, bridging across different business areas as well as augmenting it with external datasets.

A lot of times you can take something that is maybe a few hundred thousand records or a few million records, and then by the time you’re joining it, and appending different pieces of information onto it, you can get the big dataset sizes.

Gardner: You’re really looking primarily at internal data, while also availing yourself of what external data might be appropriate. Maybe you could describe a little bit about your organization, what you do, and why this internal focus is so important for you.

Cavaretta: I'm part of a larger department that is housed over in the research and advanced-engineering area at Ford Motor Company, and we’re about 30 people. We work as internal consultants, kind of like Capgemini or Ernst & Young, but only within Ford Motor Company. We’re responsible for going out and looking for different opportunities from the business perspective to bring advanced technologies. So, we’ve been focused on the area of statistical modeling and machine learning for I’d say about 15 years or so.

And in this time, we’ve had a number of engagements where we’ve talked with different business customers, and people have said, "We'd really like to do this." Then, we'd look at the datasets that they have, and say, "Wouldn’t it be great if we would have had this. So now we have to wait six months or a year."

These new technologies are really changing the game from that perspective. We can turn on the complete fire-hose, and then say that we don't have to worry about that anymore. Everything is coming in. We can record it all. We don't have to worry about if the data doesn’t support this analysis, because it's all there. That's really a big benefit of big-data technologies.

The real value proposition definitely is changing as things are being pushed down in the company to lower-level analysts who are really interested in looking at things from a data-driven perspective. From when I first came in to now, the biggest change has been when Alan Mulally came into the company, and really pushed the idea of data-driven decisions.

Before, we were getting a lot of interest from people who are really very focused on the data that they had internally. After that, they had a lot of questions from their management and from upper level directors and vice-president saying, "We’ve got all these data assets. We should be getting more out of them." This strategic perspective has really changed a lot of what we’ve done in the last few years.

Gardner: Are we getting to the point where this sort of Holy Grail notion of a total feedback loop across the lifecycle of a major product like an automobile is really within our grasp? Are we getting there, or is this still kind of theoretical. Can we pull it altogether and make it a science?

Cavaretta: The theory is there. The question has more to do with the actual implementation and the practicality of it. We still are talking a lot of data where even with new advanced technologies and techniques that’s a lot of data to store, it’s a lot of data to analyze, there’s a lot of data to make sure that we can mash-up appropriately.

And, while I think the potential is there and I think the theory is there. There is also work in being able to get the data from multiple sources. So everything which you can get back from the vehicle, fantastic. Now if you marry that up with internal data, is it survey data, is it manufacturing data, is it quality data? What are the things do you want to go after first? We can’t do everything all at the same time.

Our perspective has been let’s make sure that we identify the highest value, the greatest ROI areas, and then begin to take some of the major datasets that we have and then push them and get more detail. Mash them up appropriately and really prove up the value for the technologists.

Gardner: Clearly, there's a lot more to come in terms of where we can take this, but I suppose it's useful to have a historic perspective and context as well. I was thinking about some of the early quality gurus like Deming and some of the movement towards quality like Six Sigma. Does this fall within that same lineage? Are we talking about a continuum here over that last 50 or 60 years, or is this something different?

Cavaretta: That’s a really interesting question. From the perspective of analyzing data, using data appropriately, I think there is a really good long history, and Ford has been a big follower of Deming and Six Sigma for a number of years now.

The difference though, is this idea that you don't have to worry so much upfront about getting the data. If you're doing this right, you have the data right there, and this has some great advantages. You’ll have to wait until you get enough history to look for somebody’s patterns. Then again, it also has some disadvantage, which is you’ve got so much data that it’s easy to find things that could be spurious correlations or models that don’t make any sense.

The piece that is required is good domain knowledge, in particular when you are talking about making changes in the manufacturing plant. It's very appropriate to look at things and be able to talk with people who have 20 years of experience to say, "This is what we found in the data. Does this match what your intuition is?" Then, take that extra step.

Gardner: How has the notion of the Internet of things being brought to bear on your gathering of big data and applying it to the analytics in your organization?

Cavaretta: It is a huge area, and not only from the internal process perspective—RFID tags within the manufacturing plans, as well as out on the plant floor, and then all of the information that’s being generated by the vehicle itself.

The Ford Energi generates about 25 gigabytes of data per hour. So you can imagine selling couple of million vehicles in the near future with that amount of data being generated. There are huge opportunities within that, and there are also some interesting opportunities having to do with opening up some of these systems for third-party developers. OpenXC is an initiative that we have going on to add at Research and Advanced Engineering.

We have a lot of data coming from the vehicle. There’s huge number of sensors and processors that are being added to the vehicles. There's data being generated there, as well as communication between the vehicle and your cell phone and communication between vehicles.

There's a group over at Ann Arbor Michigan, the University of Michigan Transportation Research Institute (UMTRI), that’s investigating that, as well as communication between the vehicle and let’s say a home system. It lets the home know that you're on your way and it’s time to increase the temperature, if it’s winter outside, or cool it at the summer time.

The amount of data that’s been generated there is invaluable information and could be used for a lot of benefits, both from the corporate perspective, as well as just the very nature of the environment.

Gardner: Just to put a stake in the ground on this, how much data do cars typically generate? Do you have a sense of what now is the case, an average?

Cavaretta: The Energi, according to the latest information that I have, generates about 25 gigabytes per hour. Different vehicles are going to generate different amounts, depending on the number of sensors and processors on the vehicle. But the biggest key has to do with not necessarily where we are right now but where we will be in the near future.

With the amount of information that's being generated from the vehicles, a lot of it is just internal stuff. The question is how much information should be sent back for analysis and to find different patterns? That becomes really interesting as you look at external sensors, temperature, humidity. You can know when the windshield wipers go on, and then to be able to take that information, and mash that up with other external data sources too. It's a very interesting domain.

Gardner: What skills do you target for your group, and what ways do you think that you can improve on that?

Cavaretta: The skills that we have in our department, in particular on our team, are in the area of computer science, statistics, and some good old-fashioned engineering domain knowledge. We’ve really gone about this from a training perspective. Aside from a few key hires, it's really been an internally developed group.

The biggest advantage that we have is that we can go out and be very targeted with the amount of training that we have. There are such big tools out there, especially in the open-source realm, that we can spin things up with relatively low cost and low risk, and do a number of experiments in the area. That's really the way that we push the technologies forward.

Talking with The Open Group really gives me an opportunity to be able to bring people on board with the idea that you should be looking at a difference in mindset. It's not "Here’s a way that data is being generated, look, try and conceive of some questions that we can use, and we’ll store that too." Let's just take everything, we’ll worry about it later, and then we’ll find the value.

It's important to be thinking about data as an asset, rather than as a cost. You even have to spend some money, and it may be a little bit unsafe without really solid ROI at the beginning. Then, move towards pulling that information in, and being able to store it in a way that allows not just the high-level data scientist to get access to and provide value, but people who are interested in the data overall. Those are very important pieces.

The last one is how do you take a big-data project, how do you take something where you’re not storing in the traditional business intelligence (BI) framework that an enterprise can develop, and then connect that to the BI systems and look at providing value to those mash-ups. Those are really important areas that still need some work.

There are many companies, especially large enterprises, that are looking at their data assets and wondering what can they do to monetize this, not only to just pay for the efficiency improvement but as a new revenue stream.

Gardner: For those organizations that want to get started on this, how do you get started?

Cavaretta: We're definitely a huge believer in pilot projects and proof of concept, and we like to develop roadmaps by doing. So get out there. Understand that it's going to be messy. Understand that it maybe going to be a little bit more costly and the ROI isn't going to be there at the beginning.

But get your feet wet. Start doing some experiments, and then, as those experiments turn from just experimentation into really providing real business value, that’s the time to start looking at a more formal aspect and more formal IT processes. But you've just got to get going at this point.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: David Norris, Practice Leader - Analytics, Bloor Research Posted: 16th October 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Advanced analytics is becoming a mainstream business activity and the tools to enable that to happen are being introduced and improved all of the time. This week I had the fortune to be briefed on a product that I have been aware of for some time, but which I had not formally got to learn about, TIBCO Spotfire. Spotfire Version 5 is due shortly, and one of the reasons I was keen to talk to them is that, unlike so many of the exciting products in this area, this is one that is actually available in EMEA late November 2012, and not at some point to be determined in the future.

Analytics used to be the preserve of a small group of very skilled statisticians, who got paid an awful lot of money and, in my experience, seemed to spend an extraordinary amount of time building anything that gave you any really useful insight. But I would contend that all of that is now changing very rapidly; and with the amount of data being made available to help explain the market, and the operations of all enterprises, this is an area of great growth. In a global market you can no longer rely on intuition to get you through, you need facts. In an era of big data, reports and even slicing and dicing data with OLAP, there is just too much data on hand to make assimilation of data, and its translation into actionable insight, meaningful. We all know that banks, retailers and telco's have always had a lot of data but, with the evolution of RFID and sensors on all manner of devices, it is no longer just confined to those sectors that the explosion of data is occurring. It is all very well to have data, but how do you make sense of it, and the answer has to be statistical analysis. We have to use tools to help us classify and detect patterns in the mass of data, and identify the significant from the random. As I intimated, it is no longer acceptable to spend months to tell someone something they already half know, they now want you to confirm that half understood fact in a matter of minutes, and then go on to provide fresh insights that stimulates new trains of thought.

So, what is so important about TIBCO Spotfire 5? It is one of the first tools to really tackle how to make discovery of data within the Big Data of an enterprise an enterprise-ready undertaking. What do I mean by that? Well, in the past it has been the case that most of the tools can be used to analyse very large data sets, but they do so in ways that are ad hoc and hardy likely to gain acceptance by your friendly Run and Operate team as something they will willingly schedule into their month end run times as something that is enterprise ready, and ready to be part and parcel of the same world as your average ERP month end activity.

What Spotfire is aiming to do is to provide the capability of the small scale artisan activity, and spot the all-important outlier of data that provides insight, but they want to do it in a way that scales without requiring massive investment, and which run in the sort of time scales that fit in with mainstream activity, and not those of a data scientist. To this end they have rewritten the memory data engine, which has resulted in massive in-memory performance improvements. They have moved from the use of C# to C++, giving them more low-level control over memory, and they have changed the way that run times operate so that instead of running each component discretely, the elements are now built and rendered in one pass, which results in impressive improvement in the time to deliver a visualisation. They use hybrid operation using the power of the database, where appropriate, to perform some functions that are best done within MS SQL, Oracle or Teradata, and then Spotfire ingests the results and makes them readily available in visualisations etc.

I have written before about how Universities are now adopting R as the new standard for all statistical analysis and how if you want to be able to capture that mass of talent R has to be the way to go: Spotfire is now part of that trend with the TIBCO Enterprise Run Time for R (TERR). TIBCO are making things more ready to run with Self Service Predictive Analytics so the everyday tasks of statistical analysis are provided to the analysts to speed up operations.

They are also looking to take this capability and embed it into the more familiar elements of the TIBCO market offering. Embedding analytics into their enterprise tools, affording insight and prediction into enterprise operations to enhance management of resource in all manner of aspects, is surely the way that all tools must go and TIBCO are to be commended for leading in this field.

TIBCO are at the heart of the enterprise architecture and it is good to see that they view Spotfire not just as an interesting outlier to their mainstream business but as an integral part of where things are going. We live in a world in which data and its analysis is key to maintaining competitive advantage, managing cost and understanding operations. Spotfire looks to be at the very core of making that a reality and I can commend anyone interested to take a closer look.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 20th September 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Having just spent the first week of September as a Games Maker at the Paralympics working as a scorer for the wheelchair fencing, my eye was caught by an article in the July 2012 Logistic Managers magazine entitled - "What will logistics learn from the Olympics?" Well after my own personal experiences from interview to actually being there, I thought it is more than just Logistics that can learn from what has happened in GB this summer.

In the Logistics Manager article (by Malory Davies) it was pointed out that there would be a huge strain on logistics systems due to the operation of the Olympic Route Network. This had resulted in companies looking at innovative approaches to the issue. UPL, who were the Olympics and Paralympics logistics supplier, for instance, had taken to using the Thames to move goods into the village. It used 2 barges to ferry goods from Tilbury to a wharf near the village. DHL had set up a consolidation centre on the outskirts of London to service the Westfield shopping centre which is right at the entrance to the Olympic Park. The Freight Transport Association had release guidance on making deliveries in London and other Olympic venues. Foot couriers were used make deliveries either on foot or on public transport. One logistics company, City Sprint, used roller-bladders to make deliveries.

Having had to travel during the Paralympics during the day to get to my shifts, it was interesting to note the number of helpers on the key stations on the London Underground and Docklands Light Railway. The personnel were clearly identifiable and had radio communications to base. They had been well trained in how to handle crowds coming onto the stations and their customer relations was faultless - this is best summed up by my first arrival at the ExCel Centre, where, as I went up the steps from the Custom House DLR station to the walkway to the Centre, there was a happy Transport for London employee with a megaphone singing to reggae beat where you should go! My daughter works in the City and she told me that during the Olympics she had no problems in getting into work, in fact it was empty! So organisations did take on board the idea of home working, as a way of solving the load on London's transport system; as well as people deciding to take holiday.

But what about the Games themselves, both in terms of the volunteers and the athletes? Well we know now that, in terms of medal totals at both Olympics and Paralympics, we over-achieved on our overall goals, although in some sports we didn't quite get there. Let us look at the athletes first. Our success is due to the investments made into each sport and into certain individuals either through Lottery funding or through private enterprise sponsoring. This resulted in the sporting bodies being able to target and plan effectively for the last four years. Yes there were some hiccups - notably Idowu and British Athletics just before the Olympics. So by appropriate investment, athletic bodies were able to plan and execute against that plan over a long period, even during the recession. The only worry, as I see it, is whether the Government's aim of getting more people actually taking part in sport is going to occur. With the reduction in the investment in school sports and the push for local clubs to make up the shortfall through volunteering, I am not sure that this objective will be met.

As a Games Maker, I have to say I was impressed with the organisation to select, train, cloth and allocate shifts. There was effective use of email to provide information to us. We had our own website that provided both general information and also information appertaining to the role you were playing. Whilst at the Games, there was a daily newsletter that you could pick up when "clocking-in", which had competitions and crosswords. Once again, investment in the process of the life of a games maker had been made and appropriate plans put into place. LOCOG and its Olympics/Paralympics partners, such as McDonalds and Omega, were up to the tasks required, and helped to deliver what everybody has described as the most enthusiastic and helpful Games Makers ever. It is interesting to note that the Games Makers are being offered the opportunity of an online qualification in Customer Service, courtesy of McDonalds. What a good piece of legacy for the young volunteers.

So what are the areas we can learn from this incredible project? Some of them are already well-known in that the right investment with the right flexible plan, which has continual monitoring, makes a successful project. We also know that the right motivated people also make success. But it is also right that we need to have room for innovative ideas, which means we need to think out of the box at times. For those of us who have been involved in programme and project management, we know that you have to have the "big picture" that you can use to sell and market to management. But for those at the sharp end we have to plan at a much more detailed level. The key in the end, and what I feel the Olympics and Paralympics succeeded in delivering, was to link the "big picture" to the detail for different parts of the project from transport to logistics to athlete development to a band of motivated volunteers. It is this concept of volunteers that we now need to think about to capitalise on what was found during the summer.

What about the use of technology? Just before the Olympic Park was being built I was approached to work with some organisations to look at the use of RFID to control and manage logistics movements on the site. This opportunity, to my knowledge, was not taken up. But RFID was used during the Marathons to check runners as they went through the fuelling stations. All ticket holders and games makers received an Oyster card to cover travel to the Games on the day of their tickets or shifts, thus making this the greenest Games, as well making it faster through the gates at stations within Zone 6 that people used. It was interesting to note that although there was a major use of technology to handle timings, photo finishes, and communications to the Press Centre, it was the paper record that was the ultimate records of the results. For example as a scorer for wheelchair fencing, I had to use a touch screen to enter the contestant names, which were then displayed on the boards behind the pistes. Although the hits were recorded using a hand held device, it was the piece of paper that I kept the score on that was ultimate record of the fight. Each Olympic and Paralympic Games will get more dependent on technology and the key to it working is integration of the various elements in a seamless manner.

There is a lot we can learn from the success of the Games so that we can make the same success with our projects.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 23rd July 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

The latest report from RFID research specialists IDTechEx found that, in 2012, the value of the entire RFID market (which covers tags, readers and software/services for both active and passive formats) will be $7.46 billion, up from $6.37 billion in 2011.

The research found that, in some areas, RFID orders are up 10% or more. This is due to growth of passive UHF systems for tagging apparel and many closed loop applications. It is also driven by some governments making it a legal requirement to fit RFID (for example on animals in New Zealand and Europe) or they come up with huge sums of money to buy RFID for projects as diverse as non-stop road tolling and library tagging to national ID cards and passports. Interestingly, IDtechEx found that military spending on RFID is down from previous highs.

IDTechEx found that, in total, 3.98 billion tags will be sold in 2012 versus 2.93 billion in 2011. Most of that growth is from passive UHF RFID labels. IDTechEx commented that, at that frequency, suppliers are still barely profitable so far. For several years capacity has far exceeded demand and those involved in UHF passive RFID tag manufacture are still not profitable over the term of their investment in the topic. From 2007-2009 there has been a series of consolidations, particularly of UHF tag manufacture. In contrast, most of the companies involved in passive HF tag supply are profitable. However, from 2011 onwards there has been strong growth in passive UHF tag demand with Impinj, Avery Dennison and others emerging as leaders. Others such as Smartrac have been acquiring companies creating a large RFID business.

Figure 1: 2012 Revenue by Component Type ($ billion) (Source: IDTechEx, RFID Forecasts, Players and Opportunities 2012-2022)

The report contains some interesting statistics. For instance, at the start of 2012, the cumulative number of RFID tags sold over the last 65 years was 15.1 billion. 20% of that number were sold in 2011.

In many sectors, particularly airline baggage and post, UHF RFID demand has failed to live up to expectations - by a long way. However, in retail, RFID is seeing rapid growth for apparel tagging. IDTechEx found that this application alone demands 1 billion RFID labels in 2012, with 1.35 billion tags forecast for 2013. RFID in the form of tickets used for transit will demand 500 million tags in 2012. IDTechEx find that the RFID market will grow steadily over the next decade, rising four-fold in that period to $26.19 billion in 2022.

So all that hype about RFID wasn't all incorrect. If you, as a vendor, identified the right market to concentrate on or built a complete surrounding business covering many areas then you succeeded.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 10th May 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Where is the data that we have lost in information? - TS Elliott

Where is the information we have lost in the business? - Simon Holloway

Here is some data: 38, 33, brown, 2. Do you know what I am talking about? Probably not. Let me now give you some context to this data, thus providing you with information - 38 waist, 33 leg, brown colour, 2 pockets. Do you have a better idea of what I am talking about? Perhaps, but perhaps not. Let me put you out of your misery if you haven't guessed yet, I am talking about a pair of trousers - men's more likely than ladies. But how do we want to use this information? To sell the trousers? To make them? To do an inventory check in a shop or warehouse? To find the trousers in your wardrobe? In each of these business processes this information is not enough. So when we talk about sharing data/information between applications (what DBMS was all about), what we have to understand is that each time we use the data/information we see slightly different views depending on the business process the data/information is being used in.

So to understand the data that we need to support our business we have to understand the different views that we have of certain collections such as Customer, Supplier, Employee, Product, etc. These views are based on the way in which the business processes wish to view or interact with the data. Additionally we have to understand who can see what data at what time in what location and on what type of device.

When I wrote the CCTA Data Management guide in 1994 [1], I introduced the concept of a lifecycle for data. For every piece of a "data collection" (a record, an entity) there is a lifecycle hidden in the business processes of your organisation. The phases of the Information Management Lifecycle are: 

• Plan: To identify the requirements for information from users and business plans, and to plan for the acquisition, maintenance and use of that information;
• Acquire: To acquire the information identified efficiently and to a level of quality required for its use, and in a manner that meets the organisation's business objectives;
• Maintain: To maintain information so that it is kept in a state where it can be made available in the appropriate form, to the accuracy required, and in the appropriate time scale to support business objectives;
• Use: To provide information to the right people, at the right time, in the right place, and in the appropriate form to support business objectives;
• Disseminate: To inform business and IT users of the availability of information to meet their objectives; and
• Dispose: To remove information without compromising the integrity of the remaining information, such that there is an unacceptable risk to the continued provision of information to support business objectives.

 

Figure 1: Simple Information Life Cycle 

Planning

You may have winced a little at this and said to yourself we don't plan for data. Well, actually, you do every time that you research and develop a new product or service to sell, or, if you are in IT, every time you have a new system, and personally when you buy a new car or house. The issue is that you do it subconsciously and this can lead to problems later on. So the tendency is for us to not really plan what data we need and how we use it. This results in unnecessary data duplication as well as a mountain of data being collected that we never use.

Acquisition

This covers both the process of creating the data initially and also purchasing data. The mantra is that we only want to create data once, but without proper planning and the amount of legacy systems that we have this can be difficult to obtain.

We also face issues that when we acquire data from external sources, we very rarely check its quality or that it has exactly the same meaning as the data with the same name, which will result in us comparing apples with bananas!

Certain data that we acquire is more sensitive and, in certain cases, we have regulatory requirements to report. Therefore we need to be able to identify which users or systems are able to create (and of course maintain or view) the data. This, of course, in its own right, involves a process to be able to associate rights of access to information and also to processes.

The rapid technology changes of this century have also meant that we can create data instances much more rapidly as we use automated data capturing devices such as RFID and Scart. This change in technology is leading to more systems being involved in processes as well as the need to sort through the information being generated so that only a certain amount is actually recorded.

But it is not only technology that requires data creation to happen more rapidly but also the business. In trading transactions, the speed is vital to the success of the transaction. In the automotive sector, you, the customer, are ale to change your mind about certain options up to certain moments in the production process.

Provision

Provision takes two forms: Use and Maintain. Once we have "acquired" data we then not only need to use it but also maintain it, as it is more than likely to change over time. The way in which we use data and information will be commonly through transactions that have been defined in the applications that we use to run our businesses. However, some organisations have made the move to a more event-driven approach, where a business event causes one or more business processes to be enacted. These are automated through the use of Business Process Management Software. Here the business process tasks are associated with either an application transaction that is presented to the user or a manual process that could be accomplished through an email or through a form which the user has to put the decision(s) on. In addition, certain decisions may have been implemented as business rules and stored in a Business Rules Engine.

Dissemination

It is no good acquiring data, either internally or externally, if you don't let people in your organisation know what data there is. This means data must have definitions, sizes, formats, etc so that people understand what it means, how it can be used and, most importantly, where it is being used. This gets into a big discussion area of data ownership or what I prefer to call data stewardship, as no one in an organisations "owns the data" - it is the organisation's. In the past we used data dictionary systems to record this, they then became repositories and now they are master data management databases.

Disposal

This is a part of the lifecycle that we all too often forget about. Therefore we end up with loads of out-of-date data that we should have either archived or deleted. All data has an end life. Sometimes this is controlled by government or industry regulations, sometimes by organisation policy: whichever it is there is a process that needs to be employed that allows the data to be removed from active, and even archive data, storage and disposed of. In certain circumstances this process and the tasks involved will need to be recorded to conform with regulations.

Conclusions

Data and information are the lifeblood of any organisation but without properly defined business processes that allow the raw material to be created, extracted, analysed, manipulated, shared, maintained and disposed of, it is useless. Business processes are triggered by events, normally from external sources, but not always. Some of you may have heard the term "Enterprise 3.0". The difference between 2.0 and 3.0 can be summed up as follows:

• Information has moved from being static to dynamic in nature
• Processing has moved from transaction-based to event-based
• Storage of data has moved from database to ESB
• Applications have moved from ERP to BPMS-based sitting on top of legacy applications
• Business intelligence has moved to real time business rules
• From a 2 dimensional world to a 3 dimensional one.

All this is so that we can support he business need for agility and responsiveness to changes.

[1] Data Management, CCTA, Information Management Library, 1994

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 4th April 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

One of the main issues stopping RFID becoming all pervasive has been the cost of the software and hardware needed. On March 26th, I had a briefing with Tego, who have just released a new product, TegoDrive, which may be the answer to the cost conundrum.

Who are Tego?

Tego are a RFID solutions provider focused on high-memory applications that gather and store information on tagged assets. Based on their experience in the aviation industry, they have developed tags that can carry the entire life history maintenance records on aircraft parts wherever they go, accessible through any standard RFID reader. The company is based in Waltham, Massachusetts, USA and was founded in 2005. Timothy Butler, President and CEO of Tego explained "'Beyond ID' is Tego's theme of RFID achieving more than barcode applications. The standards, protocols and systems that support RFID are actually aspects of a powerful wireless communications network that can now be exploited for more than just identification."

What solutions do they provide?

A wide range of rugged industrial high-memory tags are available from Tego and its partners for many applications.

The TegoChip is available as three distinct product families, with memory size options of up to 32kBytes, and is fully interoperable with the UHF Gen 2 RFID infrastructure.

• XM product family provides high memory capabilities for applications, including record keeping and security.
• XL product family provides similar capabilities to the TegoChip XM, but with enhanced memory retention and the ability to survive harsh environments, including high temperatures and radiation.
• GW product family provides the capability to interface to sensors, controls and e-ink style displays, or for any application where the tag includes an interface to an external device such as a temperature sensor.

Tego Radion tags provide track and trace functionality for items that are exposed to radiation, including use in X-rays, gamma sterilization and nuclear applications.

The TegoChip XM family is the commercial grade version of technology used in aviation and other industries to store asset history information. Fully compatible with standard Gen 2 infrastructure, the chips can store not just an EPC identification code but also up to 32KBytes of user data. The tags are supplied to end users in the standard smart card size of 3.370" by 2.125" and are available as short range tags that operate at a few inches or as long range tags that can be read at ranges of a few feet.

Figure 1: Tego products (Source: Tego Inc)

Tego also offers kits for users considering several form factors. Tego Aviation Launch Kit is an "out of the box" solution for aviation companies adding RFID tags to flyable parts. It includes the reader, software and tags needed to start reading and writing ATA Spec 2000 records on tags.

TegoView is an "RFID solution platform" that runs on standard RFID readers and allows users to work directly with Gen 2 tags of any memory size. It allows users to initialize tags, write to user memory and display tag information in a user-friendly form. TegoView supports the new ATA standard for organising data in tag memory and provides precon�gured automatic reports for reader display.

Tego partners

Tego has established global partnerships and alliances with leading tag converters and systems integrators. In fact it is like looking at the great and good in the world of RFID and includes Intermec, OatSystems (a division of Checkpoint), Odin Technology, Caen, Sirit and ThingMagic (a division of Trimble).

The new announcement

On April 2nd, Tego announced a new product to their portfolio - TegoDrive. TegoDrive treats information stored on RFID tags as files and folders on the desktop. By installing the software on an end-user's desktop or handheld device, tasks such as adding new content to a tag are as simple as "save-as" or drag-and-drop. Butler stated, "TegoDrive eliminates the bottleneck and cost of customizing proprietary RFID reader applications to work with existing enterprise software. Microsoft Windows becomes the reader application program, and accessing RFID assets becomes a simple drag-and-drop extension of desktop computing. TegoDrive allows tag users to store and retrieve their own data, regardless of the format it is in, and to access tags using standard operating system commands already familiar to them."

Figure 2: Screenshot of TegoDrive in action (Source: Tego Inc)

TegoDrive is currently in beta testing with customers across multiple industries. The product will launch in kit form in April, including a third-party reader and TegoChip tags bundled for under $1,000 USD. A standalone software version of TegoDrive will also be offered with pricing comparable to typical office application software. A custom API will be available in the future to allow for reader and application integration.

Comment

Tego have been at the forefront of the development of memory technology on RFID tags. TegoDrive takes the ability to use RFID to solve business issues into another dimension. With a low cost of entry and the ease with which users can gain benefits due to the simplicity of its drag and drop and use of exiting business applications, this makes Tego and TegoDrive leaders in the next stage of RFID development.

By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 15th February 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

Some time ago, I expressed concern about whether current IT approaches could cope with the need of the emerging "universe of things" - machines and sensors in machines, all generating vast amounts of data all of the time.

Now, RTI, one of the companies I mentioned in that blog, has announced its new product suite, RTI Connext, a family of products designed to connect real-time applications across an enterprise. Connext Micro is for embedded systems in small devices; Connext DDS is for full-function applications using the OMG DDS data-centric architecture standard; Connext Messaging is for general purpose real-time applications and also supports JMS (Java Messaging Service); and Connext Integrator provides adapters to conventional SOA-based and discrete IT applications. The whole is held together with the RTI DataBus.

In essence, these products can marry real-time "operational systems" approaches, using data-driven and event-processing techniques and are used to manage jet engines in planes during flight and operational warships, to conventional business information processing systems.

This could become extremely important if, as I anticipate, we are approaching a bigger "inflection point" crisis in data volumes than some people are contemplating. There are lots of clever ways to make existing technology more efficient, in order to deliver near-real-time results from the anticipated growth of data in today's IT systems. But what if, tomorrow, entirely new systems emerge and add to what already looks like exponential information growth?

We can just about cope with, say, RFID systems generating data for human-scale processing. But what if every machine out there produces data for interpretation by other machines (the Semantic Web is probably relevant here, but it seems to me that this is more concerned with meaning and ontologies than real-time performance); which, in turn, generate more data as a result of these interactions; which have, in turn, to be analysed so as to support strategic human-level decision-making? Which then feeds back data into the system that machines interpret as instructions, generating more data as they respond and change their state... "Data in motion" is starting to be as important as data in databases.

We will probably need new architectures for this - but we will probably still want to reuse human-scale technologies where appropriate. The neat thing about RTI Connext, I think, is that it supports hybrid solutions, so you can introduce new approaches as and when they are necessary, not in an anticipatory "rip and replace" effort which will probably destroy your business in the short term...

So, Connext is worth looking at, I think, together with other innovative approaches to handling really Big Data, such as Pervasive's DataRush accelerator. I've seen a Siemens case study around real time management of wind farms which uses the RTI approach because conventional technologies simply can't cope today; but, for most of us, we should be thinking of the implications of data-centric, event-driven, publish-and-subscribe approaches to handling Big Data on our future business automation strategies.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 27th January 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

When I first wrote the RFID market overview, one of the key things I identified was that RFID hardware couldn't exist without RFID middleware and applications, and neither could RFID middleware and applications exist without RFID hardware. What has also become clear is that no longer are organisations just looking at passive or active tags, what they want is for their RFID middleware and applications to be able to work with a mix of different tags, both active and passive, and even at different frequencies. It is a case of choosing the right horse for the course!

On January 12th, Zebra announced they have entered into a "cooperative relationship and licensing agreement" with Checkpoint Systems. This relationship brings together Zebra's active location solutions with the passive RFID, auto-ID, Wi-Fi and sensor capabilities of Checkpoint division OATSystems' OATxpress middleware. The objective is to provide increased visibility of assets across an enterprise. The agreement is a non-exclusive contract and provides Zebra with an OEM software license for OATxpress

A reminder for those of you who are not sure about the two organisations involved. Zebra is one of the leading suppliers of bar code, receipt, card, kiosk and RFID printers and supplies, as well as real-time location solutions. Over the last year or so they have also developed a real-time location solution (RTLS), WhereNet ISO/IEC 24730-2. This provides robust location performance both indoors and outdoors with a long tag to sensor range. WhereLAN III RTLS tag delivers 1 meter locating accuracy, lower deployment and ownership costs, lower power consumption, and 802.11 b/g Wi-Fi backhaul.

Checkpoint Systems is a leader in shrink management, merchandise visibility, apparel labeling and asset tracking solutions. Checkpoint has some 40 years of experience of RF technology and shrink management requirements. In 2008, Checkpoint Systems acquired one of the leading RFID middleware companies, OATSystems (see OATSystems acquired by Checkpoint). This strengthened their RF capability and RFID customer base and has allowed OATSystems, as a division of Checkpoint, to further develop supply chain, manufacturing and inventory management applications on top of their RFID middleware for a number of verticals ranging from Apparel to Aerospace.

So what we have with this agreement is that Zebra can now offer Checkpoint's OATxpress device and data management capabilities in conjunction with their WhereNet RTLS solution. This makes it easier for a potential customer to purchase a complete solution from one point. From Checkpoint's viewpoint it gives access to Zebra customers and to the Zebra partner network thus providing further global access. From Zebra's viewpoint it can be summed up by a quote from Phil Gerskovich, senior vice president, new growth platforms at Zebra Technologies, "The addition of OAT's passive RFID and other auto-ID technologies capabilities will enable Zebra to play a larger and more meaningful role in helping organizations to make smarter decisions in managing their operations." Zebra has stated that they will announce details around its first product with the capability to implement applications that combine both active and passive RFID in the coming months, so watch this space!

In my view this relationship makes perfect sense to everyone and, most importantly, to potential and existing customers of Zebra and Checkpoint Systems.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 24th November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Before I start I should say that this is not just about Hadoop but also about all its extensions, distributions, alternatives or replacements. For brevity's sake we need some terminology here so I will refer to these generically as BDDB (big data database) solutions.

As someone said to me recently, "it's only when you start to look at Hadoop that you start to realise what's important about the MS in DBMS". However, it's not management that I want to discuss and, actually, while a major focus of the BDDB vendors is to provide the sort of manageability you might expect, there is some way to go before these are fully robust.

What I want to discuss is governance, and there are a number of issues. Firstly, the advocates of BDDBs suggest that you might well want to include conventional structured data within your BDDB as well as unstructured data, because relevant queries require both types of data. Fair enough. But how do you ensure the quality of the structured data? I don't know any data quality tools (or profiling tools for that matter) that run against BDDBs. That means that a) you don't care about data quality or b) you cleanse the data at source (a good idea but many companies don't do it) or c) you load the data into your conventional warehouse first, cleanse it and then export the data out to the BDDB. In any case, governance goes beyond your traditional data quality. It is also about validating your business rules so that the logic for transformations is sound from a business perspective.

Secondly, there are quality issues around the unstructured data that you may load into your BDDB. Consider stock ticks or call detail records: both of these are frequently duplicated and those duplicates need to be filtered out. Similarly, lots of RFID events have no value, typically when nothing changes, and you also need filtering mechanism here too. (IBM has such a solution but, strangely, it is in the WebSphere portfolio rather than InfoSphere where all the big data stuff is - go figure). Further, this issue is not limited to sensor and event-based information. Consider tweets: I write a tweet (not often) and someone forwards it, someone else comments on it, it goes viral (not likely): how many tweets is that? If the original tweet gets copied 5,000 times does that count as one tweet or 5,001? I guess it depends on what you want to do with the information but there is certainly a governance issue.

Thirdly, there is the question of how you get meaningful information out of unstructured data? This is particularly important if you want to combine this information with structured data. Here, at least, there is now a product. Informatica has just released HParser, which is a parser optimised for Hadoop. That is, it runs on Hadoop (with all of its parallelism and so forth) and which is used to parse unstructured data and semi-structured data in much the same way that a data quality tool might parse a product description.

HParser runs on nearly any distribution of Apache Hadoop and Informatica distributes it via its marketplace. Informatica has also just announced a partnership with Hortonworks and you can also see the link to Informatica's market place from the Hortonworks data platform. The nicest thing about it is that doesn't require the analyst or developer to know anything about MapReduce as s(he) just works within a graphical user interface and the software takes care of the implementation. The parser will parse web logs, call detail records, various providers of financial information (Bloomberg et al) and, more generally, XML and JSON (JavaScript object notation). The software will discover relationships and hierarchies within the data and flatten them.

I dare say that HParser will not be the last product to start to tackle governance within the BDDB space but it is the first.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 22nd November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Red Lambda recently came to market with a new SIEM (security, information and event management) product. Its distinguishing feature is that it has a CEP (complex event processing) engine at the front-end because, in the company's own words, "log and security data is a big data problem". I have been preaching this, not in so many words, for the last couple of years but the only other SIEM vendor that I know of that uses CEP is Tier-3, though I also know that SAS has been doing work in this area (for example, for real-time identification of 'low and slow' attacks, which is notoriously difficult).

More generally, the CEP market segment is characterised by two use cases: supporting algorithmic trading and other functions within capital markets, and supporting business process management (BPM) and improvement within SOA (service oriented architecture) environments. So Progress, Streambase and Sybase are in the former camp while Oracle, Progress (again) and TIBCO are in the latter group, along with IBM's WebSphere Business Events.

What is surprising to me is that, with the exception of IBM, none of the other vendors that have long-established CEP products seems to have recognised the wider truth in Red Lambda's statement: that CEP is the solution to many of the issues raised by big data, especially where that is instrumented data arising from sensors, logs (web, security or otherwise), smart meters, RFID, GPS or similar. That's not to say that they haven't dabbled with employing their products in other environments but they certainly aren't, at least to my knowledge, targeting 'big data' as a generic issue.

The key, to my mind, is to be able to support data mining techniques to build a relevant model (or models) and then score incoming events against that model in real-time. For example, Red Lambda has implemented a data mining technique that it calls Neural Foam, which is like a neural network except that it doesn't require training (note: in case you are not into data mining this is a seriously important feature). More generally, you would want to have support for PMML (predictive modelling mark-up language), which is the industry standard for porting data mining models: so you can build a suitable model in your warehouse, port it to your CEP engine and then, as I say, score in real-time.

This is what IBM's InfoSphere Streams does and, given Oracle and TIBCO's presence in the business intelligence space (in the latter case with Spotfire), then you might think that they would do so too. In particular, by continuing to focus on CEP as a corollary to BPM and SOA they are leaving the field wide open for IBM. In the case of Oracle this seems very un-Larry-like.

More particularly, IBM is implementing Streams to augment its data warehousing offerings. Not only are there Streams installations in conjunction with DB2, but IBM already has Streams being used in conjunction with Netezza. In other words, it is easy to conceive of situations where Streams might make the difference between a customer licensing Exadata and/or the Oracle Big Data Appliance on the one hand and an IBM database or BigInsights (which integrates with Streams) solution on the other. As I said, most un-Larry-like to hand a major competitor such an advantage. Still, I'm sure that IBM is happy enough to have the playing field to itself.

Finally, just to return to SIEM for a moment: what's the betting that Streams will be integrated with QRadar, which IBM has gained with its acquisition of Q1 Labs? If anyone wants to place a bet to the contrary, please let me know: I'll be happy to take your money. And that doesn't spell good news for any of the other SIEM vendors out there: Tier-3 and Red Lambda may be in the game but everyone else (unless they're quick) is going to be left with an out-of-date architecture. But then, I think that's where they are already.

By: Laurie McCabe, Partner, SMB Group Posted: 16th November 2011 Copyright SMB Group © 2011

In conjunction with IBM’s Smarter Commerce initiative, the SMB Group and CRM Essentials are working on a series of posts discussing how technology is empowering today’s customer, and why companies have to change their approach in order to build strong relationships with them. This is the third post in the series, which is a summarize transcript of the podcast series that Brent Leary of CRM Essentials and Sanjeev Aggarwal, of SMB Group recorded with Ron Kline, director of marketing for IBM’s midmarket division, about IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions for SMBs. If you’d like to listen to the recorded podcast series, click here.

Brent Leary: We’re really excited to talk to Ron Kline, director of marketing for IBM’s midmarket division. Ron, before we jump into the Smarter Commerce Imitative, IBM has been doing so much around this whole idea of a Smarter Planet, can you talk a little bit about the big picture of the Smarter Planet initiative.

Ron Kline: Sure. What we mean by Smarter Planet is that the world we live in is becoming smarter. Everything around us is becoming more and more instrumented, and that allows us to measure really almost anything.

Think about it: there are over a billion transistors for every person on the planet. Over 30 billion RFID tags are embedded across the supply chain around the world. Everything is becoming instrumented. Supply chains, health care networks, even natural systems like our rivers. As a result of being able to measure and instrument from various touch points, the world becomes much more inter-connected and intelligent. By measuring and connect this information, you can build a more intelligent planet – one that can respond much more quickly to change.

Take an example like in San Francisco where they’ve launched a parking system so you can see what parking spaces are available throughout the city and determine where there is an open place to park. I actually have this app on my iPhone now. With the next step, you’ll be able to pay for your parking using your smartphone as the payment device.

Sanjeev Aggarwal: Thanks Ron. So what is Smarter Commerce, and how does it fit into the bigger Smarter Planter picture?

Ron Kline: Smarter Commerce is about how we deliver the customer experience using all of the insights that we are gaining about our clients and supply chain to provide a much better customer experience.

For example, you used to just go out and buy a car, or a company would just order parts from a supplier. But as consumers got more information at their fingertips, they could start to get price comparisons online and hear what other people had to say about a particular product before they go shop. Things have quickly moved on to include people sharing information and opinions on social networking sites and blogs.

Smarter Commerce helps you maximize the insight that you generate through customer interactions, whether in the store, over the web, from smart devices – what is being said out in social communities and taking that insight and pulling it together to improve the customer experience. Then you can tailor your offerings to what a customer is interested in. You can improve profitability by targeting the right offerings to the right customer at the right time, or by reducing the cost of returns, restocking, and supply chain expense by having to handle reverse logistics because you just didn’t know what the customer was looking for. The bottom line is improving the overall customer experience and living up to customer expectations.

We sort that into four big buckets, but it all comes down to customer experience. It’s the marketing, how do I target and personalize my marketing? Yes, to get better yield out of my marketing dollar but really to have a better experience for my customers – so that I am providing relevant, targeted, offerings or information. Then, how do I manage that whole sales process, fulfillment across stores, the web, social sites. And customer service has to span all of the touch points. It’s not enough to have a customer service department anymore, customer service is something that a client experiences when he is buying a product or shopping for a product and when he is looking for additional service. On the internal side, how do I control the procurement of goods and source the goods. I can have a smarter procurement process and a smarter supply chain process only if I know really more about my customer.

Brent Leary: Talk a little bit about who should care about Smarter Commerce in an organization and why they should care about it.

Ron Kline: Well, the customers care about it so, therefore, all of us as businesses need to care about it. It’s something that any business of any size really needs to focus on. It’s just as important for small and midsize businesses to deliver a superior customer experience as it is for a large enterprise. In fact, Smarter Commerce and Smarter Planet can help level the playing field for midsize companies. In this environment, it’s all about building a more loyal customer, understanding that customer better, and then being able to deliver a better experience.

Sanjeev Aggarwal: Can you give us an example of how a midsize company is using Smarter Commerce today and what type of results they are achieving?

Ron Kline: Sure. One example I find pretty interesting is Elie Tahari, a high fashion clothing designer and retailer. Nobody is more focused on appealing to the tastes and the emotions of their customers, but those tastes can change very quickly and a manufacturer who is caught with too much of yesterday’s style has got a lot of money tied up in inventory that is out of date.

Elie Tahari implemented an IBM Cognos solution that allows them to have a unified view of all of the information available from their different systems to make better decisions about what the market is saying and what specific customer needs are.

So now, instead of following what was a typical practice in the retailing industry – sending stores the same distribution of sizes based on historical information across the country – Elie Tahari has insight from their customer data for each particular store over a period of time. They can say, the distribution looks a little different over here, and distribute accordingly. It’s a better customer experience because the chances of being out of stock had been reduced. It saves money on costs of returns or discounting to try to move product that is not selling, either because you don’t have the right style in stock or you have to return it back to the parent company because you ordered too many of one size. This has enabled them to improve the customer experience, and on the supply chain side, they don’t end up with too much of the wrong type of thing.

Another example is BJU Press, a publisher in the United States that provides home schooling materials for kids in the K-12 age group. They have developed a web store front end with an IBM partner, CrossView, using WebSphere Commerce, and Coremetrics, a web analytics application. Now they can provide customers with an easier online experience to search for products, continually improve that search experience.

In both cases, IBM and its patterns were able to not only improve the customer experience, but also the economics for the company as well.

Brent Leary: Ron, those are some great examples, but how is IBM making Smarter Commerce accessible to the SMB market?

Ron Kline: In fact, the examples that I gave you are midsize companies. They have the same pain points as larger companies; they just haven’t had the ability to address it in the past because a lot of the technology and solutions were out of reach.

IBM has bridged that gap in a of couple ways. One way is to provide offerings that are built and designed for the midmarket. We have a process in IBM to insure that the offerings that we bring to market for this customer segment are built and priced appropriately for midsize companies. An example, Unica Email Optimization [OnDemand] Solution is $1,500 a month for running up to twenty-five events. It’s very a very affordable solution with a lot of really great technology in it. Unica Marketing Operations [OnDemand] is another one, marketing operations on demand is $6,000 per year for up to ten seats. These are very much within the range of a midsize company, and provide the kind of analytics and insights that help a company deliver this Smarter Commerce experience.

We’ve also learned that customers are looking for local trusted advisors and that’s where IBM’s investment in a very large partner ecosystem has helped bring the IBM technology to these midsize companies through local business partners.

Sanjeev Aggarwal: How does an SMB that wants to learn more about this get started?

Ron Kline: Absolutely, first of all, you can talk to your local business partner because they are the trusted advisor for you there locally. At www.IBM.com/smartercommerce you can learn about what Smarted Commerce is and get a bigger picture view of what other customers are doing in this area and how they are benefiting, and of course, what our offerings are.

Brent Leary: Ron thanks so much for your time today and explaining what Smarter Commerce is all about, thanks again.

Ron Kline: My pleasure, thank you very much.

This is the third of a six-part blog series by SMB Group and CRM Essentials that examines the evolution of the smarter customer and smarter commerce, and IBM’s Smarter Commerce solutions. In our next post, we’ll talk about how Speedo International is serving smarter customers with Smarter Commerce solutions. In the meantime, please share with us the successes you’ve had and the challenges you face in adapting your business to better serve smarter customers.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 4th November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Apart from industry hype it's easier to say what big data is not. To begin with it is not Hadoop (see preface to this series: What is Hadoop?). Nor is it simply having lots of data. And especially it is nothing to do with having lots of transactional data.

Let's think about data growth for a moment. The first thing to note is that petabyte scale storage issues are not new: CERN had a distributed Objectivity-based database holding a petabyte back in the 90s, long before the large Hadron collider was much more than a dream in the eye of most physicists. All that's happened is that the commercial world is catching up on the scientific community. And, of course, it's all relative: what's big to me may be chickenfeed to you.

Where is growth coming from? Well, we can assume that all sorts of data are growing. If you are a successful company then you would expect transactions to be growing, so your traditional data warehouse is growing. But it's growing incrementally, not by orders of magnitude. In a survey we conducted last year, respondents reckoned, on average, that data warehouse capacities had doubled in the previous five years. They estimated the same growth rate in the next five years.

The same argument also applies to content. Certainly content management requirements are expanding, but not especially fast.

No, the two major sources of growth are instrumentation on the one hand and external data on the other. These actually overlap.

Instrumented data means anything that you are monitoring. This could be based on sensors, RFID, smart meters, monitoring of web sites, log data from databases and network devices, call detail and IP detail records, SCADA devices and so on. This sort of data is sometimes called machine-generated or interactional data. Now, log data has, for years, been collected and stored using log management, database activity monitoring and SIEM (security information and event management) systems, while the same is true of web site monitoring (clickstream analysis). However, what has changed is that we are now instrumenting more and more things and/or we have realised the potential of the instrumented data that we previously threw away.

As an example of this last point, a typical oil rig has something like 40,000 sensors on it but most of that data is neither collected nor analysed. To take another example: blogs and social media have been around for years, even if Twitter is more recent: organisations are now realising that sentiment analysis may have a useful purpose.

So, the issue is twofold: there is more of this instrumented data and we have the ability to exploit more of what we already have. This last part is important: while there was plenty of this data around in the past we lacked the ability to process it easily and inexpensively. This is where Hadoop comes in or, more specifically, MapReduce, because it enables the investigation of this sort of information relatively cheaply. This is crucial. The truth is that most companies deploying big data solutions don't know how much of all this data is actually useful, but the point is that you can take these very large datasets and look for the combinations of data that really are useful without it costing you too much. The process is very akin to data mining - looking for relationships in the data that you know may exist but now knowing what and where they are.

There is one other point to bear in mind: for some applications, for some types of instrumented data, putting the data into Hadoop or some other data storage (including a traditional data warehouse) and then analysing it, may be too slow. Where you have very large amounts of data combined with low latency requirements then you may need to use complex event processing rather than database technology for analysis purposes. However, this is getting beyond the point: we are here discussing what big data is; not how you implement it, which I'll come back to in another article.

The bottom line that is that big data is not really about the data or about database management systems but is about how you query ALL relevant data, regardless of whether it is generated internally or externally, and either after it is stored or before you do so. If IBM had not already purloined the term BigInsights for its Hadoop-based product I might be inclined to suggest using that term as being more meaningful than "big data" but I guess we are stuck with the latter.

By: Matthew Wailling, Director, Cordless Consultants Posted: 16th May 2011 Copyright Cordless Consultants © 2011

May has arrived, and the new fiscal year is underway. Many of you will already have opened the magic envelope containing the number of zeros attached to your budget for 2011/2012. Many of you will already have spent it – mentally at least. But with technology progressing at a rate that’s perhaps faster than ever before, even a one-year strategy can look outdated by the time the funds are there to spend. With the precarious economic situation of the past two or three years you may have been forced to revise plans, reduce numbers and reduce spend.

If however you managed to get away and attend 2011’s technology events, and here I’m thinking particularly of Cebit, CES and ISE, you’ll have spotted some extremely exciting developments with great potential to save costs across the business through workplace efficiency, reduced business travel and more effective marketing. For those who need reminding of the latest announcements in mobility, collaboration and convergence, here are my top ten technologies to consider over the next year.

1          Fuel Cells

As we work in an increasingly mobile fashion, with smartphones and netbooks becoming powerful enough to obviate the need for some desktops, we need lasting power on the move. The next step in mobile working is fuel cells; they generate power through a series of chemical reactions between ingredients such as hydrogen and oxygen. At the CES exhibition Fluid Computer Systems unveiled the world’s first fuel cell tablet PC. Expect more to follow suit.

2          3D Screens

Figures from Gartner show that more than 24% of flat panel televisions will be 3D-enabled by 2014. Every major screen manufacturer is competing for its slice of the pie. We’re already seeing 3D notebooks and Sony has developed a glassless screen that doesn’t require 3D glasses; plus the rumour is that Microsoft’s Windows 8 will feature a fully 3D interface. Death by PowerPoint may soon be consigned to history.

3          Tablet PC

There are now more than 80 tablet computers on the market. Apple’s iPad may have won the branding war, but Ruvo’s 11.6” multi-touch screen is apparently the smallest fully functioning PC in the world. There are huge ramifications here not just in the way we work, but the way we provide workspace. With the launch of the blackberry playbook and now Amazon’s first tablet on the horizon (off the back of the hugely successful kindle range) this is a very hot area indeed.

4          Motorola ATRIX 4G

And talking of lightweight technology, Motorola’s ATRIX 4G is a dual-core processor-powered smartphone which docks into a full-size display and keyboard when required to give a full desktop experience when in the office. This could be the best way to access the cloud – from anywhere.

5          NFC Mobile Phones and Tablets

So if your smartphone is now a virtual PC, what else could it become? Near Field Communication (NFC) turns mobiles into bank cards, allowing you to make payments. Beyond that the RFID technology creates huge opportunities for interactive advertising, and other potential uses include electronic ticketing, ID and even electronic keys. Samsung’s Wave 578 is already out, Vodafone will launch four NFC mobiles in 2011 and both the next iPad and the iPhone 5 are likely to feature NFC chips.

6          RiTech Signature USB

After some high-profile data security disasters in the past few years, including theft and downright forgetfulness, RiTech International’s Signature USB stick will offer some reassurance for the security-conscious and lift restrictions on mobile working. Its built-in hardware encryption, dual fingerprint recognition and unique self-destruct tamper protection is a ground-breaking combination to protect sensitive data on the move.

7          Directional and Hidden Audio

It’s very easy to overlook the audio experience at work – this top ten is predominantly visual – but consider two recent innovations in aural experience. Directional audio can now be sent to a specific person or area, for instance a discussion area, while nearby workspace remains unaffected. And where space is at a premium or aesthetics take priority, flat panel speakers can recessed into walls and painted, wallpapered or even plastered over while delivering exceptional sound quality.

8          Curved Video Displays

Flat-panel monitors are a huge space-saver, but the larger they are, the less effective the space gain. And the heavier they become. Now display advertising and broadcast need have no boundaries in location or size thanks to NanoLumens’ curved video displays. The company has just launched a thin, lightweight, low-power display that can cover any size or shape of surface. This will mean motion ads on tube station walls and visual displays you can wrap round a building pillar or hang in the most unlikely of spaces. Quick to install, versatile and portable.

9          Mixed Reality – Holographic Display

Science fiction, not for the first time, becomes reality as holograms come into business use. RealFiction’s dreamoc XL and Holo-Rizon are 3D displays which provide holographic-like, free-floating video images. While the initial concept is aimed squarely at retail and point of sale, the potential for broader business use is enormous.

And finally….

10        The TelePresence Robot!

With curved 3D displays, telepresence brings video conferencing to life, creating a face-to-face experience that’s almost like being in the same room. Gostai’s Jazz technology gives a ‘real world presence’: with the Jazz robot in one location, using your webcam and microphone you can experience the other location as if you were there in person. Imagine surveying a new factory development on another continent without leaving your desk. In fact Jazz Security is specifically geared for remote workplace surveillance. The bottom line is a huge saving in time and travel costs.

Of course these aren’t the only exciting developments to have emerged from the big technology events of the past few months and doubtless more will follow. For the moment though, and until the beta versions of Windows 8 convince more companies to move on from the still functional Windows XP, I think this list is a good starting point for the next year’s investment. Singly, and in combination, they provide the opportunity for a more sustainable and flexible way of working.

If you’re devising a strategy for the next five years – and strategies need to be highly agile with the speed at which technology is now developing – all these could affect everything from data storage to office layouts, and everything in between.

Keep an eye out for a series of articles on each of the ten technologies described above.

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 4th May 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

There is a lot of confusion around “big data”. People naturally assume that big data means lots of data. Which is true. But it isn’t any old data or, at least it doesn’t have to be. The reason I bring this up is because just last week I heard about a company investigating the possibility of using Hadoop to store and support the analysis of several years’ worth of transactional data.

Now, it is possible to think of reasons to use Hadoop for this purpose: it might be cheaper or you might prefer Java programmers to SQL developers but this is not the sort of environment where Hadoop would naturally spring to mind as an application. Moreover, I don’t care how large your organisation is, you won’t need huge quantities of disk for a few years of transactions. This isn’t, relatively speaking, “big” data, it’s actually pretty small data but if you are used to storing only 3 months’ worth of data then maybe it looks big.

So we need to be clear about what we mean by big. Generally speaking we are at least talking about hundreds of terabytes and more often petabytes.

The next thing to think about big data is what sort of data it is. Hadoop and MapReduce are particularly useful when it comes to analysing semi-structured and unstructured data, while traditional data warehouses, using traditional analytic techniques, are not. On the other hand, you can do things with structured data in a conventional data warehouse that would be much more difficult to do using MapReduce. So there is a good case for treating Hadoop and MapReduce on the one hand and data warehousing on the other, as complimentary. However, if you are going to start looking at using Hadoop for transactional data then they become competitive, which is something else entirely.

A contributing confusion is the suggestion that big data can be equated with machine-generated data. By machine-generated data I mean anything that does not originate with someone keying in something like an order somewhere. So, anything generated from the Internet (Twitter feeds, Facebook pages, linked-in, clickstream data and so on) as well as from computer operated machine tools, environmental monitoring devices, RFID sensors, smartphones, stock market ticks (complex event processing) and so forth.

There are two things wrong with this. The first is that I think “machine” is the wrong word here: I don’t believe that anyone thinks of the Internet as a machine, or their cell phone for that matter. I prefer the term auto-generated data.

But the relationship with big data is more important. It is certainly true that all of these sources can generate lots of data, though often a lot of it gets filtered out. However, a Twitter feed is fundamentally different from, for example, a SCADA device in that the former generates unstructured data and the latter generates structured data. Hadoop, going back to my earlier point, could be ideal for storing the Twitter-based information and then you can use MapReduce for sentiment analysis. But traditional approaches to warehousing and analytics should be entirely suitable to analysing SCADA-derived data.

The bottom line is that Big Data is not very useful as a term and it doesn’t necessarily equate to Hadoop and MapReduce, while the latter do not necessarily map to auto-generated data either.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 24th March 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

I came across an interesting article by Claire Swedberg today, first printed in RFID Journal. I am always fascinated by the uses people find for RFID Journal and this one hit the right spot.

During last November's New York City Marathon, a runner passed an RFID interrogator on the road near the halfway mark that captured the ID number on her shoe's RFID tag. Within seconds, a video of her young children appeared in front of her on a 20-foot LED screen, and she could hear them encouraging her on. This scenario repeated itself 7,000 times for as many runners, across three locations along the racecourse. The Support Your Marathoner service was provided free by ASICS, a manufacturer of running shoes, apparel and accessories, using media, as well as software, to deliver that media, from California advertising firm Vitro. ASICS intends to sponsor a similar service for this year’s marathon, utilizing the same RFID infrastructure to deliver content to the athletes, but with additional features.

So how did this work? The system took advantage of the RFID-based timing technology used by New York Road Runners, the organization that manages the New York City Marathon. ChronoTrack has supplied the timing system for the annual event since 2009. The solution consists of 46 Impinj Revolution readers installed along the course, with Impinj antennas running across the track itself, and each runner wearing a ChronoTrack D-Tag containing a ChronoTrack Viper ultrahigh-frequency (UHF) Gen 2 RFID tag. ChronoTrack installed three additional Impinj readers and antenna strips across the track to read runners' tags to support ASICS service, and fed that data to a cloud-based server managed by Vitro.

Using Facebook and the official Marathon website, supporters of a runner were encouraged to enter a seven-second video using the web-cam on their PC or laptop with  a special message for a friend or family member running in the race. Vitro software linked the video or pictures to the ID number, instructing the streaming of that video, or the display of the photograph, on a 20-foot screen positioned in front of the runners.

What an innovative and inspiring use of RFID!!

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 24th January 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Back in September 2010 I was asked to meet those in HP responsible for devising the strategies being offered by HP to the Retail sector, Kobi Elbaz, Director, Client Solutions and Workstations, EMEA, and Emily Dart, Manager, Retail Store Solutions.

Before I look at the solutions and offering being promoted by HP, let us look at the retail industry itself. The retail sector has undergone its biggest ever evolution in the past decade as new technologies have given people greater choice in the way that they shop. People, who shopped in stores or via catalogues and door-to-door selling, can now buy online or via digital TV. This has resulted in a multi-channel approach to selling by retailers intent on ensuring they maximise sales and market share with 2009 and first half of 2010 being one of the toughest recorded for retailers.

Liane Dietrich, MD at LinkShare UK, has recommended[1] that, as customers have increasingly turned to the web in search of the best deals, the key for retailers looking to boost dwindling high street sales is to seize the opportunities which exist online by promoting their brand whilst also appealing to the ever-savvy online shopper. Dietrich explained that one consequence of the bargain hungry customer is that they have become more demanding—shoppers now require more from their online shopping experience and expect to be presented with something extra to entice them into making a purchase. Therefore to be successful in an economy which still remains fragile, retailers need to adapt to the changing shopping habits of their target audience as well as maximise the potential of all revenue streams available to them. Today’s customers are often better connected and hold more technology in their hands than exist in stores, thus enabling to compare prices online through their mobile phones.

So what is HP offering to help with these issues? Elbaz explained that HP saw that retailers needed to invest in the latest customer-friendly technologies and, given HP’s penetration into the vertical with 90 out of the world’s top 100 retailers being customers, HP equipment handles over 3.5 billion credit card transactions annually. Besides the hardware that people are familiar with from HP, the company also offers:

• Point of Sale (POS) systems based on an industry standard architecture with a small footprint;
• Digital signage ranging from 42 inch to 47 inch LCD displays; and
• Kiosk implementations that include media players, Touchsmart PC and touch screens.

From a services viewpoint, HP aim to be the partner at the customer’s table. In the retail sector they are offering 4 solutions:

• Store-to-go is an outsourcing alternative for retailers. It is an alternative to traditional services of contracting and ownership, relieving the retailer of the burdens associated with purchasing, deploying, managing, optimising, and upgrading an in-store environment. It is a packaging of a hardware offering with surrounding services.
• Business intelligence is based on HP’s business intelligence offering using HP hardware, and Oracle or Microsoft software, with services. BI solutions can be built to understand how customers shop, identify up-sell and cross-sell opportunities and assess same-store sales to increase turnover. Process improvements, as well as operations and IT efficiencies, can be identified and implemented. Collaboration solutions that allow retailers to interact more closely with both customers and suppliers are also included.
• Track and trace visibility allow distribution networks to operate more effectively through increased visibility and performance metrics. In this package of goodies is an RFID solution that provides automation, efficiency and reliability of data to support real-time decisions and advanced analytics for a competitive advantage. There is also pick-by-voice or pick-to-light solutions to select the right part, track inventory and send part replacement notices. There is support for both RF and WLAN mobile devices. Both warehouse management and workflow management capabilities are included in the solution.
• eCommerce and Multi-Channel provides support for customer direct services, customer relationship management, business continuity as well as data protection and recovery.

Solutions means software, particularly applications, and that is not part of the HP portfolio. However HP has formed major partnerships with the 3 main application vendors in this sector: SAP, Oracle and Microsoft. In addition they have formed strategic partnerships with best-of-breed vendors such as Retallx, eRetail and Aldata, to name just a few. HP, through its EDS acquisition, has also acquired a number of vertical-oriented services groups. Now each of HP’s software vendor partners has a retail strategy of their own, so there would seem to be potential for a disconnect. To avoid this HP are working closely with their major software partners to integrate their solutions with their software partners’ solutions. This results, if you like, in a SAP, a Microsoft, an Oracle and so-on version for each solution, where appropriate.

In an additional discussion with Mario Vollbracht, Worldwide Segment Executive, Retail and Consumer Goods Industries, explained that HP saw that being independent of software applications meant they could better respond to their client’s need with a right combination of hardware and software appropriate to the existing portfolio of their client. Vollbracht also stated that HP saw their ability to manage effectively the legacy portfolio of retail organisations coupled with HP’s business process knowledge as key differentials in the services offered by the company.

Elbaz expounded that HP not only saw the technology challenges that retailers faced, but they themselves were retailers with stores in Eastern Europe where they were learning to eat their own dog food. He explained the HP POS solution was able to support the necessary agility that business required, by providing solutions that were compatible as a retailer grows with the ability to customise and redeploy systems. This business requirement goes hand in glove with HP’s known stability and reliability as a hardware vendor. This approach is very like the way HP went into the use of RFID to track and trace.

For what I was told of a year or so of operating, HP has come a long way, but I felt that they aren’t quite there. The information on the solutions on the web site is a bit sketchy, but what there is is very good. I also feel that the relationship with different software partners needs to be made clearer in terms of what is actually being offered by the partnership. Retailers aren’t going to buy hardware; they want cost-effective and quick-to-implement solutions which give a very good ROI. These solutions are a combination of hardware and software. It is a case of nearly there, but if you do start talking to them you may well find the solution you are looking for, but you need to do some digging to get there.

[1] Online retail in 2010, John Ronson, Retail Digital, Apr 16, 2010

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 17th January 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

I came across an interesting article in the RFID Journal through a reader service I belong to called RFID NORDIC Daily News. It really caught my imagination: using RFID in international poker matches! The article in the RFID Journal is entitled, “RFID Gives Pokertronic Its Strong Suit” and is by Rhea Wessel and published on January 7th.

Pokertronic are a German company based in Regensburg, who were founded in 2008. They are a joint venture with AniMazing GmbH. The company offers services and solutions enabling the filming and broadcasting of live poker tournaments. One of these products and services is an RFID-enabled poker table that, according to the company, makes it easier for casinos, poker clubs and television-production businesses to provide spectators with a look into the hands of match competitors.

The table comes in 2 forms: a regular rounded rectangle and a bean shape. It is a retrofitted wooden and leather poker table that can accommodate 10 players. One RFID reader and 11 reader antennas are incorporated into the table, and each playing card is embedded with a passive 13.56 MHz RFID tag containing an NXP Semiconductors Mifare RFID chip. The tag is flexible, and does not change the feel of the playing cards. The company resells the RFID playing cards, which it purchases from a playing-card manufacturer. The whole combination sells for €7,500 ($9,760).

So how does it work? Uwe Kerscher, Pokertronic's CEO describe the process in the article as follows, “The reader beneath the table reads the cards' tags and transmits the information saved on those tags to the computer system. The transmitted information is encrypted and includes each card's face value and suit, such as the queen of diamonds. The encrypted data is fed into software created by Pokertronic, to evaluate the cards and generate a graphic illustration of each playing hand, much like those seen on televised sports events".

Is this just theory or has it actually been used? The answer is yes, it was used to broadcast live matches in October 2010 at the European Poker Championships, held at the Grand Casino Baden, near Vienna, Austria. Sales of the table are slated to begin early this year.

I always knew that RFID would find a use in the most unlikely places!!!

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 17th December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

Last week I posted a short blog post about a collaboration between NXP Semiconductors and Google to provide an open source software stack for NFC. This article looks at this announcement in a little more detail.

In a nutshell what is this announcement about? Well, firstly, the NFC stack will be fully integrated and validated on Gingerbread, the latest version of the Android platform. The other piece of the announcement relates to Google integrating NXP’s NFC controller (PN544) into its newly launched Nexus S phone, co-developed by Google and Samsung, offering users access to NFC based services and applications. Using natural touch gestures, NFC devices can easily pair with accessories, interact on a peer-to-peer level to exchange data, and connect to a huge installed base of reader and tag infrastructures. Nexus S will offer consumers immediate access to read NFC tags.

What does this mean? For developers of applications for Android it means that they are now able to access an open source NFC implementation, giving them a faster time to market and lower implementation and development costs. NXP have agreed to help drive the development of new applications that extend the touch interface of mobile applications beyond the devices screen.

Launched in 2009, the PN544 is, according to NXP, the world’s first truly industry standard NFC controller. It provides a fully compliant platform for handset manufacturers and operators to introduce NFC devices and services. The NXP PN544 chip is fully compliant with all released NFC specifications on the Single Wire Protocol (SWP) connection with the SIM and the Host Controller Interface (HCI). Features include:

• Small footprint for size optimisation
• Optimised for low power consumption
• Optionally working in Battery Off and Battery Low modes
• MIFARE 1K/4K Reader/writer functionality enabled in host baseband
• Optionally available with an modular, generic and platform independent software stack
• Optimised antenna designs for best-in-class RF performance

Eric Chu, Mobile Platforms Program Manager, Google, stated: “With NXP's contribution, the introduction of NFC in Android provides developers, service providers, and device manufacturers a game-changing opportunity to deliver new services while enabling users to interact with each other and the physical world in ways previously not possible.”

NFC is a market proven technology co-invented by NXP in 2002. In 2004 NXP co-founded the NFC Forum to lead the collaboration with all industry stakeholders and help standardise the technology. NFC technology evolved from a combination of contactless identification (RFID) and interconnection technologies. NXP have been ranked as the number one contactless IC vendor by ABI Research for three years in a row.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 29th November 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

Some of you have been following my articles may remember an article I wrote about Convergent Software (A demonstrator for the new standards for RFID in Libraries) in February 2009. Well this week, Paul Chartier, their Managing Director, let me know that the company was launching a range of software products for the library community.  These meet the new conformance requirements recently announced on the RFID for Libraries Support website (http://biblstandard.dk/rfid/).

There are two products in the initial offering designed to help stakeholders to future-proof their investment in ISO 28560-2:

• ISO 28560-2 Planning and Modelling software:  This software allows libraries and other stakeholders to experiment with the encoding options of ISO 28560-2 by selecting and arranging data elements and encoding these on a simulated tag.  The main advantage of this software is that it can be used as part of a pre-investment process without requiring any RFID hardware or tags. This product incorporates their Template Builder and Data Builder tools that I reviewed in February 2009.
• ISO 28560-2 Quality Control software: This software combines the functionality of a fully compliant decoder with the additional powerful function of diagnostic software that identifies encoding errors and points to possible causes of those encoding errors. This product incorporates our Template Builder, Data Decoder and Data Doctor tools.

The announcement also contained details of 2 other products that are to follow shortly; namely:  

• ISO 28560-2 Comprehensive software: This software combines the functionality of the planning software and the quality control software products with their Data Editor tool. Chartier stated that this will provide the most comprehensive support for ISO 28560-2.  
• An interface module that enables the various software-only products to be linked to specific RFID encoding/decoding devices. This version of the software will take the simulation one stage further and allow prototype tags to be produced for testing purposes. It also can read tags claiming compliance with ISO 28560-2 and report any errors in a comprehensive diagnostic report.

All the products meet the requirements of the recently published Guidelines for ISO 28560-2 Conformant Devices and Processes.  A Compliance Statement is available on their website which explains in detail how the software products achieve this.

Convergent Software Limited is still offering its two software development schemes to help RFID vendors in the library sector to rapidly develop their support for the new ISO standard:

• The Benchmark scheme provides software and support to those companies developing their own bespoke system to support ISO 28560-2.
• The Integration scheme enables software developed by Convergent Software Limited to be embedded in vendors' software as an OEM component.

Convergent Software Limited develops and markets software and tools to support the encoding and decoding of data on RFID tags. The company also has products to support IATA RP1740C baggage handling (see article: Bagging Handling Applications get an RFID Simulator and Diagnostic tool).

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 12th October 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

GlobeRanger Corporation announced at the end of last week the first successful demonstration of active and passive RFID interoperability in support of the  ISO 18000-7 technology for the Department of Defense (DoD). The ISO 18000-7 specification defines the air interface for RFID devices operating as an active RF tag in the 433 Mhz band used in item management applications.

The goal of the demonstration, conducted jointly with IDENTEC SOLUTIONS at GlobeRanger’s headquarters in Richardson, TX, was to prove to DoD personnel the simplicity of integrating ISO 18000-7 compliant RFID technology into GlobeRanger’s iMotion Edgeware solution, which is currently deployed by the U.S. DoD, so as to provide shipment arrival notification and secondary data validation.

Michael Bigbee, Senior Vice-President of Sales at GlobeRanger, said “iMotion is effectively the only integrated, seamless platform on the market to support all DoD AIT initiatives, ISO 18000-7 Active RFID, EPCglobal Gen2 Passive and IUID standards. We are proud of our record to enable repeatable end-to-end goods tracking and in-transit visibility for the DoD.”

This is another example of the collaboration between software vendors and specialist systems integrators in the RFID space.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 6th October 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

Ubisense have announced an extension to the Transit Yard Manager application. These extensions allow the product to meet the requirements of rail yards and added the capability to monitor and control maintenance processes. "We are pleased to be able to expand our transit industry solutions to the rail industry," commented Jay Cadman, VP Sales and Marketing. "Accurate location is driving process improvements for our customers and we anticipate expanding further into other areas such as MRO and terminal solutions by working closely in conjunction with our customers."

Ubisense’s experience in deploying their solution in the transit industry showed them that rail yards and maintenance facilities experience similar problems to bus transit facilities. The Transit Yard Manager solution supports the precision location of engines and cars. The application reliably tracks both the orientation of the engine or car and its location to a precision of 12 inches. The TYM web-based interface provides a simple means to search for specific rolling stock or groups of assets that share similar characteristics. This reduces the amount of manual time spent documenting their location and provides reliable data to more effectively manage yard operations. Rail operators are able to use the application to provide indoor and outdoor visibility of their yards, and providing data on rail yard processes so they can be streamlined, reducing maintenance costs and inventory levels.

Ubisense Transit Yard Manager is installed in both bus and rail operations at locations around the world including Metro Transit (Minneapolis) and JNGV in Jena, Germany. Ubisense is completing its first installation in a large American passenger rail company

Ubisense also announced that the Transit Yard Manager now integrates with GIRO's HASTUS™ software and supports real-time information exchange with HASTUS, an integrated and modular solution for optimized transit planning, scheduling, and operations

By providing schedule system integration through a real-time connection to the HASTUS solution, a dispatcher can select a piece of work in the scheduling system, highlight a bus on the interactive map in Transit Yard Manager, and "click to assign". The application can then send the vehicle number and location to HASTUS. With exact vehicle location in a yard, it is also possible to further automate the scheduling process using optimisation tools available within HASTUS.

Transit Yard Manager from Ubisense provides real-time visibility for indoor garages and outdoor transit yards to an accuracy of less than one meter, delivering exact bay, lane, and position information instantaneously. The system utilises ultra-wideband (UWB) technology to provide up-to-the-minute, precise location tracking performance in tightly enclosed cluttered areas where other RFID and wireless technologies fail. Ubisense Transit Yard Manager eliminates the costs associated with manually logging the constantly moving vehicles in a yard, and ensures that the vehicle is parked exactly where is shown in the system.

"One of the principal driving forces for transit agencies to deploy an automated vehicle location system within garages and yards is to increase the efficiencies with scheduling. By connecting to HASTUS in real time, agencies will now be able to automatically indicate to driver operators the location of the vehicle without having to enter this information manually," said Ubisense CEO Americas, Russ Chandler. "We are excited to be able to work with our partners at GIRO to provide this additional capability to our customers."

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 22nd July 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Welcome to a panel discussion that examines the need for improved common defenses—including advancing cooperation between enterprise architects and chief security officers—to jointly defend against burgeoning cyber security threats. The risks are coming from inside enterprises, as well as myriad external sources.

From the panel, at The Open Group’s Security Practitioners Conference this week in Boston, we’ll learn more about the nature of these borderless, external, cyber security threats, as they emerge from criminal enterprises, globally competitive business sources, even state-based threats, and sometimes a combination of these. We’ll also hear recommendations on developing smarter processes for cyber security based on proven methods and pervasive policies.

To help broaden the scope of enterprise architecture, and to develop a leverage point for "mission architecture"-levels of security and defenses, we're joined by retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Harry D. Raduege Jr., chairman of the Deloitte Center for Cyber Innovation, and who co-chairs a cybersecurity commission under President Obama; Jim Hietala, Vice President of Security at the Open Group, and Usman Sindhu, researcher at Forrester Research. The panel is moderated by Dana Gardner, principal analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Raduege: With openness come these new threats. The vulnerabilities that we have of operating in cyberspace are magnified by identity theft, information manipulation, information theft, cyber crime, and insider threats that are prevalent in many of our organizations and companies today. Also, the threat of espionage, of losing lots of intellectual property from our businesses, and the cyber attacks that are taking place, the denial-of-service (DOS), and also the threat that we see on the horizon—cyberterrorism.

There's now a tremendous opportunity for us to gain the benefits of being able to communicate, not only nationally, but also internationally, and across all borders, in the area of cyber security. This is an international problem, and so an opportunity for us to take advantage of it. We’re all in this together.

Many people are bringing best practices to the table. We’re learning from each other’s experiences. The international cooperation and the opportunity to meet and discuss these areas are very valuable to all of us individually, and to our companies and to our nations.

This is the significance of this type of a gathering, to talk about the real benefits of cyberspace, but also to talk about the issues of cyber security that are facing us all. The importance of the underlying foundational aspects of having a great enterprise architecture is pointing more toward a mission architecture for business success.

Organizations like The Open Group are working on the common standards that are so important for the international community to comply with and to have as guiding factors. Education is very important, developing a cyber mindset across all people of the world, not only in the government organizations, but for industry, and also the individual users at home.

The aspects of education and training and awareness of what’s going on there in cyber space is paramount for proper operation, but also for the protection of your critical information.

Sindhu: Traditionally, security has been a point technology. Even in the government space, there has been a lot of focus around just technologies. We have seen saw how the importance of point technologies has been overemphasized, rather than risk analysis and process.

Today, many organizations, including the public and private sector, are waking up to the fact that technology alone is not the answer. It’s the process and people as well. That’s where deriving these best practices would be a key in collaborating with the private and public sector and bringing in an architecture.

As far as this interconnectivity is concerned, you'll see lot of different business-to-business (B2B) and business-to-consumer (B2C) interactions. It happens today. Today, business partners and distributors do business on the go, on social media, either Twitter feeds or Facebook, or something I call ad-hoc communication through their mobile devices. This is the nature of today’s interaction. This is the nature of B2C and B2B interactions.

... And in the 21st Century we'll have a lot more innovations and more technology adoption in a much more accelerated fashion.

That’s where the smart concept comes in. This entails smartening our physical infrastructure, our critical infrastructures like utility, healthcare, financial services, transportation, public safety, and also city administrations, down to the IT system itself.

It will use of lot of IT enablement from either the cloud or communication infrastructure, things like RFID technologies, 4G technologies, and solar technologies, to embed lot of situational awareness, analytics, and locationing into the systems.

This is a smart kind of a concept that embeds itself into smart city infrastructure where all the different components embed all the IT technologies together. There are other initiatives like smart grid or smart healthcare that are embedding these IT technologies as well.

That's a great way to start the 21st Century with this innovation, but the need for security arises at the same time. As Gen. Raduege mentioned, cyberspace is a new frontier, or information security in the cyber world, is a new frontier.

That’s where we have to address lots of different issues and problems around policy, architecture, and best practices. It’s only going to get more serious, as we connect a lot of different systems that were not connected in the past.

One of the key aspects of smartness is cross-industry and cross-team collaboration. Today, when we start to look at some of the smart deployments, either in the vertical sectors like utilities, healthcare, or even other private-sector industries, we see more and more that security is getting attention from the board-level and C-level executive.

Similarly, enterprise architecture is getting its attention as well. Going forward, we see a great emphasis on combining these two initiatives, even though it’s still a very nascent stage at the board-level talks and C-level talks. We're not seeing a huge focus on cyber security in some instances, but of course it’s changing. It’s increasing.

It's fair to say that the security and enterprise architecture will play a key role, as both concepts mingle together to bring about best practices in architecture in the early phases into planning, deployment, and delivery of the smart services.

Hietala: It’s still early in the process of really bringing enhanced security into the professional enterprise architecture. So, in The Open Group Architecture Framework (TOGAF), in three of the nine iterations of it, we've added significant security information and content that enterprise architecture need to bear in mind in developing architectures.

But that work is ongoing. We have a couple of projects both to enhance the security of TOGAF, and also to work to collaborate with the Sherwood Applied Business Security Architecture (SABSA) folks, another security architecture development methodology, to harmonize those two approaches.

There's a lot of work ongoing there, and there's a lot of work needed in developing reference architectures outside of purely IT. We have a document that we are updating called Enterprise Security Architecture. It will be published this fall, and updates some work that was done five or six years ago, sort of an IT reference architecture.

From an enterprise perspective, looking at mission success and thinking about cyber security really is the Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) role inside a given enterprise. That probably is most relevant to address the issues. The interesting thing is that many of the new developments that we’re looking at—whether it's smarter hospitals, smarter medical devices, smarter electrical grid—are industry specific and they require a lot of cooperation between organizations in an industry.

There's a role for standards and industry organizations to pull together and come up with some common standards to facilitate better security, maybe better frameworks or things like that, that can be leveraged across an entire industry.

We see a need, as you start to look at cyber security and the different kinds of architectures, to develop new reference architectures to address some of these new applications of IT technology to everyday life. If you think about networks in cars or networks of smart devices comprising the power grid, what does security look like for those things? Our membership is starting to look at some of those and trying to determine where we can add some value for the industry.

Raduege: The Internet has changed our world, and the way we operate. For years, we've had enterprise architects who have been working down the hall or in the basements of organizations, and who have been trying to figure out the best way of technically aligning the Internet and all of the interconnected networks to make it work as best it could.

Now that this world of cyber has really come upon us, it has really elevated the importance of the enterprise architect into the higher levels of an organization, just because of the threats that are constantly coming upon us in our business operations and our mission success.

The enterprise architect has now gotten the attention of the C-suite executives and organization leadership. But, they don’t like to think as much about enterprise architecture, because it really has that technical connotation as my colleagues here have mentioned, we're really talking and focusing more now on the people and the process aspects of running the business properly.

The front-office people, the C-suite executives and leaders of organizations, instead of thinking about enterprise architecture from a technical aspect, are becoming much more interested in a mission architecture.

In other words, what's the architecture needed to complete my mission so that I can have success—whatever your mission is, if it’s government activity or whether it’s industry. Mission architecture has taken on new meaning that takes into account the technical architecture, but also adds the workforce domain and the process elements of the organization.

So, mission architecture is really pointing toward business success, whatever your business is, whether it’s government operations or industry.

Sindhu: Architecture is important, but there is no silver bullet to it. Since the smart concept is industry-wide and is global, there could be many references to architectures that could go in. Some things have started to happen.

For example, the Department of Homeland Security came over to IT risk baseline about a year-and-a-half ago. It collaborated with the IT vendors and IT sector in general and started to create this risk baseline, which comes about in the earlier phases of architecture.

As you develop a framework, you take feeds from the various industry standards and regulatory compliance mandates and you start to create a risk baseline, a risk profile that touches every single silo of people, process, and technology. Over the time, you do the collaboration, internally, but externally as well.

Hietala: Definitely there is a need for increased public-sector and private-industry cooperation. We have an initiative here, The Open Group's Acquisition Cybersecurity (ACS) Initiative. It was brought to us by the Department of Defense as a consulting effort. They wanted an organization to pull together private industry and try to drive some standards looking at the supply chains to the major IT suppliers. That work is ongoing and that would be a good reference of an initiative like that.

Sindhu: The role of the architecture and security has to be involved right from the planning phase, where you manifest the value of security being built in, either to the products or in general to the architecture? That has to be the first step—that we acknowledge the need to embed that into the overall process.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript or download a copy.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 24th May 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

2010 seems to be the year of major consolidation in the IT world. We have seen Progress acquire Savvion, Oracle acquire Sun Microsystems, IBM buy Cast Iron, HP absorb Palm, just to name a few. So now we see SAP announce that their North American subsidiary, SAP North America, is to acquire Sybase.

What is the full Sybase portfolio? Sybase have segmented this portfolio into the following areas:

• Database management
• Analytics and business intelligence
• Modelling Development
• Mobile messaging, eEnterprise and commerce

My Bloor colleague, Philip Howard, in his IT-Analysis article (Sybase and SAP: the unanswered questions) examined what this acquisition meant in terms of information management. I want to look at this from the point of view of ERP applications, BPM and sensory devices.

SAP has been developing along 2 separate strands for the last 10 years or so. Firstly they have been developing their own infrastructure platform based on Java—NetWeaver. This infrastructure portfolio covers UI, integration, development environment, BPM, BRM, identity management amongst many other things. The NetWeaver infrastructure also includes support for RFID and other sensory devices. In the InDetail report I wrote on RFID Middleware (SAP Auto-ID Infrastructure and SAP Auto-ID Enterprise, February 2008) I highlighted that there architecture was missing a component that was the norm in RFID middleware, namely the piece that interfaces to the readers. A market had grown up with 2 specialised products being developed by SIs to fill this gap and in other customer instances other RFID middleware software rivals to SAP were being used. One of these was RFID Anywhere from Sybase iAnywhere. RFID Anywhere from Sybase's subsidiary iAnywhere is the product right at the edge providing the links to the sensory devices, whatever they are, and being able to translate that data back into meaningful information for the business to take action upon. So here is another piece of complementary software solution coming from this merger—in that it will plug the missing gap in the product portfolio expected for RFID middleware.

The second part of SAP's strategy has been to start to "componetise" their ERP solution as well as move down in the SMB enterprise market. So SAP have added 3 ERP product suites:

• SAP Business All-in-One is based on the SAP ERP product, tailored for midsize companies. The package comes with a templated implementation methodology. Each partner remarkets and adapts the package for a specific industry sector. It is aimed at companies with up to 2,500 users. There are more than 1,200 channel partners providing more than 700 industry-specific solutions. SAP offers All-in-One as a hosted option.
• SAP Business One is SAP's entry level product aimed at customers with up to 100 users. It has limited customisation for specific sectors not supporting Aerospace, Defence, Life Sciences, Oil and Gas, and Utilities. There are more than 1,150 channel partners; providing more than 550 add-on solutions, many industry specific.
• SAP Business ByDesign is a fully integrated, SaaS business solution used by medium-sized companies to run their mission-critical business processes. It is aimed at company with between 100–500 users. It has an even more limited customisation for specific sectors than Business One. There are a limited number of partners available to support this option.

The addition of Sybase Mobility products provides SAP with ways to assist their ERP product set to be able to interact with mobile technology in a more effective way.

By: Andrew Callaway, Communications Manager, AIM UK Posted: 25th March 2010 Copyright AIM UK © 2010

Faked British Passports and identity theft of the kind associated with the recent murder of a Hamas official in Dubai are preventable, claims one of Britain's leading technology trade associations.

AIM UK, the non-commercial trade body for the automatic identification and data capture industry, says that natural feature identification technology which takes a "finger print" of a document's fibres would make the forgery of passports and other documents virtually impossible.

Prof. Anthony Furness, AIM UK's technical director, said: "The use of faked British passports has caused outrage and raised serious concerns about fraudulent use, forgery and identity theft. The fact that fake passports are being produced and are passing scrutiny suggests inherent flaws in the documents and the systems that handle them."

However, as an emerging identification technology—natural feature identification—could provide the solution. Prof. Furness, a leading contributor to European Commission projects on identification and location technologies, added: "Natural feature identification is similar in a number of ways to finger printing except that it involves taking a 'finger print' of a document's fibres. Like human finger prints, these are unique so a fake is easily detected. To a high degree of statistical confidence these natural fibre 'finger prints' can be taken from any pages of the document and distinguished from any other passport."

Linking this technique to appropriate biometric profiles would provide a highly effective defence against forgery, fraudluent use and identity theft and AIM UK is calling on Foreign Secretary David Miliband to open a debate on improved protection for British passport holders.

AIM UK was established in 1984 as a not-for-profit trade association with a remit to increase awareness of the potential of automatic identification and data capture technologies (AIDC) to radically improve business efficiency. These technologies include barcodes, 2D codes, radio frequency identification (RFID), biometrics, smartcards and voice recognition. member companies range from one-person consultancies to multi-nationals and are among the UK's most innovative technology solutions providers.

www.aimuk.org

By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 9th February 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

In the previous article with this title I discussed the consolidation of the MDM market. The same thing is happening in the CEP (complex event processing) market. However, here matters are somewhat different. In this sector, first IBM acquired AptSoft, then Aleri merged with Coral8, Informatica got AgentLogic and, most recently, Sybase has acquired the assets of Aleri (along with Coral8).

In the case of IBM, this means that that company has two major CEP engines: AptSoft, which is primarily used in conjunction with business process management, and InfoSphere Streams, which is the high-end, more serious CEP product. Informatica, on the other hand, primarily acquired AgentLogic to support event-driven data integration, though AgentLogic is still being targeted at government implementations where it has historically been strong.

Sybase is different, and it now has three CEP engines since it also has its own Sybase CEP product that works in conjunction with Sybase RAP (real-time analytics platform). However, before Sybase released its own CEP engine it partnered with, amongst others, Aleri and, in fact, Aleri has been a Sybase VAR for a number of years, so the acquisition is not simply tactical and to gain market share (though it undoubtedly does that) but it also has a more strategic rationale.

The point here is that these acquisitions were actually done for different reasons, at least in part. However, the Sybase purchase, in particular, raises interesting questions. For one thing, it means that Streambase is pretty much the only pure play left in the capital markets sector, which now looks like being carved up by Sybase, Streambase and Progress between them. But is Streambase big enough to continue on its own? A merger with Vertica seems likely at some point.

However, this is not the whole point. This acquisition pretty much marks the end of consolidation within the CEP capital markets sector. However, there remains the infrastructure market, exemplified by AptSoft and AgentLogic, and it is also notable that Progress recently bought Saviion and the company is likely to integrate this with Progress Apama to compete in this space.

However, perhaps most interesting is the RFID and sensor space, where there are other active CEP vendors like Starview and Event Zero. This is starting to ramp up and, interestingly, Sybase has stated that it plans to extend beyond capital markets in due course, and IBM has already done so. Progress has some customers here already and obviously this represents an opportunity for Streambase also.

So, what we have is a partial consolidation in the CEP market for one particular sector. It will be some time before that spreads into other areas, where markets are still in their infancy.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 20th January 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

MAINtag SAS and Tego, Inc announced on January 12th 2010, that the companies' jointly-developed FLYtag products will be used in a pioneering effort to tag thousands of aircraft parts across the Airbus A350 XWB fleet.

MAINtag were founded in 2004 and provides RFID tags, readers and software to major accounts for their industrial optimisation. They design and produce in house, rugged industrial RFID tags for challenging environments. Founded in 2005, Tego, Inc. produces high-memory RFID chips, tags and software. Its technology enables RFID applications that go beyond simple identification to allow rich storage of information and data tagged to assets for their life.

MAINtag will be the prime contractor for the jointly secured multi-year Airbus contract to supply next-generation RFID high-memory tags that can hold the complete birth record and maintenance history of aircraft parts, enabling new cutting-edge Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul applications. The combination of MAINtag's expertise in tag manufacturing and Tego's high-memory chip, provides the first standards-compliant, high memory and fully-passive RFID tags that help achieve Airbus' goal of value chain visibility.

The A350 XWB will begin using MAINtag's FLYtag solution, which incorporates Tego's high-memory RFID chip (the TegoChip), to tag over 1,500 pressurized and non-pressurized parts and components on each aircraft. MAINtag and Tego will offer the FLYtag for use on all aircraft. The A350 XWB will be the first aircraft in the Airbus fleet that will use RFID on flyable parts and will be rolled out with the involvement of Airbus suppliers. The program will deploy ruggedized high-memory RFID tags on flyable parts, allowing improved aircraft configuration management and line maintenance, repair shop optimization, warehouse logistics, payload tracking and life-limited parts monitoring.

"We are very proud to have been chosen by Airbus, and are excited to work with MAINtag to deliver the first flyable parts RFID tags that will allow Airbus and its suppliers to get RFID in the air quickly," said Timothy Butler, president and CEO of Tego, Inc.

As Aircraft manufacturers move towards being paid only when an airframe is in the air and not on the ground, then the ability to reduce the time spent in MRO whilst still maintaining the necessary safety requirements has become a priority. This solution has been talked about since around 2002 when I first became involved in RFID. This really shows how RFID has crossed the chasm and has become an important part of solutions to solve business problems in today’s agile world.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 20th January 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

MAINtag SAS and Tego, Inc announced on January 12th 2010, that the companies' jointly-developed FLYtag products will be used in a pioneering effort to tag thousands of aircraft parts across the Airbus A350 XWB fleet.

MAINtag were founded in 2004 and provides RFID tags, readers and software to major accounts for their industrial optimisation. They design and produce in house, rugged industrial RFID tags for challenging environments. Founded in 2005, Tego, Inc. produces high-memory RFID chips, tags and software. Its technology enables RFID applications that go beyond simple identification to allow rich storage of information and data tagged to assets for their life.

MAINtag will be the prime contractor for the jointly secured multi-year Airbus contract to supply next-generation RFID high-memory tags that can hold the complete birth record and maintenance history of aircraft parts, enabling new cutting-edge Maintenance, Repair and Overhaul applications. The combination of MAINtag's expertise in tag manufacturing and Tego's high-memory chip, provides the first standards-compliant, high memory and fully-passive RFID tags that help achieve Airbus' goal of value chain visibility.

The A350 XWB will begin using MAINtag's FLYtag solution, which incorporates Tego's high-memory RFID chip (the TegoChip), to tag over 1,500 pressurized and non-pressurized parts and components on each aircraft. MAINtag and Tego will offer the FLYtag for use on all aircraft. The A350 XWB will be the first aircraft in the Airbus fleet that will use RFID on flyable parts and will be rolled out with the involvement of Airbus suppliers. The program will deploy ruggedized high-memory RFID tags on flyable parts, allowing improved aircraft configuration management and line maintenance, repair shop optimization, warehouse logistics, payload tracking and life-limited parts monitoring.

"We are very proud to have been chosen by Airbus, and are excited to work with MAINtag to deliver the first flyable parts RFID tags that will allow Airbus and its suppliers to get RFID in the air quickly," said Timothy Butler, president and CEO of Tego, Inc.

As Aircraft manufacturers move towards being paid only when an airframe is in the air and not on the ground, then the ability to reduce the time spent in MRO whilst still maintaining the necessary safety requirements has become a priority. This solution has been talked about since around 2002 when I first became involved in RFID. This really shows how RFID has crossed the chasm and has become an important part of solutions to solve business problems in today’s agile world.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 7th December 2009 Copyright Quocirca © 2009

Radio Frequency Identification (RFID) or tagging and its close cousin Near Field Communications (NFC) have both been touted for great and sexy futuristic applications. These range from the tagging and tracking of all consumer goods to the conversion of mobile phones into all purpose ‘super wallets' where simply waving the phone at the checkout would perform the appropriate transaction.

The idea with RFID is quite simple. If you can apply sufficiently low cost tags to items you can replace the line-of-sight constrained barcode with something that can be read automatically over a range of a couple of meters. This opens up applications from stock control and in-store anti-theft detection, to esoteric ones like domestic fridges that automatically trigger a restock event when the last carton of milk is removed, or rubbish bins that notice something should have been recycled.

The problem with this sort of post-cyberpunk ideal is that while cost per tag is falling, the cost and complexity of large deployments of tags, readers and the changes this brings to business processes rises with scale. The benefits may be significant when this occurs, but they also get harder to identify, isolate and quantify. While visible at board level, many individual cost centres will not see significant benefit, making large scale projects harder to justify, so most RFID deployments have been on a smaller scale where value is well defined and clear.

A similar picture is true with NFC, although some large deployments, such as Transport for London's Oyster card, have very worked well, as they are closed applications and have the support of an entire infrastructure. The idea of similar technology on all mobile phones has potential and could ultimately yield plenty of interesting applications, but there are a lot of vested interests and agendas that have to be aligned in the meantime.

Mass market, high tech applications will have their place at some point in the future. However the use of tags and short-range radio devices to read them can work very effectively today in applications where it is necessary to prove that the right action has been taken with a specifically identified object. In other words, assurance or compliance with a specified process can be of higher importance than the "wow" factor, and so worth spending money on.

Compliance applications might seem boring compared to the futuristic opportunity to tag and wave at everything, but they are often of critical importance, and therefore can have huge benefits, usually in mitigating or avoiding risks—including saving lives. There will always be situations where human input cannot be relied on to effectively mitigate the risk.

Consider the needs of maintenance staff working on electrified rail lines for example. When the power line being worked on is switched off it has to be attached to earth to avoid current being induced by other nearby power lines. The heavy duty earthing straps are critical to safety and preventing damage, so deployment must be well controlled, but they also HAVE to be removed before power goes back on. Several straps will be used over the course of one maintenance session, and by a number of engineers, so it is critical to account precisely for all of them.

The difficulty is how to positively identify each strap and know who checks them out. Each one is a weighty coil of 2cm diameter cable, with heavy-duty clamps at each end. Labels or barcodes are difficult to attach and become difficult to use in the challenging outdoor environment next to the tracks.

However, a solution based on radio tags read by nearby readers fits the bill by giving each earthing strap a unique identity. The engineers then use Motorola handheld devices with a snap-on NFC reader and suitable software to link each specific cable to a specific engineer. At some point developments will be taken a stage further and GPS will be used to provide the specific location for each cable while it is in use. All of this information is logged for audit and alert purposes to ensure safety of the workers and avoid damage to tracks and power lines.

While this verification application tags and tracks mobile objects, tags can also be used to validate the location of the tag reader itself. For example security guards can have tag readers attached to handheld mobile devices they may be already carrying for mobile communications as they patrol. Tags embedded around the perimeter and at vulnerable points of the area they are employed to secure can be identified and read, ensuring that the guard has passed that point and at what time. This provides an audit trail that the security process has been complied with.

In each case the reading of a tag is providing a time, person, proximity and location stamp for a business process that depends on repetitive tasks. This will provide authentication to validate a process for compliance purposes, but can also protect assets and perhaps lives. In constraining the solution to meet specific business needs, even the most advanced technologies can be deployed in a cost effective manner.

These applications, provided in this case by customers of one of the UK's mobile data specialists, TBS Mobility, demonstrate not only that there are valid uses for NFC and RFID, but that they do not have to be huge or mass market. There are a number of companies like TBS that combine mobile data experience with an understanding of task-based processes and this is where there can be valuable deployments. They show that even advanced technologies can be quickly applied to existing problems, without the need for a ‘sci-fi' shift in thinking, or sky-high cost or complexity. It's just a matter of understanding the problem and then looking at what technology might fit.

Much against the doom and gloom that many commentators are issuing around RFID and NFC, it is not a case of "ta-ta for now" (TTFN)—but more about getting on with what is necessary, or to use an earthy acronym, "JFDI"...