By: Philip Howard, Director of Research - Technology, Bloor Research Posted: 13th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

Vertica has just announced that it is offering its data warehousing technology via the Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud. This is quite a departure. While there are other data warehousing vendors offering hosted warehousing services, Vertica is the first to offer its facilities via cloud computing.

When I first heard about this I have to admit that I was dubious about how much take-up there might be but, having considered it, there are clearly a number of opportunities. The first is for companies offering analytics via a SaaS (software as a service) model: using a cloud-based approach means that they can extend their services without getting involved in building or extending their own data centre.

Secondly, there are small and medium sized companies who do not have the desire or the ability to build and manage a data warehouse of their own; and thirdly, there is a significant market within large enterprises that want a temporary data mart. Normally, you would load one of these up, query the hell out of it for a few weeks or months, and then close it down. But why go to the expense of having that kit hanging around, and the software licenses to go with it?

Finally, while it isn't a target market per se, a cloud offering gives Vertica a significant advantage when it comes to proofs of concept: implementation is more or less immediate and costs are minimal.

So, how does it all work? Well, actually it's trivial. There's no software to install or download; once you're signed up you start loading your data and once that's complete you can run your queries, analyses and whatever. You can opt for one, three or multiple processing nodes, as required. Provided you have three or more nodes then you get automated failover. Backup (which is highly compressed, to save on storage) comes as standard and, because Amazon is hosting the software you get Amazon level SLAs and support. Capacity starts at 500 Gb with a monthly fee of $2,000. Discounts apply once you get into the multi-terabyte range.

This is really quite appealing if you are in the right prospective user bracket. What is more, it is difficult to see some of Vertica's competitors offering the same sorts of capabilities as Vertica, as it requires an architecture predicated on the sort of grid technology used in cloud computing, which Vertica has but many others do not. Incidentally, there is no reason in principle why Vertica could not be implemented on other supplier's clouds.

I have to admit to not paying much attention to cloud computing prior to this so I am surprising myself by thinking that this looks like it has legs: I can easily envisage Vertica picking up significant numbers of implementations in a market that it effectively has to itself.

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By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 13th May 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

Spam has been with us, in name at least, for some 15 years. According to the watchdog Spamhaus, 90 per cent of all email now sent is spam. Fortunately that does not mean 90 per cent of our inboxes are filled with the stuff.

The problem has been contained through the widespread deployment of anti-spam products and services in the highly competitive market of the past decade.

Before spam became a big problem, there were still specialist email security vendors like Clearswift and Marshal Software that checked outgoing email to ensure it complied with internal rules on content distribution and decency.

But that was the mid-1990s, when sending email externally was a relatively new concept and volumes were low. The vendors' software was installed on email servers themselves—at the heart of the IT department, which was the last place spam with its sometimes viral payloads was welcome.

Then came a rapid evolution of products that kept spam at arm's length—either appliances at the network edge or in-the-cloud services that ensured an almost clean incoming email stream. These specialist solutions identified and eliminated spam but also targeted its sources and cut them off.

Many of the biggest names to have emerged in email security have now been acquired by the big IT infrastructure vendors. We now have such pairings as Google and Postini, Microsoft and FrontBridge, and Cisco and IronPort. Others have become, or remain part of, some of the major IT security companies, such as Trend Micro, Symantec, Websense and Secure Computing. A few, like MessageLabs and Mimecast, still retain their independence.

The interesting thing is that the market has now come full circle. With most business users having spam controls in place, the email security vendors have found new business harder to acquire and have been limited to attracting competitors' customers rather than finding green-field opportunities.

This difficulty has meant they have started to target broader content security issues, such as content accessed and uploaded via web browsers and email archiving.

The aim is to expand the range of products and services sold to existing customers and to be more attractive to those of competitors who may be tempted to jump ship.

This broadening of focus has also allowed a number of small vendors that might otherwise have died to diversify and stay in the market. Both Marshal and Clearswift now see themselves as content policy engines.

Regardless of the content's origin or destination, they aim to ensure people only distribute content they are authorised to. Others like Tumbleweed and Proofpoint, having failed to establish a strong presence in Europe first time around, reckon they can make more of a mark with a renewed focus.

The choice can seem mind-boggling if you take all these vendors and review them alongside other content security specialists such as ScanSafe, which specialises in managed services for web security; Bloxx with appliances for web security; and anti-spyware vendor Webroot, which recently acquired spam-filtering firm Email Systems.

The whole market has converged on content security for a good reason—and one that is sometimes lost sight of. One of the main functions of IT is to allow the secure sharing of content, within organisations and externally.

For this to occur within employers' and regulators' guidelines requires policies to be in place and implemented. This has led to much talk about data leak prevention (DLP), a term that has come into general use in the past few years.

DLP is all about stopping the wrong stuff going to the wrong people. Most vendors will have the term somewhere on their marketing materials.

But there is no silver bullet for DLP. For any organisation this is a broad discipline that requires integrating multiple products from different vendors.

First there are people—who they are, what groups they belong to. For most organisations this information is already defined in existing directories, generally Microsoft's Active Directory or an LDAP-based product. Any content-filtering products need to integrate with this and build on it, and not require redefinition.

Then there is content. Nearly all the products from content-filtering companies deal with data moving across networks—apart from some email archiving services.

But content spends most of its life at rest sitting quietly on a disk somewhere until someone disturbs it. Content security must start here, ensuring that such data is secure, whether on a storage array in a data centre, on an employee's desktop or on some mobile device out in the field. Content filtering companies do not address this.

Only when content is on the move—or when it has been created on the fly, as are many emails—can policy engines really decide what content is and if the person doing something with it should be authorised to do so.

Before investing in a new product from a content-filtering vendor, perhaps based on some lively marketing relating to the hazards of data leaks, IT departments should take a good look at what is already in place and what gaps need filling.

They may well find they have many of the components already. Where they do not, existing suppliers may already have evolved their offerings to plug those gaps.

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By: Peter Williams, Senior Analyst, Bloor Research Posted: 12th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

De-duplication (de-dupe) specialist DataDomain today [12th May] launched its fastest—and the industry's fastest—de-dupe appliance, the DD690.

The stand-alone unit, which has an Intel quad core CPU, can achieve up to 1.4TB/hour throughput, or up to 170MB/sec in a single-stream for a large database. Its addressable physical capacity is 35.3TB. However, up to 16 DD690 arrays can be installed in the DDX cabinet, to provide a maximum capacity of 28PB and an aggregate throughput of 22.4TB/hour.

What DataDomain describes as "the fastest single-stream de-dupe engine in the world" uses its own operating system with an architecture to maximise processing and indexing within the CPU while minimising disk access. DataDomain's VP of product management Brian Biles told me that this approach would be difficult to match. "We expect a 50% de-dupe speed-up every time Intel doubles the number of CPUs."

The big positive in de-dupe is that it drastically reduces nearline and/or offline storage. (Primary storage is never de-duped.) In simple terms, all the data is examined as it is backed up and duplicate files and/or blocks (or even smaller segments) are replaced by a pointer tag to where the single instance of the data is held.

This picture becomes even more attractive—at least using the DataDomain architecture—if data is coming from a number of remote locations. A further announcement is the extension of its processing capability to allow up to 60 separate data streams to be de-duped before transmission over a WAN to, for instance a single large receiving DDX. Clearly, the less physical data that needs to travel over the wire, the faster this is completed. Moreover, bringing separate data silos together in this way means a greater space saving—since, otherwise, identical data will remain replicated in the different silos—and is easier to manage centrally.

Competitive approaches are, in general, not as efficient in space-saving; but DataDomain expects its de-dupe to achieve a 10x reduction and, combined with data compression, will achieve a 20x output space reduction—with a 95–99% reduction in cross-site transmission bandwidth. Then comes the question: "In that case why wouldn't everyone do this?"

There are several answers to this, and most of them revolve around where it is applied. DataDomain's phenomenal growth—doubling turnover in three quarters since it IPO'd last year and adding nearly 300 new customers in the past quarter alone—is a testament to the fact that most large organisations are now taking the plunge. (The company is now the de-dupe market leader in the US and a recent survey suggests it will soon overtake Symantec and EMC in Europe too.)

A second deterrent is that de-dupe performance can be a dog. That is why throughput figures are key, and why a stand-alone de-dupe appliance tends to be the best option; this is also part of why some vendors only provide de-duping on already backed-up data (as a background task that still slows down other processing and saves less space). In some systems performance can be improved but only at the expense of output disk space, to some extent defeating de-dupe's whole purpose.

Perhaps most of all it is considerations about recovery from backup—and especially disaster recovery (DR). The data is not a mirror of the live system and, if recovery is needed, it has to be ‘reconstituted' to its original form. So, if an immediate switchover to a remote DR site is needed, forget de-dupe—at least for the critical on-line data. But in all other cases, it comes down to how efficiently and reliably the recovery can be performed.

The output file will be the same in either case. Retrieving blocks using existing pointers will be faster than when they had to be created; but, of necessity, it will be slower than contiguous reading—unless segments are placed in optimum sequence and sometimes memory-held so no disk access is needed at all. DataDomain does try to arrange its stored segments optimally for retrieval performance.

Potentially, then, recovery can be as quick as would be the case without de-dupe—largely removing that objection. Likewise, if some de-duped data goes to off-line archive on tape, and has to be reconstituted first. However, this performance level will not be achieved by all solutions, so performance testing vis-à-vis likely SLA requirements should be considered in all major evaluations.

The reliability and integrity of the data, and protection against hardware faults, is covered by such things as on-the-fly error detection and correction and continuous disk ‘scrubbing' to remove errors before they become a problem. So, short of a DR regime where up-to-the-minute mirroring is crucial, I ask again: "why wouldn't you include de-dupe?" It is, anyway, very green (greatly reducing disk space and network bandwidth), so energy and heat saving—which provides an obvious ROI.

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By: Andy Hayler, Associate Analyst, Bloor Research Posted: 11th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

A new entrant to the data integration space is expressor software. Although there is no shortage of integration technology out there, in practice large scale integration projects involve a large amount of manual scripts which deal with what transformation to apply to a certain column in a source system before sending it on to a target system. This approach often results in business rules being embedded within this code, and hence not re-used in other projects. Moreover current technologies map physical columns to others, and so if (as inevitably happens) changes occur to these structures, then these scripts need to be updated. Consequently, high maintenance costs are a frequent issue for data integration applications. Another issue for many enterprises is the limited batch window, which means that performance of such integration jobs can be a bottleneck, enabling Ab Initio, in particular, to carve out a high-performance niche in the market against players such as Informatica and IBM (who acquired Ascential).

The expressor technology tackles both these real problems head-on. It uses a higher level semantic abstraction model to derive business rules and store these in a metadata repository, maintaining a layer between business terms such as "Full customer name and address" and its physical representation(s). In this way it is easier to re-use business rules across projects, and the abstraction layer means that physical structure changes in the underlying data sources are quicker to adapt to. It has built a series of connectors to common data sources, such as databases, XML and even Cobol copybooks.

The speed issue is dealt with by designing the expressor engine with MPP processing (which is also the approach used by Ab Initio), enabling customers to throw standard hardware at the problem. The company's principals have long experience in embedded software, and have written a platform neutral engine that they claim shows very high performance in tests relative to other vendors. These claims will need to be validated by independent studies and real-life customer experience; claiming your product is ten times faster than the leading product on the market is something that will require careful testing, though it is intriguing.

The company has been formed by a couple of industry veterans who have been programming in this environment for years and have in-depth experience of the main vendor technologies in the market (and hence know their limitations). The company has received USD 7.5 million dollar funding primarily from two reputable VCs, and has brought in experienced management. Its product hits general availability in June 2008, though it has been conducting trials at a number of customers in spring 2008.

The problems expressor addresses are very real. Although it will be attacking large, entrenched competitors, the success of Netezza in the data warehouse market has shown that such heights can be scaled. The company will need to back up its bold claims on performance with independent (preferably customer) case studies, but even if its performance claims are partly true, then the big boys may have something to worry about soon.

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By: Andy Hayler, CEO, The Information Difference Posted: 9th May 2008 Copyright The Information Difference © 2008

IBM recently introduced version 8 of its master data management (MDM) technologies, now known as Infosphere MDM Server. IBM's has built up a suite of MDM offerings based around the acquired technologies of DWL (customer hub), Trigo (product information management) and Ascential. There are two important aspects to V8, the first technical, the second commercial.

On the technology side, MDM Server is an important step in positioning IBM's MDM offerings as genuinely multi-domain, i.e. being able to handle all master data types, rather than having separate approaches to customer and product data. This is sensible for many reasons. While the operational characteristics of customer data and product data may differ, enterprises increasingly want to see a coherent, unified approach to dealing with master data of whatever type. Moreover there are many other types of master data beyond customer and product, and enterprise architects wish to avoid a profusion of hubs based on un-integrated technologies. At this stage it is important to understand that there are still two distinct IBM product lines, but V8 is the first step along the path to unifying these into a true multi-domain MDM technology, a multi-year roadmap. Over time I would expect to see, for example, unified data governance functionality across both product lines e.g. common data stewardship and security applications. Amongst the improvements V8 offers are enhancements to the underlying product domain, allowing support for hierarchies, types, sub-types, categories and terms and conditions associated with a product. There is also a new "account" domain, an account being an agreement between two parties with terms and conditions that can be enforced through the MDM Server.

With Version 8 comes a more flexible pricing structure. IBM's MDM offering has traditionally been perceived as a big ticket item, with software licence costs upwards of USD 1 million for a typical deal. With its recent version 8 release (February 2008) came a new "entry level" pricing model. This pricing is based on a mixture of the data domains to be covered and record volumes to be held; allowing customers to get started at a significantly lower price point than previously, and scale up as needed. This makes good sense, since very few MDM projects are big-bang affairs where customers immediately switch on an enterprise hub covering multiple data domains. It is more usual for customers to begin with a particular data domain (maybe customer, product, location or asset) and deploy a hub in a particular division or subsidiary, gradually increasing the scope of the hub coverage over time. By being more flexible in its pricing IBM is widening its potential market, and giving the potential for up-sell opportunities later.

Recently IBM has seen an increase in customers outside its traditionally strong base in financial services (no bad thing given the current issues in the financial markets), with recent customer wins in retail, automotive, and in Asia Pacific e.g. the Vietnamese tax department. Interestingly Q4 2007 and Q1 2008 were the most successful quarters ever for the company in terms of MDM customer shipments, which is surprising given the meltdown in financial services. Its roadmap towards a unified multi-domain approach is a positive and important step in appealing to MDM customers beyond the financial services vertical.

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By: Simon Holloway, Senior Analyst, Bloor Research Posted: 9th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

Warehouse management is viewed by all involved in Logistics as a key to being successful in this fast moving industry. But the price of IT systems with the right mix of functionality for the SME market has been a major issue in the reticence of these organisations moving away from the use of Excel spreadsheets. 3M Supply Chain Solutions has been a major player in the warehouse management system (WMS) market with its HighJump product since their foundation in April 1983. They have over 1,300 customers worldwide; these include such well-known names as Duracell, Sony, Yamaha, Pepsi, Toyota, Bridgestone and of course parent company 3M. At the end of 2007, 3M Supply Chain Solutions released a version of their WMS—HighJumpWarehouse Advantage-45—specifically for the SME market. Bloor was given a briefing on the capabilities of this new venture by Chris Goldsmith (Director, Product Strategy), Hugh Murphy (EMEA Marketing Manager) and Chad Eckes (Director, Product Strategy).

Goldsmith stated that "Globalisation continues to increase competitive pressure even for smaller companies, which result in several challenges for these companies. They are being forced to innovate while, at the same time, they need to cut costs to remain viable. SMEs have fewer resources but must interact with larger, more advanced companies in the global supply chain. On top of this, goods movement and logistics are riddled with inefficiencies due to lack of investment in technology." In the past SMEs may have needed new systems, but were unable to afford a long and expensive implementation cycle. Additionally, they have wanted a simple system without the full complex support for warehouse management, but this system has to be able to grow with them. Because of their size, SMEs also need a system with fast employee adoption. What an SME would really like is a WMS vendor who will provide them with best of breed functionality and architecture without best of breed pricing and, most importantly, who will be there in the future.

Eckes explained further: "3M Supply Chain Solutions has built HighJump Warehouse Advantage-45 to address the pains of SMEs. It is a rapidly configured WMS that is designed to be fully implemented within 45 business days. The solution contains all the key warehouse management features an SME needs, and is built upon the same technology as our enterprise-class WMS—HighJump Warehouse Advantage." WA-45 provides the following WMS features:

• Tracking and visibility of inbound orders
• Receiving: automatically validates receipts against orders
• Directed put-away: ensuring the right materials are put away in the right location. Materials can be put away using a variety of algorithm choices, including FIFO and LIFO.
• Picking: support for by order, batch or label.
• Coordinate packing and shipping processes to increase fill rates and cut preparation time for shipping documents and ship confirmations.
• Replenish materials automatically so associates have sufficient inventory to fill orders, and short-shipped orders are minimised.
• Inventory control: 3M Supply Chain Solutions claims that the solution can achieve up to 99+ percent inventory accuracy, visibility and traceability.
• The system captures every transaction in the warehouse and presents operational information through a web interface.
• A web page development tool, WebWise, that allows the user to edit and create pages, so users see information in the terminology and format to which they are accustomed.

To achieve the 45 day implementation, 3M Supply Chain Solutions has provided a number of aids to make implementation easier and faster. These include:

• Playbook: the analogy Goldsmith and Eckes gave Bloor that it was like a sports playbook
• User guide: this provides specific direction by Job Category; namely the warehouse leader and the system administrator
• HighJump University: this is a set of online courses, involving about 30 hours of class time. The courses are aimed at the SMEs' key users with the goal of making them productive from day one
• Warehouse Wizard: this wizard provides an easy to use means of converting the Logical Warehouse definitions to the actual Physical Warehouse environment.

Murphy described the flexible pricing of WA-45, "For some users, we realise that they want to make an outright purchase so WA-45 is available on license covering a maximum of 20 concurrent users. Other users prefer a subscription-based manner. So WA-45 is also available in this way. The conditions are the same as for the perpetual license, and clients sign for at least a one-year license, which is renewable annually. WA-45 also has an la carte functionality, allowing a user to only buy the functionality they need."

With the current pressure of SME logistics companies, WA-45 is a welcome addition to the software available to run effective warehouse operations. Bloor are particular impressed with the way 3M Supply Chain Solutions has gone about the engineering of a version of their Tier 1 product to meet the needs of SMEs, but at the same allowing them to grow into the larger system. The portfolio of tools to support the quick implementation is very impressive. 3M Supply Chain Solutions is consolidating their position as a serious player in the WMS market.

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By: Dale Vile, Managing Director, Freeform Dynamics Posted: 8th May 2008 Copyright Freeform Dynamics © 2008

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

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

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

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

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By: Dr Fern Halper, Partner, Hurwitz & Associates Posted: 8th May 2008 Copyright Hurwitz & Associates © 2008

When I first started to research the text analytics industry about three years ago, people didn't understand why I was so interested in this nascent marketplace. I had always anticipated how important it would be. I remember working at Bell Laboratories, in the 1980s, analyzing structured data using advanced data mining techniques, trying to predict customer actions. I knew then that this structured data was only a piece of the puzzle and that unstructured data needed to be part of the mix. Since that time technology and computing power have obviously come a long way and text analytics has become an increasingly mature market.

Over the past several years, I've gotten to know many of the vendors in the space, talked to many customers deploying the technology and, in 2007, published a benchmark study entitled, "Text Analytics: The Road to Understanding Your Company's Unstructured Data." Three key findings from our research have been borne out in the market:

• Voice of the Customer is a key application area. Our research indicated that end-users placed a high priority on customer focused applications, with 75% of respondents planning to deploy customer care related solutions. Today, many of the vendors in this space have gained great traction in this area.
• Text analytics moves beyond business intelligence. While early adopters of the technology deployed text analytics together with data mining and BI, and this is still a very popular means of deploying the technology, our study indicated that end-users were interested in deploying text analytics in conjunction with both BI and content management. Since then, I've seen more evidence in the market for this kind of deployment.
• The market will continue to consolidate. At the time the report was published, ClearForest and Inxight had recently been acquired. I predicted that additional market consolidation would take place; and it has.

Since the study was published in August, 2007, and due to the factors mentioned above, the market has reached the next level of maturity. For these reasons, I believe it is time to provide another benchmark. I am looking for a few sponsors who would like to partner with our firm in bringing valuable market research to the end-user community. If you are interested, please contact Carol Caliendo at carol.caliendo@hurwitz.com or 617-454-1030.

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By: Simon Parums, Managing Director, Themis Posted: 8th May 2008 Copyright Themis © 2008

Although IT department employees are covered by the same Health and Safety laws as other workers, there are many issues specific to the industry. Staff working in IT are required to spend much of their time sitting at a computer so the most common complaints are limb disorders such as repetitive strain injury and eye strain from long spells working at a computer screen.

Computer screens are wrongly blamed for a wide range of health problems. In fact, only a small proportion of computer users actually suffer ill health as a result of working at a screen. Where problems do occur, they are generally caused by the way in which they are being used, rather than the computers themselves.

Employers can avoid claims from staff for these issues by ensuring a good working environment and examining the ways computers are used. All employers should also have a Risk Assessment. This will help them identify the risks so they can take the relevant steps to reduce them.

IT employers should have:

• A full written Health & Safety Policy in place;
• A Fire Risk Assessment carried out on their premises;
• Adequate First Aid cover;
• Training in Display Screen Equipment (DSE); and should
• Look into obtaining separate Risk Assessments for groups of employers including young workers, pregnant workers, noise, stress etc.

All of the above should be carried out on a regular basis and not just as a one off.

Here are some other common complaints from IT workers and tips on how employers can combat them:

Aches and pains
Repetitive Strain Injury (RSI) has become the common term for all manner of aches, pains and disorders, but it's not always correct and can mean different things to different people. A better medical name for the whole group of conditions is ‘upper limb disorders'. Usually these disorders do not last, but in a few cases they may become persistent or even disabling.

Employers can avoid problems by good workplace design, to make sure staff can work comfortably, and that they take regular breaks from the workstation. Short and frequent breaks are thought to be more beneficial than longer, less frequent ones. Preventing upper limb disorders is easier than ever.

Limb complaints can arise from employees who use laptops and portable computers. Make sure are compact and easy to carry. Design features such as small keyboards can make prolonged use uncomfortable so consider advising staff to use a docking station.

If full-sized equipment is available advise staff to use it. Like other computer users, people who habitually use a portable should be trained how to minimise the risks. This includes sitting comfortably, angling the screen so it can be seen clearly with minimal reflections, and taking frequent breaks if work is prolonged. Wherever possible, portables should be placed on a solid surface—importantly this should be at the right height for the user to prevent back injuries

Damage to eyesight
Extensive research has found no evidence that working at a computer can cause disease or permanent damage to eyes. However, long spells of screen work can lead to tired eyes and discomfort. Also, by giving eyes more demanding tasks, it might make users aware of an eyesight problem they have not noticed before. To prevent problems employers can help ensure screens are well positioned and properly adjusted, and that the workplace lighting is suitable.

The heat generated by computers and other equipment can make the air seem drier and some contact lens wearers find this uncomfortable. Where the air is dry, employers should increase the humidity.

Employees covered by Health and Safety regulations can ask their employer to provide and pay for an eye test from an optometrist or doctor. Employers only have to pay for spectacles if special ones (for example, prescribed for the distance at which the screen is viewed) are needed and normal ones cannot be used.

Headaches
Headaches are a common complaint in the workplace and it's often assumed they are caused by working at a computer screen, but this isn't always the case. Headaches may result from several factors, such as:

• Screen glare
• Poor image quality
• A need for different spectacles
• Stress and anxiety
• Reading the screen for long periods without a break
• Poor posture

Try to identify the reason for any headache complaint as it can usually be put right quite easily. It could be something as simple as adjusting the employees chair, changing the monitor or providing further training on how to use the computer. This is something that will be identified if you have a full Risk Assessment carried out.

It's extremely important to remember that, no matter what size of the business, all employers have Health and Safety obligations to ensure staff have a safe working environment. If you are confused about any of the information given in this article it's essential you speak to an expert. A small cost to seek advice could save you thousands in the long run from claims brought against the company. Good Health and Safety practice also increases productivity which will have an impact on bottom line profitability.

If you require further information please visit http://www.themissupport.co.uk/

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By: Gerry Brown, Senior Analyst, Bloor Research Posted: 8th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

There is a plethora of white papers, webcasts, newsletters, conferences, and general advice emanating from the technology industry today. But why are many messages from the most dynamic and innovative industry on earth so similar? For example, this is the latest advice, paraphrased from one leading analyst organization, on how to implement BI:

• Ensure business vision and sponsorship
• Ensure data lineage, governance and quality
• Combine planning, reporting and analysis
• Enable forecasting and simulating (modeling) scenarios
• Account for cultural change
• Make applications more intuitive, making them easier for business users

Granted these are all sound management principles, but are they ground-breaking? A similar set of 'to do' actions could be applied to virtually any enterprise software including ERP, CRM, and SCM. How many times have you heard "set goals and milestones, implement in bit-size chunks, and measure results"? In recent times the IT industry has been mesmerised by investment appraisal techniques such as ROI and TCO.

Much of what we read in the technology industry media today follows good data governance and general management practices. This is all well and good. Now this might be because, as Larry Ellison believes, real innovation is now largely dead in a fast-maturing software industry, and we no longer have enough ‘new' new stuff to talk about. I prefer to believe this is not the case. The IT industry is as vibrant and as energetic as it ever was.

However, times have moved on and the technology is now the easy bit. User interfaces are now much easier to navigate. Implementations can be completed in weeks in many cases. The depth and breadth of software functionality is awesome. Software mostly works.

We now understand that failed CRM and BI implementations (for example) are not mostly the fault of the software, but rather overall project management. Typically problems have centred on available project management and technical expertise, lack of executive sponsorship, and lack of buy-in from end users. No wonder business management advice is in vogue.

In addition, many IT project management techniques such as ITIL and PRINCE have proved unwieldy and frustratingly slow from an end-users' point of view. Empowered business managers with BlackBerrys in their pockets, laptops in their knapsacks, and PCs in their homes want their say. IT is becoming inseparable from the business and deeply embedded in our everyday lives. Who can say where technology ends and life begins? Data (or IT) management and general management principles are becoming blurred.

Vendors and industry commentators have an obligation to help customers navigate through the complexity of the technology industry so they can make well-informed superior purchasing decisions. This will help the industry to continue its high levels of growth despite the world economy slowing down.

Increasingly technology consumers will value knowledge that combines elements of both technology know-how and best business management practices. This knowledge needs to be at an appropriate granular level to enable effective project management and implementation of a specific technology. More focus on helping and guiding customers and to listening to their specific information needs will help to provide the compelling and rich hybrid ‘business and IT' content that customers need and want.

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By: Philip Howard, Director of Research - Technology, Bloor Research Posted: 8th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

Leading data integration vendors like Informatica and Business Objects (SAP) have recently (over the last year or so) been making much of the fact that they can support unstructured data. That is, that you can use these tools to move (say) Word documents around. This is absolutely true and it is useful enough in its way.

But there's a big difference between a Word document and content. Why do you think that all the ECM (enterprise content management) vendors all have their own tools for migrating data from competitor's platforms? And why does everybody use these (or an independent product such as EntropySoft's, about which I wrote here recently) rather than an ETL (extract, transform and load) tool?

The answer is that ETL vendors extract Word documents at the database level whereas EntropySoft and companies in the ECM space interface at the application level, thereby having an understanding of the context within which that content is stored, and the metadata surrounding it.

Now, all the major players in the data integration space, and even some of the smaller ones, make much of the fact that they have connectors that have a deep understanding of a variety of application environments such as SAP, Oracle and so on, because it is a clear advantage to understand the context within which your data runs or will run when it comes to moving that data. So why don't these suppliers apply the same principle to content? It's not even as if they would have to develop their own connectors in the various ECM systems: they could license them from third parties if they preferred.

Actually, I think the ETL vendors are simply unaware that there is an issue with moving content. They think that content is just another word for unstructured data and that they know all about moving data. It hasn't occurred to them that there are major auditing and validation issues that arise whenever regulatory control is applicable, such as whenever the FDA (Food and Drug Administration) or the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission) is involved, for example.

The problem here is that the big data integration players are pitching their products as platforms that will serve all your data requirements. The truth is that right now they are very far from offering such capability. Content is one major element that is missing. With a few exceptions, so are replication and synchronisation. Data integration has a long way to go yet.

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By: David Tebbutt, Programme Director, Freeform Dynamics Posted: 7th May 2008 Copyright Freeform Dynamics © 2008

Today saw the start of Green IT 08 at the Design Centre, Islington. It's a combination mini-exhibition and conference. It was interesting to see a mix of customers, vendors and analysts sharing their views. And, my, how the field has consolidated in the past year or so.

Then, a lot of IT people were discovering green issues for the same time. Waves of evangelism ensued and, indeed, are still washing over us. But what I found interesting is the stage we seem to have reached with green, or climate change, or carbon—take your pick. I hesitate to mention that I was in IT when decimalisation came along, when VAT came in and, of course, when we had Year 2000. Like 'green' all of these created huge amounts of heat and steam followed by action in the IT world, especially since all three had a specific deadline. Green doesn't really have a deadline but the pattern is being more or less repeated. Lots of confusion, lots of explanation and, perhaps now, a more or less common understanding.

Most of the speakers today were agreed on what needs to be done. I liked the Highways Agency idea of dividing the actions up according to whether they're down to the individual, the ICT department or the Enterprise to take them.

With few exceptions, money was declared the number one driver. Regulation was up there. And green was usually seen as a useful by-product. Nothing new there. Although some people suggested that green was the primary driver—but it seemed to me that, while this might be true among some staff, it wouldn't normally get buy-in from the boardroom.

I liked JP Rangaswami's (MD of BT Design, which embraces ICT) fairly hard-nosed message of, essentially, "cut the carbon" (my words, not his) and cascade the authority for doing so from the board down through champions. These are senior departmental "go to" people who advise and encourage, act as a sounding board and, when necessary, veto things like unnecessary flights. He doesn't believe that all answers are known yet but he does believe in avoiding dithering because this leads to inaction.

I also liked the plain speaking of Her Majesty's Government's CIO John Suffolk. He doesn't like having his agenda driven by IT people who advocate the latest technology without being able to explain what benefits it delivers. He'd rather copy someone else's success. He has adopted the champion/challenger approach in which he champions what he thinks is good and will only consider a challenger if it wins by a sustantial margin.

His bottom line is, "know what good looks like" and challenge suppliers to meet these requirements. To give an example, he mentions people who are pleased that servers are being 30 percent utilised. He asks, "would you run an office that's only 30 percent utilised? He seems to see some of the madness in the IT industry for what it is and continually questions "Why?".

Perhaps the sheen is beginning to go off green and it is heading to becoming part of business, just as has Quality, which was quite a fashionable topic some years ago. This has to be for the good. A green thread which runs through everyone's thinking is probably the best way to impact an organisation's environmental footprint.

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By: Marcia Kaufman, Partner, Hurwitz & Associates Posted: 7th May 2008 Copyright Hurwitz & Associates © 2008

Just after I returned from last month's IBM SOA IMPACT Conference, the Hurwitz team started to interview companies for case studies to be included in the second edition of SOA For Dummies. So for me, one of the benefits of attending IMPACT was getting a feel for some of the key trends in customer SOA implementations in preparation for this research.

I was particularly interested in the "Smart SOA" theme introduced at IMPACT. It seemed an apt description based on the large number of participants (6000 customers and partners) and the diversity and quantity of customer presentations (over 250 across 8 different subject matter tracks) that took place during the week.

But I must admit, initially I wasn't quite sure about the significance of using the word smart. Does implementing SOA make you smart? Do you need to get smart before you can bring SOA to your company? Or as Drew Carey, the "special guest" at the conference kickoff, joked about the "Smart SOA" theme by saying something like, "What does IBM mean by this...smart SOA as opposed to the stupid SOA our competitors sell?"

After just a few days in Las Vegas with lots of smart IBM customers and partners it was pretty easy to understand why Smart SOA does a good job of describing the current level of customer adoption of this approach. Based on my observations at IMPACT 2008, I see three major trends supporting the scenario that customers, partners, and vendors are all getting smarter about SOA.

Getting Smart about bringing IT and Business together.
Companies have moved very quickly to create a business driven (rather than IT driven) approach to their SOA initiatives. Sandy Carter, IBM VP SOA Strategy, cited some impressive statistics supporting this trend in her IMPACT keynote on SOA deployments. She quoted a recent IBM customer survey which indicated that the percentage of SOA initiatives requiring business involvement jumped from 30% in 2006 up to 70% in 2007. IT executives want to get the business involved with their SOA initiatives from the beginning and this is having an impact on how companies are selecting a SOA vendor. IT-centric approaches are out. Customers are looking to their SOA vendors for help in implementing SOA within the context of the specific requirements and best practices relevant for their own industry. Results of IBM's survey of customers indicate that the #1 criteria used to select a SOA vendor is business expertise.

And just as customers have gotten smarter about improving the collaboration between business and IT, IBM has gotten smarter about capitalizing on its deep vertical industry experience to help companies achieve success with SOA. IBM reports an 80% win rate on SOA related deals when they engage the customer in a Business Value Assessment. This is a set of tools designed to be used with both the customer LOB and IT management to ensure that the customer receives industry specific ROI business cases, key process models, and a SOA solution proposal. In addition, IBM partners and systems integrators like LiquidHub and Perficient, who both presented at IMPACT, are finding that they have more success by using industry specific knowledge to support customers in developing a SOA Roadmap based on business process and governance.

Getting Smart about educating developers, architects, and business analysts about SOA
Just a few years ago, acting in the role of SOA evangelist at a very large organization could get sort of lonely. There weren't a lot of other people around with a similar focus so sharing ideas about SOA best practices was not all that common. Now there are organizations like the SOA Consortium, a SOA advocacy group comprised of end users, service providers, and technology vendors, that use forums and online collaboration tools to share information on SOA best practices and help establish standards. By the way, the SOA Consortium (part of the OMG) has a SOA case study contest underway right now with submissions due by June 30.

At IMPACT IBM announced a Smart SOA social network to facilitate communication between IT and business executives who would want to explore issues and share ideas about SOA. The social networking experience can help people gain the education they need when they need it. The need for SOA specific education is seen as a number one priority by many companies. Lack of having sufficient staff with the right skills is still seen as a major inhibitor in developing a SOA infrastructure.

If companies are going to have a business focused approach then you need to have more developers who understand the business and business analysts with a stronger understanding of technology. Some companies have been very successful at retraining developers who may have strong mainframe skills, for example, that are no longer in such high demand so they can be participants on the SOA team. Architects are using online collaborations tools like Twitter to expand knowledge of SOA and business skills.

Getting Smart about scaling SOA
There was a big change this year at IMPACT with many customers beginning to move forward based on the success of their early deployments of business services. I talked to many customers who are now moving to scale with broader SOA implementations across business units. Customers understand that it is wise to select an initial SOA project that services a major need of the business and will show ROI and success relatively quickly. However, scaling SOA requires a different level of attention to enterprise issues such as process integrity and latency.

For example, one insurance company director of enterprise architecture told me about what it takes to scale. This director told me that his organization had deployed its first services seven or eight years ago. He has learned a lot of lessons over the years. For example, he recommends that organizations should not try to scale SOA to the enterprise level without automated governance—regardless of how large and expert the IT team happens to be. His team has found out the hard way that a lack of SOA governance will result in a failed SOA deployment.

Getting smart with SOA is certainly a journey for many of the companies we have talked to over the years. It is easy to get caught up in the excitement. Customers that I talked to at last year's IMPACT conference were excited that there were other professionals just like them in attendance. This year, there were signs that customers are moving to the next level and maybe even getting smarter.

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By: Simon Holloway, Senior Analyst, Bloor Research Posted: 7th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

Last month, I had the pleasure of having a briefing from Martijn Iseger, Product Marketing Manager of QPR Software Plc, on their QPR Business Process Management Suite. QPR Software has a different approach to providing BPMS solutions, which allows a phased approach for BPM adoption. The major benefit of this approach is that the customer does not have to commit a large amount of resources to a "make or break" BPM project. Instead, this flexible BPM adoption approach allows customers to bring BPM in-house at a pace that suits them best.

Have you heard of QPR Software before? They were founded in 1991 and their headquarters are in Helsinki, Finland. They went public in 2002 and are quoted on the Helsinki Stock Exchange. They have 60 employees with a subsidiary in South Africa. Their go-to-market strategy is based on a large partner network with 72 VARs in 58 countries, and 184 partners in total. This extensive partner network has resulted in QPR Software having an impressive worldwide penetration for a company of their size. The key markets for QPR Software are Nordic, UK, USA, South Africa, and Japan. They target organisations in the process of transition and who, from a technology viewpoint, are Microsoft .NET Platform based. This sales and go-to-market strategy has been very successful as they have over 1,500 customers, which include Bosch/Siemens Domestic Appliances, TTSL/Tata Indicom, Canon, Emirates Identity Agency, Petrobras, Copel, City of Oulu and Swiss Post.

With 75 % of the Swiss market share, PostParcels, the parcel division of Swiss Post, is the leader in parcel distribution. About 4,000 employees are responsible for transporting around 105 million parcels a year and an average of about 500,000 per day. Krystian Lasek, Head of Strategy at PostParcels stated that the QPR BPM solution significantly improved the quality of their services to customers, something their customer surveys clearly identified.

So what is different about QPR Software's approach to BPMs? QPR Software has put together a well integrated suite of best of breed products to provide support for organisations implementing Business Process Management from strategy formulation, process design to live running with Performance Management, an important driver for continuous process improvement. Some of these products are engineered by themselves, whilst others are OEM'd from organisations QPR consider to be the pick of vendors in these niches. The QPR BPM Suite consists of the following products, all of which are based on the Microsoft platform:

• QPR ScoreCard - is a Performance Management tool. It provides both support during the formulation of business strategies for the capture of objectives and measures, as well as the automatic collection and consolidation of data from business processes. The information is provided in the form of scorecards, digital dashboards and strategy maps.
• QPR ProcessGuide - provides support for analysis and design of business processes for business users. It provides support for BPMN, with the ability to convert the BPMN models into BPEL specifications for making process designs executable with workflow execution engines.
• QPR FactView - is a Business Analysis add-on to QPR ScoreCard. It provides support for dashboards and alerts, multi-dimensional analyses, slice and dice of data. QPR FactView is a tailored version of QlickView from QlikTech. This technology provides in-memory analysis and data association so that data is loaded, prepared and presented on the fly.
• QPR Workflow - is the Business Process Automation add-on to QPR ProcessGuide. It is an OEM version of PNMsoft Sequence. It works in Microsoft Internet Explorer environment to provide automation of human-centric business processes.
• QPR Portal - provides the portal glue both at runtime and during development for pulling together the product suite through a single user interface.

QPR have put together an impressive set of products to provide an environment for the development and management of business processes. By using standards for their interfaces they have also allowed their potential customers to purchase only those pieces of the suite that they require. This provides greater flexibility as well as the ability to start small and expand to the full capabilities as required. All the products work on a client server approach.

QPR Software has cleverly chosen the portal medium, in the form of QPR Portal, to pull the different products together into a single suite, which is able to be customised to include other products depending on clients needs. There is a key business user focus to the whole suite with all the tools being easy to use. The BAM environment provided by QPR ScoreCard and QPR FactView is very powerful being based on tools originally developed for Business Analysis and Performance Management

The QPR BPMS Suite provides an impressive portfolio with an innovative approach based around flexibility, whilst at the same time providing the necessary IT controls and business user ease of use requirements that are needed. Bloor would recommend that potential BPMS users take a closer look at this flexible solution.

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By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 7th May 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

Most networks deliver a range of services—voice, video and IM, for example—as well as traditional IT applications. A business's dependence on its network is linked to how distributed its working practices have become.

But to get an objective measure of how distributed a business is can be tricky and requires looking at branch networks, remote-mobile enablement and external interaction. To this end Quocirca has designed a distributed business index (DBI) that encapsulates all three types of working.

The DBI has a minimum of one—for a business with the single premises and no external or mobile workers—to a maximum of 30 for a business that has many buildings and lots of external and mobile workers.

In general terms, financial services organisations turn out to be the most distributed and public sector ones the least. But generalisations can be misleading. While one German regional government body had a DBI of two, another one from the UK scored 30. The lowest score for a bank, 11, was also from Germany.

The index allows the trials and tribulations of distributed working to be compared. Businesses enable remote working because they expect it to improve efficiency, increase customer and employee satisfaction and keep down costs. But there is, of course, a downside if it all goes wrong when the network fails for some reason.

The impact this has on highly distributed businesses is palpable. All businesses care about the experience their users receive when working at their PCs.

But those with a high DBI are far more concerned about the experience of remote workers than those with a low score. And for those with the highest DBI, network downtime has much more impact on external and mobile workers than it does on office-bound ones.

Most businesses still operate with a single HQ and branch offices but today the quality of communications between different buildings, however widely distributed, is expected to be good for video and web conferencing, centralised content management and emails with huge attachments. The need for enriched communications extends to those workers who spend some or all their time outside the office.

Again, businesses have always had field service engineers, sales people and truck drivers who work remotely, but today many of these workers are linked to business processes through mobile devices.

These demands on external access have also led to a big increase in remote working by employees who, in the past, would have spent nearly all their time in the office.

Home-working provides flexibility to those with families and also lets employees communicate with each other and customers around the clock.

In other cases it is home working that enables staff to work in the first place—for example, agents of virtual call centres permanently based at home. But if an employee can link into a business process from outside the office, so too can customers, suppliers and partners.

This is the fastest growing driver of distributed working—outsourcing of tasks. Some of this is traditional outsourcing. For example, a mid-market company can use an external IT management company to work from afar or give external accountants access to internal records.

But in the past decade more customers and suppliers have been encouraged to do some of their own leg work. This ranges from individuals managing bank accounts online and tracking the progress of goods ordered online, to whole groups of businesses sharing centralised supply-chain management systems.

The degree to which businesses are distributed varies from one industry to another. Retailers have the most branches—on the whole most goods are still bought from shops and there are some very large retailers.

Utility companies have the most mobile workers—lots of field service engineers rushing round repairing faults—and finance organisations have the most external workers—all those inter-company financial transactions.

The worry is that the most highly distributed businesses are, in some cases, struggling to support their distributed workforce. They are pushing the boundaries of distributed working and sometimes failing to meet their own expectations.

Yet these businesses will be the ones to reap the benefits first if they can overcome some of their problems, which are often—at least in part—down to an overworked data network.

There is plenty that can be done: better broadband connections for small branches and home workers, more efficient use of network connections through use of network acceleration products and services, keeping employees focused on their work by limiting their activities and access to content.

Getting these things right and making sure the underlying platform—the network—can perform, will allow distributed working to be pushed to new limits.

Quocirca's report, The Distributed Business Index is free to readers for download.

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By: Judith Hurwitz, CEO, Hurwitz & Associates Posted: 6th May 2008 Copyright Hurwitz & Associates © 2008

I spent part of last week at CA's (Computer Associates in the old days) industry analyst meeting. My overall impression is very positive. CA is a complicated company with a complicated history. Often when a company has a near death experience, it either dies or changes. I have seen many companies that wither away—even if they don't die completely. CA seems to be one of the exceptions. While it is hard to translate two full days of discussions and interactions into a couple of hundred words, I will put it in context with some of the ten key things I learned.

One. A focused approach. CA has selected three areas of concentration: enterprise management, governance, and security. This is a far cry from past decades where CA focused on hundreds of markets with thousands of product offerings. CA still has a boatload of mainframe products that it still sells but it has moved these products under a separate business unit.

Two. Enterprise IT Management remains a lynch pin offering. Management software has long been at the core of CA's product offerings. The company has now divided its management portfolio into six discrete areas: service management, project and portfolio management (Clarity), application performance management (Wily), infrastructure management, security management, and datacenter automation (built on performance management and configuration management). Like IBM, CA is putting forth the idea that a customer can start with any one of these areas and then move to the next. Perhaps the fact that CEO John Swainson started corporate life inside IBM had something to do with that change. CA is building a case that it is architecting these product areas with a common foundation. It is an ambitious goal but a necessary one.

Three. The mainframe is still a money maker. CA remains committed to the mainframe market. It is experiencing strong growth—especially with the introduction of the z10.

Four. Focus, focus, focus. CA is getting very pragmatic under the operational leadership of president and COO, Mike Christenson. The company is focusing on its top 4,000 customers.

Five. Focus on systematizing governance. OK, so everyone is selling governance. CA is making good use of its Niku acquisition (reborn as Clarity) to become a player. In addition, the company is using some of its management technologies to support automation of governance. This is clearly an area where CA is investing.

Six. Security as core. The Netegrity acquisition has served CA well. It plays well in everything from SOA, governance, and virtualization. Securing highly distributed environments never goes out of style. ID Management is one of the key enablers across the portfolio.

Seven. Data Center Management is the most mature area of Enterprise Information Technology Management. I sat through a two hour deep dive about CA's datacenter management offering. This is a big area, not just for CA but for everyone in the management space. The overall "vision" is to provide an overall unified infrastructure management platform. The offerings range from traditional systems management to network management. The focus of the team seems to be on providing integration points between modules across the product line—an ambitious plan.

Eight. CA likes Virtualization. CA is focused on virtual systems management. They are working to integrate virtualization management into their own offerings as well as offerings from partners. CA's focus is around packaging management as a service—an obvious requirement if you are going to be a player in virtualization.

Nine. Getting focused on business services. CA is focusing a lot of attention on the area of business service management. I liked the approach of having a formal policy based automation engine. CA claims its differentiator is its ability to implement dynamic server provision.

Ten. CA does SOA. CA has been relatively quiet about SOA in the past. It was interesting that, rather than producing a SOA product offering, CA is retooling its technology offerings as a set of SOA services with web services interfaces. Obviously, creating the interfaces is the easy part. But it is a step in the right direction.

The bottom line—CA is clearly a company on the move. It is living in a rough neighborhood with tough competitors. But I am impressed with some of the new thinking and some of the architectural approaches that are the foundation for the company's product directions. CA has made the right acquisition moves that are paying off. Now, the proof will be in what acquisitions come next and the way CA will execute on the vision and directions.

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By: Philip Howard, Director of Research - Technology, Bloor Research Posted: 6th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

Fresh from the debacle at Terminal 5, which is a good example of why big bang approaches to migrations (and other implementations) can be dangerous, I have a number of disparate observations to make.

The first is that I recently spoke at a conference at which Informatica was also presenting. Listening to what they had to say I noted a slide presenting results of a survey into migration projects and the very high rates of project failures and overruns that characterise this market. The results were (within a percentage point) identical to those published in the Bloor Research paper on this topic last year but they were credited to the Standish Group. When I queried this, assuming that this attribution was in error, the company responded that this was in fact correct but the Standish Group's survey had been carried out in 1999. In other words, we have got no better as an industry in managing data migration in seven years: which is a pretty damning statement, which only underlines my call for more migration specialists.

And on that point, you might like to check out www.datamigrationpro.com, which is a web site representing an informal special interest group for exactly this purpose.

On to products and vendors: of which a couple have attracted my attention recently.

The first is IBM Optim, which is the product that IBM gained when it acquired Princeton Softech recently. There are two interesting points here. The first is that Optim is targeting big bang migrations. Now, Optim is primarily an archiving product so what does it have to do with migration? Well, the contention is that in many (though not all) migrations, much of the data that you are migrating is not actually required, or not required immediately, so you can archive it off the source system prior to the migration. This cuts down the amount of data that needs to be migrated during the cutover process, thereby reducing the downtime window that is required. Subsequently, you can migrate the archived data separately and add it back into the new system, if that is required. Or you can just leave it as an archive, if that is appropriate. In either case this seems a sensible idea that will be useful in some instances.

Secondly, Optim allows you to define business entities so that you archive a customer (say) with all of his orders rather than just working on tabular basis, which is a good way to approach data migration as well. This is exactly what Celona does, for example. While not yet integrated with DataStage, this is certainly a potential capability that IBM could develop that would enhance its offering in this area.

The other vendor that I want to mention is Valiance Partners. This company has a product called TruCompare, which provides a test environment for comparing source and target (or source and expected target) data that is based on 100% testing of records rather than sampling. It is not dissimilar to GoldenGate's Veridata although at this time I am not in a position to compare the two since I have not a detailed briefing on TruCompare yet (when I have I will report back). In any case, the value of either of these tools in helping to ensure accurate migrations is not to be exaggerated.

Thus we have a mixed bag but it is encouraging that more vendors are paying more attention (and I have not even mentioned Business Objects' focus on SAP R/3 migrations) to data migration as a market in its own right.

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By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 6th May 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

In economically challenging times it is no surprise to see the knee-jerk reactions of many organisations to ‘cut costs'. Overall solvency (profitability), and the monthly demands of liquidity (cashflow) are vital for the health of any company—most businesses cannot rely on government rescue like that extended to some now infamous banks—so it sometimes seems that cutting costs is the best thing to do.

However cutting equally across all cost centres in a blind panic is rarely effective in the long term and should be taken as a last, rather than first, resort. There are often many avenues that can be addressed before wielding an indiscriminate axe. This is particularly important in those areas where direct expense is most visible, but the true business value is opaque or diffuse.

Take mobile telephony as an example. Those responsible for telecommunications in most organisations have a pretty good idea of how large their total phone bills are and can see how much certain elements, for example mobile calls, are growing by. This makes it an easy target area for swingeing budget cuts. According to recent Quocirca research, around a half of companies are not seeing mobile spending falling in line with tariff reductions. Telecoms managers can also see who the worst offenders are, as over two thirds believe they have sufficient accuracy and detail to know ‘how much' and ‘who spends what' from itemised charges on a mobile phone bill—what they don't know is ‘why?'.

This piece of information is critical, because not only does it provide an indication of what value might be being gained, it also offers some intelligence that could be used to decide if it is possible to find an alternative, so that the value can be retained while the cost reduced.

Businesses obtain significant value from voice communication, and the mobile phone has become a primary tool for delivering this, ensuring that people can be reached when away from their desk. Decisions can be made faster, avoiding costly delays, and improving responsiveness. Individuals are able to make use of previously dead time, hopefully either improving their personal productivity and taking control of their work/life balance, or perhaps just as likely staying in touch friends or relatives.

Making mobile calls while in an office with perhaps a lower cost fixed phone nearby is of more questionable value, but something that many employees will do. Why? Because it is more convenient and generally the desired contact numbers are already in the phone and just a click away. There's also the flexibility of being able to start a call while sat at a desk but not having to hang up and call back when other demands make it necessary to get up and move, say to head off to a meeting, or to go home.

If the call is important, mobile flexibility means it does not need to be curtailed, promoting value over cost. What is the value