By: David Norfolk, Senior Analyst, Development, Bloor Research Posted: 16th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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Intel seems to think of itself as a hardware company but it is also a serious player in the software arena, with extremely sophisticated compilers, including what is perhaps the most broadly adopted (and highly regarded) FORTRAN compiler, still much used for computationally-intensive high performance computing.

Even more interesting is that it supplies excellent tools for debugging parallel programs running on Intel's multicore computers (that is, on Intel's x86 architecture computers using chips with several "cores" or CPUs internally). Soon, every computer you can buy will be multicore (for reasons associated with controlling heat production) and only programs which can run on many cores at once will full take advantage of them. In fact, since individual cores on a multicore computer generally run at a slower clockspeed than the single cores on today's computers (again, to control heat production), applications that can only run on one core at a time will slow down as you buy newer machines (or, since newer internal designs compensate for the lower clockspeed, not run much faster). Has anyone ever wished to buy a new computer and not see things markedly speed up?

Unfortunately, as well as promising increased throughput, running in parallel on several cores brings the possibility of several interesting "new" programming bugs (to be accurate, they aren't really new; as they are possible, but less likely, in existing systems). These are essentially "non-deterministic": that is, they only appear sometimes, typically when the programme is stressed in production, and may not show up in testing on small amounts of data.

The first of these is the race condition—the programmer assumes that operations run in a certain order, which they do, when running on one core doing one thing at a time. However, with several cores sharing the work, which one finishes first is often a matter of chance and things may run in the wrong order.

The second new bug is the deadlock. This occurs when a process running on one core holds a resource while waiting for a second resource to be released, if at the same time the process holding the second resource is waiting for the first program to release the resource it is holding. A deadlock brings both processes to a stop and the program they are part of never finishes.

Intel's tools, that help address these problems on Intel technology (you'll need to find equivalent tools on other platforms), are Intel Threading Building Blocks, which helps you write parallel code that works properly; VTune Performance Analyser and Thread Profiler, which detect potential or actual performance problems; and Intel Thread Checker, which detects deadlocks and race conditions.

However, this isn't just a programming technology issue. Management has to encourage programmers who are coding for x86 multicore architectures, using Intel compilers, to use these tools as routine. If they are coding for different parallel programming technologies, they should be using something equivalent—parallel programming is non-intuitive and you need tools to help you understand what is going on.

For example, Levent Akyil (Software Engineer, Performance, Analysis, and Threading Lab, Intel Software and Solutions Group), who was presenting at Intel's recent Software Conference in Prague, demonstrated the case of a simple programme loop calculating the value of pi. It works on a single core, at a certain speed (which you have to remember to benchmark; else, how can you tell if your multicore implementation is efficient). However, moving the parallel version of the program (after threads have been introduced) to a multicore machine (and remember that "single-threaded" applications will only ever run on one core at a time no matter how many are available), might generate wrong results (and as this is "sometimes", you may not always notice, which is worrying). This is because both cores are trying to process the same variables, a potential race condition, and sometimes something gets overwritten before it can be used, an example of a data race in action. This is easily fixed by putting a "lock" on the variables you are changing, until they have been processed. That's fine, but the calculation now crawls on two processors, running orders of magnitude more slowly than on a single core—because, it turns out, you put the lock inside the loop (and therefore are constantly requesting and releasing it, which are "expensive" processes). So, you move the lock outside the loop—and it still runs slowly because of contention within the chip—each iteration invalidates the cache needed by the other processor, which then has to be reread, slowly, out of main memory. Fix that, and the calculation runs about twice as fast on 2 cores as it does on one. However, to recognise and fix these problems, you need tools that help you to see what is really going on.

Now, the point Akyil was making here is that parallel programming is hard and sometimes non-intuitive - but that Intel's tools (VTune etc.) are really good at letting you visualise what is going on in this sort of situation, if you remember to use them. Akyil cited one company which had what it thought was a parallel programme—which ran serially much of the time without anyone noticing, until they ran VTune Analyser and Thread Profiler. It is easy for a programmer to assume s/he understands the issues when s/he doesn't. This implies a need for training; and management recognition for people doing the job properly rather than taking shortcuts, which are (largely) management people and process issues.

James Reinders photo © David Norfolk

James Reinders (author of “Intel Threading Building Blocks: Outfitting C++ for Multi-core Processor Parallelism”, and Director of Marketing and Business at Intel), gave the keynote at the Prague conference and himself raised some interesting issues with multicore and “thinking parallel”, which Intel definitely sees as the future of computing:

• How can managers distinguish the rather cosmetic messages about Parallelism coming from some companies, from (what he claims is) Intel's much more solid offering. "Thinking parallel" is non-intuitive for many programmers, let alone their managers, and the devil is in the detail. The answer is, to get independent expert advice on this issue—now, before a (possibly dysfunctional) solution is forced onto you by circumstances.
• FUD—Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt—is a real issue, according to Reinders. Some vendors may use the multicore crisis to panic you into buying technology which doesn't really meet your needs. He quoted compiler companies claiming to match Intel's math library capabilities—but without all the parallelism support in Intel's libraries. And the promotion of GPUs (graphics processor units) on video cards as a general-purpose parallel processor you can offload business work to—but which have real ease-of-programming and maintainability issues, because GPU programming is currently so hardware-specific.

However, we should put the multicore crisis, which is a real one (especially for high performance desktop systems) in perspective. As Reinders allowed, some platforms (the mainframe z series and big Sun servers, for example) have been doing parallel processing for years. The Java application servers commonly used in business are inherently capable of processing their workloads in small parallel chunks.

There is parallel expertise out there, if not necessarily where you think you want it. In fact, Ray Jones (Worldwide VP, z Software at IBM, speaking at an Analyst seminar in Marlow, UK recently) seems to be pinning his zSeries (System z) mainframe software strategy on allowing his customers to deal with the multicore crisis. As well as handling transactions and the application server, well-suited to parallelisation, the zSeries has robust virtualisation and prioritisation services and the z10 can emulate a fast (about 4GHz) single core processor for your legacy single-threaded applications (running in parallel with other processors), if you need one while migrating to the ubiquitous multicore platforms.

We think that there are many ways to address the coming multicore crisis, only some of which require you to rewrite your applications for massively parallel programming (check out Pervasive's solution for certain kinds of database programming, for example). However, our message to corporate managers is that they should be starting to make "fact-based choices" of the competing strategies for multicore now.

And a good start might be to involve developers in the debate—perhaps to buy them some books and point them at whatif.intel.com where Intel makes some of its experimental research-oriented software for the new multicore world available for them to play with (its finished products are here). The presentations from Intel’s Software Conference are also available on the site link.

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By: Dr Russel Winder, Partner, Concertant Posted: 16th May 2008 Copyright Concertant © 2008

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As I think most people in the computer industry are now aware, we have moved from a period of computers having ever-increasing clock speeds, to a period of computers having ever-increasing core count. Although today's workstations and laptops only have 2- or 4-core processors, the days of having 64, 256, 2048 cores are rapidly approaching. Of course, mainframes and supercomputers have had this level of parallelism for many years, but the crucial difference is that this sort of processor count is now widespread and not the preserve of just a small, elite part of the business.

Concurrency has been with us since the beginning of computing; first as time-sharing, later as multi-processing (aka multi-tasking) and then multi-threading. Time-sharing was introduced to increase utilization and availability, multi-processing to allow applications to have concurrency, and multi-threading because multiple processes were often too heavyweight for the concurrency applications needed. As the mainframe server people and the HPC people know, the tools of the multi-threading trade—locks, monitors, semaphores, etc—create overhead.

In many of the processors available today, and many of those available in the near future, the model is of communication between processors through shared memory. Shared memory is also a big problem: many of the problems associated with shared memory, multi-threaded programming are caused by unanticipated changes to memory shared between threads. Debugging such problems can be problematic because the problems are non-deterministic—i.e. you are unlikely to get the same behaviour for two consecutive executions of a program.

Java was a revolution in programming in two ways, it reintroduced virtual machine based languages into the mainstream of computing, and it made support for multi-threaded programming integral to, and at the heart of, the programming language. C++ and C have always relied on external libraries, most notably PThreads and Boost.Threads. As followers of C++ will know though, the new C++ standard (C++0x) introduces threads as an integral part of the C++ language.

Processor manufacturers and language designers are promoting threads as the tool for managing concurrency. Yet it is well known amongst trainers and people actually writing multi-threaded systems that multi-threading is hard, and is the most problematic topic for most programmers. Multi-threaded programming is complex and difficult; it is the source of many errors and bugs; and it is hard to debug multi-threaded systems. So more cores result in more threads, and hence more trouble.

What have the people who have been doing parallel programming for years been doing to combat the problem? The HPC community using Fortran, C++ and C have focused on OpenMP and MPI. MPI is a standard library for handling message passing between processes on different processors. This is really a way of managing a program spread over a cluster of network-connected processors. OpenMP is a way of using annotations in a Fortran, C++ or C program to direct the compiler how to "automatically" parallelize the code for using multiple threads on a multi-threaded system. So MPI seems less relevant to multicore than OpenMP. Could OpenMP be the answer to the problem of programming threads? Possibly, but using OpenMP brings its own problems. It is however a step forward from programming threads directly.

Where is Java going in this increasingly parallel world? The java.util.concurrent package puts the emphasis on lock-free programming, data structures with more fine-grained control of parallel access, and futures. Futures are a way of programming that avoids explicit locking. A future is a value that is being calculated in a parallel thread but the value of which is not needed just yet: execution occurs in parallel until it cannot continue without the value. So threads are executed to the point where they cannot continue and then they block until the value is available. This is very much a fork-join way of working, and in most cases can be used to create the maximum amount of parallelism.

Are futures the future? Well the C++ standards committee seems to think so. The C++0x standard introduces futures as an integral part of the language. This is especially pleasing for me as I led various research programs during the 1990s, the most important of which created and tested a futures-based way of programming using C++.

Are futures the only future? Definitely not, they are but one tool in the armoury. The important thing in concurrency and parallelism is to minimize sharing and the need for critical sections. This can be taken to the extreme, as was done in occam and later Erlang. In these languages, processes with their own memory are the unit of concurrency and parallelism; there is no shared memory per se. The processes communicate using message passing. In a sense occam and Erlang take the MPI model to its logical conclusion. Moreover, there is a mathematical formalism that allows a much more disciplined approach to system construction, Communicating Sequential Processes (CSP). In a way, it is a shame that threads were invented. In many ways it would have been better to stay with lightweight processes, message passing and no shared memory. Of course, this way of working can be imposed on a shared memory, thread-based system, so there is hope.

Is there another alternative? Indeed there is, it is called transactional memory. In this model, the memory itself provides a transaction-based update scheme, very much based on the idea of an atomic database transaction. Sun especially, but also IBM and ARM, and others, but not Intel, are producing or planning processors that offer hardware support for transactional memory. In the x86 world though the only option down this route is software transactional memory (STM). In this model, the atomic commits are handled entirely in software. Perhaps surprisingly, the Haskell community has been at the forefront of experimenting with this model, though Intel have a specialized compiler providing STM for C++. We believe they are using this to understand whether the transactional memory approach has any mileage, and whether they need to go the route already trodden by IBM, ARM and Sun of providing hardware support for transactional memory in their future processors.

So should Fortran, C++, C, Java et al. invest in a transactional memory model? Well it would be a way forward. Should they instead drop the notion of shared memory and create lightweight processes as the tool for applications programmers following the occam and Erlang approach? Possibly. It would certainly remove a large amount of non-determinacy. Should Java follow Fortran, C++ and C and implement OpenMP? Well it is possible, the annotations system allows such a thing to be done. However it seems unlikely as the Java community has become wedded to multi-threading, and the java.util.concurrent package is not finding the penetration of use that it should

Everyone agrees that threads are as much the problem as they are the solution. Application programmers should not be using threads directly, they should be using high-level abstractions. The question is will they realize this? Will they have the gumption to get trained up in the tools and techniques, especially those of algorithm design, before writing their massively parallel applications. We certainly hope so. Two reasons: we want to offer the training, but also the successful exploitation of multicore devices depends on it.

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By: Judith Hurwitz, CEO, Hurwitz & Associates Posted: 15th May 2008 Copyright Hurwitz & Associates © 2008

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I had a very interesting conversation with Jeff Barr, the senior web services evangelist at Amazon. I have known Jeff for almost 15 years. In those days Jeff was one of the architects at a company called Visix, an early graphical development environment that was ahead of its time. Visix's software development environment was designed as an abstraction of the underlying infrastructure. Visix came into the market before the Internet infrastructure became the defacto standard. But for me, it set the vision for where we are today. Jeff started at Amazon in the summer of 2002 with the Visix and some Microsoft experience in his consciousness.

Amazon's business model is different than a traditional software company that often spends 18–24 months convincing customers to adopt new hardware/software or services. Amazon is leveraging a different computing model based on providing customers will a set of predefined services that can be bought without making a long term commitment. In a sense, Amazon has had the luxury (or good sense) to roll out service after service and see what sticks. As Jeff sees it, "people's brains light up. They can build their business and applications in a positive way without having to worry about bandwidth, power and cooling." His perception is that customers don't think about whether the cloud provided by Amazon will support their needs. Clearly, he is able to talk this way because Amazon has made the investment in a scalable architecture to support an infrastructure that is designed for massive scalability.

The other issue is that having built this architecture for its own retail requirements, Amazon had the foresight to exploit the technology to create a new line of business—in essence, a compute cloud based on providing a set of tools and product offerings to the market. The message to the market is straight forward; use these services so that you can innovate quickly without having to build from scratch. In taking this approach, Amazon creates a test bed that allows the company to collaborate on new functionality with partners. In addition, and perhaps most importantly, it allows customers to buy incremental capability so they can scale up and down when they need to. According to Jeff, one of the benefits of the cloud is that it isn't dominated by the needs of one customer. In other words, one customer may have a spike in demand while another has less need at that point in time. Over the years, Amazon is able to understand usage patterns that are predictable.

Amazon's business model follow this approach. A customer creates an account with Amazon that in essence gives them a charge account with Amazon. Customers get access to all of the Web Services APIs. Their usage is tracked and they are billed for what they use. The business model is quite straight forward. Amazon charges 15 cents per gigabyte per month—not a lot of money even when you scale. What is interesting to me is there is no contracts to negotiate—everyone understands the rules. I asked Jeff if customers ever ask to buy a "private cloud". While Amazon has been asked by customers, Jeff felt that because of the amount of experience that Amazon has with its hosted services discourages customers from explaining, "This is a business we want to be in. We have a lot of experience in our organization. We build highly cost effective data centers and sophisticated monitoring and operations." He contends that Amazon has the expertise based on its 13 years in the business is enough to keep customers from walking away from its cloud. If you do the math, it would be difficult to argue. For example, if a customer needed 500GB of storage for two years, the cost would be $1800. In addition, it avoids the requirements for managing that environment.

Jeff makes a good point. If a customer needs to scale from 10GB to 100 TB in a month it might be hard to pull off. "This is routine for us," Jeff claims. From his vantage point, the cloud changes the relationship between the customer and their hardware vendors. In effect, customers are sharing hardware resources with lots of other customers. So, the question becomes, who is your partner? It is no longer the provider of the hardware or the operating system. You probably still have a relationship with your software provider.

So, Amazon's view of the cloud is pretty straight forward—it is a way to get value out of virtualization. Jeff points out that if developers uses Amazon's elastic cloud service, for example, they pay to access servers on an hourly basis. Amazon allocates server to that account, provides a copy of the operating system they need to get started. That process takes a few seconds.

Another dimension of Amazon's business revolves around the companies that actually build applications that sit on its infrastructure. Amazon has built a bunch of its own applications that it offers as services. In addition, there are a number of application companies that are building applications on top of the Amazon platform. One that Jeff mentioned to me is called RightScale, an automated cloud computing management system intended to help customers of Amazon's Elastic Compute Cloud with issues such as load balancing. In addition to this type of company there is a community of 370,000 developers. Because Amazon sets the barrier to use so low, it is easy for a developer to try a service without making a long term commitment.

The more I think about Amazon's platform and business model, the more sense it makes to me. I believe that Amazon and others such as Google, salesforce.com, and eBay are a peek into the future of the new generation computing. In a sense, this model breaks every rule that the traditional computing industry has been built on. This movement towards enterprise software as a service and utility computing is beginning to redefine hardware, software, management and services. I predict that this new business model is going to slowly but surely turn the industry upside down. It isn't only that the business model is different. The underlying technology platform based on standards and a service oriented architecture is propelling this change. The only thing that will slow this transformation is fear of change. But what else is new.

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By: Tony Lock, Programme Director, Freeform Dynamics Posted: 15th May 2008 Copyright Freeform Dynamics © 2008

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

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

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

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

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

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By: Philip Howard, Director of Research - Technology, Bloor Research Posted: 15th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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I have for sometime been extolling the importance of discovering your spreadsheets, assessing the risks associated with them, and the need to take control of significant spreadsheets, as a part of any data governance initiative. However, I have not previously written about the role of spreadsheet management within the emerging market for GRC (governance, risk and compliance) software.

The big players in the GRC market are the 800lb gorillas of the software world, companies like SAP, Oracle, CA and IBM. If we take SAP as an example, it has a variety of software offerings that "automate end-to-end GRC processes to address corporate governance and oversight, risk management, and compliance management and reporting". These options work directly with SAP application software and the company sees its ability to offer such capability as a competitive advantage.

However, the downside to this GRC approach is that it is limited to SAP applications and the databases and infrastructure that support the SAP environment. Which is fine, up to a point, if you are a dedicated SAP shop and don't have, say, Oracle applications also running in your environment. Of course, CA and IBM are less proprietary when it comes to application software so a GRC solution from one of these vendors will not force you to have multiple solutions.

Except that none of these vendors (as far as I know) have any support for end user computing (EUC) such as Access databases, spreadsheets and so forth. And given that research indicates that upwards of a third of all corporate data resides in spreadsheets this would seem to leave a large hole. Of course, there are tools from a variety of vendors for managing spreadsheets but they have, hitherto, been separate and distinct from any conventional GRC solutions, which means that to do a complete job of GRC you have been obliged to have multiple systems supporting multiple dashboards to monitor your GRC environment—which is clearly a bad thing.

However, Compassoft has just released version 4.0 of its Compassoft Enterprise product and, apart, from beefing up its spreadsheet management capabilities the big news in this release is that it has opened up its environment, so that you can either import (typically by means of web services though there are other mechanisms available) other GRC information into the Compassoft environment and present data through its dashboard or, conversely, you can export data in the same fashion so that you can present EUC management information within the dashboard of your (say) SAP GRC portal.

While it is likely in the future that the major vendors will buy up spreadsheet management suppliers (or build their own capabilities—less likely) precisely so that they can include this sort of functionality within their GRC suites in the future, such consolidation has not yet started to happen. At present, therefore, this leaves in Compassoft in an enviable position, with a distinct advantage over its rivals in terms of GRC functionality.

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By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader, Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 15th May 2008 Copyright Bloor Research © 2008

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I was speaking to an accessibility guru in a large government department and she told me a distressing story. An up-and-coming member of staff who is profoundly deaf was invited to attend an important meeting. A sign language interpreter should have been booked for the meeting but that had not happened. Unable to follow, or participate in, the meeting the deaf member of staff left. A month later management were reviewing a promotion for him and it was rejected because he left the meeting. We could argue that the HR department failed in their duty but I would rather investigate how technology could have help to avoid the situation.

Part of the problem is that sign language interpreters are a specialist and scarce resource, so they cannot be called at a moments notice because of travel time, besides anything else.

Collaboration software could provide the framework for a solution to this specific problem. Spontania from Dialcom provides collaboration capabilities where the user can choose the relevant mode or modes of access that include:

• Instant messaging
• Teleconferencing
• Videoconferencing
• Application and file sharing
• Whiteboard capabilities
• Mobile devices

The system requires a dedicated server running Spontania in the enterprise but only a downloadable ActiveX widget on the client. Once installed it can have an immediate impact on how meetings are organised:

• Participants do not have to travel, which improves productivity and increases the flexibility of setting up the meeting.
• Instant ad-hoc meetings can be set up, as long as the attendees are within reach of a mobile device.

But it also opens up new ways of working; examples from the users of Spontania include:

• A bank's call centre can now invite a client to join a ‘conference'. The client can now see the agent (and vice versa if the client wishes), they can share presentation material and view the output from applications. This multi-mode interaction has proven to be popular with the bank's clients and this has been reflected in the sales conversion rate.
• An organisation that has been set up to offer more working opportunities for people with impaired mobility implemented Spontania. The users can work from home, so avoiding the effort and issues of commuting; whilst still benefiting from the real-time and visual interactions of the office, which improve productivity and avoid any feelings of social isolation.
• An international company has improved its ability to communicate with its staff and clients around the world by adding extra channels on their collaboration network for different languages. A presentation or announcement now includes simultaneous translation into several languages and the user can choose the channel they are most comfortable with.

So, if I now look at my story again we could change the ending. The department installs Spontania. The meeting is arranged and instead of everyone having to travel to the same place, time and money is saved by having a virtual meeting. The deaf member of staff arrives 15 minutes early to check that the interpreter is available and to check the signs they are going to use for certain specialist concepts. Disaster!. The interpreter has not been booked, but now there is less of a problem because the interpreter does not have to travel. A panic phone call to the agency and an interpreter is found within twenty minutes. The formal part of the meeting starts 10 minutes late so the interpreter is already available. The staff member stays in the meeting makes valuable contributions to the discussions and this is noted by the head of department. A month later the promotion goes through on the nod.

I believe that collaboration software can be a boon to any enterprise but can be life changing to many people with disabilities.

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By: David Tebbutt, Programme Director, Freeform Dynamics Posted: 14th May 2008 Copyright Freeform Dynamics © 2008

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The push for environmental sustainability must have been music to the ears of those involved in videoconferencing and its many derivatives. It provides another strong weapon in the vendors' sales armoury. Now, not only can organisations save staff time and reduce travel costs, they can also cut the use of fossil fuels into the bargain.

Add a couple of other things into the mix, like the growth of IP-based broadband and the advent of high definition screens, and the scene is set for an explosion of online face-to-face activity ranging from top-end lifelike telepresence systems right down to desktop applications using webcams. Each plays its part in an organisational collaboration strategy, depending on who the users are and what they're trying to achieve.

Task-oriented people who work together and who know each other can probably put up with lower fidelity or less comfort than strangers who might feel more at ease if they feel they're 'sitting around the table' with other participants. Broadly speaking, the environments could be summarised as boardroom, meeting room and desktop. Although you could add venues such as hospitals and police stations for remote consulting and interviewing, respectively.

As you might expect, you can pay from very little to a great deal depending on the level of sophistication you need. The major vendors are Cisco, Tandberg, Polycom, Teliris and Hewlett Packard. You can get a specially fitted multi-screen room, a 'room within a room', facilities added to a room, a deskside system, a desktop system or, at the lowest level, something that will run on your laptop or other mobile device.

Some services are managed, so you have no technical hassles. Others are provided as equipment to be managed by IT or whoever. At the bottom end, the user is in charge. In terms of hard ROI, Teliris claims that its payback period can be as short as 28 days. In one particular example, 52 business trips between Sweden and Japan were cut to eight or nine. Bingo! Every trip saved from then on is a bonus. Apart from the monthly management fee, of course. Mack Treece, Teliris president, said "Every customer has paid back their room in under twelve months."

LifeSize can supply room systems, at a cost, but it takes a more relaxed approach than some others. A couple of screens hung at the end of a meeting room is good enough. One can be used to check what your end looks before using it for presentations, shared whiteboarding or whatever. As the name suggests, the screen image is life size, but the fact that it's halfway up a wall doesn't seem to matter much. Once the conversation is under way, you tend not to notice. And eye contact, as with the central zone of most systems, is fine.

Some systems require some hefty dedicated bandwidth. LifeSize can do a reasonable job across a conventional broadband line. Most, if not all, high end vendors will adapt to the available bandwidth, losing high definition along the way if necessary. When I finished a recent conversation with Texas-based LifeSize CEO, Craig Molloy, one of the UK distribution people turned to me and said, "That cost us nothing, that call." That's because the company already had a megabit available in each direction on its DSL connection. Bear in mind that each participant was using just one screen/camera combination. It is theoretically possible to scale LifeSize to twenty screens or more.

Before long, we won't be speaking of these things as separate systems. They'll become as much a part of the organisational make up as the furniture in the boardroom, a whiteboard in the meeting room or the phone on a desk. Large organisations will probably install a few top-end systems in their main offices, complemented by larger numbers of the more traditional in-room systems and tiny systems that run on laptops or PCs. At this level, expect a great deal of blending with other collaboration and communication systems such as those provided by IBM/Lotus, Microsoft and Adobe, for example.

On our desktops, it will become quite natural to flick from looking at each other, to sharing screens, to presenting, to whiteboarding to IM, for example. The work itself will take over from the need to see each other although the option is there if visual contact is needed.

Possibly the biggest downsides at the moment concern interoperability and the local loop. Although lip service is usually paid to standards, some systems still do not play nicely with others. And, if reception flickers and stutters, you can almost certainly point your finger at the local loop. But, weighed against the alternatives, the odd glitch is a pretty good trade-off.

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By: Andy Hayler, CEO, The Information Difference Posted: 14th May 2008 Copyright The Information Difference © 2008

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It is nearly a year now since Microsoft acquired Stratature, so it seems timely to reflect on what Microsoft is planning for its entry into the master data management (MDM) market. Microsoft's MDM product, code-named "Bulldog", is based on the Stratature technology, but is much more ambitious. The Stratature technology (the catchily named +EDM) was an inherently multi-domain MDM hub which was mainly aimed at the "analytic" MDM market, which is populated by the likes of Kalido and Hyperion DRM from Oracle.

Stratature +EDM had a reputation for being good at hierarchy management, a subject that is often glossed over. We are used to simple hierarchies such as organisation charts, but there are also more complex hierarchies where a parent/child relationship may have an arbitrary depth along any path. A business example of this is in bill of materials. The ability to deal with variable depth "ragged" hierarchies is something that eludes many MDM technologies, but +EDM could do it. Also, all data entities and hierarchies in +EDM were versioned, and changes to master data could be validated against the rules defined for the particular business rules or hierarchies defined. Again, this version management and the ability to associate business process workflow around the lifecycle of master data is an important but sometimes neglected area in some MDM products.

Microsoft has temporarily removed the original +EDM product from the market while they go about the necessary re-engineering for their future plans, but have produced a "technical preview" version. This is the original product plus some minor changes, such as updating some out of date code libraries, and incorporating all the outstanding code patches. Both existing customers and prospects can download and experiment with this. Some companies beyond the original Stratature customer base are already using this code actively. Most of the existing Stratature customers have stayed loyal, with a majority signed up to the tech preview program. The plans for Bulldog are still under wraps, but it is clear that Microsoft want to construct a far more all-encompassing offering, able to deal with operational master data as well as analytic MDM applications. Clearly this will be able to take advantage of significant Microsoft infrastructure, such as SSIS and Biztalk, but there is a lot of work needed to make the transition to a product fully capable of operational MDM, such as the provision of robust APIs to allow complete web services operations.

The new MDM product will become available in the next version of Microsoft Office System, whose own availability has yet to be announced and is the subject of much speculation. As the MDM product plans become clearer I will cover them, but it is clear from conversations that I have had with Microsoft that it sees MDM as important and that it is putting significant resources into developing Bulldog. Its entry to the market will be interesting to watch.

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By: Fran Howarth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 14th May 2008 Copyright Quocirca © 2008

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Software applications are the backbone of businesses today. A recent survey conducted by Quocirca, commissioned by Fortify Software, of 250 organisations in the US, the UK and Germany, found that developing or modifying software applications is business critical or very important to two-thirds of organisations. Not only that, but reliance on software development is increasing and bespoke application development is seen as a competitive differentiator for end-user organisations.

Not only are bespoke or modified software applications becoming more important, but they are increasingly being web-enabled over networks that are being opened up to access by employees, business partners, suppliers and customers. This increases productivity by allowing for greater collaboration and by speeding up the rate at which transactions can be performed.

But it is a double-edged sword. Many large enterprises have thousands of web-enabled applications running over their networks and their developers are under pressure to release new applications at an ever faster rate. The internet is also no longer the static marketing tool for organisations that characterised it during the 1990s. Dynamically changing content is the order of the day—and that means that applications are frequently updated, with extra functionality being added at a fast and furious pace.

Each of these applications may contain thousands, or even millions of lines of code, making it likely that at least some bugs have been incorporated along the way. Accepted levels are that there will be 0.5 significant errors per thousand lines of code, so a fairly small, 10,000 line application will have five significant errors within it—somewhere. Each of those errors could make the application vulnerable to attack and that is playing into the hands of hackers. Gone are the days of script kiddies; now a new breed of hacker has emerged that hunt for insecurely written code and vulnerabilities in software applications that will allow them to steal information contained in those applications. And, to an increasing extent, those attacks are specifically targeted—at an individual organisation or a certain individual.

The stakes are set to rise even higher as organisations turn to practices that could actually increase their risk of exposure even further for three reasons.

First, the survey showed that organisations are fast adopting service oriented architectures (SOA), with 66% of respondents having already adopted, or are in the process of adopting, a SOA. Among German respondents, that percentage rises to 84%, 71% of which are exposing legacy applications—potentially leaving them more vulnerable to attack as some of these applications would originally have been intended for internal use only and therefore developed without concern for today's security threats.

Second, organisations are also increasingly using next-generation Web 2.0 programming techniques and tools. The survey shows that 45% of respondents make use of JavaScript/AJAX programming tools in order to write applications that provide users with a much higher degree of interaction than traditional applications, and that enable dynamic, on-the-fly content to be produced. However, these new programming techniques actually increase the chance of applications containing vulnerabilities. For example, many Web 2.0 programming techniques make use of JavaScript as the data transport mechanism, which exposes more of the business logic of the applications such as access controls at the browser level, instead of at the server level, meaning that it is more exposed to users, and therefore to hackers. The problems involved are not yet widely understood, but a significant number of organisations report that they are encountering vulnerabilities that are specific to the new programming tools.

The third potentially insecure practice to which organisations are exposing themselves is that of trusting the development of their software applications to third parties. This requires that watertight service-level agreements be put in place to demand the highest standards of security be used in the development and testing of the software, and that the third parties can be held accountable for vulnerabilities that slip through the net. However, the survey does show that those organisations for which the importance of bespoke software development is increasing are least likely to outsource this activity, meaning that organisations do at least understand that outsourcing code development could be a less secure practice than keeping this in-house.

As well as these findings, the survey brings to light the fact that many organisations are not doing enough to actively build security into their applications at the design and development stages, nor are they making sufficient use of automated tools to test the security of the applications that they develop. It is well known that fixing security flaws is more expensive that ensuring that they do not exist in the first place. It is imperative that security be considered at all stages of the software development lifecycle to ensure that organisations allow as few vectors of attack against their networks to be left open as possible. In today's world, the penalties for sloppy security practices that lead to data leaking out of an organisation are high-and no one wants to be the subject of the next negative headline.

Quocirca's report Why Application Security is Crucial is free for readers and can be downloaded here.

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By: Judith Hurwitz, CEO, Hurwitz & Associates Posted: 14th May 2008 Copyright Hurwitz & Associates © 2008

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I was minding my own business and twittering (I think that is how you say it) when I noticed a breaking news story from the Wall Street Journal: HP would be acquiring EDS. This is quite a significant transition for HP that will help transform the company into a new position in the market. Now, at this time it isn't official—no conference call yet on my calendar but it certainly looks probable. In fact, Mark Hurd has acknowledged that the companies are talking. I picked up that detail from Larry Dignan and Justin Perlow's blog. So, what does this mean? There are a lot of issues at play. Here are my five 'top ten' thoughts:

One. HP needs more significant help on services and consulting. When Carly Fiorina was HP's CEO, they tried to buy PriceWaterHouseCooper's consulting practice and failed. After that failure, IBM scooped up the consulting practice which became the highly successful Global Business Services. Since then HP has made small targeted acquisitions. To compete in a global market, HP needs the deep expertise and customer relationships of a major consulting operation. And EDS is one of the biggest. The deal is reported to be worth between $12–13 billion. EDS revenues are around $22 billion.

Two. Synergy looks good between HP and EDS. Both companies have chosen to partner with many of the same software players including Oracle, Microsoft, TIBCO, and BEA (now part of the Oracle family). In addition, both companies have focused on big outsourcing deals. Therefore, the business philosophy of the two companies are close. The trick, of course, will be to bring these two organizations together in a way that keeps important consultants happy. This will be important since a services company is only as good as its people. Leveraging the EDS big tent will be key. Ironically, it might be easier for HP to integrate a company like EDS into the fold than to integrate a big software company. HP's existing services organization will fit into and under the EDS umbrella. The big challenge will be to manage costs. IBM has done a good job over the last several years making Global Services profitable and it hasn't been easy.

Three. Keeping services partners happy will be a challenge. HP has used the fact that it wasn't IBM Global Services as a differentiator. If it buys EDS it will have to do some work manage channel conflict. This might take some fancy footwork.

Four. What about the mainframe business? EDS has a significant mainframe business. The mainframe has been something that HP has studiously avoided. Does this mean that HP will learn to love the mainframe? It might consider such a relationship given the complexities of scaling and managing high end data centers and clouds. It might take some convincing but if HP watches carefully what EDS has achieved with the mainframe it might change its tune.

Five. Will HP know how to leverage EDS's expertise to enhance the software business? There is nothing like being close to the customer in difficult implementations to know where the pain is. If HP goes through with the acquisition it would be wise to leverage this expertise in the software group. Leveraging EDS's deep customer expertise could add assistance to the software business.

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By: Judith Hurwitz, CEO, Hurwitz & Associates Posted: 13th May 2008 Copyright Hurwitz & Associates © 2008

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A few months ago I wrote a blog entry criticizing Twitter. I was not sure I got the relevance of this micro-blogging site. So, I decided that it made sense to spend time getting deeply involved in a Twitter community to test it and see if my opinion would change.

Here are my thoughts now. First, I am finding myself intrigued by Twitter. It is a quirky environment. I see some comments like "I am drinking my first cup of coffee of the day" or "My airplane is delayed." I think that I know too much about some people's daily habits and not enough about others. I also get breaking news on Twitter and find some fascinating links from political pundits. I am finding that I get some unique insights into people I know and people I don't. Some entries are simply entertaining and make me laugh. My colleague, Robin Bloor, for example, has been posting haikus that are wonderful. I look forward to them. I exchange comments on topics with other analysts that I have gotten to know over the years. I am also reconnecting with people I haven't talked to in years.

I was talking to John Simonds last week and he thinks that some bloggers are using Twitter in place of their regular blogs. It might be the perfect solution for bloggers with short attention spans!

So, I think I have changed my mind to a certain extent. Twitter does fill a role in a world where our time is sliced thinner and thinner and where we don't always have the time to pick up the phone and call. It provides a way to create micro-communities that have intriguing possibilities.

I think this is just the beginning of what we will see in the next five years. It reminds me somewhat of the early commercial Internet days. It was an intriguing platform that has potential but needed to evolve. How will Twitter and other similar sites evolve? I think that we will see the refinement of specialized closed groups focused on either topics or issues. I could see, for example, a company setting up a Twitter-like capability to allow a team of scientists or researchers to ping each other with quick ideas. This is different than traditional communications methods used by these groups. In formal conversations or papers these participants feel compelled to write long and complicated explanations of ideas and concepts. If you are limited to a hundred or so characters you are forced to get the core of your idea out very, very quickly.

Like email in an older generation, Twittering could have the effect of quickening the pace of communication—but in a radically different way. Sometimes the most important innovation comes from a single phrase or idea that expands into a universe.

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

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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

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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: Neil Ward-Dutton, Research Director, Macehiter Ward-Dutton Posted: 12th May 2008 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License

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Along with an assorted collection of other analysts and journalists, on Friday I sat down for a conversation with Charles Phillips. The invitation came pretty much out of the blue a couple of weeks ago; the reason was because "Charles is interested in having a conversation about Web 2.0 trends in the enterprise, and outlining what Oracle's looking to do in that area".

The invite was interesting not only because Oracle's been pretty backward in coming forward about its collaboration story of late, and it sounded as if it might be preparing to say something new. It was also interesting because Oracle is renowned in analyst circles for being very structured and controlled in the way it engages with analyst firms. Whereas other vendors have long attempted to at least give the impression that they're interested in having conversations with analysts who have useful insights, no matter the size of firm they come from, Oracle has mostly stuck to its policy of only focusing on what it calls "tier 1" firms (Gartner, Forrester and IDC). I think MWD currently rates as a "tier 3" firm... so an invitation to a meeting with Oracle's President was pretty surprising. Still, as my Grandma always used to say, "never look a gift horse in the mouth"...

As it happens the briefing wasn't a hoax, and it was rather good. In the spirit of all things 2.0ey, Oracle has started to explore a kind of "market conversation" approach to talking about the work it's doing in the Enterprise 2.0 arena. Phillips was—for Oracle—close to being excitingly off-message at times. The assembled Oracleists also seemed to be genuinely interested in witnessing a conversation, rather than a prepared speech. Which was cool.

So anyway. There were four particular things of note that I took away from the conversation, all of which I think we'll be keen to track going forward:

• Oracle is putting real muscle behind Enterprise 2.0. It's building a dedicated sales force, combining pre-sales, consulting, and education resources together along with feet on the street. It'll be selling consulting offerings, together with a set of underpinning technologies, all of which exist today—Oracle Portal, Oracle Universal Content Management, and WebCenter, together with the underlying Fusion Middleware pieces. It's building out a set of "use cases" based on some internal market research and will sell its offerings through those.


• BEA's assets will be part of the picture. The Enterprise 2.0 sales initiative will bring in people, assets and resources from BEA. This is good news because it shows Oracle is looking at its acquisition of BEA not just from the standpoint of acquiring middleware market share.


• Oracle is relaunching its collaboration offering. The new Oracle Beehive technology is being developed to sit alongside Oracle's existing technology stack as outlined above, and it's not escaped Oracle's attention that if it can make market inroads with an Enterprise 2.0 story, it has a potential follow-on opportunity to displace some of the (very large chunk of) enterprise spending that goes on "heritage" collaboration software product upgrades. The company's Collaboration Suite hardly set the world on fire back in 2002–05: this shows that Oracle is revving up to have another go. But avoiding taking the incumbents on head-on this time.


• As well as building out a standalone proposition, Oracle is folding the technology into its other offerings and processes. Phillips talked about work going on to integrate the collaboration platform capabilities in Beehive together with its Fusion applications and its BPM technology offering. But it's also taking much of the technology and using that internally within Oracle—and as it learns about what works, it's infusing a number of its own business processes with an Enterprise 2.0 flavour. The Oracle Partner Network is one place where it's trying stuff out (with 9,000 Oracle products and 20,000 partners on the books, this could be viewed as Oracle's own long tail opportunity. Sidenote: Oracle has *9,000* products? Jeez. That's not good.)

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