By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd July 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

This weeks Police Review, which is essential reading for those involved in the depressing work of policing this country, carries an interesting story on page 4 concerning that font of all knowledge Wikipedia (www.policereview.com).

Apparently the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) is advising the plod to search Wikipedia to verify their evidence prior to attending court. A former officer from the Met and advisor to the Home Office recounts being shown printouts from Wikipedia which were going to form part of officer's evidence to the court. Of course the printouts contained inaccuracies and I guess the officer faced the potential embarrassment of relying on dubious facts from Wikipedia.

As we all get lazier and increasingly rely on data sources such as Wikipedia to produce "facts" there is a real danger that factual inaccuracies will creep into our day to day lives. This is a perilous path that needs to be trodden with care.

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By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 3rd July 2009 Copyright Quocirca © 2009

We often hear about what is happening with the largest enterprises in the UK—those who are seen as making up the main part of "UK, plc". However, there are few organisations with more than 1,000 employees, and even though they do make up around one third of the UK's GDP, they are also far more distributed, with divisions, groups and even sub-companies headquartered in many different places, often to minimise the payment of taxes to the UK's coffers.

Under the level of the large organisation comes the mid-market. For the purposes of this article, we'll define this as those companies that employ between 100 and 999 people. According to the National Statistics Office, there are around 17,000 organisations that fall into this category, and again, they make up around one third of the UK's GDP. As many of these organisations will be semi-private organisations, let's call them "UK, Ltd".

Quocirca has just carried out research for IBM, looking at how the mid-market deals with its data, and how it manages core financial processes and reporting. The findings show that much could be done by the mid-market to improve effectiveness and efficiencies, and Quocirca believes that if small changes could be made on a consistent basis across a broad group of the mid-market, the UK finances would benefit from many billions of pounds in improved revenues, margins and therefore tax payments.

As a starter, the research shows that the mid-market is highly pragmatic in how it obtains technology. This should not be a surprise, but it does put paid to the perception that the mid-market is a pure Microsoft stomping ground. The vast majority of organisations have multiple different databases from different vendors, and are struggling in how best to pull these together.

More to the point when it comes to how they struggle is the fact that they tend to have high amounts of business-important data held in spreadsheets—with many of these spreadsheets stored locally to the originator on their PC. Such an approach minimises the capability for such data to be shared, and the majority of respondents felt that spreadsheet issues, combined with lack of access to all data sources, meant that they had little faith in the data being presented to them and that their decision making capability was therefore impacted.

To get around this, nearly one quarter of respondents used email as their prime means of sharing data. Not only does this lead to inefficiencies around data storage, with multiple copies of the same file being held in various in and out boxes, but it also means that no-one can be sure whether the version of the data they are looking at is the latest version or not.

Few respondents had moved to a fully automated business process model—the majority were working with large parts of their processes still be carried out in a manual, and often ad hoc, basis. Indeed, many said that their processes had not changes for a long time—something that is hard to believe when the markets have been changing so much, and that mid-sized organisations must have high degrees of flexibility to be able to respond to such changes.

Just imagine—if each mid-sized organisation could move to a full shared data model, could apply business intelligence constructs to this through being able to aggregate and report on multiple different data sources, and then to use such knowledge to measure performance against key performance indicators (KPIs) and make the small changes that are continuously needed to ensure that an organisation meets its goals.

If through better management of and reporting on data, combined with the use of reasonable performance management, the revenues of mid-market organisation could be improved by just 1% and profitability by the same amount, the impact on the 33% of the 2008 £1.41 trillion UK GDP at a performance and tax payable level could well help in bailing the whole of the UK from the current financial mess that we are in.

However, the greatest issue with the mid-market—inertia—may well be the one thing that stops this from happening. Although the research showed a reasonable understanding of the term "business intelligence", it is still seen as being too expensive and complex for use in the mid market. "Performance management" was seen as being mainly around staff appraisals, not around monitoring the financial performance of the business itself. Business processes are seen as something where money can be saved by doing everything manually—and so introducing considerable errors and the need for extra time in dealing with these.

Come on, UK Ltd! Relatively small changes can bring great rewards—not only for you as an individual, not only for your business, but also for the UK as a whole. And if anything needs help at the moment, it's the overall economy.

Quocirca's report on the research underpinning this blog item is available for free download.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd July 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

The drunkard's walk is a concept used within probability theory and it has application within various aspects of IT. I had better start by explaining what it is.

Actually, I'll start by talking about tennis. During Wimbledon there have been the usual comments about bad luck with net cords evening out. Unfortunately, that isn't true. At the start of the match both players have a 50:50 chance of having more bad net cords than their opponent. Now, suppose that you get the first bad net cord, what are the chances for the remainder of the match? Of course, it is still 50:50. So, on average, if you were the person who got the first unfortunate bounce off the net, then you will come off worse in terms of net cords on average. The same is true for bad lbw decisions in cricket.

The drunkard's walk is an extension of this idea whereby you look at the drunkard lurching in any one of eight directions on the assumption that each lurch is independent of the one before. What you find is that as he or she tends to get further and further away from the starting point. In other words, going back to tennis or cricket, or even capital markets (‘the trend is your friend'), there is a tendency for luck, good or bad, to perpetuate itself. Which is, incidentally, a good reason to support the use of technology in sports, since it removes the bad decision issue.

The drunkard's walk may seem to contradict the idea of reversion to the mean (which is a fancy way of saying that things even out) but in fact it doesn't. If you had a million drunks all starting from the same point and monitored where they were after a few hundred steps then the mean position of all the drunks would be at or close to the starting point but each individual drunk would probably be a significant distance away from there: the reversion to the mean applies to the average of all drunks not any individual drunk.

So, things don't even out for individual tennis players or cricketers. This will be familiar to any database administrator who is getting skew in his partitions: if things evened out you might expect that skew wouldn't be a problem because it would even out but the fact is that once it starts happening you know it will only get worse.

The actual case in which the drunkard's walk recently came up was when I was asked about the application of data quality to data mining. Data mining tools typically have facilities for coping with things like null fields and the use of default values but they are otherwise fairly limited in this regard. Moreover, with the exception of SAS, which owns DataFlux (and even then I don't think the company thinks of DataFlux especially in conjunction with Enterprise Miner), the data mining vendors don't have partnerships with data quality vendors and don't talk about it much. And the same would be true of people using Matlab or R. And the reason, I think, is because they expect that any errors in the data will ‘even out' given that you are working with very large sets of data. But they won't even out, unless you also run those models a very large number of times against a very large number of datasets. So, if you want accurate data mining models you need to pay close attention to data quality, just as you do for other business intelligence applications.

Other applications of the drunkard's walk in IT? Well, anywhere there is divergence from the mean: without remedial action it is likely to diverge further. This would include things like deteriorating performance, risk management, and errors in spreadsheets. No doubt you can think of others.

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By: David Heyes, COO, TFM Networks Posted: 3rd July 2009 Copyright TFM Networks © 2009

Working from home—we've heard it all before haven't we? How it supports a more flexible work environment, ensures greater productivity, and delivers financial savings in office and travel costs. It's also greener and demonstrates a commitment to Corporate Social Responsibility. But if it's so obvious why aren't more companies maximising the potential?

Staff certainly prefer working from home; a recent survey carried out by Avaya found that 78% of staff would prefer the ability to work from home over a pay rise. So why not give them what they want?

Home working is likely to become an integral element of business operations. Staff have every right to request flexible working and employers have a legal duty to give any request serious consideration. In fact flexible working legislation has recently been extended to offer all employees with children up to the age of 16 the right to work from home, which may also force organisational reviews. So, offering home working to your staff before being forced to do so could make good business sense for you and your workforce.

Home networking benefits add up
The economic and operational benefits of home working add up to a tempting business proposition. Flexible working policies can help to retain key staff and expand the workforce without the added cost implications and overheads of new office space. Initiatives like hot-desking to reduce the number of seats can be introduced, or you could even develop a permanently remote workforce—supporting company growth without the traditional operational overheads.

Working from home also overcomes lost time spent commuting and the constraints of traditional office opening hours and, in addition, technology such as teleconferencing and video-conferencing maintain the need for face-to-face contact without compromising human interaction.

The rapid growth of electronic and virtual communication methods such as Twitter, messenger services and social networking sites can also provide an alternative channel of communication to maintain essential relationships with customers, colleagues and suppliers.

The traditional office is changing. We are moving away from the tribal manager with the team around them, set working hours, fixed costs and long commutes and heading towards an online community who works flexibly at less cost and more productively.

The business reality remains however that organisations need to balance these benefits and changes with the need for secure and fast access to business applications, and the requirement to adhere to health & safety and legal guidelines.

Is the technology piece really that simple?
Core to the move towards home working is the ability to provide secure, reliable and fast access to your main business applications when away from the office. Some broadband providers would have you believe that providing your staff with a home broadband connection is all it takes for increased productivity and lower operating costs but home networking isn't simply plug-and-play.

Below are five questions your broadband provider may rather sweep under the carpet.

1. Service: What happens if the broadband connection fails?
Time is money. If a home broadband connection goes down, then your employees' performance will be compromised. If staff are stuck at home with no Internet and no access to business applications for any number of days, then suddenly home networking loses its appeal.

When looking at networking options, cut through the sales jargon and look at the factors that really matter to your business. Is there a clear service level agreement with guaranteed availability? Service credits for down-time ultimately count for little when all you want is the service to be available. What's the average speed of answering when phoning for support? Is your network being pro-actively monitored? Once the fault has been accepted, you don't want to wait days, so same or next day resolution is essential, to ensure productivity is not compromised.

2. Performance: What about speed, bandwidth and prioritising key applications over your network?
Many business applications require faster round-trip times (the time taken to move information across a network) than can be offered by consumer broadband providers, who will typically guarantee 250ms, while many business applications require better than 100ms.

Another bugbear is the highly publicised furore of ‘Up to 8MB/24MB' advertising, where the average is actually around 25% of the advertised ‘Up to' speed, and sometimes much less at peak consumer times. This serves to compromise and reduce performance, directly impacting on the ability of employees to work productively.

To guarantee speed bandwidth and prioritisation you may need a business-grade MPLS network with Quality of Service and end-to-end performance guarantees.

An end-to-end guarantee is becoming increasingly important as organisations migrate over to other technologies such as Skype—without it, your company will have no guarantee of voice quality delivery to the user, effectively leaving you with no assurance that you have the right tools for the job.

3. Security: How important is this to you, including data protection?
Your staff, your applications and data still need to be protected from web-based threats and data leaks. There is a need to balance remote access with protecting your assets, and remote workstations need to have the same security protocols, web filtering and data protection in place as the office.

This is not possible with consumer broadband but it is by having an MPLS network and appropriate company-usage policies in place.

If security is absolutely critical, then a virtual, fully hosted solution where there is no possibility of sending or downloading information remotely makes sound business and even better financial sense.

4. Health & Safety: What are the regulations for home workers?
By law, employers are responsible for the welfare of employees' working from home, so businesses must carry out health and safety assessments or request workers to sign waivers.

When considering waivers—given new legislation around corporate manslaughter—it's advisable to put procedures in place to ensure staff are safe when using electrical equipment and take necessary breaks when working with visual display units for long periods of time.

Understandably, coordinating site visits to ensure compliance with all health and safety requirements presents an additional time and cost burden you might not have been aware of, especially if you have a large number of employees working offsite, but it's an essential consideration to avoid future issues. Your company insurance may also need to be reviewed to ensure it appropriately covers you and your employees.

5. Maintenance and Procurement: Who provides the home office supplies and equipment?
Staff will also require the necessary hardware, software and office supplies to do their jobs from home. Providing printers, scanners and fax machines for one office is one thing, extending this to a remote workforce is quite another.

Staff travelling to the local superstore to replace expensive toner, broken printers or even paper can be a significant and hidden false economy in terms of productivity and unnecessary additional costs.

When adopting home networking, you'll need to be aware of these requirements and the additional cost implications, in order to build it into your business plan.

Home networking in a box
Given the wider business implications involved in home networking, the headline-grabbing home business broadband rates that appear a good deal may not prove that cost-effective. You'll need to factor in the in-house resources needed for initial set up and ongoing support, from onsite HR and health and safety assessments to security and hardware updates and replacements.

Alternatively, home networking as an all-inclusive managed service may prove an easier and more cost-effective option for many businesses. The managed service approach provides end-to-end support through a single service level agreement, simplifying the management of the home network.

A managed home networking service is designed to covers all aspects of the connection from support and security to maintenance and health and safety. This ensures your business benefits from all the advantages of a remote workforce, and that you have the reassurance that home workers get business-quality support and access to applications, so that home networking delivers on its promises.

There is a strong business case for home networking—speed, bandwidth, but it's so much more than just a broadband connection.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 3rd July 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Big data. Small budget. That’s the message Aster Data Systems is sending with its latest product launch.

Aster this week rolled out the first-ever massively parallel (MPP) data warehousing appliance priced at the $50,000 mark. Finding opportunity in the global recession, Aster is aiming to fundamentally change the economics of data warehousing and business intelligence (BI) by providing a compute-rich appliance on a lower-cost architecture that, Aster says, is also cheaper to administrate and operate.

That's a big promise and one that, if it pans out, may indeed ripple through the $20 billion-plus data warehousing industry, one of a few hot growth areas in IT. Only about 10 percent of data warehousing deployments are at the high-end, opening a potentially large market for Aster and its supplier brethren to win over on value-oriented offerings in the mid-market.

Should Oracle Be Worried?
Should Netezza and Teradata be scrambling to roll out a lower cost solution to compete with a scrappy Aster? Teradata has been seeing some wins lately—the State of Ohio, Ruby Tuesday, Hunan Telecom and RealNetworks are some of its newest clients. Netezza has also picked up a few new clients, including WIND Telecom, Esselunga, and Telcel. Oracle, of course, is serving much of the Fortune 500. A recent Forrester report put Teradata, Oracle, IBM and Microsoft at the head of the market, with Netezza, Sybase and SAP noted for niche deployments.

Other warehouse solutions are also being driven into the market, by such vendors as Greenplum. [Disclosure: Greenplum is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts]. At the higher end of appliances, Oracle and HP teamed up last year on the Exadata appliance for Oracle warehouse workloads. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts]. If the Oracle buy of Sun goes through, we may see other appliance and warehouse packing permutations from Oracle.

For now, Aster is coming out with its lower-cost competitive solution dubbed MapReduce Data Warehouse Appliance – Express Edition. Aster is seeking to level the playing field on the data warehousing entry front, and that message should resonate well with companies that need an entry-level solution that doesn’t compromise on power. Aster—and it won’t be alone—clearly sees a sweet spot with companies that are value-conscious and growth-minded.

“The Aster MapReduce Data Warehouse Appliance changes the economics of MPP data warehousing appliances by enabling an entry point of $50K for the most compute-rich, analytically-expressive data warehouse appliance on the market,” says Mayank Bawa, CEO of Aster Data. “This contrasts directly with an entry price of $500K for appliances from Teradata, Netezza, and Oracle. With a huge number of data warehouses under one terabyte, this entry pricing now democratizes data warehousing and fast, rich analytics, and brings the power of data within the reach of departments and enterprises, big and small.”

The Big Data Trend
The “Big Data” trend is growing. Although most data warehouses are still under one terabyte, Aster is betting more companies are beginning to see the light on the need for a viable database platform to scale and provide high-speed analysis. MPP data warehouses are often regarded as the most scalable, best analytic performance, highest availability, and most flexible in the data warehousing world. The problem is cost, and complexity of the manpower needed to wring the value from such systems. Many organizations can’t afford a high-end MPP data warehouse or appliances, or find the staff to man them.

Data volumes and complexity continue to explode, and we can expect more as unstructured web data, mobile device data and the need for better BI into dynamic markets to continue to meld into a thorny data management problem. Appliances fit the bill well due to the ability to directly tune the software specifically to the workload (and hardware platform), and further best exploit parallelism and MapReduce approaches.

Throw another monkey wrench into the mix: I expect to see more “data warehouse as a service”-type entries, whereby the entry level moves to the cloud.

Data volumes and complexity continue to explode, and we can expect more as unstructured web data, mobile device data and the need for better BI into dynamic markets to continue to meld into a thorny data management problem.

Remember batch outsourced processing? What’s the difference? Cloud-based warehousing also sets up the ability to mix and match data set joins in the cloud in novel BI extraction and analytics tag-teams. It’s not so far-fetched and could produce a whole new reason to get your data (or subsets or metadata instances) into a/the cloud.

This week, Aster is pushing the on-the-ground deployment envelope with the MapReduce Data Warehouse Appliance Express Edition on general warehouse productivity and applicability. Aster’s secret sauce is its approach to parallelism in the data warehouse, the company says. The way Aster goes at parallelism makes it possible to for the data warehouse to run on commodity-grade hardware, albeit with aforementioned appliance tuning.

The appliance pre-packages the Aster nCluster analytic database software on Dell hardware and gives companies the option to include MicroStrategy’s BI software for up to one terabyte of user data. That's an attractive bundle for the small- to mid-sized business. Aster promises significant improvement in analysis speeds by leveraging a MPP architecture—even for smaller data warehouses.

Aster isn’t leaving large enterprises out of the cost-savings equation, of course. The company also launched Aster MapReduce Data Warehouse Appliance – Enterprise Edition in sizes ranging from one terabyte to one petabyte of data.

(BriefingsDirect contributor Jennifer LeClaire provided editorial assistance and research on this post. She can be reached at http://www.linkedin.com/in/jleclaire and http://www.jenniferleclaire.com.)

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By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 2nd July 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

Alfresco have recently announced a cloud-based integrated ECM solution with ParaScale, a startup company developing cloud storage solutions. The Alfresco Content Management solution and ParaScale's Cloud Storage software will be available on the same hardware, and the claim from Alfresco is that, unlike traditional ECM architectures, the combined solution will enable organizations to store and access content without adding management overhead or cost.

John Powell, Alfresco's CEO, stated that, "Managing content effectively has become an indispensable part of running an efficient business. Content growth requires a sophisticated ECM solution that can scale users and content volumes simply and at low cost without massive up-front capital expenditure. Legacy applications may run in the cloud but modern Content-as-a-Service approaches, consuming services resident in the same cloud, are required to inherit the benefits of a Cloud Service Architecture. Only then can users achieve on-demand scalability, fault tolerance, cloud-wide network security and cost efficiency."

Integrating the Alfresco ECM solution with the ParaScale cloud storage platform improves manageability and performance for ECM users, while lowering costs both by eliminating a layer of servers to run Alfresco as well by allowing the usage of commodity priced storage. ParaScale's storage nodes are standard Linux servers and it took very little effort for Alfresco to bring up their application directly on ParaScale's storage servers.

The ParaScale cloud also supports policy-based replication to ensure high availability for content access. Users can set policies to configure the number of copies of a document that are replicated within the cloud. When a new document is created, the ParaScale software propagates the new version within the cloud to another storage node based on the policy.

This announcement provides another boost to the use of the Cloud as means of reducing cost whilst at the same time providing security and speed.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 2nd July 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

After nearly a 20-month gestation period, Oracle today announced the arrival this month of the next generation of its sprawling middleware family, the long-anticipated Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g.

Billed as a "complete, integrated, and hot-pluggable" middleware set of suites, the new software infrastructure offerings, which the Redwood Shores, Calif. computer giant previewed in November 2007, bolsters functionality, integration and business intelligence (BI) benefits across its vast product portfolio, including new capabilities for Oracle SOA Suite, WebLogic Suite, Web Center Suite, and opening debut for Identity Management as a suite.

With the spoils of the BEA acquisition now fully baked into the mix—and with anticipation for what the pending Sun Microsystems buy brings—Oracle is well on its way to obviating the middleware moniker. Perhaps we should call it "anyware."

The glaring missing link now, however, is the cloud element of Oracle's destiny. With such a broad infrastructure, data lifecycle, and apps/services development portfolio—not to mention deep hooks into Oracle's burgeoning business applications offerings—the only needed outcome to fulfill is the "any" in "anyware." That must include a fluid sourcing, hosting and business model future—the nearly obvious Oracle Cloud.

Now that it's here, the 11g continental conglomeration must be the gateway for the enveloping 12c, as in "c" for cloud. You don't need to be an oracle to factor that clear and necessary path to the future.

Meanwhile, terrestrial Oracle also announced today that its middleware remains the company's fastest growing business with 90,000 customers worldwide, including 29 of the Dow Jones' top 30, 98 of Fortune's 100 Global, and 10 of the top 10 companies in major industries.

Enhancements across the platform of platforms in the Fusion Middleware 11g include:

• SOA Suite, a unifying system of human and document-centric processes and an event-driven architecture (EDA) with a complete range of SOA capabilities from development to security and governance. Deployed on the Oracle application grid infrastructure, the SOA underpinnings are optimized for building and integrating services on private and public clouds.
• WebLogic Suite (including WebLogic Server) adds new features, including Fusion Middleware GridLink for Real Application Clusters and Fusion Middleware Enterprise Grid Messaging. Fusion Middleware ActiveCache also enables rapid scale-out to meet changing user demand and system load.
• WebCenter Suite provides a broad set of reusable, out-of-the-box WebCenter Services components that can be plugged into any type of portal—intranet, composite application, Web-based community—to enhance social networking and personal productivity.
  • Composer, a declarative, browser-based tool, makes it easy for both end-users and developers to create, share, and personalize applications, portals and social sites.
  • WebCenter Spaces, a new pre-built social networking solution, enables end-user driven, created and managed communities (Group Spaces and Personal Spaces) to increase productivity, communication, and efficiency.
• Identity Management delivers the first components of a fully integrated Identity Management suite and features deeper integration with other Fusion Middleware solutions, as well as new features such as Deployment Accelerators, Universal Federation Framework, and a modern unified user interface based on Oracle’s Application Development Framework (ADF) Faces.

Fusion Middleware 11g also builds on the previously announced Oracle Fusion Middleware 11g strategic development tools including JDeveloper, Application Development Framework, and TopLink.

One of the key take-aways from 11g is the infusion of BI and analytics across the portfolio. That will also be a key of any cloud-based offerings from Oracle. Comprehensive BI as a service may very well be the killer application of cloud approaches.

Of the still standing middleware field—IBM, Microsoft, Software AG, Red Hat/JBoss, Progress, TIBCO, SAP and Sybase—only a few will be both able to get the "anyware" in terms of product breadth and of cloud delivery. [Disclosure: Progress and TIBCO and sponsors of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Oracle has sewn up its field brilliantly via its organic and aquisitions-fueled growth of the past decade. With Sun and its ID management, file system/directory, Solaris community, and speedy silicon, the path to cloud seems inevitable and closer than most thought for Oracle. Incidentally, control of Java is more a strategic weapon than an enabler.

Oracle still needs more total governance (don't we all!), a PaaS play, and a whole lot of globally established and cutting edge, cloud-delivery data centers in place humming along. Oh, and the transition from a licensed to subscription commodity services business models won't be any much easier for Oracle than Microsoft. Has to be done, however.

But, as usual, Oracle will stride like the Rhodes Colossus the build, buy and partner spectrum of opportunity to attain a gobal cloud delivery capability. Nothing but the best will do, of course. Oracle has just about everything else in place, that's abundantly clear.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 1st July 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

When people think of Software as a Service (SaaS) and web services delivery, they often envision business applications like salesforce automation, email, and human resources management.

But Hewlett-Packard has been delivering quality assurance and applications performance management functions via SaaS for years. Its Business Technology Optimization (BTO) services, part of its Mercury acquisition, made the leap to SaaS delivery long before web-based business applications became popular. You could say SaaS for developers and testers—code warriors—paved the way for SaaS for salesmen—road warriors.

Now, as interest in cloud computing ramps up, the ability to deliver more aspects of IT lifecycle and quality management, along with broader project and portfolio oversight values, is also ramping up. Yet a missing ingredient for IT innovators has been how to begin and how to organize these sourcing changes effectively.

Such a SaaS whole greater than the sum of its web services parts will better help IT managers do more with less, and provide better applications faster, as well.

To better understand the expanding role of SaaS within IT, and how professional services can newly help in the transition to holistic SaaS use by IT departments, I interviewed two executives recently at HP's Software Universe conference in Las Vegas: Scott Kupor, vice president and general manager of Software-as-a-Service, and Anand Eswaran, vice president of professional services, both in HP's Software and Solutions group.

Here are some excerpts:

Kupor: At HP for the last nine years, we've been selling IT management applications as a service delivery option. If you think about things like testing, performance management, or project and portfolio management (PPM), for example, those are traditional IT applications that we’ve been selling with this similar delivery model.

What we’ve been hearing from customers today at the conference are two key things. Number one, the cost benefits that initially drove them to SaaS are ever present and incredibly more important in this financial environment. The benefits are really coming to fruition. The second is that we’re starting to see a migration of SaaS from what was traditionally testing services toward other more complex and more customizable IT management applications.

We’re hearing a lot of interest from customers around IT service management (ITSM), service desk applications, and service management applications. These are things that have traditionally been the domain of inside-the-firewall deployments. Customers are now getting comfortable with the SaaS model so much so that they’re looking at those applications as well for deployment in a SaaS environment.

Eswaran: We’ve made a very conscious shift from what was inherently deployment of products. The approach right now is transformed into what business outcomes can we achieve for the customer, which is something which we would have been unable to do some time back.

We have changed focus now from deploying a single product set to achieving outcomes like reduction of outages by 40 percent, increasing quality, getting service-level agreements to a certain point, and guaranteeing that level of service. That’s been hugely helpful.

All of what we do at the back end, whether it’s how we leverage SaaS, what products we use, what software we use, what consulting and professional services we use, all of that is going to be transparent to the customer. What they care about is a service, which we will deliver to the customer. SaaS enables us to get to that service, get to that time-to-market, much faster.

This all gets us to the point of what customers refer to as "killing the game," getting to a point of being able to offer outcome-based pricing and guaranteeing that outcome, as opposed to the traditional consulting model of billing rates and hours.

Kupor: Remember, all these are complex IT management applications, they have third-party integrations.

That’s really what IT’s job is—to help deploy business applications and govern the integrity, security, the authenticity, and the performance of those applications.

They have custom code that customers are building on top. Those are all areas of domains of expertise for the services organization. Through the work that [Anand's team] and we are doing together, we can together deliver a cost-effective delivery option for customers, but without having to sacrifice the complexity, integration, and customization opportunities that they demand for these applications.

We’ve heard this a lot from our customers today, that they’re actually interested in looking at how, as an IT department, they can deploy their own applications in a third-party cloud environment. You hear a lot of people talking about infrastructure on demand or computing power on demand.

People are looking toward these third-party products as a way to basically take an application they’ve built in-house and deploy them externally in, perhaps, an Amazon environment or a Microsoft environment. Where the interesting opportunity is for us, as a management vendor, is that customers will still need the same level of performance, availability, security, and data integrity, associated with applications that live in a cloud environment as they have come to expect for applications that live inside their corporate firewall.

We’ve been talking to customers a lot about something called Cloud Assure, which is the first service offering that HP has brought to market to help customers solve those management problems for applications they choose to deploy in a cloud-based environment.

That’s really what IT’s job is—to help deploy business applications and govern the integrity, security, the authenticity, and the performance of those applications.

Eswaran: Everything is eventually going to get transformed into a service for the customer, so that they can actually focus on the core business they are in. When you have things transformed into a service, everything we do to offer that service should be transparent to the customer.

It becomes a services-led engagement, but that’s where we clearly differentiate "services" from "service," the singular, which is the eventual outcome the customer needs to create for themselves. That’s why we really partner well between SaaS and Professional Services. We believe that we are on a path of convergence to eventually get to offering business value and a service to a customer.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. The podcast is also available for download.

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By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 1st July 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

My data is very personal to me so, like many other people, I take great exception when it is lost or stolen by incompetent organisations. If data is lost by a private sector company I can vote with my feet and take my custom elsewhere. This doesn't solve the data loss issue but it makes me feel a bit better.

Contrast this with a government body that loses my data. I have nowhere else to go, short of maybe leaving the country. This issue, coupled with the fact that government in all its guises handles what is my most sensitive data, presents us as citizens with a challenge—how can we make our governments handle our data more securely?

In the UK, public confidence in government, of whatever description, is extremely low. Fuelled by expense claims that fail the "reasonableness" test by the man or woman in the street the view is that politicians, the government and the ruling classes are hopeless at best and criminal at worst. There is no sign that this confidence is returning.

Meanwhile government collects vast amounts of data that enables it to conduct its day to day business—licencing vehicles, paying benefits, running hospitals, tracking criminals and so on. Unfortunately it becomes a heady mix when one considers the amount of very personal, sensitive data that is being held in databases.

Even the most personal of personal data, our unique DNA code, is now, for many people, in the hands of the government. Data loss incidents raise the cry of "something must be done" but what is that something? What can we as IT professionals do to help solve the problem?

When thinking about the government use of citizen data it quite often shocks people when they realise the amount of data that is stored across government systems. The vast majority of these databases are perfectly legitimate and form a vital tool for the administration of a country.

Here is a sample of some government databases being used, or planned, in the UK.

• The national DNA database stores records of over 4.5 million people which is around 5.2% of the UK population. Everyone that is arrested in the UK has their DNA taken and kept on file even if they are not found guilty or even charged, which has raised some interesting civil liberties concerns.
• The National Identity Register, or ID database, is another politically sensitive database currently in the design phase. It is believed by some that over time this will contain all citizen's data as a prelude to the enforced carrying of ID cards—a very sensitive issue for the British.
• The TV licensing database contains 28 million addresses and the DVLA database stores records of 38 million vehicles registered in the UK alongside driver and vehicle licensing information
• The Department for Work and Pensions customer database has 85 million records that are accessible to 80,000 departmental staff plus 60,000 staff in other departments and 445 local authorities.
• ContactPoint is a database designed to hold the name, address, gender, date of birth, school and health provider of every child in England.
• The communications database is planned to centralise details of calls and websites visited by users by utilising data from phone companies and internet providers. This data will then be open for inspection by over 500 public bodies.

According to the Joseph Rowntree Reform Trust the UK government spends £16bn a year on databases and plans to spend a further £105bn on projects over the next five years.

Ultimately government needs to be avoiding headlines such as one that appeared in March 2009 concerning the ContactPoint database. Security flaws halted work on the database after the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) admitted that it had uncovered problems in the system for shielding details of an estimated 55,000 vulnerable children.

These include children who are victims of domestic violence, those in difficult adoptions or witness protection programmes and the children of the rich and famous, whose whereabouts may need to be kept secret.

The shielding system for vulnerable children is supposed to withdraw everything but a child's name, sex and age from the computer record that will be available to 400,000 children's services workers with access to the database.

But local authority staff who had been uploading information on to ContactPoint discovered that the shielding did not always work.

The executive director of family and children's services for the borough of Kensington & Chelsea in West London said that "Some people are seeing this as an IT issue but, in reality, it is a child protection issue,"

In my view this really starts to focus ones mind on IT security issues.

The Inside Threat - Again
I believe that the biggest threat to government data actually comes from within. Despite exciting stories of hackers breaking into government databases the vast majority of data loss incidents have stemmed from the inside threat.

I use the term inside rather than insider as I believe it better articulates this problem, which breaks down into two areas.

• Incompetent and non-malicious: i.e. I sent all of the HMRC database in the post
• Competent and malicious: i.e. I am going to steal this medical data and blackmail the patient

The incompetent and non-malicious is by far and away the most prevalent actor in any data loss incident. We have all read the headlines and seen the news reports. I guess someone leaving an unencrypted laptop on a train isn't as exciting as a targeted hacking attack, but it is the reality when it comes to government data losses.

That said, of course there are competent and malicious data loss incidents where an attacker is in a position to steal data. Again I believe a lot of this is by users that already have privileged access to data in the first instance, and then go rogue. Espionage and break ins are far less common.

So what steps can government take today to help prevent data loss?

Data encryption is one of the more well established data security tools. Vendors have produced a number of easy to use encryption solutions that enable users to rapidly encrypt their data, be it at file level, folder level or the entire hard disk.

Alongside these many implementations comes the inevitable downside.

For encryption this has always been key management. Relying on users to remember their encryption passwords is a risky business and can result in corporate data being locked away, sometimes never to be seen again. Clearly this is an unacceptable state of affairs and needs to be addressed before encryption has been widely adopted. Unfortunately departments that have purchased an encryption solution as a tactical add on, rather than as a part of a strategic encryption roll out, quickly realise that their quick fix ends up causing horrendous problems later on.

The most appealing aspect of data encryption is the fact that if hardware that contains encrypted data is lost the associated dramas are far less exciting. After all, only some hardware has been lost which contains an incomprehensible bunch of gibberish. Bad that hardware has been lost but no where near as bad as if it had contained valuable government data.

Strategic data encryption is a must for any system that contains sensitive data. But great care needs to be taken in rolling it out. It is vital that implementers fully understand the environment in which they are working so that all relevant hardware is encrypted. Discovery is vital—forgetting about one single USB drive may invalidate an encryption solution that has been deployed across an entire government department.

Patch management, like data encryption, is one of those basic IT hygiene tasks we all need to undertake day in and day out.

The rampant success of the Conficker code late last year was attributed to neglected patching. This included 8,000 PCs on a hospital network in Sheffield that were infected after managers apparently told staff to turn off automatic security updates. A patch, released by Microsoft in October 2008 and 3 months before the Sheffield incident, would have prevented the problem. Likewise the Ministry of Defence was still subject to a Conficker infection early in 2009.

Patches need to be tested and deployed under a controlled environment, following advice from the software manufacturer as to its urgency. Testing has traditionally been a problem as an untested patch my end up affecting production systems, so IT managers need to take a view as to the time to complete appropriate testing and the need to deploy a patch to combat a known exploit.

With good, well managed data encryption and a robust patch testing and deployment strategy an organisation will be a long way down the road of establishing a safe, secure and compliant IT infrastructure...

Compliance

Compliance is something that all those working in IT need to get their heads around. If anything is guaranteed for the future it is the realisation of more and more rules and regulations for both the public and private sector as governments look at preventing a repeat of the current financial situation.

Even now, before any more draconian legislation is introduced, there is an awful lot that needs to be considered by organisations working in the EU. Not all of them apply to every sector, industry or geography, which makes things even more complicated when trying to unearth which acts you should be worrying about.

IT compliance in both the public and private sector is normally a good thing as it often instils good practices and procedures. On the other hand over compliance can be detrimental as the organisation can be bogged down in achieving a goal that delivers little direct business benefit. Medium sized businesses often have a real struggle ensuring their systems are compliant.

Compliance failure may escape regulatory attention for a while, that is until something goes wrong and then IT systems will be explored in fine detail. This also applies when a company is being sold or floated, with newly discovered compliance failures having a direct negative impact on a businesses valuation.

Ultimately compliance is a balance that legislators need to achieve, with our assistance.

As organisations switch onto the world of compliance they realise that it is far more cost effective to run compliant systems 24/7 rather than hastily scrabble to clean up prior to an audit. Those days should be long gone and organisations should ideally be "audit ready" at all times, or at least strive to be.

The public sector is often revealed as having poor data security practices, and the vast majority of headlines relate to public sector organisations failing in their data protection duty. The private sector appears to have been able to hide their mistakes away from public eyes unless a data breach attracts a prosecution or the company owns up of their own accord.

Regulators are getting more intrusive and aggressive. The UK government is now actively dealing with data protection issues with the Data Handling Procedures in Government report published in June 2008 that set out clear and mandatory procedures to be followed by all government employees that have access to and responsibility for citizen data.

The report was drafted in response to HMRC's loss of 25 million child benefit records in November 2007. As a result of this data loss and to thwart future episodes related to this type of preventable loss, all departments placed immediate restrictions on their use of removable media and subsequently all departments have initiated programmes to encrypt laptops and USB memory sticks.

All organisations—public and private—need to avoid being caught up in the headlines for the wrong reason. In the past a good flogging by the media appeared to shake a response from the public sector, but should we really rely on the fourth estate to be the ultimate sanction for data loss offenders?

It is vital that we as IT security professionals remain aware of the acts and regulations that apply to our specific geography, market place or industry sector. Government departments face increased scrutiny, quite rightly, as they store more and more data on citizens.

With the current turmoil in the worldwide finance sector there is no doubt that legislation, oversight and regulation will be under more scrutiny than ever before. The risk is that politicians will see heavier compliance requirements as a quick fix to managing far more complex and difficult issues, and that will have a knock on effect to the IT security community.

In the meantime all we can do is keep our own house in order and make sure we are able to deliver compliant and well managed systems to the business. To achieve this we all need to understand our IT environments, manage our known risk, protect against unknown risks, prevent device misuse and secure mobile devices.

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By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 30th June 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

Security firm Sophos are reporting that spammers are capitalising on the recent death of Michael Jackson to harvest active email accounts. The body of the email appears inert, with no hidden malware. Instead the spammer is expecting, no doubt, to collect email addresses of those interested in hearing more about the "truth" surrounding the pop star's death.

The SANS Internet Storm Center noted in their blog that organisations should be aware of impending Jacko spam and within hours it appeared.

Stand by for a bunch more spam with a lot more malicious content as this story drags out, as it surely will, for years to come, making a lot of lawyers very rich indeed.

More details here http://www.sophos.com/pressoffice/news/articles/2009/06/michael-jackson.html

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 30th June 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

In this Web 2.0 world, enterprises increasingly need data from public websites, including news sources such as CNN and even social networking sites such as Facebook, for integration into business intelligence (BI) and service-oriented and web-oriented architecture (SOA/WOA) applications.

Kapow Technologies, which provides tools designed to speed finding, downloading, cleaning, and integrating data and content from the web, has released a new version of Kapow Web Data Server (formerly the Kapow Mashup Server). The new version includes a handy new “URL Blocking” feature that screens out web junk, such as banner ads, ensuring that only data needed for the application in being downloaded. [Disclosure: Kapow Technologies is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Recently Stefan Andreasen, founder and CTO of Palo Alto, Calif.-based Kapow, demonstrated his company's value around managing data services quickly, without hand coding. At the Web 2.0 Expo in April, he demonstrated an iPhone mashup application created using Kapow tools and IBM Rational EGL as an example of the conference's "Power of Less" theme.

“Traditionally, it would have taken at least three months and significant IT resources to create and integrate a web data source and serve it to a mobile device," Andreasen explained prior to the demo, "but today, through rapid application development technology from Kapow Technologies and IBM, two developers spent a total of three hours creating a dynamic personalized web application for the iPhone."

Kapow boasts that the Web Data Server 7.0 is “the industry’s only platform that can access, enrich and serve web data with complete assurance―100 percent of data, 100 percent of the time.”

The value is more than for convenience. More than ever, web-based content plays an essential role in many business processes and analytical presentations. Doing operational and business ecology business intelligence (BI) requires fast an easy integration of web-based content and data assets.

With Kapow's patented visual development and Web data automation platform customers can gain data access to any intranet or extranet business application, as well as any website or application on the web, the company says. This cuts out manual approaches, now quite common.

Rapid data access is vital for today's agile application development, like mobile, WOA and other types of agile business applications, Andreasen says. Regardless of whether or not developers have programmatic access via an application programming interface (API), Kapow provides easy access to enterprise and public web data, then extracts and transforms it into a standard web service or data feed, he explains.

…today, through rapid application development technology from Kapow Technologies and IBM, two developers spent a total of three hours creating a dynamic personalized Web application for the iPhone.

A key element in the data server are the Kapow robots that the company says “use standard web protocols and security mechanisms to automate the navigation and interaction with any web application or website, providing secure and reliable access to the underlying data and business logic.”

Offering an example of an application built with its technologies, the company points to a hypothetical sales app providing “a full 360-degree view of prospects and customers by automatically extracting data from internal customer relationship management (CRM) systems, subscription data feeds such as Edgar Online, corporate sites, blogs and social media sites including LinkedIn, Technorati and Facebook.”

New features in the Kapow Web Data Server 7.0 version include:

• "100 Percent Browser Engine Compliance," which handles complex web data sources, including JavaScript and AJAX intensive Websites.
• Intuitive point-and-click integrated development environment (IDE) for “surgical data extraction accuracy with no coding.”
• Scalability improvements offering real-time performance optimization and the ability to download large file downloads directly to disk for enterprise scale projects
• Browser-Based Scheduler, which provides automation of data refresh and synchronization schedules.
• Authentication for RoboServer, which provides “seamless integration with existing enterprise security and authentication systems.”

Further information and pricing is availabile at http://kapowtech.com/index.php/products/overview.

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

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By: David Norfolk, Practice Leader - Development, Bloor Research Posted: 30th June 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

Sorry it has taken a while to get my second report on RSC 2009 out—it's turning a braindump into respectable reportage that takes the time, I find.

On Day 2, I was pleased that in the "Innovation for a Smarter Planet" keynote, in which Steve Mills (IBM Senior VP and Group Executive IBM Software) and Grady Booch (IBM Research Fellow) stressed the opportunities and Utopian prospects (if we do things right) for a world in which "everything" is identified and connected, Al Zollar (General Manager of IBM Tivoli) had a significant slot, explaining the importance of managing all the myriad "intellectual property", software and hardware assets this Utopia will hold.

I'm just glad that Tivoli really seems to be an equal player with Rational in IBM—as, after ITIL v3, I think that the relative importance of Operations in the IT world is due to increase. After all, it's Operations that actually manages the delivery of ROI from technology, as a new computer program or clever piece of hardware delivers nothing to the business until it is installed and used. I've always thought that Tivoli should be part of the Rational brand—or, perhaps, Rational should be part of Tivoli—as many Rational and Tivoli products, notably Rational Asset Manager and Tivoli CMDB, must work together to provide the foundation for IBM's part of the Smarter Planet.

I had an interesting chat with Greg Sikes (Director, Enterprise Architecture and Systems Modelling, IBM Rational software), following on from his Actionable Architecture for the Smarter Enterprise keynote on Day 1. I am very much of a believer in "actionable" EA. In other words, that an EA model is no value unless it is actually of practical use (and seen to be of use) to someone other than Enterprise Architects. Which involves managing the expectations of all the stakeholders in EA, including people like Human Resources and the CEO's secretary, as well as managing the EA assets.

The scope of an EA model is greater than just an IT system, but parts of it should transform into IT systems; although other parts could transform into, say, organisation charts used by managers; Business Process Models; and so on. But there usually isn't just one EA model and one Architect—or even one tool. An EA model, or models, in something like Rational System Architect defines a context in which, say, corporate data models (using an Entity Relationship Diagramming tool), IT system models (in UML2, say), business models (in Websphere Business Modeller, for example) or even Organisation Charts (in Visio, perhaps) fill in the details.

However, IBM now has two new EA modelling tools from Telelogic (where Greg Sikes comes from): IBM Rational System Architect for Enterprise Architecture in the context of Business Process Management and IBM/Rational Rhapsody for model-driven development for real-time, embedded or technical systems—and software development generally. Plus, IBM had its own EA practice before the Telelogic acquisition (plus Rational Rose, which had systems engineering and some architectural capabilities), although as Ian Charters (IBM Distinguished Engineer, Rational; of whom more later) admits, IBM didn't have a really effective EA modelling tool until System Architect arrived.

Nevertheless, I could find the choice between System Architect and Rhapsody rather confusing, because EA as I understand it extends well beyond the technology context. Top level EA abstractions don't really care whether a process is implemented in hardware or software—or a manual process—although it is, as I've said, important that EA models transform, with additions, into working business process and technology implementations. So, why shouldn't parts of an System Architect EA model become embedded systems in hardware—and if they do, must Rhapsody be involved on the way? And, if Rhapsody is designing an embedded system and the associated software, can it handle the manual processes in which it is used and their organisational context?

So I asked Greg to clarify: "Enterprise Architecture, supported primarily by the System Architect product, is about "Architecture for Planning" while Rhapsody is about "Architecture for Building". That really sums it up, I guess

Greg goes on to say "Enterprise Architecture provides the ability to clearly communication strategies and objectives to the organization; EA allows organizations the ability to understand how hardware and software assets are used by the organization (roles) and processes they use to run their business. Understanding is certainly valuable, but the real value of EA comes with actionable architecture—the ability to investigate multiple future architecture scenarios and understanding the impacts to assets, organization and process before making the changes".

And Rhapsody, Greg says, "is about model-based systems and software design and development. Product architectures and behaviours can be created and explored in Rhapsody prior to being built. The real power of Rhapsody comes with systems that have embedded software—Rhapsody can help our customers design software in a platform independent manner and later on, implement software on specific target platforms".

In the integrated scenario he continues, "Architecture Plans (in EA) are handed downstream, either between companies in the supply chain or within a single entity, to the Build team that continues putting meat on the bones with eye towards product development". Good, I feel very happy with that clarification.

I had a chance to go "Speedjamming" at RSC 2009—which is the marketeers' way of letting me talk to the sort of real internal gurus who sometimes aren't allowed out around press or analysts unsupervised. This gave me a chance to meet Ian Charters, IBM Distinguished Engineer, Rational, and get a traditional IBMer's take on EA. I also attended Ian's presentation entitled "Enterprise Architecture : putting the "A" in Business Process Management" which, thankfully, was very much in line with Greg's views, above. In IBM terms we have two kinds of architects: first, the Enterprise Architect, who deals in abstractions and things that are always changing, who uses a generalised tool like System Architect and who is comfortable with "knowing something about everything"; then there is the Solution Architect (perhaps called a "designer" outside of IBM) who deals in specialist areas such as BPM and SOA frameworks and who uses specialised tools such as Rational Composer or Rhapsody and who is only happy when knowing "everything about something".

You can express this in a 2d "2x2" model, showing aspects of a project relevant to the 2 kinds of architect—and then add a third dimension corresponding to the business, IT systems and technology planes of the overall conceptual model. This view seems to describe a landscape over which various players travel and which helps you co-ordinate the activities of all the stakeholders in a business system so as to deliver something holistic, "the right thing, done right". You can think of BPM (Business Process Management—or Modelling) as being about "doing things right", while high level EA is about "doing the right things", although I think you could also view BPM as simply part of holistic EA "doing the right things and doing them right". OK, so that's just a taster—luckily there is a published paper which goes into the details, here.

However, a somewhat unrelated part of our speed jamming chat was about the need for more professionalism in IT. Sure, I've met people who've become real experts just through experience—but you'd be amazed at the holes in their knowledge sometimes, which I've spotted through being a techie too (try talking about directories to a self-taught Netware 3.11 guru), but how could a business user have seen them? I knew about directories because I have a rather rusty Netware 4 CNE qualification and a business user could recognise that (and ask when I last recertified) without needing to know much about Netware.

Ian is quite proud of his "distinguished engineer" status—because he had to earn it, with assessed courses as well as with "in the field" experience. In fact, Ian and I's first point of contact was when we both agreed that the proof point for IT professionalism was when IT professionals routinely expected to take out professional indemnity insurance. What other "profession", besides IT, allows you to make a mess of things, put an extra check mark on your CV and move on unscathed? Well, banking, perhaps.

I also had an interesting Speedjam with Geoffrey Clemm (Distinguished Engineer, Configuration and Change Management, Rational Software). He's the guy responsible for bringing the 3 (or more) Configuration Management tools IBM has post the Telelogic acquisition (and its Jazz initiative) into one whole—in fact, he welcomed Telelogic as it gave him the ammunition to convince IBM to do something about integrating IBM's configuration management story.

What he seems to have come up with is a federated view. The Jazz platform with Team Concert (and or Subversion and other 3rd party tools) provides an agile development SCM and defect tracking facility, with instant messaging collaboration support and all the other trendy nice things. Then, (extremely non-trivial) connectors asynchronously synchronise with a Requisite Pro back-end that provides heavyweight audit and regulatory support across the Enterprise if you need it—and manages collisions between agile teams working on parts of the whole....

I need to look at this in more detail, but it seemed an attractive attempt to get the best of both worlds, to me - Geoffrey struck me as very much an engineer, not a marketroid. That's the good side of IBM analyst relations, we get to talk to people who actually write IBM technology, with no marketing controls/supervision; beyond the fact that long term IBM people really do believe in IBM—but the Telelogic infusion seems to have stirred them up in a very good way. I wonder if readers have any views on this sort of approach to a "federated CMS"? I asked Robert Cowham (chair of the BCS Configuration Management Specialist Group, which has just held a successful "Pragmatic Configuration Management for IT Services—Reducing Cost and Risk" conference with the ITSMF) and he said that he'd gained a similar understanding of IBM's approach to integrating its old tools with Jazz—but that it does all depend on those connectors!

Finally on Day 2 Richard Crisp (see my RSC day 1 report) put me on to Ravenflow. Its RAVEN product helps to engineer formal requirements out of Word documents and the like. This is a very interesting approach as it helps you bridge the gap between the rigid world of computer code and the ambiguous, fuzzy, world of business. Without expecting business users to read UML ["no Prudence, that really isn't a good idea no matter what the book said..."] you can apply completeness and consistency checks to their requirements and go back with sensible questions, in business terms. Of course, you really need to square the circle and go back with an animated simulation of your requirements model for them to play with (taking care to manage expectations so that they don't think you're delivering a working system). Here, iRise, just across the aisle from Ravenflow in the RSC Exhibit Hall, has a part to play but whereas Ravenflow is an algorithmic transformation of a word document into UML, as far as I can see, the iRise product suite is a much more qualitative, illustrative effort. Perhaps the two should share technology—although I have to say, from talking to both at RSC, this seems rather unlikely.

Now RSC is coming to England on the 12 and 13 October at the Grange St Paul's Hotel, London.

Blog Tag: RSC2009

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 29th June 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Even in this global recession, one-third of IT organizations plan to increase virtualization, including cloud-computing initiatives, in the next two years, according to a survey conducted by Harris Interactive and sponsored by Microsoft.

Seeing the downturn as an opportunity to upgrade, nearly two-thirds of 1,200 IT professionals surveyed in the U.S., U.K., Germany, and Japan plan to invest in new infrastructure technology, according to results released this week.

While news in the past year focused on budget cuts for IT, 98 percent of those surveyed by Harris are planning either to maintain or increase investment in infrastructure technologies. Top priorities for those taking the bold approach of investing and innovating despite tight budgetary times, include:

• 42% plan increased investment in virtualization.
• 36% plan increased investment in security.
• 24% plan increased investment in systems management.
• 16% plan increased investment in cloud computing.

Not surprisingly, keeping the lights on in the glass house is a bigger priority than innovation.

When the question comes down to investing in innovation versus “keeping the lights on,” the IT pros in the four countries surveyed responded that 37 percent of their budget is going to innovation while 63 percent is going to keep the lights on.

Innovation is less of a priority in the U.S. than it is in the other countries. When the percentages are broken out in the Harris report:

• US: 29% innovation, 71% “keeping the lights on.”
• UK: 41% innovation, 59% “keeping the lights on.”
• Japan: 41% innovation, 59% “keeping the lights on.”
• Germany: 35% innovation, 65% “keeping the lights on.”

These percentages may reflect the fact that U.S. IT had been hit harder by the recession than those in the other countries, said Bob Kelly, corporate vice president of infrastructure server marketing at Microsoft. But the overall percentages show a slight trend to innovation, he said during a teleconference highlight the survey results.

“The ratio of 63 to 37 percent is actually slightly changed,” Kelly said. “About two years ago when we did similar research we saw that it was 70/30. So really, in this downturn we’re seeing an increased focus on innovation.”

Further he said the current research indicates that companies are falling into two categories when it comes to dealing with the recession. One group is retrenching and just holding on to their existing IT infrastructure while waiting for the recovery. The second group actually views IT innovation strategically as a way to pull out of the recession.

“They’re seeing this as their strategic opportunity to really make hay and move their business forward to accelerate out the other side of this economic downturn,” Kelly said.

The survey confirmed Microsoft’s in-house belief that IT budgets still have room for investment in infrastructure innovations, he said. The Redmond folks hope that will include convincing corporate IT departments, which pretty much skipped the Vista era, to finally move from Windows XP to Windows 7.

More survey highlights are available at the Microsoft Core Infrastructure Optimization site.

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

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By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 29th June 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

Standards come and go, and some never have lift off; but I think FCoE is one that will ramp up—as evidently does QLogic. The starting point is that the FCoE standard is here, backed by some products, and has been tried and tested. It is now beginning to ship.

What does it do? It does what it says on the tin—sends FC traffic over Ethernet cables alongside the Ethernet traffic. This is an acknowledgment that FC is not going away any time soon because what it does not do is any convergence of FC format to, say, IP (but Ethernet will deal with IP traffic as well).

So how does it help? Major reasons why FCoE will grow are cost and flexibility—and specifically for the larger organisations carrying both an FC network and an Ethernet one. It is not a matter of the FCoE converged adaptors being low cost—they certainly cost more than Ethernet NICs if not FC HBAs—but that using the technology will allow a simplification of an organisation's physical networking infrastructure.

Perhaps the biggest deal in this is that a single set of cabling to cover both network types suddenly becomes practical. Existing cabling costs may not immediately be reduced because that money has already been spent; but when a decision to extend or change the network occurs, the user knows that 10Gb Ethernet copper cabling with converged adaptors covers most future eventualities—and costly FC cabling is rendered obsolete.

The adaptor uses a single server port to handle both 10Gb Ethernet and FC HBA traffic, so this potentially frees up plenty of comms slots on each server; then the mixed traffic behind it will share one cable instead of needing two. There is also a potential for serious power savings in this.

Tell-tale signs of take-up include IBM and HP both announcing FCoE in the last couple of weeks. Scott Genereux, senior VP of worldwide sales at FCoE adaptor provider QLogic, was very bullish when I spoke to him last week, when he said: "We see every major storage vendor supporting FCoE by the end of the calendar year." (Of course, if this fails to materialise as expected then the scope for infrastructure savings will be considerably reduced.)

His view was that a change of attitude began when QLogic succeeded in shrinking the technology onto its single chip converged network adaptor (CNA). He expects QLogic to be the major beneficiary of the early takeup because, as I reported in April, it has a head start with its 8100 Series CNAs. These combine 10Gb Ethernet with FC at the full 10Gb speed (so above 8Gb FC) partly achieved through the in-built FCoE offload engine.

Genereux said IBM was going with QLogic, although the situation with HP was not as clear.

It is in the data centre that Genereux sees the biggest plus. "One person can manage both FC and Ethernet instead of two," he said. However, this will only be entirely true if the whole FC infrastructure is taken across to FCoE—meaning an upfront cost before the expected ongoing savings. In that situation QLogic Ethernet users will find the common APIs and management tools familiar.

Meanwhile he suspected that there was a higher comfort factor over the security of FC than IP on Ethernet, an argument for not converging the formats at this time.

QLogic has certainly made a major commitment and has begun shipping its CNA to the channel. (In EMEA volume shipments are due to start by the end of next month.) Genereux said this was backed by training for its channel partners, not least because they needed to understand and explain to end users where the value of such a switchover would come from.

Some will see FCoE as a short-term move. On the other hand, the death of FC itself has been forecast for a while and I see little sign of this. FCoE might actually prove a useful half-way house; once an Ethernet infrastructure has completely replaced FC, then the full move away from FC will become a less daunting task.

Who knows, anyway, if a completely new mega-advanced standard, needing different cabling again, might emerge in due course. If everyone, for some reason, went for it, it would still be easier to convert from one network than two. So the lack of convergence right now is not, to me, a huge deal.

Call me a cynic, but I would also not be surprised if some of QLogic's competitors (for instance FC-lovers Brocade and Cisco or arch-competitor Emulex) were playing down FCoE's potential—simply because QLogic has a technology lead right now.

Not that QLogic is so fool-hardy as to put all its eggs in one basket. Genereux realises iSCSI will be more popular at the SMB end; it has its own solutions there and recently purchased Netxan which supplies an Ethernet NIC with an IP offload engine. The company is also working hard with Infiniband for high performance server clusters (a market in which it has reached the number two supplier spot).

There is no denying QLogic is also considering a 16Gb FC HBA; if the demand proves to be there that only demonstrates greater FC longevity than some predict. By the same token, Ethernet could go to 40 or 100Gb.

Anyway I am not a betting man, but I think FCoE will do pretty well in the next few years—starting about now.

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By: Michael Warrilow Posted: 29th June 2009 Copyright © 2009

As you may (or may not know), in May of this year, Micro Focus announced its intent to acquire two of the remaining enterprise QA / testing software companies. In doing so, it seems to have subsequently begun a somewhat mild bidding war for Borland. Current bidding levels means they'd get change from US$100M. What's more, Micro Focus officially purchased Compuware's testing / quality business unit for US$58M at the start of June 2009. These are (relative) bargain prices.

Whatever way this plays out, it will likely result in a QA / testing software market that is (even more strongly) dominated by HP, thanks to its acquisition of Mercury in 2006. Market research shows that the HP testing tools dominate the enterprise test / QA software market, undoubtedly. The only other remaining players include IBM/Rational and ... er ... umm ... let me think ... anyone ... MKS and Microsoft, maybe? The market has consolidated almost to the point of being a monopoly, or perhaps duopoly, imho.

It will be interesting to watch the outcome from the current bidding war for Borland. It's likely IBM is now in the race, which means HP will likely have to respond. Other than that, and being (overly) optimistic, perhaps there's a new entrant that will shake things up. Otherwise, the inevitable result is further concentration among the established market (share) leaders.

It's yet another small indicator of the current trend toward mega-vendors and monolithic stacks in enterprise computing, imho.

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By: Simon Perry, Principal Associate Analyst - Sustainability, Quocirca Posted: 26th June 2009 Copyright Quocirca © 2009

CSC this week hosted their EMEA Industry Analyst summit; Innoventure, in Paris. It was never quite explained what exactly an innoventure was but it sounds like a cross between innovation and adventure so perhaps it is like inventing something while dressing up in swashbuckling clothes. This potential for glory mixed with a lack of clarity unfortunately extended also to CSC's cloud strategy, which the vendor struggled to convincingly explain.

Like several other vendors, including cloud enabling infrastructure providers like VMware, Microsoft and CITRIX, CSC recognises that there are a number of potential approaches to implementing the cloud architecture. CSC refers to cloud architectures implemented for single tenancy within an owned (or internal) datacentre as private clouds, and internet hosted multi-tenancy external models as public clouds. The company uses the term hybrid clouds to refer to the mix of internal and external clouds that is really most likely to occur in a production, enterprise environment. While other vendors will interchange the terms "private" for "hybrid" while using "internal" where CSC uses "private", CSC's story is pretty much so far so good.

Where it all began to get a lot less clear was when CSC went on to explain that the internal cloud architecture was actually a simple extension of the existing datacentre architecture and therefore something that CSC has actually been doing for decades(!). Furthermore, internal, or in CSC's parlance "private" clouds are in fact "legacy". June 23rd 2009 thus goes in this writer's diary as being the date on which the first use of the term "legacy cloud" was heard. No doubt we will soon hear of "Cloud three-dot-oh" from some overly keen brand hack.

Moreover, CSC states that the driving philosophy behind their cloud strategy is "If we're going to be disrupted, we may as well disrupt ourselves", inferring a forward looking and proactive strategy. However, in relation to the question of how they see adoption of cloud architectures in the market playing out they state, "The market will decide and we will track the market direction and speed (before deciding on our own strategy)." As any backseat driver knows you either need to climb into the driver's seat and grasp the controls, or you ought to stay in the back and be gracefully taken wherever the vehicle is headed—trying to steer from the comfort of the rear is however just distracting to everyone concerned.

All of which is disappointing, especially given the outsourcing vendor's clear strength in underlying datacentre infrastructure, courtesy of their extensive portfolio of global and high capacity computing estate. The vendor has no shortage of processing capacity, IT skills, IT enabled business transformation acumen, and a track record of delivering innovative projects to the likes of Zurich Insurance, British Post, SNCF and long list more. Having thus helped disrupt others in a positive way, they might therefore reasonably be expected to demonstrate more real progress toward "disrupting themselves" than they currently show.

The one bright indicator of CSC's intent is their push for use of the Security Content Automation Protocol (SCAP) as a method for advertising the security and trustworthiness of a cloud based service. SCAP provides for 15 assertions related to security state, and CSC intends to be able to assert capability in all 15 areas. whilst encouraging the use of SCAP as a de-facto standard across the ICT industry for deploying trusted cloud computing services. SCAP assertions can be consumed automatically by a potential cloud services customer, thus providing an initial and ongoing statement of security capability and state, which could furthermore also be tied to a SLA via contractual terms. CSC's intended reliance on SCAP demonstrates that at least from an info-sec point of view, they have a firm grasp of the minutia involved in actually delivering cloud architecture on a workable basis for the enterprise customer.

CSC's biggest problem in navigating a successful path around cloud will be to pay the same level of attention to detail to their overall cloud services go-to-market strategy as they are demonstrating toward the details of cloud security and trustworthiness. Cloud is more than technology architecture, it is also a shift in the customer relationship management, in the billing approach, and in the range of services of potential interest to the customer. CSC's stated intention to "disrupt themselves" is currently likely to be achieved only through inattention to the need to formulate and execute a joined up strategy. Hardly innovative, and hardly a swashbuckling adventure for CSC's shareholders and customers.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 26th June 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

The Open Group, a technology-neutral consortium, have released an Eclipse plug-in that puts TOGAF 9 capabilities literally at your fingertips. The TOGAF Customizer was donated to The Open Group by Capgemini.

Based on the Eclipse Process Framework (EPF), an open-source project managed by the Eclipse Foundation, the TOGAF Customizer can be used to implement TOGAF 9 more easily. TOGAF is an industry-consensus framework and method for enterprise architecture (EA) developed by The Open Group, and released in February. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The new customizer contains all the content of TOGAF 9 in a structured and editable form, including guidelines, concepts, and checklists, as well as detailed work breakdown structures for the framework’s new and improved architecture development method (ADM).

In a nutshell, moving TOGAF into an industry-standard IDE brings a Web 2.0 flavor to the document, making it akin to a wiki. What's more, collaborating via an IDE's built-in communications and sharing attributes—as well as version management—can make TOGAF more into a "living" document, and eases innovation and ongoing improvement.

With the new tool, users can align their EA practices with TOGAF 9 and create organization-specific versions of the standard that represent the concerns of their unique business and technology environments. All goes into and out of a common repository. In addition, the new tool makes it much easier for enterprise architects to integrate TOGAF with other common EA frameworks, such as Zachman, FEAF and DoDAF.

Key features and benefits of the TOGAF Customizer include:

• Specific constructs for tasks and steps enable processes to be formally defined with related content, such as inputs, outputs, roles and responsibilities
• Supporting editor allows users to make changes to the standard TOGAF framework content and tailor it to their specific organizational context
• Underlying content management system supports group collaboration, editing and versioning
• Plug-in architecture allows new content packages, including document templates, to be created and linked to TOGAF

The new plug-in is available for download from: www.opengroup.org/togaf/.

Many architects are familar with the development lifecycle, and many developers have designs on becoming archiects, so the melding of two essential IT fucntions on a common pallette, so to speak, makes a great deal of sense.

I can hardly wait for what we've seen so far with Google Wave to come into prime time. Combining what Google Wave, the Eclipse IDE and TOGAF 9 does will make for a powerfully productive future.

And, of course, we should never under estimate the power of the community effect. I expect we'll see quite a bit of novel innovation from how users leverage and expand on what the framework in an IDE value only begins with.

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By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 25th June 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

Appian have announced a new release of the Appian for SharePoint module. The new release features ease-of-use enhancements, including Form Pickers and new packaged Appian Smart Services, as well as updates to the Appian for SharePoint Web Services interface.

In my BPMS Market Update, I talked about how MOSS had achieved the status of Word in terms of being the default portal that all vendors needed to work with. What we are seeing is a number of vendors who already had an interface strengthening these additions. All provide to MOSS users the ability of using more sophisticated process management capabilities such as orchestration of system and human events, detailed tracking and Business Activity Monitoring of all actions that are available in the product itself.

The new module from Appian allows users to easily track process performance, handle tasks, and escalate actions from a Microsoft SharePoint dashboard. In addition, Appian can bring process orchestration to the management of sites, folders, documents and permissions. Appian for SharePoint includes native service interfaces to control common SharePoint actions in a structured process to facilitate the automatic construction and destruction of SharePoint content. The new release of Appian for SharePoint includes the following enhancements:

• Users can now add a SharePoint document picker to an Appian Form, allowing them to browse and select documents from SharePoint while inside Appian. Additionally, Appian provides the source code to enable users to extend this picker to other SharePoint elements, such as Lists and Sites.
• Most web services actions within Appian for SharePoint are handled through Appian's Web Services node. However, for a select set of actions handling file transfers between SharePoint and Appian, packaged Smart Services will be made available that are tailored to these transactions out of the box using some Smart Services.
• The web services interface to SharePoint has been extended to support user context passing. This ensures that no passwords are required to be passed over the Web Services connection, and that SharePoint change logs will accurately show which user changed a SharePoint object.

Matthew Calkins, president and CEO of Appian, said. "Appian for SharePoint plays a critical role in helping companies extend the value of their entrenched Microsoft Office environments. With easy process mapping, rapid development of automated processes, and no coding required to produce process applications, Appian for SharePoint continues Appian's mission to offer the most flexible, easy-to-use, and comprehensive BPM suite on the market."

Appian are one of the best innovators in the BPMS market at the moment. This new module shows their understanding of the needs of their customers and provides some much needed specialised process expertise for financial service users of MOSS.

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By: David Tang, Global VP, VoSKY Technologies Posted: 25th June 2009 Copyright VoSKY Technologies © 2009

If talk is cheap, why do businesses still have high mobile phone bills? It's simply because mobiles have become the primary phone for many business users, even when they're in the office.

The sheer convenience of a single, roaming device makes mobile phones the preferred choice for many. Especially with the latest generation of iPhones, BlackBerrys and smartphones that offer web access and WiFi connectivity. But this convenience and mobility comes at a price. Telecoms consultancy Analysys says around 80% of corporate telephone bills is on calls made to, or by mobiles.

It is typically mobile-to-office and office-to-mobile calls that are the pain points for businesses due to the high costs associated with interconnection charges that are passed through by fixed and mobile carriers. For companies that have travelling employees, expensive international roaming charges can add up quickly. Although the EU capped the cost of roaming at €0.46 per minute, and incoming calls at €0.22, bills can still be unexpectedly and painfully large when employees are travelling, even for those routine ‘touching base' calls.

Converge and save
So while few companies want to scale back the use of mobiles, the majority are actively seeking ways to slash comms costs incurred from the use of mobiles, especially in the current lean economic climate.

Fixed-mobile convergence (FMC) via Skype offers a way to do just that, bridging the gap between a company's phone system and mobile phones to create a single, converged network that makes for easier communications, both for the office and travelling employees, while slashing monthly telecom charges. Let's take a look at the 3 simple steps needed for an FMC solution.

The 1, 2, 3 of FMC
The first requirement for a flexible and easy-to-deploy FMC solution is a mobile smartphone with WiFi capability (Apple's iPhone, BlackBerry models, the Skype 3 Phone, Nokia's N Series, and many others).

The second is to install the Skype client on the mobile—in many cases, it is pre-installed—and to set up the user's Skype account. This gives the mobile user access to the World's largest VoIP network and its 400+ million users.

The third requirement is a PBX-to-Skype application gateway, which links the office PBX to Skype. These application gateways already enable business users to take advantage of VoIP benefits—low international call costs, enhanced inter-office communications, Web click-to-call, mobile extensions etc... . The good news is that companies can deploy FMC without having to replace their existing phone system.

Roaming free
The solution works like this. The mobile user can call other Skype users—whether mobile or at their desks—via their mobile's Skype client. The Skype call is made either over WiFi connectivity, making it completely free; or via the mobile's 3G capability.

While users would traditionally pay for Skype usage over 3G from their data plan, UK MNO 3 has announced that it will make Skype calls completely free to its customers from May. This move breaks new ground for mobile VoIP traffic, and looks set to be adopted by other MNOs in the coming months, making it possible to kill expensive roaming charges.

Marrying mobiles to the PBX
Businesses then bring their mobile and PBX usage together using the PBX-to-Skype application gateway. This adds from 8 up to 30 Skype lines to the company's existing PBX that can be picked up and transferred between extensions like an ordinary call. The gateway also centralises Skype provisioning, usage and management, giving IT managers full control without installing Skype on each PC.

This means that users' Skype accounts and call preferences can be set up via the PBX gateway, to automate routing of calls from the office PBX to the mobile over Skype. Likewise, mobile users can utilize Skype on their smartphones to call office to speak with colleagues. This call is completely free because it is a Skype-to-Skype call between the smartphone and PBX gateway.

The right to roam, free
The Skype FMC solution really is that simple, and management of the solution is under full control of the corporate IT team. This ensures accountability and user compliance when using the system, as the team can set up speed-dials and routing options to maximise the cost savings via Skype.

It also has the key advantage of needing no changes to a company's existing PBX equipment, office phones or computers. All it needs is the right type of smartphone, PBX-to-Skype gateway, and Skype to cut out fixed/mobile and roaming costs completely.

FMC presents an easy win to the cost-conscious business, by enabling them to slash their fixed/mobile costs, and to keep them low. But it also gives businesses a pathway to truly converged, flexible communications, using Skype to link the mobile user and device to the office PBX. That's a real killer business mobile application.

http://www.vosky.com/

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 25th June 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

More enterprises are looking to the cloud compute model—both public and private—to efficiently support myriad applications and data workloads. Platform Computing, a pioneer in high-performance computing (HPC), is now jumping into the fray with a private cloud management platform: Platform ISF.

Platform ISF, which becomes the centerpiece of the company's cloud computing strategy, creates a shared IT infrastructure from physical and virtual resource pools, to deliver application hosting environments, according to automated workload and resource scheduling policies. The Markham, Ont. company said its new offering will be released in beta this week, with general availability planned for the fall.

Platform ISF leverages Platform’s resource sharing technology, EGO, and its virtual machine orchestrator (VMO), combining to deliver an infrastructure-sharing platform. Platform has also built in additional capabilities for self-service, reporting and billing—helping to make clouds a bill-as-you-go affair (a fringe benefit of IT shared services). This is also expected to drastically reduce the costs of IT, as resource utilization levels increase thanks to resource sharing.

Platform ISF is a technology-agnostic cloud computing management platform that supports any collection of hardware, operating systems and virtual machines, said Songnian Zhou, CEO, chairman and co-founder. This allows organizations to leverage existing resources and corporate standards, as they build and deploy private clouds.

Platform's private cloud software, the elevate of its grid capabilities, allows implementers to access IT infrastructure via portals using visual interfaces, or programmatically via Java, web services, .NET and other popular frameworks, Zhou told me last week in a briefing. Platform ISF offers a "meta template" of workload support environments, allowing for flexible requests for resources, all of which can be charged back in granular fashion to the actual consumers of the IT resource services.

While third-party "public" clouds can offer raw infrastructure and computer resources on a pay-per-use basis, most enterprises will probably use a combination, or hybrid, of both internal and public cloud resources. Platform ISF acts as the management layer for pulling such disparate resources into a unified environment and is independent of location or ownership of resources.

Also, Platform ISF is governance agnostic, allowing for third-party governance to additionally manage how such cloud services are used, provisioned and automated -- to an IT departments requirements.

While Platform has been around for a long time, they're hardly become a household word. This may not be a bad thing, according to Derrick Harris at GigaOm:

Of course, Platform is no IT behemoth, which also could work in its favor. While they might consist of useful pieces, cloud offerings from companies like IBM, Microsoft and HP can be difficult to grasp. They can involve an array of systems management tools, servers and other products that leave customers dizzy—and potentially locked in.

Jon Brodkin, writing at The Industry Standard, quotes Forrester analyst James Staten, who enumerates other players in the cloud management field—3tera, Elastra, Enomaly, and Zimory, and the open source Eucalyptus—but says that all of them, unlike Platform lack at least one of the elements necessary to build a cloud.

I was impressed with Platform's heritage of providing HPC grid services for 15 years as a precursor to cloud street cred. Platform's approach can be used by enterprise IT departments to move to cloud benefits, on their terms, rather than the fantasy notion of cloud being best approached without IT.

As Zhou says, "Cloud is built, not bought." I couldn't agree more.

Expect Platform ISF to be used on business intelligence workloads early on, with J2EE, and PaaS to follow close on. Oh, and we ought to expect more HPC loads and requirements to be make via public-private tag-team clouds too.

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By: Philip Howard, Research Director - Data Management, Bloor Research Posted: 24th June 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

I usually regard a single instance of something as (possibly) interesting, a second as maybe a coincidence and a third as a trend. On that basis Ab Initio, the reclusive data integration vendor, is definitely under attack.

Now, it is not as if Ab Initio has not had some serious competition in the past. It has been going head-to-head with Informatica for some time, for example. And now that IBM salespeople are being encouraged to target non-IBM accounts the same would be true for Information Server and, for that matter, SAP Business Objects and Dataflux. However, while these companies may meet and beat Ab Initio in new deployment bake-offs there has previously been little incentive for existing Ab Initio users to move away from that platform. This is because Ab Initio, while expensive, has very high performance and an excellent reputation for looking after its customers. And it's not as if Informatica, IBM and the rest aren't pretty expensive too.

However, that is all changing and to illustrate that point I will refer back to my three instances. Briefly, my three instances are that expressor is actively targeting Ab Initio and, according to expressor, is winning proofs of concept against Ab Initio on performance grounds. Secondly, Talend is also actively targeting Ab Initio accounts with its newly introduced massively parallel option. And, thirdly, I ran across an account that has replaced Ab Initio with Streambase's event processing engine, not that Streambase is actively targeting this market.

So, why is what expressor and Talend doing important? Because they can not only match or beat Ab Initio in performance terms, they are also much less expensive. I see the situation as analogous to the data warehousing market when Netezza first entered that space. In Netezza's first customer win against Teradata the total cost of the new system was less than the annual maintenance of the system it replaced. This is exactly the sort of proposition that expressor and Talend are offering to Ab Initio customers and, in these recessionary times in particular, these are offers that are likely to look very tempting.

Moreover, if the data warehousing analogy is anything to go by then as expressor and Talend start to pick up more and more Ab Initio customers then more competitors (Pervasive with its Datrush engine, for example) will appear in the market trying to do the same thing. And, of course, Informatica, IBM and the other mainstream vendors will also be under threat, just as Oracle and others have come under attack in the warehousing sector. It looks like interesting times ahead for the data integration market.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 24th June 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

In many companies, IT departments remain in an isolated functional silo, often not reporting to the CEO, and often unfortunately disconnected from the main business imperatives.

Now, the combination the down economy, tight IT budgets, and the advent of more cloud sourcing and data center architecture options offer two paths to IT leaders: Remain on the alienated edge, or move to center-stage in how businesses adapt to their changing markets.

HP, at its Software Universe conference last week, offered a path that helps unify people, process and product into a roadmap for how to transform IT, and therefore to better help transform the business—while keeping costs down.

To more deeply understand the transformative challenges facing IT and business leaders alike, I interviewed Andy Isherwood, vice president and general manager of HP Software and Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

All the conversations I've had with CIOs are that the capital expenditure is typically being reduced by anything between 0 and 40 percent, and operating expenditures being decreased by up to 10 percent. It's less, but still pretty significant.

So you’ve ended up with a significantly smaller budget to do stuff, which can cause big problems for organizations. They have a certain amount of infrastructure in day-to-day activities to maintain. This means that they have to spend all their budget on existing projects and keeping the lights on, rather than any innovation. If you can’t innovate, then you can’t deliver value back to the business and you become just an IT function delivering the core value.

So, how do we innovate and how do we use the budget more effectively than we do today to allow us not just to keep the lights on, but to do this huge amount of innovation?

If we don’t do it now, we won’t be able to do it in the future, because, as demand picks up, it’s just going to be "all hands to the pump" to be able to deliver just the demand that picks up, as we come out of the recession.

The financial situation at the moment is driving a more intense look at those sourcing options and what it does from a financial point of view for that particular organization. ... SaaS is a great offering. We’ve been in that business for nine years and we have 700 customers. So, we know that business well. We know that, in times in which capital expenditure is being restrained, they can move to a more operating expense-oriented budget, but still be able to innovate, which is a pretty compelling proposition. As we move through, and capital expenditure is freed up, that might change, but at least people have the option.

Whether it’s insourced, outsourced, a partner activity, whether it's on premise or off premise, all of these options give people choices. From an HP standpoint, we have the ability to give people the choice. Our recent acquisition of EDS clearly adds the last pillar of choice, given that we have now an outsourcing business, which is significant.

People have a lot of choice, but they quite often find it difficult to make a decision on the best choice. Other people feel that the choice gives them a lot more scope to do things differently, to manage budgets in a different way, and do things more effectively.

The management of all of these sourcing options is a key consideration. Take the example of an organization putting things onto a public cloud.

What I'm hearing from customers is that they want advice on what should they insource, what should they outsource, what should they put in the cloud, and what should they have as a SaaS offering.

They’re still going to have the same requirements from a governance and management standpoint, but it might be a lot harder than having it in-house.

Management requirements on governance around what data is out there, what performance is like, and what scalability is like, are all considerations and discussions that we help with. It can make the whole world a lot more complex for CIOs. Therefore, the management capability that we have around all of those options becomes even more important.

We’re finding that people want advice around the choices. ... What I'm hearing from customers is that they want advice on what should they insource, what should they outsource, what should they put in the cloud, and what should they have as a SaaS offering.

That’s a really important job and an important role for someone like an HP, which actually doesn’t have a bias, because we've got all the options. If we were only a cloud computing or any outsourcing company, we’d be giving customers one option. Our role as a consultant to not only evaluate what is best for those organizations, but what is good for them financially, is a very important part of the role HP can play and should play.

[The solution] becomes more of a management of the service, than management of the infrastructure that develops or delivers the service. So, our role is about, governance, management, and control of the services that are delivered to an organization, rather than the product, power, or the storage that’s delivered to a company.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. The podcast is also availale for download.

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By: Peter Williams, Practice Leader - IT Infrastructure Mgmt., Bloor Research Posted: 23rd June 2009 Copyright Bloor Research © 2009

BakBone Software, long recognised for its flagship NetVault product families primarily focused on backup and recovery, recently splashed out to acquire ColdSpark and the technology from Asempra as part of its new strategic direction which it describes as Universal Data Management (UDM I presume). Then, earlier this month it launched NetVault: FASTRecover to eliminate backup windows (more of which in a moment).

BakBone's UDM breaks down into three discrete but inter-linking areas; its existing integrated data protection (IDP) and the new Centralised Policy Management (CPM?) and Message Management. It is designed to allow a company to directly control and apply policies to its data. In itself that is not too revolutionary, but customers will be able to do this irrespective of the applications that create, alter or interface with the data—while it is on the move across the network as well as at rest.

IDP is a long-used BakBone acronym covering the data security, availability and retention and has been implemented through its NetVault: Backup suite. It covers all virtual and physical storage environments. It is essentially about static data.

"[UDM] is a much more holistic view," Andrew Brewerton, BakBone's EMEA technical director, told me. "Information on the move is very important, whether it's entering the company or transient."

He said the aim was to deal with how the data moves in and out of the organisation as well as how it was stored, removed and deleted. I should mention that not all of this has suddenly been put in place as yet; I think it broadly provides a roadmap for the coming year.

It is CPM (I am saving ink here) that covers the creation, maintenance and application of management policies to apply across an enterprise's data. One way it will do this is to allow applications to inherit global data policies and apply them related to such things as de-duplication, encryption, message archiving and data loss prevention.

It was ColdSpark that brought in the bulk of the Message Management element with its e-mail processing and delivery solutions aimed at enterprises. It addresses complexities in tracking messaging (including the fact that most e-mails are now application generated).

"If you take Exchange in large environments you may have 10 or 20 Exchange servers to present to the user, and possibly 10s or 100s instances of Exchange covering potentially millions of messages—with some doing nothing but routing," said Brewerton. "What ColdSpark does is reduce this, by taking thousands down to one or two or high performance boxes—and inside a policy engine."

I have not got as far as finding out exactly how it achieves this, but I can see this scenario is very costly and that the software could quickly pay for itself; not least in savings in Exchange licences. The software enables monitoring and optimising of enterprise message performance—combining with message archiving, classification and customer message communication.

By initial header content analysis it can apply a policy so that, for instance, in-bound messages such as spam can be diverted or archived. Likewise, outbound policies can be applied. The main aim is not to flood the mailboxes.

By being integrated with CPM and IDP, it is able to better control infrastructure performance at the same time as improving overall data availability and policy compliance levels. Much of the linkage will be through new open APIs which will facilitate applying the new features for existing NetVault: Backup users as well as making inroads into enterprises that are non BakBone.

NetVault: FASTRecover is essentially a re-branding of the very advanced NetVault: Real-Time Data Protector (NVRDP) launched late last year—which Bloor recently evaluated. NVRDP, which uses the newly-acquired Asempra technology, is stand-alone; but the new name demonstrates BakBone's commitment to make it more closely integrated with the rest of the NetVault suite over time.

What this provides is continuous data protection (CDP), with integrated snapshots (unusual), for Microsoft Exchange, SQL Server and Windows file system data—but the unique and, to me, exciting part is its ability to achieve recovery to live within a couple of minutes (the minimum around 30 seconds). This almost completely overcomes the concern with CDP (for these Windows environments) that, while it normally eliminates a need for backup windows (except, say, once a week late at night), when recovery is needed after a glitch this can take hours. It is therefore very easy for me to see a rapid ROI payback.

As a software only company, BakBone can provide NetVault: FASTRecover as software-only to run on existing equipment. On the other hand, it runs very effectively as a pre-configured appliance that includes hardware, software and storage. So BakBone is now offering the option of hardware purchased either directly from BakBone or through a BakBone reseller. The plug-and-play options minimise the need for installation and ongoing management expertise—and appliances are available in different sizes to fit for all organisations up to large enterprises.

BakBone has, in the past, rightly focused on a very integrated, feature rich and reliable data set; this provides a sound data structure to build on. The acquisitions are a hint that it is becoming more innovative and (perhaps) adventurous. Its trick is to integrate the new features so as to reduce the overall administrative burden—but keeping the system simple enough for its large, loyal user base to remain happy. I will watch with interest to see how this all pans out over the coming year.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd June 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Quality early in application development sounds nice, but actually making it happen brings significant cost savings, repeatable quality assurance processes, higher user satisfaction, and shorter development cycles. The results reward developers, end users, and IT operators alike.

To better understand the journey to quality assurance for new applications—and the processes that work best—BriefingsDirect interviewed IT executives at FICO, Gevity and JetBlue in a podcast discussion moderated by me, Dana Gardner. It comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas this week.

Listen as we hear from Matt Dixon, senior manager of tools and processes at FICO; Vito Melfi, vice president of IT operations at Gevity, a part of TriNet, and HP Award of Excellence winner Sagi Varghese, manger of quality assurance at JetBlue.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. The podcast is also available to download

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd June 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

HP's purchase last year of EDS came just as talk of cloud computing options ramped up. So how does long-time outsourcing pioneer EDS fit into a new cloud ecology?

Is EDS, in fact, a cloud provider? And how will IT departments properly factor their decisions on what to keep on-premises in data centers versus placing assets and workloads on someone else's cloud infrastructure?

We pose these and other "fluid sourcing" future questions to David Gee, Vice President of Marketing at EDS, in an interview by me, BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner. It comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. The podcast is also available to download.

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By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 22nd June 2009 Copyright Quocirca © 2009

Many businesses will find that leasing a computing platform is more cost effective than buying one, especially with the current constraints on capital spending. In light of this it is good news that, as reported in Quocirca's free report Managed Hosting in Europe, there is an ever-increasing choice of managed hosting providers (MHP) in Europe.

MHPs pre-configure hardware, networks, storage and infrastructure software for customers to run all types of business applications, from email to ERP. MHPs take on responsibility for keeping the platform up to date and will commit to higher service-level agreements than internal IT departments. Furthermore, hosted platforms are an ideal way to house applications that need to be shared among multiple organisations; this includes those of independent software vendors (ISV) as they join the rush to software as a service (SaaS) as an alternative way of delivering their products.

In the past hardware servers have been provided on dedicated basis for each customer, but now, MHPs are turning en masse to shared hardware infrastructure as they compete with emerging cloud platforms from Microsoft, Amazon, Google, salesforce.com and others.

There are offerings for business of all sizes. At the enterprise end there are the big systems integrators that include managed hosting as part of a broader service offering. For small businesses there are communications providers that provide it as an add-on to network access services. Spanning the whole market are specialist MHPs whose raison d'être is the provision of enterprise-class compute platforms to all. These include NTT Europe Online, Rackspace Hosting, Savvis, Attenda, 7global and a host of other emerging vendors.

Quocirca hopes IT-Analysis readers will find the report a useful reference and also invites feedback via managed_hosting@quocirca.com for a second version of the report that will address any errors or omissions.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 22nd June 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

IT departments are nowadays having to do more with less, gaining additional productivity while spending less money. It sounds simple, but making it happen is very complex.

How do IT departments and companies approach this problem? How will cloud computing and "fluid sourcing" options help or hinder the process? And how can IT budgets slide while expectations rise that new architectural approaches can be adopted with low risk?

To probe deeper into the harsh new IT economies of performance can be managed, BriefingsDirect sat down with Anton Knolmar, Vice President of Marketing for HP Software & Solutions, for a discussion moderated by me, Dana Gardner. It comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the Hewlett-Packard Software Universe 2009 Conference in Las Vegas.

Read a full transcript of the discussion. The full podcast is also available for download here.

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By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 22nd June 2009 Copyright Quocirca © 2009

The UK's MPs may rue the day a disk listing details of their expenses was leaked to the Daily Telegraph from the House of Commons Fees Office earlier this year, but they were going to be made public at some point anyway, courtesy of the UK's Freedom of Information Act which the MPs themselves passed into law in 2000.

The leak has not just exposed the actual expenses claims but the ill-defined and opaque policies that underlie them—herein may lie the bigger lesson for others.

There are plenty of examples of data that has reached the public domain that should never have done so, not least from other parts of the UK government.

This has led to a burgeoning demand for methods to control the use and dissemination of data electronically—so called data loss prevention (DLP) technology. Effective DLP requires that three things are understood and controlled: people, data and policy.

Most organisations are on top of the first of these: they know who the people in their organisation are, or at least have the means to do so. This includes not only employees but also external workers who need access to their IT systems.

Information about people is stored and referenced using directory servers. There are plenty of these around, including IBM's Tivoli Directory Server, Microsoft's Active Directory and Novell's eDirectory. While there is plenty of choice, they all largely comply with a widely accepted open standard known as LDAP (lightweight directory access protocol), so it is fairly easy for other applications to access information about users regardless of the specific directory in use.

The second area, data, is complex because it's all over the place and in many different formats based on various standards. Of course, there are data repositories that limit what can be done with the information stored in them: content management systems for documents and databases for structured data.

However, the risk of leakage is greatest when data has been extracted from a repository and is being transferred by email, shared over the web or copied to some portable device. To ensure the sharing of data is authorised and safe requires that it is monitored—that the organisation knows when and where it is in use. DLP technology, supplemented by good end point security, helps to address all this.

Next comes policy. Policies define who can do what with different types of data. For example: only accountants can attach financial spreadsheets to emails; no one can move data onto USB storage devices; employee records must only be printed in a secure print room.

Defining and understanding policy across an organisation is the hardest part of the job. There are plenty of tools to help but the problem is selecting a policy engine that can be used by a range of applications that handle data.

There is no clear market leader and few standards in this area. The headache this causes should not be underestimated—a key reason for getting data use under control is to demonstrate compliance with various privacy and security regulations. To do that it is necessary to demonstrate policies are in place and enforced wherever possible.

IBM's recent announcements around DLP underline the problem. IBM Tivoli Storage Manager has a policy engine that the company claims can manage stored data "down to the individual file level". But this does not help with data being created on the fly or stored in places beyond Storage Manager's control, such as end user devices.

To boost its offerings in the DLP market IBM has formed two partnerships over the last six months: Verdasys for the management of end points and Fidelis Security Systems for monitoring data in use. But the problem is both the new partners' products have policy engines too—so now to control the use of data using an IBM solution requires three policy engines. This means there's plenty of scope for duplication and inconsistency.

IBM is not alone. Security vendors have addressed DLP through multiple product lines developed in-house, acquired or via partnership. For example Symantec bought Sygate for end point security (now Symantec End Point Protection or SEP V11) and Vontu for DLP (now Symantec DLP V9), both of which had their own policy engines.

CA, EMC/RSA, Trend Micro and Websense have all made acquisitions in the DLP and end point areas and face similar problems with co-ordinating policy. McAfee has the most centralised approach. Its ePolicy Orchestrator (ePO) was developed in house and is core to its security suite. All its acquired technology is integrated with ePO as well as with 50-plus partner products, all done using McAfee's own proprietary software development kit.

For each vendor, the integration issues around policy will be addressed given time. However, there is a bigger issue: there are no widely accepted standards around the definition of and access to policy. It would make data security far easier to implement if there were and if a policy could read from any compliant policy repository, just as user details can be read from LDAP-compliant directory server.

The state of UK politics is a parody of this: it is easy enough to find out who your MP is but tying down the policies that control their behaviour is another matter.

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 19th June 2009 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2009

Potential MySQL customers who are wary of the database's future under Oracle stewardship have a possible alternative in Postgres Plus, an open source alternative from EnterpriseDB, says that company’s CEO, Ed Boyajian.

He sees reality biting the MySQL community as a feeding frenzy in the software acquisition food chain from both Sun Microsystems' gobbling up of MySQL last year, and now Oracle's likely snapping up of Sun. “When MySQL got acquired by Sun, a lot of that community got fractured,” Boyajian told BriefingsDirect. “That fracturing started with Sun and continues with Oracle so I think that will have an impact on adoption patterns.”

He says potential MySQL customers, wary of getting “sucked into Oracle’s sales machine,” are looking at EnterpriseDB’s Postgres Plus®Advanced Server, the company’s relational database management system (RDBMS) product, which is based on the PostgreSQL open source database.

Competing with Oracle is nothing new for EnterpriseDB, which has been playing David to Oracle’s Goliath in the database market for years. Although this David has its own Goliath watching its back as IBM is an investor in and has a partnership with the Westford, Mass. company, which was founded in 2004

The latest version of Postgres Plus, being released today, is touted by EnterpriseDB as “the fifth-generation of Oracle compatibility technology,” which allows Oracle customers to move applications to the EnterpriseDB database.

This version of Postgres Plus is designed to require “minimal migration effort” for Oracle customers looking for a low-cost, open source-based RDBMS as an alternative to giant vendor’s proprietary database products.

Oracle buying Sun and acquiring MySQL does have a positive side, Boyajian says.

One of the selling points for Postgres Plus is that it runs on commodity hardware and now it is being deployed in virtual and cloud environments.

“When Oracle acquires Sun and gets a great asset like MySQL it’s a great endorsement for open source software,” he said.

His company maintains a close relationship with the Postgres community, Boyajian said. Several EnterpriseDB employees are "key core members" of Postgres, he said.

One of the selling points for Postgres Plus is that it runs on commodity hardware and now it is being deployed in virtual and cloud environments.

“There are some customers that are using blade servers,” Jim Mlodgenski, EnterpriseDB's chief architect told BriefingsDirect. “For the cache servers [used heavily in social networking apps] you don’t need much horsepower as far as the CPU goes,”

Social networking sites have greater requirements for maintaining a data cache in memory rather than for CPU power, he explained. Postgres Plus offers a feature called “Infinite Cache” to support those requirements.

Some customers take advantage of the commodity prices for “one CPU and a lot of RAM,” Mlodgenski said. “Using commodity hardware at the caching layer you’re able to leverage low cost commodity hardware to cache everything, get the performance benefits of running everything in memory without investing a lot in a high-end SAN [storage area network] boxes,” the architect explained.

The cloud is also on the horizon for Postgres Plus users. “We have other people who are deploying in more virtualized environments, cloud environments,” Mlodgenski said.

He said when the product was designed several years ago it wasn’t focused on the cloud but because of its flexible architecture Postgres Plus users were able to move into cloud environments such as Amazon EC2.

BriefingsDirect contributor Rich Seeley provided research and editorial assistance on this post. He can be reached at RichSeeley@aol.com.

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By: Simon Perry, Principal Associate Analyst - Sustainability, Quocirca Posted: 18th June 2009 Copyright Quocirca © 2009

Though their lineage dates back to before World War II, ATMs in their modern form appeared widely on the high street in 1973. Since then they have bred like rabbits and spawned numerous cousins in the form of automated ticket dispensing machines and point-of-sale devices. They have also arguably created the payment services backbone that has enabled the "cardholder not present" transaction capability that is internet payment services.

Along the way ATMs have also fundamentally altered the relationship customers have with their banks. Gone are the days of queuing at inconvenient times in actual banks and dealing with real tellers, bank managers and advisors. All replaced with anytime, anywhere banking, in whatever currency of whichever country you're standing in. Meanwhile branches have closed, and while almost everyone appreciates the convenience, there are many who rue the dehumanising of the bank/customer relationship.

All of this is worth keeping in mind as the NHS, and its international health care counterparts, dabbles increasingly in technology-enabled remote diagnosis and treatment of patients. The efforts of the NHS' Aberdeen TeleHealth initiative, based in no small part on Cisco's telepresence technology, have yielded some impressive results.

The NHS trials used high-definition telepresence communications, enhanced with customised cameras, scanners and a wide variety of other electronic diagnostic tools. The patient, normally assisted by a relatively unskilled helper (who may have no more than rudimentary first-aid skills), can be subject to an array of tests as well as being interviewed by the remotely located GP or specialist.

The healthcare service has field tested such diagnostic services in the remote wilds of Northern Scotland, out to the remote North Sea oil drilling platforms and with the communities on the Orkney and Shetland islands. Such communities are remote, sparsely populated, and suffer from a lack of dedicated and local health professionals. If enough trained personnel were to be supplied, they would be underworked - but horrendously expensive to maintain and manage.

The NHS trials have delivered impressive results, with the service reporting that diagnostic accuracy is on a par with in-person capability. While the telepresence approach requires availability of relatively high network bandwidth between the patient location and the remote healthcare professional, as well as a not-insignificant capital cost in technology, it is cost effective compared to providing comparable healthcare to remote communities via traditional means. Telepresence-based medicine makes it possible to more accurately and more rapidly diagnose a patient compared to the service that could be provided by way of the irregular in-person approach that such remote communities have historically suffered.

Such benefits are substantial, and it is clear that remote diagnostics provide important potential benefits in terms of service and cost. That said, it is also critical to remember that effective healthcare ought to be more than just treating patients as "units" to be pumped through an increasingly automated health service factory. Arguably, telepresence-based health services are another step down the path of dehumanising healthcare and turning it into an assembly line for the dispensing of treatments that address mainly the symptoms, and rarely proactively address the causes. The provision of telemedicine to a remote community that previously had no service is better than nothing, but is it the best we can do as a society?

The old bedside manner has to become the new telepresence-side manner. If some of the more mundane reviews and check-ups can be automated out of the health system—such as repeat prescriptions, blood pressure tests and anything else that can be made self service through web interface or remote monitoring—then more time should be freed up for the medical professional to spend in real consultation with the patient. This can then help with preventative treatment, so minimising reactive treatments, and again freeing up more time.

Therefore, technology used correctly can create a virtuous circle—whereas used wrongly can be counterproductive. Let's ensure that the healthcare beancounters don't ruin it—and that healthcare professionals can get back to caring more about their patients, and focusing less on the profitability of the service.

Many people would complain already that they are treated as walking wallets rather than individuals by GPs, as they are herded through community clinics in 10-minute appointment increments. We need to be careful as we take this path that we do not end with unintended consequences whereby there is some added convenience to some, at the expense of degraded and dehumanised services to everyone.

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