By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 11th January 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

Genuitec, LLC has revamped its MobiOne development tool to allow Windows operating system users to design and build App Store-ready iOS apps—native apps for iPhone, iPad and iPod Touch—without using a Mac. This means there is no longer an additional expense to buy a Mac machine or learn Objective-C to design apps that operate natively on iOS devices.

Previously, the Flower Mound, Tex. company's MobiOne supported a webapp-only model that allowed design of webapps that run on iOS devices. Now, users can design native apps or webapps with the same design files, using AppCenter, a cloud technology that Genuitec engineered, that allows app designers to test their native and webapps in a private Genuitec cloud. [Disclosure: Genuitec is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“By removing the barriers to entry for iOS app design and building, MobiOne is truly at the forefront of making mobile technologies accessible to the masses," said Wayne Parrott, vice president of product development. "If a Windows users has enough skill to design a PowerPoint slide, they can design and build iPhone and iPad apps with ease. Web developers with HTML5 and CSS3 skills will see even greater productivity.”

MobiOne is designed for web developers, marketing departments, business consultants, and anyone who wants to create and build App Store-ready iOS applications and webapps. MobiOne uses drag-and-drop functionality similar to stringing together a PowerPoint presentation, but has a powerful engine that allows users to build iOS apps or webapps from the same code base.

That engine is the AppCenter technology, which allows for easy testing of apps and webapps over the air using iOS 4+ or through iTunes. Testing links can be shared via email or SMS for multiple device testing and previews.

To learn more about the MobiOne Studio, go to http://www.genuitec.com/mobile/docs/highlights/current/. A 15-day free trial is available at: http://www.genuitec.com/mobile/download.html. After the free trial, the cost is $99 per license.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 9th November 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

The next BriefingsDirect case study interview focuses on Southwest Airlines, one of the best-run companies anywhere, with some 35 straight years of profitability, and how "IT as a service" has been transformative for them in terms of productivity.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from a recent VMworld 2011 Conference. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Here to share more about how Southwest is innovating and adapting with IT as a compelling strategic differentiator is Bob Young, Vice President of Technology and Chief Technology Officer at Southwest Airlines. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: We have heard a lot about IT as a service. How have you at Southwest been able to keep IT squarely in the role of enablement?

Young: As we are taking a look and trying to be what travelers want in an airline, and we are constantly looking for ways to improve Southwest Airlines and make it better for our customers, that's really where virtualization and IT as a service comes into play.

People want to be able to get on Southwest.com, make a reservation, log on to their Rapid Rewards or our Loyalty Program, and they want to be able to do it when they want to do it, when they need to do it, from wherever they are. And it’s just great to be able to provide that service.

We provide that to them at any point in time that they want in a reliable manner. And that's really what it gets right down to—to make the functions and the solutions that we provide ubiquitous so people don’t really need to think about anything other than, "I need to do this and I can do it now."

Gardner: I travel quite a bit and it seems to me that things have changed a lot in the last few years. One of the nice things is that information seems to be at your fingertips more than ever. I never seem to be out of the loop now as a traveler. I can find out changes probably as quickly as the folks at the gate.

So how has this transfer of information been possible? How have you been able to keep up with the demands and the expectations of the travelers?

Young: If we talk about information and the flow of information through applications and services, it really starts to segment the core technical aspects of that so the customer and our employees don’t really need to think about it. When they want to get the flight at the gates, the passenger is on a flight leg, etc., they can go ahead and get that at any moment in time.

... The same is true of how we provide IT as a service. What we want to be able to do is provide IT whenever they want it, whenever they need it, at the right cost point, and to meet their needs. We've got some of the best customers in the world and they like to do things for themselves. We want to allow them to do that for themselves and be able to provide our employees the same.

Gardner: How in IT have you been able to create common infrastructures, reduce redundancy, and then yet still ramp up to meet all your requirements?

Young: What we've been able to do and how we have been able to meet some of those challenges is through a number of different VMware products. One of the core products is VMware itself, if we talk about vSphere, vMotion, etc., to be able to provide that virtualization. You can get a 1-to-10 virtualization depending on which type of servers and blades you're using, which helps us on the infrastructure side of the house to maintain that and have the storage, physical, and electrical capacity in our data centers.

But it also allows us, as we're moving, consolidating, and expanding these different data centers, to be able to move that virtual machine (VM) seamlessly between points. Then, it doesn’t matter where it’s running.

That allows us the capacity. So if we have a fare sale and I need to add capacity on some of our services, it gives us and our team that run the infrastructure the ability to bring up new services on new VMs seamlessly. It plugs right into how we're doing things, so that internal cloud allows us not to experience blips.

It's been a great add for us from a capacity management perspective and being able to get the right capacity, with the right applications, at the right time. It allows us to manage that in such a way that it’s transparent to our end-users so they don’t notice any of this is going on in the background, and the experience is not different.

... We started our virtualized environments about 18 months ago. We went from a very small amount of virtualization to what we coined our Server 2.0 strategy, which was really the combination of commodity-based hardware blades with VMware on that.

And that allowed us last year in the first and second quarter to grow from several hundred VMs to over several thousand, which is where we're at today in the production environment. If you talk about production, development, and test, production is just one of those environments.

It has allowed us to scale that very rapidly without having to add a thousand physical servers. And it has been a tremendous benefit for us in managing our power, space, and cooling in the data center, along with allowing our engineers who are doing the day-to-day work to have a single way to manage it, deploy, and move stuff around even more automatically. They don’t have to mess with that anymore, VMware just takes care of the different products that are part of the VMware Suite.

Gardner: And your confidence, has it risen to the level where you're looking at 70, 80, 90, even more percent of virtualization? How do you expect to end that journey?

Young: I would love to be at 100 percent virtualized. That would be fantastic. I think unfortunately we still have some manufacturers and software vendors—and we call them vendors, because typically we don’t say partners—who decide they are not going to support their software running in the virtualized environment. That can create problems, especially when you need to keep some of those systems up 24 x 7, 365, with 99.95 percent availability.

We're hoping that changes, but the goal would be to move as much as we can, because if I take a look at virtualization, we are kind of our internal private cloud. What that’s really doing is getting us ready for the evolution that’s going to happen over the next, 5, 7, or 10 years, where you may have applications and data deployed out in a cloud, a virtual private cloud, public cloud if the security becomes good enough, where you've got to bring all that stuff together.

If you need to have huge amounts of capacity and two applications are not co-located that need to talk back and forth, you've got to be much more efficient on the calls and the communications and make that seamless for the customer.

This is giving us the platform to start learning more and start developing those solutions that don’t need to be collocated in a data center or in one or two data centers, but can really be pushed wherever it makes sense. That could be from wherever the most efficient data center is from a green technology perspective, use the least electricity and cooling power, to alternate energy, to what makes sense at the time of the year.

That is a huge add and a huge win for us in the IT community to be able to start utilizing some of that virtualization and even across physical locations.

Gardner: Is there a centralization feature to this that also is paying dividends?

Young: That’s a huge cornerstone of the suite of tools that we've been able to get through VMware is being able to deploy custom solutions and even some of the off-the-shelf solutions on a standard platform, standard operating systems, standard configurations, standard containers for the web, etc. It allows us to deploy that stuff within minutes, whereas it used to take engineers manually going to configure each thing separately. That’s been a huge saving.

The other thing is, once you get the configuration right and you have it automated, you don’t have to worry about people taking some human missteps. Those are going to happen, and you've got to go back and redo something. That elimination of error and the speed at which we can do that is helping. As you expand your server footprints and the number of VMs and servers you have without having to add to your staff, you can actually do more with the same number of or fewer staff.

Gardner: How you feel about desktop virtualization?

Young: What’s really driven us to take a look at it is that around our environment we can control security on virtual desktops, etc., very clearly, very quickly and deliver that in a great service.

The other thing that’s leading to this is, not just what we talked about in security, is the plethora of brand new mobile devices—iPhones, iPads, Android devices, Galaxy. HP has a new device. RIM has a new device. We need to be able to deliver our services in a more ubiquitous manner. The virtual desktop allows us to go ahead and deliver some of those where I don’t need to control the hardware. I just control the interface, which can protect our systems virtually, and it’s really pretty neat.

I was on one of my devices the other day and was able to go in via virtual desktop that was set up to be able to use some of the core systems without having all that stuff loaded on my machine, and that was via the Internet. So it worked out phenomenally well.

Now, there are some issues that you have to do depending on whether you're doing collocation and facility, but you can easily get through some of that with the right virtualization setup and networking.

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 2nd November 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Educators are using of desktop virtualization in innovative new ways to enable "bring your own device" (BYOD) benefits for faculty and students. This latest BriefingsDirect interview explores how one IT organization has made the leap to allowing young users to choose their own client devices to gain access to all the work or learning applications and data they need—safely, securely, and with high performance.

The nice thing about BYOD is that you can essentially extend what do you do on-premises or on a local area network (LAN)—like a school campus—to anywhere; to your home; to your travels, 24x7.

The Avon Community School Corp. in Avon, Indiana has been experimenting with BYOD and desktop virtualization, and has recently embarked in a wider deployment for both this school year.

To get their story, Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, interviewed Jason Brames, Assistant Director of Technology, and Jason Lantz, Network Services Team Leader, both at Avon Community School. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: You've been successful with server virtualization, but what made it important for you now to extend virtualization to the desktop?

Brames: One of the things that is important to our district we noticed when doing an assessment of our infrastructure: We have aging endpoints. We had a need to extend the refresh rate of our desktop computers from what was typical—for a lot of school districts typical is about a 5-year refresh rate—to getting anywhere from 7 to 10, maybe even 12 years, out of a desktop computer.

By going to a thin client model and connecting those machines to a virtual desktop, we're able to achieve high quality results for our end users, while still giving them computing power that they need and allowing us to have the cost savings by negating the need to purchase new equipment every five years.

By going with virtual environment, the problem that we were looking to solve was really just that—how do we provide extended refresh rate for all of our devices?

We're located about 12 miles west of Indianapolis, Indiana, and we have 13 instructional buildings. We're a pre-K-to-12 institution and we have approximately 8,700 students, nearing 10,000 end-users in total. We’re currently supporting about 5,500 computers in our district.

... Currently have 400 View desktop licenses. We’re seeing utilization of that license pool of 20–25 percent right now, and the primary reason that we’re seeing that utilization is because we’re really just beginning that phase, with this being our first year for our virtual desktop roll out. We’re really in the second year, but the first year of more widespread use.

We’re training teachers on how to adequately and effectively use this technology in their classroom with kids. It's been very highly received and is being adopted very well in our classrooms, because people are seeing that we were able to improve the computing experience for them.

Lantz: With that many devices, getting out there and installing software, even if it’s a push, locally, or what have you, there's a big management overhead there. By using VMware View and having that in our data center, where we can control that, the ability to have your golden image that you can then push out to a number of devices has made it a lot easier to transition to this type of model.

We’re finding that we can get applications out quicker with more quality control, as far as knowing exactly what’s going to happen inside of the virtual machine (VM) when you run that application. So that’s been a big help.

A lot of our applications are Web-based, Education City. It’s a lot of graphics and video. And we found that we're still able to run those in our View environment and not have issues.

Gardner: What are you running in terms of servers? What is your desktop virtualization platform, and what is it that allows you to move on this so far?

Lantz: On the server side, we're running VMware vSphere 4.1. On the desktop side, we're running View 4.6. Currently in our server production, as we call it, we have three servers. And we're adding a fourth shortly. On the View side of things, we currently have two servers and we’re getting two more in the next month or so. So we’ll have a total of four.

Gardner: Now one of the nice things about the desktop virtualization and this BYOD is it allows people to access these activities more freely anywhere. How do you manage to take what was once confined to the school network and allow the students and other folks in your community to do what they need to do, regardless of where they are, regardless of the device?

Brames: We’re a fairly affluent community. We have kids who were requesting to bring in their own devices. We felt as though encouraging that model in our district was something that would help students continue to use computers that were familiar to them and help us realize some cost savings long term.

So by connecting to virtual desktops in our environment, they get a familiar resource while they're within our walls in the school district, have access to all of their shared drives, network drives, network applications, all of the typical resources that are an expectation of sitting down in front of a school-owned piece of equipment. And they're seeing the availability of all of those things on their own device.

... A typical classroom for us contains four student computing stations, as well as, depending upon the building size, three to five labs available. We’re not focusing our desktop virtualization on those labs. We’re focusing on the classroom computing stations right now. Potentially, we'll also be in labs, as we go into the future.

Then, in addition to those student computing stations, we’re seeing those applications where our administrative team or principals and our district-level administrators are able to begin using virtual desktops to access while they’re outside of the district and growing familiar with that, so that whenever we enter into that phase where we’re allowing our students to access from outside of our network, we have that support structure in place.

... We’re also seeing an influx of more mobile-type devices such as tablets and even smartphones and things like that. The percentage of our users that are using tablets and smartphones right now for powerful computing or their primary devices is fairly low. However, we anticipate over time that the variety of devices we’ll have connecting to our network because of virtual desktops is going to increase.

Gardner: How is that hand-off happening? Are you able to provide a unified experience yet?

Lantz: That’s part of phase two of our approach that we’re implementing right now. We’ve gotten it out into the classrooms to get the students familiar with it, so that they understand how to use it. The next step in that process is to allow them to use this at home.

We currently have administrators that are using it in this fashion. They have tablets and are using the View client; they connect in and get the same experience if they're in school or out of school.

So we’re to that point. Now that our administrators understand the benefits, now that our teachers have seen it in the classrooms, it’s a matter of getting it out there to the community.

One of the other ways that we’re making it available is that at our public library, we have a set of machines that students can access as well, because as you know, not every student has access to high-speed Internet, but they are able to go to library, check out these machines, and be able to get into the network that way. Those are some of the ways that we’re trying to bridge that gap.

Technology Integration Group has resources that allow us to see what other school districts are doing and what are some of the things that they’ve run into. Then, they bring back here and we can discuss how we want to roll it out in our environment. They’ve been very good at giving us ideas of what has worked with other organizations and what hasn’t. That’s where they've come in. They’ve really helped us understand how we can best use this in our environment.

Gardner: I often hear from organizations, when they move to desktop virtualization, that there are some impacts on things like network or storage that they didn’t fully anticipate. How has that worked for you? How has this roll out movement towards increased desktop virtualization impacted you in terms of what you needed to do with your overall infrastructure?

Lantz: Luckily for us we’ve had a lot of growth in the last two to three years, which has allowed us to get some newer equipment. So our network infrastructure is very sound. We didn’t run into a lot of the issues that commonly you would with network bandwidth and things like that.

On the storage side, we did increase our storage. We went with an EqualLogic box for that, but with View, it doesn’t take up a ton of storage space with link clones and things like that. So having seen a huge impact there, now as we get further into this, storage requirements will get greater, but currently that hasn’t been a big issue for us.

Gardner: On the flip-side of that, a lot of organizations I talk to, who moved to desktop virtualization, gained some benefits on things like backup, disaster recovery, security, and control over data and assets, and even into compliance and regulatory issues. Has there been an upside that you could point to in terms of being a more centralized control of the desktop content and assets?

Lantz: When you start talking about students bringing in their own devices, it's difficult to monitor what's on that personally-owned device.

We found that by giving them a View desktop, we know what's in our environment and we know what that virtual machine has. That allows us to have more secure access for those students without compromising what's on that student’s machine, or what you may not know about what's on that student’s machine. That’s been a big benefit for us allowing students to bring in their own devices.

Gardner: Do we have any metrics of success either in business or, in this case, learning terms and/or IT cost savings? What has this done for you? I know it's a little early, but what's the early results?

Brames: You did mention that it is a little bit early, but we believe that as we begin using virtual desktops more so in our environment, one of the major cost savings that we’re going to see as a result is licensing cost for unique learning applications.

Typically in our district we would have purchased x number of licenses for each one of our instructional buildings because they needed to utilize that with students in the classroom. They may have a certain number of students that need access to this application, for example, but they're not all accessing it during the same time of the day or it's on a machine that’s on a fat client, a physical machine somewhere in the building, and it's difficult for students to have access to it.

By creating these pools of machines that have specialty software on them we’re able to significantly reduce the number of titles we need to license for certain learning applications or certain applications that improve efficiencies for teachers and for students.

So that’s one area in which we know we’re going to see significant return on our investment. We already talked about extending the endpoints, and with energy savings, I think we can prove some results there as well. Anything to add, Jason?

Lantz: One of the ones that’s hard to calculate is, as you mentioned, maintenance or management of this piece and technology, as we all know you’re doing more with less. This really gives you the ability to do that. How you measure that is sometimes difficult, but there are definitely cost savings there as well.

Gardner: I know budgets are really important in just about any school environment. Do you have any sense of the delta there between what it would be if you stuck to traditional cost structures, traditional licensing, fat client, to get to that one to one ratio, compared to what you’re going to be able to do over time with this virtualized approach?

Brames: Our Advanced Learning Center is the school building that has primarily senior students and advanced placement students. There are about 600 students that attend there.

Last year, 75 percent of those students were using school-owned equipment and 25 percent of them were bringing their own laptops to school. This year, what we have seen is that 43 percent of our students are beginning to bring their own devices to connect to our network and have access to network resources.

If that trend continues, which we think it will, we’ll be looking at certainly over 50 percent next year, hopefully approaching 60–65 percent of our students bringing their own devices. When you consider that that is approximately 400 devices that the school district did not need to invest in, that’s a significant saving for us.

Gardner: If you could do this over again, a little bit of 20/20 hindsight, what might you want to tell others in terms of being prepared?

Lantz: One thing that’s important is that when you explain this to users, the words "virtual desktop" can be a little confusing to teachers and your end-users. What I've done is taken the approach of it’s no different than having a regular machine and you can set it up to where it looks exactly the same.

When you start talking with end users about virtual, it gets into, okay, "So it’s running back here, but what problems am I going to encounter?" and those sort of things. Trying to get that end user to realize that there really isn’t a difference between a virtual desktop and a real desktop has been important for us for getting them on board and making them understand that it’s not going to be a huge change for them.

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

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 1st November 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

People of a certain age often enjoy recalling for younger folk the size of the early mobile phones that were lugged around in the mid-1980s, whilst marvelling at the latest smartphones. These brick-sized devices could not even send text (SMS) messages (the first of which was sent in 1992); they were good for voice only. But, what would it have taken almost three decades ago to have had all the capabilities of a 2011 smartphone based on the available technology of the day?

This was one of the subjects covered in a recent New Scientist article titled “They said it couldn't be done: 7 impossible inventions”. To quote the article:

“The components for the iPhone à la 1985 we've listed so far would fill a large wheelbarrow. But we have left out something important.”

“The processor at the heart of the iPhone 4 can perform up to a billion operations per second (the new iPhone 4S is even zippier). You might have matched that in the mid-80s if you had bought the Cray X-MP, then the world's most powerful supercomputer. But the Cray would have filled an office cubicle and also required an industrial-strength refrigerator to remove the waste heat. So cancel the wheelbarrow. To haul the 1985 iPhone around, we're going to need a truck.”

Interesting stuff, which underlines why the consumerisation of IT has become such a big issue. When I left the academic world for the commercial one in 1986, for the first time in my life, on my desk at work I had dedicated access to a computer (albeit a text-only dumb terminal) which was linked to a network providing me with any information my employer had stored that it felt would be useful to do my job. I also now had a telephone with its own number; my friends and family could now contact me when I was at work (before that hand written letters had been the main method).

The new entrant to the work place now has all this and much, much more in their pocket. This is the issue driving IT consumerisation. Employers can no longer impress new recruits with technology and connectivity, they are more likely to disappoint. Competitive employers today are those that allow their employees to use the advanced technology they have become used to at home in the workplace.

Consumerisation does of course throw up many challenges, not least how data security, contracts and billing are handled. These issues were discussed in a recent free Quocirca report “Carrying the can” sponsored by ttMobiles and the subject of a recent conference organised by the Wireless Improvement Group (WIG). Quocirca’s presentation given at the conference can be downloaded here.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 28th October 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

A recent new story in New Scientist: “Light is not fast enough for high-speed stock trading”, reminds us how important the speed of network communications has become for some organisations.

….“cable company Hibernia Atlantic is spending $300 million to build a new transatlantic cable to shave 6 milliseconds from the present 65-millisecond transit time between London and New York. It will be the first new cable to cross the Atlantic in a decade and trading firms are likely to pay premium rates to use it.”

“This is because even though a computer can execute millions of instructions in a microsecond, the furthest light can travel in that time - even in a vacuum - is just 300 metres. That is an age if algorithms are competing to execute the best trades.”….

For intercontinental finance trading firms, the network is the problem; perhaps they should try replacing photons with faster than light neutrinos!

For most businesses, their use of networks is somewhat more pedestrian, however, the network each relies on is fundamental to their business. That network is a complex mix of internal infrastructure, network services from mobile and fixed line providers and the internet; take any element away and their business processes start to fail.

Making the network faster is only part of the challenge for most businesses, although many tolerate worse performance than they need to, because the network has been neglected for too long. The other two big challenges are availability and security.

Only when these three aspects of network management are under control can a business consider that it is getting the best of its existing network assets and know when and where added investments will make a real difference. A high performance, highly available and secure network infrastructure is the only way a business can consider itself ready for today’s IT challenges – to be cloud-ready.

In the age of device and application consumerisation, users, as well as lines-of-business and IT departments themselves, are constantly deploying ever rmore resource hungry applications; businesses expect the network to cope. IT managers that take their network for granted or fail to pro-actively maintain it will be going backwards just by standing still.

Quocirca’s report, sponsored by Networks First, “Don’t forget the network”, is freely available here.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 18th October 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Recent Quocirca research among European, US and Australian small businesses shows how far the trend to consumerisation of user access to IT has progressed. Over 70% of those interviewed said they allowed at least some of their employees to access certain data and applications from their personally owned devices.

When Quocirca speaks with chief information security officers (CISO) in larger businesses they admit that one of the reasons their organisations are also observing the same trend is that in practice it is hard to stop. Senior staff will insist on such access, junior ones will seek ways around controls, including the use of other communications channels if they are blocked from access to formal ones, such as corporate email, from the personal devices.

However, as the Quocirca research shows, there are positive reasons for allowing such access. The use of smartphones is fundamental to enabling remote working. Over 90% of the small business managers interviewed had staff that worked out of the office at some point during the week and they were the ones most likely to be using such devices for remote IT access.

Of course, it is not just smartphones. Many of those employees will already have notebook and laptop computers and they are also rapidly turning to tablets. Over 40% of the respondents in the recent research said some of their employees were using such devices and another 20% expected this to be the case within 12 months.

In many cases, remote workers, for example field service engineers logging faults and social workers filing home visit reports, will be using company-issued mobile devices to participate in locked down business processes. However, for a growing majority it is simply about more flexible working and access to information as and when it is needed—such information workers are behind the mobility revolution that is going on in the IT industry and readers here will mostly fit that category.

However, regardless of all the benefits, information workers present their employers with a problem. How do you keep control of the information itself? How do you benefit from mobility and consumerisation without losing control, becoming a victim of data loss and coming to the notice of regulators? There is also a problem for the users themselves. As they switch from one device to another for convenience, how do they get a consistent view of their data?

There is no silver bullet for solving the employer’s problem, but there are ways of reducing the risks. First, a business must take as much control of its data as it can. It is possible to secure mobile devices using encryption and host based end-point security, but there is the problem of device ownership; installing software on the users’ own devices creates licencing and management issues.

For many, a better way is to impose centralised controls; that is, to provide a means of accessing data which is easy to use and requires minimal modification of the user’s device. There are three basic approaches, to achieve its goals a given organisation may need to use one or more of them: 

1. Virtual desktops. Here, data is not actually processed on the device, but the device is simply an access tool to a desktop that is available anywhere the user can get online. There are limitations with this approach when it comes to smartphones (due to screen and keyboard size), but software in this area is improving fast (for example Citrix Receiver). However, it may still require some locally installed software for some advanced functions.
2. Provide access to applications that allow data to be viewed and updated, but not copied. For example, just because you allow employees to read email remotely does not mean the actual content need be copied to a device. Such applications can be provided through the creation of corporate app stores that support the range of devices employees want to use and the users can proactively download providing their consent for installation in the process. This is the best way to provide access to corporate applications (CRM, ERP etc.) for those on the move.
3. Provide direct access to central document stores. Here, with the right products, access can be provided to view files with appropriate caveats. Public domain documents (e.g. market materials) can be freely copied and used later offline, whilst restricted documents can only be viewed whilst online helping to protect an organisation’s digital rights. Some products require no local software be installed to provide such access.  Offerings here include portals such as Microsoft SharePoint or specific file sharing/backup services such as Trend Micro SafeSync and Druva InSynch.

The last of these also helps solve the employee’s problem; if the central data store supports access from multiple operating systems (iOS, Windows, Android etc.) it gives them access to documents from whatever device they happen to be using. Providing this is a secure service it also helps prevent another insidious problem; if there is no easy to use a method for centrally storing documents then employees may synch their devices using other services—some secure, some less so—employers may then have no idea where their data is ending up.

Generally speaking, the benefits of embracing consumerisation outweigh the risks, providing those risks our mitigating in so far as is possible. Employers that are proactive in doing that will ultimately find they get more out of their employees, without taking unnecessary risks with their data.

Quocirca’s report; The data sharing paradox, is freely available here: http://www.quocirca.com/reports/620/the-data-sharing-paradox

 This article first appeared in Oct 2011 on http://www.silicon.com

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 18th October 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Our next VMware case study interview focuses on the City of Fairfield, California, and how the IT organization there has leveraged virtualization and cloud-delivered applications to provide new levels of service in an increasingly efficient manner.

We’ll see how Fairfield, a mid-sized city of 110,000 in Northern California, has taken the do-more-with-less adage to its fullest, beginning, interestingly, with core and mission-critical city services applications.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the VMworld 2011 Conference. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Here to share more detail on how virtualization is making the public sector more responsive at lower costs is Eudora Sindicic, Senior IT Analyst Over Operations in Fairfield. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Why virtualize mission-critical applications, things like police and fire support, first?

Sindicic: First of all, it’s always been challenging in disaster recovery and business continuity. Keeping those things in mind, our CAD/RMS systems for the police center and also our fire staffing system were high on the list for protecting. Those are Tier 1 applications that we want to be able to recover very quickly.

We thought the best way to do that was to virtualize them and set us up for future business continuity and true failover and disaster recovery.

So I put it to my CIO, and he okayed it. We went forward with VMware, because we saw they had the best, most robust, and mature applications to support us. Seeing that our back-end was SQL for those two systems, and seeing that we were just going to embark on a brand-new upgrading of our CAD/RMS system, this was a prime time to jump on the bandwagon and do it.

Also, with our back-end storage being NetApp, and NetApp having such an intimate relationship with VMware, we decided to go with VMware.

Gardner: So you were able to accomplish your virtualization and also gain that disaster recovery and business continuity benefit, but you pointed out the time was of the essence. How long did it take you?.

Sindicic: Back in early fiscal year 2010, I started doing all the research. I probably did a good nine months of research before even bringing this option to my CIO. Once I brought the option up, I worked with my vendors, VMware and NetApp, to obtain best pricing for the solution that I wanted.

I started implementation in October and completed the process in March. So it took some time. Then we went live with our CAD/RMS system on May 10, and it has been very robust and running beautifully ever since.

Gardner: Tell me about your IT operations.

Sindicic: I have our finance system, an Oracle-based system, which consists of an Oracle database server and Apache applications server, and another reporting server that runs on a different platform. Those will all be virtual OSs sitting in one of my two clusters.

For the police systems, I have a separate cluster just for police and fire. Then, in the regular day-to-day business, like finance and other applications that the city uses, I have a campus cluster to keep those things separated and to also relieve any downtime of maintenance. So everything doesn’t have to be affected if I'm moving virtual servers among systems and patching and doing updates.

We’re also going to be virtualizing several other applications, such as a citizen complaint application called Coplogic. We're going to be putting that in as well into the PD cluster.

The version of VMware that we’re using is 4.1, we’re using ESXi server. On the PD cluster, I have two ESXi servers and on my campus, I have three. I'm using vSphere 4, and it’s been really wonderful having a good handle on that control.

Also, within my vSphere, vCenter server, I've installed a bunch of NetApp storage control solutions that allow me to have centralized control over one level snapshotting and replication. So I can control it all from there. Then vSphere gives me that beautiful centralized view of all my VMs and resources being consumed.

It’s been really wonderful to be able to have that level of view into my infrastructure, whereas when the things were distributed, I hadn’t had that view that I needed. I’d have to connect one by one to each one of my systems to get that level.

Also, there are some things that we’ve learned during this whole thing. I went from two VLANs to four VLANs. When looking at your traffic and the type of traffic that’s going to traverse the VLANs, you want segregate that out big time and you’ll see a huge increase in your performance.

The other thing is making sure that you have the correct type of drives in your storage. I knew that right off the bat that IOPS was going to be an issue and then, of course, connectivity. We’re using Brocade switches to connect to the backend fiber channel drives for the server VMs, and for lower-end storage, we’re using iSCSI.

Gardner: And how has the virtualization efforts within all of that worked out?

Sindicic: It’s been wonderful. We’ve had wonderful disaster recovery capabilities. We have snapshotting abilities. I'm snapshotting the primary database server and application server, which allows for snapshots up to three weeks in primary storage and six months on secondary storage, which is really nice, and it has served us well.

We already had a fire drill, where one report was accidentally deleted out of a database due to someone doing something—and I'll leave it at that. Within 10 minutes, I was able to bring up the snapshot of the records management system of that database.

The user was able to go into the test database, retrieve his document, and then he was able to print it. I was able to export that document and then re-import it into the production system. So there was no downtime. It literally took 10 minutes, and everybody was happy.

... We are seeing cost benefits now. I don’t have all the metrics, but we’ve spun up six additional VMs. If you figure out the cost of the Dells, because we are a Dell shop, it would cost anywhere between $5,000 and $11,000 per server. On top of that, you're talking about the cost of the Microsoft Software Assurance for that operating system. That has saved a lot of money right there in some of the projects that we’re currently embarking on, and for the future.

We have several more systems that I know are going to be coming online and we're going to save in cost. We’re going to save in power. Power consumption, I'm projecting, will slowly go down over time as we add to our VM environment.

As it grows and it becomes more robust, and it will, I'm looking forward to a large cost savings over a 5- to 10-year period.

Gardner: Was there anything that surprised you that you didn’t expect, when you moved from the physical to the virtualized environment?

Sindicic: I was pleasantly surprised with the depth of reporting that I could physically see, the graph, the actual metrics, as we were ongoing. As our CAD system came online into production, I could actually see utilization go up and to what level.

I was also pleasantly surprised to be able to see to see when the backups would occur, how it would affect the system and the users that were on it. Because of that, we were able to time them so that would be the least-used hours and what those hours were. I could actually tell in the system when it was the least used.

It was real time and it was just really wonderful to be able to easily do that, without having to manually create all the different tracking ends that you have to do within Microsoft Monitor or anything like that. I could do that completely independently of the OS.

Gardner: We're hearing a lot here at VMworld about desktop virtualization as well. I don’t know whether you’ve looked at that, but it seems like you've set yourself up for moving in that direction. Any thoughts about mobile or virtualized desktops as a future direction for you?

Sindicic: I see that most definitely on the horizon. Right now, the only thing that's hindering us is cost and storage. But as storage goes down, and as more robust technologies come out around storage, such as solid state, and as the price comes down on that, I foresee that something definitely coming into our environment.

Even here at the conference I'm taking a bunch of VDI and VMware View sessions, and I'm looking forward to hopefully starting a new project with virtualizing at the desktop level.

This will give us much more granular control over not only what’s on the user’s desktop, but patch management and malware and virus protection, instead of at the PC level doing it the host level, which would be wonderful. It would give us really great control and hopefully decreased cost. We’d be using a different product than probably what we’re using right now.

If you're actually using virus protection at the host level, you’re going to get a lot of bang for your buck and you won't have any impact on the PC-over-IP. That’s probably the way we we'll go, with PC-over-IP.

Right now, storage, VLANing all that has to happen, before we can even embark on something like that. So there's still a lot of research on my part going on, as well as finding a way to mitigate costs, maybe trade-in, something to gain something else. There are things that you can do to help make something like this happen.

... In city government, our IT infrastructure continues to grow as people are laid off and departments want to automate more and more processes, which is the right way to go. The IT staff remains the same, but the infrastructure, the data, and the support continues to grow. So I'm trying to implement infrastructure that grows smarter, so we don’t have to work harder, but work smarter, so that we can do a lot more with less.

VMware sure does allow that with centralized control in management, with being able to dynamically update virtual desktops, virtual servers, and the patch management and automation of that. You can take it to whatever level of automation you want or a little in between, so that you can do a little bit of check and balances with your own eyes, before the system goes off and does something itself.

Also, with the high availability and fault tolerance that VMware allows, it's been invaluable. If one of my systems goes down, my VMs automatically will be migrated over, which is a wonderful thing. We’re looking to implement as much virtualization as we can as budget will allow.

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 29th September 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Our next VMworld case study interview takes the pulse of CharterCARE Health Partners, and examines how virtualized desktops and thin clients are helping with digital records management and healthcare industry compliance and privacy requirements.

We learn how Rhode Island-based CharterCARE has embraced private cloud and virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) to support its distributed, 579-bed community-based health system. The organization operates the Roger Williams Medical Center, Our Lady of Fatima Hospital, and several other caregiver facilities.

We'll hear how the tag team of private cloud and VDI has provided better data management, security, reliability, and regulatory auditing capabilities. The successful infrastructure modernization effort has also helped CharterCARE move to electronic health records and has helped improve their processes for clinicians.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the recent VMworld 2011 Conference. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

Here to dig into more detail on the CharterCARE IT infrastructure improvement story is Andy Fuss, Director of Technology and Engineering at CharterCARE Health Partners. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: I'm interested why data management has been a primary driver for you as you've looked to adopt both the private cloud and VDI. What is it about the data equation that’s made this look like a good solution for you?

Fuss: We need our data to be accessible everywhere, at every time, no matter what provider is at what facility. Even from an engineering and technology standpoint, no matter what system analyst, what network engineer may sit down wherever they are to troubleshoot an issue, we need that common set of tools.

Common repository

We need the common repository of information for a caregiver. That would be the electronic medical information. It could be the x-rays, the slides, the CT scans, or the results that were dictated by a radiologist. Whatever it might be, that information needs to be available in a flexible manner and delivered directly to the deskside experience.

Now, if that’s a desktop, it needs to be on a regular PC, but if we're talking about a tablet, we need to accommodate the tablets that people bring in and have come into the facility and are now actively being used, or zero client technology.

We have all the different technologies and pieces. We're trying to promote these pieces to be used and trying to be flexible with accommodating them and getting people to the information that they need so they can take care of the first priority, which really is patient care.

Gardner: Tell me about the extent of your distributed campus and environment. Not only are you dealing with many different types of data and many different endpoints, but you're also distributing this across a multitude of different environments.

Fuss: We have two main acute hospitals. We have a nursing home, a cancer center, outpatient care offices, and several different offices all around the community. So the data truly needs to not be resident in one spot.

We also needed to have a secured disaster recovery (DR) facility, so that if anything were to happen to our primary data center that’s on one of the campuses, we could flex seamlessly over.

So building a cloud for us made total sense. That cloud hovers between one of two data centers. One is at one of the acute facilities, and then 100 miles away in another state, we have another data center. Our cloud roams between the two, and we have data flowing from each area.

So the connection really is no longer about where it’s physically located by any restriction. It’s more of just gaining access to the internet and being able to make connections. Where you're accessing that data from or where you're using it is seamless to the end user and provides a solid customer experience.

... There are a lot of people who can embrace different types of clouds. You've got hybrid clouds, private clouds, public clouds, all with different offerings. For us it made sense to do a private cloud. For others, it may make sense to do hybrid type cloud.

As we move toward the future, I can see that we might be able to offload some of our services toward the public cloud. As we increase the size of some of our data and we have patient care cut over to the side, there might be some other data that does not follow the same guidelines. We can put that into a secure public cloud and attach everything.

VMware is coming out with those tools and using those tools to make that kind of continuation project possible to look at. We're very excited about some of the initiatives that we've seen at VMworld -- the vCloud Director, with security, the different layers built into that that could make some of the public cloud usable for us for specific applications.

Gardner: Correct me if I am wrong, but it sounds as if private cloud to you means better security.

Fuss: Oh, it does, most definitely. I'm no longer worried about the endpoint device walking away from us. I'm not worried about theft of an individual device, because the device has nothing more on it than some connectors to get somewhere.

When we were first embracing zero client technology in a lot of places, we did some studies. We talked to some different people who had already embraced it. One particular hospital I spoke to said they had on video someone stealing a zero client device, perhaps thinking that they had stolen some great new utility tool for home, a new PC. They were all excited.

They also have them on video, bringing it back the next morning, because they couldn’t do anything with it when they got to their house. Using cloud, using the technologies that ride in the cloud, like VMware View and access to the data through VMware View, really helps to lock things down and it helps to prevent things.

No data leakage

In the past, somebody could have taken a PC, and let’s say that PC could have had metadata on it or could have had some files on it that were saved in someway. It was comical to hear that story from another person who was in a similar situation as us, where there was no data loss or data leakage, even if that device had never come back. So the cloud really has tightened things down for us.

One of the primary concerns for our electronic medical records is that it’s patient data, financial data, and so needs to be PCI-, and HIPAA-compliant. All the different compliance standards that we need to abide by are all satisfied with the ways that these machines are locked down, by the way the cloud is moving, and where we allow it to move to.

Gardner: How do you view private cloud and VDI -- separate, distinct, together? What’s the relationship?

Fuss: They're definitely together. They have to be together. In my opinion, it’s what makes sense. We want to see the data tight. We want to see the integration tight. We can have a cloud where the data roams back and forth, but the connection into the cloud actually uses that data.

As I sit here on a device, a personal device at the office that is connected to my virtual desktop instance, this device doesn't even have to be on my network. I'm utilizing a public network that we have here at the hospital system and I've connected into my virtual desktop. I have full accessibility. I'll flip over here in a few minutes when I go into another meeting. I'll bring my iPad with me, another personal device, and I'll be connected right to that same virtual desktop.

So the cloud has allowed me, with View, to seamlessly move between all these different devices. I no longer am tied to something. I'm no longer tied to a specific physical location, a physical anything. I really am completely mobile. I can work anywhere at any time and have that same common set of tools.

It doesn't matter if I'm working out of the DR site. I should no longer call it disaster recovery. I should call it our second data center because even though it really is 100 miles away, I can still sit there and work all day long just like I'm anywhere else. That ability is really the value that using a cloud and using View gives you.

I want a physician in his office, out on the road or wherever they might be, at home, in a practice have access to that same data and have a similar look and feel every time they connect from whatever device. That's what these solutions that we've opted for have provided for us.

... We can already see the expansion, the use of that technology in different areas. We have some physicians with iPads working throughout the facility, visiting the patient’s bedsides, looking at their charts, all that kind of flex room is great.

I've seen it in our administrative areas, our human resource officer using iPad remotely. We’ve had our Chief Information Officer using an iPad, using a PC at home, and connecting through the View client to her machine.

We’ve gotten support not just from forcing the technology out there, but by people asking for the technology. That’s how you can tell you have a good product. People asking, "Can I be moved to this new product, because the flexibility of my supervisor, director, whoever is using is what I need."

Hit a home run

If the director calls saying, "I need this employee to have this flexibility," you know you've hit a home run with the technology. I haven’t had anybody call asking for another PC at another location for the same person to work. I have people calling saying, "I really need to get them onto this technology as soon as it’s possible, because it's made this employee so efficient. I need to do that for everybody else."

... Also, everything that we're doing allows us not to focus on location, and that's the big thing. We break away from location. So where is the data center? Is it going to be affected by the next hurricane coming up the East Coast? Well, if we have a fear of where the hurricane is, we can move our data center 100 miles inland. Or if we think that inland is going to be more affected, we can keep it in Rhode Island, which is right on the ocean.

So we have that ability, and nobody knows where that data is other than the IT department. We know it's within the system, within the security, but nobody would ever notice the difference or question where the data is running or residing. They might ask, and we could tell them, but nobody says, "Wow, that's slow" or "I can see a difference." None of those kind of calls comes in as the cloud flexes.

Gardner: At VMworld, you've had a chance to look over View 5, and the PC-over-IP benefits there; is that something that’s in your pipeline?

Fuss: Absolutely. We’re blessed to be in the VMware 5 beta test user group, and we’re loving what we see. We like the performance. The PC-over-IP expansion is amazing. They’ve written a great protocol there with their partners, and that is the technology that’s going to continue to drive the reinvention of the desktop.

We’ve gone through the reinvention of the desktop a few times in my career, from somewhat dumb terminals to smart terminals to client server. We seem to be making our way back to where we’re keeping our data safe in data centers and in silos. We’re giving people a great end-user experience to give them a full PC feature-set. We’re doing it all securely and we’re doing it all with products that integrate seamlessly with one another, and that’s really the goal.

We want the user to sit down and feel comfortable with whatever technology they use, and to have a way to take care of our patients that need our help and take care of what other important administrative business they may do, so we can keep moving forward.

... So the benefits are there, and they’re just growing now, as it's integrated and being used more in the clinical areas. We’ve seen some growth recently. Even our pharmacy staff is starting to carry iPads around, when they’re doing inventories of some of the medication machines and being able to get that information right there, but on a device that’s secure. If they were to leave it behind, nobody could connect to anything, and that data all sitting safe inside the data center.

So the adoption is there, the benefits are already there, and it's just growing and growing. Every time I turn around, we’re bumping another 50, another 75, virtual machines, into another pool of machines for a new purpose, and that’s the expansion that I keep wanting to encourage.

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

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 28th September 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

In many ways, the mobile device explosion and the cloud computing ramp-up reinforce and support each other.

Cloud services make mobile devices -- like smartphone and tablets -- more productive, while making users better connected to enterprise resources and work processes. On the other hand, mobile devices -- with their ubiquitous, non-stop wireless access -- make cloud-delivered applications, data, and services more relevant and more instantly available anywhere.

The next BriefingsDirect podcast discussion then focuses on the rapid and massive shifts confronting enterprises as they adopt more mobile devices and broaden their uses of cloud services ... in some kind of managed fashion, one would hope.

There are good reasons for doing these in tandem, with strategic coordination. By leverging cloud and mobile, applications can be supported by a common, strategic, architectural, and converged-infrastructure approach.

Furthermore, by making cloud-delivered applications and data context-aware, delivering enterprise applications to any device securely can be done at a reduced cost (a lot when compared to conventional applications infrastructure models). It therefore over time makes little sense to have unique stacks beneath each application for each application or device type.

So how do enterprises adjust to these mobile-cloud, dynamic-duo requirements in the strategic and a proactive way? How can they leverage and extend their current applications or identify which ones to fold and retire?

It’s clear that radical, not incremental, adjustment is in order to make sure that the cloud-mobile era is a gained opportunity and not a fatal or devastating misfire for IT operators -- and business strategists alike.

Our next guest, Paul Evans, Global Lead for Application Transformation with HP Enterprise Business, helps explore the promises and perils of adjusting to the cloud-mobile shift. The interview is conducted by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: We have to go through a radical transformation now in terms of our applications. I don't use these words lightly. There are these new technologies, part of the megatrends that are affecting organizations.

In the technological world, we have the world of cloud, and we have the world of mobile. We cannot ignore them. People can’t abdicate and say, "I'm not going to go do it." It's not going to be that way.

At the same time, the CIOs and senior stakeholders are looking outward and asking what are these new technologies, what could they do for me, how could they improve customer service, and what will my competition do?

They also look also over their shoulder and say, "I spend 70 percent of my IT budget keeping the applications I have today working. I probably don’t have enough budget or resource to do both. So the question is, which one of these should I spend more of my time on?"

The answer is that you really can’t afford not to spend time on either. So it's a balancing act between how I encompass the new and exploit it, and at the same time, what do I need to do with my existing applications.

Andy Grove, the former head of Intel said that this is a major inflection point.

This year people are predicting that if you count the amount of smart phones and tablets that will be shipped, i.e. bought, that it will be greater than the number of desktop, laptop, and network PCs. So we're tending now toward an inflection point in the marketplace that says more people will interact using mobile devices than they will static devices.

That trend isn’t just a blip for 2011. That continues as we accelerate, as people just get more comfortable with using that technology, as functionality improves, and security and manageability come under control.

We're at that point now. That’s why we use this term radical transformation, because for the people that really want to exploit this, they're making their plans, they're drawing up their action lists of what they have to do, both at the front end with the mobile and cloud environment, but also with their legacy environment.

Although we see the world of cloud and mobile as very new-age, very sexy, and all the rest of it, at the end of the day, people have to sit down and deal with what the environments they have right now. They may not be so exciting. They may not be so new-age, but at the end of the day, they make products, count money, and run the organization as it is today. They are the legacy applications.

I often sit down with a customer who says, "We have to take stock. We have to make a plan. We're not going to do this one day at a time or a week at a time. We have to appreciate how we are going to exploit cloud.

What applications that we have in the back-end server environments are we going to bring forward to the cloud to service a mobile environment? What we are going to do about the use of mobile within our organization and what we are going to do about serving our customers better through mobile devices and the technologies that go with them?"

This is going to be pervasive. This is the way we're going to do things for the foreseeable future. Therefore, if we don’t get it right now, we stand a risk of making decisions about platform types or architectures, or whatever it may be, that within six months, we’re going to say that it wasn’t such a good idea.

Never been here before

I meet so many customers now that are saying, "We’ve never been here before. We’ve never been with this volume of devices. We’ve never been through the fact that over half of our workforce now brings their own device with them into the office."

They're sending out policy documents that say, "you shall not do this," and it's totally ignored. The changing workforce has a totally different level of expectation as it were, of what's possible, just in terms of the amount of transactions that are performed over the net or 20,000 applications downloads in a minute.

These are transactional rates in volumes that we've never seen before. Despite a lot of our previous experience, you just can’t leave it and say, "It worked five years ago. It’s going to work for the next five years." That's what our customers are dealing with today.

There are two critical questions have to get answered. One is the organizations that are going to move applications to a cloud environment are not going to move all of them. One of the questions we get all the time is, What percentage of my applications or products should I be moving to the cloud? And of course the answer is ... It’s not a percentage thing. It’s the type of application.

It’s still formative times, but in HP’s view, clearly applications that probably are not embodying intellectual property would be a type of application that's well served moving into the cloud. And, any form of application including servicing, providing a service across a wide population of users as well, especially those who are obviously in a mobile environment; applications that are productivity-centric.

You really want to drive the cost down as low as possible for any of these productivity applications. There's no sense in running on aging infrastructure where the costs are high. You really want to be getting the cost down, because if it’s a productivity application, it doesn’t differentiate you. And if it doesn’t differentiate you, then why would you spend anything more than the minimal cost?

So put those productivity applications onto the lowest cost environment where you couldn't provision an infrastructure that has this elasticity that the cloud environment provides.

No clear line of sight

So we're moving applications from back-end environment to the cloud. Then we have an opportunity to rationalize the portfolio. Rationalizing the portfolio had two big impacts. One, it takes cost out, which means that you can consider that as saved money or money that can reinvested in the mobile world.

But also you're taking out complexity. Every organization, I think, would agree at the moment that their environments are too complicated, and by virtue of being to complicated, it makes it difficult to change them, and people are looking for agility and flexibility.

So first things first. When we're talking to organizations, what we're trying to understand is what are the candidates that can move to the cloud, and that’s a big hot topic. A lot of our users and customers say, "We sort of get our head around cloud. That’s okay. We can see it’s a different paradigm. It has a different cost model. It helps me with provisioning. Life’s good."

So they can get their head around that, and as you can tell by just reading the press and listening to what goes on in the world, you would say people are on the move with cloud.

On the other hand, when they are looking from the outside in with mobile, there is less of a precedent there. The sharp customers that we are working with are saying, "We don’t want to fall into traps. We're going to build an environment that suits one type of mobile environment and we are going to be able to test it and manage it." They know that they don’t have that order of control. The days when it was, "You shall use this device, and that device we know how to work," have gone.

If you think back to mainframe days, people had to use a 3270 device. That was it. It was defined by IBM. That’s the way you're going to do it. And if you didn’t have one, then you didn’t get to participate. The world is now totally the other way around.

The technical challenge is to support this environment agnostically and say, "We don’t care what you're using." What we can do is understand how to manage and provide the right level of security to that device, whatever that device may be. Maybe you come inside the network and that’s going to be a high performance network these days, because of the whole issue of impatience.

As I said, the volume and the variety of platforms are unprecedented. Even though we had the PC world, the PC as the client was a single entity. It had some interesting characteristics initially, but there was one brand. What we're dealing with now is many different ways. Therefore, we have to understand this from an agnostic standpoint, so that the consumer can continue to use the device of their choice and can get the services they require from this new cloud and server environment.

Virtuous architecture adoption

As organizations begin to realize that the world is going to change, their view is going to be "We need architecture."

By virtue of developing an architecture, people are beginning to realize, as they begin to take stock of where they have been spending their money, that they have in the past and may have an opportunity to drive more efficiency and effectiveness into that organization, whilst at the same time delivering innovation.

So I think this inflection point can have some really good signs about it. ... It’s forcing decisions on people now, because the people that appreciate that this radical transformation is something that they can’t stop and they should exploit, rather than trying to ignore. People are actually seeing that there are significant efficiencies to be gained from deploying these new technologies.

Radical travel changes

What’s interesting is that there are always industry "skews" of technology. We have a tool in HP called the Business Value Framework. What that tries to do is interpret where the business wants to go.

Ignore the technologies for a moment. You could argue the airline industry is relatively commoditized -- then what people are going to look for is how we're going to have that small differentiation that makes us better than the rest of the world.

When you look at this business value framework and you look at things like services and transportation, what comes through very loudly is customer service and customer satisfaction is key. If you can serve people better, if you can give them better information, then there is highly likely that they are going to come back as a repeat customer.

You don't want to spend a truckload of money dragging people to your airline and then displeasing them, so they go to somewhere else, because that's makes the whole initial effort worthless.

What people are looking for is obviously loyal and devoted customers who come back and back and back, and that all comes down to deliver customer satisfaction. One of the customers we've been working with, Delta Air Lines, has really put that at the forefront. They can provide very rich, very high quality information, so that people know what's going on.

Range of devices

Working with Delta, they've been providing to a range of mobile devices, like smart phones, tablets, etc., but also to traditional desktop environment, rich information, not only when you're waiting for the plane, but also when you're on the plane by virtue of seat-back videos screens so that people get a continuous feed.

If you're flying from A to B to C, you're going to change planes in the middle. If you're going to miss your connection, you usually sit on the plane, knowing you're going to miss your connection, and then what are you going to do? That means you get off the plane, queue with 500 other people, and then you eventually get another plane -- eventually -- all the time trying to figure out how you can tell your family why you are late and rest of it.

Delta is trying to provide an environment that says while you're on one of your airplane, it's already working out the next connection and it will give you that information on the plane. It will give the e-boarding card. It will send you the vouchers that would allow you to get some refreshment, all to your mobile device, so that all of that stress and angst that you’ve had traditionally gets taken out. In a commodity industry that's the sort of thing you have to do to be different from the rest.

We see that in a number of industries. We see people today delivering and developing mobile applications, particularly in the commodity world, to deliver up a much higher level of customer service and satisfaction.

What we are definitely doing in some respects is using the experience we built up in dealing with people's legacy environments and understanding what they value. What they value are things like structured workshops, to have an open debate between technology and business that says who is leading, who is following, where are we going, and what do we need?

A lot of the things we do in terms of those initial services set the scene, so that we just don't leap in and decide, "Well, we're going to support X device. We're going to provide this app on it." And then, six months later, we're struggling with how we're going to deploy that app over multiple platforms and how we're going to use new technologies like HTML5 etc. to give us that agnostic approach?

It’s this convergence between the mobile world and the traditional world, because we believe that’s the big thing. We can talk about the sexy front end, the smart phones, the pad environment -- and it's great to talk about those -- but at the end of the day, those devices only really get to do what they are paid to do, when they connect to rich and meaningful information at the back end. So for this convergence we sit with users, sit with the CIO, and understand what is it that they're going to be converging in terms of information from the back end and the utilization of the mobile device on the front end.

Put into context

Then, how do we connect those together? How do we sit down and say, "What sort of speed of transaction, what volume of information are we talking about here," and obviously understanding that. That information has to be put into context now for the device of the front-end. If you're delivering this to a smart phone, it has to be represented in a totally different way than if you were going to deliver it to a desktop PC or, in the middle, a pad.

So the point being is we've got to be aware of those. We’ve got to be aware of the user’s context and understand what we can and cannot deliver to them. But I think behind the scenes, and of course, this is where the consumer says, "I don’t really care," but the whole management and security that you put in place, and HP has spent a lot of time, and a lot of effort, and a lot of money in acquisitions and development of technologies that allow people to manage and also provide a secure environment, to those devices that are at the front-end.

There are serious challenges. I wouldn’t for a second say this is a piece of cake. Just ring us up, and 30 days later you get a solution. It is not like that. This is a big deal. There are serious challenges and therefore they need serious people to fix them. We're into understanding how you get this end-to-end view, because if you only look at a piece of the puzzle, you aren’t going to build what is absolutely necessary.

If you type in hp.com/go/applicationtransformation, there are a plethora of different links there for people to read up on things, watch videos, whatever. We're also developing a digital repository for predominantly video material. We find that our customers are very clear in telling us that they like watching short, sharp pieces of materials that are being videoed, so they can get the message quickly and get offline.

Maybe the days of reading a 20 page white paper are gone, which I am not sure is true, but definitely our clients told us very clearly that they like watching videos. So we're developing a whole series of video-based material, whether it's on application rationalization, application modernization, mobility in the enterprise world, or infrastructure.

The intention here is not to hear from HP, because we will do what we're paid to do, which is trying to convince you we have some very smart people in technologies and products, but also hear from industry experts, hear from our customers about what they're doing, how they're doing it, and the sort of benefits.

So if you stay in touch through hp.com/go/applicationtransformation, we'll always point you to materials that in some instances are not being delivered by HP, but just hear from our customers and hear from industry analysts about really what is now possible.

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

You may also be interested in:

• Making the Leap from Virtualization to Cloud Computing: A Roadmap and Guide
• HP's Liz Roche on why enterprise technology strategy must move beyond the 'professional' and 'consumer' split
• HP Expands Security Portfolio to Battle Threats from Mobile, Cloud and Social Media
• Tag-Team of HP Workshops Provides Essential Path to IT Maturity Assessment and a Data Center Transformation
• HP Premier Services Closes Gap Between Single Point of Accountability and Software Sprawl
• HP Discover Interview: Security Evangelist Rafal Los on Balancing Risk and Reward Amid Consumerization of IT

By: Martin Gandar, Independent Research Analyst, Independent and Ovum Associate Analyst Posted: 22nd September 2011 Copyright Independent and Ovum Associate Analyst © 2011

It’s now the norm for operators to limit data downloads on most of their mobile tariffs. There are exceptions and depending on your country you may still find unlimited data-plans or special broadband tariffs, but for moist users there will be limits that start low at 200MB per month and range up to 1GB.

Providers should inform you via email or text if you are close to exceeding your mobile data allowance. Different operators have different policies on what action to take against customers who exceed their allowances and the most common include:

• Cutting-off your connection (though this is rare and normally reserved for those who excessively and repeatedly exceed their allowance).
• Throttling your speed (many operators, including T-Mobile and Vodafone in the UK, will downgrade your connection to their 2G network).
• Charging you per extra
• Cancelling any bundled access to wi-fi hotspots

This isn’t going to be a great problem for most users as we seldom use more than 200Mbytes of download in a month, and the table below shows that we can get quite a lot within the limits on offer

Source of estimates: O2 [1, 2]. Online radio calculation assumes 128kbps bitrate. 

So there shouldn’t be any panic, but if you are the sort of user who wants to stream TV to your phone then be careful ! Service2Media offers the following guidelines on how to avoid surprises.

1. Buy a SIM card when abroad: If you’re going for more than a couple of days, it might be cheaper to buy a pay as you go SIM card in your destination country. It will almost certainly be cheaper to make calls within that country; although not necessarily cheaper to make a call back home. Double check the tariffs. You’ll also need to ensure your handset is unlocked. 

2. If you don’t get a SIM then watch out for roaming costs: Your data-plan is unlikely to be Global or even EU wide so you need to agree a ‘passport’ style deal with your provider if you want to avoid the sort of unexpected bills reported in the press You can also do simple things like getting people to call you rather than calling home. It’s always cheaper to receive a call when you are abroad. Your friends pay the normal cost to call your phone and you pay a call to receive it in the country where you are traveling but this is a lot less than calling home from abroad.

When it comes to data charges fortunately in many EU countries mobile operators have been forced to introduce a cut-off limit for roaming data charges. However, this doesn’t apply to customers travelling beyond the EU.

So if a typical smartphone uses around 200MB of data per month. Typically the networks charge between 4 euro/MB and 8 euro /MB for data roaming. If you are abroad for a month and don’t limit data roaming then you’ll end up with a bill about 1,000. Euro Downloading a typical MP3 file would cost you about 20 euro. Watching one hour of television would cost about 2,500 euro, so getting a special rate from your provider is a must.

3. Turn off data intensive features of your phone. You only need to do this if you aren’t sure of what you’ll be downloading and either you’re close to your limit or you are abroad and unsure of the cost.

• iPhone: Go to Settings > General > Network > Data Roaming and select Off. For an extra precaution, you can disable all internet connectivity in iOS4.
• Android: Go to Settings > Wireless & networks > Mobile networks and uncheck ‘Data roaming’. Android also offers the option to disable internet connectivity altogether.

4. Limit yourself for high bandwith activity. Only do the items below if you are aware of the amount of data you are downloading.

Downloading or streaming video/music (for example applications such as YouTube, Spotify, Last.fm, TVCatchup, BBC iPlayer).

• Using P2P applications on your phone (e.g. BitTorrent)
• Using voice-over-IP applications (e.g. Skype)

5. Don’t Tether unless you know what you are doing

Tethering means connecting your mobile phone to a PC or laptop as a modem and sharing your phone’s 3G mobile broadband service. This includes USB tethering and tethering via the iPhone & Android personal hotspot features.

Recently, though, some providers such as AT&T have made tethering an official data plan add-on. Paying $20 extra per month. Similarly Sprint charges $30 per month for tethering access through its new HTC EVO 4G for Android users and T-Mobile offers Nexus One models Android 2.2 "Froyo", providing both tethering and Wi-Fi hotspot creation options..

6. Use apps rather than web browsers: Apps are far more efficient at communication that working through the extra layers imposed by web access. If you can make use of native apps that are efficient communicators it could save you a considerable amount of data traffic for your popular applications. Always look for a well-built app if there is a choice between web usage and app.

7. Check how you download emails
If you use a web-based email system such as Hotmail, Yahoo or Googlemail, checking your email is just counted as surfing the web (except if you download an attachment ) This is a safe way to avoid getting large data downloads as you can always see what’s there before you download it.

If you use Outlook then you might end up downloading everything that’s sent to your e-mail attachments included even if you don’t open them. This may not be a problem if you

8. Use VoIP/instant messaging (e.g. Skype) over Wi-Fi not 3G 

Use VoIP(Voice over IP) on your smartphone or IM (Instant Messaging) application such as MSN Messenger, Skype or Google Talk. But only use them for a WiFi hotspot don’t use them over the mobile network though as they’ll eat into your data limit.

9. Know how to control your phone: We see many people who don’t install a power control bar or the equivalent so that they can toggle on and off things like the use of WiFi and in this context, the synching of data. Using such tools allows you to say whether you want to synch data between your various messaging and e-mail accounts and your smartphone and turning these off can save a lot of unnecessary downloads, that you might prefer to do using WiFi or if you are travelling might prefer not to do at all. It’s also of course useful for it’s primary purpose that is to conserve battery life.

10. Monitor your usage: so you can see where you are against your monthly limits.Finally and almost most importantly, be aware of your usage by monitoring it using an app such as 3G Watchdog for Android phones or something like At&T’s myWireless iPhone App to show you where you are on data usage for that billing cycle.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 21st September 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion focuses on the impact that mobile devices and applications are having on enterprises. We specifically examine what steps businesses can take to better manage mobile applications and develop their own versions of enterprise app stores.

The skyrocketing popularity of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets has, on one hand, energized users, but on the other hand, it has caused IT and business leaders and CIOs to scramble to support these new clients productively and safely.

In order to explore how enterprise app stores are part of the equation for better mobile management and overall mobility-enabled work success, we examine the trends driving enterprise mobility with a principal analyst from Forrester Research. Then we'll hear from Partnerpedia on how enterprise app stores can be added to the usual mix of IT applications delivery and management strategies. [Disclosure: Partnerpedia is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The app store trends panel consists of John McCarthy, Vice President and Principal Analyst at Forrester Research, and Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. The disucssion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: How profound is the shift that we're in? Is this iterative, or are we in a real sea change?

McCarthy: It’s definitely the latter. We're really at this rare moment in time for the technology sector, whether you're talking about vendors, end-users, or CIOs who are trying to manage all this. It’s not just mobile. It’s not just cloud. Software as a service (SaaS), smart computing, machine to machine, analytics, social -- all these things are spinning up together to create an accelerating array of change in the marketplace.

Gardner: You mentioned cloud and SaaS. It seems to me that the mobility issue is almost accelerated in a virtuous cycle. That is to say, the more mobility, the more reliance on cloud, the richer and safer it is. The more confidence people have in cloud, the more they can do with their mobility.

McCarthy: These things are feeding off of each other. As soon as I start talking about deploying mobile, and increasingly, it’s not just deploying mobile to my employees, but deploying mobile to my partners and customers, whether it’s B2B or B2C, I am talking about a much broader network problem.

So the network architectures of the cloud solutions are becoming almost synonymous with mobile solutions. So the two innovation cycles are intersecting and feeding off of each other.

Gardner: What is it now that organizations need to do to get their very necessary mission-critical information out to these mobile devices? How does it compare to the past?

McCarthy: The analogy that I draw, when I have discussions with clients now, is that it’s like being the captain of the Titanic, if you're the CIO. Everybody is focusing on those things that they see above the waterline -- how am I going to design these applications and how am I going to deliver them? There's this whole debate of whether I need to go native, hybrid, or browser-based.

But below the waterline is a huge broader part of the iceberg -- how am I going to manage these applications, how do I need to rethink my security architecture, is SOA really going to be enough for the level of integration that I need? The skill sets that I need as an IT shop are very different in this world?

We are working from a current research point of view that mobile and all these other things that are being bundled up with it that we just talked about are going to drive probably an order of magnitude bigger shift in IT and the CIO’s organization than the PC did 20 years ago.

It’s the PC shift on steroids that we are going to be looking at over the next three to five years as mobile completely enables companies to rethink their business processes, and that drives rethinking of their technology architectures, management, and skill sets underneath that.

The app store

Gardner: Sam Liu, why does the app store model have applicability to the enterprise?

Liu: [The app store model] is setting the bar in terms of the user experience in the enterprise, the fact that people who are both consumers and employees of companies are essentially buying the devices, bringing them into the workplace, and forcing the issue onto IT.

You have the mobile professionals and power users of the company taking what they've experienced in the consumer role and requesting a similar experience in the enterprise. The challenge for IT is that this opens up a whole new can of worms for them in terms of policies, procedures, security, and control.

If you look back maybe 15, even 10 years ago, a mobile device was somewhat of a luxury, used by a few people in the company for primarily email. Most of the time, it was a BlackBerry device. We've gone from a singular device and a singular application environment to this perfect storm of a combination of a multitude of devices, platforms, and apps, popularized by the consumer world. That's a big challenge for IT.

Gardner: John, how confident are you that the app store is going to be an integral part of what the enterprise does vis-à-vis mobility?

McCarthy: Clearly the notion of an app store is an interface to this technology. The rate of change and the complexity of this environment basically says that I need more of a self-service module. I can’t go out there and hand-provision these applications like I did in the PC world.

Because people have become so accustomed to this app store model, as Sam just pointed out, from a consumer adoption point of view, that user interface paradigm is going to continue over. I think what’s going to happen is that, behind the scenes, the enterprise app store functionality, from a management point of view, will be much richer over time, and that's where the divergence is going to be.

But as an interface and a way to get people the information and applications, there's one school of thought that says these app stores will replace the old intranet as the paradigm for not only getting apps, but actually subscribing to information.

Using technologies like Flipboard where you subscribe to the travel policy and you ultimately get the most updated version of that. That it’s going to evolve pretty dramatically from where we are today. It’s going to be the user interface paradigm to all this management capability that IT will use, but also these additional capabilities that the end-user -- whether that's customer, employee, or partner -- will access.

Mobile internet paradigm

Liu: I agree with John on the point about the app store becoming the sort of mobile intranet paradigm. Today, I'm not seeing any corporate intranet that work even halfway decent on a mobile device. So if you extend the concept of an app to content, information, anything that is relevant in a corporation, the app store paradigm is a very nice interface and a very effective delivery model for a mobile intranet, for that matter.

McCarthy: The other thing Sam is that, if you think about these apps, they're called apps, because they are not full-fledged applications. They're much simpler and task-oriented, so there's going to be more of them to manage.

The app intensity of the organization is going to grow geometrically, as we start to unbundle these big complex systems like SAP and Office and provide them in more digestible and more segmented experiences. It’s no longer a one-size-fits-all world. The homogeneity of these applications and the PC as the end-user device is blowing apart as we speak.

Gardner: What is it that people need to do? Should they build, buy, partner? How are you seeing it manifest in the market?

Liu: You're going to see a range of approaches. We've been talking to about a dozen or so enterprise IT organizations. The majority of them are in the early stages of trying to figure this out. They see the momentum coming. They're not going to be able to stop it, and so they're trying to figure out the right approach to dealing with all this multitude of devices and applications.

In most cases, they seem to be prompted by the influx of tablets and smartphones, but many of them are thinking beyond that. They're actually planning ahead. They're thinking about devices in general. It could be a mobile device or it could be even a desktop or a stationary endpoint. So they're looking beyond the immediate issues.

Our advice to them is, look, figure out your near term and long-term objectives, and then scope a pilot accordingly. Start with a clear definition of what you're trying to accomplish from a business standpoint, the objectives and the metrics, and then go about it that way. Identify the most pressing needs in terms of the users, apps, and devices and define your first project around that, so you can get a handle around what’s feasible and what’s not.

One of the challenges is that clearly the technology has changed a lot, but also just the lifecycle of hardware and software. It used to be anywhere between three to five years that IT could depend on. Now, you're looking at one year for changes of the devices, platforms, and new apps. That rate of change is also a big challenge for them.

Working in parallel

McCarthy: There are two things happening in parallel.

People are moving out of the renegade pilot phase, and as Sam laid out, trying to take an architected approach. How do we holistically look at what our strategy is around mobile? Not just developing the apps, but how are we going to manage the apps? How are we going to manage the fact that different constituents, both internal and external, need different amounts of functionality and different amounts of security is driving it?

The other thing that we're seeing happening is, companies are now saying, "Oh my God, how am I going to manage the lifecycle of these apps? It’s relatively cheap and easy to build them, but how do I keep up with the endless releases that are going on and the operating system wars on these devices?" Apple and Google are doing four operating system releases a year that you need to manage to make sure your apps still runs.

Then there is the whole point, particularly in the customer-facing space, of how do I update my app so that it stays competitive, and we can really use that system of engagement with our customers to build that ongoing communication, which every company wants to get with their customers?

What we are seeing is that people are starting to look at how to manage the lifecycle of these apps and then, in parallel to that, I need to figure out what are my policies going to be and then how do I enforce or instantiate those policies That's where people are turning to these enterprise app stores from the vendors.

It's less of a selling and more of a management prerogative and design point. Then, of course, there is the complexity of the device environment.

Liu: The enterprise app store, is all about the app, how to procure and vet the app, so to ensure security and integrity, as well as distribute it to users, and controlling which users can have access to which apps. Also, it's enforcing policies, such as mandatory installs and updates of versions. Those are overall key elements of enterprise app store.

That said, it's not the end-all be-all. Enterprise app lifecycle management is much more than that. It's another issues, from tools to the actual hardware device controls, but certainly when it comes to apps and managing apps on mobile devices, mobile users, the enterprise app store is a big component of that.

Other features

Some enterprise app stores don’t go beyond a basic app distribution and tracking, but in others you'll find features such as license management. Not all apps will be developed in-house. Some will actually even be purchased from third parties.

In a mobile world, you can expect to see more and more of that, only because, if nothing else, most IT organizations don’t have the system and the resources in-house for mobile devices and apps, so those tend to look outside to third parties for their solutions.

So in that situation, license management is an important part of enterprise app stores, so that IT can actually control just who has what license. If their job changes, we can bring it back and reallocate it to another user. Otherwise, you lose that cost that you paid for the app. Things like that should be built into enterprise app store.

You can also do bulk licensing. Most recently, you saw Apple’s program around bulk purchasing for businesses. Similarly, enterprise app stores will have some mechanism, when it's applicable, where companies can make bulk purchases and manage a pool of licenses across entire employee or contractor base.

Gardner: John, do you see an economic benefit to this as well as a convenience and productivity benefit?

McCarthy: Initially it's going to be, "I need to manage these things." It's going to be knowing what's out there and making it easy for people to get at these things.

Sam made the point that this is much more of an ecosystem play. This notion where I am going to be developing everything myself isn’t going to work. There's going to be a lot of these third-party apps that the company, either on their own or through their services provider vets and says, "Here are all these other productivity apps that you can take advantage of. We have made sure that they work with our core business apps that we've developed."

But that focusing of what are limited IT resources is part of what's driving the app store phenomenon. IT doesn’t have time to build this themselves. They have to go out to a third-party universe, because the value isn’t going to come from managing these things. The value is going to come from these new customer or employee apps that allow us to rethink our business processes. We need to manage that complexity or we're going to have huge liabilities and huge risk and compliance issues.

Gardner: Sam, it sounds as if the enterprise app store could also have a benefiting role when it comes to a hybrid model. Apps might originate with third parties, clouds, or SaaS providers. So is that the vision over time with these app stores?

Liu: It shouldn’t matter, especially to the employee or the user, where the apps come from or who built it. It's all about the experience.

Also, in some ways it shouldn’t matter what device they're coming in from, whether it's a smartphone, an iPad, laptop, or desktop. There should be a similar rich user experience that’s appropriate for that particular form factor. So you abstract these hows and whats from a user standpoint. It becomes a more user-friendly and more productive environment for the user.

Reinventing the process

McCarthy: I think we are going to see more and more of these apps driving the reinvention of business processes. The reliance on these apps is only going to explode over the next three to five years. So we need a way, as we have talked about, where it's easy to find those apps, but also it's easy to manage those apps.

It's serving both sides, serving the needs of the businessperson or the customer, but also serving the requirements of the organization to allow us to harness this, but minimize the cost of managing these devices, making sure that they are secure, that we are not doing stuff with consumer data that’s going to get us into trouble. This is part of the whole rethinking of management and security in a world where it's much more mobile and much more outside the firewall.

Gardner: Any thoughts about the future for how businesses use app stores, not just internally, but as a business channel?

Liu: Actually we've run into a few enterprises already thinking in that mode. Initially when we talk to IT, they're thinking about the internal issues, especially about controlling management policies, but they're also being asked to build systems that are customer-facing, and in some cases systems that deliver and sell products to customers. So, where it applies, such as software and apps, they're looking at how to use the same paradigm for delivery of app services and apps to end customers.

So it's potentially a new channel and a new revenue model for companies, not just simply a cost issue of trying to manage and control.

McCarthy: And there are all of those businesses that are going to emerge where people talk about data exhausts. We know what people are doing. The app store becomes a way for people to tap into that and you can start to monetize that.

Gardner: And it strikes me that there shouldn’t be any reason that the same infrastructure that supports an internal app store wouldn’t also support an external one.

Liu: No, it's very similar. Furthermore, we have an app store white paper that’s freely available as a download on our website, www.partnerpedia.com.

Gardner: And John, any research reports or notes that are available on this subject from Forrester?

McCarthy: There are a number of reports that we've done outlining kind of the future of mobile management. People can come to forrester.com and search the site and they'll find the stuff that myself and a number of colleagues have written relative to this topic.

[For free white papers on enterprise app stores and better mobile management, go to www.forrester.com or www.partnerpedia.com.]

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

You may also be interested in:

• Enterprise App Store Trends Point to Need for Better Applications Marketplace for ISVs, Service Providers, Mobile Business Ecosystems
• Enterprises Seek New Ways to Package and Deliver Applications and Data to Mobile Devices
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• Verizon Rolls Out Enterprise App Store
• Enterprise 'App Store' Unveiled . . . Cool Idea

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 20th September 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Consumerisation of IT has been a popular recent discussion point, and it is the encroachment of consumer mobile devices – in particular smartphones and tablets – that appears to be causing most passion. The pro argument generally starts with one of the following; employees are already used to better tools in their personal life, we have to do this to recruit younger workforce, our brand will suffer if we’re not seen as leading edge, or it’s cheaper.

Whatever the reality or merits of the first three, the last point deserves closer investigation along with the impacts on organizational security. The problem is that allowing employees to pick, choose, buy and bring their own mobile tools into the workplace seems like a simple outsourcing of a particular procurement issue to someone who cares more passionately about it. However, it brings a lot more complex baggage than the neat little black or white cardboard box the hardware arrives in and aligns into three significant aspects to mobile consumerisation – device, contract, content.

Device is the part that most focus on, and why not? It’s the shiny gadget that has become cool and desirable. It taps into people’s feelings about self-esteem and status as well as any social needs for connection or geeky desire for the latest toy. These devices are expensive, and so on the face of it encouraging employees to BYOD (bring/buy your own device) saves money.

However there are bigger costs and risks at stake elsewhere for the organisation. Mobile devices typically need network contracts, unless relying on pay-as-you-go or free Wi-Fi for connection. All-embracing corporate contracts come with many financial economies of scale that a chaotic collection of independent employee ones will lack. Quocirca has explored this challenging issue more fully in its recent free to download report “Carrying the can”.

The third area, content, is equally complex, as whoever owns and pays for a mobile device - employee or employer - its use is likely to straddle personal and business activities. In addition to communications tools and access for business applications there will always be a mass of consumer content. For smartphones and tablets, “content” includes both software and data. The line is often blurred, and despite many technical and religious discussions along the lines of “app or browser”, the underlying issues of enterprise control of costs and risks apply either way.

The convergence of work and personal content on one device, no matter who purchased the hardware or pays for the connection, raises the issues of content security, suitability and diligence.

For most organisations mobile security is a major concern, and rightly so, as it is not only malicious acts such as theft and hacking or the careless loss of a device that might lead to breaches of security. Simply cutting corners for the sake of ‘expediency’ will not do. Two doctors were recently overheard on the train discussing how their operation lists were being downloaded to their iPhones. They found it useful, but wondered if it might not really be good practice, although they ‘presumed’ there was insufficient detail to indentify patients.

Whether this procedure was instigated by the users trying to make their lives simpler or someone in IT wanting to appear useful, is irrelevant. Mobile security needs to be seen to be taken seriously as well as actually being addressed through suitable on-device software, content access practices and services from providers. All too often it appears that there has been only a limited mobile security risk assessment or insufficient user training. These aspects may lack the intellectual pizzazz of security software, VPNs and all things prefixed ‘cyber’, but the social or human elements are critical for addressing the weakest link – the user.

For mobile devices, even the technical aspects of security are rarely completely understood in IT departments, and the more complex issues involving the diligence of checking suitability of use can really only be answered by those responsible for business processes. What is the right usage of any given application on a mobile device? It might depend on the individual role or department, work needs, employee location at the moment of access and actual device in use at the time. This is a complex mix of business and social requirements that need suitable policies and tools for enforcement.

Employees should know where they stand, what is acceptable and what is not. There are a number of mobile device management tools vendors that have stepped into this adjacent area of monitoring, directing and curtailing user behaviours. While this might seem a bit ‘big brother’ to some, many organisations will need audit trails to show they have sufficient safeguards in place to protect sensitive data. If the details of someone’s operation was found on the train, the health authority or employer would be where blame would be cast first, not the employee.

With BYOD these management tools now have the more difficult task of projecting the need for organisational control onto the personal device of an individual. They need to do this without compromising the integrity of business activities or violating the individual’s personal content or device. It is a fine line, and an easier way to tackle it would be to have one device for work, one for home - as many do now - but ultimately a portfolio of functions or personalities will need to reside on a single device.

The wave of virtualisation that hit the datacenter is already travelling through the network as virtual private networks and virtual desktop infrastructures. These offer an insight into how businesses might secure BYOD, and may extend virtualisation further into multiple virtual personalities (and operating systems) on the mobile devices at the edge. 

All of this has cost implications, and these content considerations as well as the contract issues need taking into account when organisations consider the savings of allowing employees to acquire their own devices. ‘Consumerisation’ is looking as simple and pain free as ‘convergence’.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 12th September 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Our next VMworld case study interview scouts out how the Tampa Bay Rays, a Major League Baseball team, is using an extensive amount of virtualization on and off the field.

The Rays' IT department has just started bringing more and more of their applications, data, and processes out to the mobile tier using virtualization and thin-client approaches to make the preferred mobile device, the tablet, super powerful for them. And they're extending the value of virtualization into disaster recovery (DR) too.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the recent VMworld 2011 Conference. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments.

To hear more winning statistics about the Rays and their back-end to client virtualization experience, we're joined by Juan Ramirez, Senior Director for Information Technology with the Tampa Bay Rays. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Why has virtualization been good for your organization?

Ramirez: Back in 2007, when we first looked at virtualization, we had a lot of issues. Our main data center was located at our stadium in Saint Petersburg, Fla. We were actually running out of space. Electricity was a huge problem. We kept hearing from our operations department that our data centers and our equipment were just consuming too much energy.

We had to come up with a new data center. We needed to build something else, because we were just basically outgrowing it. We needed a plan to say, "You know what, this is going to be our new data center. We're going to be there 5 to 10 years," without going back and requesting additional space or consuming more electricity.

That's when everything started. We went from a two-room data center room to basically just using half of that room with virtualization. We started very small — four hosts to manage our own infrastructure. Now we have 10 hosts in production and growing.

Another dilemma that we had was every time we needed to provision servers, or a new application needed to be introduced, it would have taken weeks, if not a month, for us to procure the proper hardware and software to make this available for different departments. So we needed to cut time on that and make things happen faster. It is a fast business.

Gardner: To what degree have you actually embraced virtualization?

Ramirez: Currently, we're at 95 percent. We had certain goals to start — about 50 percent — and gradually every year just adding more and more resources. At 95 percent, you can see that we really value this, and this is the route that our business is going to.

Gardner: What IT does it take to support a major league team?

Ramirez: First of all, coming from a small-market team, we don’t have the luxury to have a large IT department to support the 300 plus users that we currently have. So it’s very important for us to be very proactive and be ahead of the game.

It is a 24×7 operation, especially during the season, which as we all know, is one of the longest in professional sports, with 162 games per year, not counting playoffs. So it is challenging for us, but I believe that we have a great team.

We also have great resources that we've implemented in the last five or six years and we're on top of it. Without VMware and the different products that we deploy, I think today we'd be in a lot of trouble if we wouldn’t have gone that route.

Gardner: Clearly it's working for you. Tell me about how many apps you're supporting. What sort of workloads have you?

Ramirez: From the applications perspective, we have everything from our scanning application, which is homegrown SQL back-end, Windows application front-end, and web-based front-end to our finance departments, Microsoft Great Plains 2010.

We also have our customer relationship management (CRM) system, which runs on a proprietary application from Ticketmaster, to homegrown application. Close to 10–30 applications are used on a daily basis from every department and different aspect, which is incredible.

Our email system, Microsoft Exchange 2010, is 100 percent virtualized. And every new application that comes up in our pipeline is basically virtualized. Going forward, nothing resides in our physical server, which is tremendous for us.

When we started, we wanted to go slow and to make sure that everyone throughout the organization had a good feel for it, a good vibe. Once we earned the trust from the different departments and other department heads, we introduced it, we showed them and we trained them. It was a no-brainer. Everyone was on board. Everyone loved the technology. Just loved the fact that while it previously took weeks and months for them to provision anything from our department, it's now hours, at the most, which is great.

It also helps us big time with disaster recovery (DR). Our second data center is located in our Port Charlotte Spring Training facility. It's easier for us to move workloads, depending on where we're at in the season and the time of the year. We can move a machine from the production main data center to the backup data center and provide those resources over to our different departments.

When we started with DR, it was a very tough decision because we wanted to do everything automated, but management did not see the need for it. So we actually started with manual processes. We started building a data center down in Port Charlotte. We did some migrations and that didn’t work out too well. So we came back to the drawing board and said, we need a tool that can help us automate this process. This has to be 100 percent automated.

Our recovery manager had just come out and we wanted to test it. We actually beta tested it and received some evaluation licenses. We put together a quick product to show administration and management how good the product was and how important it was to us, especially in the location that we are at.

The rest is basically history. We have pretty much 100 percent coverage on everything that is virtualized. We're able to take periodic snaps and move them over to the VR facility, where we do a weekly test of each individual virtual machine (VM).

Gardner: So that must make you sleep a little better during hurricane season?

Ramirez: Absolutely. It used to be nightmare from June to the end of September around here, but not anymore.

Gardner: Let's move into this other innovative area you have been experimenting with, and it's the use VMware View 4.6. You've been involved with moving into thin clients, virtualized desktops, and I understand also using mobile apps on tablets. Tell me why that's been important for you and what you've done.

Ramirez: Throughout the year, we've grown tremendously. We now have close to 250 remote users. All those remote users need to be equipped with very expensive laptops. It's very expensive and very hard to manage.

We're a small IT department. It's very hard to track down 250 users throughout the year. It's very hard to keep older machines up-to-date. When something goes wrong, it gets ugly pretty fast. We needed to get an alternative and come up with a plan where it would be easier to manage, where it would be easier for them to conduct their work.

We started very basic by putting the in VMware View client. First of all, we set up a lab here and asked a few of our key guys to test and give us some feedback. The feedback was overwhelming. We started with five or six guys, and now we probably have close to 65 users using it on a daily basis.

Users have come back and handed in their laptops. Now, they're strictly on iPad or Android tablet, which is tremendous for us. It's easier for my department to manage. It's easier for them to go out there on the field and just use a lightweight device to connect and conduct business with it.

So it's big for us right now. It should be a huge hit in the upcoming year. With our development department, everything that we are projecting is basically basing it on VMware View.

Gardner: In addition to VMware View, you also seem to be using an iPad app, how did that come about? How does that fit into the equation?

Ramirez: That came as we started adding more users and receiving feedback. I started using it for my daily management show, introduced a few key personnel to it, and they liked the idea. Now, everyone is basically using that app to connect and do most of their work.

We decided to introduce other departments and show them the capability and how easy it is to connect and get their business done without turning on their laptop — waiting for it to boot, the VPN, the password, and all that stuff that sometimes gets in the way.

Gardner: I understand you have scouts, managers, you have lots of folks out in the field. They're at ballparks. They're watching ballplayers. They're in the field, and can they just download an iPad app and then sign into VMware View? How do they actually connect in, and what are the logistics for really linking your resources and apps out to that field?

Ramirez: Everyone in the organization wants a tablet. They come to us, which helps us big time. Normally we do the procurement for them, or if they go out there and buy it, they will just bring it over to us, and by default our installation and process includes that application. It's the first application that they're introduced to.

My department is able to figure the necessary settings on the application and just leave it ready for them and let them know that right now you can just use your iPad application to connect into your resources and conduct, and use most of the applications that you will be using on a daily basis. It's a big plus for us and for the user. They just love the fact that they have a small application, a small tablet, and one application to deal with. Everything else is handled from our end.

Gardner: So this is productivity for you, because you're supporting more users in the way that they want to work, probably with fewer resources when it all comes down to it, when you can consolidate. And then they're getting that added productivity of access to the data and the apps wherever they are, whenever they want to use it. So it's kind of a win-win.

Ramirez: Absolutely. From a management perspective, it’s great, it's awesome, getting apps for a better application and a better system to have deployed.

We've had nightmares throughout the years, lost laptops with very sensitive information. We have to protect users, and there are so many things that goes on on a daily basis. Now if there's an issue, it just takes seconds to correct, and the users just go back in and continue doing their work.

Gardner: What’s been the return on investment (ROI) for you moving in these directions?

Ramirez: The ROI has been huge. We used to buy 10–15 servers on a yearly basis. Now, we just procure our servers every three or four years. We get hit from left and right with different departments. They have different needs — we need 10 servers, we need 15 servers. We no longer have to procure those and spend all that money right away. We have resources allocated for it.

So the ROI has been there. As a matter of fact, we did research two years ago and have discovered that on our initial investment for both data centers the return on investment was 24 months, which was probably more than we thought. We didn’t realize how fast we were able to recoup our investment and how much flexibility we had moving forward.

For DR, we were coming from a situation where we had nothing. Everything was in one data center, and if a storm came by, we would basically be out of business. Having a fully automated system in place is huge for us.

I don’t even know where to start and what number to tag this with, but it is very important to us. It has helped with insurance cost. It has helped with just the ease of everyone knowing that if something happens near our stadium, we have our data and we can still conduct business moving forward.

We are buying fewer laptops. We no longer need all the extra services that with 250 laptops can get very costly. Instead of ordering an $1,800 laptop for a user, which normally lives 12–24 months, now we can just buy an iPad or have the users use their own iPad, and connect. That makes a big saving for us going forward.

We have very big plans to move ahead and try to be 99 percent virtualized. Private cloud is very important. It's high for us. We keep growing, and our needs and demands are huge. So we definitely have a lot of plans.

Coming down the line, we're counting big on the upcoming vSphere 5 and SRM 5. That’s going to help us tremendously. It has some features there that are must-have for us.

Again, moving forward, application development and everything will hopefully be based on a thin app and ease of use and administration for our users. VMware View is another big component for us.

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

By: Albert Pang, President, APPS RUN THE WORLD Posted: 5th September 2011 Copyright APPS RUN THE WORLD © 2011

With growing signs of leading one of the most important segments of the enterprise applications market, Salesforce.com embodies the disruptive power of Cloud-based delivery of sales, marketing and customer service software.

At the same time, Salesforce.com is increasingly using its scalable platform to reach beyond its core competency of selling customer relationship management (CRM) applications by unleashing a floodgate of applications developed by its ISV partners to help customers build the next-generation Social Enterprise, a movement that is designed to engage more users, allow for easy and real-time collaboration across different roles, and ultimately yield tangible results to their bottom line.

Social Enterprise Soars Into Space
The power of Salesforce.com was evident at the Dreamforce event where it is pushing into new Social Enterprise frontiers in a series of announcements including an equity investment in ERP vendor Infor in order to help drive back-office data to the new era of real-time collaboration among salespeople, customers as well as those involved in non-sales functions like finance, production and supply chain management.

Similarly Salesforce.com has invested in startup Kenandy, a Cloud-based ERP vendor founded by Sandra Kurtzig, a guru in manufacturing applications who is expected to be instrumental in helping Salesforce.com reach not just regular salespeople, but also production supervisors and quality managers of asset-intensive companies from Siemens to Toyota.

In addition to the investments, Salesforce.com introduced a new portfolio of Social Media-infused tools and services including Chatter Now for instant messaging, Chatter Service for self-service knowledge gathering and Data.com for enhanced crowd-sourcing with Dun & Bradstreet’s proprietary business data. All these new offerings will start leveraging HTML5 to bedazzle users with an attractive frontend ideal for mobile device viewing.

During the week-long Dreamforce, the common catch-all phrase from Salesforce.com executives was that Social Enterprise has become the rocket ship "that will propel the business of anyone associated with the vendor’s platform and applications strategies to stratospheric levels". However the sunny outlook is clouded by a host of issues that Salesforce.com needs to address in order to fulfill its vision of taking its stakeholders along for the rocket ship journey.

There lies the paradox of one of the most successful software companies that has transformed the CRM applications market for more than a decade. Yet it has failed to make a profit consistently, while its recurring revenues from its existing customers appear to have stalled.

Salesforce.com Dethrones Siebel
During that period, Salesforce.com dethroned the former champion of CRM software, Siebel, by reinventing the market segment with the innovative use of the on-demand delivery model, or for that matter redefining how customers should be served in the new era.

For its part, Siebel scored a series of home runs with its integrated sales force, marketing and customer service automation applications until it was weakened by tumbling sales following the Dot Com bust. Finally Oracle acquired Siebel in a $5.8 billion deal in 2005. Unmistakably Salesforce.com is in a stronger position than Siebel at any point in its history. When Siebel was acquired by Oracle, it only had fewer than 5,000 customers. Today Salesforce.com has more than 100,400 customers. And there are thousands more from its recent acquisitions of Heroku and Radian6 that have shored up its capabilities in Web development in multiple programming languages and social media applications.

As the following table shows, Salesforce.com was the No. 1 CRM applications vendor worldwide in 2010, edging past Oracle and SAP and others still reeling from the last recession. Salesforce.com, which led the $15.8 billion market with nearly 10% share last year, never skipped a beat even in the depth of the recession by picking up more customers and recurring revenues than its competitors.

In a survey of more than 1,000 IT managers, executives and CIOs conducted by APPS RUN THE WORLD this summer, Salesforce.com was found to be the primary Sales Force Automation system at more than 12% of the surveyed companies—consisting of mostly enterprises with more than $500 million in revenues. In many cases these companies have positioned their Salesforce.com system as the primary CRM engine, displacing Siebel that has laid dormant after years of under-utilization or failed implementations. For example, Salesforce.com stands side by side with Siebel at a 6000-person media company acting as a customer-facing engine that sits between its ad servers and the back-end Oracle ERP to support its online advertising business.

Additionally Salesfore.com is on a $2.2 billion annual revenue run rate after posting a 38% jump in sales to $546 million in its latest quarter. During that period, Salesforce.com signed more than 60 deals with each yielding at least $1 million in subscription revenues over the length of the contract. It also signed three $10 million+ deals, plus another $10 million+ transaction following the end of the quarter.

Salesforce.com Faces Considerable Challenges
However, such success stories mask a host of problems with Salesforce.com. By one measure, Salesforce.com gets less subscription revenue per customer than some of Social CRM applications vendors as if they were beating Salesforce.com at its own game because the pervasive nature of their Cloud-based services has translated into bigger subscription sales.

As the following chart shows, Salesforce.com received $1,631 in average monthly subscription revenue per customer in its latest quarter. By comparison, Eloqua, which sells Cloud-based marketing automation applications and is also an ISV partner of Salesforce.com, saw its monthly subscription revenues from its more than 1,000 customers reaching $4,966 in the second quarter of 2011, according to its S1 filing in advance of its initial public offering.

Social business applications vendor Jive, which is also planning its own IPO, did even better with monthly subscription revenues averaging $7,874 from its 635 customers during the same period, according to its S1 filing. Despite a steep rise in its early years, Salesforce.com’s monthly subscription revenue per customer has been stuck at $1,400 level over the past few years.

What that suggests is that Salesforce.com’s continuous growth in subscriber base has not translated into bigger wallet share among its customers. The lingering recession could have played a role behind some companies reducing their Salesforce.com expenditures as part of their overall cost-cutting moves. In addition, new services like Chatter have been bundled into its CRM sales without incurring additional revenues. Another reason is that the new wave of social CRM apps vendors are beginning to undermine Salesforce.com’s mind share and market positioning because the newcomers are considered easier and more affordable to use on a large scale.

Jive, for one, is said to have more than 15 million users running its products. Cloud-based vendors from Cornerstone OnDemand to SuccessFactors are touting six million and 15 million subscribers, respectively. Salesforce.com, which has not publicly revealed the number of users in recent years, is estimated to have fewer than three million users.

Salesforce.com will face stiffer challenges than ever in getting its products into the hands of potential users. In the same survey that we conducted this summer, one of the biggest electronics makers has decided to adopt Eloqua as its primary marketing automation system, despite the fact that it also uses Salesforce.com, Microsoft Dynamics CRM and Siebel to automate its sales function in different parts of the organization.

To boost utilization of its software throughout an organization, Salesforce.com introduced a new social enterprise license agreement that allows every employee within its customers to have unrestricted use of its products.

It is not clear whether such a program would help address another big problem, which has to do with the inability of Salesforce.com to make a decent profit even though its products have been on the market for more than 10 years.

The cumulative earnings (net income after tax) for Salesforce.com since its founding in 1999 amounted to $173.4 million, or 2.7% of its aggregated subscription revenues of $6.4 billion. In the first half of its fiscal 2012, it lost $3.7 million following a series of acquisitions. By comparison Oracle posted $3.2 billion in earnings, or 30% of $10.7 billion in total revenues in its last quarter of fiscal 2011. SAP posted $851 million in profit after tax, or 23% of its product sales of $3.7 billion in the second quarter of 2011.

One of the reasons behind Salesforce.com’s spotty earnings track record has to do with its heavy sales and marketing spending, which represented half of its revenues in its latest quarter. Oracle spends 20% of its revenues on sales and marketing. Intuit, which sells both packaged and on-demand ERP and business management applications and is twice the size of Salesforce.com, spends only 29% on sales and marketing in its latest fiscal year. There are signs that Salesforce.com is making an effort to address its high sales and marketing expense ratio by working closely with its ISV, reseller and systems integration partners.

At last week’s event, Salesforce.com announced a $50 million fund to help its consulting partners expand their capacity, thereby lowering the costs for the vendor to sell and service its customers. However these new programs will take time before they can have a positive impact on its financial results.

Salesforce.com To Shift Strategies
In the meantime, there are near-term measures that it can do to remedy the situation, while positioning itself to become one of the biggest beneficiaries of the Social Enterprise movement. For one thing, sales force automation has become a losing proposition when much of the selling is done over online commerce and end-to-end order management.

The rise of social media points to the fact that its future is tied not to salespeople using Salesforce.com to better connect with their customers, but rather harnessing the collaborative power of all employees (sales, marketing, R&D and support), partners and even customers themselves working with tools like Chatter Now to address specific customer requirements.

That’s why Oracle has spent $1 billion on its recent acquisition of ATG as well as additional resources to promote the Distributed Order Orchestration strategy that is at the heart of its Fusion Applications. While Oracle may have lost many Sales Force Automation deals to Salesforce.com in the past, the real value of the Siebel assets lies in hard-to-replicate expertise in such verticals as pharmaceuticals, financial services and communications. Again Salesforce.com is acknowledging that its future will be based on how relevant its solutions will be in the eyes of these vertical industry users and it’s working closely with its channel to address that.

The last thing, or perhaps the most important move, is for Salesforce.com to turn Chatter into a full-blown open social network, broadly expanding its reach to tens of millions of users. Currently Chatter, which is being run as a private social network for businesses, has been adopted by 100,000 organizations. However it is not clear how defensible is the positioning of Chatter when formidable players from FaceBook to Google allow segments of their hundreds of millions users to create business-class private social networks.

If it fails to thwart such threats, Salesforce.com may need to consider the unthinkable by buying a complementary social network like LinkedIn. At a market cap of more than $8 billion, it would be an expensive purchase.

Still the window of opportunity is narrowing and Salesforce.com may need every rocket ship component that it can find in order to sustain its leadership in the CRM applications market and become the biggest Cloud service provider behind the making of the new Social Enterprise.

Let us help you better understand the positioning and market shares of CRM and Social Enterprise vendors like Salesforce.com by emailing us at info@appsruntheworld.com.

By: Andy Jones, Director and General Manager, Europe, Xerox Global Document Outsourcing Posted: 26th August 2011 Copyright Xerox Global Document Outsourcing © 2011

The saying is probably as old as the marketing business: It costs more to acquire a new customer than to keep an existing one.

Many companies today focus the bulk of their marketing budgets on acquiring new customers. But what happens after that? Once prospects become customers, they typically receive an ongoing series of routine communications that do little to deepen the relationship or build the brand. Statements and invoices, policy notifications and updates—these “transactional” documents convey important information. But that’s about it.

In a world where competition is intensifying and long-term customer loyalty is increasingly viewed as a prize corporate asset, the failure to maximise the impact of these valuable touchpoints represents a missed opportunity to improve the bottom line.

This customer opportunity can be most commonly seen within the financial services industry. If a bank has a 20 percent customer attrition rate on average, the firm must acquire 20 percent net new clients each year just to remain in the black. The cost of customer acquisition averages 200 euros per retail account.  So it’s easy to see why using marketing spend effectively to maintain customer loyalty is essential to revenue stability and, ultimately, growth. Not only this, customer experience will be a key competitive battleground for financial institutions going forward; customers will join for a superior experience and customers will leave over a poor one.

We offer the following tips to financial services institutions to make the most of customer communications:

1. Strike early: Most cross-selling opportunities occur during the first few months of a customer relationship. Research shows that banks that communicate with customers early and often in the relationship improve cross-selling results and lower attrition rates. Customer welcome packs are a common means of building on the initial relationship; they need to be crafted carefully and tailored to the customer and product needs.

2. Be responsive: By scanning and electronically storing the documents needed to open an account, banks can provide a faster, more efficient account-opening process, obtain information for more personalised communications, ensure greater data accuracy and increase compliance. Looking through paper records or shunting them off to storage facilities will not be deemed adequate in the future. Start thinking now about back file conversions, information repositories and comprehensive workflow capabilities to make servicing the customer a natural and seamless act for your customer service agents.

3. Take inventory: Any communication with a customer—by phone, web or face-to-face—is an opportunity to acquire data about their life stages, attitudes, needs and preferences. The information can then be centralised and integrated into the bank’s inventory of brochures, catalogues, fulfilment literature, direct mail and statements so that details about individual customers or targeted segments can be placed in a bank’s own document templates to deliver greater impact. Analytics will be crucial; banks can take a page from what retailers do in this regard, in order to know your customer well enough to both sell and service him.

4. Get personal: While most information from banks today appeals generically to a mass audience, they are more likely to generate sales if they personalise every document, e-mail, etc. Incorporating variables in documents such as the customer’s name, product type or life event is the key to generating response rates that far outstrip the typical 0.5–2 percent expected from direct-mail campaigns. Of course you also need to know if your customer will welcome personalised communication or if it will be considered an invasion of privacy. 

For example, getting personal can go hi-tech with quick response codes (QR codes), modules that marketers print on communications for customers to scan with smartphones, directing them to a personalised landing page with tailored information about products and services, case studies, helpful tools, etc. In order for QR codes to be effective, marketers should stay true to the basic principles of marketing. People will only engage and interact with the content if it is relevant to them. The content on the initial communications piece must be relevant in order for the person to be interested in navigating to the landing page, and the content on the site must be relevant in order for the person to spend a meaningful amount of time there.  

5. Keep it simple: Keep product information—including rates and fees—as simple as possible (and feasible given regulatory requirements) so bank staff can explain them and customers can understand them.

6. Be creative: Customers say they would be more responsive to more informal and creative communications from their financial institution; get the marketing and legal departments to work together to produce understandable and compliant communication.

7. Change the channel: Different customers prefer different communications channels (direct mail, e-mail, online, text messages, etc.), so ask early in the relationship which method the customer prefers and stick with it. Communicate offers in terms that customers or prospects will readily understand, through the channel they prefer, and at a time when they are open to receiving it.

8. Embrace social media: Don’t be afraid. In the modern communications landscape, customers are increasingly expecting their service providers to communicate with them via social media. Bank executives must ask themselves: What are our consumers’ expectations and requirements around social media? What information do they want shared via social media, and what conversations do they want to participate in? To address these questions, banks have begun to create social media teams charged with transforming traditional methods of doing business. Beyond social channels, however, banks must decide whether to build the infrastructure and processes to manage the social media communications, or to “borrow” the infrastructure and process instead (meaning: outsource it). Social media channels are fabulous opportunities to learn what your customers are thinking about.

Personalising customer communications promises to be an effective way to maintain customer loyalty and win new customers when done efficiently. The document supply chain is crucial to this end: In many cases banks keep a large marketing inventory, employ multiple service providers, and duplicate many processes—slowing down the document supply chain and incurring unnecessary costs. To be able to reap the benefits of personalised communications knowing when to engage a third-party solution provider who specialises in optimising business processes is becoming more important.

Lloyds Banking Group, the UK’s largest retail bank, understands that a strong business process outsourcing partner can automate workflow, consolidate vendors and improve touch points with their customers. Working with Xerox, the bank has transformed its document supply chain and is now supporting its excellent customer service with high-quality, targeted marketing materials while at the same time streamlining business processes and realising savings in cost and time. Suppliers can bring innovation, use technology and process enhancements in customer care, transaction processing as well as document and digital asset management capabilities to improve efficiencies.

Power is changing hands in the industry, slowly but inexorably. Power is moving to the customer. Customers will insist on dealing with their financial institution when and where they choose, with their preferred channel and on their terms. Customers will want to be in control and know that their financial institution consciously put them in control with their needs first. Improving the customer communications process is a vitally important step for attracting and retaining the right customers.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 3rd August 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

This week Quocirca had a briefing with a security vendor which provided an insight into a fundamental change going on in the use of IT and one of the major drivers for that change. The vendor was Bradford Networks, named not for the city in Yorkshire UK, but small town in New Hampshire USA).

Bradford provides products to carry out a range of network management and control capabilities; network discovery, end-point management, network access control and policy enforcement around network usage. None of that is unique to Bradford, which is perhaps why, when it started selling this product line back in 2005/6, it focused on a niche—higher education. Not any old aspect of network usage in the sector, but specifically student dorms, or halls of residence as they are called than in the UK.

The problem Bradford helps university IT administrators manage is the wide variety and ever-changing identities of devices students want to attach to the network services offered in such places. Even five years ago, this included Windows PCs, Macs, gaming devices and early smartphones (mainly BlackBerrys). Today of course you can add in Android devices, iPhones, iPads and others. The range of devices supported by Bradford, which extends to CCTV cameras, door entry systems and firewalls is impressive.

Bradford has been successful selling to this niche in the USA and also in the UK, where, via a single reseller, Khipu Networks, it has signed up many UK universities, including Oxford, Nottingham and Durham. A case study for Durham University can be seen here.

What makes Bradford’s story interesting to Quocirca is the speed at which its business is changing. In the last couple of years Bradford says the profile of its business has switched from almost all higher education to 85% other sectors including healthcare, manufacturing and banking. Bradford says this change has been demand driven and is not the result of deliberate targeting (for example, it still has just the one reseller in the UK, but is planning to change that).

There are two reasons for this change in the business profile at Bradford. The first is the range of devices that organisations now have to support, as Bradford says; “now the rest of the world has started to look like [the higher] education [sector]”. But the second reason is perhaps more profound; the students of 5 or 6 years ago are the employees of today; the change at Bradford is surely a bell-wether for the growing tide of consumerisation, a big driver for which is the entry to the work place of the IT savvy “generation Y”.

Of course, Bradford is not alone in addressing this issue. It will have to make its own case against a range of larger vendors all targeting end-point management and security. This includes end-point management vendors such as Kaseya, LANDesk and IBM/BigFix, but also IT security vendors—for example McAfee, Symantec and Trend Micro are all now investing in managing end-points as well as securing them.

There is another vendor that could be added to both these last two lists; Microsoft. It too is in the end-point management business with it Systems Centre Configuration Manager (SCCM) and recently announced InTune on-demand service, which Quocirca wrote about in a previous blog post. Microsoft is also in the end security business with its Forefront End-point Protection (FEP) product which Quocirca wrote about here.

However, as both posts point out, Microsoft is missing the point. As ever, it lives in its own Microsoft bubble. Its end-point management and security products only address Windows PCs, not even its own struggling Windows Mobile operating system. Generation Y has certainly found there is more to life that Microsoft and Bradford Networks is benefiting from this. If Microsoft does not change its game its fortunes will surely head south like that of its new mobile devices partner, Nokia.

For Microsoft this tide of consumerisation impacts two of its biggest product lines that account for over half its business; Windows desktop and Office. Quocirca would not be the first to speculate about the long term future of Microsoft. In its June 9th leader celebrating the 100th birthday of IBM, The Economist speculated which of today’s IT vendors might reach a similar age. Microsoft was not one of them.

Two recent Quocirca reports, sponsored by Kaseya, cover end-point security are available for free download: The IT Profit Centre and The total MSP.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 21st July 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Selecting the right mobile business device is no longer a simple matter. When mobile phones just looked like phones and laptops were the only type of mobile computer with a “qwerty” keyboard the criteria most often used would be latest, lightest and largely the same (as each other ie consistency). Most 'road warriors' would be equipped with a ‘standard build’ of each device and the job of procurement/facilities departments would be to ensure that those who needed a particular device would get it.

This task has always been beset with challenges. In the past some employees would try anything to get upgraded to the newer (typically smaller) phones and the latest (typically better specified) laptops. With only a relatively small number of employees having mobile devices, there would often be a (possibly grudging) recipient for the hand-me-downs of those fortunate to benefit from upgrades. No wonder so many phones were ‘accidently’ dropped, driven over or lost.

How times have changed. Now far more employees have experienced the latest technology as consumers and expect to be well equipped with mobile devices at work. Most now want bigger phones with more features or functions and smaller laptops or even tablets with fewer.

However, according to a recent survey conducted by EMC owned Mozy, a specialist in online backup, some less desirable ways to get the latest hardware are still prevalent. This research looked into the rates of replacement for various IT devices and the reasons given by those in small and medium sized businesses; it produced some interesting results, especially for mobile phones. While 60% cited corporate process and a sensible business justification to get a new mobile, 13% would try to break their old device and 4% would claim the new one was for a (non-existent) new starter.

From the earliest business use of mobile phones, desire for personal choice may not have changed, but there are at least more acceptable ways for personal preferences to be achieved. The research also showed that 15% would go to a store to trade in and buy a new device in order to get the one they wanted.

This 'bring-your-own-device' (BYOD) approach has been gathering momentum in recent months, but does vary across regions, and acceptance depends on the size of the organisation. Small and medium sized businesses are more likely to be more tolerant of variety, whereas large enterprises like uniformity, standards, and commonality. This is particularly important when considering who is responsible for maintaining and supporting the various devices, and even more critically when dealing with the inevitable security concerns.

However there is a bigger issue that is often missed—ownership of mobile contracts. These have cost implications far larger than what’s included in the tariff, from intra-company phones calls, to the loss of economies of scale for corporate discounts. Simply allowing or encouraging employees to choose their own service provider as well as the devices themselves could introduce costs that far outweigh any perceived savings from not having to buy devices. UK based mobile communications management specialist, ttMobiles, predicts that companies adopting an uncontrolled BYOD policy could see overall company phone costs rise by 27%.

Anecdotal evidence suggests ever more sophisticated commercial models are becoming used to support personal choice, including providing employees with a mobile 'allowance' and then allowing them to top this up from their own funds in order to have a higher spec or more personalised preference. This further blurs the question of responsibility and liability associated with the mobile device, the software that is acquired for it and the data that may end up on it.

This in particular raises further issues, especially when the taxing complexities of write off or personal benefit are considered. There may be some slight tax pain for some employees, but most will happily pay to get their favourite device. Organisations however, strive to get the best lifetime book value out of their assets for the benefits of shareholders and need to ensure that, whoever does the choosing, the company accounts still look good.

A balanced approach that combines personal choice with corporate control and responsibility is now required. But while the old centralised control of 'standard issue or nothing' has gone out of the window, organisations will still need to monitor, mediate and manage employee mobile choices to a greater or lesser extent. This is especially important when it comes to selecting mobile contracts, where significant economies of scale can kick in, and the organisation is typically footing the monthly bill.

This issue is explored further in Quocirca’s report “Carrying the can” which is freely available for download.

By: Matthew Wailling, Director, Cordless Consultants Posted: 7th July 2011 Copyright Cordless Consultants © 2011

In my last post I gave you a list of 2011’s top ten technologies; those which should be permeating your consciousness when considering your next budget allocation.

First on that list were fuel cells, and what they could mean for portable devices such as tablets. It may not be long before they allow your workforce to be connected anywhere and for far longer periods of time. There are now some 150 different tablets available and, believe it or not, they’re not all from Apple! The guiding principles for any mobile device are that it’s always on, always connected and, well, portable. This means two things 1) it’s going to need a lot of power and 2) it can’t really be tethered down by a power cable. 

As someone who’s now on their second iPhone, I’m all too aware that a busy morning out of the office means hunting for a plug by lunchtime. And this challenge isn’t just limited to Apple. The iPad 2 has a battery that should last all day, but what’s the experience of the owner who’s using it rather than wearing it like a fashion statement? And the excitement around the BlackBerry playbook is already being tempered by commentator concerns about its perceived battery life. So what’s the solution? While doing a bit less work and turning devices off for elevenses may be attractive for some, it‘s not be suitable or appropriate for every business model.

Could the answer lie with electrochemical energy conversion devices (or as the marketing department calls them; fuel cells)?  We are already familiar with ‘electrochemical energy conversion devices’ otherwise known as the battery. A battery has all its chemicals stored inside, which it converts to energy (electricity), but as we know it eventually goes flat unless you’re connected to a power socket. And it seems pre-programmed to happen mere seconds before we click ‘save’! Fuel cells, however, work on the same principle, but as chemicals, typically hydrogen and oxygen, constantly flow into the device, electricity constantly flows out.  Fuel cells generate electricity quietly, they don’t use fossil fuels, and there’s no ongoing pollution either; the by-product is water vapour. 

Fuel cells have been around for a while, with the first (alkaline fuel cells) being used by NASA in the 1960s. Unfortunately these were highly susceptible to contamination and very expensive—not great characteristics for something your average user will throw in a bag and lug about the city. Thankfully things have moved on, and a number of solutions are nearing market readiness. One such device is the Mobion from MTI Micro. This portable (cigarette packet size) fuel cell has no moving parts and is estimated to provide up to 60 hours of silent power before it needs a replacement ethanol fuel cartridge—and water vapour is the only waste produced.

A second exciting approach is being made by Swedish company MyFC, which has developed the PowerTrekk portable fuel cell, using hydrogen as its fuel source. The PowerTrekk is marketed as able to work in extreme weather conditions (presumably so you can charge your BlackBerry en route to the top of Everest). Again, the only waste product in power production is water. While these show interesting potential, both the PowerTrekk and Mobion are external charge packs. So although they give hours of extra work-time for the agile worker, it’s yet another device to squeeze into the briefcase (or backpack for those on more mountainous terrain).

This technology only becomes truly exciting when it is integrated with mobile devices, replacing the traditional Lithium-Ion battery. MyFC are moving down this road by developing Fuel Cell ‘blades’—3mm thick sheets that could be integrated to the back of a laptop screen or the bottom of other mobile devices. All we need now is for mobile device manufacturers to work with the likes of MyFC and maybe the mobile vision can become a reality. 

So what about these myriad tablets on the market?  Admittedly, some are wonderful and some are, well, less so but the model that showed huge potential was the fuel cell-powered Windows 7 tablet from Fluid Systems. This $80k prototype created a lot of excitement at the start of the year and could have marked the start of a new era. Unfortunately, Fluid Systems now reports that its primary investors have withdrawn funding, citing nervousness about competition from established brands such as Apple and Motorola. Sad news for a company that was taking great strides into the future. So perhaps while fuel cell devices are still the grail, we need an Apple or a RIM to focus enough effort and investment in this area to bring them to market. 

There are some questions that need answering before we’re in a position to throw away our power cables. One advantage of a mobile device for the business traveller is that we can work when flying, but hydrogen and aviation don’t have a great track record. As you can only just about take an HB pencil through airport security without feeling under serious scrutiny, there may be a way to go to convince airlines that 300 passengers carrying hydrogen cells is nothing to worry about. But that’s a technical point I’m sure the developers can solve. I’m more worried about leaving my fuel cell phone turned on in my pocket and ending up with a very wet suit.

 Next time, Matt Wailling will be getting up close and personal with 3D screens.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 15th June 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Talend, an open-source middleware provider, today announced Talend Cloud, a unified integration platform for the cloud and hybrid IT environments.

An extension of the recently announced Unified Integration Platform, Talend Cloud is designed for organizations looking to manage their data integration processes, whether on-premise, in the cloud, via software as a service (SaaS) or for hybrid environments. [Disclosure: Talend is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Talend is not providing its own public cloud offering at this time, but is making Talend Cloud available now to enable other cloud and enterprise hybrid users to mange data via a community-enhanced portfolio of data and services connectors.

For organizations with hybrid IT environments—that combine on-premise, private cloud, public cloud and SaaS—application and data integrations are difficult, yet critical to leveraging these multi-sourced models. Concerns surrounding latency, bandwidth, permissions and security are causing new forms of integration and data management challenges.

Talend Cloud provides flexible and secure integration of on-premise systems, cloud-based systems, and SaaS applications, said Talend. It also provides a common environment for users to manage the lifecycle of integration processes including a graphical development environment, a deployment mechanism and runtime environment for operations and a monitoring console for management—all built on top of a shared metadata repository.

It strikes me that these services are directly applicable to business intelligence and master data management for analytics, as the data can be cleansed, accessed and crunched in clouds, even as it originates from multiple locations. Hybrid data cloud analytics can be very powerful, the Talend Cloud is helping to jump-start this value.

“Although cloud has become ubiquitous in today’s IT deployments, many organizations are still trying to determine how to function in hybrid environments,” said Bertrand Diard, co-founder and CEO of Talend, in a release. “Using Talend Cloud, customers can address these issues within a single platform that addresses a broad range of integration needs and technologies, ranging from data-oriented services to data quality and master data management, via a unified environment and a flexible deployment model.”

Deployment Flexibility
The new platform provides deployment flexibility for Talend’s solutions and technologies within the Unified Integration Platform, including data integration, data quality, master data management and enterprise service bus. All components can be installed transparently in the cloud, on premise, or in hybrid mode. Key features include:

• The ability to expand and contract deployments as required
• Support for standard systems and protocols
• An open-source model that makes resources accessible by various of platforms and devices
• Modular architecture that allows organizations to add, modify or remove functionality as requirements change over time
• The ability to maintain security and reliability of integration, allowing organizations to meet customer service-level agreements (SLAs)

Talend Cloud provides automated deployment on such popular cloud platforms such as Amazon EC2, Cloud.com and Eucalyptus. Also included is the addition of new connectors offering native connectivity to a broad range of key cloud technologies and applications as well as the most popular SaaS applications.

New connectors continue to be added on a regular basis, either by the open source community or by Talend’s R&D organization. The Talend Exchange provides the latest connectors which can be downloaded and installed directly within the Talend Studio, at no per-connector cost.

Talend Cloud is available immediately. More information is available at http://www.talend.com/products-talend-cloud/.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 2nd June 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

There are usually two diverse opinions voiced with the introduction of any new technology; some will present it as the solution for everything and use it despite adverse consequences, others will deny it has any real value and rigidly stick to what they've become used to.

There have been plenty of examples the first of these views. From examples such as 'The Last One' a 1980s tool aimed to replace the need to ever write software again to the Apple Newton touchscreen personal digital assistant in the 1990s, disappointment can quickly follow impressive overhype. What the vendors think will be major milestones or paradigm shifts turn into inch pebbles and blips on the technology landscape. Those who have adopted unreservedly find they are stuck down a cul-de-sac and have to change plans and start again.

So is it safer to be a cynic and stay closer to the latter stance?

Not always. The risk, often stated by those hyping up the technology, is of being completely left behind. While this might overstate the issue, there is the risk of a missed opportunity to re-evaluate what the business and its stakeholders are really about.

For example, the recent surge in interest in tablets, in particular Apple's iPad. Notwithstanding that anyone who has the slightest positive comment is labeled a 'fanboi', detractors of their business merits focus on two main aspects—lack of a 'real' keyboard and poor support for Microsoft Office. Both are valid comments, especially as they are often made in the context of the tablet as a laptop or even desktop replacement, however, the word 'replacement' needs more scrutiny.

When computers entered the working environment, they replaced previously manual central processing functions, and most people had little direct interaction with them. Only when PCs became pervasive did a major change occur from an employee’s perspective. To do work, it became necessary for many to go to a computer, typically at a desk. However, few roles truly need to be deskbound for the whole working day. There may have been some whose raison d’etre is content creation—graphical or textual—where sitting at a drawing board, typewriter etc was the norm, but most workers in offices, factories and hospitals only need a desk for somewhere to belong, do the odd bit of paperwork and these days occasionally access their PC.

But as PCs became more pervasive and embedded in working practices people became tethered to the desktop and since it was now equipped with various applications so that anyone could easily and casually create content—presentations, spreadsheets documents, email etc—they did. The result? A proliferation of unmanaged data and communications overload. The John Cleese training video “Meetings, bloody meetings” about how companies and individuals had got sucked into constant time-wasting meetings instead of working on what was really important could be re-mastered for the digital age as “Desktops, bloody desktops”.

Over the last couple of decades, the proliferation of PCs, then laptops, with almost ubiquitous connectivity, has spread concepts and technology from the world of work into the heart of the home. The recent arrival of smartphones and tablets combined with widespread cellular networks has accelerated more individual aspects including social networking and the opposite movement of consumer technology into the workplace. Now the main technology themes surrounding businesses are attempts to bring cohesion to it all to improve worker productivity with mobile working, unified communications and collaboration.

The impact on the once singly dominant PC in all this is intriguing. While they have greatly evolved, they are still at heart the marriage of a typewriter and monitor forcing creative use onto a desk or a lap. Bloated files of charts, busy pages of words and data tables of cells ensure that users need to keep close to the screen. Everybody can use the PC or laptop to communicate, receiving emails in remote locations, making calls with IP telephony or messaging, but in a closed and personal way, almost oblivious to those physically around them. The experience is relatively formal, contrived and difficult to share—either to collaborate with someone alongside, or to pass to someone over a desk.

The tablet form factor is far more informal, akin to a piece of paper. It is not Personal Computing but generally a shared digital experience. It is not well-suited to the over weight and stilted data of an office desktop, but to consolidated, filtered, aggregated information and multi-media content. The combination of social interaction, smart consumer design with universal network access and power to drive all digital content seems to fit the bill for allowing most people to simply get on with the productive activities they need to do, rather than be constrained by a technology straightjacket into wasting time.

There are many highly successful products that have a major impact over a long period of time that eventually start to outlive their usefulness or relevance. It then becomes worth considering a major change, no matter how problematic it first appears. Some will cynically see the increasing sales of tablets like the Apple iPad as the latest fad or craze—fine for the techno-junkies and Apple fanbois but not relevant to the real world which is filled with serious tools like a BlackBerry or Microsoft Office.

The reality is that working practices have always adapted to fit the constraints and limitations of the tools available. New tools give everyone an opportunity to re-appraise business and personal practices, and see if they have been blinkered to new possibilities by being too settled with ‘that’s how it’s always been’.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 27th May 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

A slew of announcements from Citrix Systems and a debut in North America for an aggressively priced Fujitsu public cloud IaaS set demonstrate that the post-PC cloud world is maturing rapidly.

Whereas the web took longer than many people 15 years ago thought to impact the enterprise IT landscape, cloud computing may actually gain maturity and subsequent acceptance faster than the conventional wisdom holds.

How did Citrix, at its Citrix Synergy event, move the needle forward on cloud maturity? They showed how an end-to-end, hybrid cloud model can readily work, one that addresses the network, user, enterprise, SaaS applications, and public cloud providers.

Citrix calls the hybrid cloud networking achievements a cloud "bridge" and "gateway." But in effect the architecture addresses how an individual user can be recognized and managed in the cloud from wherever and how ever they attach to the Internet, also known as the front door to the cloud.

At the other end of the equation (and with meta data and governance coordination to the front door) is the the way the user's enterprise also relates to the clouds—the back door. This allows a business function or process to proceed across multiple cloud and legacy domains and supported by multiple hybrid services. The apps and services can come from the cloud and SaaS providers, while the data and directory services emerge from within the enterprise, and the user gets to conduct business using a managed pallet of services from a variety of hosting models.

This same vision, of course, could apply to consumers and their needs as processes. It's, as yet, less clear who would pull all those elements together. But a mobile data services carrier would make a nice candidate.

In any event, the virtual computing vision will perhaps be best proven on the business side first, as a business process can be controlled, and its needed parts defined, better. Citrix explains it as managing among and between personal clouds, private clouds and public clouds. I recall having a chat with Citrix CTO Simon Crosby at the last Citrix analyst event I attended in Dallas. He was very engaging on the vision around this end-to-end capability. I have no reason to doubt Simon knows how to make this work.

Consider too that the managed hybrid cloud services would be inclusive of video, voice, compute power, data, SaaS apps, and full desktops as a service. Nice.

Cloud elephant
Managing this network hop, skip and jump with security, access control and governance—a Service Delivery Fabric—is the real cloud elephant in the room, and something that must be solved for cloud maturity to proceed. When solved satisfactorily, the inclusive clouds-to-IT, at the individual user level, process benefits will be simply ... huge. It will change how business and people operate in dramatic and unexpected ways. It's what makes the cloud-mobile-social mega trends disruption a once in a lifetime event.

Citrix is by no means alone in seeing the problem and working toward a solution set. An announcement of intention from a new Akamai and Riverbed partnership earlier this month is working to the same end-to-end synergy, although details remain sketchy on the how (and when). Expect more from the Akamai-Riverbed partnership later this year and into 2012. But I do know it seeks to make what Citrix calls the front door and back door to clouds of clouds operate in a coordinated fashion, too. [Disclosure: Akamai is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Citrix is racing to make cloud synergy hay in the market perhaps most quickly by leveraging the NetScaler technology and installed base (now there was a prescient acquisition). Citrix also had a slew of other announcements out of its Synergy event. They address a "personal cloud" value via IT remote management using iPad apps, advances in virtual desktops and applications delivery (including a VDI in a box maker acquisition), multimedia delivery that scales, and more on worker collaboration capabilities.

Lastly, Citrix is ramping up its OpenStack work as an early and aggressive participant to help define the right heterogenous data centers to apply those front and back doors to. The Citrix commercial offering for OpenStack provides an interesting model for making platform dependencies a thing of the past, while using Service Delivery Fabrics to build out the new value-creation areas for IT and Internet. Yes, this is a slap at VMware, and it is expected in the second half of 2011.

So keep an eye on Citrix for one of the best shots at nailing the end-to-end cloud equation. It's a game changer.

Fujitsu makes a good deal on public cloud
The other cloud news of the week that caught my fancy was Fujitsu bringing a public cloud IaaS offering to North America from a venerable data center site in Silicon Valley—Sunnyvale to be specific. Fujitsu, which has delivered a public cloud offering in Japan for two years, is using its own hardware, software and cloud stack and multi-tenancy special sauce, but the end-result offerings are good old IaaS elastic compute services featuring standard Windows and Linux runtime instances and standard three-tier storage.

What's not standard is the pricing, it's a try and buy model with very aggressive total costs for those needing basic cloud services but with support services included. Fujitsu says the pricing is about 10 percent higher than comparable Amazon Web Services offerings, but the support is included, which could be a deal-maker for SMBs and ISVs. There's a pending PaaS marketplace to help ISVs make a global go at expanded markets but without the need to build or lease data centers. It becomes a pay-as-you go OpEx-only model to expand into regions and countries.

Fujitsu is not only making it nice on full-service price for SMBs, but for large enterprises that need to accommodate multi-national issues around physical location of servers and/or the desire to coordinate apps on like IaaS instances at multiple locations around the world, Fujitsu has an offer for them.

The Fujitsu North America cloud goes live on May 31, and more services will now be added over the coming quarters. A freemium trial of up to five VMs, a TB of storage and three Windows OSes will be available through the summer, with a seamless move to paid once the trial is over, said Fujitsu.

I like the fact that we're seeing competition on price, support, global reach and soon on how to best deliver II as a service for both enterprises and apps providers. Let the Darwinian phase of cloud maturity ramp up.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 17th May 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

There's little doubt that employees want to use a growing range of devices to access data. Recent Quocirca research shows that while Windows-based desktop and notebook PCs still dominate, they are fast being supplemented by a diverse range of alternative form factors and operating systems.

In the new survey, which was sponsored by Trend Micro, 88 per cent of small and mid-sized businesses say at least some of their employees are using smartphones for business purposes and 43 per cent report at least one or more of their employees use tablet PCs.

These devices are not always owned by the business. Some 74 per cent of the firms questioned say some of the devices used belong to staff.

Respondents to the survey cite more efficient business processes as the biggest benefit of enabling access to data from mobile devices. However, whatever the benefits, such sharing creates security headaches for IT managers, especially as most of the sharing is over public networks.

Only if data can be shared safely will businesses have the confidence to embed mobile users and their chosen devices into business processes. That is the message of a recent Check Point-sponsored report by Quocirca called A value proposition for IT security, which is available for free download.

The report advocates putting in place a compliance-oriented architecture, or COA. The justification for any investment required to achieve a compliance-oriented architecture is as much about creating business value as it is about reducing business risk.

Discussions about IT security usually focus on reducing the risk posed by outsiders or malicious insiders. Mitigating these risks remains paramount but it is also important to make sure that a compliance-oriented architecture protects well-intentioned employees from themselves.

The most common way data leaks occur is through the accidental actions of employees. They need to share data but may accidentally share the wrong data with the wrong person by email or some other communication channel.

And of course they may, if it is not controlled in some way, store data on mobile devices that are subsequently lost or stolen. Theft, accidental loss and erroneous disclosure are by far the most common reasons for self-report data breaches, as data in the report shows.

The irony is that while data loss is a common problem, despite the many high-profile incidents—not least the recent problems at Sony—lost data is actually rarely compromised. The thief who steals an iPad is more likely to be interested in the resale value of the device than the data stored on it.

Yet that fact does not cut any ice with regulators. Good management of personally identifiable information is obligatory. Organisations must comply and be seen to comply.

A compliance-oriented architecture involves putting in place the ability to control the use of data, monitoring and controlling what is being sent by email and what is being copied where. It should also be used to control the printing of data, an often overlooked source of data leakage.

Data loss prevention, or DLP, tools are designed to track the movement of data and allow the enforcement of policies regarding its use, including the copying of data to mobile devices.

However, data loss prevention is not enough on its own for ensuring the safe use of data on mobile devices. One of two approaches to the use of data on mobile end points must be adopted. The first is to stop data ever being copied to them in the first place.

This approach involves only allowing access to sensitive data that is stored centrally, either through the use of virtual desktops—such as Citrix XenDesktop and Microsoft Remote Desktop Services—or via a secure file-sharing service, for example Trend Micro's recently announced Safe Sync for Business or portal services such as Microsoft SharePoint.

If it is accepted that sensitive data will end up on mobile devices then a second approach to end-point security must be taken, through the securing of the device itself. This approach involves encrypted storage. Deploying and managing encryption has a cost, especially with a growing diversity of operating systems, and while encryption might sound like the only foolproof way of protecting data, it is not the be-all and end-all.

Remember that the devices are increasingly personally owned and therefore there are limits to what IT departments can do with them. Furthermore, encryption only protects stored data and data in transit.

Employees must be able to decrypt data to use it, and then it becomes vulnerable again. Other points of vulnerability are if users select weak passwords or if strong policies result in passwords being written on a piece of paper that is held with the device.

There is no silver bullet for securing the use of data. It involves implementing a number of measures that add up to a compliance-oriented architecture. The range of measures required will depend on how a business approaches IT and its attitude to risk.

However, when broaching the subject of investing in technology to increase the security of data, it is essential to point out the value that any given investment will bring to a business as well as the risk it will mitigate.

This article first appeared in May 2011 on http://www.silicon.com

By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 28th April 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Over the past few months I have written about the problem of mobile voice data protection and the need for those conducting information and business risk assessments to consider the cost of losing voice data.

When traditional computer data goes missing it is often obvious, as a laptop, CD ROM or USB stick has actually been lost. Unfortunately when a mobile phone is intercepted the bugging will happen without the user knowing, often only discovering the problem when financial data has been leaked or intellectual property stolen.

So what can be done?

Voice encryption is crucial to ensuring mobile data is secure and is a must have for those likely to be at risk—namely those talking about sensitive content on their mobile phones. A solution from Morrigan Partners can do just that.

Using the Morrigan Secure Application (or MSA), an authorised user can make a secure call over any mobile communications network to another MSA-enabled handset. The MSA solution also supports secure SMS and voicemail whilst it scans for malware threats such as Trojans.

The MSA runs in parallel to standard unencrypted smartphone systems and is capable of deployment across standard communication networks using standard smartphones. Calls are securely routed between one MSA handset to another MSA handset for call integrity and messages are securely held on the secure server if a phone is off line and immediately sent when reconnected. Four encryption keys are randomly generated and discarded after each call providing a level of protection.

The MSA runs over data‐enabled networks including 2G, 3G, 4G and Wi‐Fi allowing mobile devices to move freely and uninterrupted between all networks globally during a secure call connection. This is especially interesting as a common technique to further protect calls is to force a 3G connection. Whilst this may work in areas where there is 3G coverage there are a surprising number of black spots where a 3G connection is not possible. Would a user accept no mobile phone coverage just to protect their calls? Unlikely. Therefore a voice encryption solution that can use a 2G network if required is a useful option.

There is no doubt that voice data is at risk. As more and more people use their smartphones to run their entire lives, hackers and others will focus their efforts on getting the information they need from these devices. In many respects attitudes towards mobile phone data security reflect those held 20 years ago towards the humble personal computer. Back then attacks were minimal, anti-malware was yet to become established and hacking was in its infancy. Now we are in a maelstrom of attacks against the PC using sophistication and scale we previously thought impossible.

Cast one's mind forward 20 years and it boggles at the depth and breadth of attacks our cell phones will be subject to. In the meantime anyone that conducts sensitive business using a mobile phone should seriously consider implementing an industry leading mobile phone encryption package without delay.

According to our research report “Nigeria Telecom Sector Analysis”, the number of internet users are growing at a very fast pace with rapid telecom infrastructure developments in the country. Moreover, underwater submarine cable (Glo-1) has supplemented the growth by offering faster and cheaper Internet access to the subscribers. With growing internet users, Nigerian broadband market is also expanding in terms of both number of subscribers and revenue. As per our research, it is anticipated that number of broadband subscribers will grow at a CAGR of around 9% during 2010–2014. Additionally, favorable regulatory environment and intense competition among private players would fuel growth in this segment.

Besides, the mobile market of the country has tremendous growth potential. With rapidly improving mobile infrastructure and intense competition among mobile operators, the number of mobile subscribers will grow at a double-digit CAGR during 2010–2014. Our study also finds that competition among various telecom operators is increasing as they are now looking for new business expansion and customer retention strategies to sustain and gain higher chunk of the market. In this regard, our report presents an overview of the competitive landscape, in which, leading industry players have been covered along with their marketing strategies.

Our report provides insight into Nigeria’s telecom market trends and presents rational analysis of its future potential e.g. WiMax, 3G, 4G etc. The report includes a thorough study of mobile, fixed line, internet services, and broadband services in the country. Our report presents current and future trends in the telecom industry along with an analysis of the telecom service providers. We have also provided a snapshot on Nigeria’s regulatory framework with market attractions and roadblocks.

“Nigeria Telecom Sector Analysis” is a thorough study of Nigeria’s telecommunications market by our team of experts. The report presents all the information in a coherent manner to make it easy to understand. Our team has included every aspect of the telecom industry to provide the true scenario for clients to investigate, to judge, and to make prudent investment decisions.

For free sample of this report visit: http://www.rncos.com/Report/IM233.htm

About RNCOS:
RNCOS specializes in Industry intelligence and creative solutions for contemporary business segments. Our professionals study and analyze the industry and its various components, with comprehensive study of the changing market behavior. Our accuracy and data precision proves beneficial in terms of pricing and time management that assist the consultants in meeting their objectives in a cost-effective and timely manner.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 14th April 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

HP made a series of announcements April 12 on application transformation. In advance of the news, BriefingsDirect met with an HP application transformation expert to dig into some new research and to better understand HP’s response to the fast-moving trends supporting the rationale for application transformation.

These same trends are pointing to a deeper payoff from the well-managed embrace of hybrid computing models. But applications also have to be delivered more securely, even in these hybrid implementations, while the new delivery models also mean adding automation and governance features across the entire service lifecycle. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The new research describes how top level enterprise executives are reacting to these fast-moving trends, buffeting nearly all global businesses. HP has delivered some new products and services designed to help companies move safely, yet directly, to transform their applications, improve their hosting options, and free up resources that can be used to provide the innovation needed to support better business processes. It's in the support of business processes, after all, that’s the real goal of these modernization activities.

And it was on this note that we welcomed Paul Evans, Worldwide Lead for Application Transformation for HP Enterprise Business. The discussion was moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Evans: We see three mega trends, and we validate this with customers. We haven’t just made these up. And, the three mega trends really come down to firstly that people are evolving their business models.

When you get recessionary periods, hyper growth in particular markets, and the injection of new technologies, people look at how to make money and how to save money. They look at their business model and see they can make a change there. Of course, if you change the business model, then that means you change the business process. If you change the business process, the digital expression of a business process is an application. So, people need to change their apps.

So, you change your model and the process and need to change your app, because for most people now, the app is pretty much the digital expression of their business. For many of us, when we go online or do some form of transaction, at the end of the day, it’s an app that is authenticating this, validating the transaction, making the transaction, whatever it may be. That’s one mega trend we see happening.

The second mega trend is that technology innovation just keeps on going, whether it’s the infusion of cloud architectures that people are looking towards, or the whole mega trend around mobile connectivity. That is a game changer in their mind. It’s a radical transformational time for applications, as they accommodate and exploit those technologies.

No precedent
Some people just accommodate them and say, "Okay, we can do things better, maybe less expensively. We can be more innovative, more flexible in this way, or maybe we can do things differently. Maybe we can do things like we have never ever done them before."

I don’t believe there's any precedent for the mobile evolution that we're going to see coming towards us through smartphones, pads, or whatever it may be.

We can't look back over our shoulder and say, "What we did five years ago we'll just do that again, and it will be wonderful." I don’t think there is any precedent here. There is an opportunity for people to do some really innovative things.

Third, it’s the whole nature of the changing workforce. The expectations of people that are joining with the community every day on the net is very different from the people at the other end of the spectrum and their experience.

When we look at young people joining the net and when we look at young people coming into the workforce, their expectation is very high in terms of what they want, what they need, and what they would like to achieve. This is in terms of the tools they utilize, whether it’s social networking, whether it’s just the fact that their view is that they are sort of always on the network, whether it’s through their mobile or whether it’s through their notebook or whatever device they use.

They're always on, and therefore the expectations of those people who are going to be with us now for the next 60–70 years is starting from a position of, we have always known the web, we have always liked the web, we have always had the web. So their view is, we just want to see more of it and better. We want to see things as services rather than processes. The expectation of those people is also having a lot of effect. Those three mega trends affect the way that organizations have to respond.

Fundamental audience
So we actually went to the C-suite—the CEO, CIO, and CFO—and just tried to understand from them how they see things, too, because they are clearly a fundamental audience that we need to work with and understand their opinions and how their opinions have changed.

Two or three years ago, during the heavy economic times, cost was all it was all about. Take cost out. Take cost out. Don’t worry about the functionality; I need to take cost out. Now, that’s changed. We've seen, both from the public and the private sector, the view that we've got to be innovative. Innovation is going to be the way we keep ourselves different, keep ourselves alive the way we move forward.

A business requirement is that we need to innovate. If we stand still, we're probably going backwards. I know that sounds ridiculous, but you have do more than just keep up to speed. You've got to accelerate. And, we asked the C-suite if innovation therefore is important.

Some 95 percent of the people we talked to said innovation is key to the success of the organization. As I said, that was both public and private. Of course, the private sector would, but why would the public sector, because they don't have any competition? But, they are serving citizens who have expectations and want the same level of service that we see from a private organization in the public domain.

So, one, the audience said to us that innovation is key. Two, we didn’t see any massive difference between public and private. Then, we asked them how they relate innovation and technology. Basically, they told us that technology is the innovation engine. It is the thing that makes them innovative. They're going to have new products and new services, but whether the technology is involved in the front end or the back end of that, it’s involved. It’s not an administration function anymore. It's the life blood of what they do.

So it's not HP saying this. It's our customer saying to us that technology would be the engine that they will use to be innovative going forward. We told them, "Well, technology is a big thing. Are are we talking about mobiles? Are we talking about blade servers? What do you see?

Applications and software that derive more flexible process was the number one area where they would invest first, across all the audiences. So, their view was that they know there are lots of pieces for technology, but if they want to innovate, they see that applications and software is the vehicle that gets them there.

Changing definition of 'application'
The whole expectation around the application is changing, and I think it’s irreversible. We're not going to go backward. We're going to keep on driving forward, because people like HP and others see the real value here. We're going to start to have a different approach to apps. It’s going to be more component driven and it’s not going to be monolithic.

We have to go away from the monolithic app anyway, because it’s not a flexible device. It's not something that easily delivers innovation and agility. People have already understood that the cost of maintaining those monolithic, legacy applications is not acceptable.

We're going to get far more sophisticated in how we do those things, and they'll be tailored to this whole notion of context awareness. So, they'll understand where they are and what they're doing. Things will change by virtue of the context of the person, where they're based or what device they are using.

I really get excited by the fact we're just starting down that road, and there is a lot of good stuff more to come.

You can look at an on-premise supply, you can look at off-premise, you can look at outsourcing or out-tasking, or you can look to the cloud. There are a lot more choices available to people who maybe could lower the cost, and that has a direct impact on the bottom line.

But, if you're looking at core applications, something that is fundamental to your business, they're not so easy to just move around. The CIO looks at those and say, "I’ve got this massive investment. What do I do?" Then, he swings around and sees the world of cloud and mobile heading towards them and says, "Now I'm challenged, because the CFO or CEO is telling me I need performance improvement, if I need to get into these new markets whatever it maybe."

At the same time, they need to cut costs, be really innovative, and explore all these new technologies. He wants to understand what he's going to do with the old ones, which may take money and funding to achieve. At the same time, he wants to exploit and be innovative with the new. That’s a very difficult position to sit in the middle of and not feel the stretches and strains.

We sit with the CEOs on their side of the table and try and understand the balance of what business is looking to achieve, whether that would be improvement in product delivery or marketing and customer satisfaction. The things that people look to a technology group for and say, "Our website experience is losing its market share. Do something about it," that’s in the CIO’s regime. He looks around the other way and says, "But, I have got all these line of business guys that also want me to keep on making product or making whatever and I need to understand what I do with legacy."

So, we sit on their side of the table and say let's make a list, let's prioritize, let's understand some of the fundamentals of good business and your technology and come up with a list of actionable items. You got to have a plan that is not 12 months, because this is not a 12-month thing.

Building for the future
Anyone who's been keeping their eyes on HP for a while would have seen some significant investments, especially in the software area,, and this preceded the research where customers are telling us that apps and software are pretty important.

The investments in companies like ArcSight and Fortify have been there because, as they say in ice hockey terms, we're trying to predict where the puck is going to go, and we're trying to move toward where the puck will be, as opposed to where it is now.

We've been investing in acquisitions, but also investing in internal R&D, looking at the customer’s environment to see what things are really top of mind. Effectively, we know this change is irreversible. The technology industry, whether you like it or not, never goes backward.

As I heard on a television program, we are compelled to travel into the future. It’s not being corny. That’s what we're doing. We're looking at this, so the new range of products and services that we're bringing out are around several of those core areas.

One, is that people need to get a real good handle on what they've got. A lot of CIOs we meet and a lot of people we talk to in the IT function will openly admit that they have a no clear idea what their portfolio looks like. They don’t know how much it’s costing them. They don’t know what the components are. They don’t know how well they're aligned for the business.

They don’t know what sort of technology underpinnings they've got and what sort of security level they're implementing. That sounds like a pretty terrible picture, but unfortunately it’s pretty much reality. There are definite clients we meet who do know, but they're pretty rare.

So you’ve to get your head around that first, because if you don't know what you’ve got, then how the hell can you move forward? So, we've invested a lot in Application Portfolio Management, a new software product, combined that with a whole portfolio of services to exploit it, which really gives people a very rich graphical environment and the ability to understand the portfolio and make decisions.

This whole notion of where we've been in the past—service-oriented architecture (SOA) and shared services—is a real underpinning. Some people think SOA died. SOA did not die. It's actually one of the technological underpinnings for going forward in creating these shared services which we're going to be calling a cloud environment.

We tell people we can help them understand which apps are fit to go to the cloud and should go to the cloud. This is how we get them to the cloud. By the way, we'll also tell you the ones that shouldn't.

We get that question a lot. Of course, when you talk cloud, you invariably get people talking about the biggest excuse not to go to cloud, which is that it's not secure.

As I said, we're into irreversible change. We know there may be challenges, which is why the acquisition of companies like ArcSight and Fortify, and what we have brought out recently with the application securities in the product have really changed the rules on security, not to view this as a bolt on.

Anybody that is familiar with the notion of a stack knows we go from hardware at the bottom to application at the top with all the intermediate layers. We could bolt on a security enhancement to a piece of the stack with the view that we’ll stop you coming in.

Unfortunately, as you are aware, there are unscrupulous people who know their way around certain bolt-ons, and have a way of infiltrating. From reports in the press, it’s very clear about what can happen when they do. We've taken is a totally different approach.

Make security something that is inherent within the whole process. So that once you are through the gatekeeper, you can't just have a lot of fun and games inside the code. Once you are in, you're not going to get very far. Also, monitor this in real-time. Don't make this a static process, make it a dynamic process, so that you can dynamically see vulnerabilities and react to those in real-time.

Hybrid delivery
People are coming to us and saying that they have some productivity applications that maybe they shouldn't be running in an extremely expensive environment. We see a lot of people who run an app on a mainframe. We ask why, and the user responds because they always have. Maybe it's time that it didn’t.

There is a new option, this whole notion of hybrid delivery with the cloud, and looking at different models to deliver things. If you're short of cash and trying to be innovative, why would you want to spend a whole truck of cash on something that you don't need to? Go and spend it on something you should.

We need to help people understand how they can migrate their productivity up. Microsoft Exchange is a good example. Big productivity—messaging is a productivity. Yes, it helps people do what they do every day.

If I'm running Exchange, I can move this to a private cloud environment, still within my firewall. The biggest challenge everybody faces is — how do you provision for it? How much infrastructure do I need to give people the response they are looking for?

Now, everyone runs out of processing power and everyone runs out of storage. I do every day, especially storage. But, the point is how to separate environments that can smooth those peaks and troughs. We believe exchange services for private cloud is the way to do that.

The flip side is that people that are using the Microsoft Dynamics customer relationship management (CRM) package. Maybe they don’t want to be in the CRM business. They want to build relationships with customers, want to understand who they are and what they are. Maybe they don’t want to be in the whole provisioning business.

So, what we're offering is what we call Enterprise Cloud Services for Microsoft Dynamics CRM, which says we will put this on our service. The customer just buys a service through the net and pays per usage. If they don’t use it, they don’t pay.

We're going to see a lot more of that style of hybrid delivery where you pay per use. What I want, I use, and I pay for. What I don’t want, I put it back. I don’t have to take any responsibility for infrastructure and storage and all the stuff that goes with it. I want to give that responsibility to someone else and get on with my core business.

It’s a SaaS model and other options. There was a model once where everyone was on premises. Then, the whole notion of outsourcing came in, and people looked at that and felt it was pretty good. So, they went to outsourcing.

We believe that this whole notion will be called "hybrid delivery." It will be a mixture of all of them—on premises, off premised, people running services inside their firewall as private clouds. It’s actually a public provision service where it will be provisioned for them outside their firewall and then they buy what they want.

Also, one of the components of the announcement we are bringing out is what we call Cloud Service Automation, which we're extremely proud of. This is really for the people who want to get a cloud service up and running, want to do it fast, and don’t want to have to spend the next two years playing computer scientist. They want to get up, running, provisioned, and out there.

It just shows the pace of this market. We brought version one of this product out in January. In April, we're bringing out the next version with a significant level of enhancement around provisioning and manageability, and 4000 scripts embedded. So, people can just assemble things.

Back to the question you asked me earlier about the way the apps are going, this is really assembling procedures where the customer wants to do and can through a drag-and-drop environment. Some people view that as nearly impossible.

Cloud Service Automation runs on the cloud system, which is enabled by BladeSystem Matrix. What that’s doing is provisioning an infrastructure, giving people the choices of network components, upgrading systems, and their virtualization environment. All of this is through drag-and-drop. It's just staring at the screen and saying they want Linux on that, HP-UX on that, Windows on that, and a VMware on that, and then drop it on.

So this is what we call fundamental building blocks of people that are looking to deploy a cloud environment. But there is some real sort of down to earth tactical things you’ve got to think about, too.

Take, for example, the client environment. We’ve talked a lot about the server, but the client world is changing at a high speed by virtue of people’s desire to use devices that are not chained to the desk anymore—whether that’s more portable, notebook type machines, smartphones, pads or whatever. You’ve also got to take into account the fact that there are a lot of enterprise applications that you still use on traditional desktop PCs. You can't ignore those and should not.

A year after launching, about 13 percent of the Windows XP base moved to Windows Vista. So, the bulk of the market stayed with XP for whatever reason. Now they're saying they need to make that move, but some of these desktop apps are pretty sophisticated. This is not just simple productivity stuff. This is a part of the enterprise portfolio. Therefore, they also need to get worried about it big time and fairly quickly.

So what we’ve done for our customers is to look at their volume, their desktop environment, and come up with what apps they've got, what they do, are they useful, do they need all of them, could they get rid of some? The ones they want to move forward, do they need to change? Obviously, there are functional differences between XP and Windows 7.

By virtue of our knowledge and experience we can give you a very good return on your investment because we know all of the differences. We know all the gotchas. When you’ve used the special feature inside XP, we know how that will translate to Windows 7.

We're just trying to help people see that this is really important. We have been sort of screaming and shouting for the last year or two, and we believe that people are really onto this now. HP has a role to play in pointing people in the right direction.

People just need to get to their heads around it, because we appreciate it. There are some big questions to answer. We don’t trivialize this. This is not a game. This is serious. Serious problems need serious people to respond.

A lot of this is at our hp.com/go/applicationtransformation page. There, you can then go off and explore things that will interest you.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 1st April 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

In today’s hectic modern world, the mobile phone has become such a crucial communications asset that few people can cope with any downtime in its usage, even while walking. This was rarely a problem for those making voice calls, especially after the advent of Bluetooth headsets, as users can easily make and receive phone calls as they wander.

However the on-screen intensive activities of messaging—SMS, email, IM—and huge upsurge in other visual smartphone applications means that many mobile users need to look down at a screen much more than ever. It is unrealistic to expect them to want to stop walking while looking at their mobile phone screens and jabbing at keys or flicking touch screens, so there is a growing risk of pedestrian collision and more serious accidents involving otherwise pre-occupied mobile users.

Fortunately, advances in micro radar technologies have helped produce a solution which will allow mobile users to keep their gaze on their beloved mobile screen, while being warned of trouble ahead. The first product to market is from French start-up, AuReM, who offer augmented reality applications for mobile phones. It has developed a simple mobile solution for human collision avoidance (HCA), called Direction over Head (DoH).

The system uses a tiny transceiver, which is attached to the forehead of the mobile subscriber and beams two directional radar signals to their front and either side, which are then reflected off other pedestrians or larger moving objects such as vehicles. The echo responses are then transmitted via Bluetooth to the mobile phone and interpreted to produce a two-dimensional object map and an understanding of speed and position of the incoming ‘threats’. This can be displayed in a similar manner to an augmented reality application as an overlay on the screen.

AuReM’s VP of marketing, Avril Une, states it does not matter what application the user is engaged in with their head down—sending a text, playing a game, browsing a webpage—they will see the echo signals of objects that are approaching them, and can take evasive action. The application can be tuned to be sensitive in quieter rural spaces or filter out the clutter of distant or slow moving objects in busy urban areas. It can even make sounds which escalate in tone, much like the reversing alert systems available on many cars, although AuReM accepts that this may interfere with those users listening to music or actively engaged in game play. However this may be a small price to pay for avoiding being knocked over by a careless shopper or a number 73 bus.

While AuReM have been very pleased with the trials it has conducted so far, with fewer than 5% of incoming objects not being picked up by the system (only those moving faster than 20km per hour), it is far from complacent. Further developments are planned to focus on the radar transceiver and making it more discrete.

One idea is to combine its function with ear jewellery so it can be unobtrusively worn all the time, although this requires the transceiver to be split into two devices—one attached to each ear—to ensure that the two dimensional positional image is formed. This means some additional setup in the Bluetooth operation but perhaps more problematically some alignment of the devices due to the variation of sizes of peoples faces or ear positions and this can only really be performed once the devices are fitted to the ear. Given their existing knowledge of ear positions, AuRem think this might be a service that a dispensing optician could deliver.

One thing is clear, given the growth in adoption of smartphones and sophisticated applications that demand mobile users’ attention, combined with the basic human need to keep walking even when their head is down reading or touching their mobile devices, products like this will become more widespread. Many more head down mobile users will be saying ‘DoH’.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 21st March 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Video conferencing has had many false dawns, but perhaps something is changing. Some of the technology perceptions that have affected its adoption for a long time still persist. There are concerns about interoperability between different vendors’ products, the quality of the sound and video, the communications costs and impact on network bandwidth. Most of these concerns are no longer valid, yet something stills seems to be holding adoption back.

In part, the industry has addressed interoperability issues through standards, but also there has been some consolidation amongst suppliers and a recognition that video is not a standalone conferencing system, but part of a larger communications infrastructure. In the recent years, most of the specialist video conferencing suppliers have recognised the need for a range of products from desktop to dedicated whole room systems for different types of use, and that these should all integrate together and with other companies' products as part of a complete video system.

Quality has improved a lot, with cheap low-end cameras on laptops capable of delivering high definition images, and tele-presence systems capable of not only multi-screen high definition images, but directional sound and eye contact. The highest quality systems do have an impact on networks, requiring high and sometimes dedicated bandwidth, but even moderate home broadband connections are now more than enough for reasonable quality video communications.

With a sorting out of the technology issues, the user experience has been massively improved. The initiation, control and operation of visual communications no longer needs a resident engineer or expert. Software has improved and by and large allowed video to be unified with other forms of communications.

Most operators, Internet service providers and network managers would say that there has been a big uptick in the amount of video traffic on their networks, but the overwhelming percentage of this is one way, media consumption i.e. YouTube, iPlayer and so on.

So why are there still only a few groups of users for two-way or more communications?

Acceptance of the experience and appreciation of its value seem to be at the heart of the issue. It is no longer difficult or necessarily expensive, but what is missing is a killer application need to justify its regular use.

The mobile industry thought it had found it with personal mobile video calling. It is true that the fixed line telephony industry has had a number of abortive attempts with personal video telephony from the AT&T Picturephones onwards, but with the advent of their high bandwidth 3G networks, mobile operators finally thought they could sell video calling on the move. It was heavily promoted when the new generation of devices and networks first appeared, but bombed, and despite further marketing pushes, most people are more likely to see a meteor than a person making a video call on their mobile.

Many marketing campaigns promoting the use of video have focussed on what it takes away. There is no need to travel, damage the environment, waste time or meet face to face. The key question when bringing video into the communication should be ‘what does it add?’

Fixed video conferencing systems show one roomful of people another roomful. That’s great for multi-person gatherings, but with one person at both ends all you see is their head and torso and the office they are sat in. They may be able to bring things into view for a ‘show and tell’, but in many cases that will not be convenient e.g. Dr Jones, let me show you the patient, or take a look at this manufacturing process etc.

Personal mobile video can either do a head and shoulders shot of the person (generally distorted due to the effect of being close up, so not very flattering), or a ‘see what I see’ shot away from the individual. Neither is completely satisfactory. In the first instance it might be ok if the two on the call know each other well enough to not be put off, but what really does the close up image of them talking add to the conversation? While ‘see what I see’ has some merit, the loss of the facial expression of the individual takes something away, even though further context has been added.

However, it might be that with the current generation of mobile tablet devices—lighter and longer battery life than laptops, but larger screens than mobile phones—will deliver the form factor that video communications has been looking for as they deliver a different kind of mobile video experience. A user facing camera embedded in the edge of the device can incorporate both the individual’s expressions and the context of the surrounding area but the device is sufficiently portable to be taken to points or subjects of interest. The wider visual element can now add value to the call.

While it might not be acceptable or comfortable to make video calls in crowded public places (“here I am, on the train, as you can see it’s packed with irritable commuters”), within the work place it is a different story. The way a tablet has to be held—like a clipboard—means it can readily be shared with others who might need to be involved in the visual communication, but in a far more ad hoc and natural way than perched in a line looking at a full sized conferencing system. Video can be incorporated to supply information and communication into a business process without getting in the way or forcing the user to move away from where the ‘action’ is.

Tablets are already being used as a casual information access devices within businesses, with some users starting opt for them instead of laptops. With several new tablets being launched with cameras, the recent appearance of communications-oriented devices like the Avaya Flare and even Apple’s iPad2 purported to have a camera, it seems like there will be a sudden influx of smart, mobile, full screen video ready platforms.

Does this mean that these tablets are the only tools where two-way video communications will make sense? By no means, since fixed desktop and tele-presence systems have their place and valid use cases. But unconstrained video on a tablet, unified into the other on-device communications tools available could be the key to unlocking much wider adoption of visual communications.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 18th March 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Mobile adoption rates are on the rise and if market reports are any indication, growth rates aren’t slowing down anytime soon. Consumers and employees alike are the driving forces behind mobile adoption spurred by the evolution in mobile device capabilities along with the speed of mobile networks.

A recent Morgan Stanley research study predicts that sales of smartphones will overtake PC sales (including both desktops and notebooks) in the next two years, supporting the demands of our always-connected society. [Disclosure: Kapow Software is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The ubiquity of smartphones and more than 300,000 mobile apps available on Apple’s App Store, coupled with the ease and convenience of mobile computing is putting pressure on IT to mobile enable B2C and B2E applications to facilitate organizational efficiency and keep up with consumer and employee demand for mobile access to applications and content.

It’s no surprise that millions of employees around the world are bringing their smartphones and mobile devices to work, resetting workplace expectations to have always-on access to the instantly available business apps that they’ve grown accustomed to from their personal lives.

According to a survey conducted by the Yankee Group, 90 percent of organizations surveyed have already enabled smartphone access to corporate email and PIM. Yet when it comes to enabling mobile access to mission-critical enterprise apps, companies have made far less progress, with only 30 percent of those surveyed providing smartphone access to customer relationship management (CRM), 20 percent to enterprise resource planning (ERP), and 18 percent to sales force automation (SFA).

CIOs scrambling
IT leaders and industry analysts are noticing CIOs scrambling to mobile-enable legacy applications to make them available on smartphones, tablets, and even GPS/navigation devices. And, IT departments are feeling the growing pressure to get this done in a matter of months—to not only stay ahead of the competition, but in many cases, just to keep up.

One of the main challenges companies need to overcome when enabling mobile device access to existing data or legacy applications is the lack of “mobile ready” web service application programming interfaces (APIs) for existing applications.

Adding a service-level interface to a legacy application is a complex development project that typically involves a full or extensive rewrite of the existing legacy application. A common problem is that throughout the years an application has been written and modified by multiple developers, who are likely to have left the company, along with their institutional knowledge about the application. This situation had led many companies to basically re-write the application, which can take several years of coding and insurmountable resources and budget.

It’s essential that organizations evaluate these important factors when embarking on a mobile enablement project:

• Do the applications you want to mobile-enable have documented APIs?
• What components and features of your business application do you want to mobile enable?
• How are you taking into account form factor?
• How will you deal with business logic and processes too complicated to be executed on a mobile device with a limited keyboard, where air time needs to be controlled, and server round trips need to be minimized?
• How will you deal with service interruptions requiring the ability to queue processes for later execution on the back end?
• Will you be combining data from multiple apps into one mobile application?
• What mobile platforms do you need to support?
• To what extent will you want to modify or extend your mobile application in the near future?

The best way to facilitate mobile enablement projects is with focused, goal oriented, up-front planning that doesn’t underestimate the complexity of the process, especially when dealing with traditional data integration techniques.

What many companies aren’t aware of is that there is an alternative approach to developing custom-built, native apps that doesn’t require dependency on pre-existing APIs.

Known as “browser-based data integration,” this emerging approach makes existing business applications and data “mobile ready” by allowing organizations to wrap their existing web application without changing the systems that are already there.

By creating a new web service interface “wrapper” without re-writing any of the existing code, mobile access to enterprise B2C and B2E applications can be possible in days or weeks, not months or years.

It’s no surprise that mobile initiatives are now a top priority for every enterprise. The challenge is to approach these projects as swiftly and efficiently as possible to stay relevant and productive. By combining the proper up-front planning process with browser-based mobile enablement technologies, companies can quickly provide their mobile users with the data and apps they so desperately want and need.

This guest post comes courtesy of Stefan Andreasen, Founder/CTO, Kapow Software.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 3rd March 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Two on-going and fundamental changes in the way IT is provisioned and used seem only likely to accelerate in 2011. First, there is the move towards cloud based infrastructure for processing and storing data (figure 1). Then there is the proliferation in the number and variety of user end points for accessing that data.

Both trends have many benefits for businesses, such as keeping costs down, better business continuity, more flexible working practices and more efficient business processes. However, there is a downside: it can be tough ensuring consistent management, security, compliance and access across all the devices where data may be.

Many businesses will struggle with this, but it represents an opportunity for managed service providers (MSPs) and VARs with the right offerings in place to sell additional services to existing customers, and win accounts from competitors that fail to rise to the challenge.

Discussions around business continuity plans often focus on high-profile disasters such as flooding, fire and power failure. However, data from Plan B, a disaster recovery specialist, suggest that the most common reason that users can no longer access applications is due to communications or equipment failure (figure 2).

When it comes to equipment failure, this is more likely to be the user end point than a server, and with user end points the problem is as likely to be accidental loss or damage as it is to be a malfunction (figure 3).

This problem is only going to get worse as business processes become reliant on user access from an increasing range of devices. This includes point-of-sale (PoS) devices, ATMs, ticket readers, video displays—all usually in remote locations—as well as all those easy-to-lose smartphones, tablets and laptops.

To manage this it is necessary to have management tools and services that enable a consistent security and compliance policy across both centralised and distributed IT infrastructure. In addition, it is necessary to ensure that services are in place, so when the inevitable happens and user end points are lost or broken, data is not compromised and replacements can quickly be re-provisioned.

One of the attractions of cloud based infrastructure, especially for SMBs, is that service providers take on the responsibility for ensuring availability; they can also gain economies of scale with suppliers and have the expertise available to ensure they can do this at a cost which is hard for businesses to achieve if their core value proposition lies elsewhere.

All these arguments also apply to user end point management.

However, the tool types required are different. All the end points need to be discovered, registered, and made known so valid end points are recognised when they request access to centralised resources. The sheer number of end points means that many repetitive tasks need to be automated, bearing in mind that the execution of such tasks may need to be asynchronous, depending on when the end point next comes on to the network.

There is no need to reinvent the wheel here. There are end point management tools vendors including Kaseya, NTR Global, Symantec/Altiris and IBM/BigFix that have the tools an aspiring MSP or VAR can use to expand its system management services to cover user end points.

Only those that do rise to this challenge can consider themselves to be providing a comprehensive service and be regarded as a total MSP.

Quocirca’s report The Total MSP is freely available at: http://www.quocirca.com/reports/546/the-total-msp

By: Nigel Stanley, Practice Leader - IT Security, Bloor Research Posted: 21st February 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Finally what about smartphone management and how can you try and implement the raft of security policies you will need to manage an estate of these new gadgets?

There are a number of solutions that enable just this—the management of a large number of smartphones and similar devices across the business. Typically the organisation will want to manage their smartphones as they would any other device or computer attaching to the corporate network or accessing corporate resources. The use of a single management suite that aggregates all types of devices under one central tool is  probably the best approach, if you can find one that meets your requirements.

Will you permit users to use their own devices to access your systems? If so, will you permit all devices or only those that have been checked as secure by your security team? Users also need to be aware that if they are using their own devices to access corporate data then their devices may be seized for examination if there is an incident or data discovery requirement. This may deter some using their own devices to access corporate data.

You will then need to consider the use of apps and how, or if, these will be downloaded. After all, how can you be certain the apps that users download will not break your systems or introduce malware? These apps need to be policed. Finally, don’t forget to update your organisational information security policy to take into account use of mobile devices.

The solution(s)
There are a number of third party solutions emerging to the problem of smartphone security. Bloor Research has categorised them as follows:

• End user smartphone security. This is the provision of security products that a user can install on their smartphone to deliver a degree of protection. Typically it will comprise anti-malware and anti-virus products similar to those found on desktop PCs
• Smartphone management. These tools enable an estate of smartphones to be centrally managed. Typically this solution would be used in a large organisation.
• Voice security. A neglected area of smartphone security. Due to the design of the mobile phone network smartphones are at risk of voice interception. [1] By installing and using a voice security product voice calls are encrypted. 
• Data Security. The increasing use of smartphones to access corporate data means that additional data security is often needed to protect the data.
• Security Management for Network Operators. Increasingly, network operators are seeing an opportunity to sell additional security services to their premium customers.

The smartphone, a real bug in your bed - summary
Cast one’s mind forward 20 years and it boggles at the depth and breadth of attacks our mobile phones will be subject to. In the meantime, anyone that conducts sensitive business using a mobile phone should seriously consider implementing the preventative measures discussed in this presentation.

As more and more people use their mobile phones to run their entire lives, hackers and others will focus their efforts on getting the information they need from these devices. In many respects attitudes towards mobile phone data security reflect those held 20 years ago towards the humble personal computer. Back then attacks were minimal, anti-malware was yet to become established and hacking was in its infancy. Now we are in a maelstrom of attacks against the PC using sophistication and scale we previously thought impossible.

References
[1] Stanley, N. Voice Data Security - An overview of cellular (mobile) phone interception. Bloor Research 2011 Available for download http://www.bloorresearch.com/research/Spotlight/2052/Voice-Data-Security.html