By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 8th December 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Embarcadero Technologies, a provider of database and application development software, recently announced AppWave, a free platform that provides self-service, one-click access to PC software within organizations for business PCs and even personal employee laptops.

Available via a free download, the AppWave platform gives users access to more than 250 free PC productivity apps for general business, marketing, design, data management, and development including OpenOffice, Adobe Acrobat Reader, 7Zip, FileZilla, and more.

AppWave users also can add internally developed and commercial software titles, such as Adobe Creative Suite products and Microsoft Visio, for on-demand access, control, and visibility into software titles they already own. [Disclosure: Embaradero Technologies is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The so-called app store model, pioneered by Apple, is rapidly gaining admiring adopters thanks to its promise of reducing cost of distribution and of updates—and also of creating whole new revenue streams and even deeper user relationships.

As mobile users rapidly change the way the world accesses applications, data and services, the app store model is changing expectations and behaviors. And this is a good lesson for enterprises.

App stores work well for both users and providers, internal or external. The users are really quite happy with ordering what they need on the spot, as long as that process is quick, seamless, and convenient.

As with SOA registries, it now makes sense to explore how such "stores" can be created quickly and efficiently to distribute, manage, and govern how PC software is distributed inside of corporations.

The AppWave platform provides business users ways to quickly build productivity, and speed-to-value benefits for PC-based apps. Such approaches form an important advance as organizations pursue more efficient ways to track, manage, and deliver their worker applications, and bill for them based on actual usage.

Easily consumed
The AppWave platform converts valued, but often cumbersome, business software into easily consumed and acquired "apps," so business users don't have to wait in line for IT to order, install, and approve the work tools that they really need without delay.

With AppWave, companies have a consumer-like app experience with the software they commonly use. With rapid, self-service access to apps, and real-time tracking and reporting of software utilization, the end result is a boost in productivity and lowering of software costs. Pricing to enable commercial and custom software applications to run as AppWave apps starts at $10 to $400 per app.

Increasing demand for consumer-like technology experiences at work has forced enterprises to face some inconvenient truths about traditional application delivery models. Rather than wait many months for dated applications that take too long to install manually on request, business managers and end users alike are seeking self-provisioning alternatives akin to the consumer models they know from their mobile activities.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 16th November 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Our next VMworld case study interview focuses on how Germany’s largest travel agency has remade their PC landscape across 580 branch offices using virtual desktops. We’ll learn how Germany’s DER Deutsches Reisebüro redefined the desktop delivery vision and successfully implemented 2,300 Windows XP desktops as a service.

This story comes as part of a special BriefingsDirect podcast series from the recent VMworld 2011 Conference in Copenhagen. The series explores the latest in cloud computing and virtualization infrastructure developments. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here to tell us what this major VDI deployment did in terms of business, technical, and financial payoffs is Sascha Karbginski, Systems Engineer at DER Deutsches Reisebüro, based in Frankfurt. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Why were virtual desktops such an important direction for you? Why did it make sense for your organization?

Karbginski: In our organization, we’re talking about 580 travel agencies all over the country, all over Germany, with 2,300 physical desktops, which were not in our control. We had life cycles out there of about 4 or 5 years. We had old PCs with no client backups.

The biggest reason is that recovery times at our workplace were 24 hours between hardware change and bringing back all the software configuration, etc. Desktop virtualization was a chance to get the desktops into our data center, to get the security, and to get the controls.

DER in Germany is the number one in travel agencies. As I said, we're talking about 580 branches. We’re operating as a leisure travel agency with our branches, Atlasreisen and DER, and also, in the business travel sector with FCm Travel Solutions.

Gardner: This is a very IT-intensive business now. Everything in travel is done though networked applications and cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS) services. So a very intensive IT activity in each of these branches?

Karbginski: That’s right. Without the reservation systems, we can’t do any flight bookings or reservations or check hotel availability. So without IT, we can do nothing.

Gardner: And tell me about the problem you needed to solve. You had four generations of PCs. You couldn’t control them. It took a lot of time to recover if there was a failure, and there was a lot of different software that you had to support.

Karbginski: Yes. We had no domain integration, no control and we had those crashes, for example. All the data would be gone. We had no backups out there. And we changed the desktops about every four or five years. For example, when the reservation system needed more memory, we had to buy the memory, service providers were going out there, and everything was done during business hours.

We now have nearly about 100 percent virtualization. ... So it's about 99 percent virtualization. ... So the data is under our control in the data center, and important company information is not left in an office out there. Security is a big thing.

Gardner: What were some of the things that you had to do in order to enable this to work properly?

Karbginski: There were some challenges during the rollout. The bandwidth was a big thing. Our service provider had to work very hard for us, because we needed more bandwidth out there. The path we had our offices was 1 or 2-Mbit links to the headquarters data center. With desktop virtualization, we need a little bit more, depending on the number of the workplaces and we needed better quality of the lines.

So bandwidth was one thing. We also had the network infrastructure. We found some 10-Mbit half-duplex switches. So we had to change it. And we also had some hardware problems. We had a special multi-card board for payment to read out passports or to read out credit card information. They were very old and connected with PS/2.

So there were a lot of problems, and we fixed them all. We changed the switches. Our service provider for Internet VPN connection brought us more quality. And we changed the keyboards. We don’t need this old stuff anymore.

Gardner: How has this worked out in terms of productivity, energy savings, lowering costs, and even business benefits?

Karbginski: Saving was our big thing in planning this project. The desktops have been running out there now about one year, and we know that we have up to 80 percent energy saving, just from changing the hardware out there. We’re running the Wyse P20 Zero Client instead of physical PC hardware.

We needed more energy for the server side in the data center, but if you look at it, we have 60 up to 70 percent energy savings overall. I think it’s really great.

Gardner: That’s very good. So what else comes in terms of productivity?

Karbginski: In the past, the updates came during the business hours. Now, we can do all software updates at nights or at the weekends or if the office is closed. So helpdesk cost is reduced about 50 percent.

... We're using Dell servers with two sockets, quad-core, 144-gigabyte RAM. We're also using EMC Clariion SAN with 25 terabytes. Network infrastructure is Cisco, based on 10 GB Nexus data center switches. At the beginning the project, we had View 4.0 and we upgraded it last month to 4.6.

Gardner: What were some of the challenges in terms of working this through the people side of the process? We've talked about process, we've talked technology, but was there a learning curve or an education process for getting other people in your IT department as well as the users to adjust to this?

Karbginski: There were some unknown challenges or some new challenges we had during the rollout. For example, the network team. The most important thing was understanding of virtualization. It's an enterprise environment now, and if someone, for example, restarts the firewall in the data center, the desktops in our offices were disconnected.

It's really important to inform the other departments and also your own help desk.

... The first thing that the end users told us was that the selling platform from Amadeus, the reservation system, runs much faster now. This was the first thing most of the end users told us, and that’s a good thing.

The next is that the desktop follows the user. If the user works in one office now and next week in another office, he gets the same desktop. If the user is at the headquarters, he can use the same desktop, same outlook, and same configuration. So desktop follows the user now. This works really great.

Gardner: Looking to the future, are you going to be doing this following-the-user capability to more devices, perhaps mobile devices or at home PCs?

Karbginski: We plan to implement the security gateway with PCoIP support for home office users or mobile users who can access their same company desktop with all their data on it from nearly every computer in the world to bring the user more flexibility.

Gardner: If you were advising someone on what to learn from your experience as they now move toward desktop virtualization, any thoughts about what you would recommend for them?

Karbginski: The most important thing is to get in touch with the other departments and inform them about the thing you're doing. Also, inform the user help desk directly at the beginning of the project. So take time to inform them what desktop virtualization means and which processes will change, because we know most of our colleagues had a wrong understanding of virtualization.

They think that with virtualization, everything will change and we'll need other support servers, and it's just a new thing and nobody needs it. If you inform them what you're doing that nothing will be changed for them, because all support processes are the same as before, they will accept it and understand the benefits for the company and for the user.

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

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 6th September 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

The human race is spending more and more time inputting information into electronic devices of all types. So it is important that we find easier, faster and more accurate ways of transferring the information from our heads to our electronic beasts.

Using a keyboard has been the way to do this since the beginning of the computer age. More recently, voice recognition has taken off but still accounts for a small percentage of the information entered. Video cameras and audio recorders now account for most of the new content but do not displace much of the text content being produced. Gestures are the latest input method but are really only used for controlling the device not for input, although we might see some simple gestures for: hello, goodbye, yes, no, etc. Thought transference is in the labs but it will some considerable time before I can think this sentence and then see it on the screen.

All of this suggests that typing is going to remain a major method of input to electronic devices for years to come. To make matters worse, devices are getting smaller so that a full size QWERTY keyboard becomes impractical. Tablets and smartphones with touch screens do not even give any tactile feedback, although this may change in the next few years.

So, as typing is going to remain and the physical interface is not going to improve how can we make it easier, faster and more accurate? Predictive text has been around, especially for 12 key telephone input, for some years but has been of limited use because the predictions were often not right and just got in the way.

KeyPoint Technologies (KPT) have extended the concept of predictive text technology with new methods and greater intelligence; to such a degree that to type the 1700 odd characters above should require less than 500 key presses. With that increase in speed we should all become more productive and the use of on screen keyboards would become an acceptable input device for more than just a quick note. Hence helping to narrow and bridge the gap, what KPT describe as 'the chasm of inutility', between the desires of the users and capabilities of the input devices. To promote the technology KPT has announced the Open Adaptxt engine; this is an open source version of the engine freely available for a variety of mobile platforms.

What does the engine do that makes it so much more productive than standard predictive text? There are a collection of techniques which include:

• Intelligent prediction. As you type it will predict the word you are typing not just by the letters you typed but also by the context of the sentence and your personal word usage. This greatly increase the chance that the word you are trying to type will be in the prediction list and will require fewer characters to be typed. Further it will predict the next word before you even start typing; it can also predict whole phrases when that would be helpful.
• Intelligent error processing. If you type a word that is not recognised it will provide a list of alternatives. If a QWERTY keyboard is being used these alternatives will include those that would occur because of typical typing errors; for example letters typed in the wrong order, or adjacent letters ('a' instead of 's'). It can also automatically correct the word when you press space and will deal with capitalisation of proper names and acronyms.

There are further methods for specific issues that complete the engine.

Adaptxt is being marketed as a general purpose solution that should benefit all users by speeding up text entry from a keyboard. However, it should be of particular interest to users with limited dexterity who type slowly and are more likely to hit the wrong key. In fact it was originally developed to help a relative, who had lost an arm, to be able to type more easily.

I am keen to see examples of Adaptxt being built-in to applications and will write about them and hopefully with them soon.

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 23rd August 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Why would a blind person go into a library? Maybe to borrow a book in Braille, or more likely to borrow a talking book, CD or DVD. In Lambeth the new answer is to learn to use a computer.

Computers have the potential to improve the quality of life and job prospects of anyone who is blind or has a vision impairment (a Vision Impaired Person or VIP for short). A very large percentage of the world's knowledge has only been available in printed form on paper. This meant that it was inaccessible to anyone with a limited or no vision. Over the years various solutions have been used to close this gap a bit.

Braille was one very clever and successful solution but it is limited by: the cost of setting and printing any document; the size of a Braille document, which is a disadvantage; but probably the biggest issue is that it is difficult to learn, especially for anyone whose lost their vision later in life.

Audio books is a wonderful medium for fiction, where a book is read, and listened to, from the beginning to the end. It is not such a useful solution for reference or text books where navigation becomes a major issue. The cost of production also limits the titles available.

DAISY talking books provide the benefits of audio books and adds navigation capabilities.

All of these solutions have major limitations, as the number of titles is limited and great swathes of printed material - newspapers, magazines, journals - are generally not available and certainly not in a timely fashion.

More recently the rise of the computer, the Internet and various forms of electronic publishing have enabled a whole new set of sources of textual information; emails, blogs, wikis, online news channels etc. All of this is displayed on a screen and is again not accessible.

However, the fact that this information is electronic and therefore can be manipulated means that it is possible to turn the electronic words into spoken words that are accessible to people with vision impairments. All of human knowledge is being rapidly turned into electronic format and thus the knowledge available to a VIP is growing exponentially.

Unfortunately there are two barriers that need to be removed before all this information is available. Firstly the user needs access to suitable hardware and software that will read the information on the screen and enable them to navigate easily. Secondly they need to learn how to use the hardware and software. A VIP who has not learnt to use the system will not be able to assess the benefit to them and therefore will not be able to justify the initial outlay. The cost of a suitably configured machine is a considerable barrier to adoption.

The libraries in Lambeth have recently been the venue for an experiment to fix both these problems. The initiative is being driven forward by a local resident, Christina Burnett of Wide Eye Pictures, who is passionate about the benefits of computing to VIPs.

Like every modern library Lambeth has several computers in each library. The only extra hardware required was headphones; these are obviously essential if there are going to be several screen reader users in the library at one time. It is probable that headphones would have become necessary anyway for the general public as more and more audio information is available on the Internet. The other addition was to install screen reader software on all the library machines; it was decided to install it on all machines so that a VIP could use the system whichever library they wanted to visit. Some screen reader solutions are expensive and it would have been prohibitive to equip all machines; this was resolved by installing a free screen reader called Thunder which is available from www.screenreader.net. So for a minimal expenditure the libraries removed the first of the barriers.

To assist the VIP to learn to use the system a series of seven weekly training sessions was run, called DTvip (Digital Tuesday for Vision Impaired People). The initial set of sessions trained some VIPs and some volunteers so the scheme can be repeated and extended in the future. Screenreader.net, which developed Thunder, has obtained funding from Awards for All to work with DTVIP on this pilot training scheme at the Tate South Lambeth Library.

The first set of sessions was a great success and proved that the model works. Naturally, lessons have been learnt, in particular to have a structure that can support different users, ranging from a VIP who has never used a keyboard, through to a VIP who is an expert PC user but, through failing sight, needs to learn how to use a screen reader.

The second set of sessions is under way. The question now is how to quickly extend this model throughout Lambeth and the rest of the UK.

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 18th August 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

I wrote an article about new accessibility features in Apple OSX 10.7, Lion, just before it was available, I have been running Lion on both my iMac and Mac Book Air and all my comments hold.

The new feature of Lion that has really impressed me is Mail, the email engine. Apple have really researched how people would like to use mail and made significant changes to the usability of the interface. When I read about the changes and even when I saw them demonstrated I was not that excited, it is only since I have started using them for real that I realised how good they are.

The layout of the window has changed to take advantage of the standard wide screen format, which means you can see more of the email you are reading or writing. A sensible but not surprising change.

The facility to search all my emails has been made more intelligent and easier to use. For example if I am looking for an email I sent to a specific person:

• I start typing in the name and it will give me a list of suggestions.
• I choose the relevant suggestion and it places a token in the search field.
• The token gives me options to narrow the search by emails with the person's name in the from, to, or entire email.
• In my example I would choose 'to' and I will get a list of emails that I have sent.
• This list can be narrowed down further by creating other search tokens, for example having a phrase in the subject field.

This is saving me considerable time and reducing the stress I suffered when I could not find the email I was looking for. Really a big boon.

But my real favourite is conversations. This feature takes an email that has a long conversation in it, with many replies and forwards in it, and re-formats it to remove all the indentations and repetitions and just shows each step as a separate block. This makes it much easier to follow the threads and it just looks much better.

However, for me the real excitement is the massive difference to round robin replies and daily emails.

I organise a rota of volunteers. To do this I send out an email to all the volunteers asking for availability. The answers arrive over several days. With the old Mail I had to gather them altogether to process them, the new Mail does that automatically. I click on the latest reply and all the other replies are visible in the same pane, just like steps of a conversation. I can see them all at the same time, deal with them and then delete or file them as a whole. It is faster and I am less likely to miss one.

My inbox always has several daily emails, for example one from Bloor with the new articles on the site. I do not always have time to look at them on the day. I have to say they tended to get lost. But with the new conversations they are all brought together, I can skim through several days worth, pick out the few interesting bits and then delete all of them at one go. This is helping to clean up my inbox.

Usability and accessibility are close cousins; the extra usability in Mail should improve the accessibility as well. The new Mail is a great example of User Centred Design.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 14th June 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

New Quocirca research has been published to coincide with the launch of a service from Trend Micro called SafeSync for Business. The research shows that among SMBs in Europe, the US and Australia, 88 per cent say that 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 using tablet PCs. These devices are not always owned by the business; 74 per cent of SMBs say some of the devices used are employee-owned (part of the so-called consumerisation of IT).
 
This underlines a growing problem for organisations of all sizes. They have to manage and secure a growing variety of devices and operating systems—and, at the same time, deal with the rising tide of consumerisation. From a security perspective, there are an increasing number of products coming to market for securing mobile devices.

Examples include:

• Juniper’s Junos Pulse Mobile Security Suite, following its acquisition of S-Mobile (supports Android, Blackberry, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Apple iOS
• Symantec’s Norton Mobile Security (for Android)
• Webroot Mobile Security for Android
• ESET Mobile Security Business Edition for Windows Mobile and Symbian

It is notable that two of these products are, for now, only available for Android. The reason for this is twofold; first, use of Android is growing faster than any other mobile operating system, so it is worth targeting (it was reported last week that 400,000 Android devices were being activated per day). There have already been problems; for example in March, Google removed 21 free apps from the Android Market which it identified as malware aimed at stealing personal information. Second, Android is the most open of the mobile operating systems and therefore easier for both malware writers and security vendors to develop for.
 
For businesses, host device-based protection is just one approach to protecting mobile data use. Indeed, relying on device-based malware detection can be problematic if the devices are user owned. Another approach is to centralise data access and to minimise the need for data to be stored on mobile devices in the first place. This is the aim of Trend Micro’s new product, which enables such sharing. Another way to centralise access is via virtualisation using products such as Citrix’s Xen Desktop.
 
With the proliferation of such devices all businesses need to be thinking about the security of the devices themselves and, perhaps more urgently, about safe access to data. Enabling such access may make certain business processes more efficient but is also likely to be putting intellectual property and personally identified information at risk.
 
In June 2011, Quocirca will be running a workshop on end-point security and management at the NextGen Security European Summit 2011. More information is available here. The subject of end-point management is also covered in a freely available Quocirca report The IT Profit Centre sponsored by Kaseya.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 13th June 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

The increasing reliance being placed by businesses on mobile IT access will nearly always lead to increased risk, at least in the short term. One of the main reasons for this is that the growth in use of mobile devices is often ad-hoc and unplanned. Of course the way mobile devices are deployed varies; the allocation of laptop computers and BlackBerry smartphones may well be planned, whilst the use of iPads and Android smartphones may be ad hoc, driven by users with their own devices.

One reaction could be to attempt to block all unplanned usage of devices. However, this is not necessarily desirable or practical. There are many benefits from allowing remote access; the flexible working they enable mean employees can be more responsive and that can lead to more efficient business processes. Try blocking access from their devices and an employee will find a work around, sending an urgent message to a customer may be done via an open social network rather than the corporate email system, where the communication can be archived and is auditable at a later date.

What risks arise from the use of mobile devices and how can their use be controlled, so that the benefits can be realised and the threats mitigated? Before addressing this it is worth pointing out that there are two broad approaches to putting controls in place:

1. On the device itself (which may be limited depending on ownership)
2. Centrally, protecting the applications and data being accessed from mobile devices.

There are four broad categories of risk—access, data, malware and business continuity. This article details how each of these can be approached and concludes with a fifth issue; an end-point management regime is needed to pull them altogether.

Security of access
This requires addressing access to the device itself and access to the network resources that the user is permitted to use. With any device a passcode for access can be put in place; that leads to all the usual problems with password management—users forgetting them and the need to reset them.

However, the bad guys find ways around device-level passwords, so additional strong authentication of the user is desirable; especially if sensitive data is to be stored on a device. Examples are bio-metrics (most commonly a finger print), hardware tokens or a mechanism for distributing one-time passwords. Strong authentication has mostly been used for laptop device access and not smartphones and tablets. In fact, smartphones can be used for enabling strong authentication of access to laptops (see below). However, with the increasing power of these devices perhaps they should require strong authentication too.

It need not be the case that gaining access to the device itself opens up the available network resources, although in some will deem this enough to do so. Others will require secondary authentication for opening up a VPN connection or gaining access to applications. Here, the management overheads need to be balanced against risk. Too many passwords to remember, too many times they get forgotten. So it makes sense to use the mobile device to authenticate access to a single sign on system, but get this wrong and there is a lot at stake.

To counter this there are a range of additional measures that can be taken. These include:

• Hardware recognition – only allowing access from known devices that can be recognised through a range of characteristics or an agent installed on the device.
• Geolocation – using IP address analysis of GPS software to identify the user’s location and decide if this is as expected; a UK-based sales person should not be requesting access from Moscow!
• Out of band authentication – for example, sending one time passwords via an independent device to the one being authenticated (e.g. to a mobile phone to authenticate a laptop).

Security of data
Businesses worry about two types of data with respect to security. First, there us intellectual property (IP), keeping this safe is key to competiveness. Second, there is personally identifiable data (PID); it is in a business’s interests to keep much of this confidential too. However, PID is also what regulators take an interest in and many cases brought against businesses for failure to protect PID are through the loss of unsecured mobile devices.

On the device itself, the ultimate way to ensure data is protected, should the device be lost or stolen, is to encrypt stored data. However, there are caveats. Encryption introduces management overheads for two reasons; first there is a danger that data can be lost forever if encryption keys are forgotten – management tools can provide a backup mechanism through the secure assignment and storage of keys. Second, encryption will only satisfy regulators if it can be proved a lost device was encrypted, which requires the process of enabling encryption to be audited.

It must also be recognised that encryption is not the be-all-and-end-all. Data is only ever of use if can be decrypted and used. A user may choose to do things with decrypted data, which can lead it to end up in the wrongs hands—for example copying to unencrypted storage devices, printed or sent by email. So to be fully secure, end-point security software can be deployed on the device itself to control what the user can do.

Perhaps the best approach is to making sure that confidential data is never stored on mobile devices in the first place by enabling only for access and viewing, not for storage. There are caveats here too—first the benefits of the user having the device, from a business perspective, can only ever be realised when the user is online. Second, users can create data on the fly, for example making notes following a customer meeting.

A final measure that can be taken is to put in place the ability to remotely disable and/or wipe devices. From the point of view of data protection, if encryption is in place then this is a “belt and braces”, approach. However, being able to remotely disable devices ensures on-going connectivity and calling charges are not incurred.

Malware protection
Many consider it irresponsible not to have anti-malware software on user end points, but actually, much of the necessary protection can be provided through central controls that limit what ends up on a device in the first place. Most obviously, it makes sense to filter email traffic before it reaches a user’s device, however this is done, whether using server-based software, a network appliance or a cloud based service; the user’s corporate email should be clean.

Such controls can be extended to general web access, forcing access via a central proxy that checks for URLs with a bad reputation and web borne malware. Such proxies can also be used to extend web usage policy to remote users, for example limiting access to social networks. To make such web access controls work, the user must be blocked from opening up other uncontrolled internet connections, for instance via a mobile service provider. This is of course limiting what the user can then use the device for and is not practical for user owned devices.

At the end of the day many will only feel comfortable if there is protection from malware on the device itself, as part of an end-point protection suite; users can still potentially load data from USB devices or CDs of unknown origin. Most malware is still aimed at Microsoft Windows, because of its widespread use. However, as other operating systems become more common it will become practical for data thieves to attack them too. Security software suppliers are only just starting to roll out end point protection suites for smartphone and tablet operating system and businesses are slow to deploy them. The first major compromise of Google Android, Apple iOS or some other non-Windows based system should change that.

Business continuity
The flexible working enabled through the use of mobile end points, and the consequent increased efficiency of business processes, will only happen whilst the end-points and the network access they require remains available. The theft and loss of end-points is inevitable and procedures must be in place for the rapid replacement and re-provisioning of end points. It is worth pointing out that the trend for employees to use personally-owned devices to access IT has a positive aspect when it comes to risk—they will take more care of something they own than something supplied by their employer.

The urgency to replace will depend on the job-role of a given user. A field service engineer who can no longer log faults because their smartphone has been dropped in a puddle (maybe they should have had water proof one in the first place) may be given priority over salesperson who can longer read emails because their BlackBerry has been stolen (they can always visit an internet café).

However, replacing the device itself is not enough, if the creation and storage of business data on the device is allowed, then this must be restored too. This can only be done if a rigorous backup regime has been put in place. In the past, IT managers often waited until devices came back on to local area networks to perform backups. The advent of high bandwidth remote connectivity and cheap storage has led to a proliferation of cloud-based services that provide continuous data protection. From consumer to large enterprise, if data is valued, there is little excuse these days for it not being regularly backed up.

Ensuring a user can do their jobs remotely and cost effectively requires that their devices are connected as often, and as cheaply as possible. This requires working with network access providers that provide multiple means of communications, reverting to the cheapest, fastest method whenever possible. For example, using public wireless access points by default and only switching to more expensive mobile networks when there is no other option.

End point management
Policing encryption, making sure backups are performed and anti-malware software is up to date and ensuring timely re-provisioning of lost devices, across communities of tens, hundreds or thousands of mobile users is challenge for any IT department. However, the management tools for achieving this have been evolving rapidly. They allow routine tasks to be automated across groups of devices or users freeing IT staff for other tasks. Such tools can be deployed on-premise but are also increasingly available as cloud-based services.

That said, IT departments may still find the task daunting. Many have turned to managed service providers (MSPs) to provide data centre and desktop management services and some MSPs are now starting to provide mobile device management services too. Working across multiple customers, MSPs can scale their services up to cover tens of thousands of end points and build up the experience and expertise to ensure service levels that many IT departments would struggle to achieve for themselves.

Whether it is carried out in-house or outsourced, failing to put in place a management regime for mobile devices and thus mitigate much of the risk they represent is something that no business should overlook.

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: 1st June 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

As enterprises and most business users rapidly adopt smartphones and make them mission-critical to their work and lives, tablets are fast on their heels as a similar major disruptor. These fast-moving mobile trends together are also escalating demand for enterprise app stores.

The App Store is rapidly gaining admiring adopters, pioneered by Apple, thanks to its promise of reducing cost of distribution and of updates—and also of creating whole new revenue streams and even deeper user relationships. RIM, Apple’s iOS, and Google Android devices are rapidly changing the way the world does business ... and the app store model is changing the way the world does software.

App stores work well for both buyers and sellers. The users are really quite happy with paying for what they have on the spot, as long as that process is quick, seamless, and convenient. Vendors, service providers, and communication service providers should therefore explore how such stores can be created quickly and efficiently to strike, as it were, while the app store iron is hot.

So the onus is now on a variety of business service providers and enterprises to come up with some answers for app stores of their own and to serve their employees, customers, and partner ecosystems in new ways. This can't be done haphazardly. The new app stores also must stand up to the rigors of business-to-business (B2B) commerce requirements, not just consumer-driven games.

To learn more about how the enterprise app store market will shape up, BriefingsDirect assembled a panel to delve into the market and opportunity for enterprise app stores, and to find out how they could be created quickly and efficiently. [Disclosure: Partnerpedia is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The experts included Michele Pelino, a Principal Analyst at Forrester Research; Mark Sochan, the CEO of Partnerpedia, and Sam Liu, Vice President of Marketing at Partnerpedia. The panel was moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Maybe you could paint a picture of what's going on with business applications, now that we have seen the app store model really pick up and become attractive to consumers.

Pelino: Our surveys say that about 30 percent of enterprises—that’s medium, large, as well as small enterprises—are using app stores do deploy some of their applications at some level. It’s not that they're doing everything that way today. That’s the early stage of this, because this is an evolutionary path. It started on the consumer side and now it’s going into the enterprise.

... It’s really important to take a step back and recognize how important mobility has become to enterprises overall, as they are interacting with their employees and their customers and their partners and providers as well. ... We do surveys at Forrester of enterprises in both North America and Europe to better understand those priorities and how mobility fits into overall technology initiatives. We find that three of the top priorities that are being focused on by many enterprises are related to mobility.

Mobility includes many types of workers and applications that address not just the traditional email/calendaring applications, which are widely deployed by most companies, but is also pushing those applications down into line of business worker types of applications, which are tied to particular types of employees in an organization.

They're applications that may be designed for the sales team, customer service, support, or marketing. They also might be applications that are tied to the needs of particular vertical industry’s logistics or supply chain management or enterprise asset management types of applications.

The other thing that’s driving some of this momentum is that individuals, not just employees, are going out and buying lots of different smartphone devices and mobile devices. ... tablets, slates, and different types of smartphones. So, this momentum isn’t just happening within the corporation. It’s actually happening outside of that, and it's what we would call the consumerization of IT.

This means that many individuals, consumers, are driving requirements into the corporation and into the IT organization to get new types of applications on their devices, whether those devices are personally owned or ones that the corporation has as well.

One of the things to think about, when you are doing an app store, is to recognize that there's a lot of momentum around app stores in general. All the different device manufacturers have application stores tied initially to a consumer-oriented perspective.

The momentum around those app stores has driven corporations to start thinking about what they can do to more effectively and efficiently support their requirements around applications.

The thing with corporations is that IT organizations still want to control which version of the applications are in there and what types of apps an employee might have access to in a corporate environment, as opposed to what they might be doing in their personal world. Security is always a key issue here.

All of these things are really driving the need for these application stores—but at an enterprise level. More and more applications are not just coming from what the IT organization wants to put out there, but also line-of-business workers.

By implementing these application stores, I, as an individual employee with a particular role will have access to certain applications. Another employee may have access to other applications that are tied to their role in the organization. And you could broaden that concept out to interacting with partners, suppliers, and customers as well.

... More enterprises are dealing with that pain-point of the complexity of getting these applications out there, of having to have some control over which version, monitoring them, tracking what's going on with the apps, ensuring that everybody is getting the application that they should ... or not.

... What we're seeing now is that some of these key drivers are coming together for large, medium, small enterprises who must figure out how to expand their applications and capabilities.

Gardner: Is this a big opportunity for IT to do something differently and better than the way they have distributed software in the past?

Sochan: There is no doubt that the IT group is getting pushed by the end users who have become very comfortable with how they can search, browse, try, download, and purchase applications. As a result, that has raised the expectations of how those same workers would like to be able browse, search, and download applications that could help them in their business world and with their productivity.

But, there are some pretty big differences between the consumer world of buying a 99-cent Angry Birds game versus downloading business applications. So some of the things that IT groups are having to think about and sort out are security and data governance, and how data that is specific to the device can be managed and, if need be, removed.

There are also issues about how the IT group can enable worker productivity and increase the satisfaction of the user base.

Finally, there's a need to try and find cost savings and efficiencies. If you had everyone just buying individual applications, then you wouldn’t have the benefit of bulk license purchasing or the ability to purchase through normal corporate buying processes that result in larger scales of economy.

Gardner: How does an enterprise, a vendor, or a communication service provider start the process of thinking about architecting and providing such an app store?

Liu: We've talked to a number of different enterprises and various industries, and most of them are in the early stages of researching and trying to figure out what this means to them. They know that tablets are coming, but actually today’s problems have as much to do with just devices already in-house, such as smartphones.

What we're hearing in terms of platforms is that the top three platforms they're trying to figure out are iOS, Android, and the platform coming from RIM.

In that research phase, some of the issues that they're concerned about are more traditional IT policies and compliance issues. They understand the motivation from the user standpoint and the value of that, but they're really trying to understand the landscape in terms of those more traditional issues around IT control and compliance, such as security.

The other thing is that they're also more open to outsourced or cloud and software-as-a-service (SaaS)-based solutions, as opposed to something that may be completely managed in-house via traditional software. The issue there is that they want to make sure that it actually can connect to the very secure session in the corporate environment, and that by outsourcing they are not giving that up in terms of the security and control.

So you might want to start with the current devices, such as phones, and focus on maybe internal applications or select third-party applications. Deploy a project from that and then figure out how you want to evolve that towards other devices and other platforms.

Sochan: At Partnerpedia we've been working with a number of the leading tablet vendors and some of the largest enterprise customers to understand what are the business problems and what are the priorities that need to be solved.

Overwhelmingly, what we're hearing is that most customers are not satisfied with just having an open marketplace that you might see from, say, the Google Apps Marketplace. They're looking for some blended model between complete end-user autonomy and some better corporate control. That’s the first piece of feedback we are hearing.

The second piece is that there is a need to have some sort of branding. Most enterprise companies want to have some branding, so that it’s very clear to their users that this is their marketplace, this is their store. And that store has a combination of third-party built applications, similar to what you might see if you went into an Apple App Store or into the Google Android marketplace.

Depending on the type of application and the user, there's a need to have a lot of control and flexibility for the corporation to either pre-purchase those licenses and to manage those licenses effectively. Then, they can both purchase and manage the distribution of those license, and be able to reclaim them as employees leave the organization or devices are lost, as well as allowing, as appropriate, flexibility for the end-users to actually make purchases directly based on their budget.

... If you look at the core essence of an app store, there is a repository or catalog of information that makes it very easy for a company’s customers be able to find, browse, and look for products and services, not only from the vendor, but also related products and services that are of value from that vendor's ecosystem.

It almost doesn’t matter what kind of company it is. Most companies have some extended ecosystem of value-added partners. The ability to create a very rich catalog of information that your customers can browse and search and look for related products and services makes it much more compelling and gains a lot more commitment from your partners.

Because you're now providing them with of a go-to-market benefit directly to the customers, and from the customer’s perspective, they see tremendous value in your company’s products and services, because they see the richness of the ecosystem around it.

At the heart of it is this catalog that can be highly personalized. You can imagine that if you're now able to personalize this for your customers, where your customers are coming into this marketplace and they are not just seeing a generic marketplace, they are actually seeing a marketplace that’s been personalized to them.

This means that the marketplace already knows which products your customers have purchased from you and therefore is making a pre-selection or presenting them with information that’s very specific and related to the footprint that that customer already has of your products.

In some cases, in a more consumer-oriented world, you may want to actually go to a transaction and actually enable purchasing. But our enterprise customers are telling us that, equally important, if not more important, in the first steps is to have a very sophisticated lead capture engine, so that you can capture that interest that your customer has expressed, and been browsing and expressed interest in a particular product.

Then, you can route that, as appropriate, into whatever customer relationship management (CRM) system is being used and more effectively follow up with that customer, either with your own direct sales force or with passing that lead to your partners for the appropriate follow up.

... The core of the Partnerpedia offering is a white label, cloud-based, branded app store, that allows very efficient discovery and delivery of applications. The internal benefits for the internal facing app store is the capability for IT members to be able to pre-purchase select applications that they want their users have available to them. And also providing the capability to brand that app store so that it follows the company’s logo and it has a very consistent corporate look and feel.

Then, giving a way for users to be able to very easily search, browse, and look for applications that are specific to their role in the organization.

Finally, the license management of that software, allowing the IT department to be able to track licenses that have been purchased and downloaded, as well as be able to reclaim those licenses as is appropriate, when an employee either no longer needs that license or has left the organization or has lost the device.

And looking more to the future, we are also working very closely with customers that are building a private branded marketplace. And I distinguish between an app store and a marketplace in that a marketplace is much broader than just applications. It can be hard goods, products, services, or offerings from partners and provides just a much richer way for customers to discover value-added offerings from a company.

Gardner: Who are the folks who seem to be most interested in this? Is this something you're selling at multiple levels, or do you really have the ears yet of that business strategy?

Sochan: We're seeing it in a few different industries. Certainly high-tech is an area where this lends itself very well, because most companies are moving to a cloud services world and so they're looking for new and more innovative ways to combine and recombine multiple solution offerings to come up with more valuable offerings to their customers.

This is also driving opportunities for innovation and business models. how the customer pays for it. Having these bite-size pieces of innovation lends itself to new ideas and new business models in which there can be not only just actual new sources of revenue that can come out of this, because now it’s a channel to the market.

Gardner: Do you have any thoughts about the IT efficiency aspects of an app store model, if we take it beyond smartphones and tablets to the entire spectrum of endpoints the users use?

Pelino: We've been starting on the mobile device side of the world—smartphones and tablets, those types of devices. But, at a corporate level, there are other types of endpoints that you need to manage and deploy applications to, and you want the same kind of control. You also want to have a sense of how much you are spending.

As a service type of delivery model or a per user type of delivery model, you can use different kinds of models here to keep control of the cost and have efficiencies around cost that you might not have today, because there is lots of overlap happening.

There are benefits as well, when you're thinking about individual end users who might have devices that they use in certain situations. When they're at their desk, maybe they have their laptops or desktops there. So, ultimately, you could have the same environment to integrate what an individual end-user or an employee could get in terms of the apps that they're able to get and always have a consistent experience for that.

The other side of that is just having a recognition that at the IT level, as much as they would love to control this, there are lots of devices around the bend. So even in the mobile world the devices we see today are not the ones that are going to be here tomorrow and there is more and more, almost on a day-to-day basis, being announced and put out there for end-users, whether it be enterprises or consumers to use.

How do I keep that in line? This app-store model is certainly one way to do it. But, when you think about it at the IT organization level, it’s not just about mobility. They have to think about the endpoints across the organization and this could certainly be relevant in that case as well.

... You can imagine that now, with the capabilities that you have, you're going to be able to track and understand better what individuals are doing. Are they using certain applications? What they are doing? When they are doing it? As well as better understanding how you might be able to package and put together capabilities that might be more valuable to your customers in a manner that will be useful, in an individualized manner, not just basic bundles or combinations of services.

... For reference, there's a Forrester report that sets up the complexity that’s facing many organizations that I touched on very early on, called "Managing Mobile Complexity."

There's another report that’s coming out very soon around mobility in the cloud. We've been talking about these delivery mechanisms, cloud-based delivery mechanisms for applications and services, especially around mobile devices and applications and services. ...

From the business intelligence (BI) side of this, we've only started scraping the surface, because we are in the earlier stages. But as you have all of your customers, partners, and suppliers accessing these application stores, as well as your employees, you can then target those individuals with appropriate information. Not necessarily marketing all the time, but appropriate information, if it’s for employees and partners and suppliers, and for the customers, certainly marketing and promotional activities could be tied in here as well.

Sochan: As Michele motioned, there is a really exciting rich trove of data and BI that you get, because now you can see what users are interested in. You see what they are browsing.

All of us are very familiar with the Amazon-like model, where you rate products and services. The exact same thing is now enabled in these branded app stores, where the users are, in real time, rating the number of stars for that application. More importantly, they are giving their comments about what they found useful and areas that they would like to see improvements, which creates this very exciting innovation cycle.

Where previously you had very complex monolithic applications that got delivered and had a couple of year cycle, now you're seeing bite-size pieces of innovation that gets immediate feedback from the end-users. The developer sees that feedback almost instantly and is able to immediately respond with either bug fixes or feature enhancements.

What’s really exciting to me is just how fast the innovation and that feedback loop happens that just spurs more innovation.

We have some great white papers that people can access from our website at partnerpedia.com, that will give very useful insights into some of the best leading practices in this area.

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: 3rd May 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

As recent outages at Amazon Web Services and Sony PlayStation Network jar the common perception of IT business as usual, IT failures and performance snafus are nothing new, just perhaps much more prominent.

Someone, somewhere got the first call on those outages—the front line IT technical support staff. And the expanding role of cloud and the online services ecosystems that more of us depend on only point up why such IT technical support is more important than ever.

It just so happens that the importance of good and fast support is forcing technical support industry changes, with an emphasis on integration and empowerment for improving how help desks respond and perform in a spiraling crisis.

To learn more about how support is adapting to the high-impact, high-exposure cloud era, BriefingsDirect recently interviewed two lauded IT Master Technologists from HP. Part of the new support philosophy comes from providing a more centralized, efficient, and powerful means of getting all the systems involved working, and all the knowledge necessary together quickly to get applications back in action and keep them there. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

These two support stars, Chris Tinker and Greg Tinker, both HP Master Technologists, who happen to be identical twins, were chosen via a recent sweepstakes hosted by HP to identify favorite customer support personnel. Learn here why they gained such recognition, and uncover their recommendations for how IT support should be done better in a rapidly changing era of increasingly hybrid and cloud-modeled computing. The two were interviewed by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: You deal with people when they are, in some cases, in their darkest hour. They're under pressure. There's something that's gone wrong. They're calling you. So, you're not just there in a technical sense, which of course is important, but there must be a human dynamic to this as well. How does that work?

Chris Tinker: We become their confidant. We foster a relationship there between the two parties. For us, it's very exhilarating. It's the ultimate test. You want to build both the technical and business, but also the interpersonal relationship, because you have to weigh in on so many levels, not just technical. That’s a critical component, but not the only component.

Greg Tinker: And today the customer expects the technical master technologist, like my brother and I, not just to know the one thing they're asking about, because that question is going to quickly turn. For example, I am having an Oracle performance issue, the customer thinks it may be disk related, but when you dig into it, you find out that it's actually an ODBC call, a networking issue. So, you have to be quite proficient at a multitude of technologies and have a lot of depth and breadth.

Gardner: So what does it take to be a good IT support person nowadays?

Chris Tinker: It’s simply not enough to be a technical guru—not in today's industry. You have to have a good understanding of technology, yes, but you also have to understand the tools and realize that technology is simply a tool for business outcomes. If you're listening to the business, understanding what their concerns and their challenges are, then you can apply that understanding to their technical situation to essentially work for a solution.

Greg Tinker: Chris and I study, almost on a daily basis, to stay ahead of the technology curve. Chris and I both do a lot in SCSI I/O control logic, with respect to the kernel structure of HP-UX as well as Linux, which is our playground, if you will.

And, it takes what I would call firm foundation to be able to provide that strong wealth of knowledge to be the customer's confidant. You can't be an expert at one point anymore. You can't be a network expert only. You have to understand the entire gamut of the business, so that you can understand the customer's technical problem.

Gardner: Let me congratulate you your award. This was, I think, a worldwide pool, or at least a very large group of people that you were chosen from. Did this come as a surprise?

Greg Tinker: It was an honor, I can say that, and we are very grateful for that. Our customer installed base, as well as our peers and the management team, put our names into this situation. It was a great honor… For each vote that was cast, HP donated $10 to the humanitarian organization Care, to max out at a $100,000. They met that goal in just a few days. It was quite astonishing.

Chris Tinker: And it was a surprise… Very rewarding.

Gardner: Okay, you've been at this for 12 and 13 years. What's changed over that period of time?

Chris Tinker: Catchphrases change. Today it's cloud computing, but cloud computing has been around for a long time. We just didn’t refer to it as cloud computing. Shared infrastructure of course is what we called it.

Virtualization today is becoming a big ticket item, where in years past, big iron was the thing that was a catchphrase. Big iron was very large computers. We still have big iron in storage, that’s true. We still have that big footprint, big powerhouse, that consumes a lot of power, but that’s a necessity of the storage platform.

The big thing for today is converged infrastructure. These are terms you wouldn’t have heard years ago, where we are trying to converge multiple type of protocols, physical media under one medium, networking, Fibre Channel, which of course is your storage network, TCP/IP network, going across the same physical piece of media. These are things that are changing, and of course with that comes extreme amount of complexity, especially when it comes into the actual engine that drives this.

Greg Tinker: As Chris stated, the key phrase of yesteryear was big iron. I want a big behemoth machine that can outdo mainframe. If you look back to 1999 and 2000, what you were looking for in the open system world was something to compete with Big Blue.

Today it's virtualization and blades. Everybody used to say—probably about mid-2005—"I want a pizza box. I want a new blade." We no longer call those blades. Those are called pizza boxes now. Today, the concept is all about blades. If you can't make the thing 3 inches tall and 1 inch wide, there is something wrong.

Gardner: You've been describing how things have changed technically. How have things changed in terms of the customer requirements and/or the customer culture?

Chris Tinker: The expectation is more for less. They want more computing power. They want more IT for less cost, which I think that’s been true since day one, but today, of course, that "more for less" just means more computing power. The footprint of the servers has changed.

And two, the support model has changed. Keep in mind, we're in support, and we're seeing a trend with these concepts where customers are having all these physical servers and the support contracts on all these servers are being consolidated down to one physical server with virtual instances.

The support model of yesteryear doesn’t always fit the support model that they should have today.

Greg Tinker: What Chris is talking about there is consolidation efforts. Customers used to have 500 servers. Today,—I want to exaggerate my point here—we have it on a virtualization of one or two physical machines that are behemoth and it's virtualized 500 guests.

Though that model works right for consolidating the cost effort of the infrastructure, so your capital cost is less, the problem now becomes the support model. Customers tend to reduce the support as well, because it's less infrastructure. But, keep in mind, most customers kind of forget a lot of times that they've put all their eggs into the one basket, and that basket needs a lot of protection.

So now you have your entire enterprise running on one or two pieces of physical hardware that is a grossly complex with not only the virtual servers, but the virtual Ethernet modules, the Fibre Channel model concepts are all now basically one concept to run every protocol type, whether you are running infiniband, Gigabit Ethernet, Fibre Channel, etc., the complexity requires a great deal of support.

When a customer calls up and says, "We've made a change in our environment and my server has crashed, the physical server went down, or has lost access to its storage or network," you're not just affecting that one physical server, but you're affecting hundreds. So, the support model today is quick.

Gardner: It sounds to me that there is a higher risk profile. Is that a fair characterization?

Greg Tinker: That would be a fair characterization. There is a higher risk on the hardware end in the sense that you still have hardware redundancy, of course, but you're fully dependent upon cluster technology and complexity.

Chris Tinker: A good solution design for business risk assessments are still a critical component to your solution design.

Gardner: I'm going to guess that over the past several years in the tradeoff for cost and risk, people probably favor the cost side a bit. So, that means the people in your position are the backstop?

Greg Tinker: That’s what the trend is becoming. The trend is, "We're going to reduce our cost in the CAPEX and reduce our cost in the infrastructure. We're going to consolidate and virtualize that concept, and we are going to look at our support strategy in a different light." That’s what most customers think.

Gardner: What is that new light?

Greg Tinker: The new light today is that customers are focused more on the higher end support models, meaning four-hour call to repair, where it used to be 24-hour or 48-hour support models, where we were not in a huge rush. If we had a disk drive failure, we had plenty of time, because we had full redundancy, whatever. So we had plenty of time to fix those components.

Today, with all this consolidation effort, it becomes a real critical need when you have a failing component, whether it be hardware or software, to get that component addressed urgently. You don’t really have the time.

Chris Tinker: That’s a great point. Looking at that standard support model, you had so many physical servers and your business was essentially interlaced with these systems. You could handle an outage, whether it was a software or hardware condition. It wasn't as strategic or as strong as today’s virtualized environments, where you would have much heavier business impact.

To Greg’s point, this inter-support model used to work with some of these virtualized environments. I am not saying all virtualized environments, but some of these virtualized environments. With four-hour call-to-repair, you can imagine in four hours what’s required. The technologists who answer the phone first have to address the business concerns to figure out what the business impact is and understand what the problem is.

Once we ascertain what’s causing that problem and the problem has been defined, we have to figure out what’s going wrong with the technology in order to bring it back online. All that has to be done within four hours on some of our most critical contracts.

Gardner: You're sorting through implementations with loads of vendors involved. When it comes to this sort of a mission-critical situation, they're probably thankful that there's someone there trying to corral this. So, I imagine the cooperation is pretty high in these circumstances?

Chris Tinker: Yeah, the stakes are high at this level. You are talking about, not only the corporation, the customer, but you are also talking about the vendors, whether it be HP or third party, and we are partnering with all these vendors. Everybody has got a stake in the game. Essentially, their reputation is on the line.

So we partner, regardless. As we don’t want to be thrown under the bus, we don’t throw anybody else under the bus. We partner. We come together as one throat to choke or one hand to shake, however you want to look at it. But, essentially, we all have the same thing in common, the customer’s well-being.

Greg Tinker: I'll second Chris’ sentiment on that, in the sense that when we're engaged at our level, it's no longer a finger-pointing game. It's a partnership, regardless of who the customer is. If it's HP gear, so be it. If it's somebody else’s gear, and we see where the problem is at, we don't point the finger. We ask the customer to get their vendor on the bridge with us and we work as a team to get the business restored, because that’s priority one.

Chris Tinker: That’s HP technical support. That’s what we thrive at. That’s one of our charters. Our management has dictated that they want team effort, global effort.

Gardner: How did you both get involved with this? Did one get into it first and the other follow? What's the story behind how you ended up here?

Greg Tinker: It was quite a lengthy road. Chris and I actually started off going in one direction, and we agreed many years ago in school that one of us would go one direction and the other in another, and see who was enjoying the industry better. Chris joined HP and fell in love with it. He and I have a very strong Linux background. Then, I jumped ship and went with my brother Chris, and we have been with HP ever since, and have loved it dearly.

Chris Tinker: We look at IT support as a ladder and we just climbed that ladder. We started in mission-critical support and found it to be exhilarating. With mission-critical support you're talking about enterprise-class corporations. We're not talking about consumer products. We're talking about an entire corporation's business running on an IT solution and how we're engaged in that process.

Unfortunately, in our line of work, we do see customers, where the technology did not go as planned, predicted, or expected and it's up to us to essentially figure out what the expectations are with technology and ascertain whether or not the technology can deliver that. That's how we moved through support.

We started off as mission-critical support specialists. We became architects, designing solutions for corporations and found out that we were very good at escalations and that's where we are today.

Gardner: There have also been some shifts over the past dozen years or so in the degree to which remote support is possible and your ability to get inside and get that information. Maybe we could take a moment to learn more about what tools have been brought to bear to help you with this?

Chris Tinker: The HP Virtual Room (HPVR). If you go to rooms.hp.com, it’s a good example. As you just mentioned, yesteryear it was, "Hey, send me the logs. Send me the examples. Send me some data, and I'll parse through it and figure it out." You had to wait for data to come in and then start parsing those logs, parsing that data, and building your hypothesis of what might be the problem.

Now, imagine if I were able to take that in real time. So, Greg, talk about real time.

Greg Tinker: Real time is key in today’s technology world. Nobody wants to wait. Take your phone for example. Can you stand it when you have pressed the email button and your phone takes more than three seconds to load it up? Everybody gets annoyed when it's slow. Well, the same is true in technology services support.

When customers call in, they expect immediate response. By the time it gets to our level, where Chris and I sit and our team resides inside the support model, the customer is in dire straits. We use the Virtual Room technology. It's similar to WebEx.

There are a lot of similarities out there. Different vendors have different tools. We use the HP Virtual Room toolset and we can jump onto any machine in the world, anywhere in the world, at a moment’s notice. We can do crash analysis on a Linux kernel crash in real time on a customer’s machine. The same with HP-UX, Solaris, AIX—name your favorite.

We can look at these stack traces and actually find the most likely component that compromises the infrastructure. We can find it, isolate it, and remedy it.

Chris Tinker: Not only is it just us troubleshooting, but it's bringing to bear our peers. It's team work, a two-heads-are-better-than-one mentality. Greg even lived that first. At the end of the day, you've got 2, 4, or 20 people on the phone. You can imagine all of those people sharing the same desktop at the same time to try to look at a problem. You get all these different levels of expertise.

You're able to take all these talents and focus them on one scenario. So, now with four-hour call to repair, how is that even possible? It's possible when we have to bring these people and partner with these people. They could be not only HP employees and HP technical support. That goes back to vendors and those relationships. We bring those vendors into the same Virtual Room, showing them where we're seeing the problem and asking what we need to do to solve this.

Gardner: While we are on the subject of tools, what's coming next? If I were to design these types of tools, you would be the guys I would go to, to get my list of requirements. What are you asking for?

Greg Tinker: The biggest thing we see today is storage. The growth rate of storage is enormous. And the biggest problems customers run into are performance and capacity.

Capacity is the easy one, right? I am 100 percent full in my file system. I just need more. That's the easy one to fix.

The hard one to fix is "My application is not running the way I want it to, Fix it." Those are the difficult ones. We have to have a lot of tools to help us understand what the load conditions are, because it's no longer the yesteryear scenario of a Superdome, HP Rack, one big behemoth machine, four terabytes of memory, 400 CPUs, loading up one storage array. That's no longer the case.

We have grid computing structures of 600+ nodes running a multitude of different things—SAP, Oracle, Informix, Exchange, etc. All of these different load-bearing concepts are coming into one monolithic storage array. It can become quite daunting to understand what's causing that load condition, and we have a lot of tools today that are helping us ascertain the root of those problems faster.

Chris Tinker: We have become the bleeding edge of technology. Essentially, it's software that hasn't been released. It's tools which are not actually production ready, and we use these tools as well, and some tools we can’t even speak about.

But, these are tools that will be in the enterprise eventually. They will be out in the world eventually. You asked earlier what we see coming down the road? Imagination is essentially one of the only things in technology. In today's world, there are other factors of course. Business realities temper the development of technology, but it's going to be very exciting to see what technology is being developed and what's coming next.

Gardner: I wonder if you might have just some last advice for those listening to the podcast as to how they, on the consumption side, might help folks like you, on the services and support delivery side, do your job better? What advice do you have for them in order to have a better outcome?

Chris Tinker: Yeah, it's being able to articulate the actual problem at hand, and the challenge that you have with your technology, because keep in mind that technology, IT, is nothing more than a tool that allows us to have business outcomes. So it's nothing more than a tool that the business utilizes for their requirements.

Then, to have metrics around their environment. They have to have a baseline. They have to have an understanding of what the technology has been doing.

Greg Tinker: Trending is key in a lot of these new virtualized consolidated environments. You need to have a baseline, as Chris stated. We need to have the performance characteristics. Your logging and ESX is about as common as sliced bread in a grocery store. ESX environments are very common and thought of very highly. I enjoy them. They are very nice.

Customers tend to start moving towards ESXi, which is fine, but ESXi doesn't log. It does log but you only get like a two hour history. The point is that customers take that logging for granted. You have to have your logging enabled and you must keep at least a six month trend.

So you don't keep all your logs and your service forever, but a six month trend is very helpful when you have a mysterious problem show up. Then, we can compare yesterday to today and see what differences have shown up in the environment.

Gardner: It comes down to data, having the data at your disposal.

Chris Tinker: Not just data, but having a baseline. We get a lot of calls where customers have no idea of what the environment was doing before. They say, "We're having a problem now. Our users are complaining." We ask, "How did it used to run? How long did this job used to take? Did it use to take 2 hours, and now it takes 20 hours?" A lot of times, they simply do not know.

I wish customers would yield to knowing that logging is critical. You don't have to keep it forever, but keep it for a strategic period of time. Six months is a good number.

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

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 14th April 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Since the release of the iPad in 2010, the market has become awash with a variety of mobile print solutions including Apple’s AirPrint, HP ePrint, Ricoh’s HotSpot printing and Google Cloud Print to name but a few. Many printer vendors are banking on the soaring demand for smartphones and tablets to revitalise the opportunity for printing, in the office, at home and on the move. With projections that smartphone sales will reach 300 million worldwide in 2010 and up to 55 million tablets forecast to be sold this year, the opportunity is significant, even if only a small proportion of users actually need or want to print. But as the two walled gardens of printers and mobile devices come together, are vendors in danger of over-complicating an essentially simple process?

The mobile and print worlds are remarkably similar in many ways. In the mobile world, data and applications are increasingly the keys to opening up new revenue opportunities for device manufacturers and platform providers. In the printer world, pages are king as it is the ink on pages that drives revenue more than the hardware. The collision of two markets driven by proprietary platforms has created challenges in developing universal printing capabilities across mobile platforms.

So, faced with a diverse mobile device platform landscape, it is unsurprising that it has spawned such a wide array of mobile printing solutions from printer vendors. Most of these solutions are predicated on sending a document as an email attachment, via the cloud, to a web-enabled printer which has an associated email address. The exception to this is Apple’s AirPrint which currently supports printing to HP “cloud-aware” printers only—which include HP’s OfficeJet, LaserJet Pro and PhotoSmart printers.

HP’s head start
HP has had a clear head start in the market, being the first (and so far only) printer vendor to offer direct support through AirPrint. But what are the options for businesses not using HP printers that want a reliable and universal way to print to office devices from smartphones or tablets? One solution is HP’s ePrint Enterprise, part of an HP Managed Print Service which enables BlackBerry users to print to any network-enabled printer. HP has also just announced that ePrint Enterprise now also support iPhones and will be extended to Android devices in May 2011. Ricoh and Xerox also have their own solutions which require emailing a document to a registered printer. One notable and recent addition to the mobile printing fray is from EFI, the provider of Fiery controllers for MFPs from a variety of manufacturers—including Canon, Xerox, Ricoh and Konica Minolta.

EFI PrintMe Connect
Interestingly, EFI’s PrintMe cloud printing solution was launched nine years ago in response to the need for secure printing for mobile workers at locations such as hotels and airports. PrintMe offers automatic discovery of printers and their location, without the need for printer drivers or additional software. Documents are uploaded to the cloud through either the PrintMe web site, email, PrintMe print driver or the PrintMe smartphone apps. Documents can be printed through the PrintMe server to any PrintMe enabled printer client.

PrintMe also supports direct mobile printing without the requirement for the cloud. Documents can be sent directly to any Wi-Fi connected Fiery driven printer. Its latest addition, PrintMe Connect for AirPrint supports the new AirPrint platform and iOS 4.2 meaning users can print easily from any application on their Apple device to any Fiery printer. Once installed on the network, PrintMe Connect for AirPrint will show all available Fiery-driven printers as destinations on a user’s printer list. There is no need for the individual user to download an application or for the enterprise to purchase a specific iOS-enabled printer or upgrade or modify existing printers or MFPs.

Of course, the question remains as to how much mobile device users really want to print—and if there are no simple and intuitive ways to print, it is likely that users will just not bother. But even if just a small proportion of the huge installed base of mobile device users print, the market represents significant incremental revenue opportunities for printer vendors. Of all these vendors, it is only HP that has really put a clear stake in the mobile printing ground and has certainly taken a leadership position in the mobile printing space, providing a simple and effective way to print from Apple’ s latest generation of iPhones, iPods and iPads. But where EFI can potentially capture more mindshare is in the enterprise environment, where its Fiery-controller devices are widely installed.

In the meantime, the market will continue to be characterised by a mix of solutions from printer vendors and third party app developers. EFI PrintMe Connect certainly offers the potential for ubiquitous printing—at least in the enterprise, but its success will be on its partnerships and joint-marketing with printer and MFP vendors to ensure enterprises fully understand how it can be deployed to offer a simple and secure approach to mobile printing.

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

The big themes at Cisco Live, held at London’s Excel exhibition centre this week, were video and security, with a little more light thrown on its Cius IP phone.

Cisco sees video as key to addressing the world’s environmental issues and Europe’s productivity problems. The case made for video included a demonstration of a school teacher speaking to parents about their child’s progress, using a video link to show project work. It also took attendees through a couple of case studies. One was the Spanish Ministry of Justice, using video to put prisoners before judges, without having to attend courts in person (would that fit with habeas corpus elsewhere?) and a live interview with the CIO of Crédit Agricole, who pointed out that if his conservative organisation was adopting video, then its time had really come. Of course, the growing use of video which Cisco espouses has the all-important side benefit of consuming lots more bandwidth, which would mean more sales of its core products, network switches and routers.

The security issue was less about products and more about culture. Cisco does of course have a growing security portfolio, but CEO John Chambers admitted that it has a challenge to become number one or two in the IT security market (as Cisco likes to be in any market it enters). If it is to get there it will need to work on integrating its security products; a demo of the latest version of Any Connect, which can distinguish between users trying to access IT from inside and outside the firewall, used a mix of on-demand and appliance-based content security, both with different policy engines—making it hard to ensure consistency.

On the security culture front, Cisco wants to put security at its core, ensuring that all its internal processes consider security; most importantly product development (including of course software). This sounded similar to Microsoft’s, largely successful, Trustworthy Computing initiative that it introduced in 2003. That focused on privacy, reliability and business integrity, as well as security. It is good that Cisco looks like taking a similar approach but perhaps worrying that it has taken to 2011 to do so.

However, the news that Quocirca found most intriguing was around the new Cius IP phone, which will be launched next month. Chambers demoed this himself during the episode with the school teacher. He dramatically lifted the screen off the top of the phone and—hey-presto—a tablet PC. A further investigation into this Android operating system-based device showed how new the product is to Cisco staff. Eventually we discovered that it did have a soft keyboard and could run applications locally including Open Office, although it was principally aimed at being a mobile interface to the VDI (virtual desktop infrastructure).

The “street price” of the Cius is expected to be in the region of $1,000 and it will be sold to businesses only. So, in this age of IT consumerisation, Cisco seems to be missing the point—with iPads available for about $500 and a fast growing array of Android-based competitive products, mobile employees seem unlikely to be happy about being asked to carry an additional device alongside their preferred personal ones. And, with budgets squeezed it also seems unlikely that schools or courts are going to pay a premium for tablet devices from Cisco, even if they do come with an IP phone docking station.

Cisco talked about plenty else including the progress of its datacentre initiatives and its joint venture with EMC and VMware—the VCE (Virtual Compute Environment) coalition. With all this going on plus the focus on video and security, a half-hearted attempt to enter the tablet market may prove to be an unnecessary distraction.

By: Hugo Harber, Director of Convergence and Network Strategy, Star Posted: 18th January 2011 Copyright Star © 2011

Over the last two decades, technology innovation has brought the world closer together and has given people more ways to communicate with each other. While these changes have brought new heights in productivity and created a more mobile, global, and “always-on” world of work, this rapid transformation also created new challenges in today’s business environment.

Information workers and IT professionals are each struggling to manage multiple systems for communications—desktop and mobile phones, email and voicemail, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP), Instant Messaging, and web- and videoconferencing. While many of these individual communication tools are considered indispensible, they do not necessarily work well together to help people collaborate and increase their productivity. To foster efficient communication and collaboration within the workforce, organisations need a way to streamline both one-to-one and one-to-many communications, giving employees access to the information they need, when they need it.

Companies face high costs when using traditional communication methods. Long-distance charges, maintenance costs for fax and voicemail systems, and travel costs for employees all cut into company margins. Increasingly aware of the bottom line, organisations frequently look for more cost-effective means of communication and collaboration across all boundaries. But the new methods must be more than just cost-effective; they have to be fully accessible and user-friendly, and they should not trigger extra costs such as additional IT support or staff requirements. These issues lead to large IT departments and a inflated cost of ownership.

Working anytime, anywhere
Business communications are increasingly complex and require workers to manage multiple devices, applications, and face-to-face interactions in an attempt to stay productively connected with one another. As the information worker population shifts from working in headquarter locations to working anywhere, anytime, and across corporate boundaries, the challenge of reaching key decision makers in a timely manner increases. The inability to reach others at critical times results in numerous delays and lost productivity. Star has found that sometimes businesses slow down or even halt mission-critical projects due to employees’ inability to reach key decision-makers.

As soon as the challenges of this sort of person-to-person latency have been addressed, the challenge is raised to one of boosting the effectiveness of teams by improving collaboration. Unified Communications support such efforts by shifting communications, as appropriate, from asynchronous channels (email, voicemail) to synchronous modes like instant messaging, PC-to-PC audio and video, electronic white boarding, Web conferencing, application sharing, and mobile access.

Building blocks of Unified Comms

1. Presence Information: Knowing The Availability Of Colleagues: Presence information lets people know whether others are available (e.g., online, away, busy, in a meeting, out to lunch). People can publish their availability so others know how best to reach them. The system provides some automation; for example, if a user has not touched the keyboard or mouse for a set number of minutes, that user’s presence information turns to “away.” Additional state information can also be automatically published using information from Microsoft Outlook, Communicator, SharePoint, calendaring and the PBX or IP telephone system—for example “in a meeting,” “on the phone,” “out of the office,” or “free in x hours.”  In a Forrester survey commissioned by Microsoft in 2009, 59% of workers stated they would save more than 15 minutes per day with this feature.
2. Instant Messaging: More Immediate Communication: Instant messaging (IM) is the capability to send and receive text messages in real time over the Internet or a corporate network. The recipient typically sees an alert on the desktop indicating an incoming message and from whom. Enterprise IM maintains this capability within, and increasingly beyond, the corporate network, adding security that does not exist with public IM systems like AOL, Yahoo!, MSN, and Google Talk.
3. Web And Videoconferencing: Cost And Time Savings: Ad hoc Web and video conferencing improves efficiency in real-time decision-making by providing easy setup, links to presence management, and point-and-click conference launches. Value increases when the time to set up a videoconference drops to near zero. 60% of workers surveyed for a Forrester report indicated that they could save from 1 to 5 hours per week using real-time conferencing.
4. Hosted IP Telephony: Hosted IP telephony makes it possible to communicate via telephone over an IP network instead of over traditional PBX telephony infrastructure. Voice communications can be integrated with email, calendaring, voicemail/unified messaging, IM, and conferencing to provide a streamlined experience rather than the disconnected experience provided by legacy systems today. Further, IP telephony can significantly reduce the cost of telephone communications. Companies interviewed for this study were engaged in pilot testing of software-powered VoIP, including PC-to-PC calling using various devices and integration of voice with email, IM, and conferencing.
5. One-Click Communication: We are approaching a time where all you need to find someone is his name, and all the means of contact are available immediately. Several of the organisations interviewed are looking toward a single identity for each employee that aggregates all the contact information (even individual’s areas of expertise) stored in Active Directory with some of the ways staff in the organisation communicate (phone, mobile device, conferencing, IM, email, calendaring). Finding the right person becomes faster, and determining his availability and communicating via his preferred, context-dependent medium is smoothed because presence is integrated into Microsoft Office applications.
6. Mobility: A minority of users in the interviewed companies carry mobile devices that have been integrated into the UC platform. For some organisations, mobility is an important part of their UC solutions, while for others it is an adjunct set of capabilities for select users. Certain mobile devices can run email and IM clients, thus integrating the mobile phone with the individual’s presence, IM, and email. Further, with a mobile device, users can open and modify email attachments, attachments within IM and other Word, Excel, or PowerPoint documents.

Unified Comms streamline communications
Unified Communications technologies streamline communications for end users, increase operational efficiency for IT professionals, and provide built-in protection for an organisation, while serving as a future-ready foundation to enable business process innovation.

For many end-users, communications take place in disparate, disconnected silos. For voice communications, you turn to the desktop or mobile phone. For email and instant messaging, you turn to your PC. With the multitude of applications and tools from which to communicate, end-users face a chaotic environment. WorkLife, Star’s managed communications platform, breaks down traditional silos and allows end-users to collaborate within the context of the desktop and mobile applications they use every day, with the ability to switch seamlessly between modes.

An organisation’s internal communications systems often consist of a set of diverse applications and capabilities, making it difficult for employees to use the various systems and equally challenging for the IT departments to deploy, manage, and maintain the systems—all of which leads to user frustration and high total cost of ownership for IT. Unified Communications simplifies the deployment and management of this infrastructure to make IT operations more efficient and reduce the frustration associated with disparate systems.

Increased productivity, fostering and collaboration
Unified Communications offers significant benefits to organisations, including increased individual and team productivity, fostering of collaboration, improved relationships, enhanced security, and enterprise-class scalability. By granting instant access to team members, partners, suppliers, and customers across geographies, time zones, and organisational boundaries, timely information can flow rapidly and efficiently. Organisations can improve team results by using Unified Communications to share ideas and information faster and more effectively.

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 11th January 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

In December 2010 the British standards Institute (BSi) published "Web accessibility - Code of practice (BS 8878:2010)" http://shop.bsigroup.com/en/ProductDetail/?pid=000000000030180388; this document is based on, and replaces, "PAS 78: Guide to good practices in commissioning accessible websites". It extends, updates and improves on its predecessor and is therefore essential reading for anyone intending to create or update a web product.

This new document, like its predecessor, concentrates on the processes, procedures and practices required to create an accessible web product; it does not discuss coding or technical issues but does provide references to relevant standards, guidelines and practices; so there is no conflict between this standard and the guidelines produced by the W3C Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI).

Jonathan Hassell, from the BBC, who lead the development of the standard says "Most web product managers know accessibility is important, but need a guide to the decisions they make during product development which can impact disabled and elderly users of the types of multi-platform, interaction-rich products they are creating. BS8878 is that guide, and encompasses the best advice and experience from many experts from all round the world on how to make products that include these people.".

Firstly it describes the policies and structures that an organisation needs to have in place to support accessibility.

Secondly it describes a series of steps required to create an accessible web product. The steps are summarised in the document as follows:

• Research and understand the requirements for the web product;
• Make strategic choices based on that research;
• Decide whether to create or procure the web product in-house or contract out externally;
• Produce the web product;
• Evaluate the web product;
• Launch the new product;
• Post-launch maintenance.

The document describes the specific accessibility issues that should be considered at each step. At first sight this may look like a lot of new work but in reality nearly all of the steps are considered good practice for any web product development.

This is followed by an introduction to the existing guidelines for developing accessible web products as well as discussion of accessibility of non-browser interfaces and special consideration when developing for older users.

Finally there is a detailed section on "Assuring Accessibility throughout the web product's lifecycle", which identifies and discusses the various methods of accessibility validation.

Graeme Whippy, of Lloyds Banking Group, one of the authors of the standard, said "Lloyds Banking Group is committed to best practice in accessibility and sees significant business benefits in making our websites as accessible as possible".

The standard is about 90 pages long and the second half is made up of fifteen extremely useful annexes. These cover areas such as definitions, laws, standards, responsibilities, challenges, examples of web accessibility policies and statements, guides to testing and a comprehensive bibliography.

I have read the standard and found the information in it clear, concise, insightful and pragmatic. It is laid out in such a way that it can be read in small chunks as required by different audiences and steps of a project. It provides all the parties involved in the creation of web products the information they need to understand the issues, decide how to proceed towards an accessible product and, importantly, how to deal with real world conflicts between ultimate accessibility and other market forces.

It provides a single source for accessibility best practice and information on the law and standards regarding accessibility.

The only criticism I have is that it does not discuss in sufficient detail the importance of ensuring that new content added to the web product after launch is accessible. It hints and implies that this is essential but does not highlight the issue.

Having seen the document, Gail Bradbrook of Fix the Web, an organisation set up to help people with disabilities report web accessibility issues and get them fixed, said "if every web product used the standard then we would not be needed and could close down; unfortunately that is not the case yet and we are very busy and need more volunteers (see http://www.fixtheweb.net )."

To ensure the maximum benefit is obtained from the standard there is a need for a community to be built up around the standard that can add to and refine the standard based on new experiences, technologies and opportunities and I expect some organisation will step up provide the platform for this community.

The standard is an essential purchase for anyone creating web products, as it provides:

• Pre-digested research into accessibility and best practice;
• A roadmap showing how to ensure accessibility is built into web products;
• A template for recording the decisions made about accessibility which will help to show good intentions if complaints are made.

Its cost should be recouped within a few days of starting any significant web product development and it will continue paying dividends throughout the whole life-cycle. It should be used by all commissioners and developers of web products.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 5th January 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

I have to admit to being one of Quocirca’s more conservative adopters of new technology. I make no apology for that; it keeps me grounded in the everyday reality of many like-minded IT workers. It also provides a contrast to some of my colleagues who are keener to try out the new stuff. It is good to have analysts adopting both positions within the company—whilst one is saying, “have you seen the latest version of Android”, I can remind them some are happily getting by with Windows Mobile 6.1 and the majority use some version of Symbian.

So needless to say, I am yet to get myself an Apple iPad; my initial reaction being “a new tablet PC—we have been here before”. One of my colleagues has, though, and having used it for about a month has declared it “far more useful than I ever imagined it would be”. Is he just trying to justify spending company funds on a new toy, or is there really something about the iPad that is changing the way the way users are interfacing with IT applications? Two recent announcements lead me to think that the latter is case.

The first announcement was from TIBCO’s Spotfire product group. Spotfire is an analytics tool TIBCO acquired back in 2007. It has announced “Spotfire on the Apple iPad”, an extension of its Web Player technology to provide specific support for the iPad. This will allow iPad users to maximise the power of the device for viewing Spotfire output and modifying the way is it displayed. The point here is, that when I asked the Spotfire spokesperson if they would be targeting other tablets and smartphones, the response was that it would work on the iPhone, but the display is really too small be useful and that they had not tested other tablet platforms because the user demand was for iPad support. Spotfire’s users seem to be setting the pace here.

The second announcement was from Caplin Systems, a UK-based company that provides technology called Caplin Xaqua, a framework for investment banks to build single-dealer platforms, delivering rich internet applications direct to their clients' screens. A part of this is Caplin Trader that enables configurable trading on the web. Like TIBCO, Caplin has now announced specific iPhone/iPad support, citing the iPad as a device its customers see as ideal for accessing a single dealer system across the web.

It is fair to say that these use cases are for high end users, whose organisations are likely to invest in expensive devices to improve the productivity of such users and the experience they are able to provide customers when showing research results or providing investment quotations. But, what high end users have today tends to filter down to lower end users if a given device proves popular. When this is the case prices come down, the software portfolio available for popular devices grows, the technology is further improved to broaden appeal and, of course competition will increase.

There are shortfalls with the initial version of the iPad, surprisingly these including an inability to print (now addressed to an extent under iOS4.2 which allows wireless printing) and no USB port. V2, due out in April 2011, is expected to include a USB port and a camera. Competition includes various tablets and slates (an even sleeker form factor) running any one of a range of operating systems including Google Android, Windows 7 and HP Palm. It seems that the iPad may have created the tipping point for tablet adoption that failed to materialise in the past. The form factor now looks to be here for the long term. Maybe even I will end up with a tablet of some sort…

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 22nd December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

1. Technology Designed for Everyone
The technology world enlarged in 2010. Consumers fell in love with the intuitive user interfaces and versatile technologies of the likes of Apple, Facebook and Google. “I love it” is how most users describe their iPad or iPhone. Now consumers want their enterprise applications to offer a similar user-oriented experience.

Consumers want to use technology to connect and collaborate with others. No wonder social networking and mobility is such a compelling combination for businesses and end users alike. Facebook’s mobile users spend twice the amount of time on Facebook than do non-mobile users. This trend is set to accelerate. Hence SAP acquired Sybase for its mobile apps platform, rather than its database technology.

Traditional consumer brands such as Sony (Vaio) and Samsung (Galaxy) and Amazon (Kindle and EC2) sense there is more money to be made in Tech. As do a vibrant new group of entrepreneurs who have developed well over a million consumer apps on various platforms. There are no barriers or caveats to entering the software market anymore.

2. Making Technology Easy to Consume
How do you turn 5 keystrokes into 3? How do you make software that is immediately intuitive and makes obvious sense to users? Can you eradicate training courses and user manuals? Some enterprise software user interfaces look like a flight pilot’s cockpit instrument panel.

Steve Jobs, the Tech industry’s top CEO, loves a clean design and simplicity for Apple’s users. The iPod has 5 keys; the more modern iPad has 3. Jobs launched the iPhone 3G using only 11 presentation slides, only one of which contained any words. BBC Radio 4 recently praised Apple’s use of clear, plain English in its product descriptions, in contrast to Microsoft’s “techno-babble” that can alienate potential customers.

Facebook starts product development from the premise ‘how does this product enable users to communicate and collaborate?’ Features and functions become outputs rather than inputs when viewed in this manner.

3. Getting the Price Point Down
High price is the last great bastion of the technology industry. But now many vendors offer similar ranges of products to address similar markets; the key decision-making criteria has become availability, brand, and most importantly, price—especially as vendor pricing is increasingly transparent and available on the Internet. There are now many options open to vendors who want to offer more customer value and encourage product trial.

BI vendors such as QlikTech, Tableau, TIBCO Spotfire, and MicroStrategy offer generous free trial product downloads. Open Source vendors such as Jaspersoft, Pentaho and SugarCRM offer free entry-level products. Spiceworks’ network management software is free if you are prepared to accept the advertisements that come with it. Many excellent applications, such as Google Analytics for example, are totally free of charge. Virtually every kind of software platform, application and service is available for rent as a SaaS service in the Cloud.

4. Be different
Competition from now on will be intense and hostile. Recent aggressive moves from industry titans such as HP, IBM, Oracle, and Microsoft set the tone. Product innovations are easy to copy and vendors are now stepping on each others’ toes. To insulate themselves against this trend the top Tech companies have transformed themselves into brands. They hope to encourage a sense of community and belonging, customer loyalty and advocacy, and a feeling that customers cannot do without them.

Brand Finance now rates Apple, Microsoft and IBM as 3 of the most valuable ($) 5 brands on earth—ahead of Coke, Mars, Persil and all the other household names. Six of the Top 20 valued brands are from the Tech industry. The thought-leadership, business model innovations and brand distinctiveness that characterise these vendors are now becoming essential pre-requisites for success in Tech.

Those that are truly market-oriented and customer-centric will thrive. Those that remain product-led will find it increasingly hard to attract new customers. Business agility will be key to vendor survival. ‘Be fast and be bold’ as Facebook says. Vendors, customers and users should endeavour to embrace this dictum.

If there are vendors or others who want advice in any of the above, drop me a line and I will be glad to help. It is Xmas after all ;-) And a happy New Year to all our readers!

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 14th December 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

For any organisation, unified communications is about providing a single platform to drive and manage all the different methods via which employees now communicate with each other and the outside world.

A decade or so ago, this largely amounted to a debate about whether voice communications should be run over the same network as computer communications, the latter having already converged on TCP/IP (often just called IP and also the basis of internet communications). Whatever view a given organisation took back then, the market has driven things forward to make UC a reality, whether they liked or not.

The number of communications tools that are available to employees and which they choose to use has proliferated as the “web 2.0” revolution has progressed. These are largely internet-based and include cheap or even free voice services, as well as other means of communication, including instant messaging, social networking and videoconferencing.

This change in the way businesses communicate with each other has many benefits for small and mid-sized business (SMBs), but there also downsides for those that do not manage it well. Any organisation needs to understand how its employees are communicating and provide a platform to manage and monitor this; SMBs are no exception.

There are four main areas where UC can benefit SMBs.

1. UC enables SMBs to easily link in to the business processes of other organisations. This makes the automated participation in supply chains, distribution channels and support networks simpler.
2. Driving communications across a single IP-based network is cheaper than managing multiple separate networks for different communications channels. Furthermore, many of the tools used for UC are cheap or free to use. Providing a choice means that cheap data communications are often used where relatively expensive phone calls would have been made in the past.
3. Used well, UC can help an organisation drive down its carbon footprint. This is both through making communications that drive business processes more efficient but also through replacing the need for many face-to-face meetings through the provision of online collaboration tools.
4. UC makes it easier for employees to do their jobs from wherever they happen to be. This makes it easier for many to achieve a better work life balance. It can also lead to more flexible hiring, for example enabling the creation of virtual call centres where the employees involved work from home.

However, there are downsides to be considered; mainly these arise when UC is not managed well: 

1. Without the proper guidance, the cost of using UC may actually spiral out of control. For example, a UC strategy that enables mobile workers must include mobile communications, but this could result in video being streamed over a mobile network rather than a cheaper broadband connection. The right guidance and controls are needed on what tools to use and when.
2. Multiple channels of communication mean multiple ways of attacking a network. A pervasive security strategy is needed that covers all channels, not just keeping threats at bay but also ensuring employees do not misuse the tools available to them and end up leaking confidential data, be it accidental or intentional.
3. Keeping a record of communications for compliance purposes becomes more complex the more channels there are. Only by having a well-managed platform can organisations keep on top of this and keep a consistent record of how employees are communicating with each other and the outside world.

One of the biggest challenges with UC is selecting the technology to use and the vendors to provide it. By its very nature, UC has led to a collision of vendors all after a cut of the same business. This includes: 

• Mobile and fixed line serviced providers, keen to provide the bandwidth.
• Traditional telco equipment providers that are keen to maintain their existing relationships and sell IP PBXs that enable voice communications and other services over IP networks
• Data networking vendors that want you to replace your traditional PBX with their own kit.
• Software vendors that believe you don’t even need a PBX
• End use device suppliers that want to own the user interface to UC
• The suppliers of certain “web 2.0” services that think they are the best way forward
• Video conferencing vendors that will tell you no UC experience is complete without the ability to see, as well as hear, the participants in an online conference.

The approach taken by any SMB will depend on which tools matter most to its business, but also who its incumbent suppliers are. At the end of the day, putting a UC strategy in place will be as much about integrating existing tools as deploying new ones. One key decision is deciding what the core platform should be.

When it comes to the platform there are three basic choices:

1. Base UC around an IP PBX – this allows voice communications to be driven over IP and the internet and allows the integration of voice with other IP communication based services such as email, instant messaging and all these “web 2.0” channels.
2. Ditch the PBX altogether and go for software platform such as Microsoft Lync (previously Office Communication Server/OCS) or IBM Lotus Domino. For small SMBs this can be a pragmatic approach as such platforms can be procured as on-demand services. These are not just based on the platforms of large software vendors; many service providers are putting together their own on-demand UC services based on a range of underlying technology that suits them, but is largely irrelevant to the user
3. Mobile network provider approach – again there is no traditional PBX involved. Mobile service providers are keen to grow their presence in organisations of all sizes and put themselves at the core of UC. Often this will involve the deployment of pico or femto cells on the customer premises to provide a consistent high quality link to broader services.

UC sounds great on paper but achieving it involves a complex set of choices. As you progress your organisation towards the inevitable “utopia” of UC that your employees are embracing, whether you like it or not, make sure all options are evaluated to maximise the benefits and minimise the risk.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 13th December 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

‘Mobilising the workforce’, ‘mobile enterprise’ and simply ‘mobility’ have all been included in taglines for marketing programmes over recent years, and with so much emphasis on this whole area from the technology sector, one could be forgiven for thinking that humans had only just recently developed legs.

The truth is that few jobs require the individual to be fixed or tethered in a single location, but many are constrained by some physical resources they need to perform their functions. In the past, this has included access to information and other people. The difference that IT and communications (ITC) makes is that this is no longer a constraint for many working processes.

It was not always like this. When IT first appeared in the workplace as mainframes, they sat in machine rooms and were accessed remotely through paper tapes and punch cards, used through intermediary computer operators. Even when computers had interactive screens and PCs started to appear, these resources were so precious that they sat in specific locations away from employees’ desks and their use was generally shared.

To ensure all those in offices could communicate with even distant colleagues a phone was provided at the desk—not always the place of work even for ‘office’ workers. Anyone away from their desk or travelling beyond the premises would need to travel back to their desk or find a publically accessible phone to make contact. In emergencies—corporate or personal, major or minor—they could not be reached, except by tannoy systems in larger facilities and eventually pagers, which told the person to find a phone and phone in.

It might sound like ancient history to some present day workers, but it was the daily working experience of many of those currently in the positions of senior managers and decision makers.

So has this past experience led to a disconnect between mobile strategy and tactical reality? Yes.

The problem is that the rapid evolution of ITC into something highly personal and mobile has overtaken the pragmatic necessity of basic business decision making. Too many in the workforce—from senior managers adopting the BlackBerry and iPhone as status symbols, to the juniors with Twitter and Facebook habits to feed—have become overly enamoured with the technology and lost sight of what they are there to do—support the processes of working.

Of course these involve access to information and other people, and the great value of present day technology is that it liberates both. Workers do not have to be ‘mobile’ to reap the benefits, because it is the interaction with the business process that can now flexibly move to the point where it is best delivered.

Or at least, that is the theory.

The difficulty is that not only does the technology aspect over-dominate, but most business processes, their management and the people involved have been blinkered to adapt to cope with the lack of flexibility that existed before mobile technologies came about. Business processes are often not mobile ‘friendly’, nor even mobile aware.

On the flip side, mobile technologies provide so much freedom with flexible connectivity and are desired by the workforce because this is the manner of interaction they are familiar with from their experiences as consumers. This raises the risk of over-indulgence of non-work related activities and the abuse of corporate supplied mobile resources.

Working from home is then seen as a ‘skiver’s charter’; ‘presentee-ism’ becomes rife in times of tension; performance management is not designed for remote operation; silos of information (power) have tight access controls. Data leaks need preventing, mobile bills are escalating, consumer technology is hitting the workplace and the traditional processes cannot cope.

The emphasis needs to shift—at the boardroom level and all the way to the end user—away from technology, its costs, constraints and desirability to the people and processes the business needs to support. This is a shift away from regarding mobile as an ‘add-on’, to a view that sees it as core to working practices in a similar way to how it has become fundamental to employees as consumers outside of work.

This does not mean a blanket abdication of ownership of the issue by employees—with the great power of mobile connectivity comes great responsibility—and their un-tethered mobile ‘rights’ need to come with some strings attached to ensure the balance between work and life is fair.

One aspect of mobile use that is particularly relevant to this responsibility is the way social networking is becoming pervasive in work as well as home life and this is explored further in Quocirca’s free to download report “Limiting social networking’s abuse of mobile bills”

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 9th December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

Facebook is a phenomenon. Founded in 2004, it now has 600m+ active users (as of September 2010) c. 10% of the WORLD’s population. It will add around 300m users during 2010. That’s about how many people live in the whole of the US. Not that Facebook is a US phenomenon; 70% of Facebook users live outside of the US.

Number of users is one thing, actual usage is another. This is where Facebook gets really scary. Fifty per cent of Facebook users log onto Facebook everyday for 30+ minutes. People spend over 700 billion minutes per month on Facebook. So it’s sticky, which advertisers love.

The mobile revolution is fuelling Facebook’s growth. Facebook has 200m+ mobile device users. Having more ubiquitous access, they are twice as active as non-mobile users. All this for a relatively tiny software company of 1,700 employees that is dwarfed by the size and resources of the likes of Microsoft or Oracle.

So what makes Facebook so successful? Well firstly, Facebook believes that human interaction and sociability is a natural and normal human condition. This means they start their software development from the premise of ‘how does this product help people to communicate and collaborate?’

For example, Facebook’s first products to market offered relatively low functionality. Pictures weren’t shown in high definition and you couldn’t even move them around. It didn’t matter though because the product was easy to use and the pictures were easy to share with others. ‘Social’ is the startpoint for software development rather than functions, and is deeply embedded in all Facebook’s products.

CEO Mark Zuckerberg parallels this consumer-oriented mindset with that of enterprise software vendors. He believes that enterprise software vendors are more concerned with “a features checklist rather than what is really good to use”. Few analysts would disagree. It is rare indeed to find users raving about a piece of enterprise software like Facebook users do. However, that being said, Tableau, QlikTech and others have been making moves in this direction.

Zuckerberg goes further: “if you build a product that people love you can make lots of mistakes”. He means that users will forgive you if you build a product around the needs of people, and which is engaging, enjoyable and fun to use.

Facebook spends a lot of time trying to keep the user interface simple and intuitive, as Apple does. Unlike Apple, Facebook (which develops on Open Source platforms such as MySQL) also tries to be ‘open’ so that users can access and connect to a wide variety of services (including Facebook’s catalogue of 550,000 applications). This is true from a technical perspective, but also for user adoption. There are no user sign-up qualifications—apart from having to use your own real name rather than hiding behind an alias.

Facebook understands that it is at the forefront of a massive shift in tech marketplace dynamics—and wants to keep it that way. Every day their executives have intellectual debates about such issues as privacy, searching to better understand and shape trends, rather than to react to them. Facebook’s two most important corporate values are “move fast and be bold”.

Facebook may be run by a group of people who look like they just got out of High School (Zuckerberg is still aged only 26), but it should not be underestimated. Facebook has tapped into (and to some degree created) a rich vein of IT-enabled social interaction that few legacy software vendors have been able to exploit. The combination of intellectual zeal, ambition and teamwork; backed by top industry veterans (such as Netscape’s founder Marc Andreessen) has created a corporate culture that will be difficult for rivals to replicate.

Most importantly, Facebook has demonstrated a fanatical desire to understand and make sense of the fast-changing market environment around us—and convert that understanding into new products that are truly customer-centric, easy, social and fun to use. No wonder its dazzling speed to market and excellent execution is striking fear into rivals. With good reason.

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 3rd December 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

For anyone with a disability, navigating a website is likely to take longer than it would for a fully able person. If you have very good eyesight, good hand-eye coordination, the ability to scan text and images quickly, and an understanding of how the Webmaster's mind ticks, then with a few quick moves of a mouse and a few deft clicks you will get to the information you require simply and quickly. If, on the other hand, you have to use a screen magnifier and can only use the keyboard you can spend a frustratingly long time finding the link you are interested in, and this will be repeated for each page you have to traverse to get to the information, or process, that you need.

There are several ways in which a website can be made more navigation friendly, including:

• A well structured, understandable menu hierarchy.
• Jump to, skip to, links to the most important parts of a page.
• A simple heading structure within a page.
• Potentially an A to Z of all the website.
• A search function.

But none of these are as easy to use as asking a real person questions like "How do I pay my parking fine?" Or "What time are the trains from London to Cambridge next Sunday morning?" The real person may be able to answer the question immediately or may need to ask you some additional clarification questions, but you will get to the correct answer or procedure very quickly.

The Virtual Zone (http://www.thevirtualzone.co.uk) now provides consultancy and software to create virtual assistants that can provide the ease-of-use of a real telephone operator within a website.

The software provides the ability to analyse natural language and extract the salient information from the question and then initiate:

• A direct connection to the relevant webpage.
• A structured question-and-answer session similar to those used by real telephone operators.

The consultancy is needed for the initial analysis of the type of questions that may be asked by visitors to the site and how the relevant answers can be retrieved from the site.

When the virtual assistant is initially put into production it is expected that it will be able to answer about 80% of the questions put to it. The software records all the questions and answers in a database, which can then be analysed to see how the process can be improved. This learning process should quickly bring the hit rate to above 95%.

Because this technology greatly reduces the number of links traversed to get to the answer and is also a human friendly interface it will appeal to all users; but particularly those who find using the Internet difficult, either because they have a disability or because they are not that familiar with the technology.

I have played with several sites that include this solution and have been pleasantly surprised at how easy it is and how quickly I found the information I was looking for.

To make the technology as user-friendly as possible it is important that the function is well signposted so that a new user to a site will be immediately aware of its existence. This probably requires that it is near the top left-hand corner of the homepage, and also that it is signposted by a ‘jump to' link at the very top of the page (those of my readers not familiar with this concept it is a link that is read out by a screen-reader that says something like "jump to virtual assistant", the user can then hit enter and go straight to the requisite part of the page).

The technology is already being used in a variety of different types of site including:

• Transport, for example Lisa at National Rail Enquiries (http://www.nationalrail.co.uk/).
• Shopping, for example Anna at IKEA (http://www.ikea.com/gb/en/), which also has an audio output which really improves the experience.

I would recommend trying out a few examples to see how you could adapt the technology to your industry and website.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 2nd December 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

With companies putting more applications and data into Internet clouds, cloud printing is gaining momentum in the enterprise.

Vendors large and small are getting into the game. HP has made major announcements while Google has hinted at the future. Apple has begun services for iOS devices. Smaller companies like HubCast and ThinPrint have entered the fray. Yet, for all the attention, though, cloud printing is still not mainstream.

BriefingsDirect recently caught up with Thorsten Hesse, manager of Innovative Products for ThinPrint, to discuss the business drivers of cloud computing, the various options available, and the obstacles to wider-spread adoption of the technology.

BriefingsDirect: What are the business drivers of cloud printing adoption?

Hesse: In general, talking about printing is quite boring for most people. But people want to print. They need to print. They don’t want to talk about it, but they want to use it. They just want it to work.

Companies spend a lot of money for new printers, for printer management and print driver administration, for unused print outs, unnecessary paper and toner consumption, and for support and help desk. Printing is one of the most cost-intensive things in IT. Many companies also don’t want to be locked in with a specific vendor.

Another aspect is the increasing use of cloud applications and services. How do you print from cloud offerings like Salesforce or Google Apps? Mostly you create a PDF. Well, then you need a device that can print PDFs. Additionally, the use of smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices becomes more and more common, and these devices can‘t do that, or only in limited quality.

Altogether, there are at least six business drivers for cloud printing:

• Printing is one of the most cost intensive IT services—and cloud printing can save cost and enhance productivity at the same time.
• Printing technology today depends highly on printer manufacturers.
• Companies want print on demand.
• Companies use cloud applications, very often unplanned.
• Employees are becoming increasingly mobile.
• Employees use new types of devices.

BriefingsDirect: What are the different options for cloud printing in terms of delivery?

Hesse: There’re three different delivery models. First, there is private cloud software. The first delivery model is that we sell software to our customers that they install in their environment, for example in their data center or on an Amazon server in the cloud.

They buy, own, and control the software. The other end of the spectrum is a pure cloud printing service. And then in the middle we've got the hybrid cloud, where some parts are run internally in the private cloud and others in the public cloud.

BriefingsDirect: Is cloud printing secure? What makes is it secure?

Hesse: First of all, the user can print content without needing to store it on the device, which brings all the advantages of central data storage—secure and updated data in one place, no files lost when device is lost, and availability of service. The user can trigger the print job to the printer. He can also identify the printer.

BriefingsDirect: How is cloud printing evolving?

Hesse: Our solution is evolving in many directions. On top of offering print management as a software product that the customer can purchase and install internally, we’ll offer it as a cloud service. This will be a public cloud service. Customers can run it from the cloud. They can then control their internal printing environment from the cloud.

This might sound far off, but as soon as customers manage their internal desktops from the cloud with Microsoft Intune, it will be a logical step to do the same with the printers. This will evolve into a complete print management solution that can then be used not only to control the printing environment, but to build in policies to enhance it along the way.

BriefingsDirect: What is holding businesses back from adopting cloud printing?

Hesse: They mostly don’t know what’s possible, as the discussion is fogged by limited public cloud printing solutions.

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 1st December 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The latest BriefingsDirect podcast discussion examines a new book on application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices, one that offers new methods and insights for dramatic business services delivery improvement.

The topic of ALM will be a big one at this week's HP Software Universe conference in Barcelona. In anticipation, join us as we explore application lifecycle management (ALM) best practices for overall business services delivery improvement.

In this discussion, the last in a series of three, we underscore the conclusions from the forthcoming book and explain how organizations can begin now to change how they deliver and maintain applications in a fast-changing world.

Complexity, silos of technology and culture, and a shifting landscape of application delivery options have all conspired to reduce the effectiveness of traditional applications approaches. In the forthcoming book, called The Applications Handbook: A Guide to Mastering the Modern Application Lifecycle, the authors evaluate the role and impact of automation and management over an application's lifecycle, as well as delve into the need to gain better control over applications through a holistic governance perspective.

In our first podcast, we focused on the role and impact of automation and management of applications, and emphasized the need to gain control over applications through a holistic lifecycle perspective.

The second discussion in the series looked at how an enterprise, Delta Air Lines, moved successfully to improve its applications’ quality, and gain the ability to deliver better business results from those applications.

Finally, we're here now with the book’s authors to explore their conclusions. Please join me in welcoming Mark Sarbiewski, Vice President of Marketing for HP Applications, and Brad Hipps, Senior Manager of Solution Marketing for HP Applications. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Sarbiewski: The life of an application is generally the same for all companies. There is a spark of an idea: "We need this. We need software to help us do something in the business."

We make an investment decision somehow. We may do this ad hoc. We may do it based on who screams the loudest. But somehow a decision gets made. We build something somehow. We spec it, build it, release it, run it, poorly or not, and hopefully, although certainly not always, eventually we replace it, retire it, and so forth.

We wanted to take a slightly different approach to how we thought about maturity models. There are lots of them in the industry, not so much around ALM, but in sub-disciplines or in different areas. Our focus was the business outcomes that you see at different levels.

We built out a model for ALM maturity, and it’s in the book.

... We see pressure from the business to change how we do things and the technologies we use. From the business side, you see it in a variety of ways. You see, "Oh, it’s the consumerization of IT, and what I see in my consumer world I want in IT. I see this all moving fast and I don’t feel my business moving." You see that pressure.

But, you absolutely see pressure to change from the bottom-up, from the teams themselves. We want to work in a different way. We want to be able to execute faster. The whole move of agile has been, in large part, if not primarily built, then driven from development and delivery teams up. So, there is a huge motivation there.

If you can understand the results that you are seeing, that ought to help you figure out where you could be. What we've seen is a progression from the spectrum of companies, ... [many] have fairly immature processes.

We see people just getting started, and they have a relatively ad hoc, narrow, point tool, with lots of manual work. It doesn’t mean they are never successful, but results vary highly. They're very mixed. Some project teams are great, and it all depends on the project team, and the next one may stink.

So our idea around maturity—and tying it to outcomes—is the results that we see. ... It all comes back to the results. What kind of results am I seeing? If you look at the model in the book, it’s pretty easy to peg yourself as to where you are and the kinds of benefits you'd see from moving up that maturity curve.

There’s a lot of pride when you see the metrics go in the right way. The feedback that I've seen for our clients that do this really well is where the business comes back and says, "Oh, my God. The responsiveness is incredible. Even if I'm not getting the massive stuff that I used to get once every two years, I'm seeing movement on a regular basis, and I love it." And lot of clients that we talk to are really fired up about that.

What we hear from our clients is that things are hyper-competitive and that technology, in particular software and applications, is a huge competitive advantage. So, our ability to move fast and beat the competitors to the punch with capability is enormously important.

Hipps: We configured this model trying deliberately not to be ultra-prescriptive. There are many heavy-duty models that do exist, and people can dig into those to their heart’s content. This is as much a maturity scorecard as anything.

One of the examples that you might see or one of the ways you might begin to engage yourself is something like defect leakage. Defect leakage refers to the number of defects that you discover in live in the application that you could have caught earlier.

We have some figures that show that the average is in the neighborhood of 40 percent of application defects that leak into production and are discovered in live. They could have been caught earlier. It may be little higher than 40 percent, which is a fairly shocking number.

But on the high end, the world-class customers we worked with, see less than 5 percent of defects working their way into production. So right off the bat there, you're talking an 80 percent-plus drop in the number of defects that you're experiencing in a live environment, with all the attendant cost savings, brand improvement, and good will in the business that you would expect.

That’s one example of the kind of thing that you can look at, tease out, and begin to get a sense of where might I sit maturity wise. From that, you can potentially take a cue as to where is it that I want to start, where is it that I want to make the biggest investment, as I look to make myself more mature.

Speaking from the application domain, our friends in the agile communities have been the leading champions of this notion. Our default stand [as development teams] was one of being change-averse.

By that, I mean that there was this whole contractual relationship with business. You tell us what you need, and we're going to document it as best as we can, down to having all the semicolons in the right place.

"We're going to break out the quill pens and ink our signatures. Forever shall it be, and if you change anything here, we're going to hit you with the request for change, and it will go through a cycle of six weeks and maybe we'll agree to it," etc., etc. For the longest time that was the mindset. You can look at that and say it's awful, but when I had far fewer applications, and they took far longer to build, it was just the way of the world.

The recognition today for all of the reasons we've talked about in this podcast and others, our applications are everywhere. They're always on. There is nothing I can do in a business that isn't going to touch the application. It fundamentally means, we need to sweep from the table, that notion of being change-averse. Instead, we need to be in a position of embracing change. We do need to be change-ready.

As Mark said, we need to be architected and engineered, from our people process technology perspective, to put ourselves in a position to be that way. In the book, we talk a bit about some of the principles we think come into play for change-ready organizations. But, that's why it is one of the leading traits, the leading principles, in world-class organizations.

This could be a mantra of sorts: Think big, start small, scale quickly. The basic idea of think big is the idea that you want to spend some time making sure that you’ve all got a shared vision of where you want to be, and we talk a bit about whether that was a maturity model—these principles of predictability and repeatability, etc.

Hopefully we've set at least some suggested guidelines for constructing what your end state might look like. But, this point about thinking big is that, as we all know, certainly in IT but probably anywhere, it's every easy to fall into a state of analysis paralysis. We've got to figure out exactly the right metrics to decide exactly what we're going to be. We've got to figure out precisely what our time-line is.

We sort of can borrow from our friends in agile, who have said that you've got to understand the perimeter of what it is you want to accomplish, but still it's bound to change. Those perimeters are bound to shift. You're bound to discover things about yourselves, your organizations, what's feasible, and what's not in the process of actually trying to get there.

So, it's important to set yourself an objective and make sure it's a shared objective. It's just as critical to get going to not fall into a trap of endless planning and reconsideration of plans.

If you then pluck the low-hanging fruit, the easy things we could do starting this week, starting tomorrow, to advance us at least generally toward these ends, this end objective, that's great. Then, it becomes a matter of just continuing to move, scale, and adapt.

Somewhere, we make the point that, as an application team, certainly at least as an application member, I cared a lot more about measurable progress, seeing things actually advancing and getting better. Then, I cared less about how shiningly brilliant the end-state was going to be or exactly how we were going to get there.

Sarbiewski: I spent a number of years in a former life doing process change for companies. There were some trade secrets in the firm I worked with. They recognized some unchanging facts that that people can consciously or unconsciously sabotage the greatest plans, any process you want, or any kind of a change.

You have to start with people. It does involve all the people-process-technology in that order, but it's the people considerations. Do we have that shared vision? Who are the skeptics? Where do we think this could go wrong? Are we committed to getting there?

There were some questions we’d ask as we were embarking on making this change. First of all we said, what project or what pilot—if we did these changes on it—would people in the organization say, "If it works for that project, it will work for us as an organization."

So, find that visible pilot project, not one that’s an exception. Don’t find one where there are four developers and they are in the same room. If you try something new, people can say, "Well, of course, it worked for that, but that’s so atypical." So, find that project.

Beyond that, find the champion who is really respected in the organization, but skeptical of the change. We would go looking for one or two people who were open-minded enough to really give it a go, but maybe steeped in how we’ve done it, and have been very successful in how we’ve done it. Then, people can say, "That’s the kind of project we do, so you need to be able to make it work there. If Joe or Mary or whoever it is, if they buy into and it works for them, I believe."

Maybe, let's reward jointly the operations and the dev teams, if they’ve met those customer satisfaction goals, those service level agreements (SLAs), and those low counts of defects in production. You start to create a different dynamic, when you think more about lifecycle goals and cross-team goals.

Hipps: The spirit of this book, and probably the spirit of a lot of these kinds of books, ... If I have one hope, it’s that we haven’t been so pie-in-the-sky in our thinking that somebody reads this and says, "Yeah, nice idea, but it will never happen here."

So, that would be my hope—somebody takes one single way that’s implementable in the near-term within their organization.

Sarbiewski: What I’m hoping is that in these hundred or so odd pages that executives in these enterprises that we're talking to have that opportunity to take just a couple hours and have somebody give them a chance to think about how important software is, and what the true life of an application is.

Once you start to go down that path and you start to say, wait a minute, 10, 15 years of evolving this capability, what does that mean? When things are live and I’ve got hot request from the business to make a change, what needs to happen? How much money will I spend on that?

The one "aha" moment is seeing that the 12 to 15 years matter, when I’m delivering value to the business and innovating for the business. In order to be successful during those 10 to 15 years, I will make different decisions when I build this thing. I will focus on a process.

I will build the automation to a different level, because I’ve stopped thinking that my job is done when I go live. If that’s truly the job, you’ll make a lot of shortcut decisions to get to go live. But, if you think bigger, you think about the full life of an application and what it delivers to the business.

All of a sudden, it makes a whole lot more sense to do things a bit differently, to set myself up for 10 years or 15 years of success with the business, as opposed to a moment when I can say, "Yup, I achieved a milestone."

For more information on Application Lifecycle Management and how to gain an advantage from application modernization, please click here.

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: 17th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The rapidly changing and fast-growing opportunity for more businesses to reach their customers and deliver their services via mobile applications is at a crossroads.

Over just the past two years, the demand for mobile applications on more capable classes of devices, such as smartphones and tablets, has skyrocketed. Now businesses need to figure out how they can get into the action.

Small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) especially need to reevaluate their application development and end-user access strategies to be able to deliver low-cost yet impactful applications to these newer devices. This goes for reaching employees, as well as partners, users, and customers.

Hopefully, there's a shift in the skills required to put these applications on these devices and distribute them. The emphasis on capabilities is moving from hardcore coders -- with mastery of embedded platforms and tools -- to more mainstream graphical and scripting-skilled workers, more power-users than developers.

This sponsored podcast explores how mobile application development and the market opportunity are shifting, and how more businesses can quickly get into the mobile applications game and build out new revenue, share more data, and provide better direct customer access in the process.

Our panel consists of Roger Entner, Senior Vice President and Head of Research and Insights in the Telecom Practice at the Nielsen Co., and Wayne Parrott, Vice President for Product Development at Genuitec. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Entner: About 50 percent of all devices being sold in the US right now are smartphones. We expect smartphone penetration to be at about 50 percent by the end of next year. Almost 60 percent of smartphone owners are actually using applications. That’s a huge percentage.

We're now at that sweet spot where it makes a lot of sense for businesses to have applications both for their consumers and their employees alike, because there is enough of an addressable base there.

We just launched our second edition of our Mobile Apps Playbook. But to quote numbers from there, year-over-year second quarter '09 to second quarter '10, smartphone penetration in the US went from 16 percent to 25 percent.

Now, we have 3- and 4-inch screens that are actually readable. We're not just merely replicating a desktop experience, but actually tailoring it to the device and working with the strengths of the device rather than with the weaknesses.

The devices that we call now smartphones are little computers that today are as powerful as laptops a few years ago. I always say that this little thing you have in your hands, a smartphone, has far more computing power than was used by NASA to put men safely on the moon and bring them back alive.

Applications becoming easier

And now Apple, Google, Microsoft, and the others, have software development kits (SDKs) out there that make app development a lot easier than it has ever been.

If you have a talented developer or a talented person in your department, he might be able to build that internally. Or, there are now myriad development shops out there that have the capabilities to build applications and charge only a few thousand dollars -- and that's single digit thousand dollars -- to have a capable, usable application.

There are a lot more people who know how to program these things, and have good ideas of applications. There is a really good market out there to put the two together.

Parrott: We’re seeing a big move toward interest in mobile at the development side. What are the factors that’s really led to the explosion of mobile apps? It's not only the smartphones and their capabilities, but we also look at the social changes in terms of behavior.

People more and more have a higher reliance on their smartphone and how they run their lives, whether they are at work or on the move. The idea is that they are always connected. They can always get to the data that they need.

Basically, we're taking their lifestyle away from their desktop and putting it in their pocket as they move around. More and more, we see companies wanting to reach out and provide a mobile presence for their own workforce and for their customers.

The question they ask is, "How do we do that? We already have a web presence. People have learned about our brand, but they can't access this through their smartphones, or the experience is inferior to what they’ve come to expect on the smartphone."

We're seeing a big growth of interest in terms of just getting on to the mobile -- having a mobile presence for the SMBs.

Still a great deal of complexity

If you take a look at the current state of native mobile app development, it's really not much better than it was five years ago. You still see a strong fragmented programming model base, different operating systems, and different hardware capability. It's still a mess. You pretty much have to pick a subset of devices that you want to focus on.

Entner: If we take one little step back, one of the genius things that Apple has done is turn the bookmarks into an application. About 60-70 percent of all applications on the iPhone or an Android are actually glorified HTML ports. So, it's not that difficult or that demanding on the application side.

One new trend is HTML5, which is slowly but surely approaching. There has been no finalized HTML5 standard [from the W3C], but a lot of web browsers, and even mobile web browsers, have now some HTML5 capabilities. And, it will really help in the development cycle for basic applications.

Where HTML5 will not to be able to help us, at least right now, is when we try to take advantage of location-based services because there is no standard yet. They're still arguing about this one, and especially high performance graphics. But, on the standard application, HTML5 will take us miles forward and diminish the difference between the desktop and the mobile environment.

... At the same time, all of the SDKs are getting more powerful and more user-friendly. So, it's moving toward a more harmonized and more rapid development environment.

Parrott: Prior to HTML5 talking about mobile web was pretty much a joke. Mobile web was an afterthought in the phone market. You had these small, dinky displays. Most of them couldn't even render most standard HTML. What's new?

You still see a strong fragmented programming model base, different operating systems, and different hardware capability. It's still a mess. With the advent of the smartphone what you really saw was pretty much the Internet, as you experience it on your desktop, now on to your smartphone, but with even more capability.

Part of it is because HTML5 has stepped back and looked at what the future needed to be for a web programming model. To become more of a common run-time, they had to address some of the key gaps between native hardware, APIs, and web. Much of those have really centered on one of the biggest digs that mobile web had in the old days, when you were doing something, were connected, and then you lost your connectivity.

Out of the box

HTML5, right out of the box, has a specification for how to operate in an online, offline, or disconnected type mode. Another thing was a rendering model, beyond just what you see on your desktop, that actually provides a high-end graphics type capability -- 2D, 3D types of programming. These are things that more advanced programs can take advantage of, but you can build very rich desktop type of experiences on the laptop.

Then, they went beyond what you're used to seeing on your desktop and took advantage of some of the sensors that these phones have now -- accelerometers, location capability, or geolocation. APIs are now emerging as a companion to HTML5, which is a spec that will span across your desktop to the mobile phone. It's a very capable specification.

In addition, there is the movement in terms of the standards body, especially the W3C, to address mobile device API. You will eventually program in a standard way and talk to your contacts list, your cameras, video, recording devices, and things like that. That will soon be available to us in a web programming model.

What used to be exclusively the demand of the hardware API guys to do really low level, high performance bit twiddling is now going to be available to the general web programming masses. That opens up the future for a lot more innovation than what we’ve seen in past.

There is enough HTML5 core already emerging that we could start to program to a subset of that spec and treat it as kind of a common run-time that you would program across pretty much all of the new emerging smartphones as we look forward.

Entner: It's only a matter of when ... HTML5 will come. Apple and Google are at the forefront and are already launching websites and services in it. You can get HTML5 YouTube, HTML5 Google, and even Yahoo mail access. You can have the Apple website in HTML5. It just depends on what is fully supported right now.

Some browsers support it, and some don't yet. On the mobile side, it also fully depends on what is supported. If you have the WebKit engine at the core of the browser that your device is using, HTML5 is pretty widely supported.

Parrott: As we've talked to more-and-more of our SMBs, one thing that stands out is that they don't have a lot of resources. They don't have a huge web department. Their personnel wear a number of hats. Web development is just one of n things that one of the individuals may do in one of these organizations.

At Genuitec, we developed a product called MobiOne Studio. The target user is anyone who has an idea or an vision for a mobile web application or website. MobiOne is geared to provide a whole new intuitive type of experience, in which you just draw what you want. If you can develop PowerPoint presentations, you can create a mobile web application using MobiOne.

You lay out your screens, you pane them all up, and then you wire them together with different types of transitions. From there, you can then immediately generate mobile web code and begin to test it either in the MobiOne test environment, that's an emulated type of HTML5 environment, or you can immediately deploy it through MobiOne to your phone and test it directly on a real device.

If you can develop PowerPoint presentations, you can create a mobile web application using MobiOne.

With MobiOne Studio we recognized that the first thing that most companies want to do is just mobilize, just get a mobile presence, mobilize their websites, and have that capability. As Roger said a while ago, a lot of the apps you see out there are really glorified mobile websites and are packaged up in a binary format.

Second Studio phase

In MobiOne Studio's second phase, once you design and you like what you have, you have a progressive step that you can go from a very portable form to compile it down -- or cross-compile -- from HTML5 to whatever the native requirements are of that particular target app store. So, Google will have their app store, and Apple and RIM each has their own model. They are all fairly different models.

But with HTML5, you can go directly to your customers now. You can market to them directly. It depends on your way of interacting with your customers, but we have seen a number of novel approaches already from some of our customers. When any customer is in your store, you make it very easy for them to access your site, to make them aware of your mobile capabilities, lure them in, and get them connected that way.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod and Podcast.com. Read a full transcript or download a copy. Sponsor: Genuitec. Learn more.

You may also be interested in:

• Rise of WebKit Advances Mobile Web's Role, Opens Huge Opportunity for Enterprise Developers on Devices
• Genuitec Marks Progress with Two Milestone Releases of MyEclipse 6.5 Products
• Genuitec Expands Pulse Provisioning System Beyond Tools to Eclipse Distros, Eyes Larger Software Management Role

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 4th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The rapidly evolving landscape for global business—and the consequent need for IT to relate differently to businesses so they together serve their customers in innovative ways—has to mean more than business as usual from technology suppliers.

While a majority of vendors seem to be hunkering down around an entrenched set of core products and aging IT approaches, HP this week shared a different vision, what it calls the “Instant-On Enterprise." [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The Instant-On Enterprise, as HP defines it, is a data-driven organization that leverages technology for everything—but specifically to better address the ever-evolving needs of end-users. As users' expectations and experience change, so too must the ways enterprises relate to them, are perceived by them.

The next several years will form a culmination of now-clear mega trends that have only just begun to roil conventional business practices. We're talking about pervasive mobile applications use, highly responsive cloud computing models, and knowledge-adept social collaboration. More than just these shifts, there also needs to be an increasingly automated, secure, and harmonizing management capability that combines and reinforces them.

As these trends literally re-arrange business ecosystems and re-established the service delivery order, a gap will surely grow between the companies that master change and exploit enabling technologies—and those that fall ever further behind.

With that in mind, HP has rolled out new solutions that aim to help both business and government create their own Instant-On Enterprise. Not surprisingly, the driver of the Instant-On Enterprise is everything becoming connected and immediate, people expect responses regardless of sourcing and/or partner ecosystems—and within seconds instead of days.

“It takes a special kind of enterprise to close the expectation gap between what customers and citizens expect and what the enterprise can deliver,” says Tom Hogan, executive vice president of Enterprise Sales, Marketing and Strategy at HP. “The Instant-On Enterprise delivers differentiated competitive advantage, serving customers, employees, partners and citizens with whatever they want and need, instantly…"

Embedding Tech
New HP research reveals that the role of IT is shifting from chiefly being the administrator of the enterprise to becoming one and the same with the enterprise. This means enabling rapid, recurring business process improvements to meet dynamic customer demands, as well as gaining near-instant insights into shifting markets.

Coleman Parkes research conducted for HP in October reveals that 86 percent of senior business and government executives believe they must rapidly adapt the enterprise to meet changes in consumer expectations. The research also indicates that 78 percent believe technology is the key to business and government innovation, and 85 percent indicated that in order to be successful, technology needs to be embedded in the business or government service

HP’s new solutions work to help enterprises and government leverage technology in ways that will meet those goals. HP sees it as a reinvention of how technology is used to deliver innovation at every point in the value chain. That covers the services that are delivered, the mobile devices that provide the access, and the global data centers required to power the Instant-On Enterprise.

Instant-On Puzzle Pieces
There are several components to HP’s Instant-On Enterprise: HP Application Transformation, HP Converged Infrastructure, HP Enterprise Security, and HP Information Optimization:

• HP Application Transformation solutions work to help enterprises gain control over aging applications and inflexible processes that challenge innovation and agility by governing their responsiveness and pace of change.
• HP Converged Infrastructure solutions are engineered to drive out costs and provide the foundation for agile service delivery. HP promises this solution delivers the data center of the future.
• HP Enterprise Security solutions secures the IT infrastructure by people, processes, technology and content. These solutions aim to aligns security to meet business and government demands without losing flexibility.
• HP Information Optimization solutions deal with how information is gathered, stored and used. The idea is to harness the power of information and ensure its integrity and protection while delivering it in the context of the enterprise.

Realizing that there is no one single delivery model that meets every end-user need, HP also introduced two new Hybrid Delivery services. HP Hybrid Delivery Strategy Service offers a patent-pending, model-driven framework to introduce hybrid delivery concepts into their existing environments.

HP Hybrid Delivery Workload Analysis Service offers experts that gather service usage and demand profile data, and then develop a set of recommendations on how to best characterize and combine workloads in hybrid environments.

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

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 15th October 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

The term ‘unified communications’ conjures up many meanings, but is most often used by those with software or network assets to sell. Whether it is routers, switches, hubs, directories, phones or high definition video conferencing equipment, the thrust is often the same—we have the hardware to remove complexity from your network and software to unify those different modes of communication that your users ‘enjoy’. Basically it’s the IP dividend of voice over IP (VoIP) mixed with video over IP plus anything else over IP with a bit of contextual status thrown in via ‘presence’.

Sounds good to those managing a complex mix of networks, or those paying for separate forms of connection when they can see what looks like a great big free (or perceived to be free) fat internet pipe that will take all IP traffic. Unify the packets over IP and you’ve unified communications, right?

The problems come when trying to see how users fit into the deal and it does not always end in a fully cross functional, matrix managed, dispersed workforce collaborating all the way across the extended enterprise. The technology is fine, the commercial aspect works, but the social side just does not deliver, because it depends on acceptance, initiative and commitment from the workforce, and generating that takes more work than installing a CD or network appliance.

So how about taking a different approach?

There is much talk about the influx of consumer technology into the workplace, and an interesting area to look at here is social networking. However this time it is not about the use of social networking tools to connect with customers, reinvigorate marketing budgets or make the business look cool. Nor is it about the fears of employees spending so much of their time glued to their social networks that they forget to work, or how to interact with real people; although these issues do merit some attention from organisations.

An aspect of social networking that might catalyse and support the broader adoption of unified communications is the current trend towards ‘social dashboards’. These are coming about partly in recognition that most people like and use a multiplicity of social communications tools—YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, instant messaging, email etc—to hook up with their friends and contacts, yet would like to avoid the complexity of using these as separate applications. A single live ‘portal’ embracing the other tools would be ideal, but who would be the master site/supplier?

It may be too early to narrow down as there have been false dawns and social networking failures, but current players are positioning themselves as ‘accommodating’ as the market evolves. Recent innovations and updates from Microsoft around Live Essentials and the new look Twitter are examples of the trend towards this.

So what is a ‘social dashboard’ and what are the characteristics that have merit for consumers, which might turn out to be a valuable in a business context? There are several recurring themes:

• Feeds – these are live updates, tickers, messages, blogged and tweeted lifestreams or even streaming audio and videos. Ever present, constantly updated without the need for the recipient to make requests.
• Finds – uploaded responses or comment using scraps of information, interesting webpages, uploaded photos and videos can be simply and easily fed in and propagated to all contacts, ‘inline’ and without the need to open new windows or be diverted by separate applications.
• Feedback – instant opinion and comment on feeds and finds from all those in the network, a loose collaboration, trending and sometimes herd-like behaviour in the crowd. Voting and recommendation engines might seem too democratic for business decisions that need top down command and control, but with suitable moderation there may be wisdom in the crowd.
• Filters – the key to making sense of a cacophony of information. Filtering by areas of interest, favouritism dependant on the contact type (e.g. messages from the boss, or the activities of a key customer), current activities or status (do not disturb, busy working, on holiday so friends only etc). Organisations may also be able to push down centralised policies to provide automated filtering and implement security measures to block malware, filter inappropriate content and mitigate risky behaviour or data leakage, as well as permit more personal policies to improve productivity by adapting to ensure information is relevant to the context of the place, time and person.

Finally there is also the underlying ability to grow the network by finding contacts, or suggesting potential friends. When applied with business intelligence, this mechanism of seeking out the right person to contact would be extremely useful in many organisations where the traditional ‘org charts’ are always out of date or the sheer volume of external relationships make the divisions of ‘employee’ and ‘contractor’ meaningless.

Buddy lists and presence directories are already part of many unified communications solutions, but they could go a lot further to envelop the groups, commonalities and relationships that people really build their personal communications networks on. Simply having a directory with phone number, contact details and current status or presence is not enough, and the social network element provides some provenance, knowledge of, or social value of the contact. Social networks have meaning attached to the link as well as the point of the connection.

Many unified communications vendors have overly focused on the networking technology and forgotten the key part of communications; it is about people. Perhaps they could learn something relevant for businesses from social and consumer oriented tools?

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 29th September 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

ICT Accessibility is important today. But will it be important in 5 years time and what will it look like? What should organisations that are involved, interested or dependent on ICT Accessibility be planning for over the next 5 years?

Firstly, a short definition of ICT Accessibility to ensure that we are all on the same page. The international standard ISO 9241-171:2008 (Ergonomics of human-system interaction — Part 171: Guidance on software accessibility) defines accessibility as:

"Usability of a product, service, environment or facility by people with the widest range of capabilities"

The term "widest range of capabilities" is really a politically correct way of saying "including people with disabilities".

This article will use a slightly more limited definition:

"ICT for people with disabilities including: vision, hearing, speech, muscular-skeletal, learning and ageing".

Ageing is included not because it is a disability in its own right but because as we age we will tend to become less able through diseases such as Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or failing eyesight or hearing.

To try and answer the questions this article will look back 5 years, look at the present and then extrapolates 5 years in to the future.

ICT Accessibility is complex intertwined area so the discussion will be based around the following questions:

• How important is it for an individual to access digital information?
• What is the impact of laws, legislation and standards?
• Are decision makers aware of the requirements and benefits?
• Do the various professionals have the implementation skills?
• How does technology help or hinder?

How important is it for an individual to access digital information?

This is the key question that influences changing views on accessibility.

2005

Primary sources of information and services were offline: paper, telephone or face-to-face. In some cases alternative formats were offered, for example Braille or large print. Some basic information (brochureware) and some bleeding edge services were available on-line.

The majority of the population were not regular users of the Internet. People with disabilities had access to the information and services they needed off-line and access to digital information was not that important. However, there was an awakening to the potential benefits of access to digital information, especially amongst those with vision impairments who could access such information through screen-readers rather than being dependent on the information being transformed into another format.

2010

Digital is the preferred channel for most providers: how often do you hear/see "for more information go to our website"? This implies that the information is on the web but not available in any off-line format. Better service is now provided via online shopping, banking and travel than is available face-to-face or via the telephone. In particular there is a strong push in the public sector towards e-government as a way of providing better services more efficiently; hardcopy documents and forms will continue to be provided but only grudgingly.

Some providers have gone the next step with information and services only available on-line: Amazon, iTunes, EasyJet, comparison web sites etc. Where possible the product has also gone digital: music and electronic books. We are seeing the slow death of printed books; for example Amazon now sell more electronic than paper versions of some titles and the Oxford University Press has announced that it is not going to produce another printed version of the Oxford English Dictionary, which is now only be available on-line.

The other major area of push towards the need to access on-line is the meteoric rise of social networks of all sorts.

Lack of access to digital information, services and products is now serious enough to have a name, 'the Digital Divide'. Those on the wrong side of the divide are now disadvantaged but can still survive.

According to the Office for National Statistics about 1 in 5 UK adults are not on-line. This group includes people who are old, poor, or lack the necessary skills and also a small group who who wish to remain off-line.

The British Computer Society (BCS) has just published a report that shows access to IT makes people happier; not only does it enable people to do things better but it also improves their view of their quality of life.

Unfortunately some people with disabilities find themselves on the wrong side of the divide, even though they are keen to be on the right side, because the information, services and products are not provided in an accessible form.

2015

By 2015 the trend from off-line to digital information, services and products will be complete. Anything that can be provided digitally will be digital by default and will only be available in other formats by request, if at all, and probably at a premium.

By this date anyone on the wrong side of the divide will find it very difficult to carry on as a member of society. They will lack access to basic government-supplied services, most commercial services such as insurance, banking, many retail outlets, and all electronic social networks.

There will be pressure from a new group, "the recently old". This group will have been using digital channels for some years and will be furious if they cannot continue to do so because of illnesses of old age.

As the digital divide closes down it is essential that people with disabilities are not left on the wrong side through no fault of their own and therefore everything digital needs to be accessible.

It would not be overstating it to say that by 2015 access to digital information will be considered a basic human right.

What is the impact of laws, legislation and standards?

2005

Legislation existed in many countries relating to disability, including the UK Disability Discrimination Act 1995 and the the US Rehabilitation Act 1973 (and in particular Section 508 1998). These laws were either limited in relation to ICT or only relevant to government, they also seemed to lack teeth. They did not have a major impact on the accessibility of most ICT systems.

The W3C developed guidelines for web accessibility—the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG 1.0) 1999.

The British Standards Institute (BSI) published PAS 78: Guide to good practice in commissioning accessible websites in 2006.

At this time it was not clear if the legislation applied to ICT and, if it did, whether it only applied to specific parts of ICT: did it apply to websites, did it just apply to public sector organisations?

Because of this confusion the guidelines and guides were not enforced by legislation. This meant that most webmasters and their organisations were either unaware of them or ignored them.

2010

In the last year, or two, case law has made it clear that all areas of ICT are covered. Probably the most publicised example is the case against Target (a large US retail chain). An individual sued Target because its web site was not accessible and therefore he was getting a poorer service than members of the able-bodied community. It took a least two years to go through the courts. In the end it was agreed that the website had to be accessible, Target had to pay out compensation to the individual and also to a group who took out a class action, and Target had to fix the site within a given timescale. The total cost came to more that $10M.

There is still a lack of awareness amongst many business decision-makers and plaintiffs are still put off pursuing claims because of the effort involved and potentially small returns.

In 2010 eBay announced changes to their systems to support users of screen readers. There were good moral and financial reasons for implementing the changes, but it can be assumed that the possibility of legal action also encouraged their implementation.

There are still cases going through courts, for example Donna Jodhan v the Canadian Government. The number of cases going to court is likely to decrease as organisations cry 'mea culpa' rather than spend money on legal support for a case they are likely to loose.

2015

In 2010 several acts are going through the US Senate, Mandate 376 Phase 2 is progressing through the EU, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities has been ratified by most member states, rules and regulations are being passed through many other governments. All of these will have had a major impact by 2015.

By 2015 legislation across the world should be clear and have sufficient teeth so that it cannot be ignored. As it cannot be ignored, any relevant person (manager, procurer, technician, user) will be aware of the legislation and the importance of accessibility.

Are decision makers aware of the requirements and benefits?

ICT systems will only be fully accessible if accessibility is built in during all phases of implementation. This will happen if the decision makers dictate that it should. Ideally the edict should come from top management but it could be at the level of procurement or a highly motivated development manager.

2005

By 2005 most decision makers were aware of the need to provide physical access to people with disabilities, most obviously users of wheelchairs. This was certainly true in the UK and North America but may not have been so common in some other parts of Europe and the World. The decision makers were aware because the laws were clear and because the problem was easy to understand: a client in a wheelchair at the bottom of a flight of stairs leading to their building was not a photo-call that a CEO wanted to deal with.

The same could not be said about ICT accessibility. Firstly the law was not clear and had not been tested. But also the issue was not so easy to understand or even be aware of. If the issue was raised the initial reaction was "how can blind people use computers" not "what has to be done to our systems to make them easy to use by people who are blind?".

The users were only beginning to push for ICT accessibility because access to ICT was less important and because alternative formats such as braille and large print were the main requirement.

2010

Today the situation is not so different to 2005, with most decision makers still not being aware of the need for accessible ICT. The biggest improvement has been in the public sector where legislation has made the requirement clear. In the US, Section 508 makes it mandatory for government organisations and in the UK the push to e-government and the Disability Equality Duty have raised the awareness significantly.

The commercial sector is only just beginning to understand and be aware through court cases such as Target and by major organisations, most recently eBay, realising the importance of accessibility and going public with the changes they have made and the benefits to their clients and to their organisations.

The decision makers are also becoming more aware because of the noise being generated by disabled users. People are complaining when systems are not accessible and these complaints are beginning to percolate up to those who can instigate the changes.

2015

By 2015 most decision makers will be aware of the need for accessible ICT, this greater awareness will be driven by:

• Legislation will have been extended, given more power and written to explicit include ICT.
• Disabled Users will become more vocal.
• The ageing population will include users who expect to be able to access digital information and who will not accept that age related illnesses have removed that ability.
• The economic imperative to move towards digital information will highlight the need to make that information available to all.

The only question is, will this increased awareness always ensure that the systems are made accessible? There will still be a conflict between using the latest whizzy technology and the need to ensure accessibility.

Do the various professionals have the implementation skills?

Even if the decision makers decided that all ICT systems should be accessible it would not be possible if the professionals who were implementing it lacked the necessary skills. The professionals include the designers, coders, content creators, and testers.

2005

A small cohort of dedicated professionals were available to implement accessible systems, but they were the exception. Most professionals knew nothing about accessibility and were not interested in finding out. Professional education ignored accessibility with tutors not understanding why it should be included.

2010

In 2010 the number of skilled professionals has grown significantly but is still a small minority of those involved in implementing and developing ICT. If there was a sudden drive to improve the accessibility of ICT then skills would become a real issue.

The only way to know if an system is accessible is to test it. Testing needs to be done throughout the project and should use automated checking tools and user testing. There are an increasing number of professional testers who have the necessary skills to run the automated and user tests.

There are some good signs in the education field:

• Accessibility and user-centred design are now included as modules in many ICT courses, but they still tend to be add-ons delivered quite late in the schedule. Accessibility is still not built-in as an inherent part of implementation.
• The BCS is reviewing accessibility across the whole of the organisation. One aspect is to look at the inclusion of accessibility in SFIAPlus, the IT skills, training and development standard. Inclusion of accessibility in the right places in SFIAPlus will have a significant long term impact on the development of accessibility skills.
• Middlesex University now offers a MSc in Digital Inclusion.

This trend in education should ensure that accessibility becomes business as usual in the next few years.

2015

By 2015 skilled implementers should be available and should be willing to keep their skills honed because of demands for such skills from aware decision-makers.

Technology—Will Assistive Technology keep up?

There are two areas of technology that need to be considered:

• Assistive Technology: covers hardware and software that helps people who cannot see the screen well, or find it difficult to use a standard keyboard or mouse.
• The interface between the system and the user: drives screens, keyboards and pointing devices directly and needs to be accessible to the widest possible population, but it also needs to communicate with Assistive Technologies so that users of these technologies can access all the functions of the system.

2005

Speech recognition and text to speech were both available but without being too disparaging they were both fairly clunky and were only used by those who had no option. If you were blind, text-to-speech was the main way you could get access to digital information. If you could not use a keyboard, voice recognition software did enable you to input text and control the computer.

Predictive text was originally developed as an Assistive Technology, users who could only type very slowly only had to type a few letters rather than a whole word or phrase.

There were a variety of alternatives to the standard mouse, ranging from bigger mice, to rollerballs, through to controlling the mouse through winking an eye.

2010

The increase in processing power and significant advances in the software now mean that solutions that were clunky in 2005 are now so good that they are being used by people without any disability as they become a natural and efficient way to interact with ICT. This has led to some assistive technologies being built in to standard products. Examples include Voiceover text-to-speech on Apple products, and voice control in new cars; saying 'call home' whilst driving is much easier and safer than fiddling with any buttons.

Built-in touch technology has provided solutions for many people, for example those suffering from rheumatism or RSI, who cannot use a standard mouse.

Other alternatives to standard keyboards and mice are available but due to limited demand they are expensive.

2015

There will be new forms of AT, direct brain connections, wearable devices that will enable certain people to more easily control and access their ICT environment.

There will be a continuing improvement in the power available to AT: for example text to speech today tends to be fairly flat, with more power it will be possible to include emotions and clearer pronunciation and intonation.

Technology—Will the User Interface be accessible?

2005

In 2005 most of the input and output was text and that meant that it was fairly easy for the Assistive Technologies to interact. Some ancillary technologies were causing problems; probably the biggest examples were Flash and PDF, which did not always interface well to the Assistive Technologies.

There were also some web development tools that produced HTML that did not follow the W3C guidelines and was, by definition, not fully accessible. In fact it was difficult to find a tool that made it easy to produce accessible HTML

2010

Significant strides have been made since 2005. Most development tools can now produce websites that are accessible, the issue now is that it is still up to the creator to use the tools in the right way as the tools give very little assistance or guidance on how to create accessible sites. Adobe now provides PDF and Flash products that can be made accessible and has worked with the Assistive Technology vendors to ensure that the interface works.

Unfortunately there are other new technologies that have been developed that are not accessible, for example the standard YouTube screens are not accessible; so if YouTube clips are included in a website the site is not fully accessible to users of screen readers or users who cannot use a mouse. However YouTube now supports closed captioning to support people who are deaf or hard of hearing. Developers of other widgets have not been aware of the accessibility issues and have created solutions that are not accessible.

Vendors are recognising the need for solutions in specific niches, for example Xenos Axxess is a tool to create accessible transaction reports (e.g. bank statements) from non-accessible print streams.

2015

It is impossible to predict all the new user interfaces that will be used in five years time but 3D, interactive gestures and emotions will be three areas that will be commonplace. Emotions will be supported with the Emotion Markup Language (EML) that is currently being developed by the W3C. The EML will be added to text and then a text-to-speech engine will be able to vocalise the text with the right intonation or an avatar could make a suitable gesture or facial expression. The question with all of these interfaces is will the system be able to interface to the user, directly or via a suitable Assistive Technology, so that it is accessible?

New and exciting interfaces will always be attractive to the marketing departments, as a way of being ahead of the competition. It will be an uphill struggle to stop them being used if they are not accessible.

The likelihood is that new interfaces will be developed to include accessibility features built-in, however there will be a need for continuous vigilance by the accessibility community to ensure that this is the case. The community will have to recognise the new interfaces early and put pressure on the developers, standards bodies and users of the technology to ensure that it is accessible from first delivery.

Summary

By 2015:

• Accessibility will not be optional: everyone who provides digital content, services or products will need to make sure that they are accessible.
• There will be moral, legal and financial imperatives for this to happen. In particular there will pressure from users to be on the right side of the digital divide as a human right.
• Awareness will be much higher both at the user and the supplier end.
• Skill levels will have increased and should be sufficient for the demand.
• New user interface technologies will need to be accessible. Ensuring this happens will be the major challenge to the accessibility community.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 28th September 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

When you’re been brought up with some IT industry certainties, such as Moore’s Law of transistor doubling or Metcalfe’s Law of network value, it can be daunting to realise that these laws can have other unintended, but significant, consequences.

Metcalfe’s Law says that the value of a telecoms network increases with the square of the number of connections. Whether that rule is precise or not has been subject of some debate, with various proponents of different formulae, but that is not the point.

It has always been pretty clear from the days of the telegraph to phone, fax, web connection or mobile phone that each of these networks pass some sort of tipping point as the number of users soars when the network becomes mainstream.

However, while the total value of each network grows—and that’s great for all those providing products or services in the supply chain—how does it affect individual users? There is, for each individual, the increasing value in being able to reach more and more contacts within the one medium.

After all, being the only person on the planet with a fax machine is pretty useless, but when there’s a few others it becomes marginally interesting, and when all business associates have one it becomes a powerful tool.

But is there a downside to network connection ubiquity?

Clearly some networks become stretched to breaking point as available resources struggle to cope with the demands of increasing numbers of users.

Some mobile networks in particular have been hard hit, dealing with surges in new users or new mobile application usage, with the iPhone and Android platforms being cases in point.

The problem is, once people have a new, highly flexible tool, it is difficult to predict the variety of innovative uses to which it will be put. 

This issue is especially true of communications devices where it is even harder to predict the speed at which innovation will propagate.

But something other than stretched resources is starting to affect the value of networks: a corollary of Metcalfe’s Law is that the larger the physical network of connection points, the larger the social network of people.

This relationship can prove really useful, as it increases the likelihood for example of someone having an answer to that tricky question, or someone being interested in a particular quirky subject, but it also increases the volume of the banal, irksome, trivial and stupid—in short, the more chaff there is to disguise the wheat.

There are further problems in that some of the rubbish clogging the system can be automatically generated, such as spam or email updates that have been signed up for but later regretted—sometimes referred to as bacon. This rubbish propagates rapidly and it is not at all easy to distinguish from valuable communication.

Whether it is search engine results, friend requests, emails or interstitial web pages, there will be some that are too important to miss hidden amid the noise.

Thus as the physical network continues to grow in size its social value growth is affected by increasing viscosity. If there is wisdom in the crowd, the sheer numbers makes progress towards it feel like running through treacle.

At a personal level the effects are pretty clear: constant interruptions, alerts and messages which we deal with by calling it multi-tasking, endless trawling through search engine hits to try to find the thing we were really looking for and so many emails that we fear going on holiday or mitigate the fear by taking a BlackBerry and not really having a proper break.

In many respects this is analogous to the real-world inefficiencies of meetings having too many attendees or the old adage about a camel being a horse designed by committee. However, in both those instances we have built strategies and tools to cope with their worst effects. 

At least in theory, although many fail to put them into practice, which is why the Video Arts short training film from the 1990s “Meetings bloody meetings” still resonates today.

Now remember that the goal of deploying technology was to be MORE productive, not just to have more prods, dead ducks and activities.

This goal means that some artificial constraints may have to be placed on all of this networking, so that personal as well as corporate productivity does not unduly suffer.

It is unlikely that a binary switch—banning social networking during office hours, switching off corporate mobile email during holidays—will work or even be desirable, but, just like the filters that have been put in place for the unwelcome deluge of spam, something automatic will be required.

There are already some social media and content filtering tools and services available, although mostly emerging from the need to curtail access or protect data. These are generally deployed by IT, network and security specialists and justified on the grounds of reducing risks and vulnerability.

However given the increasing risk to productivity at both a personal and organisational level, a new set of tools—or interfaces to existing filters—needs to emerge to be marketed and sold to the line of business management, human resources and individual employees.

It is no longer a technical sell, but if presented and positioned correctly could be knocking on an open door. A flexible and easy-to-use time management solution for the digital age—perhaps Filofax 2.0?—would be most welcome.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 27th September 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

Technology innovation is often hard to demonstrate to those in senior decision-making roles in most organisations, and generally for very straightforward reasons. Many vendors pitch their products or services as being full of benefits, but often these are simply features dressed up with a few marketing buzzwords ending in ‘ability’. The answer to the question ‘what will it do?’ is generally ‘anything’ as those flogging the idea, either from outside or with the help of internal IT champions typically ignore the unspoken part of the question ‘...for me, our company, against the competition, etc’.

It is an issue of putting the innovation into specific context.

In October 1993 the then Anderson Consulting created a dramatic way of doing this for their retail prospects in Europe, through a ‘blue sky thinking’ experience called ‘Smart Store’, built at its office in Windsor, which aimed to transport senior retail executives into the distant future of 2010. The multi-room showcased the impact of technology in a context that would grab and sometimes shock retail executives into action. Many of the concepts, such as self scanning, logistics tagging and tracking, are now pretty much the norm, so it must have been a successful, if rather expensive investment.

While Smart Store showcased other company’s technology innovation to help Anderson Consulting sell services, other centres of innovation and executive briefing centres have been built by technology companies keen to show off their thought leadership. Both IBM and Sun Microsystems developed these sorts of facilities and have tried as hard as possible to justify the generally hidden back end ‘big tin’ with applications and services set in the context of real business.

Although the theatrics rarely meet the impressive standards of Anderson Consulting, some effort still goes into filling the demonstrations with props. It might seem trivial, but there is merit in demonstrating real world examples and doing some sort of scene setting. After all, how many business leaders or managers seeking solutions to specific business problems want to be faced simply by banks of (expensive) IBM and Sun servers?

From a recent visit to Motorola’s innovation centre in Basingstoke it is clear that money had not been frittered away on superfluous theatrics. The markets being targeted and applications shown address down-to-earth everyday business needs, not blue sky concepts. The main room is filled with many diverse communications devices from simple two way radios to smart consoles for forklift trucks; all great examples of Motorola’s innovation and technical prowess, but how do they connect to business?

Rather than looking for props or theatrics, the clues come from Motorola’s recent changes in corporate structure, in particular the decision to spin off the phones division earlier in 2010 and the acquisition of Symbol in 2006.

As the spinoff of the consumer oriented mobile phone part of the company concludes in 2011, what remains is business and public sector organisation focused, covering wireless LAN, drop in cellular networks and mobile devices. Rather than having the generic devices that might be picked up as consumer friendly phones by the average office worker, the new Motorola has large ranges of more specialised devices, some offering voice communications, some mobile data, others converging both. Why? It allows Motorola to provide different devices to target the specific working needs of different groups of workers, with tools that are sometimes rugged, often just robust, but always designed and dedicated to do a particular job—hence the reason there are so many in the innovation centre.

That is all well and good and, to be honest, what you might expect from a large technically driven company with over seventy years of innovation, but while the hiving off is bringing much needed focus, it is the acquisition and subsequent slow absorption of Symbol that turns that focus into revenue. Symbol not only brought smart small IT devices to the radio company, it also introduced an ecosystem of applications, application developers and channel partners.

This has become the driver for much activity and is where the business innovation is happening; developing a mobile application to meet the business process need of an individual worker, blending small robust hardware with the right interface options to fit their role and adding the spice of well engineered radio technology.

If Motorola can stay partner friendly and avoid the arrogance that so often surrounds long term industry players who think they can do it all themselves, this sounds like a recipe for success for all parties involved.

Mobile applications that address business needs rather than massage egos or satisfy gadget lovers will appeal to the business decision makers. That should put Motorola’s mobile innovation into context, and while its innovation centre is not overly theatrical in its presentation, this is not an issue for the practical business needs being addressed.