By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 1st May 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

CA is a company with a somewhat chequered past. Two of its CEOs (along with other senior staff) have been accused concerning financial irregularities, and the repercussions around these issues are only just quietening down. The other big challenge for CA is that its name is often extended into "CA, the mainframe software company".

The last but one CEO, John Swainson, did everything he could to put CA on more of an even keel. He uncovered and fixed the majority of the issues around the financial problems, and also oversaw the acquisition of companies that would help CA better position itself in a heterogeneous world of mainframe and distributed computing, with an aim of being just as attractive to those who do not have any mainframe computing in their organisation as those who do.

Swainson moved on, and a stint was carried out as CEO by Bill McCracken, a 'safe pair of hands' who was unlikely to ever set the world on fire.

Now, a new CEO is on board—and it looks like he means to move CA along as fast as he can. Michael Gregoire comes with experience from a line of other technology companies, having been at EDS, PeopleSoft and, latterly, Taleo. His first major appearance in front of the public was at this year's CA World, held in Las Vegas, where he presented his vision in front of several thousand customers, prospects, partners and media, along with being streamed to several thousand more people watching remotely.

Gregoire had to make sure that what he said engaged with prospects while not scaring the existing customers. On the whole, I would say that he probably managed this. His view seems to be that CA has to become not only more cloud-friendly, but to become one of the largest cloud companies around. Further speakers covered how CA was not going to be an infrastructure or platform as a service (I/PaaS) company as such—it would provide tooling that would be used by others who were providing such services. However, when it comes to software as a service (SaaS), then CA's aim is to be there—as fast as possible.

A 'cloud first' strategy will be balanced with providing on-premise solutions to keep the faithful customers happy and also to provide a pathway for these customers to move to cloud as and when it makes sense to them. Over time, CA will offer as much of its portfolio as possible as cloud services.

Under Swainson's tenure, the foundations were laid for CA to acquire a group of companies that positioned it well to deal with cloud computing. 3Tera provided a means of designing and automating the build of functions and applications; Nimsoft provided a means of monitoring and measuring how applications were performing. Wily gave application performance monitoring, and existing software such as Unicenter and Clarity provided additional means of managing what was happening in the cloud—or across a hybrid environment of physical, on-premise systems and different private and public cloud systems. Other acquisitions filled in gaps in CA's portfolio.

On top of these, CA has now acquired Layer 7 Technologies and Nolio, bringing API management and application release management to the game.

The problem for Gregoire could well be one which faced Swainson and McCracken. Yes, CA now has a portfolio of tools that provide it with the capabilities to be a world-leader in hybrid cloud management. Yes, there is a lot of work that needs to be done to pull everything together in a way that gets rid of all the redundant functionality that exists between all the acquired systems. The biggest problem, though, is more prosaic: how to make enough money from an overall offering?

A full, soup-to-nuts offering would use the capabilities of 3Tera to enable a business user to define what they need as a business process and have the basic technical components mapped out. Clarity would provide a timeline and resource management layer to create a 'project' for the work. Layer 7 would then be used to manage the various APIs between the internal and external functions identified by 3Tera and pull the overall composite application together. Nolio would be used to roll out the application as required. Nimsoft and Wily would be used to monitor and self-remediate any issues seen in the running of the application in real time.

Six enterprise systems all working nicely together. But, would you pay the full cost for all six systems? Highly doubtful. 

It is far more likely that, in this case, six times one adds up to no more that around 2.5. Can CA present a solution to the market that is at the right price point, but also keeps its shareholders and Wall Street happy? It is more likely that Gregoire will have to be bull-headed around the issue and face down the shareholders and Wall Street based on the fact that if CA does not meet the issue head-on, then there may be no CA further on down the track.

As it lies, the mainframe still accounts for around 60% of CA's revenues and more than that in profit. The mainframe side of the business cannot be left to fade, but new revenue streams will come through cloud computing.

CA has the arsenal of software to be a leading player in the cloud world. As always, the devil is in the detail: CA has to be able to move this collection of disparate software built up through acquisitions into meaningful packages of function at price points that are attractive to the markets.

Only time will tell if Gregoire is up to this task.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 11th April 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

There is a principle that internet service providers (ISPs) and governments should treat all data crossing the internet equally. It should not matter what type of device is being used, who the user is, or what site or application the data is being coming from/going to—net neutrality should mean no difference in charging models, no discriminating between the different use cases.

The arguments go back and forth as to whether this should be enshrined in legislation as a right, or allowed to drift in a competitive open market.

Despite the arguments and the capacity of technology to advance there are restrictions due to the laws of physics and certain resources that are therefore limited. This might not be too much of an issue with the massed bundles of fibre optics at the heart of fixed-line networks, but wireless networks have to balance range, capacity, power and the frequency spectrum in what is increasingly ‘noisy’ environment. Ideally without ‘frying’ anything en route.

While the resources are constrained, the boundless enthusiasm and appetite to access mobile data and applications is not. Nor, given the numbers of subscribers and devices, is the number of endpoints diminishing. In fact, with a re-awakened interest in machine-to-machine communications (M2M), or an ‘internet of things’, this is likely to accelerate further.

So what about unwired net neutrality?

There are already differential services that break the spirit, if not the letter, of the principle. To observe this, consider the way hotels have been offering Wi-Fi. Initially it appeared to be a new revenue stream, but then establishments realised it was costly to get right. As more venues started to offer it, the differentiation was lost and it became a ‘table-stakes’ offering of free Wi-Fi once hoteliers realised that actually they really made money from renting out rooms and selling food and drinks.

Not all have reached this point yet, but the more progressive organisations have already gone a step further. They offer ‘basic’ Wi-Fi for free, but have a premium service that offers greater bandwidth, improved latency etc—what might be described as ‘professional’ Wi-Fi, compared to currently simple hotspots. Basic allows a bit of email and gentle browsing, but the premium service would be good enough for consumers’ IP telephony, gaming and video streaming or virtual desktops and unified communications for the enterprise user.

Then there are cellular networks. Some carriers are premium-pricing their higher speed 4G offerings compared to the tariffs on their 3G networks. Of course with differential caps on usage it also gets a little confusing as to which is the best service for an individual user. In countries where only one or a few of the mobile networks are offering 4G today, there will be rapid pricing changes as operators switch between land grab, maximising revenue and maintaining network quality modes.

Given that users have different needs—from M2M applications that might only require a few guaranteed kilobytes to video streaming gamers who need high bandwidth and low latency—there will have to be different types of services offered. Setting caps on how many minutes of communication or megabytes of capacity will be bundled and then charged for will no longer be sufficient.

Different qualities of service will need to be differentially priced. This might require application bundling, e.g. all the social media you can eat, but video is charged by the megabyte or guaranteed service levels, e.g. all gaming traffic in sub XYZ latency, but email transmitted as ‘best efforts’.

It will be a real challenge for rating, billing and marketing, but there is no dark fibre in the sky and all the innovative use of spectrum has its eventual limit, which, with ever more users and usage, is close by.

The superfast mobile net is unlikely to be very neutral, but that might work out to be beneficial in the long run.

By: Stuart Coetzee, Business Development Manager, TISSL Posted: 11th April 2013 Copyright TISSL © 2013

Businesses such as Livebookings.com tell us that bookings made using smartphones or tablets are inexorably on the rise. So if mobile devices can increase bookings and add to the eating-out experience before a diner even enters a restaurant, how can they make table-side ordering and service work better for both parties?

Mobile devices are great upselling tools. A traditional fixed-point terminal can generally cover between 25–30 diners in a full-service environment depending on the layout of the restaurant. A handheld or tablet can cover around 50–60 without a drop in efficiency; even more with a strong system of runners. Having your best customer-facing staff equipped with mobile devices not only increases throughput but also significantly increases upselling. Our clients report an increase in dessert sales and additional drinks in sections where handhelds are employed.

Handhelds also have the advantage of being able to be used in outside areas. While running extension leads and cat5e cables can often severely damage the efficiency of a system, a tablet can be used in an outside area with the access point tucked neatly away under cover, away from the elements. As large numbers of tablets can run through each access point, once the infrastructure is in place it’s very easy to scale up as needed.

We've recently trialled giving diners the ability to order directly from their smartphone, and the results were impressive. As well as reduced hardware costs, the upselling of drinks and desserts hit 20%. This app is being further developed to automate upsell features and link them directly to the user’s dining history.

Tablets are amazing, especially for managers who pride themselves on their service skills. When running TISSL EPoS, a table plan can be viewed—meaning managers can instantly spot tables that are suffering from slow service, are waiting for food or need to pay. It’s a real bonus to have this information to hand and to be able to instantly give discounts, make voids, see counts of ‘specials’ and perform other managerial functions without having to return to a fixed-point terminal.

Mobiles are great devices for the sommelier too, providing a real-time count of the number of bottles remaining in stock, with warnings preset to alert staff to recommend alternatives if certain bottles are running low or out of stock. With this level of automation and instant data access, sommeliers are freed up to spend more time on the floor doing what they do best, offering expert advice and service.

Queue-busting is undoubtedly the optimum method of handling takeaway and counter-based services as it breaks down ordering, payment and food delivery into three separate steps—and here mobiles are unbeatable. While customers queue for food, a staff member goes up the queue and takes orders. As another staff member on the till is taking payment, your first staff member is simultaneously taking new orders. A third staff member can be introduced to deliver food if the volume of trade is high enough. Using mobile devices to take orders effectively turns a 3–4 terminal operation into a single, slick operation which increases sales.

TISSL client, Stein’s Fish & Chips Restaurant in Padstow, is a fan of mobile devices.  The team has found that 55 quality meals can be served in 15 minutes using a single queue-busting device; such is the effectiveness of the process! Queue-busting releases kitchen time, allowing chefs to cook more intricate meals whilst still providing fast service. As restaurants can then turn more meals and offer better quality, queue-busting is a sure-fire winner.

We all know that the customer experience can make or break the fortunes of a restaurant. When combined with well-trained and attentive staff, mobile POS can unquestionably bring greater speed and efficiency to the point of service, and that makes for satisfied customers.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 28th March 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

For many years, technology vendors have promised companies systems that provide the 'one true view' of their customers. CRM vendor PeopleSoft had the 360° View (somehow lost during the acquisition by Oracle); other CRM vendors provided insights into past customer behaviour and analytics vendors touted clever ways of predicting future behaviours based on visualising past activities through graphical and interactive dashboards.

The main problem with such systems lie in that they are pretty dependent on having enough past information to work against, and in analysing large data sets to provide the required visualisations—which can require large compute farms and data warehouses. That the future predictions take time to come through can also be a problem—the aim is to capture customer activity in real time and make the most of them.

Some approaches managed to get close to giving real-time value through using pattern matching: if a given customer is doing this, then based on past behaviour, we should point them in this direction. Makes sense, but requires deep analytics of past data (again) and the formalisation of the rules that will need to be in place.

Quocirca recently spoke with Featurespace, a Cambridge Ring company started in 2005. The company is currently touting itself as a customer retention and fraud identification and management company—but there seems to be a lot more underneath the hood.

Featurespace uses real time data streams for its main feeds. It is self-learning and can work against minimal historical data. Through using advanced algorithms for analysing on-line (or other—see later) behaviour, fraudulent activity can be identified at a very early stage, and actions taken to curtail it. Yes, this has value to a business, but will only tend to be seen as massively valuable by the Chief Risk Officer (or equivalent). Customer churn is an accepted occurrence in most markets and, as long as a company sees its churn as being no worse than the industry average, they are likely to stick with what they have.

The trick for Featurespace is to take what it has and create messages that have better value to businesses. For example, behavioural analysis not only identifies bad behaviour, but also good behaviour. In real time, customers can be encouraged in their good behaviour, spending more in the process and ensuring that shopping carts are completed and the customer-to-cash process is fully optimised. 

Also, bad customers can be easily identified—the bane of markets such as telecoms, where the top 20% of customers make 80% of profits, and the bottom 20% make 80% of the losses. Behavioural analysis can identify whether there is any hope in turning the customer through to profitability; if not, then bidding them a fond "farewell" (maybe even offering them a £5 voucher to go to the competition) can improve profitability and lower churn, as many of these bottom 20% are the ones that hop from deal to deal.

Such cluster analysis can lead to identifying interesting opportunities that many analytic approaches miss—and if supplemented with other data, such as the (somewhat outdated, but still widely used) ACORN scoring, can further be used to optimise offers at an ad-hoc immediate level and a strategic future product or services level.

Featurespace can help in the on-line retail space in optimising customer behaviour, but it is also showing how it can operate outside of the 'standard' markets. For example, it can analyse video streams. Imagine at an airport: your average traveller is doing all the 'normal' things - gawping at shops as if they have never seen them before; coming to a halt at the bottom of escalators and causing others to fall over behind them. 

Consider someone who is not a normal traveller—a terrorist, say. No matter what they do, their state of mind will not make it possible for them to look as relaxed or normal as the average passenger. Tracking all behaviours enables differences to be picked up very rapidly—and it doesn't have to be hidden in how it is used. No matter how aware the person is of the system, they cannot work around it: their behaviour patterns will just look more false the more they try to be normal.

Featurespace has to change its messaging, and the new(ish) CEO, Martina King, knows this and is going to be making a big push around Featurespace for behavioural analytics. 

There are competitors out there—the big one that springs to mind is IBM with the work that Jeff Jonas has being doing for some years. However, there is more than enough room for other players, and Featurespace looks like it could well be one to watch.

By: Robin Bloor, Co-Founder, The Bloor Group Posted: 27th March 2013 Copyright The Bloor Group © 2013

The main thrust of Big Data is analytics. The simple fact is that we never had the possibility of analyzing vary large data heaps until recently becasue of practical factors, like the cost of buying the hardware and networking it, the absence of analytics software to run in parallel across server grids, fast scale-out databases, the lack of cloud deployment options and so on. Most of what was needed has gradually emerged and because of that Big Data is off and running.

The Upside and the Downside
We can look at this in two ways, from the positive side and the negative side. The positive side requires little explanation. Companies can quickly assemble Big Data pools that were previously too expensive or too slow to work with. In ananlyzing them they may discover extremely valuable knowledge that they can apply to good effect. This is the promise of Big Data and everyone knows it.

I'll deal with the downside simply by providing a list:

• There is a whole new software stack to get to grips with, starting—for many companies—with Hadoop and its many children (Hbase, Pig, Hive, Mahout, Flume, etc.) Hadoop is a little like the old woman who live in a shoe; "She had so many children, she didn't know what to do." Right now Hadoop is highly capable, but immature. There are effective ways to use it, but it's easy to abuse it.
• There is a data flow issue. The old data flow of: transactional systems -> data cleansing and staging -> data warehouse -> data marts -> personal data extracts, is now being displaced. That might be fine if it was a matter of rip and replace.
• Only people who have extreme courage and an overdose of optimism will rip and replace, for many reasons. Ripping and replacing databases is rarely simple and usually gives you few business payoffs aside from reducing the number of legacy systems.
• There is no proven "new" data flow model. The old data flow was about internal data. The new world embraces external data (partner data, unstructured data, social media data, web data, even event data) It is no longer clear what corporate data actually is.
• In-memory processing is a new factor in all of this. The nice thing it provides is speed, but it is not yet clear which in-memory technologies will prove to be strategic. We have the possibility now of holding quite large databases in memory and having memory as the prime source of that data, and processing the data far faster than ever before. But no concensus has yet emerged about the best way to leverage memory.
• Master Data Management was a credible idea even though in practice it has been hard to pull off. When you add in unstructured data, social media data, other external data, etc. it is not clear how you achieve a concensus on metadata and enable broad usage of such data.
• If you are wondering why I've not yet mentioned Data Governance, it's because I was saving the best to last. There are four strands worth worrying about: data security (who can use what data and who can even view it), compliance (there are data laws, there are usage rules), data cleansing (a thorny problem when it's data from other sources—there needs to be an audit trail) and data lifecycle (when do we throw the data away).

The world of events
Behind all of this, a fundamental change is occurring in the world of IT. We are moving from the processing of transactions to the processing of events. Most machine generated data, for example, is event data. Transcations are events too, but now they are in the minority. When we move to the "Internet of Things" there will be an explosion of event data way beyond its current volume, which already exceeds transaction data by a wide margin.

Put simply, Big Data is about events. They have become the atoms of data.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 26th March 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

Sellers of computer security products and services sometimes fret that their messaging is too scary as they go on about risk, data loss and regulatory fines. To get around this, every so often they like to remind potential buyers that their wares are also business enablers. The case is easier to make in some areas than others, one such is identity and access management (IAM).

In the old days (pre-business use of the internet) IAM was mainly about providing identities to employees (and the odd contractor) to give them access to various in-house applications. This was generally from PCs and dumb terminals situated on premise and owned by the business; all was restricted to private networks. How things have changed.

A recent Quocirca report, Digital identities and the open business, shows that the majority of European organisations now open up their applications to external users; from either business customers, consumers or both. This is done entirely for positive business reasons, the top drivers being direct transactions with customers, improved customer experience, smoother supply chains and revenue growth.

However, this requires a level of IAM to be put in place that enables the quick capture and on-going authentication of identities. One of the challenges this throws up is the need for federated identity management.

Organisations that only need to worry about their own employees can put in place a single directory for centralised storage and rely solely on this to underpin IAM requirements. Microsoft Active Directory is by far the most common 'internal directory'. However, when it comes to users from external organisations a whole range of other identity sources come in to play.

For users from business customers and partner organisations, it will often be the target organisation’s own directory (so may be another instance of Active Directory). However, identities may also be sourced from the membership lists of professional bodies (e.g. legal and accounting associations), government databases and social media sites.

When it comes to dealing with consumers, social media tops the list as a source of identity. Many of us will already be familiar with these, being able to optionally use our Facebook identities to login to sites like Spotify or JustGiving. Wherever an identity is sourced from it is clear that for external users there is a growing concept of BYOID (bring-your-own-identity).

Some may frown at this and wonder how secure it can all be. The answer to that is down to the IAM system in place. This is where the different sources of identity are federated and policies about who can access what are enforced.

Banks would clearly be taking a great risk by allowing a user to move large sums of cash around based on a Google identity, but it may be good enough to answer an enquiry about opening a new account and capturing some basic details to kick the relationship off. If things go further the expense of creating a more secure identity and means of authentication can go ahead and the details updated in the IAM system.

Quocirca’s report shows that when IT and IT security managers think about IAM they still think primarily in terms of achieving certain security goals. However, its use for achieving business goals is creeping up the list the priorities. Furthermore, in the past IAM may have been seen as affordable only by large enterprise. However, it is now widely available as an on-demand service (IAM as a service/IAMaaS) and open to business of all sizes.

The majority of respondents to Quocirca’s survey report that their business managers are taking an interest in IAM. This is for not for security reasons but for its power as a business enabler. Now that’s not too scary – is it?

Quocirca’s report Digital identities and the open business is freely available to download here: https://www.ca.com/us/register/forms/collateral/quocirca-european-research-digital-identities-and-the-open-business.aspx

By: Peter Abrahams, Practice Leader - Accessibility and Usability, Bloor Research Posted: 15th March 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Based in Israel, uMoove has been working on a technology for smartphones and tablets to track eye and head movements using a device's front-facing camera. It will shortly make the SDK available to developers.

The technology will enable a user to control an application just by small movements of the head and changes of expression. This should be fun for game users; but could be life changing for disabled users who cannot control applications using standard interfaces. In fact the initial impetus for developing the technology was to help a relative who had a disease that would cause progressive paralysis.

Eye tracking technology is already available but is based on expensive specialised hardware and software. Umoove uses the standard forward facing camera in the device and runs on Apple iOS or Android so should greatly reduce the cost and make the technology available to a much wider audience.

Developers should apply for the beta SDK at umoove.me.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 8th February 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

At the end of 2012, Quocirca carried out research for BNP Paribas Leasing Solutions into the perceptions around IT and communications financing amongst UK small and medium businesses (SMBs). For the research, SMBS are defined as organisations having revenues of between £5m and £50m per annum. The results show that there are marked differences in buying habits within these SMBs—and that there is a lack of strategic thinking that could impact their capabilities to compete in the market. 

The research indicates that although the value added reseller is the most used strategic channel for the strategic buying IT and communications equipment, there is also a lot of tactical buying of equipment directly from the web. Although this happens particularly at the smaller end of the market, where the buying decision was mainly down to the owner/manager, it is still seen amongst the larger organisations where there was a dedicated purchasing function in place. 

This tends to indicate 'reactive' buying, where equipment is sourced as and when required, for example where a piece of equipment breaks or where a new project requires new hardware. However, by buying reactively, the underlying platform can become less strategic—standardisation and homogeneity can be reduced, while asset lifecycles are difficult to monitor and maintain as no real controls are in place.

It also militates against the way that modern IT is going—virtualisation and cloud computing work best where there is a more standardised and lifecycle managed set of equipment underpinning them.

However, for an SMB, putting in place this sort of rigour may be difficult. Consider an organisation that has a total IT budget per year of, say, £500,000—this falls someway along the middle of the range of SMBs that are covered in the research. According to standard metrics, between 60 and 70% of this will be spent on maintaining the existing platform—what is known as “keeping the lights on”. This will leave, at the low end, £150,000 for new IT investments.

This is not a lot when it comes to trying to implement a new technology platform—and many SMBs find themselves in the position of wanting to carry out more strategic projects, but cannot as the required money is not within their grasp.

However, the use of structured financing could help SMBs make far more of their available money by aggregating planned spend over three years into a single pool of resource that can be used as needed. Taking the same example as above, that £500,000 IT budget could be aggregated over a three year agreement to give £1,500,000—and, through a suitable finance agreement, all that money can be made available as of day one to the SMB for use against IT spend.

Obviously, the SMB will still need to plan for keeping the lights on over the three year period. However, it should be able to put in place better processes around purchasing ITC equipment; it may be able to negotiate better deals on pricing; a more standardised and modern platform should lead to savings in managing the platform and in its energy usage.

Assuming that making changes to how ITC is purchased and managed drives down the 'keep the lights on' costs to 60%, then £600,000 is now available for ITC project investment—an increase that could make all the difference between an SMB managing by struggling along and reacting to ITC events and an SMB that is more optimally supported by its ITC platform and is better suited to compete in today’s market conditions.

ITC financing can make a massive difference to organisations that are looking to gain better control over future spend and also in controlling its ITC platforms. The key is to make sure that the partner chosen to provide the financing agreement has a track record in this kind of work—banks will often require a legal financial hold against business assets, which could include the business premises and other assets, whereas a good ITC finance organisation will only have a hold against the equipment purchased through the agreement.

Quocirca has written a report on the subject that is freely downloadable here.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) Posted: 7th February 2013 Copyright Bloor Research © 2013

Traditional advertising was about placing adverts in mass media channels (TV, radio, newspapers, magazines etc) to influence mass markets. Not any more. The proliferation of 1,000s of media channels has put an end to that, as has the shift for us to consume our preferred news and content on the Internet.

In the futuristic film 'Minority Report', Tom Cruise is propositioned by digital adverts talking to him about his personal needs as he walks past billboards and advertising hoardings. Given the latest technology advances, this might be the future of advertising. Not mass messages for mass markets, not even more focused messages for market segments; but individual personalised messages just for you and you alone, enabled by digital marketing technology.

The broad category for this new kind of advertising is called Programmatic Media Buying (PMB), and the most hyped component in the stable is called Real Time Bidding (RTB). RTB works a bit like Google Search Adwords. The auction price of an online advertising space on a web site is defined by supply and demand. Mostly RTB is used for so-called 'remnant' advertising inventory - the cheaper, less attractive advertising slots, rather than premium inventory (the best slots) which is sold directly to preferred big brand advertisers, especially for corporate advertising campaigns.

Publishers like the Financial Times fear that RTB will cause them to lose control of their premium online inventory. Top publishers don't want 'undesirables' advertising in their precious media, no matter how much advertisers are prepared to pay for the space. Some publishers are piloting RTB in so-called 'private marketplaces' with their preferred advertisers in order to circumvent this problem.

RTB can display a web advert tailored to an individual who is web browsing based on his / her previous purchases, demographic profile, location, device usage, operating system used, search data, web browsing habits etc. RTB includes inbuilt customer scoring and predictive analytics technology so that advertisers can bid a dynamic variable amount (£) for a specific advertising impression based on an individual customer's attractiveness and propensity to buy.

This all sounds great for publishers and advertisers as display advert personalisation has been shown to increase returns by 10X over traditional online banner advertisements. But there are some significant challenges awaiting the advertising industry. In particular, RTB relies on consumers opting into cookies. Many of us are not so keen on being tracked. For example, the Mozilla Firefox browser offers Do Not Track (and Adblock plug-ins) as an option. More worrying for RTB is that Microsoft's Internet Explorer 10 will have Do Not Track as its default setting. In addition, smartphones do not allow for the placement of cookies, thus limiting RTB's effectiveness in this key growth market.

It is still relatively early days for RTB, and new advertising technologies are developing at a furious pace - especially as the industry titans Google, Facebook and Microsoft all have large stakes in the online advertising market. In addition, there is a myriad of other specialist best-of-breed vendors targeting the advertising technology market. This creates a complex and fragmented market landscape and digital supply chain for the media buying industry to navigate. Supplier consolidation will undoubtedly follow quickly as product suites broaden into full advertising technology platforms.

RTB was only introduced in late 2009, and in 2012 accounted for £1Bn (c. 10%) of the UK's online display advertising spend according to the IAB / PWC. ZenithOptimedia reckons the market will be worth £2.5Bn by 2016. UK opinion leaders such as BSkyB, Tesco and TalkTalk are progressively upping their RTB investments. No wonder the publishing and advertising industries are getting so excited.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 6th February 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

Toward the end of 2012, Quocirca met with an interesting company called DataSift. DataSift is a social data platform company—it takes feeds of data from the majority of social media sites and can then mine through social conversations for content, trends and insights. This is of obvious interest for organisations that are tracking sentiment of their brand in the market, but may also have other uses as well.

The one obvious target for DataSift is Twitter; the vast majority of Twitter data is available in the public domain (only direct messages (DMs) are hidden from general view). However, DataSift can also track activity around an organisation’s Facebook page, content from blogs and forums—including other semi-private information the organisation accesses via social networks established between itself and the public.

The platform is cloud-based with prices based on a combination of 'complexity', hours and hourly cost along with a data cost. The hourly cost is the simplest to explain. The price is based on the period being analysed—for a week, this would be 168 hours, for a month (nominally) 720 hours. Complexity is more difficult and is based on a calculation that can only be completed once the query has been created. However, the business model does mean that you only pay for what you get: no on-going subscriptions that have to be paid no matter what—everything is on a per use basis. The data cost is based on a small charge per Tweet analysed. For statistical validity, DataSift recommends that a 10% sample rate is used, which lowers the price significantly.

As a test, Quocirca asked DataSift to run a Twitter-only analysis of 2012 Twitter activity for a named set of vendors who are often mentioned in the same breath as big data. The query required just 10 lines of code to be written, and gave a complexity score of 2.1. Without the 10% filter in place, 2.23 million Tweets were analysed.

We selected an interesting topic as the basis for our test and Quocirca will be writing a more detailed piece on the findings, but the highlights below illustrate the potential power of the system:

• Twitter activity around big data grew by 64% over the year. This is not surprising—big data was still an emerging topic back at the beginning of the year, but was being pushed harder and harder by the vendors and the media as the year progressed.
• Nearly three quarters of Tweets contained an active link. People were not just dropping Twitter comments about big data—they were referring people to other content outside of Twitter.
• Apache had the biggest footprint with 9.4% of vendor mentions in Tweets being about it. Apache, with its Hadoop parallel processing engine and Cassandra database, is unsurprisingly the big player here.
• Second placed was 10gen, the commercial entity that looks after MongoDB, with 6.24% of vendor mentions.
• Of the 'big guys', IBM gained a creditable third place with 3.25%, with HP in fourth with 2.38%.
• There were geographic differences—IBM’s strongest country was France; Cloudera’s was Japan. SAP was (unsurprisingly) strong in Germany; DataSift itself was very strong in the UK.
• At a domain level—the sites that people were pointing people to most from their Tweets—Forbes.com was a surprise winner. Behind that, GigaOM.com and Techcruch.com were the next biggest content sources.

As a single point of interest, a look was taken at HP at a sentiment analysis level. Through the first part of the year, people’s views of HP remained fairly level, with a net sentiment score (positive comments minus negative comments) of 0—not good news in itself, but it could have been worse. However, between 14th November and 10th December, a lot of sentiment activity took place.

On the 21st November, HP’s sentiment score plunged close to -10,000. It recovered back to zero by the 24th, and then went back down to -5,000 on the 28th, rose again and then crashed down to -7,000 on the 1st December.

Why? On November 20th, HP’s CEO Meg Whitman told Wall Street analysts that HP had massively overpaid for software firm Autonomy, and accused former executives at Autonomy of cooking the books. Financial and technical analysts went into a frenzy—the very people who use social networking the most to get information out as quickly as possible. The ongoing fall-out was what caused the triple-dip poor sentiment scores over the following weeks.

This shows that, although HP got a fourth place in the mentions it had around big data, it was not necessarily positive to HP’s brand. This is why a company such as DataSift is important—it not only can remove the grunt work of dealing with analysing the massive firehose of data that comes from social networks, but also applies solid analytic against this to ensure that what a customer sees as results is there in context.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 5th February 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

Quocirca has recently published a free checklist to help those looking at investing in self-service solutions. So, why might it be useful?

Well, there has been a rush in the UK in recent retail situations towards customer self-service and automation. Pay at pump petrol stations, self-checkout tills and so on.

The reasons for this are presented as ‘customer convenience’, but it is pretty clear that it is all too often about cutting costs and too little thought is given as to how to how it might affect the overall customer experience.

Specialist retailers will argue they have to do this in order to compete with online or other, higher footfall, locations such as supermarkets, hypermarkets and shopping malls.

There may be some truth in this but, by simply commoditising the shopping experience, those making knee-jerk decisions to automate customer service run the risk of further business decline.

Clearly something is amiss as so many major and well established specialist companies have disappeared and continue to do so, mainly with a wail about “habits have changed”, “it’s all gone online” after they have narrowed stock ranges, made the stores feel like warehouses and trained the staff to be as friendly as a bent nail.

The best (and surviving) retailers—whether online, mobile or physical stores—provide service excellence irrespective of the technology or channel. Automation and self-service has a very important part to play in all these routes to the market, but it has to be delivered with the customer in mind, not simply as a cost cutting exercise.

The first thing to realise is that self-service is not a standalone tool or alternative to existing processes, but has to be integrated into the wider business in order to be successful. It should be viewed as a strategic and well-researched investment, not a simple tactical option. For this reason, the decision-making process of how to implement self-service and what solutions or tools to should be implemented has to be well thought out and comprehensive.

To start with, an organisation must identify why the move to self-service is being made in the first place and what the main requirements are. There may be a cost reduction element, but how important are other matters such as increasing cross-channel co-ordination or improving customer service levels and internal communications?

For example, are customers automatically invited to chat if their website interaction indicates they might need help or can support agents see what customers have done, requested or replied in order to avoid duplication of effort on the part of the customer?

However, this process may reveal that there are underlying issues with poor business systems, such as lack of a formal handover at shift changes or problem departments—e.g. a technical group refusing to get involved in customer contact. These will need to be addressed separately to the implementation process as simply deploying self-service alone will not fix these internal problems.

Next consider which suppliers will need to be approached and investigated. As well as taking the partisan views of the vendors themselves and some of their ‘tame’ customers, dig deeper and find out the broader market perspectives from a wider mix of customers, perhaps through trade shows and conferences. Industry analyst perceptions may also be valuable, but be aware that some analyst houses may overlook specialist or niche vendors and it is best to take a broad view.

The bulk of any product or service suitability assessment will come down to comparing features and functions, and a checklist will be useful. However, as this is an important investment, it is always important to check the people, company and its current client base of an intended supplier to get the full insight.

It is never easy going through the process by oneself, and even self-service benefits from some sort of external guidance. So for an idea of how to approach the self-service product and vendor selection process, download a free checklist.

This article first appeared on http://www.computerweekly.com

By: Tim Clegg, Head of Transformation, Calyx Managed Services Ltd Posted: 4th February 2013 Copyright Calyx Managed Services Ltd © 2013

I have been in the fortunate position over the last two years to have successfully delivered many transformation initiatives for Calyx. However without doubt there has been one initiative above all others that has brought significant improvements in the way Calyx staff are able to collaborate and communicate while also showing a clear and demonstrable ROI—our Microsoft Lync deployment.

Microsoft Lync is a Unified Communications (UC) solution that brings together a wide variety of functionality including:

• Presence and Instant Messaging
• Collaborative functions that include desktop & application sharing, presentation delivery
• PC to PC Voice calling
• PC to PC Video
• Audio Conference
• Enterprise Voice

The business case for UC Solutions will vary based on the current commitments that you are able to offset and the deployment choices with your Microsoft Lync Service. However, advantages include savings in travel and related expenses, legacy voice maintenance, call charges, mobile costs, and audio conference costs. With its many additional soft benefits, Microsoft Lync enables far more flexibility in ways of working which helps enhance personal productivity.

Calyx’s own Microsoft Lync deployment saw an immediate reduction in travel costs of 27% which helped achieve payback on initial costs within 3 months.

While, for many, embracing UC is seen as a natural step in the current social media driven age, it may be an alien concept to others. This brings a challenge of adoption and education in some organisations. For example the notion of 'presence'—always on visibility of your current availability and status—may be seen as intrusive. Instant messaging, equally, is not a comfortable medium initially for some. Nevertheless, as individuals do embrace the technology, these aspects become commonplace and UC very rapidly becomes a business critical application that your organisation will look back on and wonder how they managed without.

UC is essentially “communications integrated to optimise business processes”. Microsoft positions UC as a discipline in the broader context of Business Productivity. With integration into MS Exchange, MS SharePoint, MS Office and clients available for most platforms, Lync extends its use from the desktop to tablet and many mobile devices.

A deployment of Lync integrates with these applications out of the box. The presence indicator, for example, lights up in many different locations including Outlook and SharePoint, with the ability to send a file immediately via instant message to the co-author of a document direct from within Word. Many applications use the contact card to enable Lync features to be both visible and activated from within that application. Instant Message conversations stored directly in your Outlook Mail and Voice Mail are stored in your mail too. With an extensive Lync eco-system there are many third party created extensions for specific requirements including contact centre functionality. It’s also possible to extend functionality into other line of business applications.

Calyx can simplify the adoption of Lync as part of an organisation’s Unified Communications strategy by implementing a pilot for a small team or department. Microsoft Lync is licensed based on the functional blend required with various deployment options including:-

• Dedicated on Premise
• Dedicated Calyx Hosting
• Join Calyx Shared Platform
• Lync as part of Office 365

To find out how Calyx can support your business, please contact us at enquiries@calyxms.com

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 22nd January 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

Quocirca recently had an interesting discussion with an off-shore hosting and cloud company. Jersey-based (as in the UK Channel Islands, not the US New Jersey) Calligo is positioning itself as the right place to be for data—and for running the applications that create and consume the data.

Why is this important? Well, organisations are beginning to wake up to the fact that even when a data centre is in a 'friendly' country, there is still potentially high risks to the intellectual property (IP) held within the data.

The US Patriot Act and the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) make those European companies that have looked into their possible impact shudder. That a foreign power can demand—and get—access to their data just because it is hosted by a company in the US—or is in a facility anywhere in the world that is owned by a company in the US—means that many are looking for alternative arrangements with companies that can still offer a broad range of services, but backed with better data security agreements that cannot be ridden roughshod over by the regional government.

Calligo’s view is that Jersey is highly controlled from a data viewpoint. Although it is nominally 'in' the UK, it is actually a separate British Crown Dependency. This means that it is autonomous, makes its own laws and operates outside of the reach of other country’s legal systems— including the UK. Sure, EU laws will still apply when push comes to shove—but a European customer may be happier with a Jersey/EU escalation than a /EU/US three-way battle.

This means that data can be stored in a country where the legal system is subject to fewer overall laws, is overseen by fewer people and can be targeted to specific needs. Jersey has pedigree here with the way it has dealt with financial services in its country.

Jersey is also well connected from a data viewpoint to both the UK and the European mainland through multiple cables, and from these to the rest of the world. Therefore, placing applications and data in a commercial, secure facility on an island that is part of the EU but is autonomous has many things going for it.

But, however well Jersey is connected to the rest of the world, it cannot overcome its relative geographic isolation. When super-fast response is needed—e.g. for financial trading in the US or in Japan—the underlying latency can still be an issue. Calligo recognises this, and is looking at where else in the world it can set up similar facilities and meet the needs of organisations that want to be assured of greater security for their data and therefore their intellectual property.

The Cayman Islands are one option—they are well placed for the south of the US, for Central America and for the major markets of the top of South America. Although the Cayman Islands are a British Overseas Territory with their own legal system, they come under the overall control of the UK and have a Governor appointed by the Queen—but can still enact and follow laws that make sense from a commercial viewpoint to the islands.

Calligo also includes a data ownership clause in its agreements—the data always belongs to and is owned by the customer. Many cloud providers make no statements about this, which can cause issues for the actual data owner. On top of this, Calligo says that it has a special clause in its agreements, which make it clear that should the untoward happen, the data has to be turned over to the customer (even by a business administrator)—so making it easier for a customer to regain access to the data and move it to another provider.

Similar approaches in other parts of the world could give Calligo an interesting footprint for a global offering. With small, autonomous island states being more likely to provide laws that are data friendly while still retaining strong audit and overall data security capabilities, Calligo’s offerings of IaaS, PaaS and SaaS (for example, it hosts SugarCRM and other applications) combined with the capability to use external cloud offerings where it makes sense (such as Google Maps) will make sense to many organisations.

Overall, Calligo looks like an interesting company. For those who have worries about how their data is secured not just from the baddies out there, but also from the governments who are enacting ever more threatening laws around data access, the use of Island nations as a home for data could be just as good as using them for financial affairs.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 16th January 2013 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2013

New levels of collaboration have emerged from an increasingly networked world, and business leaders and academic researchers alike are now sorting out what the new capabilities mean for both commerce and society at large.

To learn more about how rapid trends in collaboration and business networking are driving new innovation and social interactions, BriefingsDirect invited a Harvard Kennedy School researcher and a chief strategist at global business network provider Ariba to a panel discussion.

We joined up Zach Tumin, Senior Researcher at the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at the Harvard Kennedy School, and Tim Minahan, Senior Vice-President of Global Network Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Ariba, an SAP company.

Tumin isco-author with William Bratton of 2012’s Collaborate or Perish: Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World, published by Random House. Minahan, at Ariba, is exploring how digital communities are redefining and extending new types of business and collaboration for advanced commerce. 

The chat is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: Zach, in your book "Collaborate or Perish," you're exploring collaboration and you show what it can do when it's fully leveraged. And, Tim, at Ariba you've been showing how a more networked economy is producing efficiencies for business and even extending the balance of what we would consider commerce to be. I’d like to start with looking at how these come together.

Tumin: The opportunities for collaboration are expanding even as we speak. The networks around the world are volatile. They're moving fast. The speed of change is coming at managers and executives at a terrific pace. There is an incredible variety of choice, and people are empowered with these great digital devices that we all have in our pockets.

That creates a new world, where the possibilities are tremendous for joining forces, whether politically, economically, or socially. Yet it's also a difficult world, where we don't have authority, if we have to go outside of our organizations -- but where we don't have all the power that we need, if we stay within the boundaries of our charters.

So, we're always reaching across boundaries to find people who we can partner with. The key is how we do that. How do we move people to act with us, where we don't have the authority over them? How do we make it pay for people to collaborate?

Minahan: Collaboration certainly is the new business imperative. Companies have leaned out their operations over the past couple of years and they spent the previous 30 years focusing on their internal operations and efficiencies and driving greater performance, and getting greater insights.

When they look outside their enterprise today, it's still a mess. Most of the transactions still occur offline or through semi-automated processes. They lack transparency into those processes and efficiency in executing them. As a result, that means lots of paper and lots of people and lots of missed opportunities, whether it's in capitalizing on getting a new product to market or achieving new sales with new potential customers.

What business networks and this new level of collaboration bring is four things. It brings the transparency that’s currently lacking into the process. So you know where your opportunities are. You know where your orders are. You know where your invoices are and what your exposure to payables are.

It brings new levels of efficiencies executing against those processes, much faster than you ever could before through mostly automated process. It brings new types of collaboration which I am sure we will get into later in this segment.

The last part, which I think is most intriguing, is that it brings new levels of insights. We're no longer making decisions blindly. We no longer need to double order, because we don’t know if that shipment is coming in and we need to stockpile, because we can't let the refinery go down. So it brings new levels of insight to make more informed decisions in real time.

Gardner: Zach, in your book you're basically describing a new workforce, and some companies and organizations are recognizing that and embracing it. What’s driving this? What has happened that is basically redefining the workforce?

Tumin: It’s in the demographics, Dana. Young people are accustomed to doing things today that were not possible 10 years ago. The digital power in everyone’s pocket or pocket book, the digital wallet in markets, are ready, willing, and able to deal with them and to welcome them. That means that there’s pressure on organizations to integrate and take advantage of the power that individuals have in the marketplace and that come in to their workforce.

Everyone can see what's going on around the world. We're moving to a situation where young people are feeling pretty powerful. They're able to search, find, discover, and become experts all on their own through the use of technologies that 10 years ago weren’t available.

So a lot of the traditional ways of thinking about power, status, and prestige in the workforce are changing as a result, and the organizations that can adapt and adopt these kinds of technologies and turn them to their advantage are the ones that are going to prevail.

Gardner: Tim, with that said, there's this demographic shift, the shift in the mentality of self-started discovery of recognizing that the information you want is out there, and it’s simply a matter of applying your need to the right data and then executing on some action as a result. Your network seems ready-made for that.

The reality of the community is that it is organic. It takes time to grow.

Minahan: The reality of the community is that it is organic. It takes time to grow. At Ariba we have more than 15 years of transactional history, relationship history, and community generated content that we've amassed. In fact, over the past 12 months those, nearly a million connected companies have executed more than $400 billion in purchase, sales, invoice, and payment transactions over the Ariba network.

Aggregate that over 15 years, and you have some great insights beyond just trading efficiencies for those companies participating there. You can deliver insights to them so that they can make more informed decisions, whether that’s in selecting a new trading partner or determining when or how to pay.

Should I take an early-payment discount in order to accelerate or reduce my cost basis? From a sales standpoint, or seller’s standpoint, should I offer an early payment discount in order to accelerate my cash flow? There are actually a host of examples where companies are taking advantage of this today and it’s not just for the large companies. Let me give you two examples. 

From the buyer side, there was a company called Plaid Enterprises. Plaid is a company that, if you have daughters like I do who are interested in hobbies and creating crafts, you are very familiar with. They're one of the leading providers for the do-it-yourself crafts that you would get at your craft store.

Like many other manufacturers, they were a mid sized company, but they decided a couple of years ago to offshore their supplies. So they went to the low cost region of China. A few years into it, they realized that labor wages were rising, their quality was declining, and worse than that, it was sometimes taking them five months to get their shipment.

So they went to the Ariba Network to find new sources of supply. Like many other manufacturers, they thought, "Let’s look in other low cost regions like Vietnam." They certainly found suppliers there, but what they also found were suppliers here in North America.

They went through a bidding process with the suppliers they found there, with the qualifying information on who was doing business with whom and how they performed in the past, and they wound up selecting a supplier that was 30 miles down the road. They wound up getting a 40 percent cost reduction from what they had previously paid in China and their lead times were cut from more than 120 days down to 30. 

That’s from the buy side. From the sell side, the inverse is true. I'll use an example of a company called Mediafly. It's a fast growing company that provides mobile marketing services to some of the largest companies in the world, large entertainment companies, large consumer products companies.

They were asked to join the Ariba Network to automate their invoicing and they have gotten some great efficiencies from that. They've gotten transparencies to know when their invoice is paid, but one other thing was really interesting.

Once they were in the networked environment and once they had automated those processes, they were now able to do what we call dynamic discounting. That meant when they want their cash, they can make offers to their customers that they're connected to on the Ariba Network and be able to accelerate their cash.

You have extraordinary volatility on your network and that can rumble all the way through.

So they were able not only to shrink their quote-to-settle cycle by 84 percent, but they gained access to new financing and capital through the Ariba network. So they could go out and hire that new developer to take on that new project and they were even able to defer a next round of funding, because they have greater control over their cash flow. 

Gardner: Zach, in listening to Tim, particularly that discovery process, we're really going back to some principles that define being human -- collaboration, word of mouth, sharing information about what you know. It just seems that we have a much greater scale that we can deploy this. How is that fundamentally changing how people are relating in business and society?

Tumin: The scaling means that things can get big in a hurry and they can get fast in a hurry. So you get a lot of volume, things go viral, and you have a velocity of change here. New technologies are introducing themselves to the market. You have extraordinary volatility on your network and that can rumble all the way through, so that you feel it seconds after something halfway around the world has put a glitch in your supply chain. You have enormous variability. You're dealing with many different languages, both computer languages and human languages. 

That means that the potential for collaboration really requires coming together in ways that helps people see very quickly why it is that they should work together, rather than go it alone. They may not have a choice, but people are still status quo animals. We're comfortable in the way that we have always done business, and it takes a lot to move us out.

When crisis hits, it’s not exactly a great time to build those relationships. Speaker of the House Tip O'Neill here in United States once said "Make friends before you need them." That’s a good advice. We have great technology and we have great networks, but at the end of day, it’s people that make them work.

People rely on trust, and trust relies on relationships. Technology here is a great enabler but it’s no super bullet. It takes leadership to get people together across these networks and to then be able to scale and take advantage of what all these networks have to offer. 

Gardner: Tim, another big trend today of course, is the ability to use all of this data that Zach has been describing, and you are alluding to, about what’s going on within these networks. Now, of course, with this explosive scale, the amount of that data has likewise exploded. 

Minahan: We've only begun to scratch surface on this. When you look at the data that goes on in a business commerce network, it’s really three levels. One is the transactional data, the actual transactions that are going on, knowing what commodities are being purchased and so on. Then, there's relationship data, knowing the relationship between a given buyer and seller.

Finally, there's what I would call community data, or community generated data, and that can take the form of performance ratings, so buyers rating suppliers and suppliers rating buyers. Others in the community can use that to help determine who to do business with or to help to detect some risk in their supply chain.

There are also community generated content, like request for proposal (RFP) templates. A lot of our communities members use a "give a template, take a template" type approach in which they are offering RFP templates to other members of the community that work well for them. These can be templates on how to source temp labor or how to source corrugated packaging. 

We have dozens and dozens of those. When you aggregate all of this, the last part of the community data is the benchmarking data. It's understanding not just process benchmarking but also spend benchmarking.

One of the reasons we're so excited about getting access to SAP HANA is the ability to offer this information up in real time, at the point of either purchase or sale decision, so that folks can make more informed decisions about who to engage with or what terms to take or how to approach a particular category. That is particularly powerful and something you can’t get in a non-networked model.

Gardner: One of the things I sense, as people grapple with these issues, is a difficulty in deciding where to let creative chaos rein and where to exercise control and where to lock down and exercise traditional IT imperatives around governance, command and control, and systems of records.

Zach, in your book with William Bratton, are there any examples that you can point to that show how some organizations have allowed that creativity of people to extend their habits and behaviors in new ways unfettered and then at the same time retain that all-important IT control?

Tumin: It's a critical question that you’ve raised. We have young people coming into the workforce who are newly empowered. They understand how to do all the things that they need do without waiting online and without waiting for authority. Yet, they're coming into organizations that have strong cultures that have strong command-and-control hierarchies.

There's a clash that’s happening here, and the strong companies are the ones that find the path to embracing the creativity of networked folks within the organization and across their boundaries, while maintaining focus on set of core deliverables that everyone needs to do. 

There are plenty of terrific examples. I will give you one. At Wells Fargo, for the development of the online capability for the wholesale shop, Steve Ellis was Executive Vice President. He had to take his group offline to develop the capability, but he had two responsibilities. One was to the bank, which had a history of security and trust. That was its brand. That was its reputation. But he was also looking to the online world, to variability, to choice, and to developing exactly the things that customers want.

Steve Ellis found a way of working with his core group of developers to engage customers in the code design of Wells Fargo's online presence for the wholesale side. As a result, they were able to develop systems that were so integrated into the customers over time that they can move very, very quickly, adapt as new developments required, and yet they gave full head to the creativity of the designers, as well as to the customers in coming to these new ways of doing business.

So here's an example of a pretty staid organization, 150 years old with a reputation for trust and security, making its way into the roiling water of the networked world and finding a path through engagement that helped to prevail in the marketplace over a decade.

Minahan: I'd also like to talk about the dynamics going on that are fueling more B2B collaboration. There is certainly the need for more productivity. So that's a constant in business, particularly as we're in tight environments. Many times companies are finding they are tapped out within the enterprise.

Companies are becoming more and more dependent on getting insights and collaborating with folks outside their enterprise.

So policies do need to be put down. Just like many businesses put policies down on their social media, there needs to be policies put down on how we share information and with whom, but the great thing about technology is that it can enforce those controls. It can help to put in checks and balances and give you a full transparency and audit trail, so you know that these policies are being enforced. You know that there are certain parameters around security of data.

You don't have those controls in the offline world. When paper leaves the building, you don't know. But when a transaction is shared or when information is shared over a network, you, as a company, have greater control. You have a greater insight, and the ability to track and trace.

When a transaction is shared or when information is shared over a network, you, as a company, have greater control.

So there is this balancing act going on between opening the kimono, as we talked about in '80s, being able to share more information with your trading partners, but now being able to do it in a controlled environment that is digitized and process-oriented. You have the controls you need to ensure you're protecting your business, while also growing your business.

Gardner: Tim, for the benefit of our audience, help us better understand how Ariba is helping to fuel this issue of safely allowing creativity and new types of collaboration, but at the same time maintaining that the important principles of good business.

Minahan: The problem we solve at Ariba is quite basic, yet one of the biggest impediments to business productivity and performance that still exists. That's around inter-enterprise collaboration or collaboration between businesses.

We talked about the deficits there earlier. Through our cloud-based applications and business network, we eliminate all of the hassles, the papers, the phone calls, and other manual or disjointed activities that companies do each day to do things like find new suppliers, find new business opportunities as a seller, to place or manage orders, to collaborate with customers suppliers and other partners, or to just get paid.

They can connect with known trading partners much more efficiently and then automate the processes and the information flows between each other.

Nearly a million business today are digitally connected through the Ariba Network. They're empowered to discover one another in new ways, getting qualifying information from the community, so that they know who that party is even if they haven’t met them before. It's similar to what you see on eBay. When you want to sell your golf clubs, you know that that buyer has a performance history of doing business with other buyers.

They can connect with known trading partners much more efficiently and then automate the processes and the information flows between each other. Then, they can collaborate in new ways, not only to find one another, but also to get access to preferred financing or new insights into market trends that are going on around particular commodities.

That’s the power of bringing a business network to bear in today’s world. It's this convergence of cloud applications, the ability to access and automate a process. Those that share that process share the underlying infrastructure and a digitally connected community of relevant parties, whether that’s customers, suppliers, potential trading partners, banking partners, or other participants involved in the commerce process

Gardner: When it comes to exposing the data from these processes, assuming we can do it safely, what can we do now that really wasn’t possible five years ago?

Tumin: One of the things that we're seeing around the world is that innovation is taking place at the level of individual apps and individual developers. There's a great example in London. London Transport had a data set and a website that people would use to find out where their trains were, what the schedule was, and what was happening on a day-to-day basis.

As we all know, passengers on mass transit like to know what's happening on a minute-to-minute basis. London Transport decided they would open up their data, and the open data movement is very, very important in that respect. They opened the data and let developers develop some apps for folks. A number of apps developers did and put these things out on the system. The demand was so high that they crashed London Transport, initially.

London Transport took their data and put it into the cloud, where they could handle the scale much more effectively. Within a few days, they had gone from those thousand hits on the website per day to 2.3 million in the cloud.

You need governance and support people, and people to make it work and to trust each other and share information.

The ability to scale is terribly important. The ability to innovate and turn these open data sets over to communities of developers, to make this data available to people the way they want use it, is terribly important. And these kinds of industry-government relations that makes this possible are critical as well.

So across all those dimensions, technology, people, politics, and the platform, the data has to line up. You need governance and support people, and people to make it work and to trust each other and share information. These are the keys to collaboration today.

Gardner: Zach, last word to you. What do we get? What's the payoff, if we can balance this correctly? If we can allow these new wheels of innovation to spin, to scale up, but also apply the right balance, as Tim was describing, for audit trails and access and privilege controls? If we do this right, what's in the offing?

Tumin: I think you can expect four things, Dana. First is that you can expect innovations faster with ideas that work right away for partners. The partners who collaborate deeply and right from the start get their products right without too much error built-in and they can get them to market faster.

Second is that you're going to rinse out the cost of rework, whether it's from carrying needless inventory or handling paper that you don’t have to touch where there is cost involved. You're going to be able to rinse that out.

Third is that you're going to be able to build revenues by dealing with risk. You're going to take advantage of customer insight. You're going to make life better and that's going to be good news for you and the marketplace.

The fourth is that you have an opportunity for constant learning, so that insight moves to practice faster. That’s really important, because the world is changing so fast, you have the volatility, a velocity, a volume, variability, being able to learn and adapt is critical. That means embracing change, setting out the values that you want to lead by, helping people understand them.

Great leaders are great teachers. The opportunity of the networked world is to share that insight and loop it across the network, so that people understand how to improve every day and every way the core business processes that they're responsible for.

Gardner: Allow me to extend a big thanks to our guests, Zach Tumin, Senior Researcher at the Science, Technology, and Public Policy Program at Harvard Kennedy School, and the co-author with William Bratton of Collaborate or Perish: Reaching Across Boundaries in a Networked World, and Tim Minahan, Senior Vice-President of Global Network Strategy and Chief Marketing Officer at Ariba.

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

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 10th January 2013 Copyright Quocirca © 2013

At CES in Las Vegas where the converging consumer, IT and telecoms industries like to showcase their innovation and latest technology, there are clear indicators to the main challenge of the day. It’s not a new one, but one that keeps resurfacing every time there are major spurts in innovation—making the user interface (UI) easy.

Sure, all these gadgets and functions can be combined, but how are people going to use them? It is no longer sufficient to have an easy-to-use device or application—the entire environment needs to be easy, and now that also means spanning multiple form factors.

Until the arrival of the sleek UI of the iPhone, the mobile phone user experience was pretty much a mish-mash of too simple phone menus and too complex desktop computer metaphors.

The iPhone’s success is partly reliant on the tight Apple design and control, but mostly on being more able to create and exploit a new UI experience based on touch, multi-touch and swipe.

This has been extended into a larger form factor with the tablet—no longer perceived as a laptop without a keyboard or needing a clumsy stylus like earlier iterations of the concept, but a category of device in its own right. So much so that it is affecting the mobile phone market at the larger end, creating an intermediate device type; see Samsung’s Galaxy Note 2 and the newly launched Huawei Ascend Mate, known as the ‘Phablet.’

At the larger end of the device form factor, the smart TV is already in a similar place to the early smartphone market. Vendors still try to cram too much functionality in and the majority of smart TV owners use or understand very little of the expensive innovation that has been shoehorned onto their walls.

User interfaces have evolved little and are based on another mish-mash—this time the TV industry’s awkward thrashings around Electronic Programme Guides (EPGs), derivations of computer pointer driven interfaces, and in some cases gesture and voice.

As if the problem was not bad enough, vendors are again pushing a home automation and integration agenda. Conceptually, it sounds great. Control your entertainment, heating, lighting etc. from your smartphone, tablet or TV (or PC if you still have one of those old things). 

This has brought another old concept back to the fore—should we have one interface and OS for all types of devices? The idea has some appeal, especially if it means that applications can be developed once and used on all platforms, but the reality of usage models is quite different between ‘lean back, lean forward and slouch’ (TV, computer and tablet), especially in the critical area of user interface.

Despite massive changes right across the IT spectrum, some old fashioned concepts remain strong. The keyboard, and even mouse, are putting up a good fight against the touch and swipe brigade. Even voice input has yet to really set the world alight, despite the technology maturing and improving significantly over the last three decades.

More promising, perhaps, is the use of pointing cameras back at the user—see Microsoft’s Kinect—to recognise both who they are and what gestures they are making.

It will be interesting to see how the TV and visual entertainment companies address the challenge, but if they fail to streamline and simplify the experience in a way that satisfies consumers, they may have to deal with a certain Cupertino company still waiting in the wings. However, thus far, even Apple has by its own standards struggled in the TV space.

Despite some protestations in certain vendor quarters, it is unlikely that the ‘box’ in the corner will be the hub of all activities, as the TV, no matter how smart, just like the home PC before it, will turn out to be a ‘peripheral’ to the overall system.

Households will have multiple devices, each with varying functionality, not one clunking central do-it-all base station. The common thread will be the network, not a smart hub. With the home network linking all devices together and to the wider world, services can be delivered on demand, with entertainment in both private and public clouds.

However this requires open standards, something that has been frequently elusive in this technology sector, despite efforts over many years.

One of the better initiatives is the Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), which has a number of big name members in TV, IT and telecoms, and its certification is starting to crop up more often, especially in newer devices. But there are still glaring absentees, and to really win over the consumer this type of cross device integration has to become the norm—basically, it needs more push from its current membership.

With everything at home talking on the network, control can be passed to the mobile device in hand, with applications able to adapt, evolve and mash up the services being delivered into a dashboard array that makes most sense for the individual.

The original PDAs were once described as companion devices to PCs and now their successor smartphones and tablets are capable of building a similar relationship to all other smart devices in the home, from TVs to toasters.

All the old ‘remotes’ can now safely be left down the back of the sofa where they often lay; the future of TV is smart, but probably not in the box.

This article first appeared on http://www.knowyourmobile.com

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 29th November 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

M2M (machine to machine) has enjoyed a decade or so of market push and occasional hype, yet still seems not to be meeting its full potential—why is that?

Firstly, the predictions for growth and market opportunities are huge but often hard to compare objectively. Some talk of the number of deployments, others the number of devices (billions), and yet others the numbers of cellular connections (100s of millions). There have also been predictions of M2M revenues running into tens of billions of dollars by the late 2010s.

Then some of the terminology isn’t helpful. When George Colony predicted in the 1990s that light bulbs would eventually have IP addresses it conjured up the sort of imagery popular in the BBC TV programme, Tomorrow’s World, and possibly ABC’s ‘The Jetsons’. Others started to use the equally futuristic term ‘the internet of things’ and talk of connected consumer appliances and hint that, with M2M communications, technology ‘can do anything’.

Yes it can, but only if someone thinks it is sufficiently worthwhile to spend money on, and the problem with many grand M2M schemes is that several different agendas have to be brought into line, business processes need to evolve, and there has to be broad acceptance from all stakeholders. These are much harder to achieve than fixing some of the technical challenges, and even harder when the value chain is distorted or has the wrong centre of gravity, say towards a ‘bitpipe’ connectivity provider such as a mobile operator. M2M, like many applications of technology, should start with a business need in a business process, not with a choice of communications or even software platform.

The market sizing is also fraught with problems. Sure it could be big, but the revenue split is complicated, going to a mix of hardware vendors, software vendors and network service providers. When would this be cannibalising other revenue, and from where or whom? Perhaps most critically of all for certain M2M projects, over what timeframe?

While consumers of mobile phones are used to upgrading or changing once every year or two, many M2M deployments will see devices and entire systems in place for ten years or more. One of the flagships of the M2M application landscape is smart meters—for electricity, gas and other utilities—but these types of metering devices typically have an average lifetime of twenty or more years. That would span over several generations of mobile cellular technologies, so clearly the return over time of investment is going to be much more important.

This has to work for all stakeholders too—suppliers, government/legislators, right down to the end consumer.  Returning to application posterchild of the M2M movement—smart meters—it seems that even enlightened consumers are generally unconvinced of their value and many others are simply not aware of smart meters at all. Utility companies are not helping. For example, in the UK, electricity suppliers do not provide consumer microgenerator sites (houses with solar panels) with import/export meters, so it is impossible to gauge just how much power is being fed back in. Smart meters and smart grids need to begin with some smart thinking and consumer engagement.

The underlying problem is that the M2M space has been too focused on the underlying plumbing—network connectivity, provisioning platforms and billing—and has not done enough to build application platforms and ecosystems of coherent and deployable solutions that meet business needs.

Building a solid foundation with interoperable standards is necessary, but not sufficient on its own, and it is indicative of the overly telecoms-centric approach of many in the M2M space. What is needed for the next stage of real growth is a more innovative and fast paced IT application style approach, that combines open technology with an equitable sharing of the opportunity and its rewards.  That means away from the infrastructure providers and towards developers—a model made successful in different eras by Microsoft, Sun and Apple.

The infrastructure is still vital, but M2M applications require seamless universal coverage, not cherry picked silos, and even where wireless connectivity is vital, cellular is not always the most appropriate technology and there are a number of alternatives that might prove much more suitable in the mix. For example ZigBee standards provide a low cost way for devices to communicate over short distances, and the low frequency radio technology proposed SmartReach (a consortium of Arqiva, Detica and BT) offers long range, in-building penetration at a lower data rate that is more than sufficient for a smart grid or smart meter solution.

The industry just needs to smarten up a little and think about the needs of the application, not the re-marketing of existing plumbing.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 21st November 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

At a recent Dell roundtable event on the future of cloud computing, the discussion centred around how cloud was not being adopted wholesale by many organisations yet. Various reasons were put forward, such as fear of change, fear of losing control, security issues and so on. A little while later on, several people were pushing the case for cloud around its capability to enable innovation.

Sure, cloud computing can provide a different way of doing things and can encourage a completely different way of facilitating business process – but if this is pushed as the main way that cloud works, then surely all that is happening is that users will be put off more? If fear of change is a factor to scare organisations off from using cloud, then moving critical business workloads to a relatively unproven emerging platform AND changing the way the application runs has to be enough not only to put the techies off the change, but also the business?

The view put forward by Quocirca was that organisations could start with a low-risk approach. If base level workloads such as file and print, email, payroll and so on were taken and moved onto a cloud architecture where resources could be shared in a flexible and dynamic manner, organisations could see that cloud worked and was ready for the higher level and more complex workloads.

At this stage, mayhem ensued. Several cries went up that this was just virtualisation, and not cloud. Why? Because it did not have self-service.

OK, the National Institute of Standards and Technology's (NIST) definition of cloud boils it down to 5 mandatory capabilities for cloud – broad network access, resource pooling, rapid elasticity, a measured service – and self-service. But just how important is self-service at a corporate level?

When salesforce.com first came to prominence, the biggest issue that Quocirca heard from organisations was that users were signing up to the service off their own bat, without involving IT. Therefore control was lost and new islands of functionality and data were being created that harmed the overall effectiveness of the business. In this case – and many others where externally sourced functions were easily available, such as Dropbox, self-service was a problem, not an advantage.

For simple reasons of governance risk and compliance, organisations need control over what their employees, consultants, contractors and partners can provision to themselves. Rules need to be in place and means of dealing with exceptions. NIST does not cover this in its definition, and therefore, Quocirca believes that it is too simple and is therefore flawed.

Let's look at it a different way: if a platform is connected to the internet, then it has broad access – even if there are then systems in place to ensure that only select users can get through to it. If it uses shared resources, it may just be virtualisation. Even if measurement tools are in place to audit and present reports on usage, it may still only be virtualisation. If the resource pool that is made available through virtualisation can be applied dynamically to the workloads, then this is pushing the capabilities of virtualisation. Does the lack of self-service stop such a dynamic platform from being a cloud service?

If we take the dynamic resource platform and layer tools upon it, for example Remedy, such that a user can raise a ticket to request that a service is made available to them, and the actions to do this are all automated, does this then make the platform a true cloud? If so, then something is wrong, as the self-service is not part of the platform itself – it could well be served by Remedy running on a separate physical server, yet Remedy allows for highly granular control over how services are allocated and provides a solid audit of what was done where and when.

If cloud is going to more rapidly adopted, then low-risk use cases are going to be needed to be demonstrated to the mainstream organisations. Trying to get them to move mission-critical enterprise apps from a known, already well-managed environment to one where they have worries is not the way to do it. To then quibble over whether a platform is cloud or not just because a user cannot automatically demand 14ZB of storage and 43 different email addresses is not going to help.

If the platform provides elasticity of resources for multiple different workloads and is connected to a broad group of people, then as far as Quocirca is concerned, it is cloud.

Oh – and for the purists, then sticking to the letter of the definition means that "private cloud" can never exist: it does not come under the necessary "broad network access" definition.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 18th October 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

At a recent event, IBM’s Watson was an area for discussion. Watson sprung to fame in the US by beating two humans in a TV games show, Jeopardy! This led to a lot of coverage for IBM—but also to a lot of problems.

Firstly, those that know of the win see Watson as akin to when IBM’s Deep Blue computer first beat a human chess master—it’s a great idea, but it is only a game, after all. Bridging the gap between what Watson did on TV and what it could do for an organisation is proving a little difficult.

Secondly, outside of the US, Jeopardy! is not so well known, and IBM’s marketing around it has often led to a need to explain the programme before moving on to what Watson could possibly do in a real world scenario. The feelings are that using Watson in, for example, Mastermind or University Challenge would run up against the same issue as seen in the US—a great games machine, but so what? On top of that, would IBM then have to enter similar competitive programmes in Germany, France and everywhere else? A knotty problem.

So, just what could Watson really be used for? It seems that many of the discussions IBM gets into with prospects boil down to a perception that it is a pumped-up search engine—which misses the point. Watson is the current exemplar of how to deal with real big data issues—it works against documents as well as formal data sets; it is excellent at picking out key aspects of information thrown at it; and it is getting better at assigning probabilities as to how accurate its results are against how the user is feeding it the questions and supporting data it requires.

Watson really is a fast working, highly knowledgeable assistant to humans who need to work against massive and complex data sets in order to get to a best response. Sounds a bit woolly? Unfortunately, it’s a bit difficult to tie things down much more than that.

However, Watson is moving out from the Jeopardy! cloud in some areas. For example, it is being used in healthcare—from helping to reach a more accurate diagnosis for a patient to helping to calculate the correct approach to continuing care for a health insurance company. The idea is NOT to replace the health professional, but to provide a dispassionate assistant that can use real-time information analysis to drill down and provide a range of options back to the professional.

This requires a degree of focus from Watson, and it is showing its best capabilities where its assistance can be narrowed down considerably. At the moment, Watson is not there to aid a general practitioner: it is there to help—for example, an oncologist can use Watson to assist in not only helping to decide exactly what cancer a person has, but also to come up with advice as to which treatment is most likely to have the best outcome. Even here, Watson works best if it can be further constrained—for example, to concentrate on leukaemia or lymph node cancers. The greater the focus, the more accurate the results.

Does this make Watson too specific for general use elsewhere? Certainly, as an on-premise solution, it is only for very large organisations with a highly specific need. Pharmaceuticals with research needs in a specific area where external information from other sources is rapidly changing is one possible target. Organisations with large patent libraries where "prior art" is important or searching out possible beneficial overlaps is another.

But how about WaaS (Watson as a service)? Is Watson’s specificity a major block to a capability here? Look at the legal sector—many organisations are small and could not warrant investing in an on-premise Watson implementation, yet having a capability to use a Watson approach in, for example, case law where an assistant that can sift through legal precedent and other information sources and advise on approach would provide immense help to paralegals, lawyers and barristers (and their equivalents worldwide).

There is great deal of promise from Watson—and, by its very nature, anything that is done in the real world at this stage is not going to be wasted. As Watson improves, it can take the silos of information from early-stage Watson implementations as feeds, using a federated approach to build up a networked 'Super Watson'.

IBM may still be some way away from what the original researches set as a vision—to replicate a computer system as seen in Star Trek. However, the steps along that journey are well under way, and the healthcare examples of real world Watson usage are already showing the strength of the system. Is this Watson’s only spiritual home? It shouldn’t be—but IBM has to be able to more succinctly and effectively message how Watson is different to search engines, business intelligence and business analytics to be able to get its point across.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 17th September 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Figuratively speaking, “the cloud” does not have much of a future because the term will become redundant and using it will sound dated. In the long term, public cloud will cease to be seen as a subset of the way information technology and communication (ITC) is delivered, but integral to it. In fact, it might be the other way around; in the long term, running IT in-house will come to be seen as a quaint and unusual practice.

The majority of businesses will consume applications and services over wide area networks from what was once called the public cloud. However, there will be a “long tail”, with more conservative organisations insisting that they can still run IT better than external service providers whose whole business model is built on IT. Some large organisations will also continue to invest in new in-house systems (often deployed as private cloud infrastructure).

Those organisations that fully embrace cloud services will no longer need the type of IT departments that most have today that run servers and patch software. Instead they will have service delivery specialists that focus on making sure lines-of-business and their employees have access to the applications they need and that the use and storage of data is secure and compliant; these largely will be business-focussed rather that technology-focussed roles.

This does not mean the end of the IT professional; those jobs will migrate from end user organisations to public cloud service delivery specialists. Here the true technologist will be in their element, working for organisations whose raison d’être is the delivery of high quality IT services. Whether it is the data centre, hardware/software infrastructure or applications, these professionals will be focussed on delivering effective services that will drive the success of the cloud.

Of course, individual providers will come and go, but the direction of travel is clear, away from in-house and to the cloud. This series of blogs has argued the case that public cloud service providers will succeed because in many cases they have the best platforms for the job; more secure, more available and more cost efficient. Furthermore, the compliance challenges differ little from those that exist for the use of internal IT.

The four top use cases put forward for public cloud infrastructure services in an earlier post; as an application test bed, as a failover platform, for handling peak loads and planning for the unexpected will drive early adoption and increase confidence. However, as was pointed out in another post, the majority of consumption of public cloud platforms will be indirect through the use of software as a service (SaaS).

This is the real point about cloud and information technology. Facebook and Twitter users do not think of themselves as IT users, they are just consuming applications that allow them to communicate with others. The same will be true of businesses; they will no longer need to think about IT but simply about applications. As was pointed out in another earlier post – “It’s the application stupid”.

Originally posted at Lunacloud Compute & Storage Blog

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 14th September 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

If cloud computing manages to evolve to where it should do, the end result for organisations is a mixed environment of internal and external IT platforms that stretch beyond their direct control into the value chain of suppliers and customers, and beyond to others providing services along a complex business-to-business (B2B) chain.

Historically, organisations have been able to exert a level of control through ownership of the IT stack from hardware through operating systems to applications, and have been able to ring-fence their systems through identifying where the responsibilities of their organisation ended, generally at a point defined by the use of a firewall.

However, more innovative organisations have found that, to be able to be more competitive in their markets, they need to be able to exchange information in a more dynamic and open manner across these extended value chains. However, such information flows still have to be secure and auditable – and this is where even the most innovative organisations begin to struggle.

In the B2B space, there have been certain players who have provided services for many years – vendors such as GXS and Sterling Commerce (now part of IBM)  – that have provided managed services where data from one organisation could be transferred to another, anywhere on the plant, maintaining data fidelity and providing full auditability of what had been sent, at what time to which organisation. Little did these vendors know that they were doing cloud computing years before the term came into common parlance.

As time went on, extra capabilities were added to their services – for example, the capability for catalogues of goods to be hosted and managed; dealing with the needs for paperwork to be created and made available for the physical transfer of goods across geographic borders; creating and managing auctions and reverse auctions of goods across a broad group of possible customers. The broader adoption of solid internet standards has made the reach of such vendors more inclusive – small and medium businesses (SMBs) do not need to install expensive software on their premises, they can just use web-based portals to participate in dealing with their customers and suppliers for the various requests for “X” (requests for information (RFIs), proposals (RFPs), quotes (RFQs), etc.), as well as catalogues, legal paperwork, straight-through order processing and so on. This all enables them to operate as true peers against their larger competitors in highly stressed markets.

However, is there still more that can be provided?

Certainly. The advent of cloud services is changing the way technology can be provisioned. As the take up of Infrastructure, platform and software as a service (I/P/SaaS) services increases, organisations will have less need to worry about the hardware their applications run on and they will not have to feel so constrained by what they already have in place when looking to bring in new functionality to support their needs. This starts to drive organisations toward a more “functional” view of technology – out go the large, monolithic enterprise applications that we have all grown up with; in comes the “composite” application, built up from technical services as needed to meet the needs of a specific business process.

This requires some form of cloud service provider that can act as a broker to take responsibility for managing the catalogue of technical services available to an organisation, and to provide the integration services which can bring these together on the fly in a manner that provides support not just for the single organisation’s process needs, but also to enable high-fidelity information and data exchange processes throughout the value chain. In Quocirca’s view, this will be best managed by those who already have a great deal of demonstrable domain expertise in dealing with highly mixed environments – and the B2B managed services vendors fit the bill nicely.

Quocirca recommends that organisations reviewing how they manage their B2B interactions look towards a managed service that provides highly managed and audited exchanges of information in any form required by a mix of senders and receivers. When selecting a provider, it will be well worth considering how well they will be able to support your organisation in the coming years. Here, make sure the right questions are asked as to what extra services such a provider will expect to provide itself as time progresses – and how it proposes to manage the use of external services that impinge on its own services.

If the vendor can show a clear roadmap that includes the embracing and integration of external services, then all well and good. If not, Quocirca’s recommendation would be to look elsewhere.

Quocirca’s report, “Maintaining the chain”, written in conjunction with GXS, is freely available here.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd August 2012 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2012

In advance of next week's VMworld conference in San Francisco, I recently sat down with Steve Herrod, Chief Technology Officer and Senior Vice President of Research & Development at VMware.

Our discussion hinges on the intriguing concept of the software-defined datacenter. We look at how some of the most important attributes of datacenter capabilities and performance are now squarely under the domain of software enablement.

A top technology leader at VMware, Herrod has championed this vision of the software-defined datacenter and how the next generation of foundational IT innovation is largely being implemented above the hardware.

For example, those who are now building and managing datacenters are gaining heightened productivity, delivering far better performance, and enjoying greater ease in operations and management—all thanks to innovations at the software-infrastructure level.

Join the discussion here and further explore how advances in datacenter technologies and architecture are—to an unprecedented extent—being driven primarily through software. [Disclosure: VMware is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: We've heard a lot over the decades about improving IT capabilities and infrastructure management, but it seems that many times we peel back a layer of complexity and we get some benefits, and we find ourselves like the proverbial onion, back at yet another layer of complexity.

Complexity seems to be a recurring inhibitor. I wonder if this time we're actually at a point where something is significantly different. Are we really gaining ground against complexity at this point?

Herrod: It’s a great question, because complexity is associated with IT and why we'll do it differently this time. I see two things happening right now that give us a great shot at this.

One is purely on expectations. All of the opportunities we have as consumers to work with cloud computing models have opened up our imagination as to what we should expect out of IT and computing datacenters, where we can sign up for things immediately, get things when we want them, and pay for what we use. All those great concepts have set our expectations differently.

Simultaneously, a lot of changes on the technology side give us a good shot at implementing it. When you combine technology that we'll talk about with the loosened-up imagination on what can be, we're in a great spot to deliver the software-defined datacenter.

Gardner: You mentioned cloud and this notion that it’s a liberating influence. Is this coming from the technologists or from the business side? Is there a commingling on that concept quite yet?

Herrod: It’s funny. I see it coming from the business side, which is the expectation of an individual business unit launching a product. They now have alternatives to their own IT department. They could go sign up for some sort of compute service or software-as-a-service (SaaS) application. They have choices and alternatives to circumvent IT. That's an option they didn't have in the past.

Fundamentally, it comes down to each of us as individuals and our expectations. People are listening to this podcast when they want to, quickly downloading it. This also applies to signing up for email, watching movies, and buying an app on an app store. It's just expected now that you can do things far more agilely, far more quickly than you could in the past, and that's really the big difference.

Gardner: Tech users are getting higher expectations based on what they encounter on their consumer side of technology consumption. We see what the datacenters are capable of from the likes of Google and Facebook. Is it possible for enterprises to also project that sort of productivity and performance onto what they're doing, and maybe now that we've gone through an iteration of these vast datacenters, to do it even better?

Herrod: I have a lot of friends at Facebook, Zynga, and Google, running the datacenters there, and what’s exciting for me is that they have built a fully software-defined datacenter. They're doing a lot of the things we are talking about here. But there are two unique things about their datacenters.

One is that they have hundreds or even thousands of PhDs who are running this infrastructure. Second, they're running it for a very specific type of application. To run on the Google datacenter, you write your applications a very specific way, which is great for them. But when you go into the business world, they don't have legions of people to run the infrastructure, and they also have a broad set of applications that they can’t possibly consider rewriting.

So in many ways, I see what we're doing is taking the lesson learned in those software-defined datacenters, but bringing it to the masses, and bringing it to companies to run all of their applications and without all of the people cost that they might need otherwise.

Gardner: Let’s step back for some context. How did we get here? It seems that hardware has been sort of the cutting edge of productivity, when we think of Moore’s Law and we look at the way that storage, networks, and server architecture have come together to give us the speeds and feeds that have led to a lot of what we take for granted now. Let’s go through that a little bit and think about why we're at a point where that might not be the case anymore.

Herrod: I like to look at how we got to where we are. I think that's the key to understanding where we're likely to go from here.

We started VMware out of a university, where we could take the time to study history and look at what had happened. I liked looking at existing datacenters. You can look through the datacenter and see the history of IT decisions of the past.

It's traditionally been the case that a particular new need led the IT department to go out and buy the right infrastructure for that new need, whether it’s batch processing, client/server applications, or big web farms. But these individually-made decisions ended up creating the silos that we all know about that exist all over datacenters.

They now have the group that manages the mainframe, the UNIX administration group, and the client PC group, and none of them is using common people or common tools as much as they certainly would like to. How we got to where we are were isolated decisions for the right thing at the right time, without recognizing the opportunity to optimize across a broader set of the datacenter.

The whole concept of software-defined datacenters is looking holistically at all of the different resources you have and making them equally accessible to a lot of different application types.

Gardner: Earlier, I used the metaphor of an onion. You peel back complexity and you get more. But when it comes to the architecture of datacenters, it seems that the right comparison might be a snowball, which is layered on another layer, or it has been rolling and gathering as it goes, but not rationalized, not looked at holistically.

Are there some sorts of imperatives now that are driving people to do that? We talked about the cloud vision, but maybe it’s security, maybe it’s the economics, maybe it’s the energy issues, or maybe it's all those things together.

Herrod: It’s a little of each. First of all, I like the onion analogy, because it makes you cry, and I think that’s also key. But it’s a combination of requirements coming in at the same time that's really causing people to look at it.

Going back to the original discussion, it starts with the fact that there are choices now. Every single day you hear about a new case where a business unit or an employee is able to circumvent IT to scratch the itch they have for some particular type of technology, whether it's using Dropbox instead of the file servers that the company has, buying their own device and bringing it in, or just signing up for Amazon EC2, instead of using their local datacenter. These are all examples of them being able to go around IT.

But what often happens subsequently is that, when a security problem happens, when you realize that you are not in compliance, IT is left holding the bag. So we get an environment here where the user demand can be handled other ways, but IT has to be able to compete with those.

We have to let IT be a service provider and be able to be as responsive with those, so that they can avoid people going around them. But they still need to be responsible to the business when it comes time to show that Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) compliance is appropriate or to make sure that your customer records aren’t leaked out to everyone else on the Internet.

That unique balance between the user choice and IT control is something we've all seen over the last several decades, and it’s showing up again at an even larger state.

Gardner: As you pointed out, Steve, IT isn’t just competing against itself. That is to say, maybe a 5 percent or 10 percent improvement over how well it did last year will be viewed as very progressive. But they're competing now against other datacenter architects. Maybe it’s a SaaS provider, maybe it’s a cloud provider, maybe it’s managed service provider (MSP) or telco that's now offering additional services.

We're really up against this notion that if you don’t architect your datacenter with that holistic software-defined mentality, and someone else does that, you're in trouble.

Herrod: It’s a great point. There are rate cards now for what you can use something else for. You might pay 7 cents per hour for this, or "this much" per transaction. IT departments in general have not traditionally had a good way of, first, even knowing how much they are costing, but second, optimizing to be competitive. So there's this awareness now of how much I'm spending and how long it takes. These metrics are causing this.

Gardner: Let’s revisit the context and the history here, looking at virtualization in particular. We've seen it extend beyond servers to data, storage, and also networking. Is this part of what you've got in your vision of software defined? Is it strictly virtualization, or does it encompass more? Help me understand how you've progressed in your thinking along these lines, particularly in regard to virtualization?

Herrod: We'll step back a little bit. VMware, over the last 13 years or so, has done a very good job of completely optimizing how servers are used in the datacenter. You can provision a new virtual machine (VM) in seconds. The cost has gone down in orders of magnitude. We've really done a good job on the compute and memory aspect of a datacenter.

But as you said, a couple of things have to happen from there. It's absolutely crucial to look at the breadth of things that are involved in the datacenter. We talk to customers now, and often they say, "Great, you've just lowered the cost and time taken to provision a new server. But when I put this in production, by the way, I care what LUN it ends up on, I have to look at what VLAN is there, and if it's in the right section of my firewall setup."

It might take seconds to provision a VM, but then it takes five days to get the rest of the solutions around it. So we see, first of all, the need to get the entire datacenter to be as flexible and fast moving as the pure server components are right now.

Again, if you look at the last couple of years, I would rate the industry—ourselves and others—as moving forward quite well on the storage side of things. There are still some things to do for sure, but storage, for the most part, has gotten a good head start on being fully virtualized and automated.

The big buzz around the industry right now has been the recognition that the network is the huge remaining barrier to doing what you want in your datacenter. Plenty of startups and all kinds of folks are working on software-defined networking. In fact, that's what we use as the term for the software-defined datacenter, because as networking follows as this big inhibitor, you'll be opened up to having a truly planned datacenter solution in place.

Now, we can break that down a little bit. It's important to talk about the technology piece of this. But when I say software-defined, I really look at three phases of how software comes in and morphs this existing hardware that you have.

The first step is to abstract away what people are trying to use from how it is being implemented. That's the core of what virtual even means, separating the logical from the physical. It gives you hardware independence. It enables basic mobility and all sorts of other good things.

The second phase is when you then pool all of these abstracted resources into what we call resource pools. Anyone who uses VMware software knows that we create these great clusters of computing horsepower and we allow vMotion and mobility within it.

But you need to think about that same notion of aggregation of resources at the storage and networking levels, so they become this great pool of horsepower that you can then dole out quite effectively. So after you've abstracted and pooled, the final phase is how you now automate the handling of this. This is where the real savings and speed come from.

Once you have pools of resources, when a new request comes in, you should be able to allocate storage, security, networking, and CPU very quickly. Likewise, when it goes away, you should be able to remove it and put it back into the pool.

That's a bit of a mouthful, but that's how I see the expansion. It first goes from just compute into storage, networking, security, and the other parts of the datacenter. Then simultaneously, you're abstracting each of these resources, pooling them, and then automating them.

Gardner: What's really fascinating to me are the benefits you get by abstracting to a virtualization and software-defined level—the ability to implement with greater ease—but that comes with underlying benefits around operations and management.

It seems to me that you can start to dial up and down, demonstrate elasticity at a far greater level, almost at that data-center level, looking at the service-level agreements (SLAs) and the key performance indicators (KPIs) that you need to adhere to and defining your datacenter success through a business metric, like an SLA.

Does it ring true with you that we're talking about some real management and operational efficiencies, as well as implementation efficiencies?

Herrod: It is, Dana, and we talk about it a few different ways. The transformation of datacenters, as we got started, was all about cost savings and capital expenses in financial terms. Let's buy fewer servers. "Let's not build another datacenter."

But the second phase, and where most customers are today, is all about operational efficiency. Not only am I buying less hardware, but I can do things where I'm actually able to satisfy, as you said, the KPIs or the SLAs.

I can make sure that applications are up and running with the level of availability they expect, with less effort, with fewer people, and with easier tools. And when you go from capital expense savings to operational improvements, you impact the ability for IT to do even more.

To take that one level further, whenever I hear people talk about cloud computing—and everyone talks about this with all sorts of different impressions in mind—I think of cloud as simply being about more speed. You can do something more quickly. You can expand something more quickly. And that's what this third phase after capital and operational savings is about, that agility to move faster.

As businesses’ success ties so closely to how IT does, the ability to move faster becomes your strategic weapon against someone else. Very core to all this is how can we operate more efficiently, while satisfying the specific needs of applications in this new datacenter.

Gardner: Another area that I hear about benefiting from this software defined datacenter is the ability to better reduce and manage risk, particularly around security issues. You're no longer dealing with multiple parties, like the group overseeing UNIX, the group overseeing PC, the group doing the x86 architectures. The likelihood for process cracks to develop and security issues to unfortunately crop up seem to be more likely under those circumstances.

But when you have got a more organized overview of management operations and architecting at a similar level, you can instantiate the best practices around security. Please address this issue of security as another fruit to be harvested from a software-defined datacenter.

Herrod: Security means a lot of different things, and it has been affected by a number of different aspects.

First of all, I agree that the more you can have a homogenous platform or a homogenous team working on something, the less variation and process you end up with, exactly as you said, Dana. That can allow you to be more efficient.

This is a replacement for the traditional world of ITIL, where they had to try to create some standard across very different back ends. That's a natural progression for getting rid of some of the human errors that come into problems.

A more foundational thing that I am excited about with the software-defined datacenter is how, rather than security being these physical concepts that are deployed across the datacenter today, you can really think of security logically as wrapping up your application. You can do some pretty interesting new things.

A quick segue on that—the way most security works in datacenters today is through statically placed appliances, whether they're firewalls, intrusion detection, or something else. Then the onus is on you to fit your application in the right part of the datacenter to get the right level of protection that you have, and hopefully it doesn’t move out of that protection zone.

What we're able to deliver with the software-defined datacenter is a way that security is a trait associated with the application, and it essentially wraps and follows the application around. You've virtualized your firewall and you've built it into the fabric of how you're automating deployments. I see that as a way to change the game on how tight the security can be around an application, as well as making sure it's always around there when you deploy it.

Gardner: For end users the proof is in how they actually consume, relate to, and interact with the applications. Is there something about the applications specifically that the software-defined datacenter brings, a higher level of user productivity benefits? What's really going to be noticeable for the application level to end users?

Herrod: That's a great question. I'm an infrastructure guy, as are probably many people listening here, and it’s easy to forget that infrastructure is simply a means to an end. It's the way that you run applications that ultimately matters. So you have to look at what an application is and what its ideal state looks like. The idea of the software-defined datacenter is to optimize that application experience.

That very quickly translates into how quickly can I get my application from the time I want it until it's running. It dictates how often this application is up, what kind of scale it can handle as more people come in, and how secure it is. Ultimately, it's about the application. I believe the software-defined datacenter is the way to optimize that application experience for all the users.

Gardner: Steve, how about not just repaving cow paths in terms of how we deploy existing types of applications. Is there something inherent in a software-defined datacenter benefit that will work to our advantage on innovative new types of applications?

They could be for high performance computing, big data and analytics, or even when we go to mobile and we have location services folded into some of the way that applications are served up, and there is sort of a latency sensitive portion to this. Are there new types of apps that will benefit from this software-defined architecture?

Herrod: This is one of the most profound parts, if we get it right. I've been talking about can we collapse the silos that were created. Can we get all of our existing apps onto this common platform? We're doing quite well on that. We are at a point where, depending on who you listen to, about 60 percent of all server applications are running virtual, which is pretty amazing. But that also means there is 40 percent that aren’t. So I spend a lot of time understanding why they might not be today.

Part of it is that just as businesses get more comfortable and get there, their business critical apps will get onto the system, and that's working well. But there are applications that are emerging, as you talked about, where if we're not careful, they'll create the next generation of silos that we'll be talking about 10 years from now.

I see this all the time. I'll visit a company that has a purely virtualized pool, but they have also created their grid for doing some sort of Monte Carlo simulations or high-performance computing. Or they have virtualized everything except for their unified communication environment, which has a special team and hardware allocated to it.

We spend quite a bit of time right now looking at the impediments to having those run on top of virtualization, which might be performance related or something else. Then going beyond impediments to how can we make them even better when they are run on top of the virtualized platform.

Some of the really interesting things we're able to show now with our partners are things I would have never dreamed of as great candidates when we started the company. But we're able to satisfy very strict real-time requirements, which means we can run some great applications used in various sorts of stock trading, but also used in things like voice over IP (VoIP) or video conferencing.

Another big area that's liable to create the next round of silos, if we're not careful, is the big data and Hadoop world. Lots of customers are kicking the tires and creating special clusters and teams to work on that. But just recently, we've shown that the performance of Hadoop on top of vSphere, our virtualization platform, can be great.

We can even show that we can make it far easier to set up. We can make Hadoop more available, meaning it won’t crash as often. And we can even do things where we make it more elastic than it already is. It can suck up as many resources in the software-defined datacenter as it wants, when it needs them, but it can also give them all back when it's not using them.

It’s really exciting to look across all these apps. At this point, I don’t see a reason why we can't get almost any type app that we're looking at today to fit into the software-defined datacenter model.

Gardner: That’s exciting, when we don’t have any of the stragglers or large portions of business functions that are cast off. It seems to me that we've reached the capability of mirroring the entire datacenter, whether it’s for purposes of business continuity or disaster recovery (DR), or backup and recovery. It gives us the choice of where to locate these resources, not at the individual server, virtual machine level, or application level, but really to move the whole darn datacenter, if that’s important, without a penalty.

For our last blue-sky direction with this conversation, are we at the point where we have fungibility, if you will, of datacenters, or are we getting to that point in the near future, where we can decide at a moment’s notice where we're going to actually put our datacenter, almost location independent?

Herrod: It’s a ways out, before we're just casually moving datacenters around, for sure. But I have seen some use cases today that are showing what's possible, and maybe I'll just give you a couple of examples.

DR has long been one of the real pains for IT to deal with. They have to replicate things across the country and keep two datacenters completely in sync, literally the same hardware, the same firmware layer, and all of that that goes into it.

Very rapidly, this notion of DR has been a driving reason for people to virtualize their datacenter. We have seen many cases now, where you're able to failover your entire datacenter, effectively copying the whole datacenter over to another one, keeping the logical constructs in place, but hosting in a completely different area.

To get that right, your storage needs to be moved, your network identities need to be updated, and those are things that you can script and do in an automated way, once you've virtualized the whole datacenter.

Another really fun example I see more and more now is, as mergers and acquisitions happen, we've seen several cases where one company buys another. They both had fully virtualized their datacenter and they could put on a giant storage drive the datacenter at one company and begin to bring it up on the other side, once they copied it over there.

So the entire datacenter isn't moved yet, but I think there are clear indications of once you separate out where something runs and how it runs from what you are really after, it opens up the door for a lot of different optimizations.

Gardner: We're coming up on the end of our time, but we also have the big annual VMworld show in San Francisco coming up toward the end of August. I know you can’t pre-announce anything, but perhaps you can give us some themes. We've talked about a lot of things here today, but is there any particular themes that we have hit on that you think are going to be more impactful or more important in terms of what we should expect at VMworld?

Herrod: It will be exciting as always. We have more than 20,000 people expected. What I'm doing here is talking about a vision and generalities of what's happening, but you can certainly imagine that what we will be showing there will be the realities—the products that prove this, the partnerships that are in place that can help bring it forward, and even some use cases and some success stories.

So expect it to be certainly giving more detail around this vision and making it very real with announcements and demonstrations.

Gardner: Last question, if I'm a listener here today, I'm intrigued, and I want to start thinking about the datacenter at the software-defined level in order to generate some of the benefits that we have been discussing and some of the vision that we have been painting, what’s a good way to start? How do you begin this process? What are a few foundational directives or directions that you recommend?

Herrod: I think it can sound very, very disruptive to create a new software-defined datacenter, but one of the biggest things that I have been excited about in this technology versus others is that there are a set of steps that you go through, where you're able to get some value along the way, but they are also marching you toward where you ultimately end up.

So to customers who are doing this, presumably most of you have done some basic virtualization, but really you need to get to the point where you are leveraging the full automation and mobility that exists today.

Once you start doing that, you'll find that it obviously is showing you where things can head. But it also changes some of the processes you use at the company, some of the organizational structures that you have there, and you can start to pave the way for the overall datacenter to be virtualized, as you take some of these initial steps.

It’s actually very easy to get started. You can make benefits along the way. Your existing applications and hardware work. So that would be my real entreaty—use what exists today and get your feet wet, as we deliver the next round heading forward.

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

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 2nd August 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

As is the way with IT, as soon as one bandwagon begins to be understood by the general public, another one has to be rolled out. In this case, as cloud computing starts to become more of a reality, big data is rearing its head as—depending on the commentator—the next greatest opportunity or threat to the organisation. 

As there was with cloud, there’s a lot of confusion out about big data. Many of the database vendors tried to play big data as purely having a lot of data in one or more databases. But that is not big data, it’s large data—a problem that can be handled with database federation, standard business intelligence and analytics. 

Next, it was said to be a mix of data held in the organisation that needed to be brought together so decision makers could see everything the organisation held around a specific topic to make better informed decisions—but only through whatever information the organisation was already aware of. So if the organisation wasn’t already aware of something, that was to be excluded from the results—see the problem here?

Many technology companies—aided by the PR organisations employed to monitor their brands—pushed the idea that big data was moving towards the field of social networking. They said big data was all about using the wisdom of the crowd and identifying the sentiment of the masses.

But social networking has not usurped much that went before, so any solution still has to include all the information feeds such as e-mail, call recordings, customer relationship management (CRM) records, scanned documents and so on. 

All the approaches cover some aspect of big data, but they all miss the point as well. The best, simple definition of big data comes down to volume, velocity and variety.

The volume aspect of big data is actually the one that is the least important. Big data is not about petabytes of data—it can be down to relatively small volumes that need to be dealt with in a manner that requires a big-data approach. 

However, for most organisations, big data will involve bringing together many different data and information sources which, by their nature, will tend to result in the overall amount of data under consideration being big. Therefore, volume is not something that is under the direct control of the organisation—what has to be considered is how the volume of data that ends up being analysed is minimised, (more on this later). 

Again, the velocity aspect of big data may well be a moot point—everyone wants results against their analysis of available data in as short a period as possible. However, everything is relative—for example, every millisecond added to providing results to a financial market trader can cost millions of pounds, whereas someone tracking variations in the global movement of tectonic plates may not be that worried if results take a few seconds to come through. 

The one aspect that really matters is the variety of the information. Big data is all about the mix of data and where it is held at any time. Here, formal databases under the organisation’s direct control are only a very small component of the overall mix. There are all the office documents held as files across the organisation and you may need to include voice and video files as well. 

Then there’s the information held in the value chain of suppliers and customers—information that is critical to the process or service being provided, yet isn’t under the organisation’s direct control. Then, there may well be a requirement to include information from the various social networks out there—and whatever approach is taken has to be inclusive.

Inclusivity of data sources
For example, it is pointless constructing something that is Facebook-specific, if most comments are appearing as hashtags in Twitter.

Further, it’s a waste of time writing multiple connectors to cover all of today’s social networks—remember MySpace, Bebo and Second Life? They were all the darlings of their day, but have faded to a withered existence, or almost non-existence, as newer players have taken over. 

Sites such as Pinterest are showing signs of major interest—yet this was also the case with Google+, which more resembles a Western desert than a viable, active social network, after just a short time. 

Any social network solution has to be able to embrace new platforms at minimal cost, so new networks that are just 'spikes' on the continuum do not use up lots of money in creating connectors specifically for them. 

Even the largest organisations will have little control over anything beyond a small percentage of the total available data. The two-edged sword of the internet raises its ugly head in that it does provide massive extra information resources—but then again, it also includes a massive amount of dross that doesn’t add anything to the sum knowledge of an organisation. 

So how are we to deal with this real big data challenge, without running into Dilbert’s pointy-haired boss’s dictat, “Just run me off a copy of the internet”? 

Storage and structure
Storage needs must be fully considered. EMC, NetApp and Dell are now talking about object, block and file storage, rather than focusing purely on high-performance database object storage to cover the various types of big data that needs to be controlled. 

Other storage vendors, such as Nutanix, Coraid, Amplidata and FusionIO provide systems that focus on one aspect of big data, partnering where necessary to cover others. 

The need for structure around semi- or unstructured data is leading to an explosion in interest in noSQL-based databases, such as Apache Cassandra, 10gen MongoDB, CouchDB and so on. Systems such as Apache’s Hadoop, (which enables a massively scaled-out platform for providing distributed processing for large amounts of data), can use MapReduce (the use of 'chunking' data analysis into packets of work that can be dealt with in a parallel manner across a large resource pool) approaches to minimise the amount of information that needs to be dealt with. 

What is being aimed for here is to take the seemingly infinite amount of available data and filter it down into manageable chunks. Standard internet searches can feed into a Hadoop-based system, which can then act as a feed into either standard SQL-based database or into a noSQL-based one, depending on the type of information being dealt with. 

Extra information can be added automatically via rules engines or manually, as required, as metadata that adds to the value of the information stored. Once the information is held in a recognised form, it is then down to being able to apply the right form of data analysis against it to provide suitable feeds to the decision maker. 

This is where the main problems still reside, but much work is being carried out. Unsurprisingly, a lot of this is coming from the incumbent business intelligence suppliers, such as SAS Institute, QlikTech and JasperSoft as well as those who have gained entry to the market through acquisition such as IBM (Cognos, SPSS), SAP (Business Objects) and Oracle (Hyperion, Endeca). 

The storage suppliers are also making plays in the space—EMC acquired GreenPlum and Dell continues to acquire companies that will help it create a more cohesive and complete big data approach. 

Buyer dos and don’ts
The key for buyers is to treat big data as a journey. Set short- and medium-term targets of what is required and then put in place solutions that help to move towards these targets. 

Don’t put in place anything that could result in a need for major fork-lift upgrades at a later date—embrace open standards, look for suppliers who espouse heterogeneity in storage systems and in tooling, as well as an approach that covers a hybrid mix of private and public clouds. 

Don’t fall for any supplier who says that the world is moving to or from “standard” SQL-based databases—the move is to a mixed environment of a Hadoop-style system paired with SQL and noSQL-based systems. Look for business analytics packages that enable links to be made to data sources of any kind that reside anywhere on the internet, and that can link into semi-structured systems such as social networking sites in a meaningful manner.

Big data may appear to be just another bandwagon at this stage—but it is important, and needs to be addressed carefully and sensibly, rather than in a bull-in-a-china-shop manner that seems to be pushed by many suppliers. The journey can be carried out at a measured pace, leveraging existing systems in conjunction with new systems. It just needs a strategic plan built from careful planning—and an eye to the long-term future. 

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 1st August 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

A recent meeting with a company was a rare thing for an industry analyst—a meeting where there was little disagreement, bar one small area—which I will touch on later.

From Quocirca’s point of view, technology for technology’s sake is a complete waste of money. Re-inventing the wheel through coding “new” functions where these functions are already available either within an organisation’s existing software assets, or where they could more easily be brought in through the use of off-the-shelf external code is crazy, as the organisation then has all the costs of maintenance, where an off-the-shelf function shares these costs amongst all users.

But overall, the idea that a business should make a decision, tell its IT department what that decision is and then expect it to create and manage a project to meet the business need is just not right in today’s climate. Why not? To start with, this confuses two different areas—the first is that the business is setting the strategy as it should do, but rather than the implementation of the strategy then being driven from the top down, IT tries to do what it can from the bottom up. So, historically, for example, where the board-level command has come down as “We have a problem with our customers”, IT has heard this as “Implement Siebel”, or what was a business issue around managing stock and inventory turns was heard by IT as “Buy SAP”.

Bringing the business and IT together is a theme that Quocirca has long stood on a soapbox over, and published a report about ensuring that technology was implemented purely to meet business needs a couple of years back called “Cloud computing – taking IT to task” freely available here.

So, a meeting with a company called SIG (the Software Improvement Group) proved interesting. Expecting a discussion around code inspection and the lowering of coding errors, to find that the company was a project-driven professional services company was a bit of a surprise, but as we dug beneath the surface it became apparent that SIG is a pretty useful company.

Its project teams (generally consisting of four people) work against a priority list of research topics. Sitting down with their customer, SIG teases out the main areas that are of concern and then carries out a set of in-depth technical and business analyses to identify where things are sub-optimal. Often, this could be in how the code is written or it could be in how the various functional pieces of code are working together (or not). SIG then provides a set of recommendations to the customer, based on providing a range of possibilities where the variables of risk and cost are balanced against the business’ needs. This is the basis of Quocirca’s Total Value Proposition that its analysts use with its own customers.

SIG works from what it calls a “fact-based” platform. As the project progresses, for instance using SIG’s Software Risk Monitor or Application Portfolio Analysis, measurements against expected outcomes are carried out and reported back. If there is any deviance away from the planned outcomes, this may not be a problem. The key here is that the real world has a strange way of disrupting longer-term plans. The majority of projects pick a desired outcome that could be, say, eighteen months off, and keep aiming towards that. A “good” project is one that meets that desired outcome in time and within budget.

But, what if the desired outcome should have changed, due to market conditions, the activities of competitor or a merger or acquisitions with another company? Blindly heading towards a preconceived desired outcome has shades of continuing to building aircraft carriers when the aircraft for them are no longer being bought.

What SIG does is keep reviewing the desired outcome to make sure that it is still the best outcome—and that small changes can be made during the project stages to ensure that the real end result is the right end result.

Again, if this is compared to Quocirca’s Hi-Lo road map, it is pretty much the same approach. Quocirca’s belief is that trying to predict more than a year out is not just crystal gazing—it’s more like navel gazing, even for an analyst. The best that can be done is to make a prediction across a range of possibilities for a specific time out in the future and aim for it. Let’s say that this is 3 years in the future. Then in a few months’ time, come back and review that prediction—and keep the end prediction as 3 years from now—and make changes as required along the time line to keep the long-term aim true.

This may mean changes being made to what is going on now—but these changes will be small and of a much lower cost than having to change direction by a much larger amount later on in the project.

So, SIG is a company where Quocirca feels that there is a lot in common between the two companies’ models—which makes it difficult for Quocirca to criticise the company. For organisations attempting to keep current with the pace of change in their markets and within IT, and therefore looking to a more dynamic means of dealing with projects via adopting approaches such as Agile or Scrum, bringing SIG in could ensure that the top meets the bottom in the best way.

However, as stated at the beginning of the article, there is one quibble. The company’s full name is the Software Improvement Group. Sure—it does that. But it is so much more than this—it could so easily mature into a business transformation company that helps a customer to achieve desired outcomes from a much earlier stage than when IT has already become involved.

To that end, once it has worked its way through the low hanging fruit of organisations that understand what SIG does, it may need to rebrand so that it doesn’t spend the first hour of any meeting explaining that as SIG, it is not just about software…

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 31st July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

When considering two or more items, there is the concept of “comparing apples with apples” – i.e. making sure that what is under consideration is being compared objectively. Therefore, comparing a car journey against an air flight for getting between London and Edinburgh is reasonable, but the same is not true between London and New York.

The same problems come up in the world of virtualised hosting. Here, the concept of a standard unit of compute power has been wrestled with for some time, and the results have led to confusion. Amazon Web Services (AWS) works against an EC2 Compute Unit (ECU), Lunacloud against a virtual CPU (vCPU). Others have their own units, such as Hybrid Compute Units (HCUs) or Universal Compute Units (UCUs) – while others do not make a statement of a nominal unit at all.

Behind the confusion lies a real problem; the underlying physical hardware is not a constant. As new servers and CPU chips emerge, hosting companies will procure the best price/performance option for their general workhorse servers. Therefore, over time there could be a range of older and newer generation Xeon CPUs with different chipsets and different memory types on the motherboard. Abstracting these systems into a pool of virtual resource should allow for a method of providing comparable units of compute power – but each provider seems to have decided that their own choice of unit is the one to stick with – and so true comparisons are difficult to work with. Even if a single comparative unit could be agreed on, it would remain pretty meaningless.

Let’s take two of the examples listed earlier – AWS and Lunacloud. 1 AWS ECU is stated as being the “equivalent of a 1.0-1.2 GHz 2007 (AMD) Opteron or 2007 (Intel) Xeon processor”. AWS then goes on to say that this is also the “equivalent of an early-2006 1.7GHz Xeon processor referenced in our original documentation”. No reference to memory or any other resource, so just a pure CPU measure here. Further, Amazon’s documentation states that AWS reserves the right to add, change or delete any definitions as time progresses.

Lunacloud presents its vCPU as the equivalent of a 2010 1.5GHz Xeon processor – again, a pure CPU measure.

Note the problem here – the CPUs being compared are 3 years apart, and with a 50% spread on clock speed. Here’s where the granularity also gets dirty – a 2007 Xeon chip could have been manufactured to the Allendale, Kentsfield, Wolfdale or Harpertown Intel architectures. The first two of these were 65 nm architectures, the second two 45nm. The differences in possible performance were up to 30% across these architectures – depending on workload. A 2010 Xeon processor would have been to the Beckton 45nm architecture.

Now, here’s a bit of a challenge: Intel’s comprehensive list of Xeon processors (see this link http://www.intel.com/pressroom/kits/quickreffam.htm) does not list a 2007 (or any other date) 1.0-1.2 GHz Xeon processor, other than a Pentium III Xeon from 2000. Where has this mysterious 1.0 or 1.2GHz Xeon processor come from? What we see is the creation of a nominal convenient unit of compute power that the hosting company can use as a commercial unit. The value to the purchaser is in being able to order more of the same from the one hosting company – not to be able to compare any actual capabilities between providers.

Furthermore, the CPU (or a virtual equivalent) is not the end of the problem. Any compute environment has dependencies between the CPU, its supporting chipsets, the memory and storage systems and the network knitting everything together. Surely, though, a gigabyte of memory is a gigabyte of memory, and 10GB of storage is 10GB of storage? Unfortunately not – there are many different types of memory that can be used – and the acronyms get more technical and confusing here. As a base physical memory technology, is the hosting company using DDR RDIMMS or DDR2 FBDIMMS or even DDR3? Is the base storage just a RAIDed JBOD, DAS, NAS, a high-speed SAN or an SSD-based PCI-X attached array? How are such resources virtualised, and how are the virtual resource pools then allocated and managed?

How is the physical network addressed? Many hosting companies do not use a virtualised network, so network performance is purely down to how the physical network is managed. Others have implemented full fabric networking with automated virtual routing and failover, providing different levels of priority and quality of service capabilities.

To come up with a single definition of a “compute unit” that allows off-the-page comparisons between the capabilities of one environment and another to deal with a specific workload is unlikely to happen. Even if it could be done, it still wouldn’t help to define the complete end user experience, as the wide area network connectivity then comes in to play.

Can anything be done? Yes – back in the dim, dark depths of the physical world, a data centre manager would take servers from different vendors when looking to carry out a comparison and run some benchmarks or standard workloads against them. As the servers were being tested in a standardised manner under the control of the organisation, the results were comparable – so apples were being compared to apples.

The same approach has to be taken when it comes to hosting providers. Any prospective buyer should set themselves a financial ceiling and then try and create an environment for testing that fits within that ceiling. This ceiling is not necessarily aimed at creating a full run-time environment, and may be as low as a few tens of pounds. Once an environment has been created, then load up a standardised workload that is similar to what the run-time workload is likely to be and measure key performance metrics. Comparing these key metrics will then provide the real-world comparison that is needed – and arguments around ECU, vCPU, HCU, UCU or any other nominal unit becomes a moot point.

Only through such real-world measurement will an apple be seen to be an apple – as sure as eggs are eggs.

Originally posted at Lunacloud Compute & Storage Blog

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 20th July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Size matters, or does it? Well it might depend on your particular area of expertise, but in the world of mobile consumer technology, small is beautiful and there are reasons why things are the size they are.

Mostly it is technical limitations. Some internal components, batteries antenna etc, are hard to shrink much further. Others—high definition touch screens, slim-line laptop cases—may not be as cost-effectively produced in larger sizes because of increased failure rates in the manufacturing process.

There are other things that dictate size. Mobile phones need to be small enough to be comfortably held to the side of the head and fit snugly into pockets or handbags, and tablet devices that demand more interaction need to be as large as possible to allow for more sophisticated interaction, yet still sufficiently small and light to handle anywhere.

Occasionally some sizes have been thought to be ‘just right’. However, this ‘Goldilocks’ principle that guided Apple under Steve Jobs to stay with the 3.5-inch iPhone and the 10-inch tablet seems to be under review—at least if the rumours concerning Apple’s new products come true.

But if 3.5-inch is such a good size for a mobile phone, then why change?

There is certainly competitive pressure for a bigger screen, with many of the other manufacturers tackling Apple’s hold on the market by ‘going large’. The thinking appears to be something along these lines: users want to do more while mobile, so let’s give them more space.

The downside to this approach is two-fold: hand size and pocket size. Neither is easily upgradeable, although many clothes manufacturers have done a sterling job of keeping up with the varying sizes of mobile phones and smartphones. The Galaxy Note, for instance, will fit in most people’s pockets these days, and that’s essentially a small tablet.

If the rumours are true, Apple is making the next iPhone taller, but not wider. This might avoid the comfort issues of wider phones in small hands and fit from a fashion perspective—but why bother? Taller might be better for widescreen 16:9 video viewing, when turned on the side, but this is just one application of the device—many other applications would need to be changed before they could take advantage of the extra screen space.

Developers might love the target rich (i.e. large and free spending) environment of the Apple user base, but they’ve had to think about iPads and high definition retina displays in recent years, so presenting them with yet another screen size would be a tall order.

However, using new screen space for dedicated soft functions or controls might be of interest, especially if it aids usability. The home button could move there and save a hardware component and it could be used for app navigation or advertising. It might even be used for new functionality that needs to be visible without interrupting the main app on screen—like a payment system…

The taller screen is also expected to be built in a taller overall package and a bit more height might also allow Apple to address another thorny issue, limited storage—of both power and memory.

As a larger device there should be more room for a bigger battery and, perhaps based on a recently publicised Apple patent, some detachable storage—that means SD-support. The addition of a new smaller charger/data connection, which many reports claim is now a dead-cert, would also, theoretically, create enough room for a card slot too.

Height isn’t likely to be the only element to change in the iPhone 5’s external appearance. There has been talk of using different materials in the case and backplate, in particular the potential use of ‘Liquidmetal’ technology—a strong metal alloy that is easily shaped.

If Apple changes the external connector, this might be a good time to change the shape of the device as well. Liquidmetal would allow for the inclusion of a curved back plate. With nearly all smartphone manufacturers having followed the square slab with rounded corners look, it might now be the time for Apple to throw in a curve ball, or at least, curved back?

The prospects for a size change in the iPad are less likely than those with the iPhone, but not because of some Cupertino inspired idealism. While many would welcome a low cost iPad (and therefore a ‘Nano’ tablet device might fit the bill), it might look too much like a follower to Amazon’s Kindle, and less like the universal tablet Apple has created in a market it currently dominates.

In addition, shrinking the iPad does not fit with Apple’s focus on usable design, and it is difficult to envisage where an iPad Nano might fit alongside the iPhone—it would deliver too little interaction to be a great tablet and be too big to be pocketed like a phone.

Competing head to head with other e-book readers might be a perfectly acceptable position for many vendors, but unless it can make a radical change, entering an established market with a ‘me too’ device does not really sound like something Apple likes to do.

Perhaps as some of the cheeky blogs commented in 2010, the best iPad Nano might turn out to be the new iPhone?

This article first appeared on http://www.knowyourmobile.com

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 17th July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Historically, IT projects in the public sector have tended to be overspent and underperforming. Not the sort of track record that sends out the right signals during a poor economic climate – but can things be done differently? One major problem is that central and local government have never been regarded as a joined up set of agendas or processes, and each part has gone its own way with its own systems and software. Therefore, when central government decided that a main aim was to centralise reporting, problems arose around what format the data needed to be in – and how to retro-fit existing systems to monitor and report events in the right manner.

Many different approaches have been put forward over the years, with minimal success due to lack of impetus, funds or just poor implementation. One that keeps being trotted out is the use of open source software to lower the cost of public sector IT.

On the face of it, this seems valid – using commercial, off the shelf software (COSS) involves paying a licence fee up front and then a maintenance fee per year after that, or an on-going yearly fee that nominally covers the licence and maintenance such that the customer (in this case the government) can use whatever version of software it wants whenever it wants. With free open source software (FOSS), the licence fee disappears. With millions of employees in the public sector, saving even a few pounds per person on licence fees must be good news.

However, software support is still required, and for FOSS this tends to come as a subscription, which in many cases is pretty similar to the maintenance component of COSS. For front end systems, such as operating systems and office software, familiarity is a big issue. The majority of employees understand Windows and Microsoft Office, and training can be kept to a minimum. A Linux/OpenOffice or equivalent system can present a major training problem, and on-going help desk issues which can easily wipe out any savings made from the licences. Also, there can be issues with “round-tripping” – the sending of documents to others in the process chain where actions are required and the document is then sent back. For standard government-to-citizen documents, this should not be a problem, as forms should either be web based or sent out in final format (e.g. Adobe PDF), but for supplier documents or others where e.g. macros may be involved, the loss of fidelity during the round-tripping could result in a less than legal contract being put in place.

But, for back-end systems, COSS can make a great deal of sense – the use of Linux as an operating system for large scale operations is proven, and can save significant amounts of money where the application is agnostic as to the underlying operating system. An area where this may be the case is in what was originally termed by Sir Peter Gershon in his report looking at streamlining government IT as “shared services” and is now being touted as the G-Cloud.

The idea behind the G-Cloud is to provide a set of services that are common amongst a broader group of users than a single department in central and local government. For example, HR tends to be similar across the public sector – employment contracts are by role, booking holiday is a common process and so on. Therefore, having many hundreds or thousands of bespoke systems dotted around the public sector is nonsensical, and expensive. By centralising a HR application in a manner that allows any department to use the same system, redundancy of function can be driven out of the process. Along with this, the scale of the master contract can drive down licence and/or support costs, and data becomes centralised allowing better monitoring and reporting.

A cloud platform requires flexibility at the basic level, however. The workloads involved may be unpredictable or, even where there is predictability, may be cyclical as with payroll, which runs weekly or monthly with little activity in between. Therefore, a highly scalable, flexible and sharable platform is required spread across a large number of servers. Using COSS operating systems can end up with large costs to cover the number of CPUs and cores involved, whereas FOSS gets rid of this cost.

Another aspect of G-Cloud is that it should lead to a lowering of costs for COSS through the centralisation of licensing. At the moment, a high degree of procurement is carried out at a local or departmental level, leading to licence and maintenance costs being relatively high. Centralising license usage through to G-Cloud means that greater economies of scale can be applied, and central contracts used to drive licence costs down to a minimum. Also, actual usage can be monitored, and over-licensing can be identified and removed, as well as negotiating with vendors to allow the use of concurrent licences, where the number of people using a licence at any one time is covered, rather than the number of people who could use a licence.

Another aspect of G-Cloud is a statement by central government that it agrees that there is a need to make dealing with government easier and cheaper so that smaller suppliers can get involved. Historically, public sector projects have involved suppliers jumping through so many hoops that only the large vendors and systems integrators could afford to get involved. G-Cloud is supposed to make it easier and less costly to become a government supplier – and once on the list, for government and local departments to easily find what is most cost-effective for them and take the service directly without the need for new negotiations. Encouraging smaller suppliers into dealing with the public sector should create more competition and so drive costs down.

Even with the financial climate remaining gloomy, the government has stated that G-Cloud remains a priority. It is to be hoped that this is the case, as it does offer the best promise for IT costs within the public sector to be driven down.

However, the biggest issue may well be around how data is managed and used across the public sector. It is all well and good being able to gain access to applications and services directly and to implement them via self-service, but if the end result is a silo of data that cannot easily be shared across departments as required, or cannot be reported against in context against other relevant information, then any cost savings will have been wasted.

Open data is required – both in the way that it is formatted, and in the way that it is made available for use. It is a given that the public sector has to be very careful in how data under its control is secured – there have been far too many headlines in the press about how information has been lost, leaked or stolen. However, this should not result in a knee-jerk reaction aimed at locking down the data – far from it; the end target has to be for all information to be made available in a manner that ensures that it is secure in the context in which it is being used. 

For example, a citizen should be able to see all information that appertains to them – but should not necessarily be able to see the same information for their neighbours. A public sector worker may need to be able to see a sub-set of information about a defined group of people, whereas an external contractor may only be able to see such results with any personal identifiable information excised. This capability requires data to be held in an open format, such that the overlying systems that manage the granular security required can deal with each data source adequately.

On top of this is the need for other data types to be included. An increasing amount of information about citizens, departmental work and laws is being held in standard documents, rather than directly in formal databases. As time goes on, this is likely to grow to include voice and video information as well. Tools will be required to ensure that any type of information can be included in public sector processes, and that the process chains can be open enough for public and private employees to be able to fully participate in the processes as needed.

The future of public sector IT is still in the balance. The G-Cloud is undoubtedly the biggest change that can bring cost savings to public sector processes, but needs more weight and impetus behind it to make it more generally available with more functionality, faster.

The judicious use of FOSS can help in managing costs – but an ivory-tower attitude of “FOSS everywhere” could have process costs that wipe out the technical savings. Open data has to be at the core of any public sector technology strategy – getting this wrong could destroy any possible cost savings, and could make it difficult to recover the situation in the near term.

Although still in the balance, the government must take this opportunity to drive a more flexible and functional platform across the public sector. This will be a slow process overall – but quick wins can be made for little investment, and the savings made must then be ploughed back in to gain greater savings in the future.

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 12th July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

There seems to have been a rash of articles, discussions and commentaries around the need for organisations to adapt themselves to the needs of the new generation of workers coming in to the workplace. These 20-somethings, also known as “Gen Y” are generally profiled as being at the forefront of social media usage, have moved away from e-mail and are part of the commoditisation of IT. Therefore, the commentators say that to attract the Gen Ys, organisations have to change the way that they work wholesale to provide an environment that the Gen Y will find attractive – otherwise they will just throw their arms in the air and slope off to some better employer.

But hang on. The first thing to remember is that the Gen Y brigade is not the first to go through a major change. I entered the employment market in 1981 – the year that the PC first came to the market. I was pretty tech savvy and literate, and did try to make sure that I got a job in an environment which was forward looking. My mother, who was in the vanguard of those able to use a manual adding machine at extreme speed was preceded by those who understood how to use a telephone, and those before them who knew how to use an abacus.

Did this force organisations to change how they worked to fit in with the workforce? Hardly. The technology was brought in because it was good for the business, and those who were good at the use of the technology did well in the market place. Those who weren’t, struggled.

But, the real issue here is this idea that possible employees will just walk elsewhere if an employer does not provide everything that they believe is their due. According to February 2012 figures, 21% of all graduates who had left university the year before in the UK were still unemployed by the end of the year, as were 26% of 16 year olds who left school with GCSEs. This gives an unemployed workforce of around 1 million.

If you look at other countries, it can be even worse – in Spain and Greece, over 50% of under 24s are unemployed.

With existing workforces of the late-stage baby boomers and Gen X workers, trying to move them over to a social media-centric, non-email way of work is not easy. If it is done just to make sure that some surly 21 year old who believes that it is their God-given right to be able to use Facebook at work feels at home, then I think the majority of organisations would find themselves facing a mass exodus of their existing – experienced – workforce. They will also still have problems with the Gen Y incomers who would, with little understanding of the commercial world, be security nightmares and add little in real value to the business.

However, please don’t take me to be Ned Ludd wrecking machines or a 16th century Dutchman throwing his clogs into the weaving looms. I am all for progress – but progress for the right reasons. Progress for progress’ sake is a road to ruin – but the use of new technologies because they are good for the organisation is what everyone should be aiming for.

Therefore, before any organisation decides that social networking is for them, it has to be asked “for what reason”? If social networking enables an organisation to reach out to its target constituents, and that this can be done in an integrated manner with existing approaches, then go for it. However, there may well be many within that target group who are not happy with social media, and would prefer to carry on being dealt with via the web, email or the telephone. This is the biggest problem with technology – very little that comes through as being “new” ever replaces any of the “old” that has gone before it. A social media specialist who refuses to accept that email and integrated websites are still very important is of negative use to an organisation – they will just go off and create new siloes of information.

However, organisations that insist on staying with the old because they do not understand the new will find the competition that do understand social media and how bring your own device (BYOD) can be successfully embraced will start to pass them by.

The Gen Ys coming through are essentially no different to any other group that has gone before them. When we entered the employment market, we all felt that we could change the world, that our bosses were completely past it and didn’t understand the new world being ushered in by whatever the technology de jour was.

Those technologies that were good for business succeeded, those that were just a spike on the technology continuum faded and died. Those employees who understood what was good and what was bad, and were capable of flexing their skills to embrace what had gone before and also what came along were the gold nuggets that ended up being head-hunted to very successful positions.

So – don’t fall for the Siren cry that everything must change in order to attract the Gen Y. Look at what technology is coming through, find someone who understands it enough to explain what the promises and problems are from a business viewpoint, and then implement what will help the business in an integrated and inclusive manner.

This will make your organisation successful. And, for some strange reason, success tends to attract talent – those Gen Ys that are worth it will search you out.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 11th July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

In its last post, Quocirca reported the finding from its report, entitled “2012 – The year of Application Performance Management (APM)” (freely available here), that the overriding priority for IT managers was application performance.

Respondents were asked about 15 possible areas for focus altogether. With the ranking system used, APM scored 36%, second was private cloud with 27%, closely followed by virtualisation with 26%. Hybrid cloud was 9th with 20% and public cloud 11th with 18%; bad news for public cloud then?

Not at all; to think that is to misunderstand what must happen for the momentum behind public cloud that is evident elsewhere to continue. If private cloud were not ranked so highly this would simply fizzle out as there only a limited number of projects that are deployed straight away on to a pure public cloud platform.

The overwhelming majority of IT deployment in businesses remains in private data centres (or at private space in shared co-location facilities). There it would remain trapped, if these data centres themselves were not changing; which they are, as witnessed by Quocirca’s research. The value of virtualisation and the cloud technology that pulls vast amounts of virtualised infrastructure together is being recognised and put into action by businesses of all sizes across the globe (see two other Quocirca reports, Next Generation Datacentre Cycle II – Cloud findings and Next Generation Datacentres Index – Cycle II).

There are two big benefits for businesses in doing this. First, it makes the use of equipment and power in their own data centres more efficient, and second, it enables the workloads that make up their applications to be more mobile. They can be moved from one private data centre to another or beyond the data centre to make use of public cloud resources.

With that flexibility in place the realisation is dawning on businesses that they do not have to keep investing in new data centre facilities and IT infrastructure to get more and more out of their applications. They can handle peak loads better, put in place better resilience, grow faster in the good times and scale back quickly in downturns through the use of public cloud. The stage is set for a flood of workloads from private to public cloud; in most cases this will be reach an equilibrium between the two; that is, hybrid cloud.

Cisco’s Summer 2012 Cloudwatch report reports the number of companies planning to use “cloud” has surged from 52% in 2011 to 90% this year. The report also shows that an increasing number worry less about cloud security: Quocirca’s own research also shows that the long held belief (in Quocirca’s view, a mistaken belief) that the public cloud is inherently insecure is rapidly being overcome.

The public cloud could only ever become mainstream reality for businesses of all sizes, if big businesses start to change the way they manage their IT, enabling them to embrace it. This is happening, enabled by the creation of private clouds. This process will continue to provide the investment stream needed for building public cloud infrastructure for the long term benefit of all.

Originally posted at Lunacloud Compute & Storage Blog

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 2nd July 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

It is not surprising that some of the biggest advocates of cloud-based services are those that provide them. However, there are many others, including end user organisations, that have come to recognise the benefits, along with analyst houses such as Quocirca that have followed the development of such services from the early days, before anyone was calling “the cloud” the cloud.

Whatever the level of enthusiasm, it must be remembered that, for commercial customers, cloud-based services are only ever a means to an end: the delivery of reliable business applications. This was underlined in a recent Quocirca research report entitled "2012 – The year of Application Performance Management (APM)" (freely available here) which looked at the priorities of IT managers for 2012.

The respondents, who were all senior IT managers in European and US businesses, were asked to select their top five of fifteen priorities for 2012. By a long chalk the performance of applications topped the list. Some way behind in 2nd and 3rd place, but still clearly high priorities, were private cloud and virtualisation. This is good news for cloud service providers because IT managers clearly recognise the need for data centre rationalisation and that cloud technologies are the way forward, even in-house.

As they transform the way they run applications internally, it will be easier for them to move workloads from private to public infrastructure. Indeed, the use of hybrid-cloud (the mix of private and public resources) scored slightly higher than pure public cloud. All this serves to remind that many IT departments are still pretty conservative and there is suspicion about outsourcing much of what they see as their own core value.

Small organisations with limited IT resources are the easiest to win over. Most surveys (for example Quocirca’s recent report, Next Generation Datacentre Cycle II – Cloud findings, freely available here) show that organisations of all sizes still harbour doubts about aspects of public cloud computing, especially security. However, the fact is that most small and mid-sized business (SMBs) can’t come near the service levels offered by cloud service providers that make enterprise class data centre and IT infrastructure available to and affordable by all.

Providers of cloud platforms, that is either infrastructure-as-a-service (IaaS) or platform-as-a-service (PaaS), need make the case that their platforms are the best way to deploy reliable, available and secure applications either as an alternative for, or supplement to, running them internally.

This series of blog posts by Quocirca will look at some of the technical and commercial issues that businesses should consider when evaluating cloud service providers to ensure they get the most from engagements with them. The series will also show that the direction of travel is clear; the future is one where there will be an element of cloud based services in the delivery of all business applications, simply because it is the best way to do certain things and in some cases it will become the only way.

Originally posted at Lunacloud Compute & Storage Blog

By: Clive Longbottom, Head of Research, Quocirca Posted: 12th June 2012 Copyright Quocirca © 2012

Remember Adobe? You know the company that does the PDF reader, provides the tooling behind all those flash sites and the software you always wanted to deal with your digital photos, but could never afford? Did you ever wonder what happened to it?

Well, on one level, the news doesn’t sound that good. The need for PDF creation software is nowhere near as strong as it was, since Microsoft and others built PDF creation into their software suites. Unfortunately for Adobe, the PDF reader technology is provided free of charge, and licence revenues on creation are now minimal in the greater scheme of things. It’s also unfortunate that although the number of people using digital cameras has massively increased, the number of people perceiving the need for high-end software such as Adobe Photoshop has not increased in equal amount. At least Adobe has tried to address this issue with its consumer digital image manipulation software, Photoshop Elements – but this is fighting in a highly competitive environment of cheap-to-mid-range software.

And as for Flash – well, Steve Jobs did a pretty good job of putting the writing on the wall for this when he refused to accept Flash as a technology on the iPhone, iPod or iPad, instead pushing for HTML5.

So, where does this leave Adobe? Withering on the vine? Hardly – in fact Adobe is rapidly repositioning itself as a new company that is moving from majoring on media creation to full management of the marketing function. In a recent event in London, Adobe showed some of its capabilities – and there is a lot of good stuff.

Over the past few years, Adobe has been quietly but aggressively acquisitive. From its long-ago acquisition of Macromedia, through Omniture, Day Software, Nitobi and Efficient Frontier Technology, Adobe has built up a portfolio of capabilities that enables it to make a determined tilt at the marketing function within an organisation. Flash is still there, but HTML5 is the real focus now. For those who have gone to the trouble of learning Flash, Adobe has now enabled all Flash output to be exported as HTML5 – in other words, although Adobe continues to support Flash for those who have built up the skills, it is now adding to the writing on the wall so kindly left by Steve Jobs.

Adobe has changed considerably. It now has a portfolio that spans creation of digital assets that includes:

• The various different bundles within its Creative Suite (CS), which includes its Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat, Flash, DreamWeaver, Fireworks, Premiere, After Effects, Audition, SpeedGrade, Prelude, Encore, Bridge and Media Encoder products.
• The management and publishing of intellectual property assets through its Digital Publishing Suite, which includes digital rights management of digital assets.
• Its Digital Marketing solutions, including tools to manage interactions with social networks, digital analytics, digital advertising, personalisation of offers and web experience management with multi-device capabilities with its extensive web experience management (WEM) portfolio that covers web creation, personalisation, effectiveness measurement and analytics.

There is a deal of cross-over between the various areas, with tools from one area being necessary (or at least desirable) to fulfil areas in other areas. Indeed, even comparing this year’s event with last year’s, it is apparent that Adobe has been working pretty hard in making its message more cohesive – while also trying to make its software more integrated as well.

In the past, Adobe has suffered from a clash of technologies from different acquisitions with disparate naming conventions and different front end experiences. However, a lot of work has been done to ensure that each piece of software can more effectively share information across the Adobe portfolio via a more consistent UI.

However, all is still not perfect. Although the data flows are now pretty well managed, the process flows remain problematic. Adobe seems to recognise this, and is working on multiple fronts in order to try and make the flow of work between different parts of the marketing function – and beyond into other parts of the business as well – as seamless as possible. Part of this is a project called “Genesis”, an advanced means of enabling not only data but logic flows between the Adobe products and partner applications and services.

Adobe also realises that its pricing model may not be to everyone’s liking. To create a full capability to carry out many of the examples Adobe showed at the event would require multiple different bundles and point products to be taken from its portfolio – and this requires in-depth knowledge of what does what from a buyer – or a good amount of time spent with a channel partner. To deal with this, Adobe has launched Creative Cloud, a subscription-based means of accessing a large proportion of its portfolio on-demand for a single monthly payment per user. Not only is this likely to make the Adobe portfolio eminently accessible to its core existing audience and its prospects, but also to enable organisations further down the food chain in the SME markets to use the software on a more ad-hoc basis to meet their needs as and when – rather than making a capital investment in something that may only be used once in a while and will require constant updating

Adobe is on the move. It has a lot of challenges ahead of it to ensure it becomes recognised as a valid offering in the fuller marketing arena, rather than in the media creative side only, and it needs to make sure that it both creates coherent messaging whilst painting an enticing picture of the future.

Adobe will need to build more partnerships around the areas it needs to be seen to have strength in, but does not have the direct capability itself. It already has an agreement with hybris for two-way information and functional flows between Adobe software and hybris’ ecommerce software; more like this will be required.

However, this new Adobe looks good. Beyond where it is now positioning itself, it will need to look at other touch points across the organisation – particularly in dealing with those knotty issues between marketing and sales, and also with customer support. However, Quocirca would not bet against Adobe just now.