By: Mark McGregor, Research Director, Bloor Research Posted: 31st January 2012 Copyright Bloor Research © 2012

In my recent article "The Game of Process Improvement", I referred to a book called "Innovation Games". The book is packed with details on how any of us can leverage Innovation Games to gain greater insight into our customers and users. Something that is critical to the success of BPM and Process projects, but also can be applied to the vendors of these, and other products too. Last week I spend some time talking with Luke, the author, about the book, the games and his company.

When it comes to the use of games in business I am a firm believer that they should enable people to learn. As I mentioned in my previous article, we learn more by play than by analysis. Luke, though, is concerned about making sure people understand that his games are not seen as simply a learning tool, but a business tool directed towards delivering specific outcomes. Of course he still believes that they can and should be fun!

Luke has undertaken a lot of research into the linkages between the brain and productivity. In his words: "Productivity Games are not simply 'more fun' - they are literally more effective. This is due to the fact that the concept of play is deeply integrated into human beings' mental development."

"Studies tell us that there are parts of the brain that we do not access when we are simply discussing our views, or trying to think through a complicated situation. However, when we play a well structured game with other interested players, our actions, interactions with other players, and explanations of our behaviour can provide a better, more comprehensive view of how and why we make certain decisions."

Innovation Games, although a relatively young company, boasts an extremely impressive customer list. Companies, including Adobe, SAP, Aladdin, Wyse, Google and Qualcomm, have all leveraged Innovation Games to to improve holistic design thinking, discover new business opportunities, drive strategy and product road map decisions, improve the effectiveness of sales and service organisations, fine tune marketing messages, and create more intimate, durable relationships with customers.

One of the challenges that Luke has faced over the years is the stigma associated with the idea of using games in business. In part this is due to the mistaken understanding that games do not equate to work. This has led to him and others using the term "serious games", although he (and I) prefer the term that he also uses - "Productivity Games" - to try and overcome these obstacles.

I agree totally with Luke that the objective has to be to deliver objective, useable business outcomes, and Innovation Games amply delivers on this front. I also come from the perspective that, for effective change to take hold, then people need not just outcomes but the learning. The ability to come to their own "Aha!" or "Light Bulb" moment. So for me it is also about going back and seeing how people learn most effectively and, as we say, this is through structured play.

What I can see is that there is a need for people to be able to understand how to differentiate between unstructured and structured play. I can also see that even the most boring of analysis tasks can be made to be more fun through games. So perhaps we could use terms like "Strategy Games" or "Objective Gaming" to make it clear that in board game terms it is more like 'Risk' or 'Diplomacy' rather than 'Ludo' or 'Snakes & Ladders' - e.g. it is a game, should be fun, but is directed toward a targeted outcome. As mentioned in the previous article, there are many business leaders who have successfully grown businesses using their love of, and skill at, the game of chess to succeed.

Truly successful games need to deliver both concrete outcomes and learning. The outcomes ensure that you are making good use of your time and getting business value, while the learning ensures that your people continue to grow and develop. The great thing about the Innovation Games concept, as developed and promoted by Luke, is that it delivers on both counts. One only has to take a look in more depth at the success stories to see how much has been saved/made/changed to understand that the results are definitely there. If you take the time to talk with people who have been involved in those projects, you will hear them enthuse about learning things that they did not even realise were important.

Next month, during my trip to California, I hope to meet with Luke and learn first hand more about the way he and the team leverage Innovation games.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 22nd December 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Marketing and IT have never been a match made in heaven. Extrovert creative communicators and geeky analytical techies rarely choose to passionately embrace. However, corporate needs, rather than partner choices, will take precedence in 2012.

Corporate confidence has been rocked by the ferocity and intensity of competition encountered during the current global economic downturn. Key clients and deals have been lost, salespeople are omitted from the early stages of procurements as customers research possible solutions online, and many products increasingly look undifferentiated and 'me-too'.

Many highly profitable companies are now 'looking down the gun barrel' of commoditisation and low margins caused by global competition. Senior management wants Marketing to make their companies more presentable, attractive, and relevant in order to restore premium pricing.

Marketing is now expected to take a central user role in selecting new customer-centric technologies. These include creating a Single Customer View (SCV) and involvement in customer-oriented uses and applications for 'big data'. Marketing needs to report on customer insights and analytics, better manage the customer experience, and to embrace new social media and mobility. Even 75% of marketers identify these latter elements as 'important' says a recent Marketing Week / SAS study. Little wonder then that 'familiarity with marketing technologies' is the most desirable attribute for new hires in marketing, according to an eConsultancy / Eloqua report.

To date, many digital marketing technology investments have been piecemeal and low cost, and funded out of general discretionary marketing budgets. Often marketers outsource digital marketing to ESPs (Email Service Providers) and creative agencies to manage customer and sales prospect databases, email campaign execution, search and online advertising, and web site management.

In 2012 marketers will take back some control of digital assets from external agencies. Digital marketing will emerge as an enterprise mission-critical core competence, managed in-house and supplemented with specialist agency skills, not the other way around. More techie analyst / statistician types will be recruited into marketing. Digital marketing investment will need to ratchet up a gear in 2012 as data-driven Marketing takes centre stage.

"So what has this got to do with the IT Department?" you might ask. Well, Marketing mostly will not have the line-item budget to support the level of digital marketing investment required. Secondly, marketers may be gaining desktop IT skills, but have a limited understanding of enterprise IT architectures and the constraints and complexities associated with managing and controlling enterprise data. Marketers rarely have the attention to detail, the numerical and statistical disciplines, and the procedural rigour that is commonplace in the IT Department.

Marketing needs financial help and technical support from the IT Department to make digital marketing happen in the all-embracing manner envisioned by corporate management. New scalable digital marketing technologies, common platforms, and open standards will be required to ensure interoperability with cloud services. Legacy digital marketing systems will be migrated or replaced. 'Proper' IT management and support is required from the IT Department. Marketers need to get on with the day job of being professional marketers, rather than tactical amateur technologists with the resultant risks to data integrity, security, and compliance, as has been happening recently.

In summary, IT and Marketing will need to create a close and harmonious relationship to produce the customer-centric end-result demanded by corporate management. The passionate embrace required may take some humbleness from both sides. However, such a business-IT partnership has a great opportunity to deliver against corporate goals, and enhance the image of two much-maligned departments that often suffer from a lack of corporate credence and credibility.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 15th November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Most companies have not fully 'got' social media yet. Sure, they have a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a LinkedIn presence, but then what? Wait for the world to beat a path to your door? Run a few promotional campaigns and see few results? Wait for the CEO to ask "why have we only got X number of Facebook followers?"

Many brands have a somewhat passive, reactive approach to social media marketing. EngageSciences is an interesting UK start-up with a pro-active social media formula for businesses and brands wishing to attract new social media followers, and then to monetize that presence.

Firstly, you need to sign up a critical mass of fans. EngageSciences encourages its clients to create viral campaigns on Facebook and Twitter that give away something for free. Digital marketers might run prize draws, online sweepstakes, contests and quizzes, or offer exclusive premium downloadable content, such as a white paper, for example.

These incentives can prove surprisingly effective. For example, Unilever (Pot Noodles) increased their Facebook fans from 3,000 to 25,000 and Play.com increased from 40,000 to 80,000 Facebook fans within 8 weeks of using EngageSciences.

Sign-up requires an opt-in email address to be provided, so that the prize winners can be notified. Email addresses are critical pieces of digital marketing data. For digitally-savvy vendors, this contact data can then be cross-correlated with other databases and company web site visits; so that a pattern of personal behaviour can be detected that triggers further more personalised marketing communications.

Secondly, you need your fans to spend money with you. The best incentives are those that can easily 'go viral' i.e. are forwarded to friends, family and other followers. Typically these include redeemable coupons and 'flash deals' (time-constrained discount offers), such as the '2 for 1' deals used by Café Rouge and Strada restaurants, that have proved so effective. Exclusive ("offers only for you, dear fan") web page offers also work well.

As a recent IBM CRM survey proved, contra to conventional wisdom, for the most part, consumers don't really want 'relationships', and 'connection' and 'dialogue' with corporates. Consumers want offers, discounts and the ecommerce ability to purchase online. ExactTarget research reveals that Facebook consumers who are promiscuous (who "Like" a lot of brands) and those a little older (age 27+) want something of value in return for their "Like".

The EngageSciences Fan Relationship Marketing Platform provides all the technology required to push attractive offers into the key social media channels i.e. Facebook and Twitter, and capture followers' contact details for segmentation and online re-marketing.

EngageSciences' SaaS-based hosted solution is a relatively low-cost method of quickly creating a cloud-based social marketing database as a repository for follower demographic details, social behaviour, and engagement with online social media marketing campaigns. A 'test' campaign or a monthly subscription costs c. £1,000.

EngageSciences is an invaluable short-cut to market for marketers wanting to get started with executing social media marketing campaigns. Many marketers are fumbling with DIY approaches or 'big ticket' solutions that take too long to develop.

Consumers are receptive to creative online promotions now. ExactTarget research reveals that 45% of Facebook customers currently "Like" a company at least once monthly. Already the average US Facebook user "Likes" an average of 14 companies / brands. Consumer fatigue will set in over time, and fan or follower acquisition will become increasingly more difficult and expensive.

To date EngageSciences has managed to attract some impressive high calibre brands as users - Nokia, TNT and Forbes for example. One fact is clear. EngageSciences can help to re-energise a lethargic social media presence - and there are plenty of companies out there in that broad category.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 1st November 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Chief Marketing Officers' (CMOs) main role is to serve as 'brand custodians' on behalf of their employers today. They know that what their customers buy today is not so much product features, functions and form; but more 'the brand promise' - the image of the brand, what it stands for, and how the brand makes them feel.

Hence CMOs obsess about keeping the brand's integrity intact and ensuring that creative images and messages they use are globally consistent, and are mutually supportive of the brand promise. This has always been tricky. Local country operations often employ their own agencies to build local language versions of promotional materials, and different and often contradictory logos and messages appear, serving to confuse the customer and dilute carefully woven corporate marketing stories.

What CMOs need is a central brand control system to ensure global discipline of its troops. The solution is Brand Asset Management (BAM) which is a mix of Digital Asset Management (DAM) and its parent category, Marketing Resource Management (MRM), where Aprimo (acquired by Teradata earlier this year) is perhaps the best-known supplier.

Less well-known is the UK-based company VYRE, which is making waves in the Brand Asset Management market. Over 400 brands use VYRE's Unify BAM platform. Its clients include Diageo (owners of drinks brands like Guinness, Smirnoff and Baileys) and Shell.

Typically, brand managers use Unify as a central access point and portal for brand guidelines, creative display pieces, video, pictures, blog content etc. VYRE's larger customers have many thousands of Brand Managers globally accessing up to 100,000 brand assets as part of their daily work. These assets are then combined by local marketers into finished content, brochures, flyers, advertising etc. for their marketing promotional campaigns.

This finished content is then loaded into an Approvals workflow module so that the necessary management authorisation and sign-off can be obtained. This means local language versions can be tightly controlled by Corporate, so that brand integrity can be maintained. In addition, wasteful 're-inventing the wheel' is avoided as content can be created once and re-purposed for many different promotional uses. Such systems make simultaneous global promotional product launches a reality, maximising impact and product availability. Apple and Microsoft do this effectively.

VYRE's Unify is ideal for a large company like Shell or Diageo - it allows for a high degree of flexibility and customisation so that established working practices can be simulated within the software. Now VYRE has launched a midmarket, more packaged solution called On Brand. This is only available as a SaaS version, and starts at £2,500 per month. This means for roughly the cost of a marketing executive, a brand can deploy a fully featured BAM system. This has to be tempting, as the ROI is potentially around 3x to 5x.

The On Brand price will be attractive to marketing and advertising agencies too. The global agency, Lowe + Partners, is already a big VYRE user. Marketing agencies typically provide much of the creative content for the big brands (for example Lowe serves Microsoft, Unilever, and Johnson & Johnson) and can better manage the logistics and workflow between themselves and their clients in an extranet configuration using shared systems such as On Brand.

Traditionally, many brand marketing organisations have used generic IT systems such as OpenText as databases for their brand assets. These multi-level filing systems are not that easy to use, especially for marketing folk not known for their computer-savvy skills. A system like On Brand, designed for use by Brand Managers, is preferable and offers the potential for fast global SaaS deployment (typically 6-8 weeks).

VYRE is an established 20-year industry veteran that has quietly been building clients and competencies around BAM. It has plans to grow its presence in the US and recent contracts there bode well. On Brand may just provide the vehicle to accelerate their growth and provide a stronger global presence as a leader in the BAM market.

By: Matthew Wailling, Director, Cordless Consultants Posted: 13th September 2011 Copyright Cordless Consultants © 2011

Whilst 2011 is very much the year of the tablet, the concept itself isn’t all that new, with its forefather dating back to 1993 in the shape of the Apple Newton followed in 1996 by the better-remembered Pilot 1000 from Palm. To put this timeline in context, whilst many were excitedly learning how to use the “graffiti input zone” on the Palm and installing the desktop software via floppy disk to Windows 3.1 PCs, Charles and Diana were finalising divorce proceedings and Piece Brosnan had only just  saved the world for the first time. (Although this may have gone unnoticed by many who were wowed by the massive 4MB of memory offered by the Palm wonder device)

Roll on 10 years, Daniel Craig gets “00” status, , and the tablet development continued. 2006 saw collaboration between Microsoft, Intel and Samsung which produced the Samsung Q1. This was a daring move into a new category of device—the UMPC (Ultra Mobile PC).  This “fully functioning” PC had a 7 inch touch screen, 512MB RAM, ran Windows Vista and was about the size of an A5 note pad. The UMPC aimed to bridge the gap between PDAs and Laptops at a time when BlackBerries were gaining traction (having recently passed 5 million global users), whilst Palm was concentrating on the Trio Smart phone. The Q1 was certainly innovative and whenever I showed it in client workshops it always impressed, but it never really established a market share. The tablet boom only occurred as recently as last year when the iPad (1) was released—with Apple selling 3 million in 80 days.

It’s interesting to see the difference between the success of the Q1 and the iPad and, if Gartner is to be believed, the successes of any tablet will be linked to the desire by users to buy a tablet that runs the same OS as their phone, so they can share apps across devices. In many ways this harks back to the point I made in my last blog (about 3D display) that “content is king”.  Ultimately, this isn’t really a hardware revolution, it’s all about software.

The tablet revolution is well underway with in excess of 100 different flavours now available, across a range of platforms with some 15 million units sold globally in Q2 this year. According to research firm Strategy Analytics, Apple holds a healthy share of the tablet market, shipping 61% of all tablets in Q2 2011, but this was a fall from the market dominance of 94% it had last year.  Big names entering the field have clearly impacted the market and will continue to do so. The biggest impact has come from tablets using the Android operating system. This includes HTC, Motorola and, with a follow up to the Q1, Samsung now has the “Galaxy Tab”.  Sony is bringing not one but two tablets (the S1 & S2) hoping to further dent the Apple dominance.

The Sony approach is intriguing, the S1 is a “traditional” tablet and comes with a 9.4” screen but the S2 has two 5.5” screens which could be a powerful asset to enabling multi app and dual screen working but as a Sony product, don’t expect to see it in the Tesco Value section on the pricing scale.

In addition to the devices using Apple (iOS) and Android (Honeycomb) platforms, there are two other major players we need to consider, the BlackBerry Playbook from RIM and the Cius from Cisco. The Playbook is curious from a branding perspective as one of the last things many would associate with the BlackBerry brand is play. But with a 7” screen, it's highly portable and very adept at inducing death by PowerPoint thanks to an HDMI output port which lets you link to an external display. It also has many of the security features that have helped make BlackBerry handsets the choice for many. The Playbook does have two limiting factors however. The first is a distinct lack of available apps and therefore content, and the second is that, unless you have a BlackBerry phone, the Playbook can’t easily manage calendar or email. This will probably change, but at the moment there are plenty of other devices that don’t face this problem. The Playbook is clearly aimed at the enterprise market first and the consumer second but for a pure business-only device, then look at the Cisco Cius.

The Cius offers a neat solution to corporate mobility and desktop video (both growing trends) by docking at the desk to form an IP phone with voice and video capability. So whilst the Cius costs considerably more than an IP desk phone, it is certainly less than a personal Telepresence system.  Nonetheless, the Cius has a similar drawback to the Playbook in that it needs supporting proprietary systems to offer full functionality. In this instance Cisco UC is needed to run the phone/video features, which effectively rules out home users. This point can be argued away to a degree if you are a Cisco house and want to stay that way for some time but it becomes trickier to justify the cost when we already see a number of firms exploring the use of Facetime on the already cheaper iPad to provide “free” personal video conference calls. It is perhaps best to view the Cius not against other tablets, but against other IP phones.

Ultimately, we need to understand the drivers behind the adoption of tablets. Initial growth has been in the consumer market with the iPad and, although these offer great functionality, even the most diehard Apple enthusiast has to admit there is a bit of image statement in their purchase decision somewhere.  That isn’t an irrelevant point for IT managers when choosing tablets for customer facing staff as the use of a tablet can project an image of a dynamic firm adopting modern tools. The provision of desirable devices to any member of staff (customer facing or not) can also be a boost to morale and a sign staff are valued, but these soft benefits are difficult to demonstrate to the FD. Perhaps one answer is the high tech version of having a glass of wine in an unlicensed restaurant—BYOD.

BYOD or Bring Your Own Device is exactly what is sounds like and, as a policy, is gathering pace. The concept is simple; give a fixed financial allowance to staff and let them buy a device of their choice. This gives employees the choice they inevitably want and removes hassle and cost  of providing support services for IT managers (well, some of it anyway).  There are obvious policies and procedures that are needed to enable this—not least the provision of Citrix to allow secure access to data from “untrusted” devices and suitable maintenance contracts purchased with devices, but it is certainly a novel way to solving a complex issue. A blue sky concept, possibly, but certainly not pie in the sky because, as cloud computing gathers yet more pace and SaaS is increasingly adopted, this model becomes viable.  BYOD has already been rolled out across Kraft foods and the Law Firm SNR Denton.

So what does the future hold? Even if BYOD is too radical for you, the concept of using tablets to access cloud-based apps is sound and, if it becomes a key driver for adoption, this could have significant impact on the tablet market.

Vizio, the hugely successful US manufacturer of cheap flat screen TVs has recently launched (in the US) the sub £200 tablet. Operating on Android  v2.3 (Gingerbread) it may not offer the rich experience of the latest Motorola tablet (which uses the latest Android v 3.0 Honeycomb) but this is expected as a future upgrade and may offer a solution that moves us further to mass adoption.

Helping tablet adoption further, in early 2012 we will see the launch of Windows 8—the Microsoft platform designed with the tablet in mind—and this will surely close the gap in functionality between tablets and laptops. However, by then we are sure to have the iPad 3 as well and, if you speak to pretty much any tablet user, they are usually a huge advocate of their choice of device whether it’s Apple, Android or AN Other. Perhaps this is another compelling reason for BYOD because when Windows 8 hits the screens in 2012 so will the next instalment of James Bond and, as Jerry Seinfield said:

"When you enjoy something, you must never let logic get too much in the way. Like the villains in all the James Bond movies. Whenever Bond breaks into the complex: 'Ah, Mr. Bond, welcome, come in. Let me show you my entire evil plan and then put you in a death machine that doesn't work'

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 7th September 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Recent trends are driving savvy companies to improve how they manage their supplier and buying processes using dynamic discounting.

The latest BriefingsDirect discussion focuses then on how discount management and dynamic discounting can dramatically improve how enterprises procure by better managing the buying process, improving cash management, and gaining an analytic edge on constantly improving processes through cloud-enabled automation.

To learn more about how buyers and sellers can benefit from such improved business processes around cash management in the procurement phase we interviewed Drew Hofler, Senior Manager, Working Capital Solution at Ariba. The discussion is moderated by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: In a long-term slack economy, finding new business efficiencies is not really an option.

Hofler: We've seen a lot of growth in this area, particularly over the last three or four years with another wave of economic bad news coming up now. In 2008, when the credit crisis first hit and supply chains became dramatically impacted, you had a lot of suppliers who found their access to credit severely curtailed. You had a lot of buyers who were using the opportunity to enhance their cash flow and their cash position by extending terms with suppliers.

So you had kind of a perfect storm of buying organizations pushing out payment terms and supplying organizations not able to fund those longer terms via traditional credit means, because those were being pulled away. So that created a real cash flow crisis within supply chains.

... If you look at that in conjunction with suppliers still having their access to credit curtailed, it's not as bad as it was at the height of 2008, but it still is far from where it was pre-2008 in terms of their access to credit.

You have this situation where there is significant liquidity risk in the supply chain due to suppliers who are not in as good a cash position—smaller and medium sized suppliers typically—facing a downturn in orders, facing a downturn in the economy, and not having necessarily the cash buffer or access to credit to weather that.

On the other hand, you have buyers who have massive amounts of cash that are sitting in banks, where they are earning next to nothing. In fact, two days after the S&P downgrade, Ben Bernanke and the Fed stated that they'll probably keep rates down at around zero for the next two years, until mid–2013.

... People are looking for everything to make their companies leaner and better and capture all the value that they possibly can.

Dynamic discounting is really a win-win. There is value to both sides [of purchasing relationships], and it's not just one imposing their will on the other in order to make their company better at the expense of the other. There are significant and tangible benefits to both sides when they do this.

I think that's why we've seen so many companies pick this up. We've had growth rates of 60 percent or so in our buyer customer base. Our customers, shortly after going live, have been seeing growth rates in their opportunity and discount capture with their suppliers of 60–80 percent month over month. Obviously that will stabilize at some point, but I think what that says is that huge growth curve, particularly in the first year or so of doing it, speaks to the fact that there is this latent opportunity out there.

We have customers and some of them will average around 24 percent annualized return on their cash. Others will average less. It depends on how they want to approach their supply base. Many buyers will take the opportunity, when there's an opportunity to earn very significant returns on their cash of 36 percent or more from a certain part of their supply base. Typically, the longer tail, the smaller suppliers, will take advantage of that.

But others, especially more recently, are realizing that they can take a nuanced approach to this and look at their entire supply chain and approach each segment differently.

So if you are a long tail of suppliers that otherwise would take P-Card or do things like that, you can get a large amount of return on your cash. But on the other end of your supply chain, your goal as a buying organization with more strategic suppliers is not so much to wring all the value in terms of return on cash that you can out of them, but to make sure that they are there for you when you need them, to reduce the liquidity risk.

So a lot of buyers are taking the cash that they have, using this product, and offering the opportunity to their more strategic suppliers to gain access to the cash piles that the buying organization has, but at rates that are much lower, that are closer to what they might be able to get out in the marketplace from a bank.

Those are more around 6 percent, 4 percent annualized, but still much better than the buying organization gets on their cash sitting in a money market account earning less than a quarter of a percent, or close to zero right now. But they do it in such a way that does not add a burden to their supplier.

I'm seeing buying organizations take a blended, more nuanced approach to using this. The great thing about the tools online is that they have full flexibility to do that, to group their suppliers how they wish, to offer different rates to different suppliers, to control the amount of cash that they make available, and they are really starting to take advantage of that.

When you talk about dynamic discounting, what we like to say is that it enables collaborative cash flow, and that collaboration is really what the cloud, social networking, business social networking, is really all about. It's about communicating, communicating need, and collaborating over solutions.

What I see coming down the line is that, as more and more network or cloud effect takes place, where suppliers who are on the Ariba Network, for example, have multiple buyers participating in this and so they are doing this across different buyers, it becomes more of a norm.

It becomes something that is a normal part of business. I think we're starting to see that normalized, because dynamic discounting is a very fairly young industry still in terms of overall business practices and processes. But we're starting to see it become more of a norm.

When you have that happening over the cloud, when you have that kind of collaboration of information going back and forth, you have more suppliers becoming normal, we'll see buyers learning and having access to aggregated data, trends, and behaviors that show them how to approach this, because they can see how it has worked across industries in the past, and then supplying organizations finding it much more normal.

I see it tying into the communication methods that are becoming so prevalent in social media and in the cloud, just basically to give suppliers access to the opportunity and open up the opportunity. We've seen such growth when buyers become active and make this available to suppliers, simply because it's tapping into the late need that suppliers didn’t know they had a fix for, that they had a solution for, in terms of accessing this cash.

As that becomes more available and more known through the cloud, through the collaboration, the suppliers hear about it more, they realize they have the access. Just that ability for it to go viral is what's really going to happen more and more, as we go into the future and it kind of snowballs.

In the meantime, you have this big dichotomy, where you have buyers who have lots of cash earning basically nothing on it in the short-term, and their suppliers who don't have the access to that cash and have longer terms extended to them. When they do get credit, there are some pretty restrictive covenants with their banks and they're paying a little bit higher rate than they would otherwise. You have this significant liquidity risk.

All of that is to say that what we're seeing is that buying organizations are starting to realize that they can take advantage of the fact that they have all this cash and suppliers who have this need to essentially become the bank and put that cash to work.

They earn a greater return by paying suppliers early in exchange for a discount—so they're earning a better return on their cash than it would have sitting in the bank—but they also remove some risk from their supply chain by injecting liquidity into their supply chain, giving suppliers access to liquidity that they might not have otherwise in a way that, one, is not debt to their supplier, and two, improves their working capital position by lowering their days sales outstanding (DSO), when they get paid early on that receivable.

We are seeing all these things line up to create a perfect opportunity for both buyers and suppliers to collaborate over these cash flow needs that are being created by the economy right now.

Gardner: I suppose the solution then at the high level is fairly clear, but how to implement that becomes the issue. So many organizations have disparate ways of managing these issues, managing their procurement and supply chain, often manual processes still at work.

How do you allow for the suppliers to create an incentive for this improved discounting and improved cash flow for them, and how do they then manage and instantiate this and make it repeatable?

Hofler: It’s a great point, because a lot of organizations in this realm of payment terms, agreements with suppliers, paying suppliers, approving invoices, and all of this type of thing, is still a very manual process in so many organizations.

I have looked at buying organizations and analyzed their vendor files and at times found literally hundreds of different payment terms to their suppliers, where a best practice would be to have maybe five to 10 that are pretty standardized, unless there happens to be some great exception. People are just making terms with the folks that they know, buyers knowing the salesperson on the supplier side, and agreeing to specific terms that may have nothing to do with the corporate objectives or strategy.

In order to reap this opportunity and understand what's happening a company needs to get visibility into what's actually happening. That’s where Ariba’s cloud technology allows companies to pull this through the Ariba Network and gain visibility into what's going on and automate the process greatly.

Once they have that visibility, on the one hand, they realize they can get their terms and their payment under control. A lot of times, a company will have what's supposed to be a standard term, let’s say 45 days, 60 days payment, but a supplier is being paid immediately. Somebody called in to the company and the supplier said, "I can't wait this long for my cash. Can you pay me early?" And the person on other end of the phone changed the payment to "immediate" in the ERP for the buyer.

That’s a cash flow waste right there. You're paying immediately when a buying organization could be holding up their money for 45–60 days, or exchanging that immediate pay for some value in the form of a discount.

We're seeing that companies are getting control of that process through automating it, through sending POs through the Ariba Network to their suppliers, where it's centralized and visible to corporate as a whole, bringing invoices back in to accelerate the approval process, and also bringing it under some control and visibility as well.

That opens up the opportunity that we're talking about in terms of collaborating over cash flow, because what you have are these invoices coming in and being approved in a rapid manner, because they're coming in clean. The Ariba Network assures that invoices come in clean and they're being approved quickly. Now you have invoices that are approved say on the fifth day after receipt, but not due until day 60 after the invoice date. That time gap is where the collaboration can come in.

When it is in the cloud online, the buying organization has visibility to all of their suppliers, being able to offer early payment and being able to use their cash to earn greater returns and offering early payments. But all the suppliers then have visibility into that opportunity as well. And the right party at the supplier company that has visibility into that.

When you think about early payment, discount terms, we think of the classic 2/10, net 30 that’s negotiated into a contract at some point. Think of who is having that conversation? It's typically procurement and the salesperson on the side of the supplier. That salesperson on the side of the supplier really is not all that concerned about cash flow. That’s not their metric. It's not what they're measured against, and they don’t really care.

We find that not too many companies get early payment discounts into a large amount of their spend due to that. But when those invoices have come in and have been made visible through this online portal for suppliers to see, who is it at the supplier that now is looking at that? It's the accounts receivable (AR) side. It's the controller. It's the treasurer. It's finance on the side of the supplier that cares about cash flow, that realizes when they need enhanced cash flow, and has the ability to make a decision over that.

We're seeing a huge increase when we deploy clients between what they had originally captured in contracts in terms of early payment terms, versus what they're now able to capture, once they put this in place with the Ariba Network, where the right audience and their suppliers can come in and see that.

So those things—automating the process, getting visibility into it, getting your process under control so that everything is done in a timely manner to create the opportunity, and then having an online portal visibility for your supply base to see the opportunity—are key to accessing it.

Gardner: So I think that at a very high level we're talking about better business process management (BPM), but across disparate systems of record, different organizations, and the role that Ariba plays, has the opportunity to cross among or between them, but automate, give them insight and visibility at the same time. So that’s pretty cool.

Now, I know the name of your product that you apply to a lot of this is called Ariba Discount Professional, but I have also heard it referred to as "dynamic discounting." What does that really mean? How does that work?

Hofler: The market term for us is Ariba Discount Pro, but the broader vernacular for the market is dynamic discounting or discount management. Dynamic discounting has two aspects to it. One, it's the dynamic nature of it, giving the supplier the ability and control to say when they want to get paid early, when they need the money, to have this sort of automated online conversation or collaboration with the buyer to agree on early payment terms, on an invoice-by-invoice basis.

The supplier can say they don’t need early payment all the time, but there are definitely business cycles, financial cycles in the quarter, or business cycles and seasonal suppliers, where they may have to purchase a lot of stock for an upcoming season, or they might want to purchase some equipment. Then, they need to accelerate some cash flow in order to do that.

The supplier can dynamically say, "Here's what's available to me, and I'll take that invoice, that invoice, and that invoice on an early payment. I agree to those terms." And boom, it's done. So it's basically like an ATM for them. They can choose which ones they want.

The other aspect of dynamic discounting is the fact that it allows for a fair and prorated discount rate to the supplier from the buyer. Before, in the traditional 2/10, net 30 and 2/15, net 45 that a lot of companies have, the structure is such that if you can approve the invoice and pay by day 15, you take 50 percent discount. If you can't approve it by day 15, then you wait and you pay the full amount of the invoice on day 45.

With dynamic discounting and our Discount Pro product, buyers are able to offer to their suppliers a prorated discount that says, "We can pay you early from the moment this is received or from day 15," whatever fits the buyer’s needs, and then prorate that say 2 percent discount down to 0 percent on the net due date of that invoice.

It's fair to the supplier. If they are getting paid 30 days early, they pay a higher discount. If they are getting paid 15 days early, that discount gets lowered in such a way that is fair to that supplier, and yields a constant and consistent return on cash on an annualized basis to the buying organization.

So for example, the 2/10, net 30, that’s the classic textbook example, is a 36.5 percent annualized rate of return. So at 20 days early on day 10, it's a 2 percent discount; at 10 days early, 20 days after the invoice is received, it's a 1 percent discount. Both of those equate to 36.5 percent annualized return on cash for the time period that the cash was deployed.

The buying organization is ensured a consistent return on their cash deployed. The supplier is ensured a fair system control discount based on when they actually receive the cash. So those two pieces, that slope line and proration, as well as the dynamic ability for a supplier to achieve early payment on an invoice-by-invoice basis based on their business need are the things that really define dynamic discounting.

Gardner: I have to imagine that we're talking about very large organizations, very large procurement sums, and therefore the returns can be quite substantial. It makes sense of course for the buying organization to be able to do the best they can with their cash flow, and getting a discount would do more for them than letting it sit in a low interest-bearing account, as you pointed out.

But what really intrigues me about this, Drew, is for the suppliers, where there is complexity in inventory and there is transportation and logistics issues, it gives them a chance to really analyze some of the timing that works to their advantage and then incentivize based on these discounts as to how that could then benefit them.

There seems to be a huge efficiency, maybe difficult to measure in dollar terms, but a huge efficiency potential for these suppliers when they exercise this dynamic discount.

Hofler: I would agree with that. There is just a whole ton of benefits to the suppliers, because as you say, they have full visibility into when they are going to be paid, how much, and on what, and full control over that.

As I mentioned before, it's like an ATM for them, if they need it, where they have access to this pool of liquidity, depending on the things that come along. If anything like logistics, transportation, or added gas prices spike for a week or two and their cash flow has to increase, well, because of that outlay, they can access this early payment and this cash in a way that's very beneficial for them, because suppliers have some access to some cash flow. It's not completely shut off for them. A lot of suppliers will take credit cards or P-Cards. A lot of them will access lines of credit and things to that effect.

But those do two things to them. One, P-Cards are extraordinarily expensive in terms of the exchange rate that they have to pay. And two, lines of credit and that type of thing add debt to their balance sheet basically.

With this type of dynamic discounting, suppliers access this cash flow in a way, depending on what the buyer offer might be or what the buyer might accept in terms of the counteroffer from the supplier, that is typically cheaper than than credit cards. It's often cheaper than they can find financing elsewhere, and it does so in such a way that lowers their DSO, because they're basically turning their assets of a receivable into cash. It lowers their DSO, which is great for their working capital metrics and cash convergence cycle.

And it does so in such a way that adds zero debt to their balance sheet, because it's just transferring one asset into another from a receivable into cash. So definitely a lot of supplier benefit.

Discount Pro is based on the Ariba Network platform. From the buying side, it simply requires the ability to send a message from your ERP—we call it a payment proposal message—to the Ariba Network. It requires a connection, and there are a number of ways to do that.

We have standard adapters for most of the large ERPs—PeopleSoft, Oracle, SAP. We've integrated with JD Edwards, Lawson, and various others. Simply installing this kind of middleware adapter takes the feed of data from the ERP, translates it into the Ariba cXML. You put that in place. It's basically that middleware to communicate that information back and forth from the Ariba Network, and that's essentially it.

There obviously is some work involved in that, but it's so much lower than on-premise type of work that you would have to do. There's much lower cost, and much quicker time-to-benefit for that. From the supplier’s side, being based in the cloud and on the Ariba Network, it literally can be as simple as a three minute process of signing up on the Ariba Network.

Gardner: Do you have some examples of folks that are doing this? What sort of returns it's getting for them? How it's impacting them in terms of productivity benefit as well as pure dollars and cents?

Hofler: We've had a number of organizations, a large retail and sporting goods organization, that came in and increased their discount capture by about 90 percent.

One thing is coming onto the Ariba Network and getting your process under control. As I said before, companies don't necessarily have a lot of their spend under contract discount term, but they do have some. Their procurement folks have negotiated some discounts, early payment discounts, in the contract. A lot of that is not being captured, because the process doesn’t allow them to approve the invoices in time, and that type of thing.

That was the case with this organization. It was capturing about 35 percent of their discounts, and raised that to about 95 percent very quickly. So that's an immediate savings and immediate capture of lost opportunity and value to them. Simply by getting their process under control allowed them to capture millions of dollars of lost savings.

In addition, they saw their capture of savings go from about 5 percent of their suppliers to a penetration of over 20 percent of their suppliers in a short period of time as well.

I believe it’s because of the things that I mentioned earlier. It was now putting the opportunity in front of the right people at the supplier’s side. When they realized they had the opportunity, they took advantage of it, because as I said, the fundamentals are there in the market, where suppliers are typically hurting for cash and cash flow and opportunities for that, willing to take early payment.

Buyers have lots of cash. When you just bring those two parties together in a way that makes it easy for them to collaborate and meet that need, your participation is going to go up for sure. And that's what we've seen.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Craig Denton, CEO, Next Connex Posted: 23rd June 2011 Copyright Next Connex © 2011

In electronic trading, speed matters. That’s why over the last 5 years, brokerages have embraced colocation and proximity trading—moving their servers close to the exchange or market’s matching engine—to gain advantages of a few milliseconds per trade, that can be worth millions per year. This is in addition to deployment of Gigabit Ethernet infrastructure and software optimisation techniques.

Consultancy group, TABB, recently surveyed chief investment and trading officers at several sell-side firms, and found their priorities included reducing latency, expanding network capacity and moving closer to centres of execution. Other wish-list items included improving the use of data centre space and colocation.

The problem is, the desire to cut latency by moving closer to exchanges contradicts the desire to improve data centre space utilisation. After all, if every brokerage is jostling for space in data centres close to the Square Mile, then space is at a premium. 

TABB also found that main drivers behind a brokerage’s choice of a data center were cost (ranked as ‘important’ to 57% of respondents), proximity to the local exchange (48%), space in the data center to expand (33%) and reliability of power supply (29%). 

Colo contradiction
These findings are also at odds with the desire for proximity trading. Again, competition to colocate close to the exchange drives up prices, puts the squeeze on space and, of course, puts pressure on power supplies as demand grows. So how can this apparent contradiction be resolved? The answer is still related to speed—but the key is in using the performance to achieve a different end.

From A to B and beyond
High speed can achieve two objectives. It can either get you from point A to point B faster than before; or it can enable you to cover a greater distance, from point A to point C, in the same amount of time that it used to take to get from A to B.

Advances in networking have seen the introduction of the new 40/100GB networking standard in mid-2010, with the first rollout of 40/100 infrastructure happening now. This represents an obvious performance advance over conventional Gigabit or even 10GB network links. At these speeds, network latency can be cut to sub-2 milliseconds, even over network hops of 100 miles or more.

In turn, these speeds mean that latency in the connection between data centre and exchange becomes minimal compared with the overall total execution time of the transaction—which includes the latencies inherent in the broker’s applications and the trading engines themselves. 

This has two key benefits. Firstly, accelerating transit speeds over the data centre interconnects helps to cut performance variances on transactions, giving a competitive edge for brokers, as they can commit to faster, automated transactions on behalf of their customers. Secondly, it has tremendous implications for choice of data centre location. 

Location, colocation
After all, you don’t need the data centre to be next door to the exchange, when higher speeds means you’ve almost eradicated latency in the network that connects the two sites. This level of wide-area network performance can enable brokerages and other trading houses to look beyond metropolitan data centres, taking advantage of the lower space costs and greater power resources available in out-of-town facilities, while still being able to guarantee performance for algorithmic trading and synchronous applications.

While space in extra-urban facilities can be up to 30% cheaper, giving immediate savings, power availability in particular is critical to data centre choice. More advanced applications and greater computing muscle demands more electricity and more cooling—both of which are at a premium in existing city-centre sites. It’s no surprise that the Jones Lang LaSalle Data Centre Barometer of Autumn 2010 found that power continues to be the most important factor in choosing a new data centre, with over half of respondents ranking availability of power as their absolute top priority. 

New, purpose-built facilities outside metropolitan areas, made accessible by high-bandwidth connectivity, escape restraints on power availability and can support even the most demanding requirements.

Cross-continent and contingency traffic
Low-latency data centre interconnects also have implications for international data traffic, for example linking trading engines in New York and London. By shortening international transit times, organisations can once again improve their competitiveness and execution times.

Furthermore, by giving high-bandwidth connectivity between multiple sites, these links support more efficient and robust contingency planning and DR topologies, for business continuity.

So with higher-bandwidth, lower-latency data centre interconnects, organisations can resolve the apparently contradictory demands of minimising latency while boosting performance reducing costs, and having more space and power available for growth. Speed can help to overcome the latent need for close proximity, while ensuring organisations don’t get left behind.

www.nextconnex.com

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 1st June 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 15th April 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Pitney Bowes has long been a goliath in the metered postage market with around an 80% share in the US and 65% internationally. The need to diversify beyond the stagnant postage market has seen it venture into the software world. This venture has been far from smooth as it continues to try and carve out a niche beyond its traditional dominance in the mailroom. 

The company has spent over $2.5 billion on software acquisitions since 2000 – including MapInfo (location intelligence), Group 1 Software (data management and customer communications) and most recently Portrait Software (customer analytics). These are managed by Pitney Bowes Business Insight (PBBI), which was formed in 2007 from the merger of the Group 1 Software and MapInfo businesses. However, the various acquisitions have created a patchwork product portfolio and a complex set of offerings. PBBI is now competing with far more competitors than it is used to, so must simplify its messaging and focus on the core capabilities across its product range.

PBBI’s strategy is to help its customers enable lifetime customer relationships through the application of Customer Communication Management (CCM). PBBI’s CCM comprises a set of core capabilities—data, insights, strategy and communications that help businesses acquire, serve and grow the lifetime value of their customer base. CCM particularly focuses on creating and delivering cost-effective multi-channel communications—including print, email, web, SMS and call centre interactions. 

A complex product range
PBBI’s products for CCM include solutions for document composition, archive and compliance, web self-service and interactive communications for customer service representatives. PBBI’s MapInfo has long been widely regarded as the leading product for location intelligence and geographical information systems (GIS) while its latest acquisition, Portrait Software, fills a gap in PBBI’s customer and data analytic capabilities—which include data integration and data profiling, along with analytics products such as demographic and psychographic data. 

PBBI now certainly has a range of products to enable businesses to gain real customer insight, particularly through geo-demographic and psychographic analysis. PBBI’s advantages over some of its competitors are the ability to go beyond traditional analytic segmentation using either geo-demographics or advanced predictive modelling as provided with Portrait Software. At one end of the scale, PBBI is competing against standard CCM vendors such as HP Exstream, Thunderhead and GMC, while at the other end is also competing in the business intelligence space with many smaller analytics companies and the large players, many of who have made acquisitions in the last few years (e.g. IBM/Cognos, Oracle/Hyperion, SAP/Business Objects). If PBBI can simplify its messaging, it can certainly be a real contender in these markets.

Exploiting the convergence of digital and print communications
As the communications landscape continues to become more complex, as online and offline channels converge and the use of social media grows, businesses must find a way to manage business processes across all these channels. Many of its customers are undoubtedly operating print and digital communication processes in silos and are probably using some elements of PBBI’s CCM suite—either for document composition, data quality, production or archival. PBBI must now encourage these customers to move to a single enterprise CCM platform, and thereby reduce the waste and inefficiency associated with decentralised communications processes.

But, ultimately, the biggest opportunity for PBBI is to pull together its wide and somewhat disjointed portfolio, and provide a unified CCM enterprise platform that can identify the “hot pockets” of customers by both geography and buying habits. Such highly targeted capabilities can lead to far higher conversion of prospects to customers, so reducing the cost of sale and also “buyer fatigue” caused by over marketing of different approaches to people who have no interest. Such an approach avoids the need to sell to multiple different groups within the organisation, as it provides a single approach that can be used directly by sales and by marketing, yet provides all the analytic and reporting capabilities as needed throughout the rest of the business.

PBBI certainly has the technology and the breadth and scale of products to enable businesses to create personalised multichannel communications but it cannot ignore that other players are snapping at its heels, particularly HP and GMC who both offer end-to-end CCM platforms. Along with the many vendors in the customer interaction space, PBBI has certainly got its work cut out in establishing a strong position in the market.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 7th April 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

A proliferation of on-premises applications, many of them outdated, and the ongoing data explosion are posing serious threats to businesses worldwide, according to a recent survey of companies in Europe and America by Capgemini.

The first annual Application Landscape report found that millions of applications are obsolete and no longer deliver full business value. The result, says Capgemini, is a need to rationalize and retire applications, freeing up valuable resources to drive innovation and future growth, rather than maintain outdated systems.

The sheer number of applications supported – up to 10,000 for global enterprises – combined with an estimated average data growth of five percent per month means applications management is on track to quickly become an issue of real significance. Moreover, as companies move toward the transfer of applications to the cloud, the need for systematic and well-managed application retirement will accelerate.

Outmoded applications
In in-depth interviews with CIOs and IT leaders in the US and Europe, Capgemini found that:

• Some 85 percent say their application portfolios are in need of rationalization
• Almost 60 percent of enterprise companies say they currently support "more" or "far more" applications than are necessary to run their business
• Only 4 percent say that every IT system they use is considered to be business critical
• Half agree that up to 50 percent of their application portfolio needs to be retired
• Another 61 percent say they keep all data beyond its expiration date "just in case"
• Also, 56 percent of large companies and enterprises say that half or more of their applications are custom-built, increasing the technical complexity of required platforms and technologies
• Only 13 percent say their application development and maintenance teams are aligned. And half (48 percent) say their teams are only in synch for 50 percent of the time or even less.

Ron Tolido, CTO at Capgemini for Application Services Continental Europe, said: “Our research reveals that key goals for CIOs are value creation, improving efficiencies and cutting costs. Despite the fact that data archiving and application retirement can result in significant cost savings, process efficiencies and increased agility, it still does not rank high enough on the agenda. This report shows that successful application management—achieved through a true lifecycle approach of 'build, deploy, maintain and retire'—can deliver tangible business benefits in tough economic times.”

In addition to acknowledging the growing importance of this issue, the report also reveals the numerous current barriers to effective application management including: the cost of retirement projects, the lack of immediate ROI, cultural resistance to change, regional differences, the lack of qualified developers to migrate retired application data and, most importantly, that applications are not considered a key priority.

By: Natalie Newman, Senior Analyst, Bloor Research Posted: 24th March 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

What will the 2011 Census tell us? Not much without geographic information technology! Demographic information guides the planning for all sectors. Whether for the provision of public services, the supply of power and water, or the marketing and selling of products and services, the where factor will be critical!

On March 27th everyone in England and Wales will be expected to complete the 2011 Census form. We lose an hour during the night before and hopefully that will not cause late submissions. This is the first census that can be completed on line. One hopes that this will not adversely affect an accurate information collection—the last census had an alleged 25% undercounting.

Reading an article in the local Compass Wessex magazine started a train of thoughts of what this new information can mean to public and private sector organisations.

The focus on socio and economic trends opens the usefulness of this information to countless opportunities. Is there anything that is not affected in some way? It is vital to understand where—the location—to which the statistics relate.  

Comparison with the first census in 1801 reveals great change and we all know that the speed of change is increasing. In 1801, the 2 million households averaged 5.6 people compared with 2001 where an average of 2.4 people were recorded in 26 million households. The escalation curve would be very interesting to understand how the rate of change has increased. The geographic illustration of where these changes take place will provide invaluable guidance to so many facets of planning and provision.

New questions about residents include passports held, nationality, year of entry to UK and intended length of stay for recent arrivals, main language and second residence. These statistics would reveal interesting trends, showing where employment is impacted, where transitional populations reside, where different languages should be accommodated, and where homes are not permanently occupied.

Frighteningly, apparently, 1 in 6 homes in the UK fall within a flood plain and the Environment Agency's flood testing centre at HR Wallingford in Oxfordshire is investing in experiments to withstand these wet onslaughts. The 2011 Census will reveal how many people are impacted. That could be a very pessimistic picture? Insurance risk cannot be managed without evaluating where and to what extent the risk exists. This is impossible without geographic technology.

The increasing population densities are essential for network planning organisations—water, gas & electricity, telecommunications. Without geographic visualisation, they will not know where the change in demand is taking place.

The first summary results are expected in September 2012 with more details emerging in 2013 and 2014.  That does seem like a while to wait, but maybe we should already be putting on our thinking hats and start planning how to use this information.

If geographic technology is not part of your solution, think again. Without knowing where change is taking place, the statistics are meaningless.

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

Welcome to a podcast discussion on how new models for IT support services are required to provide a single point of accountability when multiple and increasingly complex software implementations are involved.

Nowadays, the focal point for IT operational success lies not so much in just choosing the software and services mixture, but also in the management and support of these systems and implementations and the SLAs as an ecosystem—and that ecosystem must be managed comprehensively with flexibility and for the long-term.

Long before cloud and hybrid computing models become a concern, the challenge before IT is how to straddle complexity and how to corral and manage—as a lifecycle—the vast software implementations already on-premises.

Of course, more of these workloads are supported these days by virtualized containers and often by a service-level commitment. IT needs to get a handle on supporting multiparty software and virtualized instances, along with the complex integrations and custom extensions across and between the applications.

Who are you going to call when things go wrong or when maintenance needs to affect one element of the stack without hosing the rest? How do you manage and broker at the service level agreement (SLA), or multiple SLA, level?

More than ever, finger pointing on who is accountable or responsible amid a diverse and fast-moving software environment cannot be allowed, not in an Instant-On Enterprise.

Not only does IT need a one-hand-to-shake value on comprehensive support more than ever, but IT departments may need to increasingly opt to outsource more of the routine operational tasks and software support to free up their IT knowledge resources and experts for transformation, security initiatives, and new business growth projects.

To learn how this can be better managed, we've tapped an executive from HP Software to examine an expanding set of new HP Premier Services designed to combine custom software support and consulting expertise to better deliver managed support outcomes across entire software implementations.

Here are some excerpts:

Eswaran: We're offering HP Premier Services across the entire portfolio for all solutions we put in front of customers. People may ask what's different. "Why are you able to do this today? The customer problem you are talking about sounds pretty native. Why haven’t you done this forever?"

If you look at a software organization, the segmentation between support and services is very discrete, whether inside the company or whether it is support working with services organization outside the company, and that’s the heart of the problem.

What we're doing here is a pretty big step. You hear about "services convergence" an awful lot in the industry. People think that’s the way to go. What they mean by services convergence is that all the services you need across the customer lifecycle merges to become one, and that’s what we are doing here.

We're merging what was customer support, which is a call center, and that’s why they can't take accountability for a solution. They are good at diagnostics, but they're not good at full-fledged solutions. They're merging that organization.

What that organization brings in is scale, infrastructure, and absolute global data center coverage. We're merging that with the Professional Services (PS) organization. When the rubber hits the road, PS is the organization, or the people, who deploy these solutions.

By merging those two, you get the best of both worlds, because you get scale, coverage, infrastructure, capability. And by virtue of a very, very extensive PS team within HP Software, we operate in 80 or 90 countries. We have coverage worldwide. That's how we're able to provide the service where we take accountability for this whole solution.

Converged IT support and professional services
What we're announcing and launching and what we're talking about is enhancing and elevating that support from just being a product to actually being the entire project and the solution for the customer. This is where, when we deploy a solution for a customer, which involves our technology, our software, for the most part, a service element to actually make it a reality, we will support the full solution.

That's the principal thing now that will allow us to not just talk about business outcomes when we go through the selling lifecycle, but it will also allow us to make those business outcomes a reality by taking full accountability for it. That is at the heart of what we are announcing—extending customer support from a product to the project, and from a product to the full solution.

If I walk through what HP Premier Services is, that probably will shed more light on it. As I explain HP Premier Services, there are two dimensions to it.

The first dimension is the three choice points, and the first of those is what has classically been customer support. We just call it Foundation, where customer support supports the product. You have a phone line you can call. That doesn't change. That's always been there.

The second menu item in the first dimension is what we term as Premier Response, and this menu item is where we actually take that support for the product and extend it to the full project and the full solution. This is new and this is the first level of the extension we are going to offer to the customer.

The third menu item takes it even further. We call it Premier Advisory. In addition to just supporting the product, which has always been there, or just extending it to support a solution and the project—both of those things are reactive—we can engage with the customer to be proactive about support.

That's proactive as in not just reacting to an issue, but preempting problems and preempting issues, based on our knowledge of all the customers and how they have deployed the solution. We can advise the customer, whether it's patches, whether it's upgrades, whether it's other issues we see, or whether it's a best practice they need to implement. We can get proactive, so we preempt issues. Those are the three choice points on the first dimension.

The second dimension is a different way to look at how we're extending Premier Services for the benefit of the customer. Again, the first choice point in the second dimension is called Premier Business. We have a named account manager who will work with the customer across the entire lifecycle. This is already there right now.

The second part of the second dimension is very new, and large enterprise customers will derive a lot of value from it. It's called Premier TeamExtend. Not only we will be do the first three choice points of foundation, support for the whole solution, and proactive support, we will extend and take control for the customer of the entire operation of that solution.

At that point, you almost mimic a software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, but if there are reasons a customer wouldn't want to do SaaS and wouldn't want to do managed services, but want to host it on-site and have the full solution hosted in the customer premises, we will still deploy the solution, have them realize the full benefit of it, and run their solution and operate their solution.

Customer choice
We're not just giving them one thing, which they're pretty much forced to take, but if it's a very mature customer, with extensive capability on all the products and IT strategies that they're putting into place, they don’t need to go to TeamExtend. They can just maybe take a Foundation with just the first bit of HP Premier Services, which is Premier Response. That’s all they need to take.

Choice is a very big deal for us, so that customers can actually make the decision and we can recommend to them what they should be doing.

If there is an enterprise that is so focused on competitive differentiation in the marketplace and they don't want to worry about maintaining the solutions, then they could absolutely go to Premier TeamExtend, which offers them the best of all worlds.

By virtue of that, we make anything and everything to do with the back end—infrastructure, upgrades, and all of that—transparent to the customer. All they care about is the business outcome. If it's a solution we have deployed to cut outages by 3 percent and get service levels up-time up to 99.99 percent, that's what they get.

How we do it, the solutions involved, the service involved, and how we're managing it is completely transparent. The fundamental headline there is that it allows the customer to go back to 70 percent innovation and 30 percent maintenance, and completely flip the current ratio.

Impact of cloud solutions in the support mix
The reality is that cloud is still nebulous. Different companies have different interpretations of cloud. Customers are still a little nervous about going into the cloud, because we're still not completely sure about quality, security, and all of those things. So, this is the first or second step you take before you get comfortable to get to the cloud.

What we're able to do here is take complete control of that complexity and make it transparent to the customer—and in a way to quasi-deliver the same outcomes which a cloud can deliver. Cloud is a trend, and we're making sure that we actually address it before we get there.

A lot of these services are also things we're providing to the cloud service providers. So, in a way, we're making sure that people who offer that cloud service are able to leverage our services to make sure that they can offer the same outcomes back to the customer. So, it’s a full lifecycle.

In my view, and in HP Software’s view, this is a fairly groundbreaking solution. If I were to characterize everything we talked about in three words, the first would be simplify. The second would be proactive—how can we be proactive, versus reacting to issues. And, how can we, still under the construct of the first two, offer the customers choice.

We've been in limited launch mode since June of last year. We wanted to make sure that we engage with a limited set of customers, make sure this really works, work out all the logistics, before we actually do a full public general availability launch. So, it is effective immediately.

We can also offer the same service to all the outsourcing providers or cloud service providers we work with. If you feel you're bouncing around between different organizations, as you try to get control of your IT infrastructure, whether if you work with an external SI and you do not feel that there is enough in sync happening between support and an external SI and you feel frustrated about it, this falls right in the sweet spot.

If you feel that you need to start moving away from just projects to business outcome based solutions you need to deploy in your IT organization, this falls right in the sweet spot for it.

If you feel that you want to spend less of your time maintaining solutions and more of your time thinking about the core business your company is in and making sure that your innovation is able to capture a bigger market share and bigger business benefits for the company you work for, and you want some organization to take accountability for the operations and maintenance of the stack you have, this falls right in the sweet spot for it.

Smaller companies
The last thing, interestingly enough, is that we see uptake from even smaller and medium-sized companies, where they do not have enough people, and they do not want to worry about maintenance of the stack based on the capability or the experience of the people they have on these different solutions—whether it's operations, whether it's applications, whether it is security across the entire HP software stack. So, if you're on any of those four or five different use cases, this falls right in the sweet spot for all of them.

So, in summary, at the heart of it what we're trying to do is simplify the complexity of how a customer or an IT organization deals with the complexity of their stack.

The second thing is that an IT organization is always striving to flip the ratio of innovation and operations. As you look today, it is 70 percent operations and 30 percent innovation. If you get that single point of accountability, they can focus more on innovation and supporting the business needs, so that their company can take advantage of greater market share, versus operations and maintaining the stack they already have.

IT complexity is increasing by the day. Having multiple vendors accountable for different parts of the IT strategy and IT implementation is a huge problem. Because of the complexity of the solution and because multiple organizations are accountable for different discrete parts of the solution, the customer is left holding the bag on to figure out how to navigate the complexity of the software organization. How do you pinpoint exactly where the problem is and then engage the right party?

We actually start to engage with them in solving a business problem for them. We paint the ROI that we could get.

Find out more about the new HP Premier Services launch.

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

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

Welcome to a special discussion on predicting how cloud computing will actually unfold for enterprises and their core applications and services in the next few years. Part of The Open Group 2011 Conference in San Diego the week of Feb. 7, a live, on-stage panel examined the expectations of new types of cloud models—and perhaps cloud specialization requirements—emerging quite soon.

By now, we're all familiar with the taxonomy around public cloud, private cloud, software as a service (SaaS), platform as a service (PaaS), and my favorite, infrastructure as a service (IaaS). But we thought we would do you all an additional service and examine, firstly, where these general types of cloud models are actually gaining use and allegiance, and look at vertical industries and types of companies that are leaping ahead with cloud. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Then, second, we're going to look at why one-size-fits-all cloud services may not fit so well in a highly fragmented, customized, heterogeneous, and specialized IT world—which is, of course, the world most of us live in.

How much of cloud services that come with a true price benefit—and that’s usually at scale and cheap—will be able to replace what is actually on the ground in many complex and unique enterprise IT organizations? Can a few types of cloud work for all of them?

Here to help us better understand the quest for "fit for purpose" cloud balance and to predict, at least for some time, the considerable mismatch between enterprise cloud wants and cloud provider offerings, is our panel: Penelope Gordon, co-founder of 1Plug Corp., based in San Francisco; Mark Skilton, Director of Portfolio and Solutions in the Global Infrastructure Services with Capgemini in London; Ed Harrington, Principal Consultant in Virginia for the UK-based Architecting the Enterprise organization; Tom Plunkett, Senior Solution Consultant with Oracle in Huntsville, Alabama, and TJ Virdi, Computing Architect in the CAS IT System Architecture Group at Boeing based in Seattle. The discussion was moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gordon: A lot of companies don’t even necessarily realize that they're using cloud services, particularly when you talk about SaaS. There are a number of SaaS solutions that are becoming more and more ubiquitous.

I see a lot more of the buying of cloud moving out to the non-IT line of business executives. If that accelerates, there is going to be less and less focus. Companies are really separating now what is differentiating and what is core to my business from the rest of it.

There's going to be less emphasis on, "Let’s do our scale development on a platform level" and more, "Let’s really seek out those vendors that are going to enable us to effectively integrate, so we don’t have to do double entry of data between different solutions. Let's look out for the solutions that allow us to apply the governance and that effectively let us tailor our experience with these solutions in a way that doesn’t impinge upon the provider’s ability to deliver in a cost effective fashion."

That’s going to become much more important. So, a lot of the development onus is going to be on the providers, rather than on the actual buyers.

Enterprise architects need to break out of the idea of focusing on how to address the boundary between IT and the business and talk to the business in business terms.

One way of doing that that I have seen as effective is to look at it from the standpoint of portfolio management. Where you were familiar with financial portfolio management, now you are looking at a service portfolio, as well as looking at your overall business and all of your business processes as a portfolio. How can you optimize at a macro level for your portfolio of all the investment decisions you're making, and how the various processes and services are enabled? Then, it comes down to a money issue.

Harrington: We're seeing a lot of cloud uptake in the small businesses. I work for a 50-person company. We have one "sort of" IT person and we do virtually everything in the cloud. We have people in Australia and Canada, here in the States, headquartered in the UK, and we use cloud services for virtually everything across that. I'm associated with a number of other small companies and we are seeing big uptake of cloud services.

We talked about line management IT getting involved in acquiring cloud services. If you think we've got this thing called "shadow IT" today, wait a few years. We're going to have a huge problem with shadow IT.

From the architect’s perspective, there's a lot to be involved with and a lot to play with. There's an awful lot of analysis to be done— what is the value that the cloud solution being proposed is going to be supplying to the organization in business terms, versus the risk associated with it? Enterprise architects deal with change, and that’s what we're talking about. We're talking about change, and change will inherently involve risk.

The federal government has done some analysis. In particular, the General Services Administration (GSA), has done some considerable analysis on what they think they can save by going to, in their case, a public cloud model for email and collaboration services. They've issued a $6.7 million contract to Unisys as the systems integrator, with Google being the cloud services supplier.

So, the debate over the benefits of cloud, versus the risks associated with cloud, is still going on quite heatedly.

Skilton: From personal experience, there are probably three areas of adaptation of cloud into businesses. For sure, there are horizontal common services to which, what you call, the homogeneous cloud solution could be applied common to a number of business units or operations across a market.

But we're starting to increasingly see the need for customization to meet vertical competitive needs of a company or the decisions within that large company. So, differentiation and business models are still there, they are still in platform cloud as they were in the pre-cloud era.

But, the key thing is that we're seeing a different kind of potential that a business can do now with cloud—a more elastic, explosive expansion and contraction of a business model. We're seeing fundamentally the operating model of the business growing, and the industry can change using cloud technology.

So, there are two things going on in the business and the technologies are changing because of the cloud.

... There are two more key points. There's a missing architecture practice that needs to be there, which is a workload analysis, so that you design applications to fit specific infrastructure containers, and you've got a bridge between the the application service and the infrastructure service. There needs to be a piece of work by enterprise architects (EAs) that starts to bring that together as a deliberate design for applications to be able to operate in the cloud. And the PaaS platform is a perfect environment.

The second thing is that there's a lack of policy management in terms of technical governance, and because of the lack of understanding, there needs to be more of a matching exercise going on. The key thing is that that needs to evolve.

Part of the work we're doing in The Open Group with the Cloud Computing Work Group is to develop new standards and methodologies that bridge those gaps between infrastructure, PaaS, platform development, and SaaS.

Plunkett: Another place we're seeing a lot of growth with regard to private clouds is actually on the defense side. The U.S. Defense Department is looking at private clouds, but they also have to deal with this core and context issue. The requirements for a [Navy] shipboard system are very different from the land-based systems.

Ships have to deal with narrow bandwidth and going disconnected. They also have to deal with coalition partners or perhaps they are providing humanitarian assistance and they are even dealing with organizations we wouldn’t normally consider military. So they have to deal with lots of information, assurance issues, and have completely different governance concerns that we normally think about for public clouds.

We talked about the importance of governance increasing as the IT industry went into SOA. Well, cloud is going to make it even more important. Governance throughout the lifecycle, not just at the end, not just at deployment, but from the very beginning.

You mentioned variable workloads. Another place where we are seeing a lot of customers approach cloud is when they are starting a new project. Because then, they don’t have to migrate from the existing infrastructure. Instead everything is brand new. That’s the other place where we see a lot of customers looking at cloud, your greenfields.

Virdi: I think what we are really looking [to cloud] is for speed to put new products into the market or evolve the products that we already have and how to optimize business operations, as well as reduce the cost. These may be parallel to any vertical industries, where all these things are probably going to be working as a cloud solution.

How to measure and create a new product or solutions is the really cool things you would be looking for in the cloud. And, it has proven pretty easy to put a new solution into the market. So, speed is also the big thing in there.

All these business decisions are going to be coming upstream, and business executives need to be more aware about how cloud could be utilized as a delivery model. The enterprise architects and someone with a technical background needs to educate or drive them to make the right decisions and choose the proper solutions.

It has an impact how you want to use the cloud, as well as how you get out of it too, in case you want to move to different cloud vendors or providers. All those things come into play upstream, rather than downstream.

You probably also have to figure out how you want to plan to adapt to the cloud. You don’t want to start as a Big Bang theory. You want to start in incremental steps, small steps, test out what you really want to do. If that works, then go do the other things after that.

Gordon: One example in talking about core and context is when you look in retail. You can have two retailers like a Walmart or a Costco, where they're competing in the same general space, but are differentiating in different areas.

Walmart is really differentiating on the supply chain, and so it’s not a good candidate for public cloud computing solutions. That might possibly be a candidate for private cloud computing.

But that’s really where they're going to invest in the differentiating, as opposed to a Costco, where it makes more sense for them to invest in their relationship with their customers and their relationship with their employees. They're going to put more emphasis on those business processes, and they might be more inclined to outsource some of the aspects of their supply chain.

Skilton: The lessons that we're learning in running private clouds for our clients is the need to have much more of a running-IT-as-a-business ethos and approach. We find that if customers try to do it themselves, either they may find that difficult, because they are used to buying that as a service, or they have to change their enterprise architecture and support service disciplines to operate the cloud.

Also, fundamentally the data center and network strategies need to be in place to adopt cloud. From my experience, the data center transformation or refurbishment strategies or next generation networks tend to be done as a separate exercise from the applications area. So a strong, strong recommendation from me would be to drive a clear cloud route map to your data center.

Harrington: Again, we're back to the governance, and certification of some sort. I'm not in favor of regulation, but I am in favor of some sort of third-party certification of services that consumers can rely upon safely. But, I will go back to what I said earlier. It's a combination of governance, treating the cloud services as services per se, and enterprise architecture.

Plunkett: What we're seeing with private cloud is that it’s actually impacting governance, because one of the things that you look at with private cloud is charge-back between different internal customers. This is forcing these organizations to deal with complexity, money, and business issues that they don't really like to do.

Nowadays, it's mostly vertical applications, where you've got one owner who is paying for everything. Now, we're actually going back to, as we were talking about earlier, dealing with some of the tricky issues of SOA.

Virdi: Private clouds actually allow you to make more businesses modular. Your capability is going to be a little bit more modular and interoperability testing could happen in the private cloud. Then you can actually use those same kind of modular functions, utilize the public cloud, and work with other commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) vendors that really package this as new holistic solutions.

Configuration and change management—how in the private cloud we are adapting to it and supporting different customer segments—is really the key. This could be utilized in the public cloud too, as well as how you are really securing your information and data or your business knowledge. How you want to secure that is key, and that's why the private cloud is there. If we can adapt to or mimic the same kind of controls in the public cloud, maybe we'll have more adoptions in the public cloud too.

Gordon: I also look at it in a little different way. For example, in the U.S., you have the National Security Agency (NSA). For a lot of what you would think of as their non-differentiating processes, for example payroll, they can't use ADP. They can't use that SaaS for payroll, because they can't allow the identities of their employees to become publicly known.

Anything that involves their employee data and all the rest of the information within the agency has to be kept within a private cloud. But, they're actively looking at private cloud solutions for some of the other benefits of cloud.

In one sense, I look at it and say that private cloud adoption to me tells a provider that this is an area that's not a candidate for a public-cloud solution. But, private clouds could also be another channel for public cloud providers to be able to better monetize what they're doing, rather than just focusing on public cloud solutions.

Plunkett: Not to speak on behalf of Oracle, but we've gone through a few mergers and acquisitions recently, and I do believe that having a cloud environment internally helps quite a bit. Specifically, TJ made the earlier point about modularity. Well, when we're looking at modules, they're easier to integrate. It’s easier to recompose services, and all the benefits of SOA really.

Gordon: If you are going to effectively consume and provide cloud services, if you do become much more rigorous about your change management, your configuration management, and if you then apply that out to a larger process level, some of this comes back to some of the discussions we were having about the extra discipline that comes into play.

So, if you define certain capabilities within the business in a much more modular fashion, then, when you go through that growth and add on people, you have documented procedures and processes. It’s much easier to bring someone in and say, "You're going to be a product manager, and that job role is fungible across the business."

That kind of thinking, the cloud constructs applied up at a business architecture level, enables the kind of business expansion that we are looking at.

Harrington: [As for M&As], it depends a lot on how close the organizations are, how close their service portfolios are, to what degree has each of the organizations adapted the cloud, and is that going to cause conflict as well. So I think there is potential.

Skilton: Right now, I'm involved in merging in a cloud company that we bought last year in May ... It’s kind of a mixed blessing with cloud. With our own cloud services, we acquire these new companies, but we still have the same IT integration problem to then exploit that capability we've acquired.

Each organization in the commercial sector can have different standards, and then you still have that interoperability problem that we have to translate to make it benefit the post merger integration issue. It’s not plug and play yet, unfortunately.

But, the upside is that I can bundle that service that we acquired, because we wanted to get that additional capability, and rewrite design techniques for cloud computing. We can then launch that bundle of new service faster into the market.

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

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 23rd February 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

In the last 12 months technology shares on the NASDAQ exchange have appreciated by 28%. Apple’s have appreciated by c. +80%, Oracle’s by +40%, IBM’s by +30%. Microsoft’s haven’t: they have gone in reverse by -3.5%. Apple is now valued at c. $100bn more than Microsoft.

It’s not that Microsoft’s results have been so bad. Their accounts would have a finance man purring like a stroked kitten. Microsoft’s tech industry leading 30% net margin on revenue of $62.5bn created $18.7bn of net profit in 2010. Nice.

But these impressive figures hide a break from the past. Bill Gates was always obsessed with winning market share and beating the competition. Nowadays Microsoft is more interested in making loads of money and retaining the status quo. The decline of the Roman empire was exactly the same. This is what the stock market is picking up on.

While rivals such as Larry Ellison at Oracle are still hungry for scalps (for example, he said recently that he was ‘going after’ HP at the top end of the server market, ‘and then we’ll take on IBM’ with his new Sun servers and Exadata), Microsoft has been focusing much of its effort on internal wrangling and re-structuring.

Four of CEO Steve Ballmer's direct reports have departed since May 2010, including Stephen Elop who left to run Nokia, and Robbie Bach who ran Microsoft’s entertainment division. Three Divisional Heads have now gone (out of 5 Divisions), the most notable being the President of the $15bn Servers and Tools Business (STB), Bob Muglia.

Ballmer’s email to Microsoft employees on January 10th said “I have decided that now is the time to put new leadership in place for STB. This is simply recognition that all businesses go through cycles and need new and different talent to manage through those cycles”. This doesn’t quite square with Ballmer’s letter to shareholders last September that reported ‘outstanding momentum across all our businesses’. The ‘new and different talent’ to run STB is Satya Nadella, a 20 year veteran at Microsoft. He ran the Bing search engine division. A chance to blood new talent has been missed.

The Microsoft mission statement: “to enable people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential” lacks real teeth. Previously, one key objective was ‘to take on difficult challenges and see them through to the end’. When Microsoft entered a market it would never let go. It offered a low price point with continually increasing product functionality, the marketing machine kicking in with slick promotions and resellers everywhere. Microsoft’s goal was to become market leader no matter how long it took, and it was a compelling proposition.

Imagine my surprise when they retreated from the performance management market: “we've made it clear in the public domain that we're shifting back, or pulling back… (from) where we were essentially in a competition with the Cognos and Business Objects of the world“ they said. What? Pulling back? Microsoft? Unheard of.

Microsoft’s aura of invincibility has been punctured. Once upon a time, if Microsoft entered a market, existing suppliers knew they were in trouble and clamoured to sell up and get out. Not anymore. Now they fancy their chances of winning against Microsoft and tucking into that soft underbelly of late-to-market indecisiveness that has bedevilled the company in recent years.

The lion needs to wake itself from its gentle slumber, put its teeth back in, get up from its soft bed of grass and go and kill something if it’s going to restore its lost pride of place in the industry. However, a change of leadership may be required at the very top of Microsoft for this goal to be achieved.

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 21st February 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

Innovation is a subject at the very top of the senior management agenda these days. This is hardly surprising when so many CEOs across all industries regularly re-iterate the mantra of “innovate or die” in the fast-moving highly competitive business environment of today.

The high tech industry has always been revered for its amazing ability to innovate. But most of the real innovation comes from entrepreneurial start-ups, rather than the established players. Large companies like Oracle, SAP, and IBM are built for internal efficiency and economies of scale rather than wacky off-the-wall thinking—they acquire the entrepreneurial start-ups for that. Over the past 5 years these three companies have acquired 100+ companies for exactly this reason.

But now the triumvirate claim to have cracked the elusive innovation code themselves. Oracle has just invited me to attend an event in London entitled ‘Oracle Applications: A New Standard for Innovation’. Apparently this show will help the audience to “harness the latest innovations for business success… ensuring that you gain an enterprise wide strategic advantage—from the front lines to the back office of your business”.

Arch-rivals SAP, still licking its wounds from having to pay out $1.3bn to Oracle after losing a legal case involving stealing Oracle’s IP innovations, has just set up its own innovation centre in Potsdam, Germany creating 100 new jobs. The SAP Innovation Center will collaborate with local universities and educational and research institutions.

"In Potsdam, we want to establish the typical flair and the agility of a young startup and… will enable brilliant colleagues to create beautiful products and break amazing new ground" SAP said. There have been many descriptions of SAP products over the past, but “beautiful” is not one of them. Perhaps this could be a healthy break from the past?

Meanwhile IBM already has a global network of 38 IBM Innovation Centers. IBM continues to emphasise its $6bn investment in R&D per year that yields c. 4,000 patents. Sadly the commercialisation of these undoubtedly fine ideas has been poor, resulting in IBM spending $30bn+ to acquire the technologies of innovative start-ups such as Netezza. IBM plans to spend another $20bn on acquisitions by 2015. This was not exactly what ex-IBM CEO Lou Gerstner had in mind when he wrote his autobiographical ‘Who Says Elephants Can't Dance?’ book in 2002.

In recent times both Microsoft and Google have also been criticised for falling behind the frantic pace of innovation change in the tech industry. They are elephants now—and why on earth would you want elephants to dance anyway? They have many other redeeming features such as strength, power, and robustness.

From a customer perspective elephants offer reliability and business continuity, and products that will (eventually anyway) work and be supported. The same can’t be said for the innovative ‘black swan ballet dancer’ start-ups in Silicon Valley whose mortality rate is still extraordinarily high.

The message for IT customers is not to expect real innovation from the big players no matter what they say or do—elephants are not built to produce it, and real innovation is no longer part their DNA. For real innovation you are better off scouring the Internet to find out what the visionary entrepreneurial start-ups are up to.

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

Join a panel discussion on the current state of enterprise architecture (EA) and which analyzes some new findings on the subject from a recently completed Infosys Technologies annual survey.

See how the architects themselves are defining the EA team concept, how enterprise architects are dealing with impact and engagement in their enterprises, and the latest definitions of EA deliverables and objectives. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We'll also look at where the latest trends around hot topics like cloud and mobile are pushing the enterprise architects. Toward a new future?

Assembled to delve into the current state of EA and the survey results are Len Fehskens, Vice President of Skills and Capabilities at The Open Group; Nick Hill, Principal Enterprise Architect at Infosys Technologies; Dave Hornford, Architecture Practice Principal at Integritas, as well as Chair of The Open Group’s Architecture Forum; Chris Forde, Vice President of Enterprise Architecture and Membership Capabilities for The Open Group; Andrew Guitarte, Enterprise Business Architect of Internet Services at Wells Fargo Bank, and Ahmed Fattah, Executive IT Architect in the Financial Services Sector for IBM, Australia. The panel is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Hill: There were some things that were different about this year’s survey. There are several major takeaways.

More and more, the business is taking hold of the value that enterprise architects bring to the table, enterprise architects have been able to survive the economic troubled times, and some companies have even increased their investment in EA.

If you took a look at this year’s survey compared to 2007–2008 surveys, largely they’ve come from core IT with some increase from the business side, business architects and some increase in project managers. The leader of the EA group is still reporting through the IT chain either to the CIO or the CTO.

We also introduced the notion of hot topics. So, we had some questions around cloud computing. And, we took a more forward-looking view in terms of not so much what has been transpiring with enterprise architectures since the last survey, but what are they looking to go forward to in terms of their endeavors. And, as we have been going through economic turmoil over the past 2–3 years, we asked some questions about that.

We did notice that, in terms of the team makeup, a lot of the sort of the constituents of the EA group are pretty much still the same, hailing from largely the IT core enterprise group. We looked at the engagement and impacts that they have had on their organizations and, as well, whether they have been able to establish the value that we've noticed that enterprise architects have been trying to accomplish over the past 3–4 years.

This was our fifth annual survey. We did try to do some comparative results from previous surveys and we found that some of things were the same, but there are some things that are shifting in terms of EA.

Forde: In terms of the dynamics of EA, we're constantly trying to justify why enterprise architects should exist in any organization. That's actually no different than most other positions are being reviewed on an ongoing basis, because of what the value proposition is for the organization.

What I'm seeing in Asia is that a number of academic organizations, universities, are looking for an opportunity to certify enterprise architects, and a number of organizations are initiating, still through the IT organization but at a very high CIO-, CTO-level, the value proposition of an architected approach to business problems.

What I'm seeing in Asia is an increasing recognition of the need for EA, but also a continuing question of, "If we're going to do this, what's the value proposition," which I think is just a reasonable conversation to have on a day-to-day basis anyway.

Fehskens: When you compare EA with all the other disciplines that make up a modern enterprise, it's the new kid on the block. EA, as a discipline, is maybe 20 years old, depending on what you count as the formative event, whereas most of the other disciplines that are part of the modern enterprise at least hundreds of years old.

So, this is both a real challenge and a real opportunity. The other functions have a pretty good understanding of what their business case is. They've been around for a long time, and the case that they can make is pretty familiar. Mostly they just have to argue in terms of more efficient or more effective delivery of their results.

For EA, the value proposition pretty much has to be reconstructed from whole cloth, because it didn't really exist, and the value of the function is still not that well understood throughout most of the business.

So, this is an opportunity as well as a challenge, because it forces the maturing of the discipline, unlike some of these older disciplines who had decades to figure out what it was that we're really doing. We have maybe a few years to figure out what it is we're really doing and what we're really contributing, and that helps a lot to accelerate the maturing of the discipline.

I don't think we're there completely yet, but I think EA, when it's well done, people do see the value. When it's not well done, it falls by the side of the road, which is to be expected. There's going to be a lot of that, because of the relative use of the discipline, but we'll get to the point where these other functions have and probably a lot faster than they did.

Hill: I think that’s very much the case. The caveat there is that it's not necessarily an ownership. It's a matter of participation and being able to weigh in on the business transformations that are happening and how EA can be instrumental in making those transformations successful.

Now, given that, the idea is that it's been more at a strategic level, and once that strategy is defined and you put that into play within an enterprise the idea is how does the enterprise architect really follow-through with that, if they are more focused on just the strategy not necessarily the implementation of that. That’s a big part of the challenge for enterprise architects—to understand how they percolate downwards the standards, the discipline of architecture that needs to be present within an organization to enable that strategy in transformation.

Fehskens: One of the things that I am seeing is an idea taking hold within the architecture community that architecture is really about making the connection between strategy and execution.

If you look at the business literature, that problem is one that’s been around for a long time. A lot of organizations evolved really good strategies and then failed in the execution, with people banging their heads against the wall, trying to figure out, "We had such a great strategy. Why couldn’t we really implement it?

I don’t know that anybody has actually done a study yet, but I would strongly suspect that, if they did, one of the things that they would discover was there wasn’t something that played the role of an architecture in making the connection between strategy and execution.

I see this is another great opportunity for architects, if we can express this idea in language that the business people understand, and strategy to execution is language that business people understand, and we can show them how architecture facilitates that connection. There is a great opportunity for a win-win situation for both the business and the architecture community.

Forde: I just wanted to follow the two points that are right here, and say that the strategy to execution problem space is not at all peculiar to IT architects or enterprise architects. It's a fundamental business problem. Companies that are good at translating that bridge are extremely effective and it's the role of architects in that, that’s the important thing, we have to have the place at the table.

But, to imagine that the enterprise architects are solely responsible for driving execution of a strategy in an organization is a fallacy, in my opinion. The need is to ensure that the team of people that are engaged in setting the strategy and executing on it are compelling enough to drive that through the organization. That is a management and an executive problem, a middle management problem, and then driving down to the delivery side. It's not peculiar to EA at all in my opinion.

Guitarte: From my experience of talking with people from the grassroots to the executive level, I have seen one very common observation, enterprise architects are caught off-guard, and the reason there is that there is this new paradigm. In fact, there is a shift in paradigm that business architecture is the new EA, and I am going out beyond my peers here in terms of predicting the future.

That is going to be the future. I am the founding chairman of the Business Architecture Society. Today, I am an advisory member of the Business Architecture Guild. We're writing, or even rewriting, the textbooks on EA. We're creating a handbook for business architects. What my peers have mentioned is that they are bridging the strategy and tactical demands and are producing the value that business has been asking for.

Fattah: The way I see the market is consistent with the results of the survey in that they see the emergence of the enterprise architect as business architect to work on a much wider space and make you focus more on the business. There are a number of catalysts for that. One of them is a business process, the rise of the business process management, as a very important discipline within the organization.

That, in a way, had some roots from Six Sigma, which was really a purely business aspect, but also from service oriented architecture (SOA), which has itself now developed into business process, decomposition and implementation.

That gives very good ammunition and support for the strategic decomposition of the whole enterprise as components that, with business process, is actually connecting elements between this. The business process architect is participating as a business architect using this business process as a major aspect for enabling business transformation.

I'm very encouraged with this development of business architecture. By the way, another catalyst now is a cloud. The cloud will actually purify or modify EA, because all the technical details maybe actually outsourced to the cloud provider, where the essence of what IT will support in the organization becomes the business process.

On one hand, I'm encouraged with the result of the survey and what I’ve seen in the organization, but on the other hand, I am disappointed that EA hasn’t developed these economic and business bases yet. I agree with Len that 20 years is a short time. On the other hand, it’s a long time for not applying this discipline in a consistent way. We’ll get much more penetration, especially with large organizations, commercial organizations, and not the academic side.

Hornford: I think what is driving [cloud adoption] is the ability to highlight the process or business service requirements, and not tie them to legacy investments that are not decomposed into a cloud. Where you have a separation to a cloud, you’re required to have the ability to improve your execution. The barriers in execution in our current world are very closely tied to our legacy investments in software asset with physical asset which are very closely tied to our organizational structure.

Forde: Any organization that hands over strategic planning or execution activity to a third-party is abdicating its own responsibility to shareholders, as they are a profit-making organizations. So I would not advocate that position at all. You give up control, and that’s not a good situation. You need to be in control of your own destiny. In terms of what Ahmed was talking about, you need to be very careful as you engage with the third-party that they are actually going to implement your strategic intent.

You need to have a really strong idea of what it is you want from the provider, articulating clearly, and set up a structure that allows you to manage and operate that with their strength in the game. If you just simply abdicate that responsibility and assume that that’s going to happen, it’s likely to fail.

Fattah: I agree, on one hand, the organization shouldn't abdicate the core function of the businesses in defining a strategy and then executing it right.

However, an example, which I'm seeing as a trend, but a very slow trend—outsourcing architecture itself to other organizations. We have one example in Australia of a very large organization, which gives IBM the project execution, the delivery organization. Part of that was architecture. I was part of this to define with the organization their enterprise architecture, the demarcation between what they outsource and what they retain.

Definitely, they have to retain certain important parts, which is strategy and high-level, but outsourcing is a catalyst to be able to define what's the value of this architecture. So the number of architectures within our software organization was looked with a greater scrutiny. They are monitoring the value of this delivery, and value was demonstrated. So the team actually grew; not shrunk.

Forde: In terms of outsourcing knowledge skills and experience in an architecture, this is a wave of activity that's going to be coming. My point wasn't that it wasn't a valid way to go, but you have to be very careful about how you approach it.

My experience out of the Indian subcontinent has been that having a bunch of people labeled as architects is different than having a bunch of people that have the knowledge, skills, and experience to deliver what is expected. But in that region, and in Asia and China in particular, what I'm seeing is a recognition that there is a market there. In North America and in Europe, there is a gap of people with these skills and experience. And folks who are entrepreneurial in their outlook in Asia are certainly looking to fill that gap.

So, Ahmed's model is one that can work well, and will be a burgeoning model over the next few years. You've to build the skill base first.

Guitarte: There's no disagreement about what's happening today, but I think the most important question is to ask why there is this shift. As Nick was saying, there is a shift of focus, and outsourcing is a symptom of that shift.

If you look back, Dave mentioned that in any organization there are two forces that tried to control the structure. One is the techno structure, which EA belongs to, and the main goal of a techno structure is to perpetrate themselves in power, to put it bluntly. Then, there is the other side, which is the shareholders, who want to maximize profit, and you've seen that cycle go back and forth.

Today, unfortunately, it's the shareholders who are winning. Outsourcing for them is a way to manage cash flow, to control costs, and unfortunately, we're getting hit.

Hill: The whole concept of leveraging the external resources for computing capabilities is something we drove at. We did find the purpose behind that, and it largely plays into our conversation behind the impact of business. It's more of a cost reduction play.

That's what our survey respondents replied to and said the reason why the organization was interested in cloud was to reduce cost. It's a very interesting concept, when you're looking at why the business sees it as a cost play, as opposed to a revenue-generating, profit-making endeavor. It causes some need for balance there.

Fehskens: The most interesting thing for me about cloud is that it replays a number of scenarios that we've seen happen over and over and over and over again. It's almost always the case that the initial driver for the business to get interested in something is to reduce cost. But, eventually, you squeeze all the water out of that stone and you have to start looking at some other reason to keep moving in that direction, keep exploiting that opportunity.

That almost invariably is added value. What's happening with cloud is that it’s forcing people to look at a lot of the issues that they started to address with SOA. But, the problem with SOA was that a lot of vendors managed to turn it into a technology issue. "Buy this product and you’ll have SOA," which distracted people from thinking about the real issue here, which is figuring out what are the services that the business needs.

Once you understand what the services are that the business needs, then you can go and look for the lowest-cost provider out in the cloud to make that connection. But, once you’ve already made that disconnection between the services that the business needs and how they are provided, you can then start orchestrating the services on the business side from a strategically driven perspective to look at the opportunities to create added value.

You can assemble the implementation that delivers that added value from resources that are already out there that you don’t have to rely on your in-house organization to create it from scratch. So, there’s a huge opportunity here, but it’s accompanied by an enormous risk. If you get this right, you're going to win big. But if you get it wrong, you are going to lose big.

Fattah: When we use the term, cloud, like many other terms, we refer to so many different things, and the cloud definitely has a focus. I agree that the focus now is on reducing cost. However, when you look at the cloud as providing pure business service such as software as a service (SaaS), but also business process orchestrated services with perhaps outsourcing business process itself, it has a huge potential to create this mindset for organization about what they are doing and in which part they have to minimize cost. That's where the service is a differentiator. They have to own it. They have to invest so much of it. And, they have to use the best around.

Definitely the cloud will play in different levels, but these levels where it will work in a business architecture is actually distilling the enterprise architecture into the essence of it, which is understanding what service do I need, how I sort the services, and how I integrate them together to achieve the value.

Hornford: We've talked in this group about the business struggle to execute. We also have to consider the ability of an enterprise architecture team to execute.

When we look at an organization that has historically come from and been very technically focused in enterprise IT, the struggle there, as Andrew said, is that it’s a self-perpetuating motion.

I keep running into architecture teams that talk about making sure that IT has a seat at the table. It’s a failure model, as opposed to going down the path that Len and Ahmed were talking about. That's identifying the services that the business needs, so that they can be effectively assembled, whether that assembly is inside the company, partly with a outsource provider, or is assembled as someone else doing the work.

That gets back to that core focus of the sub-discipline that is evolving at an even faster rate than enterprise architecture. That’s business architecture. We're 20 years into EA, but you can look at business literature going back a much broader period, talking about the difficulty of executing as a business.

This problem is not new. It’s a new player in it who has the capability to provide good advice, and the core of that I see for execution is an architecture team recognizing that they are advice providers, not doers, and they need to provide advice to a leadership team who can execute.

Forde: It’s interesting listening to Dave’s comments. What we have to gauge here is that the state of EA varies in maturity from industry to industry and organization to organization.

For the function to be saying "I need a place at the table" is an indication of a maturity level inside an organization. If we're going to say that an EA team that is looking for a place at the table is in a position to strategically advise the executives on what to do in an outsourcing agreement, that's a recipe for disaster.

However, if you're already in the position of being a trusted adviser within the organization, then it's a very powerful position. It reflects the model that you just described, Dana.

Organizations and the enterprise architecture team at the business units need to be reflecting on where they are and how they can play in the model that Ahmed and Dave are talking about. There is no one-size-fits-all here from an EA perspective, I think it really varies from organization to organization.

Hill: One of the major focus areas that we found in the survey is that, when we talk about business architecture, the reality is that there's a host of new technologies that have emerged with Web 2.0 and are emerging in grid computing, cloud computing, and those types of things that surely are alluring to the business. The challenge for the enterprise architecture is to take a look at what those legacy systems that are already invested in in-house and how an organization is going to transition that legacy environment to the new computing paradigms, do that efficiently, and at the same time be able to hit the business goals and objectives.

It's a conundrum that the enterprise architects have to deal with, because there is a host of legacy investment that is there. In Infosys, we've seen a large uptake in the amount of modernization and rationalization of portfolios going on with our clientele.

That's an important indicator that there is this transition happening and the enterprise architects are right in the middle of that, trying to coach and counsel the business leadership and, at the same time, provide the discipline that needs to happen on each and every project, and not just the very large projects or transformation initiatives that organizations are going through.

The key point here is that the enterprise architects are in the middle of this game. They are very instrumental in bringing these two worlds together, and the idea that they need to have more of a business acumen, business savvy, to understand how those things are affecting the business community, is going to be critical.

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

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

The Open Group Conference in San Diego last week included a formal cloud computing conference stream on Wednesday, followed in that evening by an unstructured CloudCamp -- which made an interesting contrast.

The cloud conference stream
The Cloud Conference stream featured presentations on architecting for cloud and cloud security, and included a panel discussion on the considerations that must be made when choosing a cloud solution.

In the first session of the morning, we had two presentations on architecting for cloud. Both considered TOGAF as the architectural context. The first, from Stuart Boardman of Getronics, explored the conceptual difference that cloud makes to enterprise architecture, and the challenge of communicating an architecture vision and discussing the issues with stakeholders in the subsequent TOGAF phases.

The second, from Serge Thorn of Architecting the Enterprise, looked at the considerations in each TOGAF phase, but in a more specific way. The two presentations showed different approaches to similar subject matter, which proved a very stimulating combination.

This session was followed by a presentation from Steve Else of EA Principals in which he shared several use cases related to cloud computing. Using these, he discussed solution architecture considerations, and put forward the lessons learned and some recommendations for more successful planning, decision-making, and execution. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

We then had the first of the day’s security-related presentations. It was given by Omkhar Arasaratnam of IBM and Stuart Boardman of Getronics. It summarized the purpose and scope of the Security for the Cloud and SOA project that is being conducted in The Open Group as a joint project of The Open Group's Cloud Computing Work Group, the SOA Work Group, and Security Forum. Omkhar and Stuart described the usage scenarios that the project team is studying to guide its thinking, the concepts that it is developing, and the conclusions that it has reached so far.

The first session of the afternoon was started by Ed Harrington of Architecting the Enterprise, who gave an interesting presentation on current U.S. Federal Government thinking on enterprise architecture, showing clearly the importance of cloud computing to U.S. Government plans.

The U.S. is a leader in the use of IT for government and administration, so we can expect that its conclusions – that cloud computing is already making its way into the government computing fabric, and that enterprise architecture, instantiated as SOA and properly governed, will provide the greatest possibility of success in its implementation – will have a global impact.

We then had a panel session, moderated by Dana Gardner with his usual insight and aplomb, that explored the considerations that must be made when choosing a cloud solution — custom or shrink-wrapped — and whether different forms of cloud computing are appropriate to different industry sectors.

The panelists represented different players in the cloud solutions market – customers, providers, and consultants – so that the topic was covered in depth and from a variety of viewpoints. They were Penelope Gordon of 1Plug Corp., Mark Skilton of Capgemini, Ed Harrington of Architecting the Enterprise, Tom Plunkett of Oracle, and TJ Virdi of the Boeing Co.

In the final session of the conference stream, we returned to the topic of cloud security. Paul Simmonds, a member of the Board of the Jericho Forum, gave an excellent presentation on de-risking the cloud through effective risk management, in which he explained the approach that the Jericho Forum has developed. The session was then concluded by Andres Kohn of Proofpoint, who addressed the question of whether data can be more secure in the cloud, considering public, private and hybrid cloud environment.

CloudCamp
The CloudCamp was hosted by The Open Group but run as a separate event, facilitated by CloudCamp organizer Dave Nielsen. There were around 150-200 participants, including conference delegates and other people from the San Diego area who happened to be interested in the cloud.

Dave started by going through his definition of cloud computing. Perhaps he should have known better – starting a discussion on terminology and definitions can be a dangerous thing to do with an Open Group audience. He quickly got into a good-natured argument from which he eventually emerged a little bloodied, metaphorically speaking, but unbowed.

We then had eight “lightning talks”. These were five-minute presentations covering a wide range of topics, including how to get started with cloud (Margaret Dawson, Hubspan), supplier/consumer relationship (Brian Loesgen, Microsoft), cloud-based geographical mapping (Ming-Hsiang Tsou, San Diego University), a patterns-based approach to cloud (Ken Klingensmith, IBM), efficient large-scale data processing (Alex Rasmussen, San Diego University), using desktop spare capacity as a cloud resource (Michael Krumpe, Intelligent Technology Integration), cost-effective large-scale data processing in the cloud (Patrick Salami, Temboo), and cloud-based voice and data communication (Chris Matthieu, Tropo).

The participants then split into groups to discuss topics proposed by volunteers. There were eight topics altogether. Some of these were simply explanations of particular products or services offered by the volunteers’ companies. Others related to areas of general interest such as data security and access control, life-changing cloud applications, and success stories relating to “big data”.

I joined the groups discussing cloud software development on Amazon Web Services (AWS) and Microsoft Azure. These sessions had excellent information content which would be valuable to anyone wishing to get started in – or who is already engaged in – software development on these platforms.

They also brought out two points of general interest. The first is that the dividing line between IaaS and PaaS can be very thin. AWS and Azure are, in theory, on opposite sides of this divide; in practice they provide the developer with broadly similar capabilities. The second point is that in practice your preferred programming language and software environment is likely to be the determining factor in your choice of cloud development platform.

Overall, the CloudCamp was a great opportunity for people to absorb the language and attitudes of the cloud community, to discuss ideas, and to pick up specific technical knowledge. It gave an extra dimension to the conference, and we hope that this can be repeated at future events by The Open Group.

This guest post comes courtesy of Dr. Chris Harding, Director for Interoperability and SOA at The Open Group.

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

Given what they are and where they have been, there's little logical reason for Microsoft not dominating the mobile smartphone computing landscape. And it should have been a done-deal in many global major markets at least four years ago.

The only reason that Microsoft is now partnering with Nokia on mobile—clearly not the client giant's first and primary strategy on winning the market—is because of a lack of execution. I surely recall speaking to Microsofties as many as 10 years ago, and they were all-in on the importance and imperative for mobile platforms. Windows CE's heritage is long and deep. Nokia just as well knew the stakes, knew the technology directions, knew the competition.

Now. In the above two paragraphs replace the words "Microsoft" and "Nokia." Still works. Both had huge wind in their sails (sales?) to steer into the mobile category for keeps, nay to define and deliver the mobile category to a hungry world and wireless provider landscape... on their, the platform-providers', terms!

So now here we have two respective global giants who had a lead, one may even say a monopoly or monopoly-adjacency, in mobile and platforms and tools for mobile. And now it is together and somehow federated—rather than separately or in traditional OEM partnership—that they will rear up and gallop toward the front of the mobile device pack—the iOS, Android, RIM and HP-Palm pack. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

How exactly is their respective inability, Microsoft and Nokia, to execute separately amid huge market position advantages enhanced now by trying to execute in cahoots ... loosely, based mostly on a common set of foes? I'll point you to the history of such business alliances, often based on fear, and its not any better than the history of big technology mergers and acquisitions. It stinks. It stinks for end-users, investors, partners and employees.

But why not reward the leadership of these laggards with some more perks and bonuses? Works in banking.

A developer paradise
And talk about an ace in the hole. Not long ago, hordes of developers and ISVs—an entire global ecosystem—were begging Microsoft to show them the mobile way, how to use their Visual Studio skills to skin the new cat of mobile apps. They were sheep waiting to be lead (and not to slaughter). The shepherd, it turned out, was out to lunch. Wily Coyote, super genius.

And execution is not the only big reason these companies have found themselves scrambling as the world around them shifts mightily away. Each Microsoft and Nokia clearly had the innovators dilemma issues in droves. But these were no secret. (See reason one above on execution again ... endless loop).

Microsoft had the fat PC business to protect, which as usual divided the company on how to proceed on any other course, Titantic-like. Nokia had the mobile voice business and mobile telecom provider channel to protect. So many masters, so many varieties of handsets and localizations to cough up. Motorola had a tough time with that one too. Yes, it was quite a distraction.

But again, how do these pressures to remain inert inside of older models change by the two giants teaming up? Unless they spin off the right corporate bits and re-assemble them together under a shared brand, and go after the market anew, the financial pressures not to change fast remain steadfast. (See reason one above on execution again ... endless loop).

What's more there's no time to pull off such a corporate shell game. The developers are leaving (or left), the app store model is solidifying elsewhere, the carriers are being pulled by the end-users expectations (and soon enterprises). And so this Microsoft-Nokia mashup is an eighth-inning change in the line-up and there's no time to go back to Spring training and create a new team.

Too little, too late
Nope, I just can't see how these synergies signal anything but a desperation play. Too little, too late, too complex, too hard to execute. Too much baggage.

At best, the apps created for a pending Nokia-Microsoft channel nee platform will be four down the list for native app support. More likely, HTML 5 and mobile web support (standards, not native) may prove enough to include the market Microsoft and Nokia muster together. But that won't be enough to reverse their lackluster mobile position, or get them the synergies they crave.

Each Microsoft and Nokia were dark horses in the mobile devices and associated cloud services race. Attempting to hitch the two horses together with baling wire and press releases doesn't get them any kind of leg up on the competition. It may even hobble them for good.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 15th February 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

The exploding popularity of smartphones and tablets has driven expectations for access to information at any location, anytime, anywhere. Consumerisaton of technology means that mobile devices, whether rolled out by IT or brought in through the back door, are already a critical component of business communications. Despite the device management and security risks that this poses for IT, mobile devices undoubtedly boost employee productivity. The fast adoption of mobile computing is reshaping the need for business applications that have the flexibility to work on a variety of platforms, and this particularly applies to the printing market which is seeing the emergence of applications and services to enhance productivity for mobile workers.

The complexity of the print and mobile worlds
Increasing mobility brings both opportunities and challenges to printer vendors. With printed material still pervasive across most businesses, the opportunity to enable mobile workers to print reports, emails, maps or web content directly from their smartphones or tablet devices, irrespective of location or printer device, is certainly an aid to productivity. However, one characteristic that the print and mobile environments share is complexity. A disparate array of mobile devices with proprietary platforms such as Nokia’s Symbian OS, Apple’s iOS, Google’s Android and RIM’s BlackBerry OS is matched by a myriad of printer devices that share no real common standard when it comes to software or drivers. Printer vendors must therefore develop support for each mobile platform, as missing support for one of these platforms means potentially missing a huge chunk of the market.

For mobile workers who wish to print from a laptop to any device that may be available at a given location, universal print drivers are available. However, for smartphone users the options are not so simple. Printer drivers can consume anywhere from 60MB to 240MB of memory and can drain battery life, meaning that it is not always feasible to build and maintain embedded printing capability for each platform. Consequently, printer vendors such as HP are turning to cloud services to deliver print capabilities, requiring the emailing of documents from a smartphone to a registered printer.  The exception to this is Apple’s AirPrint, which provides direct support for printing from iPhones, iPads and iPod Touches through an embedded operating system function—but only to HP’s range of AirPrint compatible printers.

HP’s ePrint
HP’s main offering for mobile workers is based on its ePrint technology. HP ePrint Enterprise allows printing from any networked company printer, and any mobile device via their organisation with the HP ePrint enterprise server software enabling a “private cloud”. With the ePrint mobile app on their BlackBerry smartphone, the user can easily search for, and print to, any printer within their enterprise that they have permission to print to. And if the company wants to enable non-BlackBerry users to print, they simply email a document from their corporate email account, sending it to an enabled printer’s individual email address. The solution is printer agnostic. An employee visiting a new office location could send documents to printers in the corporate network as well as to public HP ePrint locations. HP ePrint Enterprise is currently available as part of an HP managed print services (MPS) agreement. Mobile workers can also use ePrint to print securely as it can be integrated with “pull printing” capabilities which require user authentication such as company ID swipe cards to release printed documents.

In addition, for workers who frequently travel or work remotely, HP ePrint is available as a free app for BlackBerry smartphones. With the HP ePrint mobile app, BlackBerry smartphone users can quickly search for and print to select public HP ePrint mobile print locations, such as copy retail stores, hotels, airport lounges and more. In the US, for instance, over 1,600 FedEx Office locations across the U.S. now offer mobile printing services powered by HP ePrint.

HP is not alone in offering a cloud service approach for mobile printing. Xerox’s Mobile Print Solution supports any of its Extensible Interface Platform (EIP) enabled multifunction peripherals (MFPs) while Ricoh’s HotSpot printing enables printing from mobile devices to Ricoh HotSpot compatible printers. With few organisations operating a standardised print environment, the lack of standardised mobile printing between vendors means enterprises could end up evaluating multiple solutions to meet their smartphone print requirement, which begs the question—do smartphone users really need to print?

The mobile print opportunity
Certainly, there are benefits to providing capabilities to print on the move, at different office locations or coffee shops, hotels or airports—but only if a range of printers are supported and, currently, this is not possible across mobile platforms. But when it comes to the office, do businesses really want to give their employees free reign to print from their mobile devices? As is the case with any IT service, which can either drive user productivity or be a major overall cost, a business has to navigate the fine line between permissiveness and control.

There is always the possibility that permitting printing from mobile devices could lead to unwarranted printing. Fortunately, many printer vendors are actually helping their customers minimise wasteful printing through centralised controls such as establishing print quotas, rules and policies. Quocirca therefore recommends that mobile printing solutions are deployed in the context of an overall print policy or managed print service that aims to avoid escalating costs from wasteful mobile printing in the office.

Mobile printing is clearly at the embryonic stages, but as workforce mobility increases, it certainly provides printer vendors with additional opportunity to capture further pages. Increased enterprise mobility will further drive the need for enterprise applications to support mobile platforms which could in turn increase the opportunity for mobile printing from such applications.

Future directions
So what is the future for mobile printing? This will probably come from closer collaboration between the mobile platform developers and printer manufacturers. Google is currently in beta development of its Google Cloud Print service which allows enabled apps to print from any web-connected mobile devices such as those running Google Chrome OS and other mobile operating systems, without the need to install drivers. Printer drivers are effectively located in the cloud, on Google’s servers, and the ideal approach is for printers to have native support for connecting to cloud print services. This requires what Google calls “cloud-aware printers” that, unfortunately, don’t exist yet. If Google does successfully engage with printer vendors in this initiative it promises to provide the most standardised print experience for mobile users, irrespective of platform or printer.

HP is particularly well positioned to capitalise on any potential opportunity from bringing the mobile and print worlds together, given its presence in both markets. Its acquisition of Palm has already spawned a range of WebOS-based web-connected printers for the consumer market, and Quocirca expects to see further innovation around future offerings that leverage its mobile device, software and printing expertise. 

Ultimately, three factors will probably serve to expand the opportunity for mobile printing—firstly, mobile sales showing no sign of abating; secondly, business enthusiasm for remote and mobile working continues; and finally our preference for printed documents will remain. As the communications habits of consumers and enterprise workers continue to evolve, and digital content continues to proliferate providing print functionality for devices such as smartphones and tablets can only further enhance the mobile user experience. 

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 11th February 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

I recently looked back at some significant papers that had influenced my thinking on cloud computing as part of a review on current strategic trends. In February 2009, a paper published at the University of California, Berkeley, “Above the Clouds: A Berkeley View of Cloud Computing," stands out as the first of many papers to drive out the issues around the promise of cloud computing and technology barriers to achieving secure elastic service.

The key issue unfolding at that time was the transfer of risk that resulted from moving to a cloud environment and the obstacles to security, performance and licensing that would need to evolve. But the genie was out of the bottle, as successful early adopters could see cost savings and rapid one-to-many monetization benefits of on-demand services. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

A second key moment was the realization that the exchange of services was no longer a simple request and response. Social networks had demonstrated huge communities of collaboration and online “personas” changing individual and business network interactions, but something else had happened—less obvious but more profound.

This change was made most evident in the proliferation of mobile computing that greatly expanded the original on-premise move to off-premise services. A key paper by Intel Research titled “CloneCloud,” published around that same time period, exemplified this shift. Services could be cloned and moved into the cloud, demonstrating the possible new realities in redefining the real potential of how work gets done using cloud computing.

Remote services
The key point was that storage or processing transactions, media streaming, or complex calculations no longer had to be executed within a physical device. It could be provided as a service from remote source, a virtual cloud service.

But more significant was the term “multiplicity” in this concept. We see this everyday as we download apps, stream video, and transact orders. The fact was that you could do not only a few, but multiple tasks, simultaneously and pick and choose the services and results.

This signaled a big shift away from the old style of thinking about business services that had us conditioned to think of service-oriented requests in static, tiered, rigid ways. Those business processes and services missed this new bigger picture. Just take a look at the phenomenon called "hyperlocal services" that offer location specific on-demand information or how crowd sourcing can dramatically transform purchasing choices and collaboration incentives.

Traditional ways of measuring, modeling and running business operations are under-utilizing this potential and under-valuing what can be possible in these new collaborative networks. The new multiplicity-based world of cloud-enabled networks means you can augment yourself and your company’s assets in ways that change the shape of your industry.

What is needed is a new language to describe how this shift feels and works, and how advances in your business portfolio can be realized with these modern ideas, often by examining current methods and standards of strategy visualization, metrics, and design to evolve a new expression of this potential.

Some two years have passed, and what has been achieved? Certainly we have seen the huge proliferation of services into a cloud hosting environment. Large strategic movements in private data centers seek to develop private cloud services, by bringing together social media and social networking through cloud technologies.

But what's needed now is a new connection between the potential of these technologies and the vision of the Internet, the growth of social graph associations, and the wider communities and ecosystems that are emerging in the movement’s wake.

With every new significant disruptive change, there is also the need for a new language to help describe this new world. Open standards and industry forums will help drive this. The old language focuses on the previous potential, and so a new way to visualize, define, and use the new realities can help the big shift toward the potential above the cloud.

This guest post comes courtesy of Mark Skilton of Capgemini Global Applications, and The Open Group.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 11th February 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

San Diego -- There are so many things going on at every Conference by The Open Group that it is impossible to keep track of all of them, and this week’s conference here is no exception. The main themes are cybersecurity, enterprise architecture, SOA and cloud computing. Additional topics range from real-time and embedded systems to quantum lifecycle management.

But there are a number of common threads running through all of those themes, relating to value delivered to IT customers through open systems. One of those threads is interoperability.

Interoperability panel session
The interoperability thread showed strongly in several sessions on the opening day of the conference, Monday Feb. 7, starting with a panel session on Interoperability Challenges for 2011 that I was fortunate to have been invited to moderate. [Disclosure: The Open Group is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The panelists were Arnold van Overeem of Capgemini, chair of the Architecture Forum’s Interoperability project, Ron Schuldt, the founder of UDEF-IT and chair of the Semantic Interoperability Work Group’s UDEF project, TJ Virdi of Boeing, co-chair of The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group, and Bob Weisman of Build-the-Vision, chair of The Open Group Architecture Forum’s Information Architecture project. The audience was drawn from many companies, both members and non-members of The Open Group, and made a strong contribution to the debate.

What is interoperability? The panel described several essential characteristics:

• Systems with different owners and governance models work together;
• They exchange and understand data automatically;
• They form an information-sharing environment in which business information is available in the right context, to t he right person, and at the right time; and
• This environment enables processes, as well as information, to be shared.

Interoperability is not just about the IT systems. It is also about the ecosystem of user organizations, and their cultural and legislative context.

Semantics is an important component of interoperability. It is estimated that 65 percent of data warehouse projects fail because of their inability to cope with a huge number of data elements, differently defined.

There is a constant battle for interoperability. Systems that lock customers in by refusing to interoperate with those of other vendors can deliver strong commercial profit. This strategy is locally optimal but globally disastrous; it gives benefits to both vendors and customers in the short term, but leads in the longer term to small markets and siloed systems. The front line is shifting constantly. There are occasional resounding victories – as with the introduction of the Internet – but the normal state is trench warfare with small and painful gains and losses.

Blame for lack of interoperability is often put on the vendors, but this is not really fair. Vendors must work within what is commercially possible. Customer organizations can help the growth of interoperability by applying pressure and insisting on support for standards. This is in their interests; integration required by lack of interoperability is currently estimated to account for over 25 percent of IT spend.

SOA has proved a positive force for interoperability. By embracing SOA, a customer organization can define its data model and service interfaces, and tender for competing solutions that conform to its interfaces and meet its requirements. Services can be shared processing units forming part of the ecosystem environment.

The latest IT phenomenon is cloud computing. This is in some ways reinforcing SOA as an interoperability enabler. Shared services can be available on the cloud, and the ease of provisioning services in a cloud environment speeds up the competitive tendering process.

But there is one significant area in which cloud computing gives cause for concern: lack of interoperability between virtualization products. Virtualization is a core enabling technology for cloud computing, and virtualization products form the basis for most private cloud solutions. These products are generally vendor-specific and without interoperable interfaces, so that it is difficult for a customer organization to combine different virtualization products in a private cloud, and easy for it to become locked in to a single vendor.

There is a need for an overall interoperability framework within which standards can be positioned, to help customers express their interoperability requirements effectively. This framework should address cultural and legal aspects, and architectural maturity, as well as purely technical aspects. Semantics will be a crucial element.

Such a framework could assist the development of interoperable ecosystems, involving multiple organizations. But it will also help the development of architectures for interoperability within individual organizations – and this is perhaps of more immediate concern.

The Open Group can play an important role in the development of this framework, and in establishing it with customers and vendors.

SOA/TOGAF practical guide
SOA is an interoperability enabler, but establishing SOA within an enterprise is not easy to do. There are many stakeholders involved, with particular concerns to be addressed. This presents a significant task for enterprise architects.

TOGAF has long been established as a pragmatic framework that helps enterprise architects deliver better solutions. The Open Group is developing a practical guide to using TOGAF for SOA, as a joint project of its SOA Work Group and The Open Group Architecture Forum.

This work is now nearing completion. Ed Harrington of Architecting-the-Enterprise had overcome the considerable difficulty of assembling and adding to the material created by the project to form a solid draft. This was discussed in detail by a small group, with some participants joining by teleconference. As well as Ed, this group included Mats Gejnevall of Capgemini and Steve Bennett of Oracle, and it was led by project co-chairs Dave Hornford of Integritas and Awel Dico of the Bank of Montreal.

The discussion resolved all the issues, enabling the preparation of a draft for review by The Open Group, and we can expect to see this valuable guide published at the conclusion of the review process.

UDEF deployment workshop
The importance of semantics for interoperability was an important theme of the interoperability panel discussion. The Open Group is working on a specific standard that is potentially a key enabler for semantic interoperability: the Universal Data Element Framework (UDEF).

It had been decided at the previous conference, in Amsterdam, that the next stage of UDEF development should be a deployment workshop. This was discussed by a small group, under the leadership of UDEF project chair Ron Schuldt, again with some participation by teleconference.

The group included Arnold van Overeem of Capgemini, Jayson Durham of the US Navy, and Brand Niemann of the Semantic Community. Jayson is a key player in the Enterprise Lexicon Services (ELS) initiative, which aims to provide critical information interoperability capabilities through common lexicon and vocabulary services. Brand is a major enthusiast for semantic interoperability with connections to many US semantic initiatives, and currently to the Air Force OneSource project in particular, which is evolving a data analysis tool used internally by the USAF Global Cyberspace Integration Center (GCIC) Vocabulary Services Team, and made available to general data management community. The participation of Jayson and Brand provided an important connection between the UDEF and other semantic projects.

As a result of the discussions, Ron will draft an interoperability scenario that can be the basis of a practical workshop session at the next conference, which is in London.

Complex cloud environments
Cloud Computing is the latest hot technology, and its adoption is having some interesting interoperability implications, as came out clearly in the Interoperability panel session. In many cases, an enterprise will use, not a single cloud, but multiple services in multiple clouds. These services must interoperate to deliver value to the enterprise. The Complex Cloud Environments conference stream included two very interesting presentations on this.

The first, by Mark Skilton and Vladimir Baranek of Capgemini, explained how new notations for cloud can help explain and create better understanding and adoption of new cloud-enabled services and the impact of social and business networks. As cloud environments become increasingly complex, the need to explain them clearly grows.

Consumers and vendors of cloud services must be able to communicate. Stakeholders in consumer organizations must be able to discuss their concerns about the cloud environment. The work presented by Mark and Vladimir grew from discussions in a CloudCamp that was held at a previous Conference by The Open Group. We hope that it can now be developed by The Open Group Cloud Computing Work Group to become a powerful and sophisticated language to address this communication need.

The second presentation, from Soobaek Jang of IBM, addressed the issue of managing and coordinating across a large number of instances in a cloud computing environment. He explained an architecture for “Multi-Node Management Services” that acts as a framework for auto-scaling in a SaaS lifecycle, putting structure around self-service activity, and providing a simple and powerful web service orientation that allows providers to manage and orchestrate deployments in logical groups.

SOA conference stream
The principal presentation in this stream picked up on one of the key points from the Interoperability panel session in a very interesting way. It showed how a formal ontology can be a practical basis for common operation of SOA repositories. Semantic interoperability is at the cutting edge of interoperability, and is more often the subject of talk than of action. The presentation included a demonstration, and it was great to see the ideas put to real use.

The presentation was given jointly by Heather Kreger, SOA Work Group Co-chair, and Vince Brunssen, Co-chair of SOA Repository Artifact Model and Protocol (S-RAMP) at OASIS. Both presenters are from IBM. S-Ramp is an emerging standard from OASIS that enables interoperability between tools and repositories for SOA. It uses the formal SOA Ontology that was developed by The Open Group, with extensions to enable a common service model as well as an interoperability protocol.

This presentation illustrated how S-RAMP and the SOA Ontology work in concert with The Open Group SOA Governance Framework to enable governance across vendors. It contained a demonstration that included defining new service models with the S-RAMP extensions in one SOA repository and communicating with another repository to augment its service model.

To conclude the session, I gave a brief presentation on SOA in the Cloud – the Next Challenge for Enterprise Architects. This discussed how the SOA architectural style is widely accepted as the style for enterprise architecture, and how cloud computing is a technical possibility that can be used in enterprise architecture. Architectures using cloud computing should be service-oriented, but this poses some key questions for the architect. Architecture governance must change in the context of cloud-based ecosystems. It may take some effort to keep to the principles of the SOA style – but it will be important to do this. And the organization of the infrastructure – which may migrate from the enterprise to the cloud – will present an interesting challenge.

Enabling semantic interoperability
The day was rounded off by an evening meeting, held jointly with the local chapter of the IEEE, on semantic interoperability. The meeting featured a presentation by Ron Schuldt, UDEF Project Chair, on the history, current state, and future goals of the UDEF.

The importance of semantics as a component of interoperability was clear in the morning’s panel discussion. In this evening session, Ron explained how the UDEF can enable semantic interoperability, and described the plans of the UDEF Project Team to expand the framework to meet the evolving needs of enterprises today and in the future.

This meeting was arranged through the good offices of Jayson Durham, and it was great that local IEEE members could join conference participants for an excellent session.

This guest post comes courtesy of Dr. Chris Harding, Director for Interoperability and SOA at The Open Group.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 10th February 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

As the realisation comes to the software market that the new generation of workers need user interfaces that fit with the lifestyle of Facebook, Twitter and mobile phones with apps, we are starting to see how various software companies are meeting these changes. For the BPMS market, Appian have always been one of the companies leading the way and with the release of Appian 6.5, which includes a new interface called Appian Tempo, they have produced a release that is geared towards the end user of BPMS-driven solutions in terms of a mobile and social interface with cloud capabilities.

Malcolm Ross, Appian’s Director of Product Management, told me “The release delivers a revolutionary way to extend process visibility and participation through native mobile device access, real-time collaboration, filtered and personalised views of key business events, integration to external systems, and the ability to take direct action in a familiar and intuitive social media interface.” So what does the new Appian interface deliver?

Mobility

Appian Tempo provides native client applications for the Apple iPad, iPod Touch and iPhone as well as RIM BlackBerry devices. Ross explained that mobile BPM allows employees to stay connected, allowing them to monitor, collaborate and take action on important business decisions regardless of where they are. It also extends BPM participation beyond pre-defined process participants to include all levels of the organisation. The iPhone and iPad applications are available for immediate download from the Apple App Store. The BlackBerry application is available now from the Appian Forum community site, and will be available shortly on the BlackBerry App World site. A native application for Google Android devices will be available shortly.

Figure 1: Appian Tempo user interface on BlackBerry, iPad and iPhone. (Source: Appian)

Social

There always seems to be a contradiction about incorporating social media into a business world. Social technologies are powerful communication and collaboration platforms, but they must be harnessed in a business context to have business value. Ross explained, “Appian utilises familiar social tools and interfaces to drive business collaboration across the enterprise through personalised, filtered views that allow easy collaboration with the ability to take action when needed.” Users can filter views by relevant application or process areas and subscribe to customised feeds to monitor the key events and information that is meaningful to them. As well, users can comment, pose questions and collaborate on business events through real-time message posts and ad hoc updates to targeted groups within and outside of pre-planned business processes. The last user capability is to “Take Action”; here a user can generate actions and complete tasks from inside the event feed or from a mobile device, using optimised web and mobile forms to capture data and route tasks.

Customer-Driven

Samir Gulati, Appian’s Vice President of Marketing, described how Appian 6.5, and in particular Appian Tempo, had been driven by their customers’ business needs. One example is Archstone, a leading apartment management company, headquartered in the USA. Archstone have a highly mobile and dispersed workforce which is supported by a system built on Appian. David Carpenter, Director of BPM, Archstone, stated that “Appian Tempo delivers a new level of value to our customer service associates through instant mobile access to our key enterprise processes and forms.”

Comment

I was very impressed with the demonstration of Appian 6.5 and the Appian Tempo interface. From an end user viewpoint it opens up the ability to make real-time decisions where and when they are needed by using collaborative technology. The product is definitely easy-to-use and intuitive. While all events and collaborations can be secured at a granular level, organisations that make use of the new Appian release will need to think about the security implications of the information that can be shared.

In addition to on-premise deployment, Appian has emerged as the BPM-in-the-cloud market leader. When you add the capabilities of Appian Tempo to those already in the Appian BPMS and Appian Anywhere, as well as Appian’s specific knowledge about industries such as government and financial services, you have a very compelling proposition.

By: Natalie Newman, Senior Analyst, Bloor Research Posted: 25th January 2011 Copyright Bloor Research © 2011

I am not referring to Cloud Computing but rather the cloud of confusion prevailing over geographic information amongst the general public. The confusion over this type of information; the confusion over the many terms used for information that can be linked to the earth's surface; and the confusion over maps.

Watching a TV program the other evening called, ‘The Beauty of Maps' highlighted the subjectivity of maps. The map maker has cartographic licence to create a map display which projects his interpretation of the subject; whether it is to visualise the topography correctly and read the labels easily, or to project an image that might not be true. This program described William Morgan's 1682 Map of London. He created a map of a city after it was destroyed by The Great Fire. His map illustrated the city he envisaged London would become. St Paul's Cathedral was well illustrated on the map even though it was totally destroyed and had yet to be rebuilt. Maps project what the creator intends.

There is a book written by Allan and Barbara Pease called ‘Why men don't listen and women can't read maps'.The theory goes that "due to their different roles in evolution, men had to hunt and stalk their prey, so became skilled at navigation, while women foraged for food and so became good at spotting fruits and nuts close by" [The Telegraph website]. I am not sure that explains it and, if one can generalise quite so simply, women should then be the bigger enthusiast about SatNavs. Maybe the ‘don't listen' bit prevents men from asking for or listening to directions :)

Returning to the subject—there is a great lack of understanding amongst laymen about location and geographic information systems (GIS)—as my previous article described the need to increase aWhereness. Location information—or whatever we want to call it—is simply the position on the earth's surface to the accuracy that is possible, and/or the accuracy that is required.

Initially Google Maps and Google Earth provided much needed publicity for geographic information. Google Maps, or similar, is used by most people I know to find their destination and obtain directions to reach it. Google Earth stirred an interest in places we might not visit but can view. So much good has emanated from those two applications to raise the profile of location.

The downside is that there is still not enough understanding or appreciation of the implications of geographic information and the systems. The associated costs are now even harder to sell as ‘Google is free'.

The Google application, Latitude, enables a mobile phone user to allow certain people to view their current location. I assume that these locations include both the longitude and latitude measurement; just the distance from the equator would not really help anyone.

Another term to increase the confusion, or is Google taking latitude with Latitude?

In addition, according to the latest Apollo survey table measuring the media coverage per technology company, Google came 1st in Europe and in USA, and 3rd in UK!  With that much media exposure, we should not underestimate the influence of Google!

We will have to tell a convincing story about the necessary investment to add location to your business systems. We will have to ensure that the longitude accompanies the latitude and makes good sense.

That means we, geographic professionals will have to work that much harder to tell—and sell—our story.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Building blocks of Unified Comms

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

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

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

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

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

By: Martino Corbelli, Director of Marketing, Star Posted: 12th January 2011 Copyright Star © 2011

For many businesses, the traditional role of the CIO is to help drive the company’s business strategy forward through the appropriate application of technology to automate processes, reduce costs and open up access to new markets and opportunities. There are many challenges facing IT leaders ranging from mobile working to security and data protection. Unfortunately, most of the people working in the IT department today are primarily occupied with maintaining and updating existing systems, or working hard just to ‘keep the lights on’, so to speak. If they are not doing routine work of this nature then they are typically fire-fighting as entropy sets in to existing systems and processes making them fail as they become outdated.

This means that most people working in IT are working reactively and it’s no surprise they are finding it difficult to do more with an ever-decreasing IT budget. The result for most IT departments is that they are now being challenged by their business leaders who do not believe that IT is serving them sufficiently to help meet their corporate goals. Having recently conducted a survey of 360 senior IT managers across every sector of UK enterprise, we discovered that 60% of managers cite administration and trouble shooting as the main time consumers within their jobs. Now is the time to begin to challenge this poor application of important resources and ensure that the role the IT department plays is securing business success by accelerating the execution of business objectives. So the big question for CIOs and their IT people is how do you move from being seen as the maintenance team to a key strategic enabler?

Why IT matters
Despite the fact that IT can be harnessed to provide an important driving force for any organisation, 44% of IT managers feel that they are not consulted on business issues because senior managers see them as the maintenance engineers. This is because they are often locked into the hardware and software upgrade and maintenance cycle, an area proving to be increasingly challenging with dwindling budgets. This cycle is holding them and their business leaders back from realising their potential.

This is not helped by the fact that many managers still feel that IT vendors do not really understand small and medium sized companies in the UK, nor have a workable business model to match their needs. Historically, the mid-market has been neglected by the larger vendors, mainly because it was seen as more desirable to focus on large enterprises. There has been a recent shift in attention but it’s not nearly enough. 11% of respondents in the survey said they are already using managed services that are hosted by a third party and this is providing them with the platform they need to get more of the existing IT resources they already have and freeing them up from the undesirable day-to-day tasks to focus more on activity that adds value to the business. This is the strategic and innovative focus that 53% of IT Managers believe their role should be about.

Blending IT with cloud computing services
For some businesses, managed services delivered via a cloud computing platform are the only way they can afford to deliver new services to their staff. However, many businesses are unsure how to link hosted services and integrate them with existing systems and 38% of IT managers in UK SMEs are challenged by the ‘perceived’ loss of control.

Business leaders want their IT to be better, faster and cheaper, and technology needs to provide the platform that delivers business agility, aiding organisations to focus their existing people and resources where they need them most. To do this they must align IT resources to the business strategy, not just the pursuit of keeping the lights on so existing systems don’t fail. This is an opportunity for everyone concerned, although it is often preferred to be seen as the exact opposite. As time and money becomes more stretched the warped view that cloud computing is a threat to IT department is now beginning to be understood.

In smaller businesses, IT departments do not always have expert and specialist skills or the budget to take on new solutions and support them. Cutting costs is still the big issue for many UK SMEs and to do this many are now turning to cloud computing services that provide easy access to enterprise-grade solutions with no hardware or software to buy. The services are easy to use and pay for, at a low and predictable monthly per user fee. It’s a great way to cut out the drain of capital from the business. One of the key benefits of cloud computing is the on-demand aspect, meaning that businesses only pay for the services they consume. This means the expenditure is seen to be accounted for as an operation expense, which is usually much more desirable.

These services are appealing because they can be delivered securely to any employee, wherever they are and at anytime. Deploying the right technologies to the business without having to recruit more IT people is a great advantage.

Seeking operational excellence
Every CEO and CFO wants and expects excellence from the IT investments that they sign off. At the very least they want to ensure that any operational and financial risks are mitigated. What is often taken for granted is how difficult it is to run IT systems with the required power and cooling, not to mention the right level of security to ensure the environment is kept safe and enough resiliency and back up systems to ensure business continuity. What many of them are now realising is that their data and applications are much safer and better provisioned when they are hosted in a professionally run third party data centre and wrapped around with a solid Service Level Agreement. This is in stark contrast to when their business critical systems are hastily cobbled together from their own facilities that simply can’t compete with the level of investment and sophistication on offer from a managed service provider.

As more business leaders push their IT departments down this route the role of the CIO is now becoming one of managing relationships rather than managing technology and getting lost in the detail. This is an exciting proposition as cloud computing is freeing up IT professionals to think more strategically and offload the donkey work to someone who can do it better, faster and cheaper, allowing them to focus on the key aspects that differentiate the business from its competitors. This is the real role of the Chief Information (or ‘Innovation’) Officer.

Download a free copy of The Cloud Computing Guide from: www.star.co.uk/cloud

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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