By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 6th June 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

Enterprise application integration (EAI) as a function is moving out of the enterprise and into the cloud. So called integration platform as a service (iPaaS) has popped up on the edge of the enterprise. But true cloud integration as a neutral, full service, and entirely cloud-based offering has been mostly only a vision.

Yet, if businesses need to change rapidly as the cloud era unfolds, to gain and use new partners and new services, then new and flexible integration capabilities across and between extended applications and services are essential.

The older point-to-point methods of IT integration, even for internal business processes, are slow, brittle, costly, complex and hard to manage. Into this opportunity for a new breed of cloud integration services steps MuleSoft, a market leading, open-source enterprise service bus (ESB) provider, which aims to create a true cloud integration platform called Mule iON. [Disclosure: MuleSoft is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

MuleSoft proposes nothing short of an iPaaS service that spans software as a service (SaaS) to legacy, SaaS to SaaS, and cloud to cloud integration. In other words, all of the above, when it comes to integrations outside of the enterprise.

BriefingsDirect recently learned more about MuleSoft iON, how it works and its pending general availability in the summer of 2011. There's also the potential for an expanding iON marketplace that will provide integration patterns as shared cloud applications, with the likelihood of spawning constellations of associated business to business ecosystems.

Explaining the reality for a full-service cloud-based integration platform solution are two executives from MuleSoft, Ross Mason, Chief Technology Officer and Founder, and Ali Sadat, the Vice President of Mule iON at MuleSoft. They are interviewed by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Gardner: It strikes me that the number of integrations that need to be supported are further and further toward the edge—and then ultimately outside the organization.

Mason: We describe it internally as the center of the enterprise gravity is shifting. The web is the most powerful computing resource we’ve had in the information age, and it’s starting to drag the data away from the enterprise outside into the platform itself. What this means for enterprises is, like it or not, any company of any size has some, if not most, of its data now outside of the firewall.

I'm not talking about the Fortune 2000. They still have 95 percent of their data behind the firewall, but they’re also changing. But, for all of the enterprises and for forward-thinking CIOs, this is a very big and important difference in the way that you run your IT infrastructure and data management and security and everything else.

It turns a lot of things on its head. The firewall is constructed to keep everything within. What’s happening is the rest of the world is innovating at a faster speed and we need to take advantage of that inside enterprises in order to compete and win in our respective businesses.

There are a number of drivers in the marketplace pushing us toward integration as a service and particularly iPaaS. First of all, if we look back 15 years, integration became a focal point for enterprises, because applications were siloing their data in their own databases and, for business to be more effective, they have to get that data out of those silos and into a more operational context, where they could do extended business processes, etc.

What we're seeing with cloud, and in particular the new wave of SaaS applications, is that we're doing a lot of the same mistakes for the same behaviors that we did 10 years ago in the enterprise. Every new SaaS application becomes a new data silo in the cloud and it’s creating an integration challenge for anyone that has the data across multiple SaaS providers.

And it's not just SaaS. The adoption of SaaS is one key thing, but also the adoption of cloud and hybrid computing models means that our data also no longer lives behind the firewall. Couple that with the drivers around mobile computing that are enabling our workforce and consumers, when they are on the go, again, outside of the firewall.

Add the next social media networks and you have a wealth of new information about your employees, customers, and consumers, available through things like LinkedIn and Facebook. You've also got the big data explosion. The rise of things like Hadoop for managing unstructured data has meant that we end up pushing more data outside of our firewalls to third party services that help us understand our data better.

There are four key drivers: the adoption of SaaS applications; the movements by using more cloud and hybrid models; mobile is driving a need to have data outside of the enterprise; and then social media and also big data together are redefining where we find and how we read our information.

Gardner: It also appears that there will be a reinforcing effect here. The more that enterprises use cloud services, the more they’ll need to integrate. The more they integrate, the more capable and powerful the cloud services, and so on and so on. I guess we could anticipate a fairly rapid uptake in the need for these external integrations.

Mason: We think we might be a bit early in carving out the iPaaS market, but the response we're hearing, even from our largest organizers, is that most have lots of needs around cloud integration, even if it's just to help homogenize departmental applications. We’ve been blown away at MuleSoft at the demand for iON already.

The open-source model is absolutely critical, and the reason is that one of the biggest concerns for anyone adopting technology is who am I getting into bed with? If I buy from Amazon, ultimately, I'm getting into there with Amazon and their whole computing model, and it’s not an easy thing to get out.

With integration, it’s even more of a concern for people. We’ve looked through the vendor lock-in of the 1990s and 2000s, and people are a little bit gun-shy from the experiences they had with the product vendors like Atria and IBM and Oracle.

When they start thinking about IaaS or the cloud, then having a platform that’s open and freely available and that they can migrate off or on to and manage themselves is extremely important. Open source, and particularly MuleSoft and the Mule ESB, provides that platform.

Gardner: Ali, how do you see iPaaS process enablement happening?

Sadat: It’s a pretty interesting problem that comes up. The patterns and the integrations that you need to do now are getting, in a sense, much more complex, and it’s definitely a challenge for a lot of folks to deal with it.

We’re talking not only to cloud-to-cloud or enterprise-to-enterprise, but now extending it beyond the enterprise to the various clouds and the direction of data can flow either from the enterprise to the cloud or from the cloud to the enterprise. The problems are getting a little more challenging to solve.

The other thing that we’re seeing out there is that a lot of different application programming interfaces (APIs) are popping up—more and more every day. There are all kinds of different technologies either being exposed to traditional web services or REST-based web services.

We’re seeing quite a few APIs. By some accounts, we're in the thousands or tens of thousands right now. In terms of APIs, they're going to be exposed out there for folks who are trying to figure out and how to integrate.

Gardner: What do you propose for that?

Sadat: It’s something a hybrid world, and I think the answer to that is a hybrid model, but it needs to be very seamless from the IT perspective.

If I want to do a real-time integration between Salesforce and SAP, how do I enable that? If I poke holes in my firewall that’s going to definitely expose all kinds of security breaches that my network security folks are not going to like. So how do I enable that? This is where iON comes into play.

We’re going to sit there in a cloud, open up a secure public channel where Salesforce can post events to iON, and then via a secured connection back to the enterprise, we can deliver that directly to SAP. We can do on the reverse side too. This is something that the traditional TIBCOs and WebMethods of of the world weren’t designed to solve and they weren’t even thinking about this problem when they designed and developed that application.

The difference between integration running on-premise or in the cloud shouldn't matter as much, and the tooling should be the same. So, it should be able to support both a cloud-based management, and also be able to manage and drive us in the enterprise, and set up on-premise tools.

One of the things you’ll see about iON is a lot of familiar components. If you have been a Mule user or Mule ESB user, you will see that at the heart of iON itself. What we're providing now is the ability to be able to deploy your solutions, your integration applications to a cloud and be able to manage it there, but we also are going to give you the capability to be able to integrate back into the enterprise.

Gardner: Why not just use what Salesforce provides you and let that be the integration point? Why would you separate the integration cloud capability?

Sadat: Integration, as a whole, is much better served by a neutral party than just going by any one of the application vendors. You can certainly write custom code to do it, and then people have been doing it, but they've seen over and over that that doesn’t necessarily work.

Having a neutral platform that speaks to APIs on both sides is very important. You’re not going to find Salesforce, for example, adopting SAP APIs, and vice versa. So, having that neutral platform is very important. Then, having that platform and being able to carry out all the kinds of different integration patterns that you need is also important.

We do understand the on-premise side of it. We understand the cloud side of the problem. We're in a unique position to bring those two together.

Gardner: Ross, please define for me what you consider the top requirements for this unique new neutral standalone integration cloud?

Mason: I'll start with the must-haves on the PaaS itself. In my mind the whole point of working with a PaaS is not just to do integration, but it’s for a provider, such as MuleSoft, to take all the headache and hard work out of the architecture as well.

For me, a true PaaS would allow a customer to buy a service level agreement (SLA) for the integration applications. That means we are not thinking about CPUs, about architecture, or I/O or memory usage, and just defining the kind of characteristics they want from their application. That would be my Holy Grail of why a PaaS is so much better.

For integration, you need that, plus you need deep expertise in that integration itself. Ali just mentioned that people do a lot of their own point to points and SaaS providers do their own point integrations as well.

We spend a lot of money in the enterprise to integrate applications. You do want a specialist there, and you want someone who is independent and will adopt any API that makes sense for the enterprise in a neutral way.

We’re never going to be pushing our own customer relationship management (CRM) application. We're not going to be pushing our own enterprise resource planning (ERP). So, we’re a very good choice for being able to pull data from whichever application you're using. Neutrality is very important.

Finally, going back to the open-source thing again, open source is hugely important, because I want to know that if I build an integration on a Switzerland platform, I can still take that away and run it behind my firewall and still get support. Or, I just want to take it away and run it and manage it myself.

With iON, that’s the promise. You’ll be able to take these integration apps and the integration flows that you build, and run them anywhere. We're trying to be very transparent on how you can use the platform and how you can migrate on as well as off. That’s very important.

Gardner: You’ve come out on May 23 with the announcement about iON and describing what you intend.

Sadat: That’s correct. We started with our private beta, which is coming to an end. As you mentioned, we’re now releasing a public beta. Pretty much anybody can come in, sign up, and get going in a true cloud fashion.

We're allowing ourselves a couple months before the general availability to take in feedback during the beta release. We’re going to be actively working with the beta community members to use the product and tell us what they think and what they'd like changed.

One of the other things we’re doing soon after the general availability is releasing a series of iON applications that we'll be building and releasing. These will be both things that we’ll offer as ways to monetize certain integrations, but also as reference applications for partners and developers to look at, be able to mimic, and then be able to build their own applications on top of it.

Gardner: What is it they are going to get?

Sadat: At the core of it, they get Mule. That’s pretty essential, and there’s a whole lot of reasons why they do that. They get a whole series of connectors and various transports they can use. One of the things that they do get with iON is the whole concept of this virtual execution environment sitting in the cloud. They don’t have to worry about downloading and installing Mule ESB. It’s automatically provided. We'll scale it out, monitor it, and provide all that capability in the cloud for them.

They just need to focus on their application, the integration problems that they want to solve, and use our newly released Mule Studio to orchestrate these integrations in a graphical environment. Once they’re ready, they push it out to iON, and they execute it. They can then manage and monitor all the various flows that are going through the process.

The platform itself will have a pretty simple pricing model. It’s going to be composed of a couple of different dimensions. As you need to scale out your application, you can run more of these units of work. You'll be able to handle the volume and throughout that you need, but we are also going to be tracking events. So this is, in Mule terminology, equivalent to a transaction. Platform users will be able to buy those in select quantities and then be able to get charged for any overage that they have.

Also, partners and ISVs today don’t have a whole lot of choices in terms of being able to build and embed OEM services in a cloud fashion into various applications or technologies that they are building. So, iON is going to provide that platform for them.

One of the key things of the platform itself is that it is very embeddable. Everything is going to be exposed as a series of APIs. SIs and SaaS providers can easily embed that in their own application and even put their own UI on top of it, so that underneath it it says iON, but on top, it’s their own look and feel, seamlessly integrated into their own applications and solutions. This is going to be a huge part of iON.

Gardner: Looking at the future how does the mobile trend in particular affect the need for a neutral third-party integration capability?

Mason: Mobile consumers are consuming data, basically. The mobile application model has changed, because now you get data from the server and you render on the device itself. That’s pretty different from the way we’ve been building applications up till fairly recently.

What that means is that you need to have that data available as a service somewhere for those applications to pick it up. An iPaaS is a perfect way of doing that, because it becomes the focal point where it can bring data in, combine it in different ways, publish it, scrub it, and push it out to any type of consumer. It's not just mobile, but it’s also point-of-sale devices, the browser, and other applications consuming that data.

Mobile is one piece, because it must have an API to grab the data from, but it’s not the only piece. There are lots of other embedded devices in cars, medical equipment, and everything else.

If you think about that web, it needs to talk to a centralized location, which is no one enterprise. The enterprise needs to be able to share its data with integration outside of its own firewall in order to create these applications.

Listen to the podcast. Find it on iTunes/iPod. Read a full transcript. Join the iON beta program.

By: Bob Tarzey, Service Director, Quocirca Posted: 27th April 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Quocirca has written a few times about end point management and security recently. There has also been comment on the upgrade of Microsoft’s Forefront security range and its end point management tools. A new Microsoft on-demand service warrants further comment in both areas.

Microsoft has released a “simple web-based administration console” for PCs called Intune. It is based on the Windows Update Manager code base and includes elements of Systems Center Configuration Manager (SCCM, Microsoft’s on-premise tool for PC management) and Forefront End Point Protection (FEP). The product has the flexibility to support devices both within and beyond the firewall.

Intune takes best practices from SCCM and requires System Centre agents on the target PCs. However, it does not provide all the functionality of SCCM; it cannot be used for operating system/application software distribution and power management and does not have full group policy support (these features may be added in time). Remote assistance, PC monitoring, alerts, updates, inventory management, security settings and malware protection are all supported.

When it comes to anti-malware you do not have to use FEP, but Microsoft recommend that you should not run two anti-virus engines at the same time. So you must either replace your existing product with FEP (which is included in the Intune subscription) or just keep your old one. A subscription also includes an upgrade to Windows 7 Enterprise for each PC covered, and that includes BitLocker full disk encryption, although Intune does not provide the capability to manage the enforcement of encryption.

If you have SCCM already, Microsoft advises to keep going with that. It sees Intune as a fast entry point for organisations that have no PC management place at present. The quoted US price is $11 per PC per month (around £7). So when compared to existing costs for buying and maintaining end point protection and encryption, the annual cost is approaching £90 per PC per year.

The caveat is of course that Intune works only for Microsoft PCs (running XP, Vista or Windows 7); it does not even cover Windows mobile devices. As businesses have to increasingly manage a diverse range of smartphones, PCs and tablets running a range of operating systems other than Windows, many will see this as limitation.

Microsoft muttered about support for iPhones and iPads in the SCCM roadmap, so perhaps this will end up in Intune at some point in future. However, those that want a comprehensive management tool that covers all end points both inside and outside the data centre that is available on-demand should look to other vendors such as Kaseya and NTR Global.

The freely available Quocirca reports review the use of end-point management:

• The Total MSP – using managed service providers for end-point management
• Remote IT management – the value of on-demand end-point management services.

By: Julian Holmes, Co-founder, UPMentors Posted: 18th March 2011 Copyright UPMentors © 2011

A change is taking place in the IT Industry that has a major impact on the way organisations should now look to recruit software development people. The so-called ‘hard skills’—such as an applicant’s technology skills, qualifications, and certifications—should simply be an entry requirement and a greater focus should be placed on the ‘softer skills’.

The core competencies that a recruiter should now be looking for are the behavioural skills. Whilst these are sometimes difficult to extract, a skilled recruiter with a competency-based recruitment method should be able to identify applicants who will not only suit new ways of working but also enhance the team. 

What are the competencies organisations should now be looking for?
Competencies such as a team-player, excellent communication and collaboration skills, results orientated, the ability to pick up new skills quickly, to see the ‘big picture', flexibility, someone who embraces change and a ‘can do’ attitude, to name just a few. Some organisations may already feature these as part of their profiles for candidates, however these should now be a prominent part of the recruitment process, with new employees required to perform each to a high level on a daily basis. 

What is driving the change in focus?
The growing adoption of agile software development practices has significantly changed the way project teams work. No longer are they required to work as technical specialists in silos but are now expected to work in cross-functional teams, often with direct customer contact, to understand the business challenges and to enable them to deliver the right solution.

The success of these agile teams is directly related to the ability of the team to ‘gel’ together to deliver high quality software. This way of working is a significant departure from the traditional approaches to software development. The challenge for HR departments is to strategically align their recruitment policy and practices to support software teams and deliver candidates who will not only fit with the new ways of working, but enhance and develop it further to the benefit of the team, organisation and the customer.

About UPMentors
UPMentors helps organisations to successfully deliver and cope with complex software projects by transforming people’s capabilities. Using a combination of consultancy and specific practices such as knowledge transfer, leading by example, mentoring on-the-ground and various training techniques, UPMentors gives software professionals the capability to work more effectively as part of a team and prevent project failure.

As a trusted external resource, UPMentors challenges the mindset of how training is delivered across the business; it removes unnecessary overheads, company politics and bureaucracy while streamlining the entire software development process. The company specialises in several software development processes, including Agile and Unified Process variations.

Founded in 2007, UPMentors works with large enterprises across a wide range of industry sectors; clients include Capgemini, ING Direct and HM Revenue & Customs.  For further information, please visit www.upmentors.com

By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research (Moved) 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: Martino Corbelli, Director of Marketing, Star Posted: 1st February 2011 Copyright Star © 2011

Dispelling the Myths
Organisational change is often confronted with confusion and a fear of the unknown and this has never been more true than in the case of managed services that are delivered through the Internet, commonly known as Cloud Computing or Software as a Service (Saas). For years now IT professionals have always cited the ‘data security’ excuse as the de-facto automatic response to anything presenting the remotest possibility of detaching them from the comfort zone of being able to touch their own computer servers. By stark contrast, those IT professionals that have been embracing Cloud Computing, however, seem to be having a very different experience that puts this old attitude into serious question.

What this seems to suggest is that the real threat to IT jobs is the resistance to be the driver of this transformational change that is now upon us. Businesses are now looking to transform themselves and become Internet-driven and IT professionals that champion Cloud Computing in their business will elevate their own status by harnessing the business benefits this presents. Those that don’t may well become the victims of change when their business leaders make the decisions for them and, in turn, it is this threat to their jobs that could fuel the self-fulfilling prophecy that they fear most.

Technology Transforming Business
Cloud Computing is now transforming the way business people use and pay for the technology that supports them. This is all the more reason why the IT department would benefit most by being the protagonists, rather than being left behind. Gartner defines Cloud Computing as, “A style of computing where scalable and elastic IT capabilities are provided as a service to multiple customers using Internet technologies.” We are now at a tipping point in a revolution where business decision makers can make their own IT decisions and have a solution managed and delivered for them, without having to talk to anyone in the IT department. It is not uncommon for a sales director to purchase an online Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, without first consulting with his IT Manager.

UK businesses want to remove the burden of complex and expensive IT overheads where they have up-front investments in hardware and software followed by ongoing, and often unpredictable costs of maintenance, support, upgrades, migration, business continuity, disaster recovery, back-up, archiving and fixing things when they inevitably break. All of this presents massive operational and financial risk to any size of business. To break this downward spiral businesses are looking for new solutions based on an Internet-driven, on-demand model that are easy, flexible and available anytime and anywhere. The threat to IT jobs is, therefore, from within.

Business Technology is Now in the Cloud
The situation has become untenable and any self respecting IT professional that thinks we can continue on the traditional technology merry-go-round is in for a nasty surprise. More to the point, they are not doing their employers or themselves any favours. The economic climate may have accelerated the need to take action but the basic business pressures for change were already well under way. We need 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 actually need them. To do this they must align IT strategy to the business strategy and this is an opportunity for everyone concerned, especially those in the IT department.

A Yankee Group report in 2009 that examined time allocation of IT departments in UK SMEs showed that almost two thirds of time is spent on tactical, non strategic tasks—with 40% of their time taken up just on maintenance alone. Where is the business value in this and how does this help UK businesses get a measurable return on their investments? Surely, if ever there was a threat to IT jobs then this would be it? Further, complexity is multiplying, increasing the risks of human error, and not every organisation can afford to hire the highly skilled professionals they would need in order to do everything in-house.

Worryingly, in the same report, Yankee Group found that only 14% of time was actually spent educating the business about technology. This suggests a lack of strategic input and alignment of the IT function to business objectives. All of this is underlined by statistics from McKinseyQuarterly that say computer room running costs are increasing by 20% per annum. If IT budgets are increasing at all in the current economic climate, they won’t be anywhere near those levels. UK businesses are now looking for service providers they can trust to alleviate these problems.

Confidence in Cloud Computing Grows in the Board Room
Star’s own research of business managers shows growing confidence in the security of third party data centres, with the largest group of respondents (44%) considering their data is safer and more secure in a professionally managed data centre, with round the clock support, rather than on their own hardware based at their office premises. This compares with 34% who believed that data was more secure in-house. Contrasting these findings with results from an IDC survey in October 2008, which cited security as the number one concern with cloud/on-demand computing with 74.6% of IT executives, unsurprisingly, confirming their fears above those of performance and availability.

Business leaders are now ahead of their IT colleagues when it comes to their vision of utilising data centre services. They appear more comfortable with entrusting data to a third party. Senior executives and CIOs seem to already have got the message that their data is much safer in an environment that has the best levels of security and is managed 24/7 by professional staff, something that most SMEs would find prohibitively expensive to try to emulate themselves.

Taking IT from Basement to Boardroom
Cutting costs is still the big issue for UK businesses and we’re seeing increased demand for Cloud based Internet services that provide access to enterprise grade solutions, at a low and predictable monthly fee, with no upfront or capital expenditure. These services are appealing because they can be delivered to any employee, anywhere and at anytime. This means that business leaders can make quick and easy decisions about deploying the right technologies to support them without having to recruit more IT people. They can instead get more out of the assets, the people and the budgets they already have today.

Resistance to change is always a feature of any business transformation but it is this resistance that presents the biggest threat to IT jobs and not the medium by which the transformation is taking place. Yes, it may mean new skills need to be acquired and it definitely means letting go of tactical activities that add little value to the business but surely this is a good thing? Moreover, if IT is to take its rightful place at senior executive level then this approach is essential to help UK businesses to:

• Reduce costs
• Improve service levels
• Free up company capital
• Future proof IT investment
• Quickly access new technologies
• Keep control of IT and focus on growth

Star has launched a new business guide called “Cloud Computing, what does it really mean?” to help UK businesses have an insight into how IT services, delivered via the Internet will help them. The free Cloud Computing guide can be downloaded from: www.star.co.uk/cloud.

By: James Griffin, Director of Hosting Strategy, Star Posted: 31st January 2011 Copyright Star © 2011

In May 2010, the Energy Bill[1] was presented to Parliament by Energy secretary, Chris Huhne. The Bill contains the Government’s proposals to reduce the UK’s dependence on imported fossil fuels, to combat energy waste and encourage the migration to clean and renewable energy sources.

The government wants to improve energy efficiency in UK businesses and homes and will introduce smart metering to encourage consumers to be more economical in their use of energy.  Huhne’s proposals include the introduction of new legislation to promote low-carbon energy production.

The move to reduce carbon emissions by migrating to low-carbon energy sources is laudable. However, the capital investment required to harvest renewable energy sources, by building wind farms, solar farms and hydroelectricity generators, is expected to increase energy costs[2] over the next decade.

If implemented, Huhne’s plans would see business energy bills rise by 26 per cent by 2020[3]. By comparison, domestic energy bills would rise by 1 per cent in the same period.

Energy Efficient Advice
Organisations such as BusinessLink[4] and the Federation of Small Business[5] offer advice on how to reduce business costs and energy consumption. Their websites offer common sense tips such as encouraging staff to turn off equipment and lights overnight; allowing employees to work from home and ensuring that office heating is switched off and windows remain closed while the air conditioning is working.

These are all good common sense ideas, but they are not far removed from the same sensible advice we get for reducing energy wastage in the home. However, the workplace can be very different from our domestic dwellings, and so too is the way businesses tend to consume technology. For instance, one of the areas overlooked by the advice is the potential beneficial impact of shifting more of the IT infrastructure and operations to a managed services environment, in order to help accelerate the reduction in business energy costs.

More Computing for Less Cost
Soaring business energy prices will be a major reason for company bosses to consider accessing computing and infrastructure services from third party providers. In fact, we are likely to see more and more business applications being accessed through via Cloud Computing services. We are seeing this now with services for email and messaging, application hosting, data storage, IP telephony and security, because they can all be run far more efficiently, and therefore economically, from a purpose built data centre facility.

We believe that the impending energy price rises are an opportunity for cloud computing service providers to differentiate themselves through their use of clean technology in their data centres [6].

Managed service providers are able to invest in state of the art equipment and infrastructure to support their many customers because of the economies of scale that can be achieved by building a platform from which to serve many customers. This makes the latest and most efficient computing technology available to the UK’s small and medium enterprises. An example of this is the deployment of efficient power and cooling systems and environments that can be monitored around the clock for power usage effectiveness (PUE).

PUE is calculated by dividing the power going into a data centre by the amount of power consumed by the servers and computing infrastructure. For example if 1000 KiloWatts are supplied and only 500 KiloWatts are used for powering the servers, the PUE would be 2. If 1000KW are supplied to the data centre and 800KW are used, then the PUE would be 1.25. The closer the PUE figure is to 1, the more efficient the data centre is. PUE was devised by the Green Grid group as a way of providing a common metric for calculating energy efficiencies in data centre.[7]

Green Clouds
We have seen an increased focus on the use of clean technologies to reduce the environmental impact and energy consumption associated with powering and cooling computing equipment.  Therefore, companies accessing cloud services from the Internet, will reap the benefits of reduced energy consumption and significant cost savings over the longer term.

Industry analyst, Clive Longbottom, echoes these benefits in his whitepaper, “Cloud Computing: Taking IT to task” in which he argues, “few organisations can afford to build and maintain in-house data centres to the standards demanded by tier 1 hosting companies and service providers”. [8]

In addition to the power efficiencies that can be gained in the cloud, because data centre operators ensure that computing equipment is always operating in its most optimum environment, it tends to run to its full potential and, as a result, lasts longer than systems that are run on-premise. This means fewer hardware failures, more resilient processes, with failover and business continuity measures all working to keep the business running. Ultimately, this minimises the risks of downtime and any associated loss of business and is why Finance Directors and IT Directors alike are looking at what cloud computing can do for them.

Transparent Consumption
In parallel to Huhne’s Energy Bill, from September 2010, it is mandatory for 5,000 of the UK’s largest companies to register themselves with the Carbon Reduction Commitment scheme [9]. The government scheme will encourage supermarkets, banks, government departments and any other organisation that used more than 6,000 MegaWatt/hrs of electricity, or paid more than £500k in annual electricity bills during 2008, to become more energy efficient and cut their carbon emissions.

Emissions will be capped, forcing companies to either buy allowances, or find ways of lowering their energy consumption. An annual league table will also be introduced, comparing the energy efficiency of the UK’s largest organisations.

An additional 15,000 companies will have to informally disclose their energy consumption through the use of smart meters.

Make no mistake about it, the low carbon economy is coming. The UK’s largest businesses are already committed to carbon reduction. Smaller businesses that plan for it ahead of legislation are more likely to reap cost benefits over the longer term.

There is nowhere to bury your head in the sand, because utility bills will catch us all out. What this calls for is business leaders to work together to challenge convention and consider new ways of delivering their computing, operations and infrastructure processes. The conventional methods of trying to do everything in-house simply don’t stack up already in our challenging climate but in the future this will be even more pronounced.

For more information download the free Cloud Computing Guide from: www.star.co.uk/cloud  

References:

1. Energy Bill, 25 May 2010 http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/legislation/energy_bill/energy_bill.aspx
2. Fiona Harvey’s FT blog on what we need to do now to ensure a low-carbon energy future http://blogs.ft.com/energy-source/2010/04/13/european-energy-in-2050/
3. Businesses face 26 per cent energy bill rise by 2020: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-10779638
4. BusinessLink advice on reducing energy consumption http://www.businesslink.gov.uk/bdotg/action/detail?itemId=1081139309&type=ONEOFFPAGE
5. Federation of Small Businesses, advice on reducing environmental impact http://www.fsb.org.uk/environment
6. Clean technology research company forecasts global revenues from green data centre revenues will rise: http://www.pikeresearch.com/research/green-data-centers
7. Green Grid – energy efficiency in the data centre http://www.thegreengrid.org/about-the-green-grid
8. Quocirca Report: Cloud Computing: Taking IT to Task: http://www.star.co.uk/quocirca
9. Carbon Reduction Commitment – What is the CRC Energy Efficiency Scheme http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/what_we_do/lc_uk/crc/crc.aspx

About Star
Star provides on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses. Utilising an advanced cloud computing platform, the company has redefined how business people use and pay for the technology that supports them. Star’s On-demand Business Services™ are easy to use and pay for and are available any time and from anywhere, removing unnecessary costs for hardware, software and ongoing maintenance.

Since 1995, when Star was founded, the company has been an Internet technology innovator and pioneered the system for cloud based spam and virus scanning for business email that became MessageLabs. In the last 14 years Star has established itself as a leading IT and communications service provider of the highest pedigree, looking after 3,500 UK business customers and their 500,000 users.

Star has UK based data centres that sit within a network and communications capability that forms the basis of the Star Platform, from which a wide range of computing and communication services are delivered to customers. Star has over 230 employees working from offices throughout the UK, providing the highest levels of customer service and support. Star’s technology roadmap will deliver on-demand, cloud computing services to UK businesses who want immediate access to the latest enterprise technologies. For more information please go to: www.star.co.uk

By: Hugo Harber, Director of Convergence and Network Strategy, Star Posted: 26th January 2011 Copyright Star © 2011

One of the key things that may be holding UK organisations back from enabling remote working is identifying the correct technologies that will cost effectively provide what they need. It is widely accepted that remote working is a key ingredient to help employees work more flexibly and be more responsive, but how do you get the investment required signed off in these difficult times?

This is especially relevant in the current economic and political climates. For example, at the beginning of April 2009 the introduction of legislation extending employees’ rights to request flexible working was introduced. This legislation, which applies to parents with children under the age of 16, means the right to request flexible working has been extended to 4.5 million additional workers, providing added impetus for businesses to re-evaluate their flexible working practices.

The good news is that businesses can now access new technologies in more cost effective ways, allowing them to support flexible working more easily and without the financial burden of capital expenditure.

Work from anywhere at any time
The key to implementing effective flexible working practices is to ensure remote workers are able to successfully, and securely, access key applications such as business email, with the same ease and speed as office-based colleagues. The biggest benefit to workers with the tools to work remotely is that they can operate more efficiently and have the choice to work from locations other than their regular office, choosing the times to complete tasks when they will be most productive. It also helps parents who have to plan their days around their children as now they can work around their family and social commitments.

Companies already operating in this way typically tend to be more responsive to their customers and are better placed to continue operating as normal in the event of a disaster, such as the bad weather the UK experienced recently.

Flexible working and the network
Interestingly, the rise of flexible working may mean organisations need to consider their network infrastructure and whether it is up to the task of deploying solutions such as VoIP and video conferencing, to enable remote workers to maintain vital contact with customers and colleagues. For this to work, the network must be able to cope with different types of traffic and be secure from threats at all entry points.

Pay as you go computing
To address today’s varied business challenges, increasing numbers of organisations are looking to implement technology solutions that are delivered as a services. This helps to cut costs as the financial and operational risks normally associated with IT investments are greatly mitigated. With a cloud computing infrastructure in place it is now possible to deliver computing services that are consumed as a utility, only paying for what you use and when you use it. What this means to UK businesses is that they can improve operational performance while removing the intensive administration burden of managing in-house IT systems.

The Channel Opportunity
This new legislation signals a huge opportunity for the channel to benefit from the recurring revenues of a managed service business model. UK companies will be looking to them for advice on how to use their resources in order to get more for less. Many businesses will need to re-assess their infrastructure to accommodate remote workers, and accessing advanced networking technologies as a service is the desirable choice.

The benefit of this model for channel partners is they can proactively help customers cut costs while reducing the number of support calls and freeing up their own resources to focus on related, wrap-around services. The customer will be able to rapidly reap the benefits of the service through the implementation of the new system, which requires no capital outlay and is managed on a fixed monthly cost basis. This gives them real value for money and allows them to budget their IT expenditure accurately, with no nasty surprises.

To find out more about how UK companies can quickly and cost effectively implement remote access technologies, please go to: www.star.co.uk/remote.

By: Martino Corbelli, Director of Marketing, Star Posted: 24th January 2011 Copyright Star © 2011

Just as offshore outsourcing was greeted with suspicion and scepticism in the late 90’s, the concept of putting business critical applications into the cloud has raised concerns among IT professionals, who worry that this could threaten their own position, as well as risking the ownership and security of their company’s data.

To become an IT professional takes years of training and expertise in operating systems, infrastructure and the quirks of different hardware.

So, understandably, it wrankles when people talk of IT becoming a “commodity”. However, just as many of the original off shoring sceptics came to the conclusion that divesting themselves of routine coding tasks has in fact enabled IT departments to hit increasingly tough targets and remain profitable, using service providers to manage and run routine processes and applications promises significant benefits.

This article will point out the major benefits of using a third party managed service provider to deliver standard services that free up IT resources and enable staff to focus on developing services with unique and differentiating factors that give a business its competitive edge. Often times, because so much effort is placed on keeping existing systems maintained and running it is almost impossible to do the things that will make a difference and help grow the business.

Taking IT to Task
In his latest report, “Taking IT to Task”, Quocirca analyst Clive Longbottom writes that, “IT is just a means to an end. It’s the process that matters and IT is commoditising.”

Longbottom argues that businesses are run by tasks and processes and cannot afford to be constrained by technology that doesn’t keep up with changing business demands. This requires a fresh approach to IT. To enable businesses to meet constantly evolving market requirements, IT must be able to serve changing business functions.

The danger is that in-house IT staff and equipment may not be able to keep up with the fluid business environment that places new demands on inflexible systems on a regular basis. Attempting to keep everything on-premise simply leads to, “over provisioning of hardware to serve underutilised functions”. He suggests that, “Pulling required computing power in from the cloud, and aggregating these as open composite applications enables greater business flexibility and market responsiveness”.

He recognises that this has been met with resistance among some IT industry professionals, citing loss of control, loss of data and lack of security as reasons for keeping IT functions and their associated hardware and applications in-house: “The fear of handing over control at both the technological and process level scares many, as they see this as the possibility of handing over their actual job. However, attempting to keep technology in house is possibly a far greater threat to a business in today’s markets. The speed of change is too fast for any small group of people to keep adequate pace with.”

Longbottom suggests that far from doing in-house staff out of a job, putting run-of-the-mill IT tasks into the cloud will shift the balance of the IT budget back in their favour. Commodity processes such as email, internet access, instant messaging, billing, invoicing and telephony, while critical to the business function, are standard across all industries, sectors and countries and don’t help the business to stand out against its competitors. These are things that just need to work efficiently and a dedicated third party provider can make sure they do so better than most small and medium sized organisations can.

It would therefore make better business sense to use services for these commodity processes, freeing up the IT department to focus on meeting the objectives of the business. Longbottom cites research showing that 70 per cent of in-house IT employees’ time is spent on maintaining and upgrading systems, patching, and “fire fighting”, with only 30 per cent being left available to advise the business on new technologies and invest in new services.

By sourcing IT function from cloud-based providers, in-house staff are relieved of basic running tasks that consume time and are distracting. As a result they are able to focus on harnessing existing resources to deliver more business value: “Looking to the emerging cloud to offload commodity technical services and to provide services to higher level composite business processes puts IT back where it should be: at the heart of the business, but not dictating the business”, asserts Longbottom. He recommends that business leaders look at their top three to five business critical processes to find out how they can be improved through commoditising the “base-level” tasks.

Many IT professionals still voice concerns about retaining ownership and access to their data, particularly where this might be hosted overseas. It makes sense to only use service providers with UK-based data centres, to avoid legal issues concerning customer data.

Looking at our own customer base, we can see where managed services are best suited to helping the UK’s small and medium sized business consume critical IT functions as a service in order to help them get more from their existing resources. I have provided four examples of "commodity" services that can benefit from being sourced from the cloud:

1. Email: when Bowman Riley Architects (www.bowmanriley.co.uk) first contemplated using the Star Business Email service, the decision was a tactical one, to enable one of the directors to work from home. Now, the service has been embraced as part of Bowman Riley’s business continuity strategy. Staff calling in with a request to work remotely from a client’s site, or from home, can be provisioned with secure email access within 15 minutes. This not only helped Bowman Riley to remain operational during heavy snowfall of 2009/2010, but it also allows it to comply with new UK legislation allowing parents of children under 16 to request flexible working conditions.
2. Voice Services: By accessing voice over IP telephony services from a cloud provider, companies can gain the benefits of VoIP with maximised availability. This has the potential to allow organisations to provide staff with services such as voicemail, mobile, data, conferencing and unified messaging, all on a fixed monthly pricing model that allows them to budget more precisely. Utility-based pricing gives them flexibility to add additional users as the company grows, without any capital expenditure on telephony or networking switching hardware.
3. Managed Hosting: Oxfam’s website (http://www.oxfam.org.uk), hosted by Star, was able to carry on accepting donations during an humanitarian crisis, while other websites slowed to a crawl, or crashed, as traffic spiked up to 5 million hits. Another of our customers, Intelligent ID (http://www.intelligent-id.com), is able to use Star’s dedicated network management to meet spikes in demand for online identity authentication. These can increase from 2 requests an hour up to 16,000 ID verification requests an hour, as customers’ place bets on the Grand National. This is a perfect example of Quocirca’s finding that “flexibility, scalability and availability, will be better served by third party partners with the investment in the platform technologies combined with specialist integration skills”.
4. Security: Financial industry regulations stipulate that email records of trades must be kept for 5 years (MiFID: article 51). With spam making up 90 per cent of all email traffic, this would entail a completely unnecessary expenditure on storing spam. Therefore, in these industries, filtering email for spam and malware before it gets anywhere near your network makes perfect business sense. All of Star’s services are packaged with the best digital and physical security available to protect the private cloud environments for customers. This is all part of guaranteeing operational efficiency for customers, while reducing the financial and operational risk that they would otherwise be exposed to when running systems on-premise.

Conclusion
Star’s own survey of 200 senior IT decision makers and strategists found that 34 per cent believed cloud-based services would free them from low-level maintenance functions. Over time we anticipate that this percentage will increase as more IT professionals move into the boardroom.

Only 27 per cent believed that using cloud-based services would not help them to align IT more closely with corporate goals.

Far from threatening the position of IT professionals, cloud computing services represent an opportunity for IT employees to offload the more mundane, but necessary, tasks such as provisioning, patching, networking monitoring and maintenance of hardware and application updates to businesses that specialise in these activities. This will free UK businesses from the grip of the mundane and costly exercise of running inflexible and restrictive IT systems that do not meet business requirements.

Business leaders across the UK are now being empowered to make decisions about the technology that supports them and can quickly and cost effectively adopt new services that yield higher business benefits.

Relinquishing commodity tasks to the cloud will put IT staff at the centre of business strategy: co-ordinating services delivered via the Internet, while focusing their time on the processes that promote their differentiation in the market place, helping to ensure that the business accelerates its competitive and profitable position. For more information about how cloud computing can help your business download the free Cloud Computing Guide from: www.star.co.uk/cloud

About Star
Star provides on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses. Utilising an advanced cloud computing platform, the company has redefined how business people use and pay for the technology that supports them. Star’s On-demand Business Services™ are easy to use and pay for and are available any time and from anywhere, removing unnecessary costs for hardware, software and ongoing maintenance.

Since 1995, when Star was founded, the company has been an Internet technology innovator and pioneered the system for cloud based spam and virus scanning for business email that became MessageLabs. In the last 14 years Star has established itself as a leading IT and communications service provider of the highest pedigree looking after 3,500 UK business customers and their 500,000 users.

Star has UK based data centres that sit within a network and communications capability that forms the basis of the Star Platform, from which a wide range of computing and communication services are delivered to customers. Star has over 230 employees working from offices throughout the UK, providing the highest levels of customer service and support.

By: Martino Corbelli, Director of Marketing, Star Posted: 21st January 2011 Copyright Star © 2011

Keeping to Standards
The PCI Security Standards Council—a global industry standards body managing PCI DSS—has announced the start of Phase Two of the standards development lifecycle. The PCI DSS standard was initially created to help organisations who process card payments prevent credit card fraud, but a common perception is that the majority of UK merchants and companies have not yet started the process of becoming PCI DSS compliant, and are still unsure of what is required of them. This issue is compounded by the fact that many businesses have begun to take advantage of the flexibility, scalability and cost benefits of utilising managed IT services from cloud computing providers, meaning that some (or all) data is stored off-premise in professionally run and secured data centres.

This article will explore the issues facing merchants using hosted services when seeking advice on PCI DSS compliance in the cloud.

Confused Merchants & QSAs
In order to become PCI DSS compliant, companies have to liaise with a Qualified Security Assessor, (“QSA”) approved by the payment card industry. The QSA will assess the company’s payment processes and IT infrastructure, based upon a list of criteria laid down by the payment card industry. Leading PCI players, VISA and MasterCard, have been the main drivers behind the standard and in partnership with carriers such as Barclaycard have been setting up criteria for merchants and retailers.

Merchants and organisations that are found to be in breach of PCI DSS face hefty fines and revocation of their ability to process card payments. Early last year, we contacted a number of Qualified Security Assessors to try and clarify the position for PCI DSS compliant companies that are using cloud based services. Worryingly, we found no consensus on whether compliance can be achieved if a company’s service provider is not compliant. Ideally, merchants should be able to seek PCI DSS advice from their QSA to ensure that they are compliant regardless of whether or not they choose to use hosted services. However, our research with twelve different QSAs revealed that there is confusion even among the experts as to whether a merchant can be PCI DSS compliant if their hosted infrastructure is not. All of the QSAs confirmed that they required further guidance and advice on PCI DSS compliance in the cloud.

Should Hosted Services be Compliant?
The European Network and Information Security Agency report in November 2009 (http://www.enisa.europa.eu/) raised doubts about whether merchants could achieve PCI DSS compliance if they used services from third party hosting providers if those services are not themselves compliant.

The report states (pg 29): "Certain organisations migrating to the cloud have made considerable investments in achieving certification either for competitive advantage or to meet industry standards or regulatory requirements (e.g. PCI DSS). This investment may be put at risk by a migration to the cloud if the cloud provider cannot provide evidence of their own compliance to the relevant requirements".[2]

Worryingly, some QSAs believed that a merchant can be compliant even if its service provider is not. However, this is not the view of Barclaycard, which insists that any third party service provisioned to the merchant must also be PCI DSS compliant.

Neira Jones, Head of Payment Security at Barclaycard says, "Merchants who are using non-compliant hosted services pose a risk if those services are not compliant with PCI DSS standards. As an acquirer, one of our main areas of focus for 2010 will be to encourage merchants who are presently using non-compliant service providers to move to a service provider whose services already meet the required standards.”

Better QSA Advice Required for Merchants
When considering utilising services managed by a cloud computing service provider, merchants should be engaging with their QSA to understand how their payment processing environment will be impacted. However, if the QSAs themselves are unclear on the stipulations, merchants could be given conflicting advice. Should a merchant select a provider that does not have the required level of compliance they risk the wrath of the Security Standards Council. More clarification is needed—not only for the merchants, but also for the QSAs.

At the same time, the Payment Application Data Security Standard, or “PA-DSS”, was created by the Payment Card Industry to provide a standard for software vendors that are deploying payment applications to their customers. While a number of the UK’s largest retailers make use of cloud providers for an array of hosted services, one question looms: As data is not held on retailers’ premises, who technically is responsible for securing the data? Should the merchant accept full responsibility because they’re the ones obtaining the data in the first place, or should the cloud provider bear the cross and become PCI DSS compliant themselves? 

Compliance in the Cloud
Cloud computing offers UK SMEs a great opportunity to be more competitive by accessing the latest technologies without exposing the business to the large financial and operational risk normally associated when implementing IT systems in-house. However, simply choosing a compliant service provider does not automatically make a business compliant. Mr Jan Fry, head of PCI compliance at ProCheckUp (http://www.procheckup.com/), a PCI Approved Scanning Vendor and QSA that provides network scanning and penetration testing for merchants, believes that reaching PCI compliance using a cloud provider needs to be looked at in terms of the individual environments on a case by case basis. He commented, “If you’re encrypting the data held in the cloud then you may still meet the required PCI DSS standards, it would depend on segmentation and encryption procedures in use. I’d also advise that any provider that is reluctant to let anyone on site to check out their facility that should be a warning sign.”

Surprisingly, QSAs are not giving any guidance when dealing with retailers making use of managed services, as no standard has been drafted and implemented. Due to all the different requirements and criteria that businesses have to meet to achieve compliance, it seems that QSAs are left to their own interpretation of the rules and which requirements take priority. What is becoming increasingly understood, is that merchants themselves are ultimately responsible for the security of their customer data, regardless of whether it is hosted in a third party data centre or from their own on-premise facilities, and a breach could result in them losing their ability to process credit card payments.

Having achieved the PCI DSS accreditation for several of our hosted services, we understand the process of achieving compliance. We have also experienced firsthand the conflicting advice being provided by QSAs. We call on the payment card industry to clarify exactly what needs to be done to ensure that QSAs are clear and consistent on how PCI DSS can be achieved in the cloud so that merchants can continue to benefit from the flexibility and scalability of taking services from the cloud, without fear of falling foul of the PCI.

Download The Cloud Computing Guide, free from: www.star.co.uk/cloud

References:

[1] Tripwire survey March 2010

[2] ENISA report November 2009

About Star
Star provides on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses. Utilising an advanced cloud computing platform, the company has redefined how business people use and pay for the technology that supports them. Star’s On-demand Business ServicesTM are easy to use and pay for and are available any time and from anywhere, removing unnecessary costs for hardware, software and ongoing maintenance.

Since 1995, when Star was founded, the company has been an Internet technology innovator and pioneered the system for cloud based spam and virus scanning for business email that became MessageLabs. In the last 14 years Star has established itself as a leading IT and communications service provider of the highest pedigree looking after 3,500 UK business customers and their 500,000 users.

Star has UK based data centres that sit within a network and communications capability that forms the basis of the Star Platform, from which a wide range of computing and communication services are delivered to customers. Star has over 230 employees working from offices throughout the UK, providing the highest levels of customer service and support. Star’s technology roadmap will deliver on-demand, cloud computing services to UK businesses who want immediate access to the latest enterprise technologies. For more information please go to: http://www.star.co.uk

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: Martino Corbelli, Director of Marketing, Star Posted: 7th January 2011 Copyright Star © 2011

Email is regarded as a standard, but mission-critical, business communication tool and although it causes real problems when it’s not working, it doesn’t add any value to the business and effectively just needs to operate smoothly in the background.

As business email is ubiquitous it offers no real competitive advantage because everybody else has it too. However, the real competitive advantage on offer today is getting rid of email alltogether. As it has become increasingly complex and expensive for organisations to manage email in-house now is the time to release company resources from this operational bondage, so that people, money and management effort can focus on more productive activities.

With message volumes continuing to rise, file attachments steadily increasing, security threats and data loss always prevalent, IT departments are constantly battling to keep ahead of the challenges.

What’s more, they are now scratching their heads and thinking how they are going to approach their board and tell them that soon they will have to update the software and hardware to prepare for Microsoft Exchange 2010—a conversation about capital expenditure they are not looking forward to, let alone have any confidence about what the outcome will be. Therein lies an opportunity: tell the board to throw email out, once and for all, that you are going to save them from spending significant capital expenditure and still deliver the latest and most efficient business email solution.

This is the revolution that forward thinking CIOs are joining in their droves. By changing their thinking and habitual ways of doing things they are finding new and liberating solutions that will change the landscape of their world forever, and email is just a part of it. CIOs can now get their business grade email delivered to all their users as a service so the user experience is exactly the same as before and the only difference is that they can now get their email from anywhere, anytime and from any internet connected device with a browser. Further, no one gets pulled out of bed at 3:00am to fix a problem because the service is delivered from secure UK data centres with around the clock professional support maintaining every mailbox. Suddenly the world looks very different from a CIO’s perspective and much more appealing, not to mention the Finance Director also feeling quite pleased.

No longer does the CIO worry about email security, archiving, discovery, back-up, business continuity, disaster recovery, patching, maintenance and upgrades—all of this is part of the service. Based on a per user per month price that can flex up and down in line with business requirements and paid for from operational expenditure, suddenly there is a new and more compelling way to deliver business email that will let every CIO sleep better at night.

With telephony also converging with applications, email will become the central point for all communication, collaboration and conferencing, all delivered as a service from the cloud, meaning our dependency on the email application will continue for quite some time to come. 

By: Hugo Harber, Director of Convergence and Network Strategy, Star Posted: 5th January 2011 Copyright Star © 2011

Calling businesses of all sizes
The worldwide recession has resulted in an overall decreased growth rate in the IT sector, but a recent survey* revealed VoIP services to be among the top IT technologies indicating an increased expansion of 20.1%.

This is perhaps not surprising, when one considers that VoIP can offer significant cost savings when compared to traditional PBX fixed line systems. It offers business leaders a transparent and predictable view of a company’s communications costs, something that many finance departments struggle to have a clear view of, and sometimes struggle to effectively forecast for.

VoIP has long been heralded as poised for mass market penetration, and we are now starting to see that this is the case not just for larger enterprises with 1000 plus staff but also for companies with as little as 20 employees. This rise in demand with SMEs was borne out by a recent survey carried out by Star which revealed that, amongst those businesses with 100 employees or less, 41% have already deployed VoIP technology since it was first introduced in the late 1990’s. A further 20% of SME respondents are looking at deploying VoIP within their business over the coming year, showing a 50% increase in the penetration of IP telephony over the next twelve months. These findings also reflect research conducted by Synergy Research Group where IP Telephony was found to be the fastest growing segment of the European enterprise market in 2009.

Beyond traditional convergence
So, what are the factors driving this upwards trend amongst SMEs? Increasingly, organisations require telephony systems which are not only cost effective but can help to deliver better customer services and enhance productivity. This is where VoIP can really deliver over traditional PBX systems. Beyond what is perhaps the most compelling reason, cheaper calls, there are a number of factors driving the demand. 

As VoIP is based on software rather than hardware, it can be easier to maintain, upgrade and scale up or down. With IP telephony, SMEs can also add functionality and flexibility to their communications to deliver an enhanced level of customer service, such as directly connecting web users with customer support staff and using automated functions such as call forwarding and three-way calling, all of which are rapidly becoming essential tools in our 24/7/365 world.  VoIP is also the route to more advanced applications that converge together, much like the usually touted Unified Communications philosophy. What this actually means is that we are seeing facilities like ‘presence’, mobility solutions and rich-media conferencing converging voice, data, application and video technologies and services.

Does reducing costs reduce call quality?
Whilst there are clear business benefits, as with any emerging technology there are a number of factors that businesses should be aware of before making any commitments. The central and over-riding issue with VoIP is ensuring that call quality and reliability are of a sufficient level so that there are no issues such as jitter and latency, which can result in a poor user experience. There are a number of factors that can impact a high quality of service and these can range from IP networks not being ready for real-time communications to organisations employing VoIP technology from more than one vendor.

Real time applications such as VoIP are more sensitive to network imperfections and high quality VoIP relies upon consistent, stable and low-latency network connections. However, most existing networks are built upon technologies that were not originally designed to provide these. As with any complex environment, VoIP requires telephony experts as well as network specialists which, for an SME, could mean further investment in training or recruiting personnel with these specialist skills. In fact, respondents in our recent survey with SMEs also revealed that the leading barrier to adopting this technology is a lack of in-house expertise. 

Hosted VoIP Services
So, does that mean if you don’t have the in-house expertise required to manage a VoIP system then this technology is not for you? No. Hosted and managed IP telephony can free organisations from the management distraction of overseeing the network, hardware and software and return a consistent, reliable and guaranteed high level of service. With this option, SMEs use a hosted phone system in a secure location accessed via a VPN which also offers resilience and security and allows them to move away from investment in depreciating PBX hardware which can lead to a costly hardware refresh cycle. Demand for hosted VoIP is certainly gaining ground as SMBs look to embrace the cost and performance benefits of IP telephony, not having to manage it themselves just makes the proposition all the more compelling. In fact, Illumine Consulting now estimates that the hosted VoIP segment of the market is growing 11% quarter on quarter.

With a hosted VoIP solution there are no set up costs or capital expenditure and no hardware to buy, run or maintain. Moving communications costs to a managed operational cost expense, with a fixed price, per user, per month, also makes for more predictable budgeting and billing for the finance department. Critically, the quality of service is managed by the service provider with the expertise and performance management systems in place to ensure that call quality is consistent and flawless. 

SMEs look to managed services
We have found that many SMBs are taking the lead when it comes to investing in IT infrastructure and services, as they are more and more partnering with managed service providers. Businesses like Star can help free SMBs from the management distraction of overseeing the network, hardware and software and return a consistent, reliable and guaranteed high level of service delivery.

Notes
Survey by research firm IBISWorld: http://www.eweek.com/c/a/VOIP-and-Telephony/VOIP-Growth-Remains-Strong-Despite-Recession-207028/

About Star
Star provides on-demand computing and communication services to UK businesses. Utilising an advanced cloud computing platform, the company has redefined how business people use and pay for the technology that supports them. Star’s On-demand Business Services™ are easy to use and pay for and are available any time and from anywhere, removing unnecessary costs for hardware, software and ongoing maintenance.

Since 1995, when Star was founded, the company has been an Internet technology innovator and pioneered the system for cloud-based spam and virus scanning for business email that became MessageLabs. In the last 14 years Star has established itself as a leading IT and communications service provider of the highest pedigree looking after 3,500 UK business customers and their 500,000 users.

Star has UK-based data centres that sit within a network and communications capability that forms the basis of the Star Platform, from which a wide range of computing and communication services are delivered to customers. Star has over 230 employees working from offices throughout the UK, providing the highest levels of customer service and support.

Star’s technology roadmap will deliver on-demand, cloud computing services to UK businesses who want immediate access to the latest enterprise technologies. For more information please go to www.star.co.uk

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

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

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

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

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

There are four main areas where UC can benefit SMBs.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Three megatrends are shaping the next generation of successful businesses and governments. We're talking about pervasive mobile applications, highly responsive cloud-computing models, and knowledge-adept social collaboration.

Indeed, by the year 2020, The Economist newspaper predicts there will be two trillion devices connected to the Internet. And taking a look at where we are right now, McKinsey Quarterly reported in August that in 2010 some four billion people have cell phones, and 450 million have access to a full web experience.

Moreover, Jupiter Research reports that by 2014 there will be 130 million enterprise users involved with mobile cloud activities. Not only is access pervasive, but the amount of information available is also exploding. The Economist again reports that in 2005 mankind created 150 exabytes of digital data … and in 2010 we will create fully eight times more data.

These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

As these trends literally rearrange business ecosystems, a gap will surely emerge between the companies that master change -- and exploit enabling technologies -- and those that fall ever further behind.

For those that do step up to the challenge -- expect a relentless emphasis on rapidly recurring innovation to meet dynamic customer and citizen demands.

Our latest BriefingsDirect podcast therefore focuses on how these trends -- and rapidly evolving customer, citizen, and user expectations -- are newly impacting the enterprise. We also examine how technology advancements are making it possible to drive innovation to meet these new demands for instant gratification.

Please join HP executive Dave Shirk, Senior Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at HP Enterprise Business, as we explore how HP is working to make headway, so that the next few years bring about a generational opportunity -- and not a downward complexity spiral. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Shirk: We're seeing a lot of shift going on in the marketplace right now. When we look at where consumers are driving business or where citizens are driving government, it's fundamentally changing the way they operate. We've seen three core things come out.

The business models are all starting to change the way in which people approach markets across the globe. That's having to really rethink the ways in which they've approached them versus traditional methods.

The second thing we see is this whole shift in mobile computing meeting cloud computing and the enterprise trying to figure out exactly how to take best advantage of that to create this competitive advantage. Then, the overall demographic piece weighs into that.

We've seen the rise of the millennials, as they're being referred to. All of these things are forcing business and government to stop and say, "You know what, if we're going to grow or we're going to create a service differentiation, we're really going to need to do things differently and we're going to have to do it way faster than we've ever done it before."

According to the Society for Engineers, you now have over 800,000 graduates in China, over 300,000 graduates in India, 100,000 some in Japan, etc. It's over the last 10 to 12 years that each of those graduation rates has occurred. They are part of the workforce now.

When they went through that process, they were always connected and they always were involved in a social network-based environment. They have a level of their lifestyle that is all tied to this always-connected environment. When you think about the ubiquitous computing that that has brought to them, as they enter the workforce, they are looking at things a lot differently than ever before.

They bring new ideas. They bring new ways to that. They're looking for businesses that will support that kind of methodology and structure. ... So, when we think about that Gen X group that's out there, we see them driving an enormous part of this change.

The last statistic I saw was that they are now over 50 percent of the workforce. The analogy that's always used is that, to them, being connected and always involved in some type of networking-based collaboration or information sharing of some sort is about the same as it is for you and me to pick up our remote controls and turn on our television sets. That's already having a very profound effect on how business and government are changing and the expectations that are out there in the marketplace.

It's this [demand for] immediate or instant gratification: "If I can't get what I want in the following way, I’ll find the business or government environment where I can." While the government piece maybe a bit harder to change, the business piece isn't, and so the competitive pressure to serve this audience, both as the consumer and also as employees, is a big part of that shift.

We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

We call that the "Now Problem." They want this, they want it done now, and they want it to work a certain way. We see technology as the cornerstone to being able to solve some of these trends and some of these challenges.

These changes are at a pace they’ve never seen before as they address them and try to drive these into their business or government environments.

This is probably best represented in the words of Professor Gary Hamel, who is the foremost business visionary person out there in the marketplace. In his book, Future of Management, he described it as "whiplash change."

That's very much the case when I speak with our clients both on the business side and the government side. That's exactly what they're sitting there and thinking and working through right now.

Role of technology

We look at the technology piece of [the change] and say that you really can't [react] any other way -- the pace of it, the speed of it, and some of the complexity associated with it. For a long time, business has tried to use labor as an arbitrage to try to work their way through this and just throw bodies at it. That's quickly dissipating. The speed and the connectedness that we see, and the confidence level that all of these types of services require make it no longer possible to go through that.

What we see is IT completely embedded in the business. Over the next couple of years, that's going to continue to be the trend and the strategy that will play out in the way in which business and government work this. Ultimately, that's going to be the differentiator that drives an ability not only to serve these constituencies but to out-serve them, and that's going to be the name of the game.

[The solution] starts with a desire to change and to drive innovation in a different way. We sit and we think about the fundamental change in this. We talked for years that the business was focused on business processes and business process reengineering. While that’s still very important, it isn't going to go away any time soon.

It's becoming obvious that the bigger driver and the more significant trend is the information process, understanding the segments of business or government that need to be addressed. What their needs are, what they want, what they want to talk about, the ways in which they want to interact is all part of this change that’s taking place.

Closing the gap

So, as we start to pull back and step back from this, we look at that and we look at this vision that we have for the Instant-On Enterprise and how we’re enabling end-users to become a part of that, how we’re enabling businesses and governments to provide that type of capability. It really is about closing the gap between what IT can provide and what the business needs to be able to serve each of those audiences.

What we’ve launched with this vision is to put the foundations in place to make that possible and take a journey with our clients both from the business side and government side and help them move down that particular path, find ways to navigate these challenges and these trends, and to out-serve and to over-serve all the audiences that they need to meet the needs of.

[This change] is inevitable. Different businesses and governments will have, at different times, one of these four elements be more important or more significant to them at different points. All of them share the innovation requirement. We see that in all things.

Our view is that the innovation has to take place throughout that information process. It doesn’t matter whether it happens back at the data center or at every touch point. Innovation has to take place throughout for the business to meet the needs of those segments I’ve referred to earlier -- how it services it, how it conducts itself, and ultimately how it meets our needs or exceeds the needs of the audiences.

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used.

Agility, optimization, and risk all vary in and out with innovation in terms of their need and their level of importance.

Agility really is about instant expectations, and can we turn things on and off, instead of just setting them up for a rainy day and hoping that they will be used. A big part of technology’s trouble in the past was that we created all of these things and we never had a plan for ending their lifecycle or turning them down slightly, so that we could turn up other activities or other possibilities in an instant-on environment and an instant-on enterprise. A core part of the vision that we see is being able to drive that agility to meet those changing business needs.

When HP looks at the Instant-On Enterprise, the enablement of that is really a journey, and we’ve got to figure out what pieces make the most sense. There are some things that are much easier to focus on first and then, over time, to gain more and more of an Instant-On nature.

Critical success factors

Flexibility, security, speed, automation, and insight, those absolutely are attributes that we look for. We see them as the critical success factors in the way in which every part of the environment that IT leverages, drives, and embeds in the business has to come forward.

And yet, everybody is stuck in this mode of an enormous legacy that they have to deal with, and that gets in the way of being able to provide some of these new capabilities.

We’ve spent a lot of time and gotten a lot of expertise over the years trying to figure out the best ways to address these albatrosses that are keeping IT from being able to deal with the needs of the business. In the Instant-On Enterprise journey, that's a big part of the set of steps that we have to work through and work with our clients to make sure that they understand where to prioritize.

In the first few months that I have been here, one of the things that I've learned is that HP, as a company, has this incredible breath and depth of portfolio.

Our view is that we work with our clients and figure out ways that they can, as we say, shift that equation. How do you shift from 70 percent of that equation being focused on operational management, and 30 percent, if you are lucky, being spent on new and innovation-based capabilities to help or assist the business and its growth versus shifting it the other way? How do you get to 30 percent operational mode, and move forward with 70 percent focused on the business?

Changing business models

When I spend time with clients and listen to them, a big part of what they're asking for is, "We’ve got these pressures. We're seeing the business models change and we're experimenting with some things. We're seeing the mobile and the cloud computing pieces coming at us like a freight train. At the same time, we're seeing the demographic shift both on the end-user consumer side and on our employee side. We need strategic partners to help us with this. How do we navigate this? What is the way in which we should do that? HP, do you have a point of view?"

We're in a unique position, because we're the only company in the marketplace that has a full suite of consumer products, and yet we stretch all the way back through to the data center. All the capability, all the offerings, that are in between, all the services that are necessary to address each of those pieces, are contained inside the portfolio capability that HP has of hardware, software, and services.

We looked at this and said, "How do we take the best combination of that breadth of portfolio and bring those together in a set of solutions to best address what we are hearing over-and-over from some of the research that we’ve done and listening that we’ve done with our clients?"

They need to figure out how to modernize their applications. We want to make sure that we are there and we’ve got a set of solutions for that. They’ve got huge data-center issues in terms of how they're going to transform their data centers and deal with more virtualization-based techniques and capabilities and bring networking and storage and compute power together in some fashion.

They’ve got this issue of enterprise security. They need to figure out how to secure the enterprise. I don’t mean desktops, but all points, all touch points of the enterprise -- how they build applications, how this information is accessed inside and outside of the organization, and then fundamentally optimizing that information, the ways in which you store it, the way in which you deliver it, the way in which you print it for that matter, all those pieces.

Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

Then, they need to underpin that by the best way to figure out how to deliver it. Do we do it for them? Do they build it themselves with our architecture, and our capability set, and our consulting expertise? What combination of ways makes the most sense to set that up?

... We help our clients work their way through that with a series of workshops that we do to get in and investigate. We ask a series of questions, do a series of exploratory-based activities that help prioritize where we think the quickest return on investment is, because all these require some level of return to feed the next one and then the next one.

Hybrid delivery for us is our answer to the multiple ways in which a customer or client has to go through the process of building or delivering on these various technology services to their enterprise or their government.

There’s an enormous amount of talk about cloud in the marketplace today. HP has been at the forefront of that, but we have a little different position. We think it’s unique and we think we're the only ones out there that are really positioned to do this, which is the concept of hybrid IT, where you’ve got a mix. You’ve got a mix of traditional on-premises-based capabilities, but then you figure out what private cloud or public cloud-based capabilities best serve your business on a global basis.

HP comes in and, unlike other companies that try to force you into a one-size-fits-all structure, we sit down with the client. Our unique IP in this area is that we have an incredible depth of intellectual capital in this particular area, which is helping the clients figure out the best balance or mix of the delivery methods.

We can help them build it. They can host it or we can host it for them. We can provide those services from our public cloud-based capabilities or from our private cloud based capabilities. We really don’t care, if that blend changes over time. That’s the beauty to the journey to this Instant-On Enterprise.

Starting small

Our data says that most customers still start with a small private cloud implementation to really understand the value of the cloud and demystify it. We’ve said that there is going to be something after cloud. We don’t know what that level or that style of computing is going to be, but our architecture is built such that we’ll be ready for that. For our clients, we’ll help navigate them through each of these pieces, and that’s the important thing for us.

We have our new HP Hybrid Delivery Strategy Service, which is a place for a client to start, get a basic orientation, sit down and understand kind of where we think they might consider beginning that journey. So that, along with a number of other capabilities that we have to help them through these various workshops, I think is really the best place for them to start.

There are a whole series of workshops globally that our teams are set up to do, everything from a small couple-of-hour based interaction to a full suite of in-depth analysis and consulting engagements to work with a client. ... We ask a series of questions, do a series of exploratory-based activities that help prioritize where we think the quickest return on investment is, because all these require some level of return to feed the next one and then the next one.

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

You may also be interested in:

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By: nigel parker, Director, Next Generation Data Posted: 22nd November 2010 Copyright Next Generation Data © 2010

Over the past few years there has been much talk of Britain's CIOs rethinking their data centre location strategies and heading for the hills well away from the increasingly space and power-strapped London and South East. The tale of a Promised Land offering much lower costs, access to plentiful and resilient power, high speed fibre connections and less exposure to terror threat is well-known. The big problem is that it has remained exactly that—a land full of promises—leaving many London-bound CIOs to ponder “Where can I move to today that’s any better?”

For all the talk and hype about new out-of-town builds, most have yet to make it any further than the planning stages. Little wonder therefore that most of the clamor to reject London as the epicentre of the data centre market in favour of more remote locations would appear to have fallen on deaf ears.

In defence of the ‘Londonites’, until the last year or so, there has simply been insufficient ready-to-go stock for CIOs to seriously consider and go out and see in terms of well out-of-town facilities capable of supporting the multifarious data centre requirements of the modern enterprise organisation, hosting provider or carrier.

Unless one can actually see and touch the proposed out-of-town facility and receive cast-iron guarantees on available space and the cost savings to be had, as well as SLAs on more plentiful and resilient power supply, low cost remote diagnostics to keep the server huggers happy, a wide choice of on-site, high-speed low latency fibre interconnects, plus demonstrable top-notch physical security, why would anyone take the risk of moving from their London area sites?  After all, it’s always been the place to be. 

However, once such remote-sited lower cost, all singing, all dancing, alternative facilities are seen to be available—and they are now coming through—the data centre location dilemma miraculously goes away in most cases, except for a very small minority of traders who just have to be within thirty odd miles of London for reasons of nano-second latency. The majority of CIOs now recognise for the long-term health of their businesses and wealth of corporate shareholders they must get out of town rather than sticking within the M25 when expanding or consolidating their data centre estates.

The latest Jones Lang LaSalle Data Centre Barometer[1] (May 2010) is yet another indicator showing the penny has already dropped for most concerned. More than 70 per cent of corporates in Europe now agree that location of data centres over 200 km away from existing facilities is acceptable provided there is at least a 20 per cent reduction in operational costs on the table. This is a big shift in opinion over the previous quarter’s survey where it was still around half and half.

Steve O’Donnell, an internationally recognised industry expert on data centre operations and EMEA managing director and senior analyst at Enterprise Strategy Group (ESG), recently added further weight to the out-of-town movement: "In many parts of the world, and especially in North America, large-scale data centre migration to out-of-town locations has already occurred and is widely accepted as being best practice. In the UK, city centre sites are exhausted, power is capped, choices are constrained and costs are high. As larger and higher calibre modern facilities become available well away from London, it is only a matter of time before CFOs and shareholders of UK-based companies start to insist upon less risky and more cost-effective corporate data centre location strategies.”

Twenty years of conventional wisdom, dictating London is data centre central for reasons of latency, sheer convenience and no other alternative, is finally past its sell by date. London cannot continue as the hub of the data centre marketplace. It’s time to get right out of town.

[1]  Data Centre Barometer – Jones Lang LaSalle www.joneslanglasalle.co.uk/datacentres

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 17th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

Applications becoming easier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still a great deal of complexity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of the box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Studio phase

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

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

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

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 16th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The lives of IT admins in Windows environments should get a little easier with the launch of rPath's rBuilder 5.8 for "push-button" deployment of Windows Server instances.

The Raleigh, N.C. company's rBuilder 5.8 introduces release automation to the world of Windows Server applications. With the new software, rBuilder 5.8 earns bragging rights as a first commercial solution to address deployment automation for Windows instances and apps. [Disclosure: rPath is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

The deployment challenge

For most IT organizations, deploying Windows apps into production is complex, cumbersome, and time-consuming. That complexity can lead to long delays in full deployments that leave a dark cloud hanging over service levels and business agility.

The rise of public cloud services such as Amazon EC2 has further motivated IT to become more responsive to business lines.

With its automation approach, rBuilder 5.8 is wrestling that challenge to the ground with what it calls “push-button deployment” of Windows apps. This software helps to automatically resolve dependencies to virtually eliminate deployment-time failures, automatically generate standard MSI packages that are ready to deploy, apply version control to all packaged elements, and eliminate drift between dev, test, and production release stages, says rPath.

rBuilder 5.8 also generates image output on demand for rapid deployment or retargeting between physical, virtual, and cloud environments, makes way for targeted changes for low-overhead, conflict-free maintenance, and provides a single enterprise solution for automated deployment of any application, running any platform, deployed to any execution environment -- physical, virtual, or cloud, said rPath.

There are some more resources available on the capabilities and new release: Attend a free, live webinar Nov. 16; watch a short video; read a whitepaper, and learn more.

The need for deployment speed

Deployment dysfunction is a primary source of delay in delivering IT services in response to business demand. The rPath solution also works to complement Microsoft development and operating environments, including Team Foundation Server and System Center Configuration Manager.

With some 70 to 80 percent of IT spending due to operating expenses, nearly half is attributable to deployment-related tasks. This is particularly true for Microsoft Windows environments, which constitute 74 percent of the data-center server market. If rBuilder 5.8 lives up to its promises, it could find a home in many Windows-based IT departments. And it lends a hand in migration and hybrid deployments, too.

rPath has also joined the Microsoft System Center Alliance, a partner community in support of the System Center ecosystem. The System Center Alliance provides an online community that aims to help partners collaborate on the creation of solutions for the System Center and deliver an information resource about these new solutions for customers and sales channel partners.

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

You may also be interested in:

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By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 12th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Businesses are increasingly using cloud and e-commerce to improve how they do sales, marketing, and online transactions.

One smaller company, Tampa-based MarkMaster, has quickly moved to nearly all-paperless sales transactions, found new customers via online networks, and increased the amount of product it sells to its existing clients. This was accomplished without a lot of additional IT or business-process spending by using cloud-based collaborative business commerce solutions.

To learn more about how MarkMaster is conducting its business better, BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions, recently interviewed Kevin Govin, the CEO at MarkMaster.

Here are some excerpts:

Govin: E-commerce has definitely changed our reach, which is national and international. We have a plant in Birmingham, England, that we fulfill from as well for our American-based companies. We service nine of the top 10 banks in United States. We do eight of the top 10 insurance companies. Without cloud computing, there's just no way we would have even considered doing that. ... This all has been just a godsend for us.

It's totally changed our business. I laughed a little bit at your intro, when you talked about going "paperless." One of our main product lines is rubber stamps, and it seems counter-productive to go paperless with what we do.

Yet we have changed a lot. Now, 95 percent of our orders come electronically. We have one location in the United States that services all of the US and Europe. How could we do that without some kind of cloud transacting? It just makes the most sense. Over the last 10 years, I think 99 percent of our new customers have been coming through those kinds of systems.

Most of our products are considered office supplies. So, I have to look like the big Office Maxes, Office Depots, and that kind of thing. That’s how we present ourselves. Even though we're the biggest in our industry, we're still a small company.

We deal mostly with Fortune 500 companies. We sell rubber stamps, name badges, name plates, and interior/exterior signage. It's a unique field, kind of a niche market, as rubber stamps are a mature market. But, we seem to be gaining market share, so that’s been great for us.

Top-line, our sales are growing at least 10 to 15 percent a year for the last 10 years, and that’s the same time-frame that we’ve been on e-commerce and now cloud computing. So we have to believe that that’s a lot of it. Our industry is shrinking as well. There were 1,200 rubber stamp makers, now there are 400.

Quick turnaround from cloud
We definitely use the cloud-computing models to go out and sell. There is nothing jazzy about a rubber stamp. Name badges are pretty much specified by the customers. So, we are not out there selling anything new or exciting as far as that’s concerned.

But we have changed our model, and our salespeople don’t travel with the product. They travel with the computer and they show what we can do online and what kinds of services we can provide.

The investment in hardware has actually come down over time, but we do like to keep up today with the current technologies.

We can turn around on a customer in two days, because it's just all uploading something. There are no ports to connect or anything highly technical at all.

Because both on the buyer and the supplier supply side we are having hosted solutions or in the cloud it makes it a lot easier. There used to be a real reluctance from the customers to want to put us on board, because I might only be $100,000 year in spend, and they were going to outlay a lot of IT to connect me.

Now, with cloud solutions, there is very little IT on either end. I'd imagine that it's even easier now than it was with the paper system before, because we can communicate to their end-users that we’re out here, and we’re ready to be bought from.

We work heavily within the Ariba network, and because of that, now we are an Ariba Silver supplier. So, there's a lot of pluses that go with that, and we use a lot of banner ads and things like that.

We’re posted out on Ariba’s Discovery area, so they can find us very easily, and when they look at that, they see number of connections, and we get instant credibility on top of that. Then, of course, we even use the Ariba LIVE event. That’s huge for us, because it puts us in front of all those users that are looking for somebody like us.

One of the larger banks that we deal with, when we originally started with them, weren’t even considering us as a supplier, but they found us on the Ariba Discovery network. They called us and said, "Can you really do all of this. You're a small supplier?"

We showed them our list of what we have, where we’d already made Silver. So they knew we were vetted already by the supplier and we ended up with the business. It wasn't necessarily in a RFQ kind of environment either. It was "Wow. You can do this, and you’re the supplier we want and, in our case, you’re a minority supplier." So, it was just having that all together.

Can't always be there
But, they found us on Ariba. We didn’t solicit them. I mean, we had been soliciting them, and they knew of us, but we can't always be there when the customers need these products now. It's just too hard, because our products are needed everyday. So, that came out very well for us.

Bottom-line, we have had year-over-year growth, and our customer service department has not grown, or added anybody to that staff. How does that work, because we've grown exponentially? The reality is online systems.

We proactively give them the information as to the status of their order, and they can actually see it go through our plan step-by-step. Does everybody need that information? No, but it does keep them from calling customer service. So it’s definitely changed.

Now, 10 years ago, we were 95 percent paper, and it's just totally flipped. So, you can count on your hand the overhead that this gets rid of.

We’re always talking about transacting in the cloud and getting orders and billing. The billing part is where we want our customers to go next, because it seems like the front-end integration is great, but on the back end there are 100,000 different ways that people want us to bill them and get paid—EDIs or ACH or whatever.

We see it coming. People are migrating to the pay element, so that everything is integrated, and that’s great for us. It turns money faster. I don’t deal with credit cards as much, all of which cost me a lot of overhead.

Remember, my products are $5 or $6. People buy one at a time. So, handling invoices is just a nightmare. I get 20,000 invoices every day. We need to upload them, link them, and know the bill is okay.

My clients are not the kind of clients that aren’t paying me because they don’t have the money. They're the kind of clients that aren’t paying because I didn’t do the paperwork correctly. So having that end-to-end order-to-pay integration is where we see it's coming next for us in integrating the whole cycle. Some of my larger banks have definitely gotten on-board with that and it's great, and for a small company, it changed my cash-flow as well.

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: 11th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

How do IT architectures at software-as-a-service (SaaS) providers provide significant advantages over traditional enterprise IT architectures?

We answer that "Architecture is Destiny" question by looking at how one human resources management (HRM), financial management and payroll SaaS provider, Workday, has from the very beginning moved beyond relational databases and distributed architectures that date to the mid-1990s.

Instead, Workday has designed its architecture to provide secure transactions, wider integrations, and deep analysis off of the same optimized data source—all to better serve business needs. The advantages of these modern services-based architecture can be passed on to the end users—and across the ecosystem of business process partners—at significantly lower cost than conventional IT.

Joining us here is a technology executive from Workday, Petros Dermetzis, Vice President of Development there, to explore how architecting properly provides the means to adapt and extend how businesses need to operate, and not be limited by how IT has to operate. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Dermetzis: We have a unique opportunity to stand back and see what history and evolution provided over the past 20 years and say, "Okay, how can we provide one technology stack that starts addressing all those individual problems that started appearing over time?"

If you think of the majority of the systems out there, the way we describe them is that they were built from the ground up as islands. It was really very data-centric. The whole idea was that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system gave all the solutions, which in reality isn't true.

What we tried to do at Workday was start from a completely white sheet of paper. The reality around ERP systems is actually making all this work together. You want your transactions, you want your validations, you want to secure your data, and at the same time you want access to that data and to be able to analyze it. So, that’s the problem we set out to do.

What drove our technology architecture was first, we have a very simple mentality. You have a central system that stores transactions, and you make sure that it's safe, secure, encrypted, and all these great words. At the same time, we appreciate that systems, as well as humans, interact with this central transactional system. So we treat them not as an afterthought, but as equal citizens.

If you go back in time to when mainframes started appearing, it was about transactions, capturing transactions, and safeguarding those transactions. IT was the center of the universe and they called the shots. As it evolved over time, IT began to realize that departments wanted their own solutions. They try to extract the data and take them into areas, such as spreadsheets and what have you, for further analysis.

ERP solutions evolved over time and started adding technology solutions as problems occurred. They started with a need to report data and very quickly realized it was like climbing a ladder of hierarchic needs. When you get your basic reporting right, you need to start analyzing data.

The technologies at the time, around the relational models, don’t actually address that very well. Then, you find other industries, like business intelligence (BI) vendors, appeared who tried to solve those problems.

The way things evolved, you started with an application, and integrations were an afterthought; they got bolted on. ... They kept on adding more and more and more layers of vendors, and the more the poor enterprise IT customers are trying to peel it, the more they start crying—crying in terms of maintenance and maintenance dollars.

Old approach won't scale
Right now, the state of the art is hard-wiring most of these central solutions to these third-party solutions, and that basically doesn't scale. That’s where technology kicks in and you have to adopt new open standard and web services standards.

What we try to do at Workday is understand holistically what the current problems are today, and say, "This is a golden opportunity." This is opposed to finding all existing technologies, cobbling them all together, and trying to solve the problems exactly the same way.

If you're managing any system with HRM systems, you need to communicate with other systems, be it for background checks, for providing information to benefit providers, connecting to third-party payrolls, or what have you.

Obviously, [traditional ERP vendors] were solving the problem incrementally, as they were going along. What we tried to do was address it all in the same place. Where we are right now is what I would describe as very business transaction-centric in what I define as legacy applications. Then, we want to take it more to an area which is business interactions, and interactions can happen from humans or machines.

We're creating a revolution in the ERP industry. As always, you have early adopters. At the other end of the bell-shaped curve, you've got the laggards. When you're talking to forward thinking, modern thinking, profit-oriented, innovative companies, they very quickly appreciate that the way to go is SaaS.

Now, they've got a bunch of questions, and most of the questions are around security—"Is my data safe?" We have a huge variety of ways of assuring our customers that these are actually probably safer in our environment than on-premise.

Some customers wait, and some will just jump in the pool with everyone else. We are in our fifth year of existence, and it’s very interesting to see how our customers are scaling from the small, lower end, to huge companies and corporations that are running on Workday.

A blast from the past
Applications are built on top of relational databases today, and then they are being designed thinking about the end-user, sitting in front of a browser, interacting with the system. But, really they were designed around capturing the transaction and being able to report straight-off that transaction.

The idea of integrating with third parties was an afterthought. Being an afterthought, what happened was that you find this new industry emerging, which is around extract, transform and load (ETL) tools and integration tools. It was a realization that we have to coexist within the many systems.

What happened was that they bolted on these integration third-party systems straight onto the database. That sounds very good. However, all the business logic, all the security, and the whole data structure that hangs together is known by the application—and not by the database. When you bolt-on an integration technology on the side, you lose all that. You have to recreate it in the third-party technology.

Similarly, when it comes to reporting, relational technology does a phenomenal job with the use of SQL and producing reports, which I will define as two-dimensional reports, for producing lists, matrix reports, and summary reports. But, eventually, as business evolves, you need to analyze data and you have to create this idea of dimensionality. Well, yet another industry was created—and it was bolted back onto the database level, which is the [BI] analytics, and this created cubes.

In fact, what they used were object-oriented technologies and in-memory solutions for reasons of performance to be able to analyze data. This is currently the state of the art.

The same treatment
Conversely, any request that comes into our system, be it from a UI or from a third-party system by integrations, we treat exactly the same way. They go through exactly the same functional application security. It knows exactly what the structure of your object model is. It gets evaluated exactly the same way and then it serves back the answer. So that fundamental principle solves most of our integration problems.

On the integration side, we just work off open standards. The only way that you can talk with a third-party system with Workday is through web services, and those services are contracts that we spec to the outside world. We may change things internally, but that’s our problem.

That’s the point where we have a technology around our enterprise service plus our integration server that actually talks the language that we do, standards web service based. At the same time, it's able to transform any bit of that information to whatever the receiving component wants, whether it’s banking, the various formats, or whatever is out there.

We put the technology into the hands of our customers to be able to ratchet down the latest technology to whatever other file structures that they currently have. We provide that to our customers, so they can connect them to the card-scanning systems, security systems, badging systems, or even their own financial systems that they may have in house.

We're a SaaS vendor, and we do modify things and we add things, but those external contracts, which are the Web services talking to third-party systems, we respect and we don’t change. So, in effect, we do not break the integrations.

Best way to access data
The next architectural benefit is about analyzing data. As I said, there are a lot of technologies out there that do a very good job at lists and matrix reporting. Eventually, most of these things end up in spreadsheets, where people do further analysis.

But the dream that we are aiming for continuously is: When you are looking at a screen, you see a number. That number could be an accumulation of counts that you'd be really interested in clicking on and finding out what those counts are—name of applicants, name of positions, number of assets that you have. Or, it's an accumulation. You look at the balance sheet. You look at the big number. You want to click and figure out what comprises that number.

To do that, you have to have that analytical component and your transactional component all in the same place. You can't afford what I call I/Os. It's a huge penalty to go back and forth through a relational database on a disk. So, that forces you to bring everything into memory, because people expect to click something and within earth time get a response.

The technology solutions that we opted for was this totally in-memory object model that allows us to do the basic embedded analytics, taking action on everything you see on the screen.When you are traversing, you come to a number in a balance sheet, and as you're drilling around, what you are really doing in effect is traversing an object model underneath, and you should be able to get that for nothing.

So the persistence layer is really forced by the analytical components. When you're analyzing information, it has to perform extremely fast. You only have one option, and that is memory. So, you have to bring everything up in-memory.

We do use a relational component, but not as a relational database. We use a relational database, which is really good at securing your data, encrypting your data, backing up your data, restoring it, replicating it, and all these great utilities the database gives you, but we don’t use a relational model. We use an object model, which is all in-memory.

But, you need to store things somewhere. In fact, we have a belief at Workday that the disk, which is more the relational component, is the future tape. What you used to use in legacy systems was putting things on tape for safety and archiving reasons. We use disk, and we actually believe, if you look at the future, that nearly everything will be done exclusively in-memory.

Make way for metadata
And, there is another bit of technology that you add to that. We're a totally metadata-driven technology stack. Right now, we put out what we describe as updates three times a year. You put new applications, new features, and new innovations into the hands of your customers, and being in only one central place, we get immediate feedback on the usage, which we can enhance. And, we just keep on going on and keep on adding and adding more and more and more.

This is something that was an absolute luxury in your legacy stack, to take a complete release. You have to live through all the breakages that we mentioned before around integrations and the analytical component.

As soon as you can have the luxury of maintaining one system, let's call it one code line, and you're hanging our customers, our tenants, off that one single code line, it allows you to do very, very frequent upgrades or updates or new releases, if you wish, to that central code line, because you only have to maintain one thing.

Multi-tenancy is also one of the core ingredients, if you want to become a SaaS vendor. Now, I'm not an advocate of saying multi-tenancy A is better than multi-tenancy B. There are different ways you can solve the multi-tenancy problems. You can do it at the database level, the application level, or the hardware level. There’s no right or wrong one. The main difference is, what does it cost?

All we're looking at is one single code line that we have to maintain and secure continuously. We believe in one single code line, and multiple tenants are sharing that single code line. That reduces all our efforts around revving it and updating it. That does result in cost savings for the vendor, in other words, ourselves.

And as far back as I can remember, when humans realized that you take time and material, package that for a profit, and send it to your end-market, as soon as you can reduce your cost of the time or the material, you can either pocket the difference, or move that cost saving onto your customers.

We believe that multi-tenancy is one of the key ingredients of reducing the cost of maintenance that we have internally. At the same time, it allows us to rev new innovative applications out to the market very quickly, get feedback for it, and pass that cost savings on to our customers, which then they can take that and invest in whatever they do—making carpets, yogurt, or electric motors.

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: 10th November 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

WSO2 recently announced the debut of WSO2 Carbon Studio, an Eclipse-based integrated developer environment (IDE) for WSO2 Carbon.

The new offering allows users to build service-oriented architecture (SOA) and composite applications based on WSO2 Carbon. [Disclaimer: WSO2 is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Highlights of WSO2 Carbon Studio include the ability to:

• Organize artifacts that span the multiple runtimes common to composite applications into a single project—a Carbon Application (CApp).
• Develop applications using tools designed for WSO2 Carbon-based products including the WSO2 ESB, WSO2 Web Services Application Server (WSO2 WSAS), WSO2 Business Process Server (BPS), WSO2 Governance Registry, and more.
• Test and debug WSO2 Carbon-based applications directly within the IDE.
• Export Carbon Applications in the new Carbon Archive format.

“We have found that many of our customers are developing sophisticated applications that span the WSO2 Carbon product family, and they are taking advantage of the unique strengths of our platform when used as a whole,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, founder and CEO of WSO2. “We’re now revving up our tooling support with WSO2 Carbon Studio—helping developers to organize, develop, test, and deploy these composite applications with greater ease than ever before.”

Middleware platform
The WSO2 Carbon Studio IDE is designed to take advantage of the open source WSO2 Carbon middleware platform. The Eclipse-based offering includes graphical editors for XML configuration files, an enhanced Eclipse BPEL editor, and easy integration of Carbon-based applications with the WSO2 Governance Registry. Additionally, Carbon Studio offers a rich set of third-party Eclipse plug-ins, including Maven and the OpenSocial Gadget Editor.

Carbon Studio supports SOA projects that often combine multiple application types into a single composite application or service. Developers also have single-click function for testing Java-based applications and services—without leaving the IDE. Debugging tools support Axis2-based services, Apache Synapse mediators, registry handlers, and data validators.

Tools to support SOA development include Apache Axis2 and JAX-WS, Data Service, BPEL, ESB, and ESB Tooling, as well as a gadget editor.

WSO2 Carbon Studio, available now as a set of Eclipse plug-ins, is a fully open-source solution released under Eclipse and Apache Licenses and does not carry any licensing fees. WSO2 offers a range of service and support options for Carbon Studio, including development support and production support.

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

What if you could buy and sell cloud-computing capacity the same way people book hotel rooms on Priceline or Hotwire? Startup SpotCloud, the brainchild of Toronto-based Enomaly, aims to find out.

Acting as an online clearing house, SpotCloud will allow cloud providers to offer unused capacity to keep servers busy and will allow cloud users to buy spot cloud capacity at bargain prices.

SpotCloud uses the concept of Random Access Compute Capacity, similar to cloud bursting or the dynamic deployment of a software application that runs on internal organizational compute resources to a public cloud to address a spike in demand.

However, unlike cloud bursting, which refers strictly to expanding the application to an external cloud to handle spikes in demand, SpotCloud's cloud spanning includes scenarios in which applications components are continuously distributed across multiple localized cloud providers.

The capacity itself is provided via a global pool of regional cloud providers. SpotCloud treats providers as a nameless, faceless, and possibly unsecured group of providers of raw, localized computing capability. While buyers can purchase capacity based on performance and price and the location of the provider, the name of the provider remains hidden until after the purchase is made. This is to prevent undercutting the provider's retail sales of capacity.

Wasted capacity
According to Reuven Cohen, founder and chief technologist of Enomaly, the idea came about because of numerous cloud providers whose companies—often the first such enterprise in their respective countries—weren't well known and had excess capacity. With no way to make themselves known to potential buyers on a broad scale, they were watching that capacity go to waste.

At the same time, cost-conscious buyers would benefit from being able to make quick purchases of capacity, as well as location, at favorable prices. Selecting a provider becomes easier with the clearing house, because potential buyers don't need to scour the Internet looking for potential providers. Also, buyers can continually monitor the site and determine the best price at which to buy computing resources.

The process becomes easier for both sides because SpotCloud will provide the invoicing and billing. Providers avoid the hassle of trying to bill customers for small spot jobs, and buyers, who may spread their cloud use among several providers, will have to deal with only one payment. SpotCloud will make its money by charging a fee to the seller.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 26th October 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The FUSE family of software is now under the FuseSource name and has today gained new autonomy from Progress Software with its own corporate identity.

Part of the IONA Technologies acquisition by Progress Software in 2008, FuseSource has now become its own company, owned by Progress, but now more independent, to aggressively pursue its open source business model and to leverage the community development process strengths.

In anticipation of today's news, our discussion here targets the rapid growth, increased relevance, and new market direction for major open source middleware and integration software under the Apache license.

We'll also look at where FuseSource projects are headed in the near future. [NOTE: Larry Alston also recently joined FuseSource as president.]

Even as the IT mega vendors are consolidating more elements of IT infrastructure, and in some cases, buying up open-source projects and companies, the role and power of open source for enterprise and service providers alike has never been more popular or successful. Virtualization, cloud computing, mobile computing, and services orientation are all supporting more interest and increased mainstream use of open-source infrastructure.

Here now to discuss how FuseSource is therefore evolving we're joined by Debbie Moynihan, Director of Marketing for FuseSource, and Rob Davies, Director of Engineering for FuseSource. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Moynihan: Over the past couple of years, there has been a lot of focus on cost reduction, and that resulted in a lot of people looking at open source who maybe wouldn’t have looked at it in the past.

The other thing that’s really happened with open source is that some of the early adopters who started out with a single project have now standardized on FuseSource products across the entire organization. So there are many more proof-points of large global organizations rolling out open source in mission-critical production environments. Those two factors have driven a lot of people to think about open source, and to start adopting open source.

Then, the whole cloud trend came along. When you think about scaling in the cloud, open source is perfect for that. You don’t have to think about the licensing cost as you scale up. So, there are a lot of trends that have been happening and that have really been really helpful. We're very happy about them helping push open source into the mainstream.

From a FuseSource perspective, we've been seeing over 100 percent growth each year in our business, and that’s part of the reason for some of the things we're going to talk about today.

Davies: We've been around in this space for a while, but the earlier adopters who were just trying out in distinct groups are now rolling this out into broader production. Because of that, there is this snowball effect. People see that larger organizations are actually using open source for their infrastructure and their integration. That gives them more confidence to do the same.

I recently spoke to a large customer of ours in the telco space. They had this remit. Any open source that came in, they wouldn’t put into mission-critical situations, until they kicked the tires for a good while — at least a couple of years.

But because there has been this push for more open source projects following open standards, people are now more willing to have a go using open source software.

In fact, if you look at the numbers of some of our larger customers, they are using Apache ServiceMix and Apache ActiveMQ to support many thousands of business transactions, and this is business-critical stuff. That alone is enough to give people more confidence that open source is the right way to go.

When you look at cloud, there are different issues you have to overcome. There is the issue about deploying into the cloud. How do you do that? If you're using a public cloud, there are different mechanisms for deploying stuff. And there are open source projects already in existence to make that easier to do.

This is something we have found internally as well. We deploy a lot of internal software when we are doing our big scale testing. We make choices about which particular vendors we're going to use. So, we have to abstract the way we are doing things. We did that as an open source project, which we have been using internally.

When you get to the point of deploying, it’s how do you actually interface with these things? There is always going to be this continuing trend towards standards for integration. How are you going to integrate? Are you going to use SOAP? Are you going to use RESTful services? Would you like to use messaging, for example, to actually interface into an integration structure?

You have to have choice. You can’t really dictate to use it this way or the other way. You've got to have a whole menu of different options for connecting. This is what we try to provide in our software.

We always try to be agnostic to the technology, as much as how you connect to the infrastructure that we provide. But, we also tend to be as open as we can about the different ways of hooking these disparate systems together. That’s the only way you can really be successful in providing something like integration as a service and a cloud-like environment. You have to be completely open.

Moynihan: Progress is launching a new company called FuseSource that will be completely focused on the open source business model. We're really excited as a team. The FuseSource team has been an independent business unit since IONA was acquired by Progress Software. We have been fairly independent within the company, but separated as our own company we'll be able to be completely independent in terms of how we do our marketing, sales, support, services, and engineering.

When you're part of a large organization, there are certain processes that everyone is supposed to follow. Within Progress, we are doing things slightly differently (or very differently depending on the area) because the needs of the open source market are different. So being our own company we'll have that independence to do everything that makes sense for the open-source users, and I'm pretty excited about that.

From a practical perspective, the business model is very different. In traditional enterprise software sales, there is a license fee which is typically a large upfront license cost relative to the entire cost over the lifetime of that software. Then, you have your annual maintenance charges and your services, training, and things like that.

From an open source perspective, typically upfront, there is no license cost. Our model is that there is no license cost. It’s a subscription support model, where there is a monthly fee, but the way that it is accounted for and the way that it works with the customer is very different. That's one of the reasons we split out our business. The way that we work with the customers and the way they consume the software are very different. It’s a month-to-month subscription support charge, but no license charge.

That’s also the reason people like cloud. You pay as you go. You scale as you go. And you don’t have that upfront capital expenditure cost. For new projects, it can be really hard to get money right now. All these benefits are why we're seeing so much growth in FuseSource.

While we do have some level of product management for open source, a lot of it is based around packaging, delivery, licensing, and these types of things, because our engineers are hearing directly from customers on a moment-by-moment basis. They're seeing the feedback in the community, getting out there, and partnering with our customers. So, from an economic perspective, the model is different.

Now, being backed by Progress Software provides us the benefit that customers can have that assurance that we're backed by a large organization. But, having FuseSource as standalone company, as you said, gives us that independence around decision making and really being like a startup.

We'll be able to have our own processes in any functional area that we need to best meet the needs of the open source users.

Davies: From a technical perspective, it’s really good for us. The shackles are off. There’s a lot of sudden reinvigorating that seems to move forward. We've got a lot of really good ideas that we want to push out and roll out over the coming year, particularly enhancing of the products we already have, but also moving onto new areas.

There's a big excitement, like you would expect when you have got a startup. It just feels like a startup mentality. People are very passionate about what they're doing inside FuseSource.

It's even more so, now that we have become autonomous of Progress. Not that working inside Progress was a bad thing, but we were constrained by some of the rigors and procedures that you have to go through when you are part of a larger organization. Because those shackles have been taken away, it means that we can actually start innovating more in the direction we really want to drive our software too. It’s really good.

Moynihan: From a customer perspective, this change will have a small but significant impact. We are continuing to do everything that we have been doing, but we will be able to have even more independence in the way that we do things. So it will all be beneficial to customers.

We have also launched a new community site at FuseSource.com, which we're pretty excited about. We were planning to do that and we've been working on that for several months. That just provides some additional usability and ability to find things on the site.

Overall, it will be really good for our customers. We've talked with them, and they're pretty excited about it.

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: 6th October 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

The trend toward converged infrastructure—a whole greater than sum of the traditional IT hardware, software, networking and storage parts—is going both downstream and upstream.

HP today announced how combining and simplifying the parts of IT infrastructure makes the solution value far higher on either end of the applications distribution equation: At branch offices and the next-generation of compact and mobile all-in-one data center containers.

Called the HP Branch Office Networking Solution, the idea is that engineering the fuller IT and communications infrastructure solution, rather then leaving the IT staff and—even worse—the branch office managers to do the integrating, not only saves money, it allows the business to focus just on the applications and processes. This focus, by the way, on applications and processes—not the systems integration, VOIP, updates and maintenance—is driving the broad interest in cloud computing, SaaS and outsourcing. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP's announcements today in Barcelona are also marked by an emphasis on an ecosystem of partners approach, especially the branch office solution, which packages 14 brand-name apps, appliances and networking elements to make smaller sub-organizations an integrated part of the larger enterprise IT effort. The partner applications include WAN acceleration, security, unified communications and service delivery management.

Appliances need integration too
You could think of it as a kitchen counter approach to appliances, which work well alone but don't exactly bake the whole cake. Organizing, attaching and managing the appliances—with an emphasis on security and centralized control for the whole set-up—has clearly been missing in branch offices. The E5400 series switch accomplishes the convergence of the discrete network appliances. The HP E5400 switch with new HP Advanced Services ZL module is available worldwide today with pricing starting at $8,294.

Today's HP news also follows a slew of product announcements last month that targeted the SMB market, and the "parts is parts" side of building out IT solutions.

To automate the branch office IT needs, HP is bringing together elements of the branch IT equation from the likes of Citrix, Avaya, Microsoft, and Riverbed. They match these up with routers, switches and management of the appliances into a solution. Security and access control across the branches and the integrated systems are being addressed via HP TippingPoint security services. These provide granular control of application access, with the ability to block access to entire websites—or features—across the enterprise and its branches.

Worried about too much Twitter usage at those branches? The new HP Application Digital Vaccine (AppDV) service delivers specifically-designed filters to the HP TippingPoint Intrusion Prevention System (IPS), which easily control access to, or dictate usage of, non-business applications.

The branch automation approach also support a variety of network types, which opens the branch offices to be able to exploit more types of applications delivery: from terminal serving apps, to desktop virtualization, to wireless and mobile. The all-WiFi office might soon only need a single, remotely and centrally managed locked-down rack in a lights-out closet, with untethered smartphones, tablets and notebooks as the worker nodes. Neat.

When you think of it, the new optimized branch office (say 25 seats and up) should be the leader in cloud adoption, not a laggard. The HP Branch Office Networking Solution—with these market-leading technology partners—might just allow the branches to demonstrate a few productivity tricks to the rest of the enterprise.

Indeed, we might just think of many more "branch offices" as myriad nodes within and across the global enterprises, where geography becomes essentially irrelevant. Moreover, the branch office is the SMB, supported by any number and types of service providers, internal and external, public and private, SaaS and cloud.

Data centers get legs
Which brings us to the other end of the HP spectrum for today's news. The same "service providers" that must support these automated branch offices—in all their flavors and across the org chart vagaries and far-flung global locations—must also re-engineer their data centers for the new kinds of workloads, wavy demand curves, and energy- and cost-stingy operational requirements.

So HP has built a sprawling complex in Houston—the POD Works—to build an adaptable family of modular data centers—the HP Performance Optimized Datacenter (POD)—in the shape of 20- and 40-foot tractor-trailer-like containers. As we've seen from some other vendors, these mobile data centers in a box demand only that you drive the things up, lock the brake and hook up electricity, water and a high-speed network. I suppose you also drop them on the roof with a helicopter, but you get the point.

But in today's economy, the efficiency data rules the roost. The HP PODs deliver 37 percent more efficiency and cost 45 percent less than a traditional brick-and-mortar data centers, says HP.

Inside, the custom-designed container is stuffed with highly engineered racks and the cooling, optimized networks and storage, as well as the server horsepower—in this case HP ProLiant SL6500 Scalable Systems, from 1 to 1,000 nodes. While HP is targeting these at the high performance computing and service provider needs—those that are delivering high-scale and/or high transactional power—the adaptability and data center-level design may well become more the norm than the exception.

The PODs are flexible at supporting the converged infrastructure engines for energy efficiency, flexibility and serviceability, said HP. And the management is converged too, via Integrated Lights-Out Advanced (ILO 3), part of HP Insight Control.

The POD parts to be managed are essentially as many as eight servers, or up to four servers with 12 graphic processing units (GPU), in single four-rack unit enclosures. The solution further includes the HP ProLiant s6500 chassis, the HP ProLiant SL390s G7 server and the HP ProLiant SL170s G6 servers. These guts can be flexibly upped to accommodate flexible POD designs, for a wide variety and scale of data-center-level performance and applications support requirements.

Built-in energy consciousness
You may not want to paint the containers green, but you might as well. The first release features optimized energy efficiency with HP ProLiant SL Advanced Power Manager and HP Intelligent Power Discovery to improve power management, as well as power supplies designed with 94 percent greater energy efficiently, said HP.

Start saving energy with delivering more than a teraFLOP per unit of rack space to increase compute power for scientific rendering and modeling applications. Other uses may well make themselves apparent.

Have data center POD, will travel? At least the wait for a POD is more reasonable. With HP POD-Works, PODs can be assembled, tested and shipped in as little as six weeks, compared with one year or longer, to build a traditional brick-and-mortar data center, said HP.

Hey, come to think of it, for those not blocking it with the TippingPoint IPS, I wish Twitter had a few of these on those PODs on the bird strings instead of that fail whale. Twitter should also know that multiple PODs or a POD farm can support large hosting operations and web-based or compute-intensive applications, in case they want to buy Google or Facebook.

Indeed, as cloud computing grains traction, data centers may be located (and co-located) based on more than whale tails. Compliance to local laws, for business continuity and to best serve all those thousands of automated branch offices might also spur demand for flexible and efficient mobile data centers.

Converged infrastructure may have found a converged IT market, even one that spans the globe.

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

Look for a sharp uptick in cloud computing from financial services firms over the next two years, along with similar increases in cluster and grid technologies. This increased interest comes from a concern over the current data explosion and the firms' lack of scalable environments, insufficient capacity to run complex analytics, and contention for computing resources.

These findings come from a recent survey conducted by Wall Street & Technology in conjunction with Platform Computing, SAS, and the TABB Group. [Disclosure: Platform Computing is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Completed in July, the survey found noteworthy differences in the challenges being faced by both buy- and sell-side firms, with sell-side institutions more likely to report a lack of a scalable environment, insufficient capacity to run complex analytics, and contention for computing resources as significant challenges.

According to the survey, data proliferation and the need to better manage it are at the root of many of the challenges being faced by financial institutions of all sizes. Two-thirds (66 percent) of buy-side firms and more than half (56 percent) of sell-side firms are grappling with siloed data sources. The silo problem is being exacerbated by organizational constraints, including policies prohibiting data sharing and access, network bandwidth issues and input/output (I/O) bottlenecks.

Too much data
Ever-increasing data growth is also cause for concern, with firms reporting that they are dealing with too much market data. Sixty-six percent of respondents didn't think their analytics infrastructures would be able to keep pace with demand over time.

Both buy- and sell-side firms plan to increase their focus on liquidity and counterparty risk in the next 12 months. Counterparty risk management was ranked as the highest priority for the sell side (45 percent) with liquidity risk following at 43 percent. Liquidity risk and counterparty risk scored high for the buy side with 36 percent and 33 percent, respectively.

The financial institutions plan to turn to a combination of technologies including cloud computing and grid technologies. Within the next two years, 51 percent of all respondents are considering or likely to invest in cluster technology, 53 percent are considering or likely to buy grid technology, and 57 percent are considering or likely to purchase cloud technology.

The report, “The State of Business Analytics in Financial Services: Examining Current Preparedness for Future Demands,” is available for download at http://www.grid-analytics.wallstreetandtech.com. (Registration required.) Wall Street & Technology, in conjunction with the survey sponsors, will host a webinar to discuss in-depth key findings of the survey on October 7 at 12 pm ET/9 am PT. For more information, visit: http://tinyurl.com/2ulcesm.

By: Simon Holloway, Practice Leader - Process Management & RFID, Bloor Research Posted: 4th October 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

We all know that Manufacturing is all about products and that you have to keep reinventing your product portfolio to keep ahead in today’s market. Perhaps what it is not so well known is that the majority of R&D products don’t even make the market and of those that do only 1 or 2 really make a worthwhile profit. Therefore product development is a risky business, but one we can’t avoid. So how can we limit the risks and get better control of the process of controlling the life of our products?

Andy Michuda, Chief Executive Officer of Sopheon told me, “Product life cycle management (PLM) is the most vital business process in manufacturing today. A right decision on which product ideas to develop and produce can transform a company’s future. A wrong decision can bring a company to its knees. In the race for growth and profitability, the capacity to understand and act on PLM’s power will separate the winners from the losers”. But what exactly is PLM? There seem to be no standard definitions of PLM—everyone has something slightly different to say. Even the site http://www.product-lifecycle-management.info has a number of different definitions!

Let me give you my condensed definition of PLM. “It is the business process of managing the entire lifecycle of a product from its conception, through design and manufacture, to service and disposal. It integrates people, data, processes and business systems and provides a product information backbone for companies as well as their partners, suppliers and customers.” PLM is first and foremost a business discipline, whose goal is to eliminate waste and improve efficiency, and is considered to be an integral part of the lean production model. However, because of the business complexity and rate of change that requires organizations execute as rapidly as possible, application software is becoming more and more crucial to the success of PLM. It is one of the four cornerstones of a corporation's information technology structure. Shoenhair of Ping, a PTC Customer, supports this view: “PLM can be difficult to measure, but it is absolutely critical to leaning out processes, and critical to improving information flow and control.”

Where do ERP and PLM fit? Most manufacturing companies distinguish two main process chains: the operational process chain and the technical process chain. ERP systems largely address the operational process chain, whereas PLM systems automate and enable predominantly the technical process chain.

Figure 1: ERP and PLM (Source: PLM Technology Guide)

Johan Malmström, PLM Business Development Manager, SAP, emphasised the collaborative nature of PLM, “PLM makes sure that everyone works towards one version of the truth, with clearly defined tasks and responsibilities. It manages the product structure and related information, the usage of this data across the product lifecycle as well as the process of creating this data. Process support includes workflow capabilities, program and project management, resource management etc. to make sure that the correct resources are working on the correct tasks in order to deliver the right products to the market in the right time.”

Michuda explained that PLM is implemented in practice on three different levels, each of which is supported by a different tool set.

• Transactional Processes: Enterprise resource planning (ERP) applications manage transactional processes. They are designed to unify materials planning, purchasing, financial transactions, accounting and reporting into streamlined transactional processes. Supply chain management (SCM) and customer relationship management (CRM) applications also address process needs at this level.
• Technical Data: Computer-aided design (CAD) applications, as well as those related to formula, recipe, or product data management (PDM), are primarily focused on managing the masterfile of descriptive data within the product lifecycle. These PLM systems streamline and continuously improve the processes of defining, designing and producing products, while potentially also supporting aspects of product innovation. They offer collaboration capabilities that enable enterprise-wide sharing of product designs, reducing the chance of design and manufacturing errors.
• Business Information: The business level of PLM deals with business issues around critical business-related decisions within the product lifecycle. At the business level of PLM, the emphasis is on solutions that handle innovation governance issues such as process management, decision support, idea management, product portfolio management, expertise management, and intelligence around markets, competitors and technologies. Regulatory compliance and sustainability that important not only during product innovation but also to effective management of the supply chain are also included within the business level.

So what tools are used in a PLM solution? The PLM Technology Guide shows the core technology of a PLM system and some of the many solutions that can rest on the basic technology. The orange line outlines Product Data Management (PDM), which is typically used for basic CAD file and Data Management.

Figure 2 PLM Functionality Source:  PLM Technology Guide

Who are the main players? The major players in PLM space can be grouped under 3 broad categories:

• PLM product vendors such as Dassault Systemes , PTC ,Siemens, Sopheon, Aras
• The ERP vendors such as Oracle Agile, SAP PLM, Infor PLM, Epicor, IFS
• Consulting & implementation companies such as Accenture, Atos Origin, Capgemini, ITC Infotech, IBM, Infosys, KSA, Wipro and HCL Technologies.

What is coming? Dassault Systemes, on their web site, describe PLM v2 – “PLM 2.0 is a major redefinition of the PLM markets targeting all users creating, consuming and remixing IP. PLM 2.0 is to PLM what Web 2.0 is to the Web, harnessing collective intelligence from online communities. Any user can imagine, share and experience products in the universal language of 3D. PLM 2.0 brings knowledge, from idea to product experience (IP), to life. It merges the real and virtual in an immersive lifelike experience.” SAP’s Malmström sees the following three trends:

• Consumer-Driven Sustainable Innovation: with a focus on developing the right products at the right time in fast innovation cycles.
•  Global Price and Time Pressure: requires development efficiency, sharing of information in dynamic development networks.
• Increasing Product Compliance and Regulations: manage compliance, controls, documentation and visibility.

Mike Spragg, Infor's UK director for the process industries, sees the increase in environmental awareness and the incorporation of the ‘green’ agenda as an area of PLM expansion, “PLM has much to offer manufacturers.  PLM begins at the earliest possible stages of design, meaning these new green considerations are factored in long before products are manufactured and then enter the supply chain. This can save costs that would have to be borne were the products reworked at a later date.”

Deepankar Ghosh, Head – Manufacturing Practice, ITC Infotech, provided a clear idea of the importance of PLM, “PLM industry is comparatively a niche industry which is gaining more currency and acceptance as organizations are realizing the value that the PLM process brings to the table. With an ever increasing pressure on bottom line it is imperative that companies make IT investments where the ROI is not only high but faster. A more informed and demanding customer is seeking not only cheaper but innovative and trendy products more than ever before. For an organization to be ahead of its competition, collaboration across key roles and functions within the company and with its supply chain has become critical. The environment for the PLM practice to grow is just right and we will soon be witnessing an unprecedented interest in this area.”

So, if ERP manages your operations, PLM manages your product portfolio from creation to end of life. My experience of PLM solutions is that they really do provide value—you just need to find the one that best suits your pocket and needs. If that is the case then come along to PLM Connect and find the answer.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 30th September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Management and governance are the arbiters of success or failure when we look across a cloud services ecosystem and the full lifecycle of those applications. That's why governance is so important in the budding era of cloud computing.

As cloud-delivered services become the coin of the productivity realm, how those services are managed as they are developed, deployed, and used—across a services lifecycle—increasingly determines their true value.

And yet governance is still too often fractured, poorly extended across the development-and-deployment continuum, and often not able to satisfy the new complexity inherent in cloud models.

One key bellwether for future service environments and for defining the role and requirements for automated cloud governance is in applications development, which, due to the popularity of platform as a service (PaaS), is already largely a services ecosystem.

Here to help us explain why baked-in visibility across services creation and deployment is essential please join Jeff Papows, President and CEO of WebLayers and the author of Glitch: The Hidden Impact of Faulty Software, and John McDonald, CEO of CloudOne Corp. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

McDonald: Cloud, from a technology perspective, is more about some very sophisticated tools that are used to virtualize the workloads and the data and move them live from one bank of servers to another, and from one whole data center to another, without the user really being aware of it. But, fundamentally, cloud computing is about getting access to a data center that's my data center on-demand.

Fundamentally, the easiest way to remember it is that cloud is to hardware as software as a service (SaaS) is to software. Basically, for CloudOne, we're providing IBM Rational Development tools both through cloud computing and SaaS.

... There's a myth that development is something that we ought to be tooling up for, like providing power to a building or water service. In reality, that’s not how it works at all.

There are people who come and go with different roles throughout the development process. The front-end business analysts play a big role in gathering requirements. Then, quite often, architects take over and design the application software or whatever we are building from those requirements. Then, the people doing the coding—developers—take over. That rolls into testing and that rolls into deployment. And, as this lifecycle moves through, these roles wax and wane.

But the traditional model of getting development tools doesn’t really work that way at all. You usually buy all of the tools that you will ever need up front, usually with a large purchase, put them on servers, and let them sit there, until the people who are going to use them log in and use them. But, while they are sitting there, taking up space and your capital expense budget, and not being used, that’s waste.

The cloud model allows you to spin up and spin down the appropriate amount of software and hardware to support the realities of the software development lifecycle. The money that you save by doing that is the reason you can open any trade magazine and the first seven pages are all going to be about cloud.

It's allowing customers of CloudOne and IBM Rational to use that money in new, creative, interesting ways to provide tools they couldn't afford before, to start pilots of different, more sophisticated technologies that they wouldn't have been able to gather the resources to do before. So, it's not only a cost-savings statement, it's also ease of use, ease of start-up, and an ability to get more for your dollar from the development process. That's a pretty cool thing all the way around.

Papows: A lot of about what’s going on in cloud computing it’s not a particularly new thing. What we used to think of was hosting or outsourcing. What’s happening now is the world is becoming more mobile, as 20 percent of our IT capacity is focused on new application development.

We have to get more creative and more distributed about the talent that contributes to those critical application development and projects. ... Design time governance is the next logical thing in that continuum, so that all of the inherent risk mitigation associated with governance and then IT contacts can be applied to application development in a hybrid model that’s both geographically and organizationally distributed.

When you try to add some linear structure and predictability to those hybrid models, the constant that can provide some order and some efficiency is not purely technology-based. It's not just the virtualization, the added virtual machine capacity, or even the middleware to include companies like WebLayers or tools like Rational. It's the process that goes along with it. One of the really important things about design-time governance is the review process.

Governance is a big part of the technology toolset that institutionalizes that review process and adds that order to what otherwise can quickly become a bit chaotic.

McDonald: The challenge of tools in the old days was that they were largely created during a time where all the people and the development project were sitting on the same floor with each other in a bunch of cubes in offices.

As the challenges of development have caused companies to look at outsourcing and off-shoring, but even more simplistically the merger of my bank and your bank. Then we have groups of developers in two different cities, or we bought a packaged application, and the best skill to help us integrate it is actually from a third-party partner which is in a completely different city or country. Those tools have shown their weaknesses, even in just getting your hands on them.

How do I punch a hole through the firewall to give you a way to check in your code problems? The cloud allows us to create a dedicated new data center that sits on the Internet and is accessible to all, wherever they are, and in whatever time zone they are working, and whatever relationship they have to my company.

That frees things up to be collaborative across company boundaries. But with that freedom comes a great challenge in unifying a process across all of those different people, and getting a collaborative engine to work across all those people.

It’s almost a requirement to keep the wheels on the bus and to have some degree of ability to manage the process in the compliance with regulations and the information about how decisions were made in such distributed ways that they are traceable and reviewable. It’s really not possible to achieve such a distributed development environment without that governance guidance.

Papows: We're dealing with some challenges for the first time that require out-of-the-box thinking. I talk about this in "Glitch." We have reached a point where there a trillion connected devices on the Internet as the February of this year. There are a billion embedded transistors for every human being on the planet.

You’ve read about or heard about or experienced first hand the disasters that can happen in production environments, where you have some market-facing application, where service is lost, where there is even brand damage or economic consequences.

... Everybody intellectually buys into governance, but nobody individually wants to be governed. Unless you automate it, unless you provide the right stack of tools and codify the best practices and libraries that can be reusable, it simply won’t happen. People are people, and without the automation to make it natural, unnatural things get applied some percentage of the time, and governance can’t work that way.

McDonald: Developers view themselves quite often as artists. They may not articulate it that way, but they often see themselves as artists and their palette is code.

As such, they immediately rankle at any notion that, as artists, they should be governed. Yet, as we’ve already established, that guidance for them around the processes, methods, regulations, and so on is absolutely critical for success, really in any size organization, but beyond the pale in a distributed development environment. So, how do you deal with that issue?

Well, you embed it into their entire environment from the very first stage. In most companies, this is trying to decide what projects we should undertake, which in a lot of companies is a mainly over-glorified email argument.

Governance has to be embedded at every step of that way, gently nudging, and sometimes shuttling all these players back into the right line, when it comes to ensuring that the result of their effort is compliant with whatever it is that I needed to be compliant to.

In short, you’ve got to make it be a part of and embedded into every stage of the development process, so that it largely disappears, and becomes something that becomes such a natural extension of the tool so that you don’t have anyone along the way realizing that they are being governed

WebLayers was the very first partner that we reached out to say, "Can you go down this journey with us together, as we begin developing these workbenches, these integrated toolsets, and delivering them through the cloud on-demand?" We already know and see that embedding governance in every layer is something we have to be able to do out of the gate.

The team at WebLayers was phenomenal in responding to that request and we were able to take several based instances of various Rational tools, embed into them WebLayers technology, and based on how the cloud works, archive those, put them up in our library to be able to be pulled down off-the-shelf, cloned, and made an instance of for the various customers that we have coming to our pipeline who want to experience this technology in what we are doing.

... The avoidance of things going badly is unfortunately very difficult to measure. That is something that everyone who attempts to do a cloud-delivered development environment and does the right thing by embedding in it the right governance guidance should know coming out of the gate. The best thing that’s going to happen is you are not going to have a catastrophe.

That said, one of the neat things about having a common workbench, and having the kinds of reporting in metrics that it can measure, meaning the IBM Jazz, along with the WebLayers technology, is that I can get a very detailed view of what’s going on in my software factory at every turn of the crank and where things are coming off the rails a little bit.

Papows: There's an age-old expression that you're so close to the forest you can't see the trees. Well, I think in the IT business we’re sometime so deeply embedded in the bark we can't see anything.

We've been developing, expanding, deploying, and reinventing on a massive scale so rapidly for the last 30 years that we've reached a breaking point where, as I said earlier, between the complexity curves, between the lack of elasticity and human capital, between the explosion and the amount of mobile computing devices and their propensity for accessing all of this back-end infrastructure and applications, where something fundamentally has to change. It's a problem on a scale that can't be overwhelmed by simply throwing more bodies at it.

Secondly, in the current economy, very few CIOs have elastic budgets. We have to do as an industry what we've done from the very beginning, which is to automate, innovate, and find creative solutions to combat the convergence of all of those digital elements to what would otherwise be a perfect storm.

So SaaS, cloud computing, automated governance, forms of artificial intelligence, Rational tooling, consistent workbench methodologies, all of these things are the instruments of getting ourselves out of the corner that we have otherwise painted ourselves in.

I don't want to seem like an alarmist or try to paint too big a storm cloud on the horizon, but this is simply not something that's going to happen or be resolved in a business-as-usual usual fashion.

That, in fact, is where companies like CloudOne are able to expand and leap productivity equations for companies in certain segments of the market. That's where automation, whether it's Rational, WebLayers, or another piece of technology, has got to be part of the recipe of getting off this limb before we saw it off behind us.

McDonald: If you have any inclination at all to see what it is that Jeff and I are telling you, give it a whirl, because it's very simple.

That's one of the coolest things of all about this whole model, in my mind. There there is simply no barrier for anyone to give this a try. In the old model, if you wanted to give the technology a try, you had better start with your calculator. And you had better get the names and addresses of your board of directors, because you're going there eventually to get the capital approval and so on to even get a pilot project started in many cases with some of these very sophisticated tools.

This is just not the case anymore. With the CloudOne environment you can sign on this afternoon with a web-based form to get a instance of let's say, Team Concert set up for you with WebLayers technology embedded in it, in about 20 minutes from when you push "submit," and it's absolutely free for the first model. From there, you grow only as you need them, user-by-user. It's really quite simple to give this concept a try and it's really very easy.

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 24th September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

An often-overlooked aspect of data center transformation (DCT) is what to do with the older assets as newer systems come online. Much of the retiring IT equipment can possess sensitive data, may be sources of significant economic return, or at least need to be recycled according to various regulations.

Improperly disposing of data and other IT assets can cause embarrassing security breaches, increase costs, and pose the risk of regulatory penalties. Indeed, many IT organizations are largely unaware of the hazards and risks of selling older systems into auction sites, secondary markets or via untested suppliers.

Compliance and recycling issues, as well as data security concerns and proper software disposition, should therefore be top of mind early in the DCT process, not as an after-thought.

In a recent podcast discussion, I tapped two HP executives on how to best manages productive transitions of data center assets—from security and environmental impact, to recycling and resale, and even to rental of transitional systems during a managed upgrade process. I spoke with Helen Tang, Worldwide Data Center Transformation Lead for HP Enterprise Business, and Jim O'Grady, Director of Global Life Cycle Asset Management Services with HP Financial Services.

Here are some excerpts:

Helen Tang: Today there are the new things coming about that everybody is really excited about, such as virtualization, and private cloud. ... This time around, enterprises don’t want to repeat past mistakes, in terms of buying just piles of stuff that are disconnected. Instead, they want a bigger strategy that is able to modernize their assets and tie into a strategic growth enablement asset for the entire business.

Yet throughout the entire DCT process, there's a lot to think about when you look at existing hardware and software assets that are probably aged, and won’t really meet today’s demands for supporting modern applications.

How to dispose of those assets? Most people don’t really think about it nor understand all of the risks involved. ... Even experienced IT professionals, who have been in the business for maybe 10, 20 years, don’t quite have the skills and understanding to grasp all of this.

We're starting to see this  sort of IT hybrid role called the IT controller, that typically reports to the CIO, but also dot-lines into the CFO, so that the two organizations can work together from the very beginning of a data center project to understand how best to optimize both the technology, as well as the financial aspects.

Jim O'Grady: We see that a lot of companies try to manage this themselves, and they don’t have the internal expertise to do it. Often, it’s done in a very disconnected way in the company. Because it’s disconnected and done in many different ways, it leads to more risks than people think.

You are putting your company’s brand at stake, through improper environmental recycling compliance, or exposing your clients, customers, or patients’ data to a security breach. This is definitely one of those areas you don’t want to read about in a newspaper to figure out what went wrong.

One of the most common areas where our clients are caught unaware of is the complexity of the data security, and the e-waste legislation requirements that are out there, and especially the pace of its change.

We suggest that they have a well thought-out plan for destroying or clearing data prior to the asset decommissioning and/or prior to the asset leaving the physical premise of the site. Use your outsource partner, if you have one, as a final validation for data security. So, do it on site, as well as do it off site.

Have a well-established plan and budget up-front, one that’s sponsored by a corporate officer, to handle all of the end-of-use assets well before the end-of-use period comes.

E-waste legislation resides at the state, local, national, and regional levels, and they all differ. There's some conflict, but some are in line with each other. So it's very difficult to understand what your legislative requirements are and how to comply. Your best bet is to deal with a highest standard and pick someone that knows and has experience in meeting these legislative requirements.

There are tremendous amounts of global complexities that customers are trying to overcome, especially when they try to do data center consolidation and transformation, throughout their enterprise across different geographies and country borders.

You're talking about a variety of regulatory practices and directives, especially in the EU, that are emerging and restrict how you move used and non-working product across borders. There are a variety of different data-security practices and environmental waste laws that you need to be aware of.

A lot of our clients choose to outsource this work to a partner. But they need to keep in mind that they are sharing risk with whomever they partner with. So they have to be very cautious and be extremely picky about who they select as a partner.

This may sound a bit self-serving, but I always suggest for enterprises to resist smaller local vendors. ... If you don’t kick the tires with your partner and you don’t find out that the partner consists of a man, a dog, and a pickup truck, you just may have a hard time defending yourself as to why you selected that partner.

Also, develop a very strong vendor audit qualification and ongoing inspection process. Visit that vendor prior to the selection and know where your waste stream is going to end up. Whatever they do with the waste stream, it’s your waste stream. You are a part of the chain of custody, so you are responsible for what happens to that waste stream, no matter what that vendor does with it.

You need to create rigorous documented end-to-end controls and audit processes to provide audit trails for any future legal issues. And finally, select a partner with a brand name and reputation for trust and integrity. Essentially, share the risk.

Enterprises should well consider how they retire and recover value for their entire end-of-use IT equipment, whether it's a PDA or supercomputer, HP or non-HP product. Most data center transformations and consolidations typically end with a lot of excess or end-of-use product.

We can help educate customers on the hidden risk and dispositioning that end-of-use equipment into the secondary market. This is a strength of HP Financial Services (HPFS).

Typically, what we find with companies trying to recover value for product is that they give it to their facilities guys or the local business units. These guys love to put it on eBay and try to advertise for the best price. But, that’s not always the best way to recover the best value for your data center equipment.

Your best bet is to work with a disposition provider that has a very, very strong re-marketing reach into the global markets, and especially a strong demonstrative recovery process.

We're now seeing it migrate into the procurement arm. These guys typically put it out for bid and select the highest bid from a lot of the open market brokers. A better strategy to recover value, but not the best.

Your best bet is to work with a disposition provider that has a very, very strong re-marketing reach into the global markets, and especially a strong demonstrative recovery process.

From a financial asset ownership model, HPFS has the ability to come in and work with a client, understand their asset management strategy, and help them to personalize the financial asset ownership model that makes sense for them.

For example, if you look at a leasing organization, when you lease a product, it's going to come back. A key strength in terms of managing your residual is to recover the value for the product as it comes back, and we do that on a worldwide basis.

We have the ability to reach emerging markets or find the market of highest recovery to be able to recover the value for that product. As we work with clients and they give us their equipment to remarket on their behalf, we bring it into the same process.

When you think about it, an asset recovery program is really the same thing as a lease return. It's really a lot of reverse logistics—bring it into a technical center, where it's audited, the data is wiped, the product is tested, there’s some level of refurbishment done, especially if we can enhance the market value. Then, we bring it into our global markets to recover value for that product.

We have skilled product traders within our product families who know how to hold product, and wait for the right time to release it into the secondary market. If you take a lot of product and sell it in one day, you increase the supply, and all of the recovery rates for the brokers drop overnight. So, you have to be pretty smart. You have to know when to release product in small lot sizes to maximize that recovery value for the client.

We're seeing a big uptake in the need to support legacy product, especially in DCT. We're able to provide highly customized pre-owned authentic legacy HP product solutions, sometimes going back 20 years or more. The need for temporary equipment just scaling out legacy data center hardware platform capacity that’s legacy locked is an increasing need that we see from our clients.

Clients also need to ensure their product is legally licensed and they do not encounter intellectual property right infringements. Lastly, they want to trust that the vendor has the right technical skills to deal with the legacy configuration and compatibility issues.

Our short-term rental program covers new or legacy products. Again, many customers need access to temporary product to prove out some concepts, or just to test some software application on compatibility issues. Or, if you're in the midst of a transformation, you may need access to temporary swing gear to enable the move.

We also help clients understand strategies to recover the best value for decommissioned assets, as well as how to evaluate and how to put in place a good data-security plan.

We help them understand whether data security should be done on-site versus off-site, or is it worth the cost to do it on-site and off-site. We also help them understand the complexities of data wiping enterprise product, versus just the plain PC.

The one thing we help customers understand, and it’s the real hidden complexity is how to set up an effective reverse logistic strategy.

Most of the local vendors and providers out there are skilled in wiping data for PCs, but when you get into enterprise products, it can get really complex. You need to make sure that you understand those complexities, so you can secure the data properly.

Lastly, the one thing we help customers understand, and it’s the real hidden complexity, is how to set up an effective reverse logistic strategy, especially on a global basis. How do you get the timing down for all the products coming back on a return basis?

Tang: We reach out to our customers in various interactions to talk them through the whole process from beginning to end.

One of the great starting points we recommend is something we called the Data Center Transformation Experience Workshop, where we actually bring together your financial side, your operations people, and your CIOs, so all the key stakeholders in the same room, and walk through these common issues that you may or may not have thought about to begin with. You can walk out of that room with consensus, with a shared vision, as well as a roadmap that’s customized for your success.

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: 24th September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Sonoa Systems, a provider of application programming interface (API) solutions, has changed its name this week to Apigee.

While Sonoa originally offered a free API tools and management platform, Apigee now offers three product lines for enterprises, developers, and API providers of all sizes. The company now serves more than 7,000 developers and some 140 enterprises with API management services. [Disclosure: Sonoa Systems is a past sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

“By unifying the company under one brand and launching our premium line, we can better serve the full spectrum of companies and developers using APIs to power their apps, mobile and multichannel strategies and business partnerships,” said Chet Kapoor, CEO, Apigee.

The traffic has been brisk. Currently, 2,500 GB of data per month and 25k messages are processed per second on Apigee Tech, says the firm.

As I heard more about the role of APIs and how managing and defining that traffic and use patterns—both incoming and outgoing—I was reminded too of the Big Data analysis value so many companies are building out.

What if you were to be able to analyse real-time data with real-time API activities? This may not be for everyone, but many mobile, e-commerce and service providers—and a boat load of web-focused start-ups—could develop some super insights.

Joining the analysis from APIs, systems logs, and data could be a killer business intelligence benefit. It might also spur new revenue by selling that analysis if you happen to find yourself at the juncture of APIs and data and either business or consumer behavior. Viva la real time analytics at scale!

Among the new and rebranded Apigee products:

• Apigee Premium: Announced on Wednesday, Apigee Premium provides advanced features on top of the Apigee Free platform, including unlimited API traffic, advanced rate limiting and analytics, and developer key provisioning. Visit https://app.apigee.com/sign_up to sign up for the preview.
• Apigee Free: A free tools platform launched last year for developers and providers to learn, test, and debug APIs, get analytics on API performance and usage, and apply basic rate-limits to protect their services.
• Apigee Enterprise: An industrial-grade API platform for enterprises using APIs to fuel their mobile, multichannel, application and cloud strategies. Previously Sonoa Systems’ core product ServiceNet, Apigee Enterprise provides API visibility, control, management and security.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 23rd September 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

IBM is snapping up yet another business analytics player. After purchasing OpenPages last week, Big Blue is now laying down $1.7 billion in an all-cash deal to acquire Netezza.

Netezza provides high-performance analytics in a data warehousing appliance that claims to handle complex analytic queries 10 to 100 times faster than traditional systems. Netezza appliances puts analytics into the hands of business users in sales, marketing, product development, human resources and other departments that need to actionable insights to drive decision-making.

With its latest business analytics acquisition, Steve Mills, senior vice president and group executive of IBM Software and Systems, says the company is bringing analytics to the masses.

“We continue to evolve our capabilities for systems integration, bringing together optimized hardware and software, in response to increasing demand for technology that delivers true business value,” Mills says. “Netezza is a perfect example of this approach.”

Big Blue’s long haul
Netezza fits in with IBM’s maturing business analytics strategy. Big Blue has long put an emphasis on data analysis and business intelligence (BI) as key drivers of IT infrastructure needs. The company has demonstrated a clear understanding that data analysis and BI can also be easily applied to business issues.

IBM’s relationship database, DB2, also fits into the big picture. Over the years, IBM has built a strong family of database-driven products around DB2. Essentially, IBM has successfully worked to tie the data equation together with the needs of enterprises and the strength of their IT departments.

While DB2 reaches into the past and supports the data needs of legacy and distributed systems and applications, new architectures around in-memory and optimized platforms for persistence-driven tasks are in vogue. While Neteeza's strengths are in analytics, this architecture has other uses, ones we'll be seeing more of.

Fast-forward to the Netezza acquisition. The $1.7 billion grab shows that IBM is well aware that big data sets don’t lend themselves to traditional architecture for crunching data. IBM, along with its competitors, have been developing or acquiring new architectures that focus more on in-memory solutions.

Rather than moving the entire database or large caches around on disk or tape, then, new architectures have emerged where the data and logic reside closer together—and the data is accessed from high-performing persistence.

For example, with Netezza appliances, NYSE Euronext has slashed the time it takes to load and extract massive amounts of historical data so it can run analytic queries more securely and efficiently, while reducing run times from hours to seconds. Virgin Media, a UK provider of TV, broadband, phone and mobile services with millions of subscribers, uses Netezza across its product marketing, revenue assurance and credit services departments to proactively plan, forecast, and respond to the effect of pricing and tariff changes enabling them to quickly respond with competitive offerings.

Business analytics consolidation
With the Netezza acquisition, the business analytics market is seeing consolidation as major players begin preparing to tap into a growing big data opportunity. Much the same as the BI market saw consolidation a few years ago—IBM acquired Cognos, Oracle bought Hyperion, and SAP snapped up Business Objects—vendors are now seeing big data analytics as an area that should be embedded into the total infrastructure of solutions. That requires a different architecture.

The competition is heating up. EMC purchased Greenplum, an enabler of big data clouds and self-service analytics, in July. Both companies are planning to sell the hardware and software together in appliances. The vendors tune and optimize the hardware and software to offer the benefits of big data crunching, taking advantage of in memory architecture and high performance hardware.

Expect to see more consolidation, although there aren’t too many players left in the Netezza space. Acquisition candidates include data management and analysis software company Aster Data Systems and Teradata with its enterprise analytics technologies, among others. [Disclosure: Aster Data is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Meanwhile, Oracle this week at OpenWorld is pushing against the market with its new Exadata product. The battle is on. My take is that these purchases are for more than the engines that drive analytics—they are for the engines that drive SaaS, cloud, mobile, web and what we might call the more modern work loads ... data intensive, high-scaling, fast-changing and services-oriented.

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