By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 25th November 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Nearly every enterprise – including commercial businesses, educational institutions and government organisations – relies on printing to support essential business processes, whether it is back-office operations such as accounting or payroll or front-office activities such as sales and marketing.

Regardless of how dependent an organisation is on printing, IT departments struggle with similar management challenges: providing reliable print services that meet organisational expectations while containing operational costs.

Too often, organisations own a broad range of print, copier, scanner and fax equipment, often from different vendors, requiring different software, consumables and supplies. Devices may often be outdated and inefficient, and few organisations know how many assets they have, how they are being used, and how much it costs to own, maintain and operate them.

This makes it increasingly difficult to optimise efficiency and control costs, and creates a huge IT and administration headache. Organisations facing staff shortages or lacking the correct technology expertise do not have the resources and skills to keep on top of print management issues, leaving them exposed to spiralling print costs, reduced productivity and increased risk due to unprotected devices.

This has prompted many businesses to move to a managed print service (MPS) to ensure more efficient and effective print infrastructure operation and management, from the office to the print room.

A managed print environment can deliver strategic business advantage, supporting cost reduction imperatives and environmental demands along with improved compliance and reduced risk. Today, the strongest uptake of MPS has been among large enterprises (1000+ employees). Our recent research suggests that half of European large enterprises have implemented or are piloting MPS.

The emergence of independent MPS providers that offer vendor-agnostic, best-of-breed technology, software and services is promising to expand the penetration of MPS beyond the exclusive domain of large enterprises.

This channel provides an important role in delivering impartial assessment services and unbiased MPS recommendations. Services such as multivendor break-fix, support and supplies replenishment enable organisations to protect existing hardware investments rather than moving immediately to a standardised print environment.

By retaining the flexibility to add devices from multiple vendors, independent MPS providers can innovate with the latest technology and introduce new capabilities independently of any single incumbent printer or copier supplier.

While hardware vendors will have a vested interest in moving the customer to a standardised environment, most of the major MPS vendors are able to support and manage a multivendor environment at the initial stages of an MPS engagement, sweating the assets as needed.

Not many organisations operate a standardised fleet at the outset. It is therefore vital to select an MPS provider that can provide an impartial assessment of the print environment.

However, if an organisation is planning to move to a standardised environment, a hardware-centric MPS may be the best approach. This can be supplied by a hardware vendor, SI or independent MPS provider. Many hardware vendors will use channel partners to deliver MPS midmarket.

Vendor-neutral providers can often negotiate the best prices on equipment and supplies, delivering quality at lower cost.

It is in the interest of an independent MPS provider to offer the right device for the purpose, regardless of brand. While a single-vendor strategy forces an enterprise to settle for a single vendor's offer for each area of the enterprise, a multivendor strategy enables a true best-of-breed approach across the organisation.

Pricing for traditional MPS contracts is often based on minimum volumes. We have found that is the top inhibitor of MPS adoption. Independent MPS providers often use different pricing models such as pay-per-print, so customers do not pay for pages they have not printed.

Although hardware vendors have been the predominant MPS suppliers for decades, the market is at a tipping point, evolving to encompass a wider range of providers. Independent firms should take advantage, particularly if they have the resources and infrastructure to design and deploy MPS.

This window of opportunity is limited, though: the technology that enables independent MPS providers to move up the MPS stack is also available to competitors such as SIs, managed services providers and hardware vendors, which are using the same or similar technology to move down the stack.

As MPS providers look to gain further mid-market traction, we expect further consolidation in the market. Specifically, we expect hardware vendors to acquire more independent providers to strengthen their multivendor MPS delivery and service capabilities. A report is here.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 29th September 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

The overarching message of Xerox's recent analyst briefing was about being  "services-led, technology-driven". Xerox is certainly a company in the midst of  transformation. Its total revenue has grown from $15.2bn in 2009 to  approximately $23bn in 2011.

Services now represent about half its business, up from 25 per cent two years  ago. Already an established player in the document management/processing  outsourcing market, its acquisition of ACS last year, a BPO firm, means it is  now a leading player in the services market, with an estimated value of $500bn  that combines document outsourcing, business process outsourcing (BPO) and IT  outsourcing.

While the ACS integration promises to expand Xerox's penetration into the  enterprise, it is also actively pushing its managed print services (MPS) capabilities to the SMB and mid-market sectors. Globally, Xerox is working to  accelerate the transition of its global partner network to a services-led  model.

Xerox now has more than 2,500 partners offering some form of MPS. In addition  to its traditional channel partners, its global MPS partner network also  includes a range of managed IT services, technology and software partners,  including Cisco and Computacenter.

In an increasingly commoditised hardware market, MPS is a reseller opportunity  to increase revenue through providing customers with a contractual approach to  purchasing or leasing hardware together with service and supplies.

Central to Xerox's channel MPS initiative is Xerox Partner Print Services,  which sits between its basic equipment service packages, such as eClick and  PagePack, and its direct enterprise MPS offerings.

Xerox XPPS is a cloud-based platform hosted by Xerox and offers a range of  standardised components to support a multivendor environment, such as assessment  and optimisation, device discovery and monitoring, sales contract management,  business intelligence (BI) reporting, service management and delivery, and a  customer service portal. Its recent acquisition of NewField IT and its AssetDB technology has been key  to partner enablement providing the backbone for assessment and proposal  generation architecture for XPPS, as well as an ongoing optimisation of customer  contracts.

Xerox has built a comprehensive certification and accreditation process for  XPPS salespeople and partners to support their MPS sales efforts. Accredited  XPPS partners must be able to demonstrate successful delivery for a client's  managed print service. In Europe, Xerox has approximately 170 XPPS partners,  having grown from 90 at the end of 2010. Almost 80 per cent of these partners  are fully accredited XPPS partners. One of the key strengths of Xerox's  XPPS offering is its multivendor device support, which will appeal to multibrand  resellers and also offers opportunities for Xerox's concessionaires.

In particular, the managed IT services market represents an opportunity for  multivendor MPS platforms such as XPPS, as it enables managed service providers  (MSPs) to integrate MPS with their existing managed service platforms. Although so far printing is not typically an integrated  component of managed IT services, Quocirca believes MSPs will be the next  development in expanding the opportunity for MPS among SMB and midmarket  businesses.

Xerox has certainly set a stake in the channel MPS ground, and many of its  competitors are seeking to emulate its actions. The vendor has already  successfully remodelled its Enterprise MPS tools and technologies for the SMB  and midmarket. And, as such, Xerox is positioned well to support its partners'  transition from box-shifting to a services-led approach.

Its XPPS offering appeals to a wide range of resellers, in our view particularly those strategically focused on MPS. Xerox, of course, recognises that not all its resellers will transition to  XPPS. There will always be some that are reluctant to use a vendor-hosted  infrastructure to manage their multibrand base, which may have concerns about  where and how their customer data is hosted. It should be noted, though, that Xerox has extensive ISO 27,001 security  standardisation and proper contractual terms in place to mitigate such concerns.  In such cases, resellers may consider independent third-party management tools backed up by their own networks of service engineers.

Nevertheless, for those resellers ready to develop their MPS capabilities,  using a flexible and robust hosted platform such as XPPS is a viable approach,  for both Xerox-only and multibrand resellers. Not only does this limit the risk when investing in building a MPS platform,  it also gives resellers access to Xerox global supply chain and delivery  centres. This should appeal particularly to resellers that want to expand their MPS  delivery across regions.

For now Xerox is ahead of the game when it comes to its channel MPS  initiatives, but competitors are following fast and competition will not only  come from its traditional competitors but also from those in the managed IT  services market with which Xerox, wisely, has already engaged.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 17th August 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

A number of major trends are changing the finance game for IT leaders, especially in terms of how they operate like a business within the business. There's a heightened emphasis on measuring cost, service management, hybrid computing, and outsourcing that leverage software-as-a-service (SaaS) and cloud models.

There's also a recognition that collaboration and coordinated business processes need to expand to far outside the four walls of the company. IT needs then to increasingly support ecosystems and better apply extended enterprise process governance, while striving to save money.

So how can IT adjust to these financial pressures? What must they do differently? BriefingsDirect recently interviewed an executive from Ariba to learn how CIOs specifically are seeing the world anew financially, and how they can develop mature strategies for making IT more central to helping businesses innovate productively.

Jason Kurtz, Vice President of Network and Financial Solutions at Ariba, is interviewed by Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions. [Disclosure: Ariba is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Here are some excerpts:

Kurtz: We've certainly seen several big changes. One is in the resource-constrained world. There are bandwidth constraints to support business innovations.

When I talk to CIOs, one of the biggest issues on their minds is, how do I make sure I am allocating more of my time and efforts in technology that supports business growth and innovation, versus the maintenance of existing systems? That's very different than the focus that you would have had in years past in terms of driving internal automation. That's one big change we've seen.

Two is clearly the adoption of SaaS technologies and the impact that's having on IT organizations. We see it completely changing the way companies think about IT investment, not just capital expenditures versus operating expenditures, but the roles and responsibilities that an IT organization has and how it interacts with its internal customers within the functional parts of the organization.

Three, I think you referenced it a little bit earlier, is not just a maniacal focus on managing costs, but also the adoption and return on investment (ROI) that is generated from IT investments. There's always been a focus on getting a good ROI, but I think it’s a much more significant focus across the organization on doing that, and particularly from an IT organization in terms of making sure that they have the ability to measure that.

Four was just a focus on inter-enterprise collaboration. Rather than focusing on the internal process efficiency and effectiveness within the four walls of a company, CIOs are starting to realize that the next wave of productivity will be outside their four walls, what some refer to as inter-enterprise collaboration, meaning how an enterprise automates the processes and the way it collaborates with its customers and suppliers throughout the supply chain.

... About 50–60 percent of companies who are moving to a SaaS environment or the cloud are doing it because of the cost reduction opportunities inherent in not having to deploy, manage, and support applications.

Not only do they get the cost benefits of that, but they typically have time-to-deployment benefits and less time-to-realize-value and flexibility benefits that they didn’t have due to resource constraints within an organization. That's a very common trend in the market, and specifically within Ariba’s customers, and we expect to see that trend continue.

Gardner: I'm really interested about this notion about how IT needs to operate more like a business. What is it that IT needs to do in terms of becoming more like some of the other business units or functions?

Kurtz: It starts with a really well-defined set of goals and objectives. Why are we going to undertake something, what are we hoping to accomplish with that, and how are we going to measure that? What are the key performance indicators (KPIs) that we'll be able to track success with.

To your point, there were certainly times in the past when everyone was buying into the latest and greatest technology, or something that was new and cutting edge, and wanted to try and experiment with it. Given the economic times over the last several years, the willingness of companies to just experiment and see what happens is dramatically less, and you see IT organizations taking on a much more ROI-driven approach.

So it's having a very well-defined business case for investments or initiatives that they're taking on, and making sure not only they understand what that business case is, but their internal stakeholders understand what that business case is and are committed to signing off on delivering those resources.

And it's not just an IT approval, but it's a CFO approval in many cases, and they're really holding their internal customers and stakeholders' feet to the fire and measuring on a regular basis what the ROI is for that specific initiative. We've seen a dramatic shift in the governance around that kind of ROI and adoption process with all of the initiatives that we see our customers undertaking, much more so than we would have seen two, three, or five years ago.

Gardner: I've seen where the way that IT is able to cut cost, but also actually increase their influence and impact within the organization, is to identify core-versus-context types of IT activities, and for those non-core ones, look to increasingly outsource or partner.

Kurtz: Again, a trend that fits exactly in line with that is that we see customers taking advantage of the cloud or SaaS, particularly for non-core activities.

Take, for example, integration. Integration is required in today's world, whether you're integrating within your four walls or outside your four walls, but is that really a core competence that you want to have as an organization. Or, do you want to rely on third-party integration as the service solution providers who can usually do the integration work faster, cheaper, and more flexibly? We're seeing that's just one example of ways customers are taking advantage of that.

Also, of course, the solutions that Ariba provides in the spend management space, we're seeing where customers want to focus on the core enterprise resource planning (ERP) capabilities around finance and operations and leverage tools like Ariba's Spend Management Suite to help their organizations buy better and connect with their ERP, but do it in a cloud-type of way.

Gardner: One of the things that I keep coming up against when I talk to folks in IT is that there’s still the manual paperwork at the spreadsheet level, when it comes to managing contracts and licenses and keeping track of use-pattern licensing, and how to charge back for that. It’s a nightmare for them.

Kurtz: We have many customers who use our spend management solutions to manage their IT spend, whether that’s the sourcing and negotiating of hardware or infrastructure or contract labor or software licenses, managing the contracting process and the ongoing contracting lifecycle of that, all the way through the procurement of it and then the relationship management aspects of it. We absolutely support those processes that IT organizations need to manage their cost within their organization.

Gardner: Is IT really a laggard when it comes to automation at this level?

Kurtz: You would be really surprised how much we see in terms of the world continuing to be a very manual set of processes and capabilities. If you look at it not just within IT, but if you take a step back and look at it on a broader basis, across the market, we see 80 percent of business-to-business transactions still completed completely manually. We see 85-plus percent of invoices and payments still being paper based or people cutting checks.

We see the vast majority of early payment discounts are completely missed. Some estimates indicate that 70-plus percent of all early payment discount opportunities, which procurement and other organizations work so hard to negotiate, get missed. The estimate on what this cost companies around the world is $650 billion in economic impact annually.

The very core of this problem is how an IT organization connects their internal systems, most likely ERP, within an organization to the systems and ERPs of their customers and suppliers to automate that supply chain. That’s where the big automation opportunity, efficiency, and effective gains are, or will be, next is just because the proliferation of all the combinations of systems within your organization, your suppliers, your customers.

Just think about the number of combinations that can be and how it can be very, very challenging and difficult to connect those systems into the optimal or most efficient supply chain.

Gardner: For the benefit of our IT audience, tell us about Ariba. How does Ariba take what it does and then apply to IT?

Kurtz: Ariba, at the highest level, helps companies buy better, sell better, and manage their cash better, and we do that in a couple of ways.

One, by providing technology or applications that have capabilities across each of those functions around buying, selling, and managing cash. Then, we have a community that is part of our Commerce Cloud, as we refer to it. That community includes our network that connect buyers and sellers, whether they're collaborating with suppliers, looking for new business opportunities, or helping to manage their working capital. It's a network that facilitates documents, information, and financial supply chains.

Then, we have a variety of capabilities to help our customers adopt and be successful. Some of that’s delivered by us and some of it by partners who plug into the cloud. At the highest level, that’s a little bit of what we do.

How our IT organization is taking advantage of that I think was your next question. We see a proliferation of organizations taking advantage of the ability to plug into the Ariba Commerce Cloud in different areas.

Some organizations start with our legacy, which is spend management and helping customers buy better, whether that’s identifying savings opportunities, identifying new sources of supply, negotiating better agreements, managing the contracting process, all the way through, procuring solutions, collaborating with your suppliers and receiving invoices back from your suppliers to managing cash, including payment term optimization, invoice reconciliation, and even working-capital management solutions.

Finally, for sellers, it helps create a marketing channel, new business opportunities, improved efficiencies, and collaborating with and transacting with your customers and prospects.

The nice thing about the way Ariba works is that you can plug in and use any of those pieces on a very modular basis as you need them. That’s been particularly attractive to IT organizations for the exact reasons we talked about before, which is looking for very specific ROI and very specific initiatives around their pain and needs within an organization. We've got the flexibility to help solve those on an individual or holistic need.

And 100 percent of what we do is offered through the cloud.

Gardner: We've been describing IT and its relationship to a provider like Ariba through primarily a consumption framework. But it seems to me that there is also the opportunity for IT to take something like the services you offer with your Ariba Discovery and your ability to use the cloud and ecosystem of providers to initiate a process, and then to manage it as a procurement or a supply chain activity.

Kurtz: This is really the next evolution of where companies are going for automation benefits. It's what we think about as extending the ERP into inter-enterprise collaboration. That’s where companies like Ariba can really help IT organizations.

There are some great examples of customers out there who are doing that. If you think about it on the buying side of the world, take a company like Nalco, which is the largest sustainability company in the world. They had really struggled with lack of automation around purchase orders with their customers and then the purchase orders being delivered to their suppliers from Nalco.

They were literally losing five percent of their orders that they just couldn't track being delivered from their organizations to their suppliers. These lost and delayed orders meant that they couldn't bill customers in a timely manner. It meant lost sales. It meant extending "days sales outstanding" and significant customer satisfaction issues.

A team of people were having to call and check on order status and invoice processing payments and payment status, a completely inefficient process between Nalco's customers, and its supplier partners.

By leveraging Ariba Solution and the 'Ariba Network' they were able to collaborate with suppliers and customers to significantly improve their customer satisfaction, reduce "days sales outstanding," and cut headcount that were very involved in working on things that could be easily automated.

Let’s take another example from the side of the business everyone gets most excited about, the revenue growth or sell side of the house. Fastenal is a great example, where an IT organization helps extend the services it provides internally to its customers externally to Fastenal’s customers by leveraging eCommerce and the Ariba Network to connect and collaborate with its customers.

One of the benefits of the extension that Fastenal has done is the ability to collaborate with its customers to provide real-time purchase order and delivery acknowledgements, which have greatly improved customer satisfaction. It has reduced their purchase order error rates by over 80 percent, and it reduced "days sales outstanding" by over 70 percent, a significant working capital improvement.

Other companies are doing the same kind of thing as Fastenal and receiving really good revenue growth or new business opportunities as well. It is not uncommon to see companies like Fastenal finding 50 percent-plus increases in product line cross-sells and up-sells, and seeing even 20 percent plus year-over-year sales growth within existing customers. Then, we have solutions like Ariba Discovery even finding new business in customers that they have never done any business with before.

That’s just an example on the sell side of the house of how IT organizations are extending and can extend the service that they are providing.

One of the most important things to keep in mind is that at Ariba our mission in life is to help extend or complement the ERP investments that many IT organizations have made. We help extend those outside the enterprise and the enterprise collaboration, whether that’s buying, selling, or managing their cash.

You mentioned a few examples of spend management, but also it’s about helping companies sell better, drive revenue growth, and manage their cash better by automating functions like accounts payable and providing benefits to accounts receivable on the sell side.

If you look at it in those terms, we help companies free up their limited IT resources to focus on innovation, not supporting applications or integration or customization, and focus on driving business adoption and leveraging the core internal capabilities of ERP.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 20th July 2011 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2011

WSO2 today announced the debut of the WSO2 StratosLive platform as a service (PaaS) and the launch of WSO2 Stratos 1.5, the newest release of WSO2’s open-source cloud middleware platform software. Together, they provide comprehensive cloud middleware solutions for enabling service-oriented architecture (SOA) and composite application development and deployment in the cloud.

The Palo Alto, Calif., company offers a complete PaaS both as on-premise software and as a hosted service, running the same production-ready code wherever it best suits customers’ privacy, service-level agreement (SLA), and deployment requirements. [Disclosure: WSO2 is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

StratosLive provides a complete enterprise deployment and integration platform, including application server, enterprise service bus (ESB), database, identity server, governance registry, business process manager, portal server and more.

Stratos provides the same capabilities to organizations that want the benefits of a PaaS running on their own premises. It builds on and extends WSO2's Carbon enterprise middleware platform by taking the Carbon code and adding cloud functionality for self-service provisioning, multi-tenancy, metering, and elastic scaling, among others.

All Carbon products, including the latest features from the recent Carbon 3.2 platform release, are available both as part of the Stratos cloud middleware platform and as cloud-hosted versions with instant provisioning on the StratosLive public PaaS. WSO2's approach enables developers to migrate their applications and services between on-premise servers, a private PaaS, a public PaaS, and hybrid cloud environments, providing deployment flexibility.

“The cloud is a compelling platform for enabling enterprises to combine the agility they’ve gained by employing SOAs and composite applications with an extended reach and greater cost efficiencies,” said Dr. Sanjiva Weerawarana, WSO2 founder and CEO. “At WSO2, we’re delivering on this promise by providing the only truly open and complete PaaS available today with our WSO2 StratosLive middleware PaaS and WSO2 Stratos 1.5 cloud middleware platform.”

Four new products
The launch of StratosLive and Stratos 1.5, adds four new cloud middleware products:

• Data as a Service provides both SQL and NoSQL databases to users based on both MySQL and Apache Cassandra. This allows users to self-provision a database in the cloud and to choose the right model for their applications.
• Complex Event Processing as a Service is the full multi-tenant cloud version of CEP Server, which launched in June 2011 and supports multiple CEP engines, including Drools Fusion and Esper, to enable complex event processing and event stream analysis.
• Message Broker as a Service is the full multi-tenant cloud version of Message Broker, which launched in June 2011 and supports message queuing and publish-subscribe to enable message-driven and event-driven solutions in the enterprise. It uses Apache Qpid as the core messaging engine to implement the Advanced Message Queuing Protocol (AMQP) standard.
• Cloud Services Gateway (CSG), first launched as a separate single-tenant product, is now a fully multi-tenant product within Stratos and StratosLive.

With StratosLive and Stratos, central cloud features are built directly into the core platform—including multi-tenancy, automatic metering and monitoring, auto-scaling, centralized governance and identity management, and single sign-on. The Cloud Manager in StratosLive and Stratos offers point-and-click simplicity for configuring and provisioning middleware services, so developers can get started immediately and focus on the business logic, rather than configuring and deploying software systems.

Additionally, the Stratos cloud middleware platform features an integration layer that allows it to install onto any existing cloud infrastructure such as Eucalyptus, Ubuntu Enterprise Cloud, Amazon Elastic Computing Cloud (EC2), and VMware ESX. Enterprises are never locked into a specific infrastructure provider or platform.

The availability of StratosLive and Stratos 1.5 brings several new core platform enhancements:

• Software-as-a-service (SaaS) Web application support
• Google Apps integration
• Metering and usage throttling
• Billing
• Multi-tenant logging

WSO2 StratosLive and WSO2 Stratos 1.5 are available today. Released under the Apache License 2.0, they do not carry any licensing fees. Production support for the Stratos starts at $24,000 per year. StratosLive middleware PaaS is available at three paid subscription levels: SMB, Professional, and Enterprise, as well as a free demo subscription. For details on subscription pricing, visit the WSO2 website.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 19th July 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

It is hard to believe that, in the 21st century digital age, one of the most business-critical documents—the invoice—is still created and sent mostly in paper format. In 2010, of the 30 billion invoices sent in Europe, only 10% were done so electronically. In a global economy where many other processes are being automated, a reliance on any paper-based business process seems archaic. But so far, attempts to move to true 100% electronic invoicing have been hindered by market fragmentation, cost and concerns around legal standards and interoperability. However, the emergence of managed services which provide a hybrid approach to total invoice management promise to help businesses make a gradual transition to electronic invoicing, by processing both paper and electronic invoices based on buyer and supplier preferences.

A recent Ricoh study [1] shows that, on average, 42.5 per cent of all business critical information is still in hard copy format. There is no doubt that invoicing contributes to this figure, as it remains one of the last bastions of manual processing and is labour-intensive, inefficient, costly and error prone. Quocirca estimates that the cost of processing paper invoices through manual means can range anywhere from €8 to €10 per invoice, which is significant when applied across the mountain of paper such that many businesses process on a daily basis.

Manual processes can also result in slow invoice reconciliation making it difficult to secure early-payment discounts, which in turn can result in poor supplier relationships. Furthermore, companies that continue to rely on paper-based invoicing methods may have difficulty preparing audit trails for closing books and meeting the requirements for European VAT audits. Ricoh’s study also indicates that only 39% of companies have the ability to follow an audit trail for all their business critical documents. A high reliance on paper also comes at an environmental cost—not only in paper waste but also in the associated energy costs of transporting the physical invoices.

It is unsurprising therefore that more businesses want to implement electronic invoicing (e-invoicing) to remove manual processes, speed up invoicing cycles and eliminate non-value add activities for accounts departments. Benefits of e-invoicing are far-reaching. Quocirca estimates that e-invoicing can enhance business efficiency through reducing the costs of handling invoices by up to 70%. The most obvious benefits are the direct cost savings for sending the invoice (paper, postage and printing) and in processing (accepting the invoice, processing and approving it) for the recipient.

These compelling drivers are now set to broaden e-invoicing adoption, enabling more organisations to begin the transition to electronic invoicing. In 2011, approximately 5 million European businesses are expected to send or receive electronic invoices. Initiatives such as the European Commission’s plans to revise the E-Signatures Directive in 2011 are a bid to encourage businesses to make more use of electronic invoices. Electronic invoicing is also part of the European Commission’s flagship “A Digital Agenda for Europe” which wants to see e-invoicing to be the predominant form of invoicing by 2020.

 Today the market is categorised by a mix of software products deployed on-premise and hosted services, most of which offer integration to enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems, compliance with varying country regulations and supplier on-boarding. E-invoicing networks are becoming more popular as invoices, regardless of data standards, are interchanged via a third party service providers or invoice portals. Once enrolled in a network, which may charge an upfront fee as well as an on-going fee, a supplier can send electronic invoices to any customer on the network. However such networks rely on full supplier and buyer participation, and generally appeal to larger businesses. Smaller suppliers may have little incentive to participate in networks and may not be able to justify the joining fee. But in a competitive environment they can feel under pressure to comply in order to retain the business. Meanwhile, as businesses move to electronic invoicing at a different pace, they will find themselves operating disparate processes for handling paper and electronic invoices. Poor integration of these processes is costly and inefficient.

As full e-invoicing requires buy-in along the whole supply chain, a big-bang approach to e-invoicing is not realistic. Consequently, some leading businesses are adopting a hybrid approach which provides a phased transition to e-invoicing, whilst enabling them to retain paper-processes for some suppliers and buyers where appropriate. A managed service provider (MSP) takes full control of the invoice process—including the manual capture of paper invoices and document scanning, the handling of a diverse range of invoice receipt formats (e.g. xml, CSV, EDI, fax, email or paper) and the sending of invoices in a buyer’s preferred format. Software is developed, maintained and operated by the MSP, with customers paying a “fee per transaction”, enabling lower costs.

Those businesses in the e-invoicing vanguard are already reaping the benefits. Ricoh, an MSP that provides such services, cites the example of a sportswear manufacturer who operated an expensive and inefficient invoicing process. Mailing 4.5 million paper invoices and statements a year, they outsourced their entire invoice process, planning to transition from paper to electronic invoicing over three years. Using Ricoh’s i-Invoicing service, according to customer preference, invoices are either uploaded to a web portal for online viewing, or printed and dispatched by conventional means. Customers are able to download and pay bills by logging on to the secure web portal. The number of paper-based transactional documents distributed by Ricoh on the manufacturer’s behalf is expected to reduce by 3.6 million per annum, saving €3 million.

By not restricting the format of invoices, a managed service ensures that the benefits of e-invoicing are not limited to just large enterprises, but also extended to SMEs who will gain access to a wider market of potential customers and suppliers, especially larger organisations who may prefer working with e-capable trading partners. E-invoicing will be a major factor in making business process more efficient for many businesses in the future. Those that start now will be ahead of the game as the e-invoicing market steadily builds towards critical mass.

Read Quocirca's report at: Electronic Invoicing: Ready for Prime Time

[1] Ricoh Process Efficiency Index, June 2011. www.ricoh-europe.com/thoughtleadership

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 27th June 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Many organisations are reducing the complexity, cost and risk of operating an unmanaged print environment by adopting a managed print service (MPS). However, while cost reduction has long been the primary objective for MPS, sustainability is also working its way up the agenda.

At Kyocera's recent European analyst briefing, sustainability was a key theme for its Managed Document Services (MDS) offering. Certainly, the environmental impact of unmanaged printing should not be ignored. Poor print management results in wasteful printing and the use of out-dated or redundant devices can also lead to high energy consumption. Implementing responsible printing practices can therefore go a long way to improving an organisation's environmental credentials as well as significantly reducing costs.

As paper remains an important part of many a business's workflows, the focus must be on the "less paper office" rather than the utopian ideal of the paperless office. The nature of printing may be changing—rather than outsourcing high-quality printing, it is conducted in-house and rather than printing and distributing reports, information is distributed electronically and printed only when the recipient feels it is necessary. Meanwhile, the increase in mobile working is creating demand for printing on the move. MPS seeks to address these new requirements for printing in the 21st Century, while ensuring the print environment operates cost effectively and securely with a minimal environmental impact.

Of course there are many simple steps to reducing the environmental impact of printing. These include using recycled paper, enforcing duplex printing and implementing company-wide print policies that encourage employees to print responsibly. But to make real savings—both financial and environmental—businesses need to have a complete visibility on printing volumes and overall costs. This requires a true picture of how many devices there are in an organisation and what is being printed where and by whom.

MPS addresses these needs in three main stages—the assessment, optimisation and ongoing management of the print environment. Most of the MPS measures to reduce printing costs also have an environmental benefit. Device consolidation brings order to the printer chaos that characterises a typical unmanaged print environment. Replacing single function outdated inefficient devices with modern energy efficient multi-function ones (MFPs) reduces energy usage and also enables enforced policies such as duplex printing to be enforced.

But probably one of the most important factors in eliminating paper waste is through the use of "follow-me printing", which eliminates the common occurrence of "print and forget". When a printer job is sent to a network-enabled MFP, the document is only released when an employee authenticates at the device using either a password or swipe card. Documents within individual print queues not printed after a certain amount of time are automatically deleted.

The added bonus of "follow-me printing" is that documents can be released at any location within a corporate network, promoting user mobility. This not only reduces paper waste by eliminating uncollected output, it promotes document security and mobile working. Quocirca believes these will be the driving factors for the adoption of MPS over the coming year.

Kyocera shared details of its MPS engagement with the Royal Sun Alliance (RSA) in the UK. Over five years, Project SPEC (Simplifying Print through Enhancement and Consolidation) aims to reduce RSA's fleet of more than 3,000 printers, managed by a number of vendors, to just 282 high-performance devices, operated through a centralised system. After one year, RSA has reduced print volume by 13 per cent, paper consumption by 21 per cent and energy consumption by 55 per cent. These milestones are showcased in RSA's Corporate Social Responsibility report highlighting the quantifiable cost and environmental benefits of operating a managed print environment.

Green IT should no longer be a nice-to-have afterthought behind cost reduction. More businesses now consider sustainability as a key priority due to combined customer demands, new regulations on carbon trading and constrained financial circumstances. More suppliers are expected to meet environmental criteria—according to Kyocera, sustainability is a key part of almost 80 per cent of MPS tenders with a typical weighting of 35 per cent, from about 10 per cent a few years ago. As sustainability rises up the CIO agenda, they will expect the capability to quantify the environmental impact of their print environment to meet reporting requirements.

Vendors such as HP and Xerox already address such needs through the provision of carbon calculators to assess energy consumption and associated carbon output. Quocirca believes that more MPS vendors will need to provide such analysis as part of their MPS arsenal to demonstrate how MPS can boost cost savings and environmental credentials. With a broader product range planned for the coming year, and plans to unify its offerings across Europe, Kyocera's MDS initiatives show it is catching up with the main players in the market.

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

The IT cobbler's kids finally have their own shoes.

Some 20 years into enterprise resource planning (ERP), whereby IT made business performance metrics and business intelligence (BI) a science for driving the modern corporation, ERP and BI for IT is finally at hand.

HP today unveiled a new suite of software designed to measure and improve IT performance at a comprehensive level via an IT system of record approach. The HP IT Performance Suite gives CIOs the ability to optimize application development, infrastructure and operations management, security, information management, financial planning, and overall IT administration.

The suite and its views into operations via accurate metrics, rather than a jumble of spreadsheets, also sets up the era of grasping true IT costs at the business process level, and therefore begins empirical costs-benefits analysis to properly evaluate hybrid computing models. Knowing your current costs—in total and via discrete domains—allows executives to pick the degree to which SaaS, cloud and outsourcing form the best bet for their company.

Included with the suite is an IT Executive Scorecard that provides visibility in critical performance indicators at cascading levels of IT leadership. It's founded on the open IT data model with built-in capabilities to integrate data from multiple sources, including third parties to deliver a single holistic view of ongoing IT metrics. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

HP has identified 150 standard, best-in-class key performance indicators (KPIs), 50 of which are included in the Executive Scorecard as a starting dashboard. KPIs are distributed in customizable dashboards that provide real-time, role-based performance insights to technology leadership, allowing alignment across common goals for an entire IT organization.

"With this we can leverage our human capital better," said Alexander Pasik, PhD, CIO at the IEEE, based in Piscataway, NJ. "The better automation you can apply to IT operations, the better. It frees us up to focus on the business drivers."

Lifecycle approach
The Performance Suite uses HP's lifecycle approach to software development and management and integrates industry standards such as TIL.

The first solution to be offered in the suite is the CIO Standard Edition, which includes the Executive Scorecard, along with financial planning and analysis, project and portfolio management (PPM), and asset manager modules. This edition automatically integrates data from the modules to provide more than 20 best-practice KPIs covering financial and project health, enabling the optimization of IT performance from a business investment point of view.

"Our use of IT is about driving the actual business," said Pasik, who is adopting elements of the suite and looks forward to putting the scorecard to use soon. "We need to measure IT overall. We will have legitimate metrics on internal operations."

The scorecard can be very powerful at this time in computing, said Piet Loubser, HP senior director of product marketing, because the true capital expenses versus operations expenses for IT can be accurately identified. This, in turn, allows for better planning, budgeting and transitioning to IT shared services and cloud models. Such insight also allows IT to report to the larger organization with authority on its costs and value.

Using the scorecard, said Loubser, IT executives can quickly answer with authority two hitherto vexing questions: Is IT on budget, and is IT on time?

What's especially intriguing for me is the advent of deeper BI for IT, whereby data warehouses of the vast store of IT data can be assembled and analyzed. There is a treasure trove of data and insights into how business operate inside of the IT complex.

Applying BI best practices, using pre-built data models, and developing ongoing reference metrics on business processes to the IT systems that increasingly reflect the business operations themselves portends great productivity and agility benefits. Furthermore, getting valid analysis on IT operations allows for far better planning on future data center needs, modernization efforts, applications lifecycle management, and comparing and contrasting for hybrid models adoption ... or not.

For more information, visit the suite's HP website, www.hp.com/go/itperform.

The announcement of the HP IT Performance Suite comes less than a week before HP's massive Discover conference in Las Vegas, where additional significant news is expected. I'll be doing a series of on-site podcasts from the conference on HP user case studies and on the implications and analysis of the news and trends. Look for them on this blog or BriefingsDirect partner site.

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 30th May 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Xerox’s acquisition of NewField IT, a UK based print consultancy and software solution provider follows hot on the heels of HP’s acquisition of Printelligent, a US-based managed print services (MPS) provider. With both HP and Xerox looking to expand the penetration of MPS to SMBs and midmarket organisations, the acquisition of these companies provides the additional capabilities that both companies need to ensure higher penetration rates. This market remains a largely untapped opportunity for channel partners to capture on-going service revenue opportunities in an increasingly commoditised hardware market – the acquisitions enable both vendors to approach SMBs via the channel with a services-led model that provides distinct business value to the customer.

Xerox and NewField IT

Xerox’s acquisition of NewField IT cements a long-established relationship between the two companies. NewField’s flagship AssetDB technology already underpins the assessment and optimisation capabilities for the Xerox Partner Print Services (XPPS) platform. NewField’s pedigree as a print assessment provider is well recognised across the industry with most printer and copier vendors having used Asset DB in varying degrees to support assessment of print environments and optimised MPS designs. Asset DB covers the complete gamut from graphical floor-plan based data collection to future state design of an optimised print environment.  Although Xerox’s purchase of NewField IT could be dismissed as a small acquisition, it certainly has the potential to make a significant impact of Xerox’s channel-led MPS revenue.

Xerox is keen to replicate its success in the enterprise MPS market across the SMB and midmarket, which currently has a relatively low penetration of MPS. However, success in these channel-led markets is highly reliant on resellers’ resources and skills to sell and deliver MPS quickly and effectively. The Xerox Print Partner Services (XPPS) hosted MPS infrastructure was developed over a year ago to provide channel partners with a set of tools to manage every element of an MPS contract – including sales pursuit, device discovery, optimisation and service delivery. Quocirca believes that the acquisition of Newfield IT will enhance Xerox’s credentials to deliver a comprehensive set of MPS tools for multivendor resellers far beyond the basic MPS packages currently on offer from its competitors.

While the technology benefits of the acquisition for Xerox are clear, less clear is how NewField IT will continue to operate as a vendor-neutral provider of software and services. Its existing relationship as an assessment provider for HP and Ricoh, for instance, must surely be at risk – and even more so given HP’s acquisition of Printelligent. Meanwhile, NewField IT intends to continue providing independent consultancy services to end-users, abiding by its established code of conduct which states that it will remain objective and not supply or promote the products of those hardware vendors that license its technology. Vendor-agnostic assessments are a critical part of any MPS engagement and NewField IT has long been offering these as an independent provider. However, it remains to be seen how effectively it can continue to preserve its independence when delivering vendor-neutral recommendations for MPS device optimisation.

HP and Printelligent

HP’s almost simultaneous announcement to acquire Printelligent has levelled the playing field between the two vendors. Although XPPS had recently been the only cloud MPS platform available to multi-brand resellers enabling them to manage a multivendor environment, HP’s latest acquisition of Printelligent will now provide HP channel partners a wealth of scalable multivendor MPS capabilities.

With Printelligent, HP has acquired an established MPS provider which has been offering MPS since 1993 through a network of MPS channel partners across the US. Printelligent assets will enhance HP’s assessment and optimisation capabilities and its MPS sales and services expertise infrastructure, along with HP’s cloud-based InCommand platform will enable HP to now deliver a set of differentiated MPS solutions and services via the channel.  Whilst the acquisition of Printelligent will certainly bolster HP’s channel MPS capabilities in the US, it may take some time to provide a similar set of services to its European channel, particularly given Xerox’s strong MPS presence in this region.

Market outlook

The majority of SMBs and midmarket organisations currently purchase printer hardware and consumables on a transactional basis which creates a huge opportunity for hardware vendors to encourage customers to adopt a contractual approach to buying “printing” rather than “printers”.  Consequently the market for MPS in the SMB and midmarket is moving beyond the simple single brand, basic service which essentially wraps hardware with supplies, maintenance and support. Whilst HP and Xerox will continue to offer these basic services for businesses that need it, the real cost saving – both financial and environmental – comes from a detailed assessment and optimisaton of the printer environment – from both a hardware and workflow perspective. Channel partners therefore need simple and flexible tools and an infrastructure that they can tap into to sell, deliver and manage MPS on an on-going basis. 

The market to sell MPS to SMBs and midmarket organisations is still wide open and vendors must provide their channel with a simple and effective MPS cloud platform that can deliver remote monitoring, consolidated billing, supplies and service and reporting across a multi-vendor environment. For now SMBs are most likely to be more receptive to basic services, whilst the midmarket organisations stand to benefit most from more complex and value-based MPS propositions.

Although Xerox had a head start in providing an MPS infrastructure for its channel partners, HP has made a smart acquisition which will help it catch up and strengthen its presence in this market, particularly as it can exploit its strong relationship with the IT channel. Now that both vendors have the infrastructure and tools to provide their channel partners, success will ultimately be linked to how well these vendors engage and train their channel to deliver MPS to their customers.

By: Lucy Beck, Sales Director, Palette Posted: 25th May 2011 Copyright Palette © 2011

Ask a CFO if they would like a 30-plus percent annual return on capital, while making their financial processes more efficient, and you’d probably get your hand bitten off. Especially in the current climate, which tempts businesses to hold onto their cash for as long as possible.

At the end of 2009 UK businesses had significantly improved the time it takes them to settle their bills, according to Experian’s Late Payments Index, the global information services company. Firms were paying their late bills an average of just under 21 days after agreed terms—an improvement of over 2.5 days compared with the previous year.

But while everyone’s doing it, it isn’t good for supplier or partner relationships. Nor does it make the best financial sense. So why do organisations persist in holding onto cash?

CFO versus CPO
Looking at the issue from the traditional CFO viewpoint, the only leverage they have on suppliers is payment terms and the retention of working capital. On the other hand, the traditional view of the head of purchasing is NOT to squeeze suppliers by extending payment terms, because of the risk this might incur to the company’s supply chain. 

So the arm-wrestling contest between purchasing and payment continues. What’s more, the contest is usually over very small percentages. A typical business reserve account gives around 3% interest, or just 0.25% per month. It’s better than nothing, but does it compensate for the squeeze on suppliers and the risk it causes?

Doing the maths
The alternative is dynamic discounting. While paying suppliers early to improve your own cashflow seems counter-intuitive—and is likely to cause some internal controversy—the figures certainly add up. 

Let’s assume that by offering to pay invoices in 10 days instead of 30, a company negotiates an average additional discount across its suppliers of 2%. That’s nearly six times what it would earn in interest by delaying payments. Furthermore, the return on capital would be 2% in 20 days, or over 36% annually—a figure which would soothe the most ruffled feathers. 

Even if the negotiated early-settlement discount was half of the above—just 1%—that’s an 18% annual return on capital. Whilst there is some discrepancy between achievable returns in practice and theory, there is NO argument that the payoff achievable through returns on capital employed by better management of supply chain finance is vastly superior to those achieved by e-invoicing, scanning and the resultant head count reduction. 

Capturing the discounts
Although the figures are compelling, there’s still the issue of ensuring that payment systems are capable of tracking and hitting early settlement deadlines. So how can you be sure of achieving this? 

The secret is gaining control of the purchase-to-pay process, which then gives financial managers a choice of how and when to pay, in order to best suit their working capital strategies.

Having an automated invoice processing solution is a key first step, to ensure that the invoice is received electronically or data is taken off paper documents through scan and OCR thus enabling electronic processing. However, it’s vital to look beyond simply scanning and capturing of invoice data, and uploading it onto the accounting system. 

The most vital stage is what happens after the invoice is digitised—the matching of the invoice to its corresponding PO or contract and other supporting documents, so that all evidence for prompt approval and payment is available to AP and other staff involved in the approval process.

The second issue is ensuring that the staff who approve invoices can do so quickly and easily. Manual tasks like finding supporting documentation, checking and consolidating can cause delays that could mean early settlement deadlines are missed. Not forgetting the costs associated with downstream journal corrections, and other corrective measures that arise in a manual—or less than fully automated—process.

Automatic for the payments
So automation is critical, as is the ability for AP staff to access their invoice workflow wherever they are. A cloud-based solution is ideal for these circumstances, so the workflow can be processed on handheld devices, laptops, or when working from home. 

Integration with core business systems is also critical, so that any exceptions (such as invoices without orders or incorrect coding) can be highlighted, and escalated where needed. This way, automation can be applied allowing management by exception. This also means that targets like settlement deadlines can be built into workflow, so they can be hit every time and ensure savings are captured. 

Benefiting from your banking
Many organisations already have the building blocks in place for integrated purchase-to-pay solutions, which in turn would give them the capability of deploying dynamic discounting to suppliers and partners, boosting capital and reducing the cost of doing business. 

Another option is to look at Reverse Factoring, working with your bank. Where traditional factoring uses an invoice as the underlying asset for financing, Reverse Factoring brings the qualified invoice into play. In essence, traditional factoring deals with the supplier’s receivables from many ‘unknown’ buyers, whereas Reverse Factoring deals with the payables of one well-known buyer.

The weakness with traditional factoring is, the factor company does not know whether the supplier really delivered the promised goods or services, or whether the delivered goods or sent invoice will be contested by the buyer. As a result, only about 70% of the invoice value would normally be financed. 

However with Reverse Factoring, the buyer approves the invoice prior to the financing organisation settling with the supplier, thus enabling financing of 100% of the invoice value.

So back to the beginning—the keys to Accounts Payable automation or P2P are control and choice. If you have the control over your process, which gives you insight into the real financial data as a Finance manager, you have the choice of how and when to pay your supplier. This in turn allows you to maximise the return on your capital.

The fundamental point is to ensure that systems are integrated, so that staff can track the status of invoices throughout the payment cycle. If you can’t approve an invoice within 5 days you will not have the choice of reverse factoring or dynamic discounting. 

But for companies that have that integration and control over their cycle, purchase-to-pay automation offers a real payback. 

By: Louella Fernandes, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 30th March 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

At its recent Analyst Summit in San Francisco, HP delivered a strong vision on how it aims to grow its printing revenues across consumer, SMB, enterprise and commercial markets. Whether it's consumer web aware printers, retail publishing such as SnapFish, managed print services (MPS) or digitising the commercial print processes, HP demonstrated a range of products and services and an integrated go-to-market strategy that will enable it to extend the reach for its vast portfolio.

HP certainly has a strong vision to integrate its cloud, mobile and security offerings and the one area where HP is certainly able to exploit the convergence of these trends is printing. HP has the technology expertise in each of these areas, to provide it with a competitive advantage over its traditional print and copier competitors who are all looking to capture more revenues from products and services in a mature market where HP currently dominates.

HP‘s Imaging and Printing Group’s (IPG) revenues grew by 7% in 2010, and overall, IPG accounted for 20% of HP’s revenue. Supplies revenue represents 67% of overall IPG revenue, with commercial printer hardware and consumer printer hardware accounting for 22% and 11% respectively. The consumer market for printers is highly commoditised, so HP is increasing its focus on grabbing a larger share of the commercial market. Commercial printer hardware shipments growth is important, not only for revenue but also the supplies revenue growth these devices can deliver on an on-going basis.

HP’s vision for its IPG business includes having an “ecosystem for on- and off-ramps and a comprehensive cloud-based platform”. In simple terms, this means enabling users to connect to any HP networked printer, multifunction peripheral (MFP), print shop and retail storefront from any device, securely and seamlessly wherever the user is at any one time. Behind this objective is the goal to ultimately drive higher value pages, such as colour which generate much more revenue than black and white pages, which in turn drives supplies revenue.

The mobile opportunity
HP also described its innovation around its web-enabled printers, which use the webOS platform. It’s ePrint service enables printing on any internet connected device by sending the output as an email attachment directly to the printer. HP has high hopes for adoption of this among home and business users alike. It shipped 3 million units of its web-enabled printers in Q1 2011 and expects to ship 20 million by the end of this year. 

Indeed, the advent of smartphones and tablet devices such as the iPad has generated a new wave in development of printing solutions for platforms such as the BlackBerry, Android and iOS. As well as ePrint, HP has also worked closely with Apple to develop direct printing support for HP printers and MFPs in the latest release of AirPrint available on devices running iOS 4.2 or later. HP also announced that it would provide support for Google’s Cloud Print later this year. 

The launch of its webOS TouchPad tablet also this year will undoubtedly bring native driver support into webOS for HP devices and, as such, HP is well positioned to integrate the mobile and printing experience for these devices—although it remains to be seen how popular they will be. While HP has brought mobility to the forefront of its print strategy—other vendors such as Xerox and Ricoh have also released products for printing to their printers and MFPs from smartphones.

Growing service and solutions revenue
HP is also looking to drive high value recurring business through managed print services (MPS) where it currently has 3,000 customers. MPS is a burgeoning market offering printer vendors an opportunity to capture more pages through managing office, commercial and production print environments. HP is already seeing the fruits of its joint go-to-market MPS activities between IPG and its Enterprise Business (EB) unit. This has resulted in a 200% rise in joint IPG/ES total contract value growth with 74% of the HP enterprise funnel including joint pursuits. HP also indicated that its average deal size is seven times higher through joint activities.

HP is certainly well positioned to capitalise on these joint opportunities and the two groups seem to be well aligned in their go-to-market approach. HP intends to further drive the value of MPS contracts by increasing the sales of attached document workflow solutions. In 2010, these accounted for 75% of its MPS contracts, compared to 25% in 2008.

Having developed a strong service portfolio for enterprise clients, HP is now building an infrastructure for its channel partners to deliver MPS to SMBs encouraging them to move to a contractual model away from traditional transactional sales. HP has developed QuickPage, a turnkey service offering that provides billing, account management and financing for channel partners. This hosted infrastructure minimises the resources and investment necessary for channel partners to participate in the lucrative MPS market.

An expanding print service provider ecosystem
Accelerating the analogue-to-digital transformation in graphics is another opportunity for HP to drive supplies and page growth in the commercial printing market. HP estimates that 1.46 billion pages were printed on its high speed inkjet presses in 2010. The fact that over 95% of graphics pages such as labels and packaging, signage, publishing and collateral are still analogue clearly represents a huge opportunity for HP.

As a technology giant, HP has the breadth and scale to operate in all areas of the print industry—covering consumer, SMB, enterprise and commercial print. Its vast integrated go-to-market infrastructure sets it apart from some of its competitors, and certainly the joint approach with its Enterprise Services business will boost MPS revenues. But in the enterprise and commercial print arena it faces stiff competition from rivals such as Xerox and Ricoh who are both adapting their portfolios to capture wider enterprise print opportunities. HP has got its finger in many print pies, but it will be the ability to execute on increasing page growth through its product and services that will ultimately drive its revenues in the future.

By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 11th February 2011 Copyright Quocirca © 2011

Few can have failed to notice the business and consumer appetite for mobile devices; first laptops, PDAs and mobile phones, then netbooks, smartphones and now tablets—lots of them. Mobile networks have proliferated further boosting the appeal; cellular with relatively ubiquitous mobile data at reasonable cost and cheap, higher speed Wi-Fi at home, the office and, increasingly, in public places.

But as it is difficult to use more than one device at a time, where are all these mobile devices going to be used? They are all portable, but each carries a weight, space and power commitment. There is also a cost and a need for network contracts and ultimately a limit on the number of devices that any one person needs.

There are some who, especially in affluent markets, or technology-oriented job roles (anyone in tech, comms or media industries) will want to carry a multiplicity of laptops, tablets, smartphone and perhaps also have an enterprise-provided ‘dumb’ phone and a desktop computer, but is that a reality for every employee? No. Not only could the business not afford to buy them all, it couldn’t afford to run them all either.

For many with allocated desks at work, the laptop is already cannibalising the need and budget for a desktop computer. The desktop replacement laptop might still be a large and cumbersome beast for many, but it is portable, allowing employees to use it at home or while travelling, and it gives the business an opportunity to consider hot-desking, workplace flexibility and other premise space reduction strategies.

Similarly the need for a fixed phone for all is being undermined on two fronts; soft phones running voice over IP (VoIP) on a variety of computers and the ubiquitous mobile phone. But, while VoIP telephony is still typically integrated into the corporate PBX, according to Quocirca research most businesses are only just starting to get mobile phones to work like extensions on the corporate phone network, so more work is necessary for mobiles to completely replace fixed handsets.

For each element, the organisation is looking to consolidate to reduce costs and make processes streamlined and simpler for the employee to get them to be more productive, while building flexibility to fit with changing working practices. At the same time, employees as consumers have become much more aware of what technology is available, and what they prefer to use, so enterprises are having to deal with an influx of consumer devices into their IT and communications systems.

Every device that is introduced carries a cost and brings complexity, and while businesses will increasingly allow employees to self-chose (BYOD—bring your own device), neither party is likely to want employees to have one of everything—smartphone, simple mobile, laptop, netbook, tablet. So as new devices appear, many will eventually substitute older ones as the constraints of earlier generations of technology are lifted and working styles change to take advantage of new opportunities.

So with tablets like Apple’s iPad appearing to be suddenly taking both business and consumer worlds by storm, and ultimately a limit on budgets, desks or shoulders to carry portables—what exactly are they going to replace?

Some may see the current crop of tablets as having the same limited degree of success that the first generation of devices called tablet PCs (in reality they were typically laptops without keyboards) enjoyed, but something has changed.

Sure the technology is better; communications networks have improved, the devices are lighter, have far longer battery life and brighter screens. However, the main changes are in the way the devices are used.

The user experience has improved dramatically, with sensors for orientation and movement, and touch screens that are suitable for simple typing as well as complex on-screen interaction and gestures. Through the success of the app store model, thousands of flowers have bloomed with a rich ecosystem of applications, allowing users to simply pick a portfolio of options that meet their needs.

Despite being personal and absorbing to the individual, today’s tablets are also easy to share, to show something to a colleague or customer without the technology appearing to dominate or intimidate. It might not be the best form factor for content creation, where power, keyboards and other input devices are required, but it is ideal for consumption and collaboration. This fits the business IT needs of many roles in many organisations for much of their working time—as well as meeting many leisure needs.

So are the current generation of tablets a threat to the laptop and desktop PC?

There are parallels with the workstation versus PC argument of the late 80s and early 90s—only a small percentage of the workforce ever really needed the power of the workstation, most simply needed the access to information and a bit of manipulation delivered by a PC.  Now as employees are liberated from their desks, do many really need to take anything more than a tablet for access to IT services? Probably not, so laptop and desktop deployments will be affected.

Enterprises might ask the next question—do employees need a smartphone in addition to the tablet, or will a smaller pocket-able communicator suffice? It could be that Star Trek had it right all along—communicator for voice plus tricorder for data—but Quocirca believes that most individuals who have become used to their power will probably ‘cling on’ to their smartphones.

However, tablets and their cannibalisation effect on both desktops and laptops, are another matter. They are fundamentally changing our relationship with technology, and their impact will persist long after the hype from the current frenzy of product releases has died down.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Or at least, that is the theory.

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 9th December 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

HP today announced the availability of new energy-efficient Ethernet switches, designed to help companies deal with the data explosion, while, at the same time, cutting power needs and reducing the total cost of ownership (TCO) by some 51 percent.

The company says that it's E-Series zl modules are the first devices that conform to the IEEE Energy Efficient Ethernet (EEE) standard 802.3az. The switches reduce power consumption by automatically entering sleep mode when no traffic is being transmitted. [Disclosure: HP is a sponsor of BriefingsDirect podcasts.]

Many companies today are caught between competing pressures brought by data and power. Faced with moving ever increasing data faster and faster, they find the power to do that, as well as deal with the associated cooling, expensive and increasingly unavailable.

Sleep mode
The modules, which fit into existing switches, address this by going into sleep mode, as will EEE-connected devices in the absence of traffic. Because most network traffic comes in bursts, these devices are good candidates for energy efficiency.

The modules also address another concern, which is latency in the network. According to Jay Mellman, Director of Network Product and Solutions Marketing, the modules function with an instant-on capability and will wake up immediately upon detecting traffic, eliminating latency.

In a study conducted by the Tolly Group, power and cooling savings from the energy-efficient modules ranged from 17 to 26 percent, when compared to traditional switches. The lower operating costs, combined with lower acquisition costs resulted in a decrease of up to 51 percent in TCO.

HP assisted in developing the EEE standard and the company plans to incorporate it across multiple devices. including servers, laptops, and wireless devices.

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.

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By: Rob Bamforth, Principal Analyst, Quocirca Posted: 19th November 2010 Copyright Quocirca © 2010

Despite the claims of many marketing brochures filled with words ending in ‘-ability’, there are only three real tangible benefits to consider when evaluating a product or service; value, cost and risk. When it comes to turning the bottom line from red to black – as is often the case during recession and government cuts – companies generally look to just one of these – cost cutting.  Its counterpart – value growth – whilst popular during boom years is far harder to find in a downturn. It requires companies, and more often individuals, to go out on a limb; something they are much more wary of as they look to protect their own position.

This leaves the third benefit – risk mitigation. On the face of it this seems a negative subject only to be addressed when something goes horribly wrong.  A catastrophic disk crash introduces many to the concept of regular backups. A security breach highlights the vulnerability of data assets. A volcanic eruption highlights the value of alternatives to air travel and buying comprehensive travel insurance.  Adaptability and flexibility help reduce risk; these ‘-abilities’ in particular can deliver real benefits, allowing agile organisations to pounce on unexpected opportunities as well as stave off unforeseen problems.

Hence, when problems create opportunities, a lack of flexibility can often get in the way of capitalising on them.  An example of this was apparent during the travel crisis as a result of the ash from the Icelandic volcano eruption.  It was thought that some travel operators were profiteering by ramping up the cost of one-way ‘cheap’ tickets by hundreds of pounds.  However, those travelling would have been surprised to see quite a few empty seats on the plane.  Presumably, those with tickets booked as returns but unable to travel on the outward leg didn’t show up, leaving a raft of available seats only identified at the departure gate.  Many companies with tight booking processes appear to have no way of reselling those seats as ‘standby’ on a first come, first served basis at the airport – or over the web.  Filling even 5 extra seats on a plane would have been massively profitable for the airline concerned.  It might be tricky to introduce with current systems, but a more adaptable model of reselling empty seats might have done wonders not only for the bottom line but perhaps also avoiding the negative media perception of air travel that was created by the crisis.

When problems occur, it also leads to a positive view of those who can cope in these sorts of crises – for example, when large numbers of workers were disrupted by apparently unexpected heavy snowfalls in the UK in early 2010 (well, it was in winter).  Mobile phones, laptops and remote access to enterprise systems are all now in widespread use.  Those organisations that had implemented more flexible solutions or worked with more flexible suppliers, were able to manage the sudden increase in user load as everyone equipped to occasionally work remotely did so all at once.

It is not only limitations or constraints in the technology that amplify problems when a glitch occurs, but also lack of flexibility in service offerings, levels and tariffs.  Businesses should no longer simply look for the cheapest options, even during a recession, but those that deliver the best overall value.  This means putting a value on flexibility.

Flexibility can be supported by appropriate use of suitable technology, but it really comes into its own when there is the right commercial framework backing it. No wonder then that ‘as a service’ models are springing up to offer a pay as you go model, where incremental changes in either direction are simpler to make.  Whether we call this cloud, hosted, managed or on demand doesn’t really matter, the value is about pushing the complexity and upfront costs onto someone outside who’s a specialist, and then renting the service back from them.

Need more software licenses to cope with a sudden surge or more bandwidth at the end of the month, or perhaps fewer desks and phones as you’ve moved office workers to a ‘hot-desking’ model? No problem – the service provider will “flex”

This flexibility goes further, as the rented service can be delivered ‘anywhere’, no longer tying its use to specific locations or office premises. Mobile working, not as in working on the move, but moving the place of work, becomes a doddle right?

To a point, but with all of the benefits of flexibility, there has to be some consideration and evaluation of what has been given up to get it.  The main challenge is dealing with a loss of top down control. When something critical is outsourced, hosted on an external server, or available anytime from a cloud at the end of a network cable, can you really trust that the network or service provider can deliver the quality of service you need, or that your data is really secure? These are assurances that must be sought, rather than seeing such services as a money saving exercise, and there are now many companies able to deliver safe, secure and reliable services.

More mobile and flexible working looks on the face of it to benefit both employer and employee, but there are caveats, and again it boils down to quality of service and assurance. Management tools and processes need to evolve to convince some managers that employees are not simply engaging in social network conversations, playing games or surfing the web while ‘working from home’. Similarly employees need to be assured that “off” means “off” and expectations of 24/7 availability, simply because the network is there, are not fair.

Applying suitable metrics for measurement and controls to ensure goals are met will become an increasing challenge in dealing with both employee and service provider flexibility.  The old metrics of hours in the office and narrow objectives will no longer work for many individuals, just as network outages will no longer be sufficient for measuring service provision. Part of the problem in working out new business goal oriented metrics is that companies have been based and built up on a rigid top down hierarchical command and control system.

This is where flexibility still needs to be applied by many organisations. When it is perhaps some of the apparently chaotic concepts that have emerged in IT and communications – the internet, open source, ad hoc collaboration, social networking – will ultimately lead to a new flexibility in management systems.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some excerpts:

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

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

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

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

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

Applications becoming easier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Still a great deal of complexity

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Out of the box

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Second Studio phase

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

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

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

You may also be interested in:

• Rise of WebKit Advances Mobile Web's Role, Opens Huge Opportunity for Enterprise Developers on Devices
• Genuitec Marks Progress with Two Milestone Releases of MyEclipse 6.5 Products
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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:

• rPath brings data center automation to Windows environments
  
• Trio of cloud companies collaborate on new private cloud platform offerings
  
• rPath offers free management tool for applications aspiring to the cloud

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

I met with Brian Gentile, CEO of open source BI vendor Jaspersoft. Brian is a self-proclaimed “fan of new generation software”. Here is what he believes constitutes new generation software—and how it differs from traditional enterprise software. This article explores further the tenets of the recent article ‘Is the traditional BI market in decline?’.

First, Jaspersoft has built a club of volunteers who give time and effort to the cause. It’s a bit like the parents’ committee at a well-run primary school where parents want a stake in creating the best learning environment for their kids. Jaspersoft has 175,000 registered programmers in its ‘community’ of fans who have a similar ownership stake in Jaspersoft.

These unpaid end users fix bugs and develop enhancements to Jaspersoft’s open source product, iReport. They champion the product, and provide ‘free’ programming and powerful word-of-mouth recommendations to other potential users. In addition they vote on the new features for the next release—so product development is largely driven by user priorities.

Second, the software architecture is lightweight, web-based, has open APIs, and is easy to install and upgrade. Everything is built on the Java platform and the whole software suite is only 500MB. It requires little installation and professional services consulting support, and is available both for web download and through Jaspersoft’s OEM partners as a SaaS deployment.

Third, it’s low-cost and affordable. The entry level price for the commercial version is $10,000.

Compare this with how the enterprise software vendors tackle these areas:

First, enterprise software vendors have a network of resellers, complementary software vendors, and systems integrators and consultants. These mercenaries add value to the core product only where and when it is in their best commercial interest. Vendor loyalty is typically low—software and services partners often jump ship to where the profit potential is highest. Acts of charity are not high on their agenda.

Product development rests on the needs of a small number of key customers—who may or may not be representative of the market. The vendors control which features are included or excluded from the commercial release.

Second, the traditional enterprise software architecture is heavyweight and leans towards proprietary lock-ins. For example, SAP Business Objects’ BI suite is said to contain c. 30GB of code (ie 60x the size of Jaspersoft’s BI suite). Installation and upgrades are typically long and rely on on-site consulting and services provision over many months.

Third, enterprise software is expensive. Brian reckons Jaspersoft software costs around 1/10 of the cost of comparable commercial enterprise software. The enterprise vendors’ business models demand a premium price in excess of $100K for the most part. Implementation services expenses could double that cost.

So, Jaspersoft has built quite a compelling value proposition. Participative, collaborative, lightweight, fast to implement, transparent and open, and lower cost than its legacy competitors. Granted, it is mainly adopted and used by techie programmers, and it doesn’t offer the sexy front end user experience of SAP Business Object’s Crystal reports, for example. Neither does Jaspersoft offer the comfort of the size and support resources of an SAP or similar. However Jaspersoft is clearly doing something right as iReport downloads are now at the staggering rate of a 250,000 per month.

So what can customers learn from Jaspersoft’s software development techniques?

1) Engage with the hearts and minds of your community (ie ‘The Business’)—not on the basis of “it’s your job to help IT” but rather that “it’s fun to be involved and your contribution will be recognised”. Co-creation and collaboration are the watchwords.

2) Create and choose software that is light, flexible, and easy, and incorporates ‘the wisdom of crowds’. Don’t get dragged down by miles of inflexible code that cannot be re-purposed to reflect the business challenges of tomorrow. SOA is very important here.

3) Experiment with low cost web-based solutions. If they don’t work, junk them, and try something else. Don't put all your eggs in one big enterprise software investment basket with an uncertain outcome.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

By: 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: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 1st November 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

A long time ago a whale lived in the IT sea called Big Blue. But Big Blue was no ordinary whale, it was the biggest killer whale ever. As the biggest creature in the IT sea (with 80%+ market share), all the other creatures relied on Big Blue to set the rules, which were its proprietary interfaces. If Big Blue changed its interfaces so a little fish (vendor) couldn’t interface with its mainframes, the little fish died, and Big Blue ate up its customers, thus becoming even bigger.

Eventually the sea god Neptune (the US government) lost its patience with Big Blue and threatened to break up its monopoly so the rules of normal competition could be observed. Then the IT sea began to grow healthily again, like other seas (markets). A long and expensive court case ensued and Big Blue was never quite the same again. Until now.

Today, IBM is no longer an aggressive tin-shifter nor the services company envisaged by Lou Gerstner, but a dynamic software vendor. In the last decade IBM has acquired 100+ software companies and has software revenues of c. $23Bn and 70,000 employees in its Software Group (it is almost exactly the same size as Oracle).

Just a few years ago Oracle boasted of being the biggest venture capitalist in Silicon Valley. Not anymore. In a thinly disguised reference to Oracle, IBM’s annual report says: “Today, many of our competitors are emulating our moves. For instance, several have gone on an acquisition binge to get into new spaces . . . largely to compensate for rapidly commoditizing business models”.

So why software? The 86% margin IBM gets on software is double what they achieve elsewhere. In addition, as McKinsey points out: “By pushing their products through a global sales force, IBM estimates it increased their revenues by almost 50% in the first two years after each acquisition and an average of more than 10% in the next three years”.

Analytics is the main thrust. In four years IBM has invested $12Bn in 23 analytics-related acquisitions including Cognos, Netezza, SPSS, and OpenPages. IBM’s resulting Business Analytics and Optimization (BAO) practice has 6,000 consultants and “enables clients to get far more value from their information . . . advanced analytics allow clients to see patterns in data they could not see before, understand their exposure to risk and pre­dict the outcomes of business decisions with greater certainty”. IBM plans to grow its BAO business by $7Bn to $16Bn by 2015. These are big numbers.

Customers should consider IBM for their acquired analytics competencies, depth and breadth of product set, and services capabilities. However, customers should be mindful that IBM (as is Microsoft) is a product-centric organisation. IBM sees its differentials and value as being its size and power, and a $6Bn annual investment in R&D. Customer-centricity and market orientation do not appear central. Hence ‘customer delight’, ‘customer intimacy’, and ‘customer satisfaction and loyalty’ are likely to result from paid-for consulting rather than a deliberate strategy.

Oracle describes itself as: “the world’s biggest business software company ... and seeks to be an industry leader in each of the specific product categories in which it competes and to expand into new and emerging markets”. This is a virtually identical strategy to IBM’s. And IBM also has a database (DB2) to counter Oracle’s strong position in the enterprise RDBMS market.

So an almighty clash of the titans is developing. IBM is saying to Oracle: “I’ll huff and I’ll puff and I’ll blow your house down!” Is Oracle made of straw, of wood, or of stone? Larry Ellison might have something to say about that. Let battle commence.

By: Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst, Interarbor Solutions Posted: 28th October 2010 Copyright Interarbor Solutions © 2010

Businesses are looking to cloud-computing models to foster agility and improve time-to-market for new services. Yet attaining cloud benefits can founder without higher levels of unified server, data, network, storage, and applications management.

These typically disparate forms of management must now come together in new ways to mutually support a variety of different cloud approaches -- public, private, and hybrid. Without adoption of such Business Service Automation (BSA) capabilities, those deploying applications on private and hybrid clouds will almost certainly encounter increased complexity, higher risk, and stubborn cost structures.

This latest BriefingsDirect discussion therefore focuses on finding low-risk, high-reward paths to cloud computing by using increased automation and proven reference models for cloud management—and by breaking down traditional IT management silos. In doing so, the progression toward cloud benefits will come more quickly, at lower total cost, and with an ability to rapidly scale to even more applications and data.

We're here with two executives from HP Software & Solutions to learn more about what BSA is and why it's proving essential to managed and productive cloud computing adoption: Mark Shoemaker, Executive Program Manager for Cloud Computing in the Software & Solutions Group at HP, and Venkat Devraj, Chief Technology Officer for Application Automation, also in HP’s Software & Solutions Group. The discussion is moderated by BriefingsDirect's Dana Gardner, Principal Analyst at Interarbor Solutions.

Here are some excerpts:

Shoemaker: There is hardly a place we go that we don’t end up talking to our customers about cloud. Most of the enterprise customers we talk to are looking at private cloud, the internal cloud solution that they own, that they then provide to their business partners, whether that’s the development teams or other elements in their business. Most of them are looking to build on the virtualization work that they've already done.

They want to improve their productivity, definitely get better utilization out of what they have already got. They want IT to be your better partner in the business. What that means is to shorten the time that the business has to wait for the services.

Devraj: There is also an interesting micro trend that’s occurring. A lot of the application teams, end-user business teams, are getting increasingly sophisticated. They're learning about private cloud implementations. Consequently, they're demanding levels of service from IT that are difficult to provide without a private cloud.

For example, because of things like agile development methodologies, application teams are doing a lot more application deployments and code releases than ever before. It's not uncommon to see dozens of application releases for different applications happening during the same day.

IT operations are just bombarded with these requirements and requests, and they are just unable to keep up based on yesterday’s processes, which are relatively static. These application teams and business unit teams are quite influential.

They're even willing to fund specific initiatives to allow their teams to work in self-service mode, and IT ops are finding themselves in reactive mode. They have to support them, make their internal processes more fluid and dynamic, and leveraging technology that allows that kind of dynamism.

... The third-party companies, the cloud providers, the pure-play server enablers, have an unfair advantage. Because they were started relatively recently, in the last few years, they have the advantage of standardized platforms and delivery units.

They can say, "Okay, I'm going to deliver only Linux-based platforms, Windows-based platforms, or certain applications." When you look at the typical enterprise today, however, IT has a lot more to deliver.

There is a lot of prevailing heterogeneity in terms of multiple software platforms and versions. There is a lack of standardization. It's very difficult to talk about cloud and delivery within the enterprise in the same breath, when you look at these kinds of technical challenges.

As a result, IT is undergoing a lot of pressure—but they have to deliver given the kind of challenges that they face. That’s going to require a lot of education and access to the right kind of technology, training, and guidance.

Shoemaker: Just to add to Venkat’s comment, we're seeing the business driving IT and demanding that agility and that flexibility. We talk to a lot of our customers, where their own coworkers have taken corporate credit cards and gone out into the public cloud, procured space, and have begun developing outside of them. IT really has to get in front of this. They have to manage all this.

... The one thing that’s different about cloud is that it really is a supply chain. It’s the supply chain of IT technology that the business consumes. If you think about what a supply chain is, it’s something that’s got to be repeatable. It has to be governed, and it provides a baseline or foundation and building blocks to build those services that you can then customize on top of the business.

So, the farther up that you can go with your standard building blocks, the less difficult it is to manage and focus on the custom business-facing functions on the front-end.

To do this, cloud has helped us out in a lot of ways. One of the challenges IT has always had is to get the business to consume standards. Because of a lot of hype in the market, the business absolutely is convinced that they get it, and they want the business benefits that cloud offers.

Even if the business decides to go to a public cloud, they still have to consume those elements in a standard fashion. There's no way out of that.

Devraj: And yet, the software used by these enterprises tends to be disparate, heterogeneous, and requires a lot of domain knowledge to be able to manage, resulting in significant delays and bottlenecks associated with service delivery. Those processes just don’t scale in the cloud.

At Stratavia we had built a patented technology to manage and control varied software stacks, such as databases, web servers, application servers, and even well-known packaged applications, including Microsoft Exchange, Oracle E-Business Suite, and SAP.

The content that I talk about becomes an abstraction layer, where the customer, the end user, the people who consume the services, see a very easy to understand service catalog. They can click on it. They can choose some menu options, some values from a drop-down box, and then specify exactly what they need, and have the response come back in minutes and in hours, rather than days and weeks, as is traditionally the case.

For example, just at the database layer, within the enterprise, it's very common to see four or five different platforms in use, such as DB2, SQL Server, Oracle, and so on. By automating the operations management lifecycle around these layers, Stratavia has made it possible for the enterprise to deliver and manage these assets as a service within the context of the cloud.

As more and more of HP’s and Stratavia’s joint customers started seeing value in that capability, HP brought Stratavia into its BSA/Business Technology Optimization umbrella.

There's a big gap in IT today, which is IT/Ops Engineering or IT/Ops Architecture. That’s a big missing silo within IT/Ops. And a lot of the operators today that rely on scripts, command-line stuff, and point-and-click tools need to evolve themselves to more of an architect approach. They need more of taking stock of the big picture, and taking the tribal knowledge that they have in their heads and looking at the out-of-the-box content that HP provides and selecting the right content that corresponds to their tribal knowledge.

When they go into the cloud, the underlying management, things like compliance and governance, are not out of whack. They're able to successfully take that knowledge, put it in there, and then, in their new role as architects or engineering folks, they're able to watch, measure, and make modifications as appropriate.

So, the role that people play, that key subject matter experts play, is very crucial as part of walking before running with automation.

Gardner: Now that you have mentioned Stratavia, and for the benefit of our listeners and readers, HP has acquired Stratavia, and there was also quite a bit of related product and service news on Sept. 15 around BSA as the acquisition was unveiled.

Shoemaker: Obviously, the Stratavia acquisition was a huge, huge win for us, and puts us in a great position to help our customers transform their infrastructure. ... And several other things have happened in the last 60 days. We had VMworld, and we presented a cohesive strategy for infrastructure and even PaaS built on the BladeSystem Matrix hardware platform that we have, Converged Infrastructure. We've combined that with two other pieces and a piece of Cloud Service Automation (CSA) software.

CloudStart is a consulting and a professional services-led engagement capability where we come in and work with the customer to get that transformation process nailed, so we can quickly get them moving into the cloud benefits.

On the back end of that, there is another piece that we announced called Cloud Maps, which is really more knowledge, but in a different capacity, in that it offers downloadable templates, preconfigured applications, and best practices for sizing.

We see the Stratavia acquisition fueling this fire, because in the end, cloud is a solution, and a solution needs content, and content wins. Content is what the customer is able to consume and use day one, when the solution is in. So it's important. And we've done a lot there.

We now have a best-in-class content provider in Stratavia that’s come on board to help round out the capabilities and add more into what the customer can get out of our solutions in very quick order.

All that sits on a recently refreshed BSA portfolio, with significant enhancements and new capabilities across network, automations, servers, and storage, that really makes all this happen.

... Let's face it, a lot of the CIOs are looking at a data center that’s packed full of applications that they probably don’t feel as if they have got a good handle on. Now, cloud is coming into the picture, and they've got two things to do here.

Number one, they need to start applying those new business methodologies to IT around providing cloud and the things that go with that, but also they have got a transformation piece to go along. And that can be very daunting.

What we've done is looked at the experience of helping previous customers do that work and we have applied that into the CloudStart and Cloud Maps, CloudStart being the planning and the upfront work that you need to get done.

So, we're right there with you. You don’t have to read chapter one of the book.

Then, as we put the infrastructure in with CSA for Matrix in the frame, we're embedding some of the CSA software inside of the Blade Matrix frame. So you have a way to build infrastructure as a service (IaaS) and manage it through the platform throughout the lifecycle.

Then, on the back end of that, we have the preconfigured application templates. If I need a SQL Server image to put into the system, I can pull that from Cloud Maps, build it into a framework and offer that very quickly. I don’t have to go and figure out how to size for this piece or what golden template looks like for this application.

It's really about obtaining a running start into the cloud, and one that’s not going to leave you wanting in a year or two. You have to be careful. Cloud is a great enablement technology and a lot of people are looking at IaaS, but that’s the starting point for it, and then you have to manage everything that you put inside of that 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: 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.

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By: Gerry Brown, Analyst - Digital Marketing & CRM, Bloor Research Posted: 25th October 2010 Copyright Bloor Research © 2010

Last week I looked at the effect of open source and new agile vendors such as Qliktech on the BI market in the article ‘Is the Traditional BI in decline?’. Is the CRM market similar or different?

As with the BI industry, the heavy boot prints of the large enterprise applications vendors, SAP, Oracle, and Microsoft are all over the CRM industry. Also similar to the BI market, most of the CRM old stagers are still hanging in there, many albeit under new ownership e.g. CDC (Pivotal) Sage (Saleslogix), Pegasystems (Chordiant), Consona (Onyx). The CRM market during the last decade has been a roller-coaster with many vendor casualties, whereas the BI market has grown in a more linear fashion.

The most successful CRM vendor in recent times has been salesforce.com which now has $1.3Bn in revenue, 4,500 employees, and has grown its revenues in the $250–$300m range for each of the last 3 years. Salesforce loves to spend money (c. 50% of its revenues) on sales and marketing, especially for its mega Cloudforce conferences that provide the speaking platform for its charismatic and outspoken CEO, Marc Benioff.

Salesforce is great for the CRM SaaS market and its cousin the open source CRM market in ‘taking on’ the rhetoric of the enterprise vendors. One vendor described Benioff as a ‘lightening rod’ for attracting media attention: “we just enjoy being in the salesforce.com slipstream”.

Unlike BI, where there are relatively few open source vendors, in CRM applications there are at least 60 open source CRM packages regularly downloaded from Sourceforge. The crown prince of the market is SugarCRM.

SugarCRM, like Qliktech in the BI market, is growing revenues at over 50% per annum. It claims 7 million downloads and serves 600,000 end users. 6,000 customers have the ‘paid for’ SugarCRM Professional or Enterprise editions. The Professional edition starts at only $30 per user per month on an annual subscription contract. The new version SugarCRM 6 incorporates an intuitive interface, social CRM and search functions that keep it pretty much in touch with the product developments of the mega vendors.

SugarCRM is a low cost alternative to salesforce.com, Microsoft and Sage for Sales Force Automation (SFA). In addition SugarCRM offers some basic call centre support features and marketing functions such as campaign management. A key strategic question for CRM suppliers is whether to stay focused on the triumvirate of Sales / Marketing / and Customer Support applications? Few, if any, vendors do all 3 of these applications brilliantly today.

The alternative is to branch out wider into integrated Accounting and eCommerce as a SaaS-based small business suite, as Netsuite or up-and-coming UK vendor Brightpearl do. The latter offers the Brightpearl CRM / Accounting / Time Management suite all for just £20 per user per month.

In summary, the CRM market is still growing nicely and is now well out of its early adolescent growing pains. Some segments of the market, such as SFA and marketing campaign management, are starting to look increasingly commodity in nature, as tumbling prices and the many SaaS and open source alternatives are testament. Customers should choose vendors with strong strategies, and who are willing to continuously innovate in products and their own business models in order to remain competitive. Salesforce.com has shown remarkable agility and foresight in this regard to date.

Always a good sign is when the venture capital (VC) community is prepared to sign the cheques. To date, SugarCRM has raised $46 million in VC funding and an IPO in the future seems likely. So maybe the CRM market looks like a pretty good place to be after all.

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

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

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

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

So how about taking a different approach?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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